Look Back in Anger (John Osborne)

Now that I’m reasonably back into semi-full production mode (which I had a glorious four-ish months moderately off from) perhaps there needs to be some escape clause in my reading a play per day for tech week.

Look Back in Anger is a hard read in a good way. It presents a tense, tenuous situation which is all too real and far too uncomfortable for normal people to stand. We find ourselves in the unhappy marriage of Alice and Jimmy: in class-stratified 50’s Britain upper class Alice married low-class (but highly educated) Jimmy and things have gone downhill from there.

Jimmy is smart enough to dislike his station in life and applies his frustration to everything and everyone around him. He’s casually cruel, dismissive, doesn’t listen, and is unyielding in his opinions. Alice and Jimmy’s friend Cliff lives with them and he tries to keep the peace and absorb what blows he can. Osborne shows us just enough tenderness at different points to let us see what life must have been like before Jimmy let his worst parts consume him.

We learn that Alice is pregnant and concerned about whether she wants to abort the baby, raise the child without Jimmy, or bring the child into this tough situation.

During the second act Alice’s similarly high-stationed friend Helen stays with them while she’s working in town. Seeing Alice too timid to take action (or simply making a choice that Helen thinks is wrong for her) Helen confronts Jimmy and his worldview and calls Alice’s father to take her away. Here we see more of Jimmy’s passion turned towards something good (though still abusive) as he grieves the death of a friend’s mother (but ignores his own wife’s pain.) After Alice leaves Helen and Jimmy have a fight which turns steamy, as these things often do (not to me, but, you know, presumably to someone.)

In our final act many months later we find Helen in much the same position as Alice was at the beginning of the play, though things are a little worse now. Cliff isn’t as happy, Jimmy has a little more bite and a little less love. Alice returns, confused, Helen resolves to leave, now understanding a bit more why Jimmy is magnetic, and things end as they began in a sad, twisted situation.

As a Producer
As great as this play is it is far outside of what Pronoia wants to do. We are about the elevation of comedy and escapism and historically this play was written as a response against the escapism of the time.

As a Designer
It’s a period unit set, of an apartment. I’m sure exciting things can be done, but they’re not leaping out at me.

As a Writer
This play accomplishes the magnificent task of staying (largely) away from melodrama while still being intense and disturbing. Jimmy is almost unreal in his level of vindictiveness and pettiness, but there is always the tether that reminds you that there are people like this and you can’t ignore it.

In a world where we too often confuse understanding a villain with excusing one it is refreshing to see the power of a well drawn, awful character, whose redeeming qualities don’t need to be mythic in order to have sympathy and antipathy for him simultaneously.

Doubles: Wallace v Anderson (w/o Dennis Budde and Aaron Garrett)

Aaron and Dennis are separated by time, space, and fate. Still, they persevere and tell you the life and times of George Wallace and John B. Anderson.

Dennis does an absolutely hysterical bit, and Aaron does dry history stuff. The world is as it should be.

George Wallace is the last moderately electorally successful third party candidate and John B Anderson pleaded for a centrist lane against the progressive poles of Carter and Reagan.

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The General of Hot Desire (John Guare)

With the last few days bringing plays that are just slightly too large, lots of historical research and the need to set entire days aside, not to mention preparation for several shows, my reading got a bit backed up, and I needed a quick fifteen-minute play to jump on the tracks again.

I found it by skipping to the end of Love’s Fire, a collection of short plays based on Shakespearean sonnets, and leaving the penultimate bit for later reading. Today we’re taking a (expedited) look into John Guare’s General of Hot Desire.

I have only read one other work by Guare (but it was about a president, so I had to,) but I am to understand that he likes self-commenting on the form that theater takes, and that is evident in this play. We begin with the entire company desperately trying to understand the two Sonnets assigned to them so that they can get a hot take on it, and then turn it into something worth watching.

This is entertainingly realized by the stage being filled with books of commentary that the actors try to pull from, only to be distressed when all they keep coming up with is that the play is about the general concept of “love”. Not love for any particular person, not painful love, not tragic love, just “love” as a good force on its own, and who wants to see that on stage?

They eventually contort themselves into telling an abbreviated version of the Christian story of the universe, with the tree of knowledge being set apart as the bad guy for all time: it becomes a symbol of what keeps us from God. Knowledge keeps us from understanding, and when we try to scratch around expression of the unexpressable through means of art, we step too far and God curses us with more knowledge that we mistake for understanding.

