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TELEVISUAL REPRESENTATION, SCHIZOPHRENIC EXPERIENCE, AND
APOCALYPTICISM IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY DRAMA AND THEATRE
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State University
By
Roger Dee Freeman, B.A., M.A.
*****
The Ohio State University
1998
Dissertation Committee: Approved by Dr. Alan Woods, Adviser
Dr. Esther Beth Sullivan Adviser Dr. Jon Erickson Department of Theatre UMI Number: 9911192
UMI Microform 9911192 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.
This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by Roger Dee Freeman 1998 ABSTRACT
This study examines a range of late twentieth-century theatre and drama, mainly
American, that deviates from traditional causally-oriented narrative models. The works
addressed are examined within several extra-theatrical contexts, chief among which is
television and particular representational features associated with that medium. The
principal focus of the study is on several recent plays and performances that employ
dramaturgical and theatrical devices similar to features of televisual representation.
Aside from this mostly formal concern, attention is given to how both the works in
question and critiques of television intersect with definitions and interpretations of both
schizophrenic experience and apocalypticism.
Chapter One provides an introduction to the study and some preliminary
definitions of terms. Chapter Two offers a brief inventory of televisual representational
features, followed by a survey of critiques of the epistemological, sociological, and psychological effects of the proliferation of television, as offered by several media
theorists. The chapter concludes with an examination of three recent American plays that
exhibit televisual qualities and that reflect some of the concerns that have been raised in
regard to the proliferation of television. The two subsequent chapters consider how
descriptions and critiques of television programming intersect with definitions of
schizophrenic symptomatology and apocalyptic concerns. Each chapter examines works
ii that have televisual features and that contain, to varying degrees, resonances of schizophrenic experience and apocalyptic sensibilities.
Chapter Five concludes with a discussion of various ways in which the contexts addressed throughout the study intersect with one another. The chapter includes commentary on how notions concerning the mass media, schizophrenia, and apocalypticism have been positioned within considerations of the so-called postmodern condition. The chapter also addresses the problematic relationships between notions of narrative continuity and definitions of postmodernism, media theory, schizophrenia, and apocalypse. An appendix following Chapter Five surveys several other recent American plays and performances that exhibit televisual features.
Ill Dedicated to the memory o f Bill Gular
IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their help and guidance throughout this project, I thank Alan Woods, Esther
Beth Sullivan, and Jon Erickson. I have benefitted from discussions with Cristina
Markham, Jackie Czerepinski, Scott Phillips, Laurie Schmeling, J. B. Lawton IE, and
Michael Mauldin. For their continual support and encouragement, I thank my mother and stepfather Elsie and William Gular, my sister Cynthia Race, and my brother and sister-in- law Randall Freeman and Julie Vreeland. Thanks to my father and stepmother, Larry and
Ruth Freeman. VITA
September 23, 1964 ...... Bom - Rupert, Idaho
1989...... B.A., University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
1991 -1993...... Research and Graduate Council Fellow, The Ohio State University
1993...... M.A., The Ohio State University
1993-1996...... Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University
1996-1998...... Lecturer, Department of Theatre, The Ohio State University
PUBLICATIONS
Roger Freeman, “Narrative and Anti-Narrative: Televisual Representation and Non- Causal Linearity in Contemporary Drama,” Journal o f Dramatic Theory and Criticism 12.1 (1997): 39-55.
Roger Freeman, ""Looking at Shakespeare, by Dennis Kennedy,” Theatre Studies 40 (1995): 70-72.
Roger Freeman, ""Melodrama and the Myth o f America, by Jeffrey Mason,” Theatre Studies 40 (1995): 84-85.
Roger Freeman, ""Recycling Shakespeare, by Charles Marowitz,” Theatre Studies 39 (1994): 91-92.
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: Theatre
VI TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication...... iv
Acknowledgments...... v
V ita...... vi
Chapters;
1. Introduction ...... 1
2. Televisual Representational Modes in Contemporary American Drama 17
Introduction ...... 17 Television and Narrative Representation...... 26 Television Flow as Anti-Narrative, “Information Overload”...... 29 Television and Social Fragmentation...... 36 Contemporary Drama and Theatre and Televisual Representation 37 In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe ...... 39 Reckless...... 44 Tales o f the Lost Formicans ...... 47 Precedents and Deviations...... 50 Televisual Representation: Psychological Dimensions ...... 55 Conclusion ...... 65
3. The Intersection of Televisual Representation and Schizophreniform Experience in Contemporary Performance ...... 68
Introduction ...... 68 Schizophrenia: Definitions and Symptomatology, Correlations with Televisual Representation...... 70 Interpretations of Schizophrenic Experience ...... 79
vu Televisuality and Schizophreniform Experience in Contemporary Performance...... 84 Robert Wilson and Primitivistic Models of Schizophrenia ...... 85 Contemporary Performance and Schizophrenic Hyperconsciousness Section I: 1000 Airplanes on the Roof ...... 93 Contemporary Performance and Schizophrenic Hyperconsciousness Section II: The Medium ...... 107 Schizophrenic Alienation and Media Isolation ...... 122
4. Apocalyptic Sensibilities in Contemporary Drama: Intersections with Schizophrenic Experience and Televisual Representation ...... 129
Introduction ...... 129 Apocalyptic and Millennialism: Definitions and Interpretations 132 Apocalyptic Resonances in Contemporary Drama Section I: Marisol ...... 144 Apocalyptic Resonances in Contemporary Drama Section II ...... 156 Conclusion ...... 168
5. Conclusion ...... 170 Narrative Representation and Postmodernism...... 175 Narrative Representation and the Physical Sciences ...... 181 Narrativity and the Limits of Epistemology ...... 186
Appendix: Televisuality in Late Twentieth-Century American Theatre and Drama 197 Televisuality in Recent American Dramaturgy ...... 197 Televisuality in Recent American Performance...... 207
Bibliography ...... 215
vin CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
This study examines some recent drama and theatre that deviates from dramaturgical models grounded in linear and causal narrative principles. While the works that 1 examine differ significantly from each other, each exhibits less concern for the principles of linearity and necessary causality that characterize the bulk of modem
Western drama and theatre. Chapter Two includes some discussion of the features and functions of narrative representation. Nonetheless, it seems valuable to provide a preliminary working definition here, to begin to set a context for the works examined in this study. The term representation is difficult enough. Throughout this study, 1 customarily use the term very simply to refer to particular material constructions—plays, theatre productions, television programs, and so on—that purport to depict objects and events, especially the real or imagined experiences of actual or fictional human beings.
Such representations may be termed artifactual representations. Representation has also been used, for instance by Kant, Hegel, and others, to refer to the ordering of experience
into symbolic patterns in consciousness. One could here speak of mental representations.
While 1 do not commonly use the term in the latter sense, this notion of representation nevertheless has some bearing on much of this study. This study is largely concerned
1 with epistemological, psychological, and sociological resonances of some contemporary
(artifactual) representational practices. This assumes some preoccupation with the formulation and content of particular mental representations of the world.
Relationships between artifactual and mental representations have long been the subject of some debate. Plato’s critique of the theatre in The Republic is grounded on an assiunption that mental representations of the world are influenced and conditioned by exposure to particular artifactual representations. Throughout this study, 1 will examine how similar concerns have been articulated by recent writers, for example in regard to the perceived epistemological and psychological effects of television and representational practices associated with that medium. Although I will consider the influence of particular kinds of artifactual representation on mental representations of the world, 1 should point out that my main focus is not on any presumed effects of dramatic or theatrical representations on particular viewers or readers. Rather I am mostly interested in examining how particular dramaturgical and theatrical representational devices are informed by a variety of extra-theatrical concerns, described briefly below. 1 am also interested in exploring how those devices inform particular apprehensions and interpretations of external events, as represented by various characters in the works discussed throughout the study.
Like representation, narrative is a decidedly problematic term. I most commonly use the term simply to refer to a kind of representation that is occupied with the telling of a story and that is marked chiefly by linearity, continuity, and a strong sense of logical causality between events. This definition is meant to be applied not only to narrated works like the novel or the epic poem, but a variety o f other story-telling forms, to include plays and theatre performances. As an illustration, most modem drama has been based on a formula o f logical and necessary causality, with each event connected to the others in a predominantly linear, chronological order. In many cases, of course, causal connections between events can be seen most clearly in retrospect. A common method of script analysis involves tracing developments from the end of a play to its beginning in order to identify the causal steps between events. In an abbreviated example, Nora leaves
Torvald because Torvald attacks her; he attacks her because of the letter from Krogstad;
Krogstad sent the letter because Torvald fired him; and so forth, through the blackmail and allusions to Torvald’s ill health, back to the beginning. This is not to suggest that all causally-oriented narrative plays adhere to a rigidly chronological structure: Pinter’s
Betrayal moves both backwards and forwards through time, and Miller’s Death o f a
Salesman contains a number of flashbacks. Yet even in these cases, causal connections between events are realized by the end of the plays, suggesting an immanent narrative structure.'
The reference to Betrayal and Salesman, however, indicates how narrative cannot always be said to be solely a function of a work’s internal structural features. If a work is experienced as a narrative, this is due in part to whoever is doing the experiencing. The
‘ While the examples in the passage above are all drawn from modem drama, the reliance on such causally-based structures is of course much older. The analysis applied above to A Doll House could be equally applied to Hamlet or the Oresteia. If I have selected late nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples, it is merely because the well-made play and its descendants, with their self-contained plot lines in which all events are interrelated in a closed economy, are probably the sine qua non of causal narrative play structure. well-made play is clearly an example of what Barthes has termed the “readable” text, one that limits the play of discourse and leads the reader or auditor or spectator passively along from beginning to end.^ Yet Barthes also refers to the “writable” text, which
Catherine Belsey describes as a “wholly plural text [in which] all statements are of indeterminate origin, no single discourse is privileged, and no consistent and coherent plot constrains the free play of the discourses.” Such a text “is open to re-reading, no longer an object for passive consumption but an object of work by the reader to produce meaning.”^ Thus even a work in which the objective features of narrative continuity and coherence are attenuated or even absent may be experienced as a narrative, through a process of (re)arrangement or inference. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that the closer a work adheres to the traditional narrative feature of causal linearity, the more likely it is to be experienced as a narrative, and most Western drama has been marked by a regular, almost mechanical, causal relationship between events.
Throughout the twentieth century, however, there have been numerous examples of dramatic and theatrical practices in which causality—or even the very notion of causality—is conspicuously absent or at least greatly attenuated. German Expressionism often demonstrated slight concern for tight narrative construction. One could also point to Stanislaw Witkiewicz’s idea of a theatre of pure form, in which logical coimections
■ Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1975). As cited in Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 1980) 105.
