What to Send Up When It Goes Down (Aleshea Harris)

As far as I know all theater is downstream from religious ritual. Historically, in every culture where we have theater it is preceded by group movement and music in whatever spiritual tradition they have, which is then co-opted by secular interests and often distilled into some other form.

We tend to see our modern dialogue, character, plot theater as inherited by the European tradition through the Greeks partially because that is idiomatically where we trace a lot of our culture from (from the Middle Ages, backwards through Rome, then the Greeks,) and partially because the most known forms of other cultures (say, African or Japanese,) maintain a lot of the ritualistic movement, singing, music, and repetition.

With this in mind we can understand that what we would consider “normal” theater is in fact the outlier, historically speaking.

It has been theorized that being moved by a story is a form of self-hypnosis: you allow your brain to be tricked into accepting the things you’re seeing as real, and then be affected by them. Pardon the expression, but we also know that group hysteria is a real phenomenon, and that in groups moving and sounding the same we can be swept up and feel connected.

If we take that idea we can postulate that the more ritualistic a show, if done well, the higher possibility that it can bypass a lot of the higher functions of the brain, grab your by your empathy, and produce a more powerful change in the viewer than a “regular” show might. So then, taking the form of a ritual or a dance or a group chant, is an effective choice for the artist who wants to promote guttural understanding.

So I get why What to Send Up When It Goes Down is written like it is, and I can appreciate that fact while simultaneously saying that it isn’t to my taste, frustrating to read, and as a piece of literature has done less for me than say, Fairview (Jackie Sibblies Drury) which has some thematic similarities.

Of course, reading an account, even a well documented one, of a dance is always going to pale to the dance itself. What to Send Up When It Goes Down is “A play. A pageant. A ritual. A homegoing celebration.” meant to draw attention to anti-black action, specifically violence, and molded to shape itself to the audience watching it, with lots of audience participation and discussion.

Over three movements we (the audience) are invited to move and sing, then watch some parodic scenes while we honor the dead and contemplate the future.

Even if the form this play takes was always going to be hard for me to connect with, I don’t appreciate dance as much as I ought, the tone of it is not the tact I’d prefer with these sorts of conversations; What to Send Up When It Goes Down wants to cordon off the human experience and to say “this is a black issue which you [non-black, presumably mostly white] should watch and consider” instead of a “this is a human problem which disproportionally affects certain types of us.”

I mostly consider it ineffectual and not prone to convince anyone, which is to say useless as a political tool, and potentially harmful if it pushes people to consider fewer options for persuasion. That’s my opinion of course, I’m not intimately connected to any of these ongoing conversations.

To put a finer point on it, and to directly state my bias as a reviewer: the parts meant to celebrate and commiserate take forms I don’t personally enjoy easily in theater (song and dance,) and the parts meant to incite and provoke I find largely insulting and closed-off (the scenes that play with white attitudes towards black existence and antipathy,) that is until the third movement where it addresses things more directly and less obliquely.

This isn’t for me in quite a literal sense, the script asks me to be a passive observer without critique, and ultimately I don’t think it does it’s job well for people like me.

Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) (Will Eno)

I tend to read these plays as the first thing I do when I get up, and try, if my day allows, to read them in one sitting. I usually haven’t eaten, I’m often groggy as my body stretches out the pains of waking up, and that undoubtedly harms my ability to understand at times.

So maybe I’m missing something when I say that Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) left me entirely cold and I don’t understand that praise for it and for its writer, the ascendent and popular Will Eno, as this is the first work from him I’ve read. I don’t know. Maybe it needs to be lived and seen live to appreciate what it’s doing.

Thom Pain is a rambling monologue, intentionally written as a man talking to an audience: he frequently repeats previous lines or loses track of his thoughts, or speaks directly to members of the audience. He’s callous and indifferent towards the audience, but maybe he’s looking for their understanding? I could be bringing my experience of The Torch Song Trilogy into my analysis here.

It’s just… odd. In a way I don’t find entirely repellant, but I don’t find attractive either. Why should I care what Thom has to say? Why do I struggle through his rudeness, his strangeness, my own discomfort to get to the end of an experience that does little to care about my experience or to give me anything in return?

If I’m being as open as the character I would say that this play epitomizes the idea of struggle as reward: I sat through the show, so I must have enjoyed it; it was hard to understand, so it must be brilliant; I kept looking at this man so I guess I love him? And if I love him I want to feel for him?

