Tynan's Anger

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories

1. Original Characters
2. Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
3. Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.

On Monday, I listed the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade. Yesterday, I continued with the top 5 historical characters of the decade. Today, I will begin the countdown of the Best Original Characters, going from #10 to #6.

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10. Laurence (Shining City, Conor MacPherson). Therapy is always an exceedingly dangerous area for playwrights to cover; it can so easily fall into a playwright's own self-absorption that most New York playwrights don't even bother trying. In the case of MacPherson's Dublin, however, the social stigma that afflicts therapy outside of New York City is still visibly present, and while the guilt-ridden Laurence admits his need for it, he feels the stigma as well. In MacPherson world, Laurence is the lynch pin between modern psychotherapy and the old Irish ghost story, where facing your personal demons can be as terrifying as facing demons straight out of hell. Laurence's unassuming ability to grasp this concept made him one of the most endearing characters we've seen all decade, and one who, in a perfect world, would be a role model for fighting psychotherapy's stigmatization outside the theater universe.


9. Matt (Red Light Winter, Adam Rapp) You won't find that many Angry Young Man in today's drama. You’re more likely to find plays like Red Light Winter, an excellent, Pulitzer Prize-nominated work by Adam Rapp that outlines quite clearly the problems with the modern approach to masculinity. In previous generations, characters like Matt would be the ones raging against a corrupt social. After these playwrights were fooled once in the 60s, and fooled again in the 90s, dealing with a corrupt society has turned would-be culture warriors into neurotic messes. On the other hand we have Davis, Matt's megalomaniacal best friend who cheats on the wife he has pilfered from Matt, treats everyone he meets as an object. In previous generations, Davis would be stuffing Matt into a locker. Today, Matt envies Davis' style, but secretly abhors everything about the way he thinks. Matt is the most vivid portrayal as the modern young man theater has produced this decade; he's Jimmy Porter with a self-inflicted castration.


8. Eleanor (Rock 'n' Roll, Tom Stoppard). In Stoppard's vision of Cambridge and Prague in 1968, a world where politics, philosophy, music, history, and attitude all combine in one sordid mess, Eleanor is the smartest one in the room. She's cynical enough to know when she's being threatened ("Lenka, don’t try to shag my husband until I’m dead or I’ll stick The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance up your rancid cunt, there’s a dear.”), but also one most grounded in the basic thrust of humanity ("Don’t you dare, Max—don’t you dare reclaim that word now, I don’t want your mind; which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine—I want what you love me with.") There were a handful of characters make me laugh and cry with a statement cut on a dime; Eleanor, dying of cancer, was the only one of those characters at peace with herself.


7. Lincoln and Booth (Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks). If August Wilson brought the African American experience its Death of a Salesman with Fences, Suzan-Lori Parks brought that world its American Buffalo and its True West in one play taking the Mamet world of con artistry and Shephard's brother-on-brother power struggle into an area no white playwright could bring it without resorting to stereotypes. With a sense of verbal rhythm on par with Mamet, a mysticism on par with Shephard, and a social conscious that may have even surpassed both, Parks connected the con to the culture of the present day, linked it to our nation's history (the brothers' names imply exactly what they are meant to imply), and, by my guess, the highly-coveted Universal Human Condition. By putting con artistry in both the real world its most basic theatrical form, Parks may have out-Mameted Mamet.


6. Katurian Katurian (The Pillowman, Martin McDonagh). Upon visiting Soviet Czechoslovakia, Philip Roth once said, "It occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters” (a sentiment Tom Stoppard has echoed). In the nameless totalitarian regime Katurian lives in, it's easy to see why. Katurian doesn't write for personal fame; of his hundreds of stories, only one has been published. Nor does he write for a social cause; there's no current events within the Pillowman universe for him to fight against. Instead, Katurian writes simply because he has to; there's something inside his private world that brings his instinct as a writer out of him, even if it takes the form of deeply disturbing stories about murdering children. The only thing that matters to Katurian is that his work is preserved; it's more important than a book deal, his brother, or his own life. The last to be completed work of McDonagh's famed wave of creativity, all Katurian wanted was a voice in a world not inclined to give him one; it helped that he, like McDonagh, was a fantastic writer. In fact, in debating whether this list was worth it, or whether it was a kind of pointless waste of time, Katurian's plight was exactly what convinced me to go ahead with it. Katurian would have given up everything to have the kind of freedom a blog provides. Of course, if he did have it, there'd be no Pillowman.
   

