Madness & Absurdity

MARY: Elizabeth and Donald are too over the moon to hear me, so I can let you in on a secret. Elizabeth is not Elizabeth and Donald is not Donald. [...] In spite of the extraordinary coincidences which seem rock solid, Donald and Elizabeth, not being parents of the same child, are not Donald and Elizabeth. He can fancy he's Donald; she can fancy she's Elizabeth. He can fancy she's Elizabeth and she can fancy he's Donald, but both are sadly deluded. Then who is the real Donald, you ask? And who is the real Elizabeth? It beats me. I say we drop this whole affair and leave things as they are.

--Mary's monologue from The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco (trans. Tina Howe)

Photo: Mad Men, season 3. Donald "Don" Draper fancies he's Donald and his wife is Elizabeth; Elizabeth "Betty" Draper fancies she's Elizabeth and her husband is Donald; both are sadly deluded.

"Bald Soprano": Comme C'est Absurde et Quelle Production

The Bald Soprano at Cutting Ball Theater (San Francisco's specialists in absurdism) has just been extended until mid-December! I saw the play tonight, and thought that I would have to blog about it in my typical "it's-great-but-it's-closing-sorry-I-didn't-see-it-sooner" fashion. But then I learned of the extension--so, congrats to Cutting Ball for a great start to their 10th anniversary season, and as for the rest of you--now's your chance to get tickets to the added performances before they sell out!

Being an absurdist play--lots of non sequitur dialogue, few stage directions--The Bald Soprano is very open to directorial interpretation. I've heard of productions that fill it with vaudeville-type gags or ones that turn it into a parody of English people and customs. It seemed that one of the goals of the Cutting Ball production was to strip away several of these "conceptual" layers and just let the text and the humor come through. I mean, of course the director, Rob Melrose, put his own ideas into it (he is also responsible for the new translation) but the stage was painted a flat yellow-orange, there weren't any props, there was no attempt to suggest "England."

It's funny: even though the text is so absurd and should offer no clues as to when the play takes place, it still seems a product of the 1950s--and it couldn't take place in the present day. In one scene, the Smiths' doorbell keeps ringing, but when someone gets up and answers the door, no one is there. It is interesting that Mr. Smith justs assumes that Mrs. Smith will answer the door, because she is a woman and the hostess--and he gets offended when Mrs. Smith suggests that he should do it himself. Perfect 1950s gender roles, in other words. It's weird how much of this kind of thing gets revealed in a text that is supposedly "meaningless." But then, The Bald Soprano was always meant to present a skewed version of our society and the language we use (as opposed to a fantasy of a completely different universe), so no wonder the mores of the time it was written show up in its subtext...

I liked how the actors found the subtext they needed, too, and how each of them created a distinct comic persona. Mrs. Smith the perky hostess, capable of saying any of Ionesco's dialogue with a straight face; Mr. Smith more voluble than his wife, jumping on furniture in frustrated bourgeois rage; Mrs. Martin the nervous younger woman, always uncertain of how to behave; and Mr. Martin placidly smiling, trying to calm his wife down.

I saw the show with a French friend, who said that she had never seen a production of the play, but that one of the oft-repeated lines from the show has passed into French parlance and tonight she finally learned where it was from. In the famous scene between Mr. and Mrs. Martin, they keep saying "Comme c'est curieux ! Comme c'est bizarre! et quelle coïncidence !" ("How curious it is, how bizarre, and what a coincidence!") as the realization slowly dawns on them that they are husband and wife. Evidently this is now a famous quote among French people.

(I just thought--is the Mr. and Mrs. Martin scene intended as a parody of all of those "recognition" scenes of classical Greek drama, where Electra recognizes Orestes by his birthmark, etc.?)

Tonight the theater was mostly filled with a crowd of high-school students from Marin. They were an encouragingly enthusiastic crowd, a few of them laughing to the point of having fits, and everyone going nuts (as high-schoolers do) when the maid and the fireman started making out. At the end of the show, Cutting Ball raffled off a bottle of wine and naturally, one of the teenagers won it. Which just goes to show that life does have its absurdities.

The Man Behind the King Tut Exhibit

The King Tut exhibit arrived at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park last summer, which means that for months I have been living a ten-minute walk away from one of the world's most priceless collections of Egyptian antiquities. But I still haven't been to see it. First, I didn't feel like dealing with the crowds; then, some of my friends said it wasn't very good. And now, after reading the New Yorker article on Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Council of Antiquities (subscribers only, sorry) I am not sure I want to support this exhibit with $32.50 of my money!

