[This is the last installment of “Faust Clones,” my three-part examination of seven plays adapted from the Faust story which was first recorded in the late 16th century and lives on in the 21st. (ROTters are encouraged to go back to Part 1 on 15 January to familiarize themselves with the background of the legend and its origins.) In Part 3, I’ll look at the last two plays I selected for this article, Leonardo Shapiro’s unproduced radio play from 1993, Nothing Is Ever Lost, or All in Good Fun, and the most experimental and, arguably, farthest from the Renaissance roots of the story, John Jesurun’s FAUST/How I Rose from 1996 and 2004, sneaking us over the line into the 21st century.]
Theater director,
writer, and production designer Leonardo Shapiro’s concern for ecology and the
environment, and especially his focus on nuclear pollution, are openly
reflected in Nothing Is Ever Lost, or
All in Good Fun: Radioromance, as are several of his philosophic
interests. Written in New Mexico in
December 1993, Nothing Is Ever Lost is based on Marlowe’s Doctor
Faustus.
Leonardo Shapiro
(1946-97) was the founder and artistic director of The Shaliko Company (1972-92),
an experimental theater group based in New York City’s East Village. As a prep school student in Lenox,
Massachusetts, Shapiro hitchhiked to New York City frequently where he met and
hung out with the seminal avant-garde theater group, the Living Theatre. Already politically active (his first arrest
was at 13) and a devotee of Bertolt Brecht, Shapiro learned from the Living’s
example that theater and politics could go together and he made politically
active stage works from his start in the field.
He was a student at New York University’s School of the Arts (1966-69)
where he studied with, among others, Jerzy Grotowski; while a student at SOA,
Shapiro staged the anti-war street musical Brother, You’re Next and
formed the New York Free Theater (1968-69), a street troupe that protested
racism and violence, with some of his classmates. After graduating with a BFA in directing,
Shapiro lived near Taos, New Mexico, where he formed the Appleseed Circus
(1969-71), a guerilla theater group which roamed the Four Corners mounting
protest performances for environmentalism, against nuclear weapons, and calling
attention to other liberal, leftist, and radical causes. Returning to New York City, he established Shaliko,
a troupe dedicated to presenting politically and socially aware performances
and applying the theories of Brecht and Grotowski. He served as an artist-in-residence at
Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and then became director of the
Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program (1986-92), administered by Trinity but
based at the famous East Village Off-Off-Broadway theater. When he retired from New York theater in 1992,
Shapiro moved back to the Taos area and, continuing his theater work and his
activism, he took to writing plays and poetry and a theater-based novel. Written in 1993, Nothing Is Ever Lost came
out of that period of Shapiro’s life.
Sadly, he was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer in 1995 and died
in 1997 at the age of 51.
The play begins in
radio station KAOS, an NPR outlet, where the Hermetic Mystery Theater of the
Air is broadcasting Marlowe’s Tragical
History of Doctor Faustus (which Shapiro’s Shaliko Company produced
in 1988; see the discussion in Part 1 of “Faust Clones”). Johanna Gretchen Kepler reads The Chorus
opening until Roger Radio interrupts the performance with a news bulletin from
“Washing Done” (that’s the kind of sarcasm with which Shapiro leavens his
script) about an incident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Program for Memory
Eradication (WIPP-ME) on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Roger turns the broadcast over to Tom-Tom (Coyote)
Rainwater on the scene. Tom-Tom reports
that a truck caravan with 600 tons of radioactive waste en route to the WIPP-ME
disposal site under the reservation has been lost for two days. While the station returns to the Doctor Faustus
broadcast from time to time, it’s constantly interrupted by bulletins with
direr and direr announcements and conflicting government party-line assurances and
double-talk from various agencies.
Marlowe’s text begins to disintegrate into a mix of contemporary references
as Faustus sends greetings to “the Germans Karl [Jung is my guess—although he’s actually Carl—but he could
mean Marx] and Sigmund [Freud]” and the play
morphs into a search for the missing radioactive waste shipment from the
Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Complex (whose “artistic director” is Jim Jones).
Eventually, Johanna
recruits Henry Faustus from the radio drama to help find the nuclear
waste. (Heinrich is Goethe’s name for
his Faust; Marlowe’s Faustus is John.) Faustus,
who takes on the persona of the Lone Ranger, partners with Tonto, a send-up of
the 1950s stereotype of a Hollywood Indian right down to his pidgin English. (Later in the play, Tonto remarks, in
perfectly good English: “Maybe we can escape the stereotypes that trap us as
well.”) The two ride off on a pair of .