^ Belsey 105, 104. Similarly, Elizabeth Klaver considers the role of a viewer as “textual assembler” in regard to television and some recent theatre. Klaver's observations will be dealt with in greater detail in Chapter Two. Elizabeth Klaver, “Postmodernism and the Intersection of Television and Contemporary Drama,” Joarwo/ o fPopular Culture 27.4 (1994): 69-80. between events and images are consciously thwarted. The dada and surrealist movements
both exhibited a general rejection of necessary coimections between events. And the so- called absurdist works of post-World War II Europe often rejected not only causal connections between particular events, but even the very sense of any causal structure to the world.
Nonetheless, I wish to stress that the main focus of this study is not merely the rejection of self-contained, causally-oriented narrative play structure as a feature of some twentieth-century drama and theatre taken in the aggregate. Rather, the study attempts to position some recent drama and theatre within larger historical and cultural constellations.
I examine a number of works within a variety of contexts including the proliferation of the mass media, particularly television; definitions and descriptions of schizophrenia and schizophrenic experience; and apocalyptic and millennialist concerns. I further consider how these contexts overlap and interpenetrate each other. Some brief discussion of postmodern critical theory and the influences of quantum physics is included in the final chapter. In the main, my discussion centers on recent American work, though I refer to several European examples as well. A central assumption of this study is that the significance of these dramatic and theatrical practices is a factor not merely of their structural qualities but also of their position within larger “constellations” of social and cultural practices.
In this regard, I should note that in addressing the issue of significance, I am largely following a definition advanced by E. D. Hirsch, who wished to distinguish between meaning (the object of interpretation) and significance (the object of criticism). For Hirsch, Meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by
his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable.”^ This distinction, assuming as it does that
meaning is a fixed and immutable characteristic of a text, uninfluenced by a reader’s experience of that text, is problematic. Nevertheless, while meaning and significance may not be thoroughly separable entities, I find Hirsch’s definition valuable in that it suggests that critical evaluation of a text consists not merely of examining that text’s content and formal qualities but also its relationship to its audience as well as other texts and practices.
An example of how the significance of any set of dramaturgical or theatrical devices is determined in part by the contexts in which those devices are situated is found in a critique by Jean-François Lyotard of the practices Bertolt Brecht advocated for an
Epic Theatre. In his essay “The Tooth, the Palm,” Lyotard alludes to Brecht’s objective of revealing causal links between discrete events and the social and economic structures within which those events occur. In Brecht, Lyotard observes, causal relationships always obtain between developments within social, political, and economic structures
(just as a toothache may cause one to clench one’s fist, digging the nails into the palm of one’s hand). The objective of Epic Theatre was to render those relationships discernible
(continuing the analogy, to show the connection between the toothache and the clenched
“ E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1967) 8.
6 fist). Yet Lyotard suggests that Brecht’s approach no longer corresponds to present
realities, and calls for a new, “energetic” theatre more in touch with those realities:
[T]he whole theatrical effectiveness which [Brecht] anticipates, relies upon a system of beliefs, not only the belief that there exist sociological determinations that correspond to economic structures, but the belief that these determinations form the deep lexicon and grammar of historical passions, that they produce and govern the displacement of affects and the investments of the theatrical audience. That is why this theatre is called epic theatre. But ours is no longer a time of the epic any more than of tragedy or of savage cruelty. Capitalism destroys all the codes, including the one that gives industrial workers the role of the historical hero.... An energetic theatre would produce events that are effectively discontinuous. . . . Likewise what this theatre needs . . . [is] the independence and the simultaneity of noises-sounds, of words, body arrangements, images that characterize the co-productions of Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg.’
This study will examine a number of works that exhibit, to varying degrees, the
sort of effective discontinuity and independence and simultaneity of elements that
Lyotard called for. Yet it can be pointed out that in purely formal terms Lyotard’s notion
of an energetic theatre is not entirely different from Brecht’s own ideas for an Epic
Theatre. Brecht wrote as early as 1930 that
When the epic theatre’s methods begin to penetrate the opera the first result is a radical separation o f the elements .... So long as the expression 'Gesamtkunstwerk’ (or ‘integrated work of art’) means that the integration is a muddle, so long as the arts are supposed to be ‘fused’ together, the various elements will all be equally degraded, and each will act as a mere feed’ to the rest. The process of fiision extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art. Witchcraft of this sort must of course be fought against. Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, is likely to induce
’ Jean-François Lyotard, “The Tooth, the Palm,” trans. Anne Knap and Michel Benamou. Sub-Stance 15(1976): 108-109. sordid intoxication, or creates fog, has got to be given up. Words, music and setting must become more independent o f one another
Despite this formal similarity, Lyotard’s notion of an energetic theatre diverges radically from Brecht’s ideas for an epic theatre. Brecht’s call for greater independence of various dramatic and theatrical components must be read against the background of the
“alienating” or “defamiliarizing” verfremdungseffekt that he advocated. Brecht’s call for greater independence of “words, music and setting,” was surely motivated by his larger objective of revealing the real economic and political causes behind effects. By contrast,
Lyotard’s assertion that “capitalism destroys all the codes” and his attendant call for a theatre of “effectively discontinuous” events indicates a pronounced skepticism towards such a project. The aleatory nature of the collaborative work to which Lyotard refers is greatly at odds with the objectives that Brecht set forth. There are surely differences of degree here, yet there are differences of kind as well. That Brecht and Lyotard could advocate similar approaches to such distinctly different ends seems to be due in part to the different historical, social, and cultural contexts in which each developed his ideas.’
Detailed analysis of the various contexts that form the background of this study will be given in subsequent chapters. I will note here however, by way of introduction to the next chapter, that a chief concern will be with how some current theatre and drama is
* “The Modem Theatre is the Epic Theatre,” Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 37-38.
’ Lyotard would publish The Postmodern Condition only three years after “The Tooth, The Palm” was published in the United States. A discussion of definitions and descriptions of postmodernism is included in Chapter Five. Here I will simply note that the principles Brecht advocated were all but polar opposites to postmodernist sensibilities. Any particular device, or set of devices, derives its significance, if not in fact much of its meaning, from the particular context in which it appears.
8 positioned within a cultural context heavily influenced by the mass media. Lyotard’s notion of an energetic theatre carries distinct postmodern resonances. Yet the emphasis on effectively discontinuous events and the simultaneity of verbal, aural, and visual components are reminiscent of televisual representational practices as well.* Much of
Robert Wilson’s work, which will be discussed in Chapter Three, would seem to fit
Lyotard’s definition of an energetic theatre. At the same time, Nicholas Zurbrugg has evaluated Wilson’s work in terms of its “multi-media sensibility,” suggesting that Wilson is sensitive to “the multi-linear narratives peculiar to Post-Modern culture’s multi-media sensibility.”^ Johannes Birringer has similarly considered Wilson’s work against the background of television.*® Philip Auslander has also posited an influence of mass media on some recent performers whose work would likewise satisfy Lyotard’s definition.
Auslander observes “discontinuities and lack of conventionally linear narrative” in the work of such artists as the Wooster Group, Laurie Anderson, and Eric Bogosian. He suggests that the performance practices of these and other artists “engage the world of mediatized postmodern culture, a world . . . that is best understood on the model of television rather than film.”'* Finally, Elizabeth Klaver has examined several plays and
* The description also shares some commonalities with descriptions of schizophrenic experience, a topic addressed in Chapter Four.
® Nicholas Zurbrugg, “Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility: Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine and the Art of Robert Wilson,” Modem Drama 31.3 (1988): 450.
*® Johannes Birringer, “Postmodern Performance and Technology,” Performing Arts Journal 26-27 (1985): 221-233.
* * Philip Auslander, Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1992) 50. Emphasis in the original. performances that have focused on television culture or incorporated the television apparatus into the action. Klaver also considers how these works repeat some of the tropes of the television medium.'^
Despite these few references, the relationship between television on the one hand and theatre and drama on the other has received little sustained, systematic attention.
Auslander exammes how some recent performance inhabits the semiological and representational spaces of postmodern, mediatized cultural formations in order to critique those formations. He argues that much postmodernist performance constitutes an aesthetics o f “resistance” from within the mediatized structures that it critiques. This is the fundamental position held by Klaver and Zurbrugg as well, both of whom describe the dramaturgical and theatrical incorporation of representational devices associated with television as an effective means of addressing and negotiating the complexities of the postmodern era. Yet Auslander, Klaver, and Zurbrugg all confine their arguments to discussions of strategies adopted by contemporary playwrights and performers whose work is already thoroughly imbricated within the prevailing representational practices of the mass media. At the risk of gross oversimplification, it might be said that Auslander,
Klaver, and Zurbrugg focus on the manner in which the “content” of some contemporary drama and performance fills up an already-entrenched, highly mediatized (“formal”) representational space. None offers a thoroughgoing examination of the potential social, psychologiczil, or epistemological effects of those practices themselves.
'■ Elizabeth Klaver, ^‘^Coming Attractions: Theater and the Performance of Television,’ Mosaic 28.4 (1995): 111-127; Klaver, “Postmodernism and the Intersection of Television and Contemporary Drama.”
10 This study attempts to continue the examination of the relationship between the mass media and contemporary theatre, while at the same time enlarging the contextual constellation in which this examination is carried out. Attempting such a project invites several challenges. For one thing, defining the boundaries of any given constellation is a process of exclusion as much as of inclusion. A constellation is a grouping within a much larger field, and while some particular groupings may emerge as relatively distinct patterns, the borders will always be relatively indistinct. I will argue that the particular contexts deployed throughout this study overlap and inform each other in several important ways. Nonetheless, all are in turn influenced by other forces and pressures that are not dealt with in significant detail in this study. A further challenge surfaces in examining interconnected disciplines in isolation from each other. While each chapter builds on material introduced in earlier chapters, and while the final chapter attempts a synthesis of the material presented throughout the study, each chapter nonetheless focuses on one major region of thought and discourse. The chief difficulty here is to reveal as fully as possible the contours and textures of a multi-dimensional object through the linear and one-dimensional medium of a written text while minimizing the distortions.
Another chief problem is the instability of the object. I agree with Auslander that writing and talking about the present is a difficult task.'^ The critic, caught up inside the transitory phenomena he or she would represent does not enjoy a stable position from which to attempt such a representation. Nonetheless, I also agree with Auslander that this is also a necessary (if not unavoidable) task. It would also appear that whereas the writer
Auslander 5.
11 who treats past events enjoys a relatively stable object of study, the writer whose subject is the present enjoys some immediate, albeit partial, experience of prevailing social conditions and specific events that may not be subsequently recorded in detail.
Regardless of the object of study, the critic or historian is always historically and culturally situated and his or her views are conditioned by the specificity of that situation.
Nonetheless, the writer who would address the present is at least situated at the same historical, if not necessarily cultural, locus as the events and developments that he or she would examine.