The article portrays Hawass as a megalomaniac, a relentless self-promoter who recklessly seeks blockbuster archaeological finds--digging the Valley of the Kings down to the bedrock in the hopes of unearthing a tomb. Ian Parker, the article's author, does try to give Hawass a fair shake--acknowledging that his egotism is rooted in a patriotic desire to promote Egyptian history and restore Egyptology to the Egyptians. But the rest of the article is written in such a snarky tone that the impression of Hawass as reckless blowhard is what predominates. I'm not used to seeing New Yorker profiles that so gleefully make fun of their subject--well, the critics will tear movies and plays apart, but the writers of feature articles don't tend to be so harsh on living people. Which implies that Hawass must have really pissed Parker off.

Choice quotes:

• "[Hawass] often asks rhetorical questions along the lines of 'God gave me this talent for public speaking--what can I do?'" (N.B. this is the third sentence of the article. The snark starts early.)

• "Hawass is so often found in the middle of an argument that one can usually assume the fuss is strategic. [...] He has no doubt that his fame is a vital national asset."

• "His dominant conversational tone was rebuttal laced with invective and self-regard [...] Hawass speaks English fast, with a strong accent, and in a tone that, after a while, you come to realize doesn't denote outright fury."

• "Hawass's tendency toward self-flattery obscures his past; when, reluctantly, he talks of his upbringing, his words have the texture of a Soviet-era account of Stalin's boyhood."

• "He mentioned an excavation in 1990, when he opened the tomb of a dwarf named Perniankhu and found a basalt statue that he regards as a masterwork of the period. [...] When Hawass took the statue in his hands, he told me, 'it was one of the most beautiful moments in my life, as if I were holding my first son.' This moment occurred during a press conference."

• "He told me that when he showed Obama around the Pyramids he grew to have a better understanding of him than all but the President's closest confidants. 'We became friends from the first minute,' he said. 'I told him George Lucas came here to find out how my hat became more famous than Harrison Ford's.'"

• And, most damning, considering the exhibition that is in town and the money they're charging for it: "Hawass accepted a proposal from A.E.G., the sports-arena owner and events organizer, to take Tutankhamun back on the road, with an explicit ambition of making money. [...] Any museum that took the show would be given a share of the ticket proceeds, but it would have to stomach the loss of almost all curatorial control. In San Francisco, for example, the de Young museum was able to veto items in the exhibition's accompanying gift store, and it ruled out a tissue box whose papers exit through the nose in a Pharaoh's mask. Beyond that, the museum was the provider of floor space."
  

Consider the Wallace

To all the people who encouraged me to read David Foster Wallace--who assured me that his essays were unsurpassed examples of the form; who dragged me to the DFW shelf at Powell's and said "My goal in life is to be half as good a writer as him"; who sat in a corner of my living room last fall and confessed how torn up you were about his death...

You were right, all of you. I'm only sorry that it took me this long to follow your advice! After reading Consider the Lobster, I'm joining your ranks in the Wallace-cult. (I've noticed that, at least in San Francisco, it is impossible to find Wallace's books in used bookstores--suggesting that the people who buy his books fall in love and cannot be induced to part with them.)

"Authority and American Usage," in which Wallace ostensibly reviews a new usage dictionary but really summarizes the whole history of Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism (in linguistics) and makes a complex argument in favor of prescriptivism, is probably my favorite essay in the collection... one of my favorites of all time. I love that it is so shamelessly an essay, as opposed to an article or a piece of reportage--that is, it has a thesis and a clearly organized argument running through it, and continually refers to its own structure. Because of this, and because Wallace spends a lot of the essay discussing how rhetorical and argumentative strategies function, it is really a meta-essay, which is just terrific, and quite educational. Seriously, this should be required reading in college. If only for the way that Wallace rails against the shoddy and obfuscatory quality of most academic prose.