Labels: adam rapp, angry young man, conor macpherson, Katurian, martin mcdonagh, red light winter, rock 'n' roll, shining city, Suzan-Lori Parks, The Pillowman, tom stoppard, Topdog/Underdog

Unless some new play ends up sweeping me off my feet in the next few months that I didn’t see coming, I think we can safely begin to wrap up the debate on the progress in drama in the English language for the first decade of the 21st century. Say what you will about the crisis facing the commercial theater in terms of profitability, but in terms of quality, there were a hell of a lot of good plays this decade. Some of these plays are as good as those from the golden age of Braodway; it would be a shame if they don’t become as much a part of our culture as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or Harold Pinter. I doubt that, in 40 years, I will see some future soul child of The Simpsons do to August: Osage County what The Simpsons did to A Streeetcar Named Desire, but then again, I always seem to underestimate the role of theater in American cultural life. There may be far fewer Americans, or even New Yorkers, who are aware of the works of Sarah Ruhl, Sarah Kane, Adam Rapp, Mike Daisey or Taylor Mac, but if a play makes a big enough dent on the Broadway or even high off-Broadway level, it can be seen by enough people to make a difference.

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. This first month starts with the best lines from English-language plays this decade. I have admittedly taken a more mainstream angle on this list, because my aim is to gauge which lines will resonate the loudest for the longest period of time in the future.

10.

“Not many people know this, but the Führer was descended from a long line of English qveens.” – Franz Liebkind (played by Brad Oscar), The Producers, book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan.

When Mel Brooks came up with this line, he caused co-writer Thomas Meehan to fall out of his chair laughing. He did the same to thousands of audience members of the biggest flash-in-the-pan Broadway success this decade. The line was vintage Mel Brooks, but its particular application to the musical conversion of Brooks’ first feature film was a key element of the play’s wild success. With this line, Brooks completely lightened the load of Nazi imagery that dominated the rest of the play, and validated Brooks’ controversial assertion that it was more effective to demean Hitler through mockery as rather than polemics an hour before “Springtime for Hitler,” sausage display and all, hit the stage. It was also a nod to the homoerotic connotations inherent in staging a Broadway musical, no matter how straight you may be. That a right-wing Nazi could be so blind to the inherent gayness of staging a musical only made the wink to the audience that much stronger.

9.

“You the cowboys and I'm the Indians. See who wins this war.'' – Elder Joseph Barlow (Anthony Chisolm), Radio Golf by August Wilson.

Radio Golf was the weakest play of Wilson’s decade-by-decade 20th century saga, and that was mainly because the 1990s were no place to show off what made Wilson so great. Wilson’s mix of humor, poetry, folklore, playfulness, desperation and political rage made him the preeminent voice of African-American theater in the 20th century, and this line, delivered by the only character in Radio Golf who could have fit in the rest of Wilson’s canon, pretty much summed up all of that in sentence where all but two words have one syllable. Everything went awry in Radio Golf’s second act, both for the characters and the play itself. But with this doozy of an act-breaker, Wilson showed you that, even out of his element, he could still knock you out of the park.

8.

“Jirous doesn’t care. He doesn’t care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn’t frightened by dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. Your friend Havel cares so much he writes a long letter to Husák. It makes no odds whether it’s a love letter or a protest letter. It means they’re playing on the same board…But the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable.” – Jan (Rufus Sewell), Rock N Roll by Tom Stoppard

Later in his life, John Osborne would repeatedly express his disgust with the success of Tom Stoppard, who he considered “intellectual flatulence.” How surprised would the original Angry Young Man be, then, to see that Stoppard would come up with the best explanation of the Angry Young Man mentality by an English language dramatist this decade. Jan is no Jimmy Porter, he’s more a foolish young pup blinded by the transcendent power of music that he sees as conquering all politics, ideas, and words. It would all come crashing down for Jan, as it does for just about every Angry Young Man, but with Rock ‘N’ Roll, Stoppard showed he understood the mindset his detractors accused him of ignoring. Jan’s speech here has all the attitude of “I hope I die before I get old” with all the intelligence of “I’ll get on my knees and pray/ we don’t get fooled again.”

