Festival Diary #3
Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty by Richard Foreman. Direction, composition and design by Max Lyandvert. Lighting by Luiz Pampolha. With Benjamin Winspear, Gibson Nolte and Rebecca Smee, Voice by Helmut Bakaitis. Kitchen Sink @ The Tower, Malthouse Theatre.
Many moons ago a friend of mine, then an eager young drama student, read Richard Foreman's plays and decided he wanted to direct one of them. He wrote to Foreman asking for pointers, and received back a friendly, helpful and and deeply perplexed response: "Why on earth would you want to do that?"
It's a good question. My friend's production never got off the ground, as the actors rebelled; but composer Max Lyandvert has found some more amenable performers and has now directed three of Foreman's works: My Head Was A Sledgehammer, Now I've Got The Shakes, and Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty.
Having seen the last, I find myself turning over the question of how possible it is to do Foreman's plays. On the one hand, they exist as texts which anyone might perform, just as one might perform Moliere or Ibsen or Stein. But on the other, if anyone is a theatrical auteur, it is Foreman: how possible is it really to separate Foreman's idiosyncratic texts from his theatrical practice, honed over more than three decades?
In one sense, it's easy to see why you'd want to give it a go: Foreman's plays are funny, intriguing, multi-faceted and disturbing. Eschewing plot, psychology or "common" sense, they are like the best sort of nonsense poetry - Lewis Carroll, for example, or Edward Lear - in which language creates its own alternative reality, opening up the subconscious mind to unexpected and sometimes poignant perspectives on the world. Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre is perhaps the most successful theatrical expression of Baudelaire's maxim about poetry, that it must be "a debacle of the intellect".
On his website, Foreman explains his writerly process:
For many years I have created plays in the following manner. I write-- usually at the beginning of the day, from one half to three pages of dialogue. There is no indication of who is speaking-- just raw dialogue. From day to day, there is no connection between the pages, each day is a total 'start from scratch' with no necessary reference to material from previous days' work. ...
Every few months, I look through the accumulated material with the thought of contructing a 'play'. I find a page that seems interesting and possible as a 'key' page-- and then quickly scan through to find others that might relate in some way to that 'key' page.
The relationship is not narrative-- but loosely thematic-- in a very poetic sense-- even in simply an 'intuited' way. Often-- I can not explain why-- simply that one pages seems interesting in a yet undefinable way, if juxtaposed to other selected pages.
When I have forty to fifty pages, I consider this the basis. I then arrange the pages in search of some possible loose thematic 'scenario'-- which again, is more 'variations on a theme' rather than strictly narrative. I look to establish a 'situation oif (sic) tension'-- then imagining how the other pages somehow augment and 'play with' that situation, rather than leading to story and rersolution (sic).
As Foreman explains, even typos and spelling mistakes have their place - they might "indeeed" be an artistic decision. It adds up to a vision that is intensely idiosyncratic, something like a three-dimensional map of the processes of Richard Foreman's very interesting mind.
A clue to the difficulty of dividing Foreman's text from its theatrical process comes from New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley, for example, who comments that "the gnomic dialogue... as usual with Mr. Foreman, seems inspired when you're watching it and embarrassing when you repeat it". Foreman's scripts are only one aspect of a complex and evolving theatrical process (as an aside, for a voyeuristic peek inside Foreman's process, check out Foreman's new blog, in which he notates his evolving thoughts on his forthcoming production Wake Up Mr Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!).
Max Lyandvert's production of Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty takes the only possible approach: this is very much Lyandvert's vision of the play, and clearly bears no resemblance, despite the extensive Foreman quotes in the program, to what Foreman actually does on stage. And indeed, a photocopy of a Foreman production would be a lifeless thing. But it left me feeling very ambivalent, confirming rather than challenging my doubts; much as I hesitate to claim that Foreman's texts are impossible to reproduce, the challenges are considerable.
The play itself, written in 2001 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the seeming triumph of the Free World, is not, despite its title, a "political" text. Its two characters, Fred (Benjamin Winspear) and Freddie (Gibson Nolte), exist in a Foremanesque universe of non sequitur - at one point Indians appear from nowhere on stage and run around - in which they alternately lament and celebrate the death of the huge ideologies that dominated the last century - Communism, of course, but also religion. Outside these intellectual safety nets, life, as Freddie says, is "cold and lonely". " So," he asks, huddling into a blanket, "how do I warm myself in this cold and lonely world?"
Their antics are punctuated by a Voice (one assumes the Author) intoning things like "Red Communism is dead, my friend" or "I wonder what I will think next?" Images such as half-eaten apples or boxes full of "permanently sealed documents" thicken the metaphoric mix. And there is a dog that is kept in a box, which reminds us, in Foreman's characteristic semantic play, that dog is "God" spelt backwards.
The dog perhaps epitomises my difficulty with this production. Lyandvert has replaced the dog in the box with a sex doll, which turns into a real woman (Rebecca Smee) complete with fetish mask and S&M bindings (she later becomes a kind of Social Realist angel in a bikini). This misogynistic imagery is nowhere to be seen in Foreman's text, and introduces a gendered savagery - Smee wavers between a sex slave, crawling around on stage on hands and knees, and sadistic Soviet dominitrix; at one point she steals Freddie's penis, marching off with the rubbery phallus held high.
It's hard to know what to make of this imagery: it obscures the dog/god twinning in Foreman's text (which at once parodies the idea of God and calls up, for instance, figures like Anubis) and it has none of the reflexive, self-conscious mockery, say, of the equally misogynistic portrayal of the junkie whore in Black Lung's recent production, Rubeville. I guess it equates the American Cold War paranoia of Communism with masculinist anxieties about women. But I couldn't shake the feeling that it was gratuitous.
Another problem was simply the age of the actors, who are too young to convincingly have been part of a time when it was possible to believe in the dream of communism. More elisions are created by the American accents, which vanish in odd moments when the actors briefly play themselves. These perceptual gaps are cumulatively obscuring, without really being addressed in the production: after all, there's no reason why they might not be fruitful, especially given Foreman's idea of a "spark gap" over which consciousness jumps when there is more than one thing happening on a stage.
The opening moment was perhaps the most effective: Fred sprays a mist of cleaning fluid in the air and scrapes a clear space in a pane of glass hitherto unseen, so that at first it appears as if he is cleaning the air, while the two performers repeat the opening two lines several times. It promises to be as maddening as some passages of Beckett's novel Watt (which is saying something). Although Winspear and Nolte's performances remain focused and energetic all the way through, the production lost me about twenty minutes in: a clarity of imagery in Foreman's text - which has, despite its complexities and non sequiturs, a certain elegant simplicity - is simply not translated into the production.
Lyandvert is an accomplished theatre composer, and so it's no surprise that the sound design - composed music and amplified sound - is very good, as is his design, fronted by glass panes in a reference to Foreman's practice of dividing the audience from the stage with a sheet of clear plastic. There's no doubt Lyandvert is a talented director, with a vision all his own. It leaves me wondering why he doesn't make his own texts, or instead, if he wants to work with Foreman's ideas, why he doesn't take up Foreman's open invitation to pillage his notebooks and take off from there.
Picture: Rebecca Smee in Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty. Photo: Brett Boardman
Links
Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty (text, Ubuweb)
Wake Up Mr Sleepy! Your Unconscious Is Dead! (Richard Foreman's blog)
Ontological-Hysteric Theatre
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