This collection doesn't include Wallace's famous "cruise-ship essay," but it does have other articles that rely on his powers of observation and eye for the absurd: "Big Red Son," about the porn industry's annual awards ceremony, and "Up, Simba" (qtd. here) about John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. These essays combine detailed "you are there" descriptions of the people and things that Wallace encounters, with thoughtful reflections on the significance of all of this crazy stuff--an extremely strong combination. The tone of the porn essay is incredulous, but not shocked: Wallace is not trying to create a moral panic, but simply to depict this subculture and the way it resonates in the culture at large.

As for the title essay, it seems like Gourmet magazine commissioned Wallace to go to another wacky corner of America (the Maine Lobster Festival) and describe the scene there. What they got, after some throat-clearing scene-setting, was a not-at-all-wacky, dead-earnest inquiry into whether it is ethical to boil lobsters alive and eat them. He doesn't come to any conclusions in this one, admitting that the issues are too much even for him. Still, it--and several of the other pieces--shows how concerned Wallace was with morality. His deepest desire is for people to approach life with "a democratic spirit" of fairness and sincerity.

Wallace was a great cultural commentator, and when people in the future want to know what life was like in millennial America, they should turn to these essays. Because America in the early 21st century is full of contradictions, and Wallace gets that, and writes about it, better than anyone. And these essays show that he, himself, was a contradiction. A sloppy-looking, bandanna-wearing dude who was also proudly nerdy and pedantic when it came to the English language. An acclaimed highbrow littérateur with a secret penchant for reading ghostwritten autobiographies of sports stars. A writer whose work was all about tracing his self-conscious and convoluted mental processes, but who could also be remarkably self-effacing (in several of these essays he never refers to himself as "I," but only as "your correspondent").

And I guess that's why his death hurts so much. It seemed that, in Wallace, we had someone who clearly understood the contradictions of American life, and could explain them to us, and despite being self-conscious and self-doubting so much of the time, had learned to live with these contradictions. But now, we think "If Wallace couldn't cope with the contradictions of life--what hope do the rest of us have?"

Dostoevsky for Beginners?

Fast realizing that blogging every day for a month is not all it's cracked up to be. Unwilling to admit defeat, but not feeling very inspired tonight.

Oh! I know! A number of factors have converged to convince me that I should read some Dostoevsky:

• reading David Foster Wallace's pro-Dostoevsky essay in Consider the Lobster, last week
  
• seeing Tiny Kushner last night, which includes a scene where Laura Bush reads her favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov, to the dead children of Iraq
• the hype for From the House of the Dead at the Metropolitan Opera, based on one of Dostoevsky's lesser-known novels
• a promise I once made to a young man that I would read The Brothers Karamazov if he read Atonement. I doubt that this man kept up his end of the bargain, and indeed, he broke some promises about things that are far more important than Ian McEwan novels--so I shouldn't feel like I owe him anything, but nonetheless, I still feel guilty that I haven't read Dostoevsky.
  

So now I have a question for any Dostoevsky fans who read this blog: where should I begin? Karamazov? Crime and Punishment? Something else? (I wish Wallace had addressed this in his essay.) What novel will best give me the quintessential Dostoevsky flavor and make me fall in love with his work? Please don't hesitate to offer your suggestions.

"To Startle Words Back Into the Air"

It's just the words, reverse transcription. Thinking about it. Something I can't help doing. Writing began with the effort to record speech. All writing is an attempt to fix intangibles--thought, speech, what the eye observes--fixed on clay tablets, in stone, on paper. Writers capture. We playwrights on the other hand write or rather "wright" to set these free again. Not inscribing, not de-scribing but... ex-scribing (?)... "W-R-I-G-H-T," that archaism, because it's something earlier we do, cruder, something one does with one's mitts, one's paws. To claw words up...! To startle words back into the air again, to...evanesce. It is...unwriting, to do it is to die, yes, but. A lively form of doom.

from "Reverse Transcription: Six Playwrights Bury a Seventh," by Tony Kushner

Posted because I had a great time at Playwrights' Pub Night yesterday hanging out with other people who practice this strange métier... and because tonight I am going to see the Kushner one-acts at Berkeley Rep!

Audrey in Paree

Apropos of some recent postings here at my blog, a clip from the movie Funny Face:

Fred Astaire plays "Dick Avery," a character based on Richard Avedon (prev. post), photographing Audrey Hepburn in various locations around Paris.

(and it's true that although I am skeptical of the whole Carey Mulligan = The New Audrey Hepburn comparison, I couldn't help but recall this Funny Face montage during the Paris scenes of An Education!)