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I’m pretty excited about the upcoming production at convergence-continuum. A few years ago I went over to see Act a Lady by Jordan Harrison which was an hilarious romp. So, this next piece by Harrison is to be anticipated, too. However, this one is not a funny romp. In fact, it is the exact opposite: dark, brooding, and sinister.

Finn in the Underworld at convergence-continuum

Clyde Simon, the artistic director for convergence, is pretty careful in laying out the season–placing comedic hits like Charles Mee’s Big Love right in the midst of summer to catch that breezy, sunny disposition that keeps us all optimistic, happy, and alive; but coming right back as the weather changes over to windy, overcast, and cooling to stoke our more fearful and depressed autumnal dispositions. Finn in the Underworld is the perfect direction, as Lucy Bredeson-Smith (who plays Gwen in the play) points out, for Halloween.

I recently sat down and interviewed the cast and director of the upcoming production, so I went to Playscripts and read much of the play that they have freely available online: http://www.playscripts.com/play.php3?playid=1542. Then, when I got to The Liminis, as I waited while they all ran tech, I finished up the play with the scripts that were laying about on the set. I was not disappointed.

It was initially a strange sensation, reading the play. I am used to finding books through Google Books, reading happily along, and then encountering pages missing from the middle of the book–Google’s meagre concession to copyright concerns. This extraction of pages leads to a choppy reading experience. So, as I read Finn in the Underworld I was suddenly greeted by jumps in the script that sent me looking for page numbers to make sure that pages weren’t missing…that Playscripts hadn’t done the same thing. They hadn’t. Harrison’s script plays with jumps in time and it caught me off guard.

The jumps in time are what most attracts me to the play. It is fascinating to see an encounter at 7:35 pm only to (later on) pick up the thread of what happened earlier at 2:00 in the afternoon. The jumping fills in the details on events in strange ways, creating connections that go different directions in time and create a curiously timeless, eerie feeling…as if one were, I don’t know, in Hades? I was very much reminded of Fefu and Her Friends by Fornes which creates a similar feeling through the four mobile scenes in the mid-section of the play. There is something strangely vibrant about seeing scenes out of order and then connecting pieces of information from one place back to another. Harrison’s play handles this very competently and it creates a spine-tingling experience.

Harrison has described his play as a ‘psychosexual gothic horror story,’ which is an apt description, as there are elements of all of this in the play. Gothic stories, especially stories with horror elements, remind me of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights–the mad woman in the attic or ghosts on the moors. But the elements are present here, too: a dark house, an unexplained death, a family mystery that spans generations, and, very like the tales by the Bronte sisters, a jagged-love that is doomed from the start. Appropriately, Harrison quotes Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House at the outset of his play: “An evil old house, the kind some people call “haunted”, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored.”

For those of you who want a surprise, go and see this play! It will deliver. For those of you who want to see the play, but don’t mind having your surprise compromised, spoilers follow.

Warning: Spoiler Alert — What follows reveals plot, story, and will ruin your fun.

The quote from Hill House is more than just support for the Gothic horror feel of the piece. Other than the way Harrison plays with time and play structure, the one event that threw me the most was the revelation that Carver Bishop was already dead: thus putting the ghost element squarely at the center of the horror story. But, this is not nearly enough. Harrison, like Jackson, continues, with a house that is itself alive and that wishes to consume all of those within its walls, to keep the men and women forever, tucked inside of some unearthly plane of semi-existence.

This plane is where the second act of Harrison’s play occurs, and very like the Hades mentioned briefly above, the action that transpires is very Greek in its notion of the Underworld: very Greek because the river Lethe, which flows through Hades, erases the memories of the dead who drink from it. As with those poor dead folk in Hades, so it is with all the characters in the play who are consumed by the house–and as it no doubt is for those consumed by family grief or a tragic history–memory becomes questionable, personal history is drowned or left in a murky twilight, and logic begins to run in circles. For me, this last part of Harrison’s play is the most disturbing. It is oppressive, suffocating, and claustrophobic–and it is by no means an accident that it transpires within the confines of bomb shelter.

This play runs through October 17 at convergence and I can hardly wait to see it.

I’ve been reading a book entitled New Playwriting Strategies: A Language-Based Approach to Playwriting by Paul C Castagno and liked it right off due to his focus on Bakhtin and the nature of polyvocal and multivocal texts.  Not that I am inherently just fascinated by these ideas in and of themselves, but for what they bring to an experience in the theater: characters who are complex, multidimensional, constantly shifting, identity is in flux.  As this book takes a language-based approach, so does it contain works by playwrights who really throw the rest of play creation in to flux as well.  For instance, I’m ready Native Speech by Eric Overmyer right now and am just blown away by not only the language variations in each character, but the collage of theatrical elements: the way a woman’s voice on the loud speaker announces a scene shift with subtlety and that scene shift happens without any dramatic re-set to the stage set, just simple movement through stage space–including the end of Act I, which is a Tableaux Vivant.