. . cats; Tonto’s feline steed is named Albert while Faustus’ cat is,
appropriately, named Silver. Suddenly,
the signal from the station is interrupted and a group called Revolting Artists
breaks into the studio and claims responsibility for the missing nuclear
waste. For the return of the radioactive
material, they demand “to take over the NEA and turn it into a real endowment
for real artists, namely us” and that “all art-work [be] protected by copyright
forever” so that all the royalties can be invested in “working artists.” The artists’ complaint is that “the
yahoos”—that is, the establishment—have “separated art from life, artists from
public, form from content, and both from context.” (These are all claims Shapiro made—and wrote
about—during his entire career. In fact,
the whole Revolting Artists’ speech could be a capsulization of Shapiro’s
lifelong political and social positions.)
As Johanna denies they are the hijackers, the artists are beaten and
carried out of the studio.
Meanwhile, Faustus
and Tonto ride to the last place the nuclear-waste convoy was seen, the Silver Dollar
Trading Post and Lounge on another Navajo “Res” (as Tom-Tom calls them) in Good
Luck, Utah. (“Look like IHOP in Hell,” observes
Tonto.) Tonto performs a magic trick
with a rattlesnake—which sufficiently terrifies the bar customers that they
answer the seekers’ questions. Tom-Tom
reports strange phenomena occurring all around: “border crossings of all
kinds,” “U.F.O. sightings,” “freak electrical storms.” There are also reports of “mounted bands of
Native Americans raiding frontier settlements.”
The reporter
interviews Old Dry Wind, the “senior representative” of the Traditional People
who explains that “men from your government” came to buy a cave on Indian land
for a waste dump, but the Diné (People) always refused because the land
is holy; it is their sipapu, or place of emergence. Then the government made a secret deal with a
“chief called Lawyer . . . a great talker, but not an honest man,” who tricked
the People. The Ancient Elder begs
listeners not to “allow anything to happen to” the sipapu—if it’s
blocked by anything going into the cave, “Horrible things will happen.”
Back at KAOS,
Johanna takes a phone call from Russ Perdudu who offers to trade “this convoy
of trucks I found wandering around the dessert” for “this here radio
network.” It seems his corporation,
Perot/Time/Chrysler Spectacular Systems, needs a radio network to complete his
conglomerate of Random House books, Warner Brothers movies, and Arts and
Leisure Cable Network in order corner the media market and monopolize any
story. Perdudu even proposes that his
Mattel branch “whip up a terrific Mini-Convoy,” the deluxe set of which will
come “with real nuclear waste! To
transport and bury on your own site at home.”
He adds excitedly, “God Bless America!
We’ll sell the shit back to them . . . .” Told he’s on the air, Perdudu launches into a
racist, anti-Semitic, nationalistic, anit-communist, anti-government rant—complete
with slurs. Johanna exclaims at the
“transforming power of the media” to “retribalize mankind” and despairs of “the
ignoring of this power” because people’s consciousness has become numbed.
On the trail of the
nuclear convoy, Faustus has used his “alchemical herbalist studies” to track
down some “organic matter” he and Tonto obtained back at the Silver Dollar. Faustus says it’s “a mushroom,” so he calls on
his late friend John Cage, who’s staying at “the Chelsea” and is something of a
mycologist (studier of fungi, don’t you know).
Cage, whose dialogue includes a quotation from the composer that Shapiro
used prominently in Shaliko promotional materials, explains that the substance
isn’t a mushroom at all, but peyote, which evokes “visions, changes in
perception, time sense, and mood.” This
sends Faustus and Tonto off on a vision quest for the practitioners of the
Indian peyote religion. At the same
time, back at KAOS, Tom-Tom is interviewing “an unnamed senior scientist” at
Los Alamos called Deep Throat who reveals that the missing convoy isn’t
carrying radioactive waste, but actual bombs that the lab was supposed to have
dismantled in compliance with various treaties and acts of Congress—but didn’t
to save time and money. (The scientists
also figured the bombs could be reassembled should “geo-political circumstances
change,” rationalized Deep Throat, or—just to give you an indication of
Shapiro’s basic politics—“the Republicans get back in the White House”—which,
of course, they did three years after Shapiro’s death.)
I’ve mentioned
several times that topics or phrases Shapiro used in the script of Nothing
Is Ever Lost were concerns and interests of his often since the start of
his political activism in his teens.