One might also note in this regard that simply defining, in the present, a particular constellation as a constellation is an effort to freeze a fluid object, to arrest its development. Jacques Derrida observes that one can define the peculiarity of any (social, cultural, political) structure only by observing it in isolation from the structures that precede or follow it.
The appearance of a new structure, of an original system, always comes about—and this is the very condition of its structural specificity—by a rupture with its past, its origin, and its cause. One can therefore describe what is peculiar to the structural organization only by not taking into account, in the very moment of this description, its past conditions: by failing to pose the problem of the passage from one structure to another, by putting history into parentheses. In this “structuralist” moment, the concepts of chance and discontinuity are indispensable."
Where to draw the boundaries; how best to explore interconnections; how to deal with the instability of one’s subject? These are the chief issues that must be addressed in
" Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970) 263.
12 attempting to identify and define a particular set of overlapping contexts within which to examine a body of work. In regard to this particular study, the boundaries encompass three areas which have all become a focus of some concern of writings on the so-called
“postmodern condition.” Explicit discussion of postmodernism is limited to a few brief passages throughout the study and several pages in the conclusion. Nevertheless, definitions and descriptions of postmodernism and postmodemity have been shot through with concerns about mass media, allusions to schizophrenic experience, and apocalyptic resonances. In an attempt to explore interconnections between these contexts, each chapter, while introducing new and particular material, nonetheless builds on the previous chapters in an effort to construct a composite picture of all the works addressed in this study. Works initially addressed in Chapter Two are revisited in both Chapter Three and
Chapter Four. Likewise, theoretical backgroimds introduced in Chapters Two and Three are carried forward into the following chapters.
Finally, in regard to the temporal instability of my subject, I should note that I am little interested in providing the last or total word on the contemporary theatrical landscape. I am principally interested in exploring some prevailing and emergent tensions as they relate to and are reflected in some recent drama and theatre. Those tensions are principally epistemological, psychological, and sociological in character.
Most of my objects of study, whether particular plays and performances or the theoretical backgrounds against which they are positioned, are positioned as “barometers” of some current developments in perception. 1 would like to suggest here that the quotation from
Derrida above can be taken precisely as such a barometric reading. Derrida identifies
13 chance and discontinuity as indispensable to the structuralist project. I will argue throughout this study that the features of chance and discontinuity have come in many quarters to be regarded as signal characteristics of late twentieth-century Western culture.
This study will be largely concerned with exploring some of the inflections that this sensibility has assumed.
As noted, the topics addressed in the three principal chapters of this study are interrelated. The chapter outline employed allows a path to be traced from more precisely formal features to more content-related matters.'* Each chapter begins by setting a context for the particular dramatic and theatrical works discussed in that chapter. Chapter
Two deals primarily with the influence of representational practices associated with television on some recent drama. An overview of some current media theory and criticism begins the chapter. This overview focuses on structural features of televisual representation and the relationship of narrative representation to television programming, and on various descriptions of the epistemological and sociological resonances of the proliferation of television. An examination of three recent American plays follows, identifying within each features analogous to televisual representation. The plays are Eric
Overmyer’s In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe, Craig Lucas’s Reckless, and
Constance Congdon’s Tales o f the Lost Formicans. This is followed by a discussion of psychological resonances of the proliferation of the mass media, especially television.
The chapter concludes with an examination of how the plays reflect various concerns about potential epistemological and psychological influences of television.
'* The hazards of separating form from content are acknowledged in the next chapter.
14 Chapter Three expands on the psychological issues introduced in Chapter Two, considering how some recent performance works include depictions of figures subjected to psychological upheaval similar to that found in schizophrenia. A survey of literature on the symptomatology, causes, and interpretations of schizophrenia sets the theoretical context for this chapter. This survey incorporates discussion of similarities between descriptions of schizophrenic experience and of television programming practices.
Subsequent sections examine several different performance works. A general treatment of some of Robert Wilson’s work is followed by more detailed discussion of two recent works: 1000 Airplanes on the Roofhy David Henry Hwang, Philip Glass, and Jerome
Sirlin, and The Medium, created by Anne Bogart and the Saratoga International Theatre
Institute. Analysis of the televisual features of each work is followed by discussion of how each represents experiences akin to those associated with schizophrenic symptomatology. The chapter concludes with a final reference to some particular schizophrenic symptoms that relate directly to issues raised in Chapter Four, in which they are more thoroughly elaborated.
Chapter Four deals with the prevailing preoccupation with apocalyptic and millennialist issues in some contemporary drama and theatre. A survey of literature relating to apocalyptic and millennialist thought sets the theoretical context. This survey includes discussion of the psychological dimension of the appeal of apocalypticism. An examination of José Rivera’s play Marisol follows, focusing on the particular apocalyptic motifs employed in the play. Following this examination, the works surveyed in the two previous chapters are revisited, to illustrate how the works addressed throughout the study
15 show a preoccupation with apocalyptic themes. This chapter also explores how apocalyptic notions intersect with schizophrenic experience. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the various issues addressed throughout the study interpenetrate and coalesce in several recent plays and performance works.
Chapter Five attempts a synthesis of the issues raised in the previous four chapters. This chapter considers how each of these issues exhibits a problematic relationship with notions o f narrative coherence and continuity. A discussion of various definitions and descriptions o f postmodernism is included to demonstrate how such problematic conceptions o f narrative are seen as by some as being emblematic of the so- called “postmodern condition.” Also included is a brief discussion of perceived effects of discoveries in the physical sciences on twentieth-century theatre and drama. An appendix following Chapter Five offers a survey of some other recent plays and performances incorporating televisual features. This survey also notes some further examples of the intersection of televisual representation with schizophreniform experiences and apocalyptic motifs.
16 CHAPTER 2
TELEVISUAL REPRESENTATIONAL MODES IN
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN DRAMA
Introduction
By the mid-1950s, television was already eclipsing radio as the dominant broadcasting communications medium in the United States.' Thus by the mid-1980s there was already emerging a generation of playwrights who had grown up in the light of television, and who had been exposed to the development and elaboration of a variety of representational features particular to this new medium. This chapter will argue that a number of recent American plays incorporate what can be referred to as televisual modes of representation.* As noted in the preceding chapter, many of the dramaturgical devices contained in these plays have formally similar predecessors. Nonetheless, in keeping
' David Marc, Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture, revised edition (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) 177. After 1985, Marc notes, broadcasting began to lose ground to cable systems.
* This chapter is chiefly concerned not with the technology of television but with particular representational practices associated with television programming. None of these practices is necessarily inherent to the technology itself, and others are certainly possible. By the same token, the particular features of the cathode ray tube, as distinct for instance from the stage or the cinema screen, render it more congenial to particular types of representational practices (and less congenial to others).
17 with the objective of examining works within broader cultural constellations, I will consider how these devices derive much of their significance from their position within a media- and especially television-saturated context.
While definitions of “televisual modes of representation” will emerge gradually throughout this chapter, some brief initial description should help set a context that can be filled out more thoroughly in subsequent pages. In the main, the features I identify are structural (or formal). Of course, divisions between form and content, problematic in any case, are especially suspect in the case of television. Structural features inevitably influence content.^ Nonetheless, a number of interrelated representational features can be identified as common to television programming. Almost all programming includes a verbal component, yet television by definition conveys information largely through pictures. Frequent, irregular transitions (jump cuts) are made fi-om one image to another, often involving a shift in locale. As a result, the duration of most images (shots) is typically brief. Many particular shots are repeated over time, either in identical form, as for example in the case of commercials, or virtually identical form, as for example in the case of locales associated with a particular series. Despite this repetitive feature, however, the number of even distinctly different shots is often very large."* Some final
^ McLuhan recognized this years ago, claiming not only that the medium is the message but that “the ‘content’ of any medium is another medium.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions o f Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) 8. I am not sure that this principle is as universally applicable as McLuhan believed, but it seems appropriate in the case of television. See also Stuart Hall, cited below, p. 25
'* For example. The CBS Evening News averages nearly 500 shots per episode. More than 400 of these are not identical to any other shot. More than 250 accompany news segments, which make up about twenty minutes of a thirty-minute episode. This averages about 4.5 seconds per
18 features have more to do with content than form. Within most programming segments, most shots have some referential connection to previous or subsequent shots. Between segments, however, such connections are rare. For example, the shots that make up a commercial are typically unrelated to those used in other commercials or in the program being interrupted. In some instances, even within the same programming segment, immediately adjacent shots have little in common beyond their inclusion in the same segment or a categorical commonality.*
There are indisputable similarities between the features of television representation and those of cinematic representation. David Bianculli notes that Life magazine in 1915 found fault in the “constant shifting of scenes” in D. W. Griffith’s The
Birth o f a Nation!' In general, though, there are some differences, both in degree and kind. Some are related to present technology; television has shown a greater reliance on interior settings than has cinema, surely because the relatively small surface area of the cathode ray tube makes it less congenial than the cinema screen to more expansive
shot. Shots of Dan Rather and various reporters make up about six minutes of an episode and have an average length of just over 16 seconds. All other news segment shots thus average about 3.5 seconds. Commercials and trailers make up about ten minutes of an episode and consist of a bit less than 250 shots, for an average of just over 2.5 seconds per shot. An episode typically contains about 15 news items and 20 commercials, a very few of which are repeated during the episode. These results were arrived at by personal examination of three separate episodes videotaped during one week in 1996.
* Adjacent shots with little connection to each other are common for instance to news programs containing unrelated news items. This is also common to many commercials, in which even simultaneous images and spoken texts may have little in common with each other. See below, note 24.
® David Bianculli, Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (New York: Continuum, 1992) 34.
19 pictures. While both film and television employ jump cuts, the duration of individual shots in most television programming is typically briefer than in most film. Because of the self-contained nature of most films, cinema tends towards more thorough closure than does much television programming; fictional television series in particular commonly tend towards some open-endedness, as characters and situations reappear fi-om day to day or week to week.^ Finally, aside firom previews shown at the top of a screening, cinema tends towards greater narrative continuity than most television programming, if only because narrative threads are not broken by commercial interruptions and the like.
The similarities between cinema and television have led understandably to the transference of terms initially associated with the parlance of cinema (jump cut and shot, for example) to discussion of television. While it is frequently difficult to draw sharp distinctions between the televisual and the cinematic, it seems that cinema’s seniority over television has had effects more subtle than the simple shifting of terms from one medium to the other. Perspectives on television have been conditioned by preexisting understandings of film, with the effect that conceptions of the cinematic have expanded to include features more properly televisual. A subsequent effect is that cinematic has been applied to some recent plays and performances, when televisual may be the better term.
A specific example of how televisual features have been absorbed into notions of the cinematic comes firom an interview of two members of The Wooster Group, Kate Valk and Roy Faudree, discussing the Woosters’ recent performance piece House/Lights.
