...and
all that jazz...
BURIED CHILD , The Drury Theater
While I didn't have much to do in this one, it was a bit of a challenge. I'll always remember the first read through, when we finished reading, and said a collective, "Wow!" And then we got to work, and our theme became, "Is that all there is..." Nonetheless, I wrote:
CURTAIN TIMES: Notes from the Dramaturg
"...when you talk about images, an image can ve seen without looking at anything--you can see something in your head, or you can see something onstage, or you can see things taht don't appear on stage. You know. The fantastic thing about the theatre is that it can make something be seen that's invisible, and that's where mu interest in the theatre is--that you can be watching the thing happening with actors and costumes and light and set and language, and even plot, and something emerges from beyond that, and that's the image part, I'm looking for, that's the sort of added dimension."...Sam Shepard on images:
In a critique of this year's festival of new American plays at Actors' Theater of Louisville, the reviewer for the venerable London Times dismissed the majority of the new works there as "American Realism." He clearly intended his readers to see the label as a pejorative, and I confess that coming from a spokesman for a country whose most durable contributions to the Theatre of late seems to be No Sex, Please, We're British, the remark tempted me to engage in a little artistic jingoism. Song and Dance, indeed. Cats. Humbug! Then I remembered a remark I overheard in the lobby at the same festival addressed to the Artistic Director, "Are we having doom and gloom again this year, Mr. Jory?" The audience member (as he always does) had hit on something and I confess I knew just what he meant. Perhaps "American Realism" is a style after all. But Ibsen was "Realist" after all. "Problem plays" can be good theatre. Let's see...
Of the modern American playwrights actively and successfully working, Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Sam Shepard come closest to writing what might be justly labeled "Realism." Miller and Mamet have fairly clear theses in their plays, different as those plays are. Miller is straightforward about rationally addressing social and political concerns as opposed to purely ethical or moral ones (remember The ARchbishop's Ceiling and The Crucible?) David Mamet, on the other hand, says he is primarily concerned with language as poetry (a topic for another day.) Sam Shepard certainly has discernable themes that run through the body of his work, but to see some "Realist" thesis in his work would be to do somethingt he did not intend.
Shepard does not build plays carefully structured to illustrate some point. He rather explores what he calls "images." or "image clusters by inventing a fragmented, semi-rational world in which language and incident combine to make up a whole as coherent and contradictory as life itself. This is "realistic" in the popular sense, to be sure, but to assume that his imagery is carefyly chosen and contrived to convice his audience to address some "problem" is to misunderstand how Shepard works. Shepard seems to have an actor's sense of the theatrical. He began writing plays as a teenager. He wrote one of his early plays, Chicago, in one day. One has the image of Shepard walking along a pier, espying a seagull, hearing a snatch of some cliche popular song, rushing home to his typewriter and hammering out Icarus' Mother, quickly and emothionally, with a poet's eye not a "thinker's" mind.
Someone once said that Shepard's plays make a virtue of the indefinite. This is porbably because his plays, while espousing no single point of view "play" so well. In Buried Child, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, we get several people's perspectives on the same ideas rather than a single thesis. Contradictions are essential--perhaps the point. And I'm sure you'll agree, absorbing theatre.
PROGRAM NOTE:
Sam Shepard is one of the most successful playwrights of our time perhaps because his plays are in the best sense "theatrical." This is certainly true of his Pulitzer Prize winning Buried Child. We always find ourselves wanting to know what is going to happen next. How will someone react to the new information we’ve just learned; what’s it all about…? It engages our interest by raising questions—byinvolving us in a mystery. Unlike Agatha Christie, though, Sam Shepard leads us to contradictions instead of solutions. This may frustrate us if we don’t look for something other than "solutions." We certainluy get into trouble if we expend a lot of energy trying to solve the riddle of "what’s it all about." Shepard will lead you to the opposite conclusion whenever you light on one solution.
One of the best analogies for understanding Shepard’s work was suggested by the well-known director George Ferencz (who directed Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Mensch Meier later that season). Ferencz has directed a number of prominent productions of Shepard’s plays. In an interview with Fritz Ertl in the journal of Stage Directors and Choreographers, Ferencz said:
..l.]Shepard’s] a drummer, a musician. He worked at La Mama a lot and Ellen Stewart says that he would go down there and just beat on the drums, get himself into a sweat and then sit down at the typewriter: that sense of trying to find the rhythm that would dictate the criteria of judgement in terms of his plays.
Shepard’s plays, and Buried Child in particular, might be looked on as music, in particular jazz, which is more interesting for its flaws. The contradictions are again the key. Again Ferencz, in the same interview:
There is a structure to music, but sometimes it contradicts itself. You get a melody line, and sometimes you have bass line in which, composers have been known to visually change the notes so that whatever the motif is up here is played down here completely opposite, just for the fun of it… This may not make sense in a literal way, but in another way, they have ‘resonance.’
When Ferencz was working with jazz musician Max Roach on Shepardsets, he would ask Max, "What does he mean here?"
And Max would say, "Well here’s what he means, but you have to understand, George, it’s outside the box, he’s playing outside the box. And until you’re outside the box, you can’t really understand."
Structurally, then, Buried Child might be a kind of verbal jazz. But what do we make of the images or "image clusters" that are so prominent: the corn, carrots, the roses, the buried child...? Surely we should attempt to explicate them. Yes and no. As I’ve said elsewhere, Shepard’s onstage world is only semi-rational. The contradictions may be the point. Maurice Maeterlinck, the great Belgian poet/playwright who wrote among others the greatest Symbolist (with a capital "S") play, Pelleas and Melisande, speaking of dialogue and action in a symbolist play could have been speaking of Buried Child:
Great drama, if we observe it closely, is made up of three principle elements: first, verbal beauty; then the contemplation and passionate portrayal of what actually exists about us and within us…; and finally, enveloping the whole work and creating the atmosphere proper to it, the idea which the poet forms of the unknown in which float about the beings and things which he evokes, the mystery which dominates them, judges them, and presides over their destinies. I have no doubt that this last is the most important element.
Just as we cannot completely explicate the symbols of Pelleas and Melisande, so we should resist the temptation to "figure out" what Shepard "means." It is possible to "explore" images without assigning a consistent one-to-one relationship between symbol and "meaning." We can disagree with one another about what Shepard "means" and even contradict ourselves without being "wrong." Shepard wants us to respond to the music of his symbols not dissect it. Perhaps, instead of humming a few tunes as you leave the theater, you’ll go our with a few new riffs of your own. Shepard would like that.