I really do only have another moment or two to write this so it’s all I can spare to say that this is by far the most entertaining, and close to the most comprehensible, work in this collection so far. It makes perfect sense as a close to the program and I love the way that Guare merges humor with the broader tone poem he is trying to create.

The Mandrake (Niccoló Machiavelli, Trans. Wallace Shawn)

It’s often said, and I think frequently incorrectly said, that comedy doesn’t age well, just as it’s said that comedy relies on surprise, a statement which I think applies a part-to-whole fallacy. There is plenty of comedy which is timeless and plenty which can be enjoyed again and again, only we’re not in agreement about what that comedy is.

I’ve often thought, and indeed wanted to make a show about, my thesis that comedy relies on expectation, in order to subvert it, and that when you remove comedy too far from its original context you run a greater risk of disassociating it from an audience which will naturally make the expectations that the author expects. This can be done with time, but it can also be done with space (from country to country) or ideology.

Unfortunately for me Machiavelli’s The Mandrake seems to have been hit by all three: showcasing Italian prejudices, in a Renaissance time period, with his philosophy leaves me occasionally cold. It doesn’t help that the translation beat me to life by a decade and a half and Wallace Shawn doesn’t tickle my funny bone at the best of times anyway.

That being said, there is some timelessness and some humor in the show, just not enough to bowl me over in the way that a classical work often must do to breach my usual preferences.

Rich sod Callimaco comes to Florence in search of a beautiful woman, Lucrezia, only to find her married to an old fool. He enlists the help of many friends and hangers-on to hatch a ridiculous plot all of whom employ, in small or great part, deception to try to achieve their own ends. By the end of the play everyone is happy in the lies they’ve crafted for themselves and we could take this to mean that life is unaccountably dreadful, or that a little lying to craft one’s own universe is a good thing, provided it’s not going to come back and bite you.

The actual plot, which is pure farce, is that a friend-of-a-friend will posture Callimaco as a fertility doctor, and Lucrezia’s husband Nicia, will seek him out since they want children. Callimcao will provide a cure-all with the understanding that unfortunately the first man who has sex with Lucrezia afterward will absorb the poisonous properties of the active ingredient, the Mandrake root, and will soon die.

Therefore, the group of them must find a poor young fool that no one will miss, kidnap him to have sex with Lucrezia, then proceed forward as though nothing has happened. Naturally Callimaco will disguise himself as the boy and Nizia will be party to his own cuckolding. Some more confederates are necessary to get Lucrezia to agree to the (false) plan, but she does, and they do, and it happens, and lots of money moves around, and like I said by the end everyone seems reasonably happy with what’s happened, as far as they know.

For her part, Lucrezia, once the plot is revealed, takes it as God’s will that so many different movers would conspire to pull this off.

It’s a trifling story, one made more difficult by today’s sexual politics, but is by no means a poor option if you’re in the market for something centuries old.

As a Producer
The styling of the writing is actually quite close to something I might do myself, only the language and the topics are barriers to entry and so I’d pass on this show for Pronoia. I need to keep my eye on this Machiavelli though, he might be going places.

As a Designer
Like any classical work these days I’m sure the script just becomes a veneer for the director to put his spin on things, and in that way the script opens a lot of possibilities in that it asks for very little to be seen or heard. There is a small monograph at the back of my edition which talks about the design and approach the director who did the first production of this translation took, which was intellectually interesting, but not compelling enough to divulge here.

Basically though, it allows for a lot of different choices choices a person (not I) could make.

As a Writer
I don’t think I’m going to pull anything specifically from this work: there’s no great secret or lesson lurking behind this old translation of an old farce, except the one that is always useful to reinforce: if you commit to anything hard enough, no matter how silly it may be, it can yield thoroughly entertaining work. Best not to try to cut yourself off at the knees.

Sugar in Our Wounds (Donja R. Love)

One of the most disappointing things in theater, or any story-based medium, is to get to the end of a work and realize that the author was telling a different story than the one you thought. By way of example, Abigail Washbourne’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play is a play I clicked with immediately, a group of survivors from a national nuclear meltdown gather around a campfire and struggle to remember the plot of a Simpson’s episode, but I was supremely let down by the ending, one hundred years in the future we see that Simpson’s episode play out operatically with a century of embellishment.