’ Or from season to season: “Who shot J. R.?” “Who killed Laura Palmer?’
20 House/Lights combined a 1939 opera libretto by Gertrude Stein, Dr. Faustus
Lights the Lights, with a 1964 soft-pom cult movie, Olga’s House o f Shame. Television monitors interspersed portions of the film with live or time-delayed shots of the onstage action. Stein’s text, counterpointing the action on stage and screen, was spoken live but was commonly filtered and distorted electronically. Both Valk and Faudree described
House/Lights as having a cinematic quality. Valk stated, “We began structuring the play cinematically, using the logic of film: pans, swoops, long shots. We found a physical
language, a very quirky way of moving in space.”* The first conunent that might be made here is that cinema no longer has a monopoly on pans, swoops, or long shots. The limitations of the cathode ray tube discourage shots with depth or breadth as great as that allowed by film, and it is probably true that television tends towards more static individual shots, but this is a difference of degree, not of kind. Further, while younger than swoops, pans, or long shots, the Steadicam has been a staple of film for some time now, a technological effect of the practically universal commitment of film directors to fluid motion. While “quirky” is an accurate description of the physical movement used
in House/Lights, “jerky” would be every bit as accurate.’ This, combined with the
* Mike Steele, “Experimental Theater Group Brings Order Out of Chaos,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 18 November 1997: El.
’ As indicated by the following comments: “The piece ... has been directed by Elizabeth LeCompte in that jerky, self-conscious style of movement that seems to grow out of deconstructed texts” (Hedy Weiss, “‘House/Lights,’” Chicago Sun-Times, 13 November 1997: Reviews 42); “Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte in a brisk, intermissionless 70 minutes of fragmented narrative, jerl^ movements, amplified sound and distorted television images.. . . ” (Michael Grossberg, “Naked Truth: ‘House/Lights’ Fails,” Columbus Dispatch, 9 October 1997: E7). A lengthier discussion of House/Lights is included in the appendix following Chapter 5.
21 tightness of the performing space, and distortions of the performers’ voices, created an effect less suggestive of cinema than of particular moments of television programming marked by extremely rapid turnover of images or computerized distortions of motion.
Faudree’s comments are perhaps more telling: “We bring in our own public views of reality as well, the cinematic way we look at things, the notion of channel switching, the fragmentation of life, the lack of logic in it all yet the way we eventually make sense of the shards.”*® Though his statements are excerpted from a presumably longer interview, Faudree makes no mention of television in the statement cited here. Whether the reference to “channel switching” is an inadvertent conflation of televisual terminology into cinematic concepts is uncertain; what is certain is that channel switching, a term that is quite apt for House/Lights, is a feature of television, not of cinema. Additionally,
Faudree’s references to the “fragmentation of life” and the “lack of logic” are both reflected in discussions of televison, as surveyed below. In any event, while the barrier separating the televisual and the cinematic is somewhat fluid, House/Lights is only one of the works addressed in this study that have been described as “cinematic” when
“televisual” would have been equally or more appropriate.
The physical conditions of television and theatre production are obviously different, thus preventing any absolutely precise identification between televisual and theatrical representational conventions. Nonetheless, this chapter will argue that some recent drama and theatre incorporates analogous conventions. As noted in the previous chapter, critics like Auslander, Birringer, and Zurbrugg have identified such conventions
*® Steele El.
22 in some recent performance. Their observations will be included in the next chapter, which addresses some recent performance work. For the moment, I wish to note that in terms of dramatic structure, little has been written about the influence of televisual representational practices on drama.
That such influences are being felt is indicated by some comments by Christopher
Kyle, whose play The Monogamist centers around a poet who becomes obsessed with creating a “video poem.” Discussing a 1995 production of The Monogamist, Kyle, referring to himself and director Scott Elliott, says.
This play and this production came from two people who are younger— Scott’s 33 and I’m 30. We’ve grown up watching television and film; we have a different perspective about ways to put TVs and music videos and rock music on stage, because that’s just a part of our experience, and we don’t find it incongruous with the theatre experience. I sense that for some older people, theatre is an escape from the world of media or electronic entertainment. But I think artists our age and younger are more interested in doing that kind of thing, and that’s more like what the future is going to be."
One critic who has considered the influence of television on dramatic structure is
Elizabeth Klaver. In two separate articles, Klaver examines several contemporary plays and performance texts, identifying within each structural affinities with television. In the
1980 play Coming Attractions, for example, Klaver identifies “the hard, glittering images associated with game shows and the continually shifting array of scenes and dramatic units that flicker endlessly across the screen of the TV set.” Like Oliver Stone’s popular film Natural Bom Killers, Coming Attractions follows the career of a serial killer as he
" Stephanie Coen, “Natural Spins: An Interview with the Playwright,” Theatre March 1996: 24.
23 rises to fame through media exposure. Klaver observes that the content of the play is reflected by a dramatic structure based on “the kind of jump cut that television uses to traverse a series of dramatic units, abruptly supplanting one scene with another.”'^
In an earlier article, Klaver discusses three different works (Müller’s
Hamletmachine, the Wooster Group’s reworking of Wilder’s Our Town, and Lee
Brener’s Hajj: the Performance). In each, Klaver finds “a recognition of television as thematic or satirical material, [and] more importantly an incorporation of television’s particular structuring features—such as the shape of a boundless megatext, a three- dimensional architecture in which textual free play occurs—and the subsequent effects on the viewer.”"
The works that Klaver examines all predate The Monogamist, some by more than a decade, indicating that the future to which Kyle refers is already here. Yet all of the works that Klaver examines contain overt references to television and video technology.
Coming Attractions takes television programming as its subject, and the television apparatus is incorporated directly into all of the other works that Klaver discusses. The same is true of The Monogamist, which focuses on a central figure’s obsession with video technology and his own televised image. Yet as this chapter will demonstrate, several features analogous to televisual representational practices can be found even in some plays in which television or video technology does not receive such overt treatment.
" Klaver, “‘ComingAttractions” II2, II4.
" Klaver, “Postmodernism” 69.
24 The principal works considered in this chapter are Eric Overmyer’s In Perpetuity
Throughout the Universe, Craig Lucas’s Reckless, and Constance Congdon’s Tales o f the
Lost Formicans. The degree to which television and televisual representation is actually represented varies from play to play. Perpetuity contains no overt references. Some scenes in Reckless include television sets placed on stage, and two scenes take place in television studios. The play does not, however, serve up an overt examination of television, as for example Coming Attractions does. In the main, television is simply presented as part of the landscape. Formicans contains some references to television but does not place it directly into the action. Still, the features of television and video technology are incorporated more overtly, if tacitly, into the structure of this play than the other two. Despite these differences, all three plays exhibit a structure and logic similar to television programming.
Before turning to an examination of these works, some discussion of observations, and occasional anxieties, about the featmes and influence of television is necessary. Of various concerns relating to television that have been raised in recent years, four have a direct bearing on this study. The two that will be of greatest importance to this chapter have to do with relationships between programming practices and narrative representation. On the one hand, some writers have considered how television contributes to what Stuart Hall has called “the narrative construction of reality.”''’ On the
Stuart Hall, “The Narrative Construction of Reality: An Interview,” Southern Review 17:1 (1984): 3-17.
25 other, some have been more occupied with the regular interruption or even rejection of traditional narrative structure as a characteristic of television programming.
A third concern, though related to the topic of narrative representation, is distinctive enough to warrant separate consideration. Some writers have expressed anxiety over the potential psychological, sociological, and epistemological effects of the
increase in the mass of information and the speed at which it is delivered, that has accompanied the proliferation of television and other media technology. The final concern has been that the relatively isolated circumstances under which television is most commonly viewed, rather than creating the global village that McLuhan envisioned, actually leads to social fragmentation. These last two issues, addressed here for the sake of continuity, will actually be of greater importance to the following chapter.
Television and Narrative Representation
During its relatively brief life span, television has become one of the most pervasive of all contemporary Western cultural institutions. Roger Silverstone has gone so far as to declare that “The public, broadcast texts of television: images, narratives, icons, rituals are the site of contemporary mythic culture.”*^ Television is further one of the most prolific purveyors of narrative in the modem world. Sarah Ruth Kozloff points out that television is as saturated with narrative as “a sponge in a swimming pool.”'®
Roger Silverstone, “Television Myth and Culture,” Media, Myths, and Narratives, ed. James Carey (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1988) 24.
'® Sarah Ruth Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television,” Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1987) 43.
26 From situation comedies to dramatic miniseries, narrative representation has been a chief feature of television programming. The influence of narrative is most apparent in fictional series programming, but is not restricted to it. Commercials often take narrative form, complete with a beginning, a middle, and an end (as for example when a
“protagonist” wakes up with bad breath, gargles with the advertised mouthwash, and thus regains the affection of his or her family). News programs also regularly include several mini-narratives, tightly-knit sequential accounts complete with exposition, points of conflict, and resolution.
The narrative structure of much television programming has invited some critical commentary over the past three decades. Of course, concerns about the epistemological influences of narrative representation in general have been around for some time. As a representational mode, narrative is so thoroughly naturalized as to often become largely transparent. Aristotle, for example, implicitly accepted its naturalness when he made the seemingly common-sense observation that a story must have a beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, the transparency of narrative seems closely related to its ubiquity; Roland
Barthes observes that, under an “almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.”'’
Yet despite its familiarity, narrative is a form of representation and thus a construction. As Kozloff points out, a series of experienced events is not a narrative; the
” Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 79.
27 narrative moment occurs only when that series is arranged into an intelligible representation of those events.'* Furthermore, if the familiarity of narrative representation is not necessarily indicative of its “naturalness,” neither should its ubiquity be considered insignificant. It is the combination of ubiquity and apparent naturalness that makes narrative profoundly important. As Barthes suggests, it appears that “the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused By being figured into a narrative, discrete but contiguous events may assume an apparently causal relationship that is in fact illusory—that the phrase post hoc, ergo propter hoc simply exists lends support to such a claim.“
Stuart Hall has considered the functions of narrative representation within the particular context of television programming. Ruminating on the media coverage of the
1982 Falklands war some two years after its conclusion. Hall described how a retrospective account offered by the BBC reviewed—or reconstructed—the conflict.
'* Kozloff 55. Nonetheless, as Lévi-Strauss has noted, the boundary between the naturally- occurring and the socially-constructed may not always be completely distinct. David Carr rejects arguments that narrative is merely an artificial construct (or “theoretical fiction”) imposed retrospectively on events. Carr claims that in interpreting experience, human beings gravitate naturally and immediately toward narrative arrangements that are both “pre-theoretical” and “pre-thematic.” By this argument, specific narrative accounts are constructions, but the tendency toward narrativity is a natural feature of human experience. This matter is addressed at greater length in Chapter Five. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986).