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

This leads me to one of the things that fascinated me about Mud: each scene ends with a tableau, what Fornes describes as a “stage picture.”  Having only read, and not seen, the play, I can only imagine the effect of this, but it must be startling.  The end of a scene with a stage picture: 1) emphasizes spatial constructions; and 2) provides a contemplative moment; 3) shakes up the flow of the theater piece.

By emphasizing spatial constructions I mean that as an audience member I would be interested in the physical, spatial relationships between the characters on the stage–the blocking–where they are physically in relation to each other, to the room, etc.  Spatial constructions are part of what the theater is all about. Theater, by its nature, is a spatial art form; in fact, I just picked up a book that is all about the use of space in theater.  Distance is just as important as proximity.  A character’s proximity to another character, and that character’s reaction to that proximity, can speak volumes that dialogue cannot.  Humans are visual creatures and most of communication takes place through visual sign stimuli, not through language.  Recognizing this is part of making living theater, not just stale recitations or monologues.  Spatial constructions can also lead to layered meaning, or even contradictory meaning for instance, when a character tells another she is happy, while aggressively ironing clothes and slamming the iron down on the board.  In another Fornes play, which I detested, Sarita, the set itself is very like that in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, whose exaggerated, surreal set reflects the interior psychology of the main character.  The set description reads:

Livingroom in New York’s South Bronx…the proportions are not realistic. The ceiling is inordinately high. There are no windows except for a small one, ten feet high on each side wall…

Such as set casts a dominating influence over the action that takes place within.  Mud is similar, set in a “wooden room…on an earth promontory.” The room is so small and oppressive, the poverty in which the characters live, that the three characters barely have room to move around each other.

The freezes allow for contemplation.  This is something that generally only happens with breaks between Acts, if you believe people are actually contemplating and not just rushing out to smoke or drink or whatever.  The freezes in Mud last 8 seconds, allowing for consideration of not only the characters frozen on stage, but also the relationships between them and a review of what events occurred in the previous sequence.

The freezes shake the flow of the piece, not allowing for the rhythm or rush to get too far ahead of the audience; but it’s not as intrusive as a blackout, to which some people are opposed.

I’m currently working on a piece and I may experiment with tableaux in it; although I am interested in how Overmyer handles the transitions in Native Speech, too.

Mud feels like a mix between an Absurdist piece and an Expressionist piece.  Fornes originally studied painting and I think it is easy to see the influence that has had on how she envisions sets and space in her plays.  Read, for instance, the set notes on Mud:

The set is a wooden room which sits on an earth promontory.  The promontory is five feet high and covers the same periphery as the room. The wood has the color and texture of bone that has dried in the sun.  It is ashen and cold.  The earth in the promontory is red and soft and so is the earth around it.  There is no greenery.  Behind the promontory there is a vast blue sky…

And on she goes.  The visual contrast of the colors in this set is strong.  I have always been personally fascinated by the contrast of red and yellow; but the strong bone color is set off by the red of the earth and the blue of the sky–a contrast in elements as strong as the contrast between Mae’s desires and the mud in which she is stuck.

The physical set is not the only Absurdist/Expressionist element.  The language of the play is the equal to the physical set.

MAE: You don’t know numbers.

LLOYD: Yes I do. (He stands.) I’m Lloyd.  I have two pigs. My mother died. I was seven. My father left. He is dead. (He gets three coins from his pocket.) This is money. It’s mine. It’s three nickels. I’m Lloyd.  That’s arithmetic.

MAE: That is not arithmetic.

And much of the play is like that.  Simple sentences constructed of a noun, verb, and direct object.

 MAE: I’m pressing, jerk! What are you doing! I’m pressing.  What are you doing! (He looks away.) I’m pressing what are you doing! You’re a jerk. (She continues ironing.) I work.  See, I work. I’m working. I learned to work. I wake up and I work. Open my eyes and I work. I work. What do you do! Yeah, what do you do!–Work!

LLOYD: So what. (He sits in a corner on the floor.)

The use of language in this manner (very simple constructions, powerful images, high levels of repetition) create language equivalents to the visual design: that is, highly impressive images that stay with you and create a strong sense of character, event, and purpose.

Mud is a tough play, one that comes out and punches you in the mouth and makes you spit blood.