While nearly all of Shapiro’s productions had strong politically and
socially critical aspects—if the script wasn’t already politically aware,
Shapiro staged it so that social and political criticism was at least a
subtext—he seldom included such blatant personal concerns and interests in his
work before returning to New Mexico. Among
the references in Nothing Is Ever Lost that draw on Shapiro’s personal
philosophy and politics, for instance, is the “Los Alamos National Weapons
Complex,” Shapiro’s fictionalized name for the Los Alamos National Laboratory,
the famous nuclear facility where the playwright led a two-day
environmental-theater protest on
5 and 6 August 1970 (the 25th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic
bombing). It was the first-ever such
demonstration at the lab (see my post, “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los
Alamos),” 5 August
2009). The Revolting Artists’ call for
the National Endowment for the Arts to be transformed into “a real endowment
for real artists” and their demand that art works generate permanent royalties
to support working artists are actual positions the playwright staked out, most
vociferously during the uproar over the defunding of the so-called NEA Four, some
of whom were friends and colleagues of Shapiro’s. His argument that grant evaluators and critics
have divorced artistic form, which may be judged, from content, which may not,
goes back to the earliest days of his professional career as well. Shapiro’s invocation of “U.F.O. sightings”
was a topic he actually used in a play, Strangers, workshopped in 1990
(see my post, “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014).
As the search proceeds, Shapiro’s text becomes more diffuse, airier,
less concrete. Dialogue gives way more
and more to monologues and speeches, sometimes adapted from Marlowe or other
sources like Indian prayers or politico-philosophical treatises, such as one
delivered by French Woman, identified as a Situationist, a proponent of a
French post-World War II art and political movement by which Shapiro had been
influenced. In a soliloquy by Lullaby,
Shapiro references ideas from Shiva Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere, an
examination of the People’s Temple debacle of the Reverend Jim Jones (which was
one of the inspirations for Strangers, the story line for which was
based on a radiation contamination in Goiania, Brazil, in 1987). Lullaby declares, “You have learned to be
blind, you have learned to be deaf,” an echo, perhaps, of Tennessee
Williams’s indictment of society’s intentional (or, perhaps, inattentional)
blindness in Glass Menagerie. (Williams was another of Shapiro’s
acknowledged influences.) Later, Faustus
echoes the same notion in this thoughts. The
landscape becomes increasingly threatening and ominous, littered with
radioactive animal corpses and the detritus of civilization. Faustus and Johanna (Gretchen) fall in
love—and Tonto begins to behave less like the faithful Indian companion of TV’s
Lone Ranger and more like Faustus’ Mephistophilis, leading Faustus to a secret
destination. They arrive at the Holy
Mountain of the South, one of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo
epistemology that demark Dinétah, the traditional
homeland of the Diné (see my article on
the Navajo healing rite, “‘My
Mind Restore For Me’: Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” 15 May 2013), as Tonto leads Faustus down a thousand
feet beneath the Earth’s surface.
The searchers slide even deeper through an ice tube into a cavern
Faustus compares to Plato’s Cave in reverse.
“No,” replies Tonto, “it’s Plato who got it backwards. . . . It’s not ideas that are real, it’s the world
itself.” Gretchen arrives, borne by
Silver, but she can’t stay. Tonto
reveals that they are at the sipapu—and the convoy trucks are there,
too. They’d been hidden there all along,
not hijacked but made invisible to detection systems. Tonto and the Indians that have survived
despite the Euro-Americans’ efforts to “poison us with your silly scientism and
repression” plan to use “the sacred filth in the trucks” to effect their
disappearance from the Earth into the Fifth World, leaving the white man “here
in the mess you have made.” (This is a
sort of reverse effect of the 19th-century Plains Indian Ghost Dance religion
that envisioned the supernatural removal of the white man and his civilization, leaving the Native Americans in the
natural paradise they imagined preceded the arrival of the Europeans.) Tonto and his cohorts have “called a healing
ceremony” to open the portal. (In
traditional Navajo creation mythology, the Fifth World is the present existence
of humans, but Shapiro has extended his dramatic epistemology to make this our
Fourth World, with which the Diné were dissatisfied, and posited a new, Fifth
World of renewal and happiness.)
As
Johanna describes the scene unfolding in the distance, we envision a sort of
gigantic healing ceremony, with masses of people, including Anglos and
Buddhists, dancing along with the trucks while “a picture [is] drawn in the
sand, . . . a giant tapestry pattern with some kind of colored stuff”—a huge
sand painting, an integral part of the Navajo healing rite. The mountains open up and absorb the trucks
as Faustus and Tonto emerge and chant a variation of the Nightway song. Faustus tells Johanna that he must go with
Tonto and the others (“I made a deal”) “to be their Canary.” (Shapiro likened artists to the canary in the
coal mine; also, in the Navajo legend, several animals go into the Fifth World
in advance of the Diné to scout ahead and bring back word.)