19 Barthes 94.
This is not to say that any given narrative account is inaccurate simply because it is a narrative account. That Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is written in narrative form does not by simple virtue of that fact discount any of the causal connections that the work postulates; Rome may have fallen for the very reasons Gibbon offers.
28 During the conflict. Hall noted, media coverage consisted of frequently contradictory images and meanings of what the war was all about. By contrast, the BBC’s retrospective arranged the events “into a seamless narrative web, a story from beginning to end. You wouldn’t really believe that there were altercating versions of that event. The narrative tells a story into which it is impossible to enter or introduce any questions at all.” The
BBC, Hall stated, drew on “historical myths which have in a sense stabilised the understandings which British people have of their own history.” In particular, he noted how Galtieri was represented as a second Hitler who had to be overthrown. Noting that
“form is actually part of the content of what it is that you are saying,” Hall suggested that the BBC’s (re)construction of the Falklands conflict revealed “the powerful impact of narrative in making myth appear to be real.” He continued: “When a medium like television has such a powerful, realistic or naturalistic charge to it, people then do need to have those narratives interrupted and questioned in order to understand that they are a result of a social and historical practice; they aren’t just given.
Television Flow as Anti-Narrative. “Information Overload”
Of course, in a very real sense, televised narratives are constantly interrupted, if not necessarily questioned, by commercial breaks, news updates, and station identification pauses. Such regular interruptions have been the focus of other media critics and theorists, who have expressed concerns about the randomness that characterizes television programming taken in the aggregate, what Raymond Williams
Hall passim.
29 and others have referred to as “flow.”“ Williams, who seems to have coined the term, was interested in relationships between the apparently disparate messages and images contained within television flow. Williams argued that referential links often appeared between the various portions of a stretch of television programming (for instance, between an item in a news broadcast and a plot development in an episode of a fictional series some hours later).^ Williams thus attempted to expand the definition of narrative to embrace not only particular programming segments but the entire field of television representation.
While Williams attempted to examine flow in narrative or quasi-narrative terms, others have since argued that such terms are inappropriate. They argue that while narrative predominates in regard to particular programming instances, programming in the aggregate deviates from traditional narrative structure by violating the principle of causal continuity on which it is based. Such theorists point, for instance, to the lack of cohesion between the events of a program and the commercial breaks that interrupt it.
According to this conception, flow is often just a chaotic succession of self-contained messages. This sequential arbitrariness may be further enhanced by remote control
^ Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1974).
^ Mimi White gives an example of such inter-referentiality that illustrates Williams’s point and also speaks to Hall’s desire to see televised narrative accounts interrupted and questioned. White refers to a commercial for a line of Mother’s Day cards that appeared in the midst of a Cagney and Lacey episode dealing with issues of child abandonment and the economic hardships faced by single mothers. Through reciprocal reference, the Hallmark commercial interrupted the narrative flow of the Cagney and Lacey episode, while cultural notions of “motherhood” on which the commercial drew were problematized by the program. Mimi White, “Ideological Analysis and Television,” Channels o f Discourse, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1987) 157-158.
30 “surfing.”^'* On the basis o f this interpretation, some critics have suggested that the chaotic nature of flow may be no less epistemologically naturalizing than traditional narrative structure.
Neil Postman has presented one of the most forceful arguments in regard to the randomness of television flow and its potential epistemological effects. In Amusing
Ourselves to Death, Postman reflects on the random generation of context-free messages in news programs, as well as the general randomness of television progranuning.
Postman’s rhetoric sometimes borders on hyperbole, but his fundamental arguments merit consideration, and I quote him here at some length. Of television news Postman writes,
“[here] we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.” A few pages later, he continues:
We have become so accustomed to [television news’] discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King.. .. 1 should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of
■'* Some individual programming segments show a total or near-total rejection of causally- oriented narrative. While some music videos have narrative form, most consist of streams of disconnected images. Similarly, some commercials consist of images and spoken texts with presumably positive associations but little connection to the advertised product. In 1997, Toyota introduced an ad campaign including “image spots” in which different people in various settings responded to the question, “All you have is today. How will you make it count?” The responses were generically related, but neither the question nor the responses had anything remotely to do with automobiles. (Teresa Buyikian, “Saatchi Launches ‘Everyday’ Campaign for Toyota: Feel- Good Spots Focus on the Commonplace Dramas of Joe Public,” Adweek, 15 September 1997.) Ads for Levis jeans show similar leanings; one combined a group of vampires and a voiceover describing how long the company had been around (perhaps an implied connection between the durability of Levis and the infinite life of the undead). These examples indicate how the arbitrariness of television flow is replicated on a “local” level.
31 discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction.^
Postman argues that late twentieth-century American culture has become thoroughly conditioned by a ‘T^ow ... This” mentality fostered by television (“A United
States general announced today that nuclear war with the Soviet Union is inevitable.
Now this word from Burger King”). Citing a 1983 New York Times article about declining public interest in then-Fresident Reagan’s “’misleading accoimts of his policies or of current events in general,”’ Postman argues that many of Reagan’s
“’misstatements’ fall in the category of contradictions—mutually exclusive assertions that cannot possibly both, in the same context, be true.” Postman suggests that these contradictions may have escaped scrutiny not simply because of public apathy, but because of an incapacity to recognize contradiction: in “a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped o f any coimection to the past, or to the future, or to other events . . . all assumptions of coherence have vanished.”^
While Postman’s claims have not gone unchallenged, even some of his critics have agreed with him on some basic principles. Douglas Davis faults Postman for regarding viewers as passive “victims” of television’s alleged assault on their cognitive apparatuses. Davis claims that viewers are neither passive nor incapable of rational thought, yet he agrees that much television is characterized by disjointed, rapid-fire, and context-free information. Discussing the use of television in political campaigns, Davis
“ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985) 100, 104-105.
“ Postman 108-110..
32 decries the proliferation of the “thirty-second spot,” and the replacement of substantive debate with vacuous soundbites. Yet Davis argues that this tendency arises from an erroneous assumption by campaign managers and others that the American public is unable or unwilling to attend to sustained debate. Davis argues ftudher that this assumption is fostered by the disdainful regard in which Postman and others regard the television-viewing public.”
In a sense, Davis reverses but maintains the fundamental terms of Postman’s argument. Postman claims that the chaos of television programming fosters apathy or incomprehension by numbing the cognitive apparatus of viewers. Davis argues that apathy is the natural response of a voting public starved for meaningful information by a media industry that regards it as having a minuscule attention span. Davis further suggests that remote-control surfing is not so much evidence of shrinking attention spans as that viewers are trying to exert control over a medium that positions them as passive recipients.’®
David Marc, inBonfire o f the Humanities, also faults Postman for suggesting, as
Marc puts it, that “Television cannot teach us anything, but can only entertain.” Marc argues that “Television, like any transmission medium (including books) can dispense
” Douglas Davis, The Five Myths of Television Power, or Why the Medium is Not the Message (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).
For a similar argument, see Jean Baudriilard, who asks, “is it the media that neutralizes meaning and that produces the ‘unformed’ (or informed) mass, or is it the mass that victoriously resists the media by diverting or absorbing all the messages which it produces without responding to them?” Jean Baudriilard, “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media,” In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or, The End of the Social and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 105.
33 information to those who make the effort to receive it. To despise the quality of what we leam from television is a tacit admission that we are, in fact, learning.”” As with Davis, however, Marc’s position is not so far removed from Postman’s as this passage might suggest. Postman, despite his tendency towards hyperbole, does accept that viewers leam from television; it is only the quality of what—and how—they leam that disturbs him.
Many of Marc’s arguments are practically synonymous with Postman’s. Marc, who is largely concerned with literacy, argues that
Despite, or perhaps because of, the great [television] audience’s continuing devotional affection for commercially segmented narrative series reruns, the primacy of naturalistic plot construction ... is rapidly passing from the center stage of American popular culture.. . . Instead, montage reigns as the vital aesthetic feature of American popular culture. The epistemological style of montage, which emphasizes arousal over all other human responses, has proliferated to the point of seeming organic, creating whole generations of sensibilities refined in its bouncy, colorful shadows.”
Another passage from Bonfire o f the Humanities sounds as if it could have come straight from Postman:
If, as McLuhan implies, the synaesthetic pleasure of multimedia experience is by its very nature more attractive than the single-sense visual focus of reading, what are the consequences for human memory? For one thing, visceral reaction takes priority over the particulars of content in personal recall and this is inimical to the inculcation of cultural memory in the traditional sense. Images, styles, tones, fashions, ambiences, and manners are salient. Facts, dates, names, places, institutions, cause-and- effect theories and other components that inform a literacy-based historical
” David Marc,Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy, and Long-Term Memory Loss (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1995) 42, 43.
” Marc, Bonfire 129,131.
34 perspective are reduced to the accoutrements of an entertainment experience.^'
So despite their differences, which are sometimes slight. Postman, Davis, and Marc ail agree that the rapid-fire, disjointed representational practices associated with television have a potentially significant impact on viewers and on the social, political, and cultural spheres surrounding them.
This last quotation from Marc indicates a third concern that has been expressed about the proliferation of television, as well as other mass media. Auslander notes that some “pessimistic” media theorists argue that “the information society engulfs its members in too much information; far from providing the basis for a sophisticated and just society, this information glut overwhelms social subjects, depriving them of the ability to make important discriminations and decisions.” Auslander refers specifically to
Jean Baudriilard and Jean-Pierre Dupuy.^^ Orrin Klapp and David Shenk express similar concerns about what they term, respectively, “information overload” and “information glut.””
Marc, Bonfire 60.
Auslander, Presence and Resistance 14. Auslander cites Baudriilard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard and Caroline Schultze (New York: Autonomedia, 1988) and Dupuy, “Myths of the Informational Society,” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1980) 3-17.
Orrin Klapp, Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986). David Shenk,Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (San Francisco: Harper Edge, 1997).
35 Television and Social Fragmentation
A fourth concern with the proliferation of television has less to do with stylistic programming features than with typical viewing circumstances. While some television is watched by small groups of people gathered in a public space, most viewing is a more private activity associated with the home. The relative isolation associated with television viewing has led some to argue that while television exposes viewers to events and people from around the world, the conditions under which it is commonly received contribute to social fragmentation, not cohesion. Baudriilard has advanced one of the strongest formulations of this argument:
It is useless to fantasize about state projection of police control through TV (as Enzensberger has remarked of Orwell’s 1984): TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control in itself. There is no need to imagine it as a state periscope spying on everyone’s private life—the situation as it stands is far more efficient than that: it is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other, that they are definitely isolated in the face of a speech without response.^"’
In the years since Baudriilard presented this argument, changes in television- related technology have exacerbated this concern. Marc observes that with the expansion of cable systems, programming variety has increased tremendously. Broadcasting has given way to “narrowcasting,” as stations direct programming not toward a theoretical, generally-defined homogeneous population but toward narrower subsets of that population:
Whereas once a family might have sat around the living room TV set- McLuhan’s ‘electronic hemth’—gathered together to watch an episode of
^ Jean Baudriilard, “Requiem for the Media,” For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis; Teles Press, 1981) 172.