7.

“If you let a standing army stand too long...it will find something to do.” – Mike Daisey, If You See Something, Say Something.

Mike Daisey’s legacy at this point is still tied to his immensely influential diatribe How Theater Failed America, but with this line, Daisey framed the dangers of the military-industrial complex in a succinct manner better than anyone, be it Eisenhower, Bill Hicks, or Naomi Klein. The first time Daisey used the line, he was describing the Cold War change in the Presidential cabinet from Secretary of War to Secretary of Defense, and the line served to show how the military-industrial complex has created a perpetual need for global conflict over the last 50 years. The second time he used it, he put the words in the mouth of George Washington, which added a universal element to Daisey’s view on history, politics, war, and even theater. Daisey validated that the problems that plague our world today are not that different from what they’ve ever been. That Daisey accomplished this without a proper script only makes this achievement that much more impressive.

6.

“Did I send you to the most expensive university in the world to teach you how to feel conflicted, or to learn how to manipulate great masses of people?” – Caldwell B. Cladwell (John Cullum) – Urinetown, book by Greg Kotis.

No other musical would open with the number “Too Much Exposition,” nor would any other musical end with the cry “Hail Malthus!” But no line in Urinetown captured the sick genius of Urinetown creators Kotis and Mark Hollman like Urine Good Company’s robber baron Cladwell, who used this line as a sick way of consoling his daughter. In one line, Kotis combined high-minded political philosophy with Borscht-belt sarcasm and a practicality that gave it special significance to everyone who wasted their private college liberal arts education on philosophy or theater. The ridiculous circumstances that led to this line within the structure of Urinetown are about as ridiculous as those that led Kotis to win a Tony for writing the line.

Stay tuned for Quotes 5-3, to be revealed tomorrow.

Labels: august wilson, Greg Kotis, if you see something say something, lists, mel brooks, mike daisey, radio golf, rock 'n' roll, the producers, tom stoppard, top theater quotes of the decade, Urinetown

How America Failed Theater: A capitalist marketing perspective on theater's socioeconomic role in American life.

In case you're not convinced that it's essentially impossible to make money as a theater blogger, try this experiment. First, watch this video by online media guru Gary Vaynerchuk:




Now, take Gary V's suggestion and apply it to theater blogging. First, google "theater" and see what Google Adwords come up with. You'll likely get a lot of results on movie theaters or home theaters; perhaps the term is too general. So search for New York theater. When you do this, you'll get a lot of websites of individual theaters themselves, and maybe a few other publications. Search for "regional theater," and you'll get the same, as you probably will for any city you happen to live in. The only other results I got were for vacation and ticket services. This is probably the best option for advertising, but keep in mind the majority of the desired audience of these sites are out-of-towners whose interest in theater doesn't go all that far out of The Little Mermaid or Wicked. They're not going to be all that interested in your Brechtian analysis of some way off-off-Broadway show.

In Gary V's video, the way to make money off your blog is to call up these people and get them to advertise on your blog. Of course, most theater people are introverts, and get clamped up at the prospect of cold calling. But besides that, if you're focus is being critical and editorial, there's simply no way you can court advertisements from individual theaters and claim to have independent critical judgment. If you were going to get advertising from these sources, you'd need someone else who works on your website for strictly advertising purposes. For smaller theater publications, and especially theater blogs, that's a virtual impossibility. Even if you could get someone to do it, the amount of time you'd need to invest wouldn't be worth the minimal results you'd probably get.

From a marketing perspective, it shows the limits of niche marketing, even though theater isn't by any means the smallest niche to try to make a profit. Within the theatrical community, however, there are two main factors keeping these kind of marketing strategies from succeeding. For one, theater is based more around a sense of community. Any show produced or artist supported by a theater is seen as more of a means of adding something to the theatrical discussion. Unless you're making something like The Little Mermaid, it is not seen primarily as a revenue stream (even if profit is still in the back of your mind).