As
Johanna describes the mountains themselves rising up into the heavens, she
reverts to her role as radio announcer, dedicating the performance of Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus to “Orson the Magnificent” (Orson Welles was one of Shapiro’s
acknowledged inspirations, and this radio play was clearly modeled to an extent
on Welles’s famous Halloween broadcast in 1938 of The War of the Worlds by H.
G. Wells.) As you’ve no doubt noticed, Shapiro isn’t above some low humor and
silliness, and Johanna announces that the next presentation on KAOS will be Wuthering
Heights, adapted by David Rammit, AKA David Mamet.
Native American culture, philosophy, and spiritual beliefs were
extremely important to and influential on Shapiro’s life and work from his
earliest years. After all, he named his
New York company Shaliko after the Zuni messenger spirits between the gods and
man, the Shalakos, and it’s part of what drew him back to New Mexico to
retire. The Nightway healing chant of the Navajos, which Shapiro viewed as a
model for theater as a “healing art,” upon
which he also modeled his concluding poem, “In Tsegihi,” in Nothing Is Ever
Lost is a prime example. (Tsegihi is
a place sacred to the Navajo where a shaman was taught the Nightway chant by
one of the Yeibechi and brought it back to the Diné.) Also
significant are the references to the Diné, the Navajo name for
themselves (“the People”); the subjugation and manipulation of Native Americans
and the suppression or appropriation of their culture; the sipapu, “the
place of emergence” in the lore of many Indian peoples (including,
particularly, the Taos Pueblos whose sipapu is Blue Lake in the sacred
Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Shapiro’s Taos County home); peyote, a
hallucinogenic used in Native American religious rites (and which Shapiro used
in New Mexico during his earlier sojourn); and the Yei Be Che Mountains, an
allusion to Yeibichai (or Yeibechi), a spirit in the Navajo
religion; all are taken from elements of the playwright’s personal
philosophy. Shapiro also believed, as he
laments in Nothing Is Ever Lost, that western science and technology,
though he wasn’t a Luddite, had so separated us from the natural world that we
had lost our spirituality. Even the invocation
of “mounted bands of Native Americans raiding frontier settlements” comes from
Shapiro’s childhood imagination when he dreamed of himself as an eight-year-old
boy who “danced, carried a tomahawk to school, scalped the principal, took back
the country, drove out the white man, restored the buffalo, and lived happily
ever after”—a boy’s vision of the Ghost Dance ceremony.
The tomahawk dream of 8-year-old Richard Leo Shapiro was one
of the tactics the isolated little boy, among the minority whites in a
Cuban-majority public school system in Miami and then one of only two Jews at
the Admiral Farragut Academy military school he attended in St. Petersburg,
Florida, found to gain control of his hostile world, at least in his
imagination. Magic tricks, which a young
Leo Shapiro used to practice, were another.
(This is stage magic, or prestidigitation. As a youngster, Shapiro studied with and even
assisted retired professional magician Al Cohn, 1891-1988, known as the “Sponge
Ball King.” The playwright was also fascinated
by the notion of “real” magic, or necromancy, and read the works of occultist
Aleister Crowley. It was one of the
things, alongside Marlowe’s poetry, that attracted him to Doctor Faustus.) In the
radio play, Shapiro put these words, partly a reference to his own childhood
and partly an indictment of the establishment bosses (for not being better at
their deceptions), into the mouth of Henry Faustus:
When I was a boy I did magic
tricks. I made things appear and
disappear, I changes ed one thing into another.
I found things that were lost and lost things that were found. Cards, balls, silk handkerchiefs,
rabbits. Now I’m 500 years old. You’d think I would have learned better
tricks.
Nothing Is Ever Lost, which would run about 80 minutes, was never produced or broadcast,
though it may have been submitted to a local radio station in Taos County. Given Shapiro’s habitual lack of subtlety in
expressing his politics or his disdain for the establishment, especially in
scripts where he was in control of the text (as opposed to plays written by
others, like the original Doctor Faustus or
even Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken),
it would have surprised me if he could have found a station ready to take on Nothing
Is Ever Lost. Consistent with Shapiro’s political leanings and
his general suspicion of government—he was a supporter of anarchism and
socialism and considered figures like Murray Bookchin and Michael Harrington,
also a friend, influences—a main plotline in the play is a nuclear-waste threat
and a government conspiracy involving the collusion of business and
establishment leaders. As usual, the
theater artist wore his political heart on his sleeve—and I imagine that the
daws did pick at it. Still, Shapiro
wanted to help the audience find the lost (or just hidden) things—without
losing the things that were found.