36 All in the Family or Little House on the Prairie or The Bionic Woman, nowadays Dad is just as likely to slip off into the den to look at the ball game on ESPN, while Mom enjoys an episode o f Cagney and Lacey on Lifetime, as Junior tunes in USA Network to catch the Hulkster’s latest comeback and Sis rocks out with MTV. With so many channels slicing up the national audience into ever-tinier slivers, the center will not hold. The great ‘mass’ audience of network television is being picked apart into the target ‘class’ audiences of cable TV.”
In an afterword to the revised edition of his earlier Demographic Vistas, Marc offers a similar observation, employing a more overtly political rhetoric:
In contrast to broadcasting’s intrinsic Catholicism, narrowcasting is structurally biased toward sectarianism. It balkanizes the massive inclusionary twentieth-century public created by broadcasting into exclusionary tribes, castes, sects, interests, and “lifestyles.” Narrowcasting is more suitable for preaching to the converted than for the kind of street- coraer appeal apropos to over-the-air transmission.^^
Marc argues that narrowcasting indicates that the television industry has begun to do exactly what Davis declares the viewing public has been telling it to do for years: “Break into a thousand parts. Serve me, not yourself.””
Contemporarv Drama and Theatre and Televisual Representation
Three recent American plays that exhibit features analogous to televisual representation are Eric Overmyer’s In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe, Craig Lucas’s
Reckless, and Constance Congdon’s Tales o f the Lost Formicans. Formicans and
David Marc, “The First Image, A Dollar Sign,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 2 May 1989 (cited in Bonfire 141).
Marc, Demographic Vistas 182.
” Davis 91.
37 Reckless contain, to varying degrees, explicit references to television or televisual/video
modes of representation. All three are marked by rapidly shifting scenes akin to the jump
cuts that Klaver identifies in Coming Attractions. Beyond this structural feature, all
exhibit the sort of randomness and discontinuity that various media theorists have
identified as hallmarks of recent television programming. Through this section, I shall be
interested in demonstrating how the plays in question replicate the “logic” of televisual
flow. Following a summary of the plays and a discussion of their televisual features, I examine how the concerns of various media theorists are reflected by the plays. 1 also
consider how both the plays and concerns over televisual representation intersect with
some recent research in the field of clinical psychology.
All of the plays in question display some linearity, in the sense that they are
sustained depictions of particular characters through sequential, albeit discontinuous, courses of action. Tales o f the Lost Formicans follows several characters through a series of experiences, presented as a retrospective examination prepared by extraterrestrial observers. In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe depicts the staff and clientele of a
vanity press as they pursue a variety of sustained activities. Reckless is a chronologically- arranged picaresque that follows the adventures of a central character after she flees her
home to escape firom a hitman hired by her husband.
Despite this surface linearity, however, the progression of events in these plays is much more arbitrary than is typical of traditional, well-made play structure. Rather, the plays often effect a clear dissociation of causality fi’om linearity. To borrow from
Barthes, consecution and consequence are here drawn apart. Rather than seamless webs
38 in which every event is linked by apparent necessity to every other event in a coherent whole, these three plays are more often sequences of apparently random events that are often only tenuously related to one another. The plays, in short, are analogous to television flow.
In Perpetuity Thromhout the Universe
Eric Overmyer’s In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe centers on the staff and clientele of The Montage Agency, a vanity press that provides ghostwriting services to aspiring authors. Among these is Mr. Ampersand Qwerty, a conspiracy theorist whose works include ZOG, an expose of the “Zionist Occupation Government.” To give its clients a sense of continuity. Montage’s ghostwriters work under pseudonyms.
Lefkowitz, for instance, is actually Christine Penderecki, the latest in a long line of
Lefkowitzes (at her former employers, she was the latest Mr. Rutabaga). The bulk of the play revolves around the development of Qwerty’s latest book. The Yellow Emperor: The
New Dr. Fu Manchu, ghostwritten by Christine.
There are several subplots, including a love affair between Christine and Dennis
Wu, played by an actor who doubles as Tai-Tung Tranh, a Fu Manchu character involved in one of the imagined conspiracies described in the play. Another revolves around Lyle
Vial, who is vetting a manuscript that claims that the Vatican, “The Red Whore of the
Apocalypse, controls the global media, popular entertainment, and the worldwide trade in
39 narcotics, arms, pornography, and white slavery... Lyle also busies himself with tracing the provenance of a chain letter. He has a lead: “The Doomsday Book, the great survey of Norman England,” records that a female jester, a “joculatrix,” was “the inventor of the chain letter.. . . ” Once thought destroyed during the Cromwellian Ascendancy, the letter was later discovered “in a box at the Drury Lane Theatre during a performance of
Sheridan’s Duenna . ..” (35-36).
Perpetuity reveals a number of representational features common to television programming. In structural terms. Perpetuity, like all of the works Klaver discusses, replicates television jump cuts throughout, rapidly shifting locations and characters.^’
The name of the vanity press. Montage, becomes self-reflexive in this regard. Many scenes are quite short, some only a few seconds long, about the length of a television commercial. As is common to serial television programming, narrative threads are established, then interrupted, then reestablished, then interrupted again, in an unpredictable fashion that prompted one reviewer to comment that the play “entertains, provokes, and confuses with a scattershot blast of scenes and speeches performed by a truly bizarre cast of characters.”^
Eric Overmyer, In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1989) 18. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically, using page numbers only.
One reviewer wrote that the play is “meant to be performed in quick, darting blackouts.” Richard Christiansen, “Chicago premiere of tricky, witty play undone by troupe,” Chicago Tribune, 19 January 1990: C20.
Megan Rosenfeld, “‘Perpetuity’: Plots Plus,” The Washington Post, 21 September 1990: 82. Overmyer now writes mainly for television, as reported in Kenneth Cavander, “The Art and Craft of Jumping Fences,” Theatre March 1998: I5-18ff.
40 Aside from such overarching structural issues, some scenes are reminiscent of particular programming categories. A scene featuring the Joculatrix combines features of both the formulaic chain letter and the live, on-location shot of television news programs.
The Joculatrix, ‘"'dressed in bells and motley [and waving] the original chain letter," appears in a light and declares, “This sheepskin comes to you from Whiffle-on-Trent. It has been around the country seven times...” (75). As another example, three scenes show Dennis and Christine tossing matches into a bowl, each match representing something or someone they hate, and then igniting the matches. Each time, one of the characters intones, “I love this list. This list is my favorite” (2-3, 51-53, 73-74). The scenes are reminiscent of various television commercials that relate to each other as variations on particular themes.^'
Against this shifting background. Perpetuity illustrates some abiding concerns about the narrative representation of reality, and tendencies to impose narrative structure on experience. Qwerty’s conspiracy theories all attempt to expose or impose a causal pattern on events in the surrounding world. To give its clients a sense of narrative continuity. Montage perpetuates the illusion of fictional figures like Lefkowitz. Even within the agency, Buster shares with Qwerty’s presumed readers a desire for narrative cohesion, as she searches for causal links between events:
I believe the assassination conspiracies. I know the CIA killed Kennedy, the FBI killed King, and the NTVTD killed Malcolm X. I don’t know about Bobby, but I have my theories. I believe the Jesuits killed John Paul 1. I believe the Society of the Deadly Palm touched Bruce Lee in a certain
Numerous examples could be brought to bear, but the most obvious is probably that of the commercials for Energizer batteries featuring the Energizer Bunny. See Chapter Three, n. 84.
41 way, and his blood sickened and he died three months later. Just touched him. Like this.. . .
I believe D.B. Cooper is Idi Amin’s bowling coach. I believe the body discovered in Brazil is not Josef Mengele, but Jimmy Hoffa. I believe SONY stands for Standard Oil of New York. 1 believe MIT stands for Made in Taiwan.... (23,62)
Dennis also suggests that a teleological scheme lies behind the apparent chaos of worldly events: “War, famine, revolution. The great displacements of peoples. The vast migrations of nations. The countless refugees. All part of a divine scheme. To create a greater diversity and higher quality of ethnic restaurants in New York City. God is a gourmet” (55).
The most explicit reference to this desire for narrative cohesion, and closure, comes from Lyle Vial. After declaring that “Everyone has a conspiracy theory,” exactly echoing Dennis’s earlier statement (18), Lyle says,
I think the human need for linear narrative, and narrative closure, coupled with our physiologically determined dualism which dictates our childishly Manichaean world-view—good guys, bad guys. Empire of Evil, Free World—plus our innate inability to tolerate the tensions of ambiguity, as a species, 1 mean, will bring on World War Three. We’ll blow it up just to see how it ends. (65-66)
Perpetuity thus examines two of the chief features of the narrative representation of reality: a search backward for originary causes and a forward projection toward some eventual stopping place or final effect. As suggested by the excerpts above, the entire play exhibits a pronoimced degree of ironic skepticism toward such pursuits. This skepticism finds humorous expression in the introduction of the Joculatrix. Buster and
Dennis carry the quest for narrative coherence to ludicrous extremes. Finally, even
42 Qwerty seems to regard his own conspiracy theories merely as profitable and politically efficacious fictions. After receiving the assignment to ghostwrite Qwerty’s newest book,
Christine/Lefkowitz expresses confusion over Qwerty’s earlier decision to have
Lefkowitz ghostwrite the exposé of the Zionist Occupation Government:
CHRISTINE: Lefkowitz. Isn’t Lefkowitz a Jewish name?
MARIA: O f course.
CHRISTINE: I don’t understand.
MARIA: Something about a challenge.. . . Who knows? Besides, you don’t really think Mr. Ampersand Qwerty believes all that do you? (27-28)
Later, Christine states that Qwerty’s newest manuscript began with a note to Lefkowitz.
Qwerty appears in a light on stage and speaks the text of the note:
MR. AMPERSAND QWERTY : We think the pop-fic approach the right approach for this—campaign.. . . Begin with the following preface: Dear Reader. The imaginative and speculative inquiry. Fact or fiction.. . . Rest assured that every word of this astonishing tale is true. Don’t scoff. Turn the page. Be amazed.. . . Here are the facts. Make it up, Leflcowitz, make it up. Don’t forget to mention the Hmong. The mysterious deaths among the Hmong. (29)
With its regular interruption of narrative threads and its ironic regard for grand narrative accounts. Perpetuity, both in form and content, recapitulates some of the tensions surrounding the narrative representation of reality. It simultaneously employs devices analogous to televisual modes of representation, thus illustrating some current notions concerning the relationship of narrative representation to television programming practices.