Secondly, in the case of individual theaters as possible advertisers, it is impossible to extract the product of the theater (be it talent, show, or community) from the theater that's producing it. If you're selling beer, you're almost always selling someone else's beer. From a business perspective, you have no emotional attachment to the brand of beer you're selling, even if you have a weird beer specialty market. In theater, the product your selling is inherently produced by your own personal labor and belongs to the individual laborers who produce it. Do you know anyone who buys Budweiser from Anheuser-Busch directly? Or for an off-off Broadway parallel, you can't even buy Summit Ale from the Summit Brewing Company online store.

In How Theater Failed America, Mike Daisey spoke of contemporary American theater submitting to the American capitalistic system of constant competition, fear of failure, and an artistically counterproductive need to make theater marketable to a stable audience. Tom Stoppard spoke of this just last night. Tony Adams recently talked about how theater don't focus on content anymore. Scott Walters has fought for artistic emphasis constantly. The consensus seems to be that this is a recent, troublesome development. Daisey suggested that a better title for his show would have been "How Theater Became America."

Yet, from the capitalistic perspective that these sources lament, the Gary Vaynerchuks of the world, theater is still a hopelessly unmarketable faux-commodity, one that flies in the face of long-term financial stability, and maintains a system of ethics entirely outside of that of American capitalism. From this perspective, theater still seems like something you do in spite of your desire to make a living. Whether it be theater's Marxist heritage or the nature of the artistic endeavor in general, success in theater is an entirely different mindset from success in business. The standards for good theater (artistic excellence) are wildly different from that of normal business marketing (ROI, profit).

If you're in theater, even using the term "commodity" in referring to theater will make you cringe. Yet, the fact that this cringe is nearly universal is a unique thing to theater, in terms of business and even in terms of the arts. Technologically reproducible art, be it film, music, fine art or literature, have all become dominated by a top-down big business structure to various degrees (the high art/low art distinction be damned). Theater can be top-down too, especially in New York (less so in Chicago or London). But despite the stereotypes of the Broadway producer, theater still exists on an immensely smaller business scale than just about any other form of art in the country. For all the complaining of theater's increasing commercialization and commodification, theater simply does not exist in the same financial stratosphere as any other form of art, even at its highest level. Some people who do theater are rich, but virtually no one gets rich—and I mean really rich, megamillionaire style—purely from theater itself.

As a result, theater has more of a focus on artistic excellence over profit than almost anything else in our culture. No matter what you think of the current strength of American theater, that's an enviable position for any artist to be in from an aesthetic standpoint. The downside is thatit's much harder to make a good living in theater. Of course, that's a tradeoff virtually every theater artist is willing to make.

But at the same time, most people in theater have problems with the notion of the majority theater artists having to live in poverty. As much was we like to romanticize the notion of a community of financially stable theater practicioners, without a wide-ranging income spectrum that includes the (relative) ultra-rich and ultra-poor, you simply cannot reconcile theater with the free market capitalist system that we currently live in. The Cold War proved that this liberal capitalist system is ultimately the most sustainable from a global economic perspective. By no means does that mean theater has no value in America—it may even give it more value simply precisely because it is so different. But again, what that means is that theater, at its core, has and will always run in spite of the larger socioeconomic spectrum of a capitalist society. If you go into theater, you better only want to make a sustainable living, or else you're screwed. No one should have to live in poverty. But poverty for some is virtually inevitable, and that rate will inevitably be higher a large-scale community that does not conform to the liberal democratic capitalist system. Communities like that national theater community we all strive for.

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Labels: art versus business, Broadway theatre, economics, gary vaynerchuk, how theater failed america, mike daisey, Summit Brewing Company, tom stoppard

Image via WikipediaTalking points from tonight’s Artist Talk with Tom Stoppard and David Remnick at BAM (not quoted verbatim):

The great innovation of Chekhov was his fundamental neutrality towards his characters. It seems jarring to consider The Cherry Orchard or Ivanov as comedies, but they are comedies in the same way that life is a comedy.

As he wrote in Ivanov, Chekhov recognized that in every human interaction the following conditions exist: I don’t know what you’re thinking, you don’t know what I’m thinking, and neither of us knows what ourselves are thinking.