*
* * *
In 1996, the New York-based Builders
Association, a performance and media company, commissioned John Jesurun (b.
1951) to write a play. A Faust story wasn’t
anything Jesurun was contemplating as a subject, but that’s what the Theater
Neumarkt of Zürich, the New York company’s financer, wanted. “I said the only way I’ll write this is if
you give me what I thought was an exorbitant amount of money. It was a Faustian deal,” the writer said—even
though he supposed on another occasion that selling his soul to the devil was
something “I don’t think I would” ever do.
“It’s too much trouble.”
“I thought they would say ‘no,’” Jesurun continued. “But they said ‘yes,’ so I had to do it.” But he took on the 500-year-old legend on his
own terms—an approach for which the avant-garde writer, director, and
multi-media artist famous for his integration of language, film, space, and
media habitually took—and he “took the simple story . . . and attacked it in my
own way.”
The end result, FAUST/How I Rose, the playwright declared,
has very little resemblance to the German ‘Faust.’ It is really more about the devil than about
Faust. It’s sympathetic to the devil. Faust has a friendly, if not a romantic
relationship with the devil, who is played by a woman . . . . It’s from the devil’s point of view. I would suppose everyone has had the devil’s
point of view at one time, because we’re human.
The Builders
Association used excerpts of the play in Jesurun’s 1997 Jump Cut (Faust)
and the full FAUST/How I Rose, then under the title Imperial
Motel (Faust), premièred at Mexico City’s Teatro El Granero in 1998. Jesurun has also directed a German version of
How I Rose in Frankfurt at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in 1999. The U.S. (and English-language) première, a co-production by Teatro
de Arena and the National Theater Company of Mexico, a couple of Mexico City troupes, ran at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music’s Harvey Theater in Fort Greene from 16 to 20 November 2004. (The performance on 17 November was in
Spanish without an English translation; all others were in English.) Directed by Martín Acosta, who’s the artistic
director of Teatro de Arena, the production was part of New York City’s Mexico
Now, a multidisciplinary arts festival sponsored by the Mexican Consulate and
Arts International. The play’s English
text was published in the Performing
Arts Journal in September 2004.
FAUST/How I Rose
begins with the title character (Ari Brickman), whom Jersurun makes a jet-setting
“international diplomat” in a black suit, flying over a burning city. (This, and much else, is suggested by the
actors, as there is little scenery. “The
scene is where the artist says it is,” explained Jesurun. “It throws logic out
the window, and you are compelled to believe it.”) Jesurun, also the show’s designer, employed a
giant screen on which he projected videos. Faust’s friend and confident, Phaedra
(Guillermina Campuzano), is a mouse who’s an intellectual. In an extended trial scene, Faust defends
Gretchen, or Rhonda Kindermoerd (Carolina Politti), his assistant, against a
charge of killing her unborn baby (her last name means ‘child murder’ in
German). She’s freed when the dead child
(Manuel Domínguez) possesses the stenographer and testifies in Rhonda’s behalf.
The focal character in Jesurun’s telling is Mephistopheles
(Mónica Dionne), a female punk-rocker in a blue leather jacket with her red
hair in spikes. The play happens from
her point of view. This Mephistopheles,
tossed out of heaven for inventing love (“So, ok it was a mistake. How was I to know?”), is in love with Faust,
who’s “too busy with his own reasoning” to take much notice. Then Jesurun throws in a witches’ Sabbath,
war, global political corruption, and what the New York Times’ Margo Jefferson described as “a civilization so
jaded that even temptation looks petty and stupid.” Nearly a dozen settings fly past in what the
director called “an immense imaginary geography,” including earth (a postapocalyptic
theater of war), hell (a doctor’s waiting room), a bad 24-hour diner, and a
psychedelic porn theater. Acosta called
it a “pessimistic theater to conjure up the bad times that are giving us the
eye; to raise questions—and light up flames.”
In the Village Voice, Michael
Feingold characterized Jesurun’s script as “leaping from high tragedy to coarse
put-down and from grandest archaism to lowest contemporary slang.”
Jesurun designed not only the set, but the videos as
well. The setting consisted of one large
white, slightly raked, rectangular platform, which served as the performance
area, and another rectangular form suspended on a slant over the platform.
Both forms served as screens for Jesurun’s videos, thus surrounding the
characters with swirling images, not all of which clearly corresponded to the
scenic moment, the spoken text, or the themes of the play (though sometimes
they did most eloquently). Images were
projected on the floor and on the hanging screen, theoretically integrating the
video with the live action as the video’s images shifted and moved.