It wasn’t Washbourne’s fault that she wanted to tell a story about the role of stories (and religion) and I thought I was watching a story about how survivors bond together through shared fiction, she cared more about the plot, I the characters, and neither got what we wanted out of it.

I feel the same regarding Donja R. Love’s Sugar in Our Wounds, which with all its folklore and fablestic elements is at its core an anodyne love story that thinks it’s more profound than I do.

Notably this play takes place on a southern plantation in the middle of the Civil War. I don’t know of many stories set in that particular place and time where all the pain and tragedy is amplified because you know that a small amount of comfort is just around the corner if they could just hang on (which of course, they can’t.)

I’m calling this a fable, though if it were a little more modern we might say it’s magical realism: there’s a tree that stretches to the heavens and whispers to one of our main characters, there’s a man with skin as dark as the midnight sky, and a woman with skin so yellow to make the sun jealous: there’s magic at the core of this story.

But the main drivers of this work are the twin prejudices of racism and homophobia. We’re on a plantation, and young James is a bright individual who is sensitive and thinks. He’s captured the attention of Isabelle, the daughter of the plantation owner, who teaches James as practice for when she goes off to teach “normal people.” She’s our personification of racism.

James is guided, as are the other slaves on the plantation, by Auntie Mama, an old woman with no children of her own who has likely seen much more and would like to forget most of it if she had the chance. Also on the plantation is Mattie, the presumed daughter of the master of the house who was put into the fields after he forced himself on her, and then the lady of the house treated Mattie to terrible facial scars.

It’s a testament to the play that it never shies away from any of the abhorrent aspects of life as a slave: the disregard Mattie has towards being almost-raped by her father, the casual hatred of Isabelle, the fact that the tree is so big because “every male slave who’s ever worked here has been hung on it”. These things are presented simply and without a lot pomp, because that’s just the way life is. And it’s during these moments that the play really comes alive.

The status quo of life on this plantation is disrupted by the arrival of Henry, a former runaway now sold to this plot of land. He is headstrong, unrepentant, but unable to put his thoughts eloquently. Both Mattie and Isabelle take a liking to him quickly, and both think little of taking him sexually as they see fit, which he is largely stoic about. In short order he creates a friendship, then a romantic relationship with James, as James teaches him how to read, and Henry tries to teach him how to be strong.

Where the play whimpers to me is right at the end: after repelling Isabelle’s advances Henry knows he has to escape, so he has a quick conversation with James before running away, presumably forever. He returns a few months later, having been unable to find peace or his former family, only to find that James has been hung, and everyone is sad, but has taken it on the chin, that’s how life is.

I’m disappointed we don’t see James after Henry runs away. How did he change? Can we see what provoked the hanging? I’m disappointed that James mentions that Mattie treats him differently after learning that Henry prefers James to her, but that we never see it. If the play is about “queer black love,” as the author says, can’t we see more of the prejudices of the time? I’m disappointed too that Mattie just accepts Henry’s sexuality at the end of the play after we’ve been told throughout the last quarter that she’s being outright hostile to James because of it. Maybe months change a person, but I would have wanted to see that.

What began as a magical story about squandered potential due to society’s prejudices ends with a bromide about accepting people as they are. But that’s no one’s fault that I wanted that and Love wanted to give me something else.

As a Producer
I think it goes without saying that this isn’t a Pronoia show: not comedic, doesn’t hit on themes I think are particularly in our wheelhouse, and doesn’t have roles for our usual cohorts.

Would Pronoia ever do a show that centers race? I really don’t know. Lobby Hero feels like our kind of show in some ways, and the background of much of that story is racial.

If Pronoia creates satire it is Horatian not Juvenalian, and most playwrights dealing in race these days want to go straight for the Juvenal.

As a Designer
The magical aspects of this play lend themselves to all manner of exciting design choices. One particular sequence, in which the tree whispers to James the names of all the men hung on it, is a centerpiece which would be thrilling to bring the life. The tree branches are described as growing and moving, I can imagine the soft focused light, and the quiet, considered music.

For costuming you not only have the period clothes, but also the facial scarring on Mattie and trappings of old age on Auntie Mama.

All in all, this show provides ample opportunity for design.

As a Writer
I don’t know that I learned anything as a writer for reading this. It’s good writing, though not easily applicable to what I do.