I don’t know. I don’t know what other people got out of this, or if my failure to understand is at the heart of why I have trouble writing things people want to see, but I think I’ve given it enough of my time for now.

Torch Song Trilogy (Harvey Fierstein) (The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, Widows and Children First!)

I don’t know the broader cultural penetration that Harvey Fierstein has accomplished, but he’s always seemed like someone whose name I have known, which is its own sort of accomplishment I suppose. That being said his writing has never done much for me, regardless of the obvious craft that goes into his work.

Not to shortchange his trilogy of plays here, but that trend continues with this, one of his earliest works. Regardless of how well he draws central characters Arnold and Ed, or the fearlessness with which he looks at the difficulties in their lives, the three plays rarely rose above an acknowledgement that these are well-written, well-thought-out, and funny, but still leaves me with little impression a few days after reading them.

They are interesting as a piece of pre-AIDS gay theater, a time period I haven’t read much work in, and some research reveals that the play was groundbreaking in showing Arnold as both unrepentantly effeminate, but with the universal desire to raise a family and be loved.

The three plays follow Arnold, a gay man and drag queen, and Ed, a bisexual teacher as they meet each other, break-up, become friends, and then perhaps forge a path to something more.

International Stud shows their meeting and first parting as Ed is uncomfortable with his bisexuality (or really uncomfortable with showing the gay part of it, publicly or privately) and his eventual leaving Arnold for Laurel). The play has a unique structure, two monologues, a phone-call, another monologue, then a final scene. There’s not much more I feel compelled to say about it: it’s a simple, funny story which ends sadly and I have little affection for.

Fugue in a Nursery picks up a year later, Laurel and Ed are living together, and Laurel wants to meet Arnold, who has since started seeing a young man name Alan. This play deals with the difficulty of intimacy, as well as the challenge of people accepting a relationship with a person their partner used to love. Each of the characters is convinced that the other three don’t really want to be in the relationship their in, all while insisting that they are perfectly content with where they are. Fierstein also explores the difficulty of giving partners what they need or being courageous enough to ask for what one needs in any given relationship.

If the setup and theme is more interesting than International Stud, the execution is far more muddled. We bounce from conversation to conversation, sometimes seeing the past and present simultaneously with little but the actor’s skill to differentiate. I found myself far more interested in the ideas than in the people actually espousing or living with them.

Oddly enough Widows and Children First! was my favorite of the bunch, and was the only one which managed to elicit actual emotion from me. Many years later we see Arnold raising a teenage boy, David, and Ed lives on his couch as he has recently separated from Laurel. Arnold’s mother is coming to visit and everyone is in a tizzy as to how it will go.

Fierstein consciously models the set-up, language, and action on traditional sitcoms to both show how gay families are no different than any other, and to lull the reader into a false sense of security before he pulls out the “very special episode” fodder for the end of the show.

We learn early on the Alan is dead and only that it wasn’t from being hit by a car. Little is said about him as Arnold tries his best to raise David right (a good, if mischievous kid) and impress his mother. Throughout the trilogy Arnold has never been shy about pleading for attention and emotional support, indeed his clinginess in this regard is one of the aspects I personally dislike about him the most, but in the final part of this final play he finally pleads for understanding both from his callous mother, and also from Ed, a man who has always kept Arnold at arm’s length without ever actually pushing him entirely away.

In this last play Fierstein shows the impossibility of fulfilling basic human needs when the people around you refuse to see you as an acceptable expression of humanity, and it does so to great effect.

Photograph 51 (Anna Ziegler)

A few years ago I was at a dinner party, and some people were discussing… something. Trivia, nonsense, presidential stuff, who knows? But someone claimed to know a thing that was wrong, it had to do with how presidents pick vice presidents, how the party system worked, it was all inconsequential, really not necessary for living life well, but it was wrong. When challenged, she said she knew it because of Hamilton.

Now, Lin Manuel-Miranda knew that he was contorting history in his musical- he says so directly in the annotated version of the Hamilton script, but stories are like viruses and since this story said it was based on actual events, this woman knew something untrue.

As an exceedingly amateur historian and storyteller, I’m concerned about how people learn history through stories. It’s why we care more about presidents than the legislatures that actually accomplished things, it’s why we have trouble correcting historical inaccuracies, and it leads people to think they have proof of any number of things, simply because they remember a story which told them that.

Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler is a mild danger in that regard, in that it is far more interested in telling a story than representing historical accuracy and it happens to be an exceptionally well-told story.

Critics would have you believe that it is the story of a woman mistreated and robbed of her place in history by misogynist institutions and attitudes. That’s not the play I read.

Photograph 51 details the tense working relationship between Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, two doctors researching DNA at King’s College. Franklin and Wilkins don’t work well together, whether it is due to her coldness or his unyieldingness is the wrong question. They are counterpointed by their colleagues at Cambridge, Watson and Crick who ultimately model DNA in the play as they did in real life.

At its heart the play is less demonstrative about the stultifying effects of sexism than it is about the magical progress which is made through cooperation. Wilkins and Franklin, in addition to not working well with each other and hardly sharing equipment, notes, or research, also don’t think to ask their colleagues about their own advancements. When Watson is spurned by Wilkins early in the play Watson finds Crick and the two make mistakes, even careless ones, but continue to push each other and to incorporate the research of others. They work as a team and it yields impressive results, our heroes fail to find a way to work with each other and their work, as well as the world, languishes.

Historically, Ziegler is upfront about playing with history to make a better story. She even notes that actors should not try to research the historical persons because there is too much she added or removed for it to be of use. The play, I think unfortunately, is not presented as such though, and although I loved the experience of reading it, and would thrill to watch it, I don’t know how much of what I read is true. I know a rather critical moment (Franklin’s assistant showing the photograph to Wilkins who later shows it to Watson) is fabricated and ignores historical developments which I think soften the anger some might feel for Franklin’s treatment.

Regardless, Anna Ziegler knows how to write tension and humor, and how to make subtle characters speak volumes with small, but potent, choices.

As a Producer
Although I could see myself (hopefully) writing something like this one day, the play is still more reserved than a traditional Pronoia offering. If we produced it it would almost certainly be part of us branching away from our core style.

Everybody's Girl (John Patrick)

Society is awfully myopic about the past, we tend to either lionize it or think it full of terrible prudes. The past becomes emblematic of itself and we assign roles to the media: all television in the 50’s was cloyingly wholesome, all comic books have always been about superheroes, all film in the 70s was war protesting, but none of that is ever true. The landscape is rich and varied, and if we dive in we’ll find surprises.

John Patrick’s Everybody’s Girl is a play which feels Better Call Saul by way of Full House, it’s Harold Hill: Year Zero, or Search Party: the Vietnam Years. It has both the fun, family love of a traditional sitcom and the dark, satiric humor of an indie film. Our characters are honor-deprived, openly self-interested, warm, and fiercely loyal. It’s incredibly funny in an uncomfortable way. I love it.

Everybody’s Girl starts off in the living room of an innocent-woman, Bee Bundie, as she putters around her modest home and spouts aphorisms. She’s accidentally become a news item when an imperial duck lands in her pond and a newspaper reporter named Gil, who’s hard-working if always looking for a new gig, comes to write an article.

In trying to find an angle for the article Gil starts chatting up the neighbor Linda and learns that Bee is a rather interesting individual, and all five of her sons are currently POWs in Hanoi. He quickly works out that he can launch his own ad agency if he builds it around the wholesome image of Bee, and wants to launch it by getting her chosen as mother-of-the-year.

Bee is uninterested until Gil suggests that they can use this fame to put pressure on the US government to make a prisoner exchange for her sons. So begins a morally-dubious game of Gil pushing Bee to be the conservative mom he thinks middle America wants, Linda playing games with Gil to keep him interested, and Bee going along with things in the hopes to get her sons back.

Before too long we realize that Bee and her sons aren’t as innocent as they portray themselves, and a house of cards begins to be built which threatens their standing in their small town, Gil’s aspirations, and Linda’s love life. All of this is surrounded by clever dialogue and news announcements which poke (malicious) fun at America’s tendency to look at the scandalous rather than the important and how special interests and corruption easily capture everyone up to our highest levels of government.

It’s a hilarious play that starts as You Can’t Take it With You briefly segues into Pygmalion and ends at Dr. Strangelove without the nuclear proliferation. I really can’t recommend this enough.

As a Writer
The dark comedy and satire is a favorite of mine, and the fearlessness with which John Patrick writes is an inspiration. I looked him up to see what else he did, and it turns out he’s a pulitzer winner with over thirty-six published plays so I’ll probably be busy reading him for many years to come.