I saw Jesurun’s FAUST/How
I Rose with my frequent theater partner, Diana, on Tuesday, 16 November 2004 and it was probably the
worst piece of theater I’ve seen in many, many years. I couldn’t figure out anything that Jesurun
was doing or saying. That pretty much sums it all up for me. The
performance lasted only 90 minutes, but it was the longest hour-and-a-half I’ve
spent in the theater since I can recall. If there’d been an
intermission—they were smart—I’d have proposed to Diana (who also didn’t like
the show) that we leave. I haven’t done that in many, many years; I can
remember only one time in well over two decades now. (As it was, droves
of people did leave during the performance. I usually can’t bring myself
to do that to working actors, but they weren’t really wrong in this instance.)
I can’t even tell you anything so you can test my response—I
couldn’t follow a thing in this play. It was so muddled and bloviating,
even when I could focus on the performance—my mind kept wandering—I couldn’t
figure it out. I mean, it obviously had some connection to the Faust
legend, but beyond the sketchiest outline, I can’t even describe the narrative
without help. I won’t dignify it by
calling it a plot. (I cribbed much of the above synopsis and then used
the published text to confirm my description.) I assume Jesurun had
something in mind when he wrote How
I Rose, but I’ll be damned if I can see what it was. What it
resembled is something that a bunch of over-intellectualized high schoolers
who think they’re really, really smart might put together. (My
companion called it “sophomoric,” but that sounds like college-level to
me, so I offered “juvenile.” “Pretentious” also came up, but they aren’t
mutually exclusive.)
There was only one fun thing in the performance, but it
was ruined halfway in. I doubt it meant anything significant, but,
then, how would I know? There were at least half a dozen Beatles
quotations in the dialogue (no singing) and the program material. (Also
one Dylan and one extensive Beach Boys.) My problem later was that the
performance was so enervating that I couldn’t remember most of the lyrics that
were quoted. The few I did retain were “Baby You Can Drive My Car” (used
as a scene title in the program), “Lucy in the sky with diamonds”
(Mephistopheles is also called Lucy—short, I presume, for Lucifer, though the
character is a woman), “Picture yourself on a boat on a river.” (Margo
Jefferson also included one in her Times review
I didn’t even remember—“wild thing”; either it went by me and I never heard it,
or it was in a part of the show when I tuned out.) There were others, but I couldn’t remember
them until I looked them up later. I also couldn’t remember the Dylan,
but the Beach Boys’ was “Help me, Rhonda. Help, help me, Rhonda.
Help me, Rhonda, yeah—get her out of my heart.” The only fun I had was spotting them and
trying to remember the songs they came from. Some were the titles, of
course, so those were easy. Jesurun
ruined this enjoyment by actually acknowledging the Beatles somewhere near the
middle of the play. Until then it was like one of those hidden-images
pictures where you have to search out images of, say, animals, disguised in a
forest scene. As I said, though, what all those pop-music references
meant is beyond my puny brain to figure out. (A sample of how my mind was
wandering: I kept wondering how all these pop-music quotes would work in the
Spanish text.)
(I was at the Library for the Performing Arts a couple of
days after the performance. While I was waiting for something, I had a
glance at the PAJ edition of the text
and I found the Dylan quote I couldn’t remember: “. . . knock, knock, knocking
on heaven’s door.” In the play, the sense is literal. I also
spotted one of the other Beatles quotes I couldn’t remember: “strawberry fields
forever”; it was just dropped into some dialogue.)
I never determined what the purpose of this gimmick is, but
my bigger questions are—first, why would the Mexican companies choose to stage How I Rose? It
had been around some (since ’96), and Acosta even staged the Mexico City
première in 1998. Second, why
would they export it to New York; and third, why would BAM accept it? I find it hard to accept that my judgment is
so off the beam that How I
Rose might be considered good theater by someone with discernment—though
the PAJ publication suggests, I
suppose, that somebody thought it was worth documenting. (Some people leaving behind me at the end of
the BAM performance were extolling the production, but I suspect their taste
and judgment. There were even a few “Bravos” at the curtain call. De gustibus non disputandum est,
as my dad would say. Or, perhaps more appropriately, “Audiences will buy
trash, but not garbage”—a favorite admonition of the tech director at Rutgers.
You don’t suppose it’s a case of the play being so confusing and meaningless
that no one can understand it, but everyone’s too afraid to admit that?
The emperor’s new play!)