43 Reckless
Craig Lucas’s Reckless follows a central protagonist through the hazards that she encounters after her comfortable suburban life is disrupted. The play opens on Christmas
Eve with Rachel chattering happily away until her husband Tom tells her that he has hired a hitman to kill her. Rachel escapes through a window and embarks on a series of bewildering and sometimes terrifying adventures. Taken in by social worker Lloyd
Bophtelophti and his deaf, paraplegic wife Pooty, Rachel gets a job with a humanitarian organization, finds the secret computer files that her coworker Trish keeps, appears on a game show with Lloyd and Pooty, flees with Lloyd when Pooty and Tom die from drinking poisoned champagne left on the Bophtelophtis’ doorstep the following
Christmas, falls into depression after Lloyd drinks himself to death, visits six different therapists, is taken into a homeless shelter, attends a talk show and is shot at by a masked gunman who kills the talk show guest instead, and finally becomes a therapist in Alaska.
The work contains some overt references to television. The first scene opens with
“the glow of the television” filling Rachel and Tom’s bedroom."*^ Television sets are placed directly on stage in some other scenes; Rachel leams from a news broadcast that
Trish had been embezzling funds from the humanitarian organization. And as noted, two scenes take place in television studios. Still, television is not so much an object of examination in this work as it is simply a part, albeit a rather conspicuous part, of the landscape.
Craig Lucas, Reckless (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1989) 7. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically, using page numbers only.
44 Reckless does not follow the same pattern as Perpetuity, in that it keeps a tighter focus on a single character throughout. Lucas’s play is something of a Gordian knot in which most of the major plot developments, initially introduced as chance occurrences in a life crowded with incident, are finally explained or at least tied together. The poisoned champagne was presumably left by Trish (who was embezzling funds from the humanitarian group) in an attempt to silence Rachel. The masked gunman was Rachel’s younger son, who believed that Rachel abandoned him and her family and that she was responsible for his father’s death. And the last patient to visit Rachel is her older son,
Tom Junior, whom she recognizes, though he merely comments on the resemblance between her and the pictures he has of his mother.
In Reckless, as in Perpetuity, traditional narrative principles are problematized.
Causal explanations are given for some events, but only retrospectivelyU p to the point of these revelations, events follow one another in an apparently random fashion. As reviewer David Richards observes, “There’s just no telling who’s who or what’s up, let alone why, as Rachel, still in her pink housedress, makes her way through the modem world.”^ Both Richards and Dan Sullivan refer to Reckless as a dream play, Richards noting that the play “com[es] to us, in bits and pieces, from the magical recesses of the
Like Waiter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” Rachel (and the viewer) are blown backwards into the future, perceiving causal links between events only after the fact: “The past [is] seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World: 1968) 255.
** David Richards, “‘Reckless’: Dream Disturbed,” The Washington Post, 10 April 1990: C2.
45 subconscious.” Sullivan writes that “Rachel goes from one unfortunate encounter to the
next with the speed of light, yet it all seems to connect—if not quite add up.”^*
Rachel herself sums up what seems to be one of the principal points of the play:
You know what? Things just happen. People die. And bus drivers don’t always look where they’re going, even if they should, even if they’re driving a school bus. Even if you love somebody they can still take a contract out on your life. And if you try to help somebody because they’ve been kind to you when you needed them, they can still refuse to eat and drink nothing but champagne, champagne, that’s all they’ll drink, and if you ask them to please, please take off their Santa Claus suit, just when they go out, just when you go to the store, they won’t. So? Things just happen! (47)
Much of this sense is reflected in the structure of the play. Reckless is not as
scattered in its focus as Perpetuity, yet it shows a similar tendency toward rapid shifts of
locale and very brief scenes; there are twenty-eight in all, some of which can be played in
under a minute. Also, while the play focuses on a single character throughout, the regular
interruption of narrative threads is reminiscent of television surfing. The play also
includes some effects similar to particular television devices. Rapid alternating jump cuts
are reflected by Scene Twenty-Three, in which Rachel and Fifth Doctor carry on a
conversation in the doctor’s office while Lloyd talks to himself in a hotel room (46-47).
The television dissolve is reflected in the transition from Scene Twenty-Six (the talk
show scene) to Scene Twenty-Seven. As Twenty-Six ends, the talk show Host and Guest and the masked gunman who attempted to shoot Rachel, all disappear, leaving Rachel
Dan Sullivan, “'Reckless’-A Journey Through a Nightmare,” Los Angeles Times, 31 January 1985: FI.
46 and Sixth Doctor alone on stage. The heading for Twenty-Seven reads “The action is continuous,” yet it is evident that there has been a change in location (52-53).
Tales of the Lost Formicans
Of the three plays discussed here, Constance Congdon’s Tales o f the Lost
Formicans is the most pointedly televisual in its structure. An account of late twentieth- century life in suburban America as prepared by extraterrestrial anthropologists,
Formicans centers largely around Cathy, who, like Rachel in Reckless, suddenly finds herself cut loose from her moorings. Early in the play, while addressing the audience,
Cathy steps offstage to speak with her husband and then returns to say, “Life’s funny.
One minute you’re married. The next minute you’re not. One of his students, eighteen years old, ‘Kimberly,’ plays the oboe, the baby is his.”^® Cathy leaves her home in New
York and moves in with her parents, Jim and Evelyn, in a subdivision somewhere in
Colorado. She brings along her son, Eric, a disaffected adolescent who resents being removed from his familiar surroundings. On returning to her childhood home, Cathy finds that Jim is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease,"*’ her childhood friend Judy is in a
"** Constance Congdon, Tales of the Lost Formicans (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1989) 3. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically, using page numbers only.
"*’ Although Alzheimer’s is never specifically named, Jim’s memory lapses and addled behavior clearly suggest that this is the cause. Congdon has also stated that the play was heavily influenced by her own father’s affliction with the disease: “I was originally telling the story of my father’s illness, and I knew from the beginning I didn’t want to write a two-hour play about Alzheimer’s disease.” Clark Perry, “‘Formicans’ Invades Area: Controversial Play Making Regional Debut in Tampa, St. Petersburg Times 5 August 1989: “Theatre Review” 1.
47 situation much like her own, other friends from her childhood are dead, and nothing in the neighborhood looks quite like it used to.
Formicans consists of a montage of overlapping and interpenetrating scenes.
Throughout the play, Cathy and Evelyn try to come to grips with Jim’s disintegration and eventual death, while both Cathy and Judy try to control their recalcitrant offspring.
Cathy’s new neighbor Jerry, a nurse who ends up caring for Jim in the last stages of his illness, tries to get several of the other characters to listen to his theories about faked moon landings, alien control of human beings, and suspicious coincidences between the assassinations of Lincoln and Kermedy. At one point, Jerry is captured and examined by extraterrestrials in a scene that satirizes alien abduction stories from National Enquirer and field scientists’ examinations of animals from National Geographic (52).
Formicans takes the shape of what one reviewer described as “a sort of 3-D video of life on Earth in the late 20th Century, prepared by scientists on another planet several eons down the line.”’’* Scenery is minimal, limited to a few fumitiure pieces and hand props presented as artifacts by the anthropologists. Scenes shift rapidly; Congdon suggests that the “staging should be relatively seamless, with the stage space shared by all the actors.” Congdon also notes that, aside from the actor playing Jerry, the aliens are
“played by the human cast members wearing matching sunglasses” (PRODUCTION
'** Dan Sullivan, ‘“Lost Formicans’ Mirrors the Angst of the ‘80s,” Los Angeles Times, 14 November 14: FI, F6. Formicans is another work that has been called cinematic. Wayne Loui, who directed a production in St. Louis, commented, “This is a play that has a very cinematic approach.. . . [T]here are 52 different scenes in the production ” Subsequent discussion should demonstrate that the play is more televisual than cinematic. Loui is quoted in Terry Perkins, “‘Tales of the Lost Formicans’: TNT Finds a Home on the 15* Floor of Gateway One on the Mall,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 Novemebr 1990: 90.
48 NOTES). Voiceovers by the aliens introduce and preface many of the scenes, and
occasional rewinds are used to restore the “proper” sequence:
JIM: (To someone offstage) I’m gonna finally fix the goddam toaster. Evelyn?
VOICEOVER: Wait. Reverse it, please. (Pause) Please reverse it—it’s too early—something else goes here—
JIM: Nilava? Retsote moddag aw sif eelaknife annog mee. (JIM reverses his movements very fast and exits.)
VOICEOVER: There.
CATHY : (To audience) Why would 1 move back home?
VOICEOVER: This is right. (3)
Another scene consists of a rewound version of an earlier scene. An alien in a voiceover
says, “We’ve seen this . . . 1 said we’ve seen this. And X-load tape. It’s a zoomer” (17).
Like Perpetuity and Reckless, then, Formicans employs features analogous to
television programming. Narrative threads are interrupted and reestablished through
rapid shifts of brief scenes, leading another reviewer to describe the play as “unfurl [ing]
like a high-speed video presentation . . . complete with quick-edit scene shifts and calls
for rewinds.”^’ Another declared that Congdon “has tailored her science fiction-comedy
. . . to the remote-control generation, with a pureed plot that fast-forwards and rewinds at
warp speed.”*®
Mark Bineili, “‘Lost Formicans’ Scratches Beneath Domestic Surface,” The Atlanta Journal/The Atlanta Constitution 22 September 1995: P4.
Paul A. Harris, “Science-Fiction Comedy Provides Unique Perspective On Humanity,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 31 January 1991:12. Other reviewers have discussed the play in televisual terms. David Richards describes Formicans as “a dramatic pudding . .. conceived in
49 Precedents and Deviations
What is apparent from this survey is that the rejection, by Brecht and others, of
traditional narrative form has been continued by some of the newest American dramatists,
whose works often bear structural similarities to television flow. Each consists mostly of
relatively short scenes, some lasting only a few seconds, roughly the length of a brief
television commercial. To varying degrees, as reviewers have noted, the plays are
characterized by highly-charged and swiftly-changing imagery. And the actions and
events of the plays are typically disjointed, proceeding in arbitrary fashion; many scenes,
such as those in Perpetuity in which Christine Penderecki and Dennis Wu bum matches
symbolizing things and people they hate, are only vaguely related to other scenes and
contribute little towards plot advancement. In short, the plays often possess contiguity
without continuity.
This is not to suggest that the plays replicate televisual flow precisely. In the
simplest terms, there are no commercial breaks or pauses for station identification.