In translation, it is not good to be a linguist. It is good to have an exactly literal translation as a reference point, but in translating it is more important to have to understand meaning and tone more than to strictly what is actually said (Stoppard doesn’t read Russian).

There is no such thing as a finished translation. When you write your own work, you’re done with it at the end of the day and you’re happy with it. But when you’re working on someone else’s work, there’s no way to compress and finish the creative process of translation.

In a free democracy, where there are no restraints on the media, the culture becomes saturated, and opinions lose their importance matter. But in a world where thought is restricted, media becomes a prime focus. Behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia and Russia, students would frequently go to the cafés asking for when the next article by a popular radical thinker came out.

It is hard to adjust from that mindset to one if a free-, media saturated society.
At the same time, it is not in human nature to see the positives of the good of a media saturated world. We want every opinion to matter, and can’t focus on the fact that thought is free.

In the New York theater world, there’s more of a focus on “how we’re doing “ than in London. The Broadway producer plays a larger role than the West End producer. It’s partly based on capitalism, but it’s more of a cultural focus on success and fear of failure.

There are more small theaters in New York than there ever were before. Despite the disparity between musicals and straight plays in New York, and increasingly in London, the next new play is still the great animal everyone in theater is trying to catch.

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Labels: broadway, brooklyn academy of music, chekhov, David Remnick, london, new york, tom stoppard

This was my first post on blogcritics, which can be found here.

Tom Stoppard has built his career on dramatically inverting or actualizing highly theoretical subject matter into a wholly entertaining dramatic work. Rock ‘N’ Roll, his most recent play, is no exception, dancing around the relationships among the personal, political, and aesthetic aspects of life.

Rock ‘N’ Roll is spliced between the worlds of Cambridge University and Soviet Prague, and the lives of protagonists Max and Jan. Max, one of the last remaining members of the Communist Party on the Cambridge faculty, desperately sticks to his ideological viewpoints despite a barrage of opposition and the realities of Soviet communism. Max's wife Eleanor is a classical philologist and romantic idealist who is Max's intellectual and social foil in just about any endeavor. Jan, however, develops a rebellious political conscience around his love of music, even preferring aesthetic rebelliousness and paradoxically subversive inactivity to more direct political action.

In one particularly striking scene, Max confronts his wife Eleanor, who is dying of cancer, over the traditional mind/body problem as a tangential point to a discussion of Sappho. Max argues from a Marxist materialist viewpoint, while Eleanor comes from a classical idealist viewpoint. The discussion turns from philology and classics to the basic tenets of materialism and its relation to culture. The scene, which contrasts sharply with Jan’s preceding defense of the transcendent power of musical rebellion, centers on Max’s key hypocrisy: his belief in the ideals but not the realities of Communism, despite the inherent materialism in Marxist philosophy. Max turns to biological determinism to deflect the larger contradictions between Marxist theory and practice after Stalin in the Soviet bloc.

Rock 'N' Roll depicts a world where the role of culture and art becomes indistinguishable from politics, and in many ways surpasses outright ideology in importance. While Max is a lackadaisical Marxist, Jan transcends politics and philosophy through his love of a rock band, the Czech dissident group The Plastic People of the Universe. Jan is a Czech native raised in England—modeled in part on Stoppard himself—who leaves his studies in Cambridge to return to his homeland after the Prague Spring. The play is heavily influenced by Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and like that book’s protagonist, Jan refuses to sign a petition against those imprisoned by Husák’s “politics of normalization.”

Yet Jan does eventually put into motion a petition to free The Plastic People of the Universe after the band is imprisoned. Jan’s acceptance of this distinction comes from what Stoppard describes in his introduction as the inability to “separate disengagement from dissidence.” When Jan begins a petition to free the Plastics, his political activist friend Ferdinand berates him for caring more about music than politics (in early drafts of the script, Ferdinand’s full name was Ferdinand Vanek, a recurring character in the plays of Václav Havel). Jan counters with a monologue explaining what separated arrests of political dissidents from the arrest of Plastics ringleader Ivan Jirous over insulting a policeman:

JAN No, because the policeman insulted him. About his hair. Jirous doesn’t cut his hair. It makes the policeman angry, so he starts something and it ends with Jirous in gaol. But what is the policeman angry about? What difference does long hair make? The policeman is angry about his fear. The policeman’s fear is what makes him angry. He’s frightened by indifference. Jirous doesn’t care. He doesn’t care enough even to cut his hair. The policeman isn’t frightened by dissidents! Why should he be? Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. Your friend Havel cares so much he writes a long letter to Husák. It makes no odds whether it’s a love letter or a protest letter. It means they’re playing on the same board…But the Plastics don’t care at all. They’re unbribable. They’re coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They’re not heretics, they’re pagans.