I’m sorry I can’t say more about How I Rose to show if I was just dense or
something. Another example of my wandering mind that night was that I was
thinking of how I’d describe this thing. I never figured it out,
though—as you can see. I just couldn’t retain anything! And the
acting—everyone seemed to like to shout every now and then for no reason. The cast were all Mexican and many had really
heavy accents, plus, as Jefferson pointed out, some were mush-mouthed and
speaking very fast, so there were parts of the dialogue I never understood,
even when I tried to listen.
Jefferson’s review of How
I Rose finally appeared in the Times
on 19 November, the day before the last performance.
Jefferson essentially said—more articulately than I did—what I felt about the
play, but I think she was far kinder. I
don’t know if she was soft-pedaling or if she really saw some valid artistry at
work. Characterizing it as “elaborate and obscure, flattering the
intellectual vanity of artist and audience,” she described the production as “a
postmodern pastiche of information and imagery” and “multimedia extravaganza.” But “the Faust tale,” Jefferson
asserted, “needs more than the hip intellectualism and multimedia projections.” “Mr. Jesurun uses a rhetoric of
self-conscious grandeur, slang and bits of rhyme and alliteration,” the Times writer reported; however, “Faust
needs a verbal style that does more than simply toy with chaos and violent
emotion.” Jefferson also thought, “The
occasional literary allusions and frequent rock lyrics don’t help” and that the
“actors stride about the stage and strike attitudes. They speak forcefully but not always clearly. The script defeats them and the film engulfs
them.” “As for the design,” observed
Jefferson, “images flow constantly onto the stage and a screen above it. Some of them compelled, some drifted.” In the end, she summed up, “It was very
accomplished, and almost none of it mattered”—which is how I saw it.
On the 18th, the only earlier review I’ve found (all the
remaining print notices came out after the production closed), Jeremy McCarter
of the New York Sun called FAUST/How I Rose a “wild riff” on the
Faust legend that “scrambles past, present, and future,” and declared that it
would “pitch even the strongest-stomached theatergoer, or the strongest souled,
into metaphysical vertigo.” The Sun review-writer continued that “anyone
who knows the legend from the Goethe play will be, at best, perplexed.” “Free associative, willfully obscure, and
sporadically captivating,” McCarter
described How I Rose, adding that the
play “smacks of ‘Fantastic Voyage’ and an anxious seminarian’s dream.” Remarking on the nearly bare stage, the Sun reviewer observed, “Bathing a stage
and a company of actors in video is not an overwhelmingly novel approach to
stagecraft. But Mr. Jesurun’s best
images have a galvanizing appeal. They
tend to show, or imply, elevation: lightning behind clouds, an escalator, the
stars.” McCarter also complained about
Jesurun’s “far-flung” script: “Having seen the play, and read the script, and
all the press materials thoughtfully assembled to accompany it, I still have
only a fleeting sense of what ‘Faust/How I Rose’ is about.” Jesurun and Acosta’s “use of live video
provides a lift here and there,” the journalist asserted, describing some
striking visual moments, but he found the cast “shouting some lines and turning
away from the audience for others.” McCarter
summed up, “The show runs 90 minutes but feels much longer; it may be the
densest piece to play the Harvey this side of the millennium. . . . Mr. Jesurun’s play grows wearying. Like Faust’s doomed plane, it lacks the fuel
to complete its journey.”
Prior to the show’s BAM opening, Village Voice writer Michael Feingold wrote in a preview: “Many
things, including some audience members’ hackles, are bound to rise when John
Jesurun’s Faust/How I Rose receives its New York unveiling.” He warned us to “get your right brains ready
for linguistic dislocations. . . the likes of which you’ve never experienced.” Jesurun, who comes from a multi-lingual,
multi-cultural background (his father’s family is from Curaçao, his mother’s is
Puerto Rican, and as a military brat, Jesurun grew up on army bases including
many years in Germany), “may be the perfect writer to play the devil with our
everyday cultural parameters, livening up our isolationist notion of
Eurocentric dead-white-guys art with a good dash of Mexican salsa roja.” The Voice
journalist analyzed the playwright’s dramaturgy this way:
If Jung described modern humanity
as ‘in search of a soul,’ Jesurun’s games with language, time, and narrative,
you might say, are being played over the void where that invisible object used
to reside. In a world where dogged materialism and literal-mindedness seem to
rule, he offers an escape hatch that comes without obligations to technology,
machinery, or the ostensibly solid realities that, as political life has
recently been teaching us, can vanish overnight if someone’s in a mood to throw
his power around. By the time Faust/How
I Rose comes along, we’ll know if we’re in for four more years of
devil’s deals or not; either way, our souls are likely to need the liberating
lunacy of his verbal dance.
Then, four days after the U.S. première closed, Feingold wrote
in his review of the play that it’s a “rich, densely allusive text” which
Acosta’s Mexican troupe delivered “in a solemn, sometimes thickly accented
English that made its iridescent, sly rapidly shifting verbal patterns seem
ponderous and stilted.” Though Ari
Bruckman as Faust and Mónica Dionne as Mephistopheles “registered powerfully,”
the “production as a whole felt strained.
The initial quality of every Jesurun text, a madcap breeziness, was lost
in the effortful non-translation.” Feingold
ended his notice with the hope for How I
Rose: “Someday, a troupe that can play it at its own colloquial speed will
make that [i.e., the script’s depth of gravity] clear; at BAM in English, it
felt like, of all things, a foreign classic.”
In the theater trade weekly Backstage, publishing the next month, Michael Lazan characterized FAUST/How I Rose as “fashionable to an
uncomfortable extreme” which “consists of far too much dry, expository
philosophical rambling, including utterly odd and annoying repetition of the
names and lines from Beatles songs.” Lazan
suggested that “perhaps the audience would have been more mesmerized had the
piece had more poeticism, more imagery, more magic” and reported that the “only
respite from the text is the bare, gorgeous stage, as supplemented by trippy
videos framing the action.” The Teatro
de Arena cast “seems mostly lost in this diffuse world,” the Backstager observed, and though the “talents”
of a few actors “are sometimes evident, . . . Mónica Dionne, as Mephistopheles,
is fairly flat and uninvolving though visually striking. So is the production.” In the cyber press, Dan Bacalzo on TheaterMania called BAM’s How I Rose “a flawed production” which
is “somewhat fragmented in the actual playing of the scenes.” Bacalzo found that “the richness and lyricism
of Jesurun’s language is ill served by director Martín Acosta. Too much of the time, the humor and poetry of
the text is lost,” exacerbated by the “odd disjunctures and unlikely resonances”
created by the interpolations of popular song lyrics. In English, the cyber reviewer felt, “the
show is hindered by a flatness in the overall delivery of the lines.” In the end, the TM review-writer acknowledged that “the [video] images are often
more interesting than what’s happening on the stage, so I found myself watching
the screen as much as—if not more than—the live action.
In the academic press, Northwestern University’s Kathryn
Farley, writing in the Theatre Journal,
called How I Rose “an intricate and
highly charged battle of wits between Faust and Mephistopheles” couched in “clever
and current” dialogue that “proved humorous and poignant as well.” Jesurun’s linguistic “concoction composed
mostly of complex metaphysical constructs allowed otherwise intangible ideas to
become increasingly more accessible and exciting” and the “pithiness of the
spoken-word text was matched by the visual sophistication of the projected
imagery.” “The imagery,” Farley
reported, “was lush and dazzling throughout.”
This reviewer found, however, that “many of Acosta’s directorial choices
did little to highlight the cleverness of the script or the dramatic impact of
the projected imagery.” In particular, Farley complained of “ the
rapid-fire pacing of the piece and the sloppiness of its vocal presentation”
especially “the actors’ furious delivery.”
Furthermore, the Northwestern prof felt, “Acosta’s staging also seemed
overly cautious and occasionally uninspired.”
As I warned in the first installment of “Faust Clones,” I
may not come to any general conclusion after reviewing these seven selected
adaptations of the Faust legend. I
suspect that having chosen seven other plays wouldn’t have altered that
result. I also asserted that this
collection, ranging in style, approach, and period, shows that Faust will
perhaps always be a compelling and adaptable figure for theatrical portrayal. The arrogant man who flouted every constraint
of God and man to seek endless knowledge and power can be manipulated and
manhandled to virtually any extreme, be made silly (Bedazzled), set to music (Gounod’s Faust or Damn Yankees),
treated with admiration (Goethe’s Faust)
or held up as a warning (Marlowe’s Doctor
Faustus), made a figure of fun (Doctor
Faustus Light the Lights), or post-modernized (FAUST/How I Rose) and survive to appear on a stage again in yet another
incarnation. Is there another literary
character who’s had so many avatars?
Perhaps it’s simplistic to suggest that the notion of making a deal with
the devil may just be so captivating that writers, poets, playwrights,
composers, choreographers, filmmakers, and artists of all genres just can’t
stop imagining and reimagining the implications. Maybe that’s all there is to conclude from
this examination.
No comments:
Post a Comment