The larger significance of Jan’s defense of the rebel-without-a-cause line of reasoning is his conviction that there is a realm that no politics of normalization can touch: the distinct individuality of the human spirit as expressed through art. While the politics of normalization is a politically oppressive offshoot of the Marxist notion that intellect derives from the social and political relationships between the laborer and the ruling class, Jan’s argument goes back to Schiller’s idealism, which not coincidentally was devised by a dramatist in the face of an intellectually oppressive regime. In On The Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller noted, “Art is the daughter of Freedom, and takes her orders from the necessity inherent in minds, not in the exigencies of matter.” To Schiller, no materialist account of freedom, be it through the emphasis on utility or on pure reason, could fully grasp the political as well as personal freedom of an aesthetic education.

Back in Cambridge, we get a discussion between Max, Eleanor, and Czech student Lenka on, fittingly enough, the role of the Muses in the consciousness of Sappho. Max, uninvited to the lesson, interjects himself into the conversation, and Lenka, a Czech graduate student who is infatuated with Max, is only happy to oblige against Eleanor’s objections. The discussion of Sappho’s “Poem of Jealousy” stalls on the question of whether the poet’s experience of “love, desire and jealousy” comes from her body or from the god’s interjection into her soul. What should be a lesson on Sappho quickly turns into a more general discussion of free will versus determinism, with Max arguing in favor of a brain “which you can make out of beer cans,” Eleanor defending the mind/body distinction on the grounds that “experiencing love is different from experiencing a bee sting.” Lenka, though the only student in the scene, becomes the Socratic moderator of the discussion.

Max’s defense of biological determinism is quickly exposed as a necessary extension of his lapsed Marxism. Lenka has read one of Max’s books (either Class and Consciousness or Masses and Materialism), and notes that Max’s only acceptable definition of the mind is the collective mind, which makes him hesitant to support the concept of an individual mind except as a uniform brain. Lenka accuses his stance in the mind/body debate as having a “materialist agenda.” After Lenka leaves, Max quickly confirms her larger points, as he defends the original idea of the Communist Party, which was “made from a single piece of timber. The struggle…for socialism through organized labor.” Max dismisses the current Western European manifestation of Marxism as scattered, namely the Social Democratic missions of “anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, ecological good practice.”

Max maintains a rather idealistic perspective on Marxism, one that flies in the face of the materialist implications of Marxist philosophy. It’s interesting that Max would use such a biological approach to defending Marxism, particularly since, in The German Ideology, Marx lumped consciousness with religion and all the other social structures that derive from the base relationship of man’s ability “to produce their means of sustinence,” where “men are indirectly producing their actual material life.” To Marx, the biological approach to the mind was secondary to the social and political relationship between man and his labor. To Marx, consciousness derives not from the beer can machinery of the mind, but from social relationships, arguing, “the phantom forces of the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material-life processes, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.”

Max’s relationship to biological determinism, like his relationship to Marxism, is fleeting at best. Eleanor, his intellectual foil who has heard this argument many times before, breaks down Max’s determinism in an extremely moving passage where she describes Max’s determinism as being “in cahoots” with her cancer:

Eleanor They’ve cut, cauterized, and zapped away my breasts, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished. I’m exactly who I’ve always been. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me, that’s the truth of it.
She tears open her dress.
Eleanor (cont.) Look at it, what’s left of it. It does classics. It does half-arsed feminism, it does love, desire, jealousy, and fear—Christ, does it do fear!—so who’s the me who’s still in one piece?

What’s particularly striking is that, faced with this plea, Max immediately sacrifices his stance on the mind/body debate, even if it is only out of respect for his wife. He tells her that “I know your mind is everything,” a notion which Eleanor quickly rejects:

Eleanor Don’t you dare, Max—don’t you dare reclaim that word now, I don’t want your mind; which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine—I want what you love me with.

Max’s lack of absolute conviction to biological determinism is inextricably related to his half-hearted loyalty to the Communist Party. At the beginning of the play, Max maintains that he has stayed with the Party based on his belief “that between theory and practice there is decent fit.” But in this scene with Eleanor he exposes a fundamental flaw in that line of reasoning: the practice of Communism, in Stalin, Husák, and most other actualized forms, did not match the goals of the theory. He can’t reconcile the material form of Soviet Communism with the grand ideas of Marxist Communism. Whereas Marx sought to liberate the masses from the shackles of their labor-based relationship with the ruling class, the ruling classes of the Soviets used the awareness of that relationship to exert totalitarian control over their subjects. In biological determinism, Max finds a safe, supportable materialism that can be substituted, however poorly, for the ideological materialism of Marxism that can no longer be justifiably defended. It is not all that surprising, then, that later in the play we learn that Max had actually left the Party in secret several years before the time he still claimed to be a member.

It should be also no surprise that the kind of subtle cultural resistance that Jan takes up with the Plastic People of the Universe is utterly foreign to Max. When Max learns that Jan has been arrested for petitioning for the Plastics, he can’t believe Jan would get arrested for “some pop group thing.” When Max learns that Jan had taken a record from his daughter Esme on his last day in England (instead of her virginity), he calls it “bourgeois.” Max is utterly oblivious to the more nuanced ideology behind Jan’s political vagrancy, and the disparity becomes realized in the painfully awkward reconciliation the two share when they meet in Rock ‘N’ Roll’s second act, which takes place after perestroika.

It is at least not Stoppard’s active intent to dismantle Communist ideology with Rock ‘N’ Roll. While Jan is a vaguely autobiographical character and Stoppard is a self-declared political conservative, Rock ‘N’ Roll fairly appraises the flaws of the Soviet regime while still showing the sympathetic side of Max’s reasoning behind his desperate allegiance to Marxist ideals, though it is debatable whether Max is a sympathetic character or an old, stubborn bully. Like most Stoppard plays, the larger ideological points translate into the more personal themes of hypocrisy, personality flaws, and fractured relationships. Max’s materialism is countered by Eleanor’s cancer, and Jan’s love of rock music translates to his political conscience. Such a dynamic allows Rock ‘N’ Roll to meditate equally on the dramatic and theoretical levels.

Labels: marxism, rock 'n' roll, schiller, the plastic people of the universe, tom stoppard

So after years of loudly and obnoxiously bashing Harold Pinter to anyone who cared (or to people who didn't) I'm finally starting to see the error of my ways. University Theater here at the U of C did a fantastic rendition of The Homecoming, convincing enough that I'm tempted to see it again on Broadway. My bias towards Pinter largely comes from my father (if you've ever seen The Squid and the Whale, a lot of my opinions come from the same vein as arguing that A Tale of Two Cities is minor Dickens), and the fact that my the first Pinter play I ever saw was his first, The Room, which, while mirroring the chronology of the theater world's introduction to Pinter, is not exactly an easy introduction to a playwright for a 17 year old.

Probably another factor was that I was exposed to David Mamet at roughly the same time as Pinter. While both playwrights tend to use dialog as a weapon, Mamet is much more grounded in reality and easier to digest, and hence I naturally felt the assert Mamet's superiority in the theater of menace. Now, of course, with four years of college in me, I can come up with more sources of comparison. I see the parallels to Beckett, Ionesco, and the Angry Young Man movement. I see more apt American parallels than Mamet, such as Edward Albee and Sam Shepard (Buried Child, in my mind, is Pinter with a Midwestern accent). I can even see parallels with the more comical but still emotionally jarring playwrights like Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. I still think Philip Roth deserves a Nobel Prize more, but I am less inclined to dismiss Pinter's Noble Prize outright. I also now really want to see Sleuth, and am frustrated that I don't have it On Demand in my apartment.

Labels: angry young man, david mamet, edward albee, eugene ionseco, harold pintet, joe orton, philip roth, sam shepard, samuel beckett, sleuth, the homecoming, tom stoppard