Further, the physical limitations of theatre conditions prevent the breakneck dispersal of
images that is possible with television (both in terms of production and, since the advent
of remote control, reception). As suggested above, though, the plays contain some
structural parallels to both commercial breaks and rapid jump cuts. Moreover, the
brief, often unconnected scenes and studded with bizarre, free-floating imagery.” Robert Koehler refers to the play’s “shape” as “visually collage-like, aurally like tuning in and out of a radio station,” and comments on stage devices like “quick-cut scenes, an alien narrator, time dilation (including the characters talking backward as the alien hits the reverse button).. . .” David Richards, “Spaced-Out Social Studies: Wooly Mammoth’s ‘Formicans,’” The Washington Post, 20 June 1990: C4. Robert Koehler, “Aliens Look at ‘80s in ‘Lost Formicans,”’ Los Angeles Times, 17 August 1990: F26.
50 arbitrary arrangement of scenes and the absence of clear causal links between events
constitute a pattern and a logic similar to television flow. It is also true that the plays
have formally similar predecessors. There were, after all, subplots before television. But
if the term subplot is to be applied to plays like Perpetuity or Formicans, it must be used
loosely. There are plenty of ancillary actions, but they rarely coalesce into causally-
structured patterns. Even in the case of Reckless, in which some connections emerge,
they do so only after the fact, suggesting that causal relationships can be seen in hindsight but cannot be anticipated or predicted. More often, as Rachel puts it, things just happen.
The preceding survey is intended to be indicative, not exhaustive. Several other examples of the rejection of causal narrative play structure could be cited.*' Nonetheless, as the caveats above suggest, it is hazardous to suggest that all contemporary deviations
from traditional narrative forms can be attributed, whether directly or indirectly, wholly or partially, to the influence of television representational practices. A number of other
influences and antecedents, many of which predate television, demand consideration.
Many of Muller's and Caryl Churchill’s works, for instance, are structurally similar to the plays surveyed above, but here the lasting influence of the Epic Theatre practices of
Brecht and Piscator certainly demands as much consideration as representational practices associated with television. Even so, some critics have commented on the influence of television on Muller’s work, for instance in Hamletmachine.^~ Müller himself acknowledged his own departure from Brecht, declaring that “It’s treason to use Brecht
*' See the appendix following Chapter Five.
See Klaver, “Postmodernism”; Zurbrugg.
51 without criticizing him.” He also once stated, “I believe in conflict. I don’t believe in anything else.. . . I’m not interested in answers and solutions. 1 don’t have any to offer.
I’m interested in problems and conflicts.””
Conversely, Paul Castagno has identified devices associated with Epic Theatre in the “new dramaturgy” of playwrights like Congdon and Ovemiyer (as well as Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman). Castagno notes a sense of dislocation in these playwrights’ works, referring to the function of ostranenie, “which influenced and is related to Brecht’s conception of alienation, [and which] suggests a dislocation in agreement, function, or context.”^ Nonetheless, as C. W. E. Bigsby has observed in a different context, style should not be mistaken for philosophy.” It is hazardous to equate different works or movements on the basis of particular devices or techniques alone, which can be used to different ends.” Social and theatrical landscapes have changed significantly over the last several decades. Despite some similarities to Epic Theatre, the plays surveyed here also demonstrate some clear departures, as indicated below.
In the “Short Organum,” Brecht declared that Epic Theatre would “make use in its representations of the new social scientific method known as dialectical materialism. In
” Carl Weber, “The Pressure of Experience,” in Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage by Heiner Müller, Ed. Carl Weber (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984) 16, 18.
” Paul Castagno, “Informing the New Dramaturgy: Critical Theory to Creative Process,” Theatre Topics 3.1 (1993): 33.
C. W. E. Bigsby, Dada and Surrealism (London: Methuen and Company, 1972) 78.
” The popular 1992 film Wayne's World uses cinematic devices akin to devices associated with Epic Theatre: episodic structure, direct audience address, an ironic acting style, exposure of the means of production. Yet it seems most hazardous to describe the film as “Brechtian.”
52 order to unearth society’s laws of motion this method treats social situations as processes, and traces out all their inconsistencies.” One of the devices that Brecht proposed was an episodic dramatic structure that would encourage rational consideration and thus foster an awareness of the principles behind “society’s laws of motion”:
As we cannot invite the audience to fling itself into the story as if it were a river and let itself be carried vaguely hither and thither, the individual episodes have to be knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily noticed. The episodes must not succeed one another indistinguishably but must give us a chance to interpose our judgment.*’
The plays surveyed here do incorporate such an episodic structure as well as an ironic quality that suggest a kind of verfremdungsejfekt^^ Further, all of these plays, while frequently humorous, focus on significant social and cultural issues. Reckless functions partially as an exposé of a self-imposed, if largely unconscious, ignorance or delusion about real social conditions—only after Rachel leaves her comfortable suburban home does she begin to experience, if not totally understand, the real material conditions that exist beyond it. Perpetuity examines the potentially destructive results of blind acceptance of such grand narrativizing schemes as Qwerty’s conspiracy theories. And
Formicans, besides offering a compassionate view of the debilitating effects of
Alzheimer’s, considers how contemporary social pressures can produce effects not unlike the symptoms associated with that disease.
*’ Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” Brecht on Theatre, trans. and ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 193.
** Formicans combines alienation effects with “real” aliens. Congdon has said that the aliens are symbolic of human beings’ alienation from each other and from themselves. See page 66.
53 Nonetheless, that the landscape has changed is suggested by some comments by
Mac Wellman, whose plays Castagno includes in his “new dramaturgy” category.
Wellman, who declares that artists of his time “are engaged in a war against [fixed] meaning,” is adamantly opposed to the traditional American well-made play, typified in his estimation by Death o f a Salesman. The American well-made play, Wellman argues, is marked by a “perfect reality of content, a reality whose perfection resides chiefly in the fact that it does not exist. What gets left out is the gritty, grainy truth of the world.””
Yet the approach that Wellman advocates is only partially similar to those associated with Epic Theatre. Wellman champions what he terms “affective fantasy,” in which
the spinning out of fantasy in a stream of images, daydreams or night-, and other kinds of non-consecutive episodes, is a favorite dramatic device.. . . [T]he best playwrights of our time pursue an edgy, intuitive path to explore the full damage done by the onslaught of political lies, right-wing hucksterism, and general consumer-society madness, on the inner person.*”
The expressionistic undertones of Wellman’s reference to the damage done to the “inner person” allows for a further connection with (early) Brecht. Still, a dependence on fantasy images and an edgy, intuitive approach fits most uncomfortably with the fundamentally rational and methodical principles that Brecht would begin to develop in the years just before World War Two. As much as anything else, the quotation above resonates with the effects that the proliferation of the mass media have had. Wellman claims that the use of a fantastic “stream of images” is one device used to explore the
Mac Wellman, “The Theatre of Good Intentions,” Performing Arts Journal 24 (1984): 64.
“ Wellman 66.
54 damage done by “consumer-society madness.” Given the central role of television in contemporary American society, it seems likely that such a device is itself largely a product of a media-saturated consumer culture.*'
Televisual Representation: Psvchological Dimensions
Wellman’s reference to the damage done to the inner person allows for a further expansion of the dislocation that Castagno identifies as a feature of the new dramaturgy.
Beyond verbal and structural dislocation, which are essentially dramaturgical features, the plays discussed in this chapter offer depictions of frequently profound personal disorientation, both physical and psychological. The following chapter will explore more fully some of the psychological dimensions of some contemporary theatre. By way of introducing that issue and of illustrating some further resonances of televisual representation, I would like to examine how concerns about the potential epistemological effects of media saturation are reflected in some recent psychological studies. Some of the findings in this area offer further insights into the plays discussed above and the pressures and anxieties experienced by the characters within them.
In Flow: The Psychology o f Optimal Experience, clinical psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi discusses the manner in which experience is ordered in consciousness, and examines a psychological state that he calls “flow.” To this point, the word “flow” has been used to refer to the sequence of material that constitutes television programming
*' All of the plays surveyed in this chapter gravitate in part around contemporary pop culture. Reckless stages both a game show and a talk show and both Perpetuity and Formicans include overt references to tabloid newspapers.
55 in the aggregate. Csikszentmihalyi uses the term to describe a state of intentionally- ordered consciousness marked by focused concentration and interest. Csikszentmihalyi’s research shows a positive correlation between psychological flow and a sense of happiness, vitality, and purposefulness. He argues that the conditions most likely to produce psychological flow are those that contribute to a sense of control over the potential chaos of one’s environment and a mastery over one’s own consciousness.
The basic argument, as Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges, is circular. To achieve order in consciousness, one must be able to filter and interpret a tremendous amount of experiences into an intelligible pattern. Accomplishing this requires mastery over consciousness. But that mastery is achieved only through the intentional arrangement of experience: “At one point we are saying that the self directs attention, at another, that attention determines the self. In fact, both these statements are true: consciousness is not a strictly linear system, but one in which circular causality obtains. Attention shapes the self, and is in turn shaped by it.”^^
Csikszentmihalyi states that the experiences to which one attends play a powerful role in determining the contents and ordering of consciousness. Any number of activities can help to produce flow—sailing, reading, even assembly line work—provided the person engaged in those activities has a sense of control over them. Of those activities that work against such a sense o f control, television viewing is one that Csikszentmihalyi regularly cites: “TV watching, the single most often pursued leisure activity in the United States
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990) 34.
56 today, leads to the flow condition very rarely.”*^ Further, in considering the potential effects of a loss of control over the contents of consciousness, Csikszentmihalyi sounds a warning similar to those voiced by the media theorists referred to throughout this study:
People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media. They are easily manipulated by demagogues, pacified by entertainers, and exploited by anyone who has something to sell. If we have become dependent on television, on drugs, and on facile calls to political or religious salvation, it is because we have so little to fall back on, so few internal rules to keep our mind from being taken over by those who claim to have the answers. Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.^
Of course, it is unlikely that the mind has ever provided all of its own information.
This would seem especially true in a media-saturated information age. The main issue at hand seems to be the degree to which the mind can attend to and structure the information it receives. Research into human memory indicates that while the human brain is able to process tremendous amounts of information, the amount that can be consciously attended to at any given moment is relatively small. Cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus observes that information must be held in short-term memory long enough to be rehearsed before it can be transferred into long-term memory. Loftus states that the amount of information that can be held in short-term memory is quite small, and that such information is likely to decay within seconds if it is not attended to and rehearsed.®^
“ Csikszentmihalyi 83.
^ Csikszentmihalyi 128.
Elizabeth Loftus, Memory (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1980) 14-19.
57 This awareness of the functioning of human memory reinforces the concerns of media theorists over the effects of the mass media on individual and group consciousness.
The “unified sensorium” of television that McLuhan described** may actually discourage focused attention by bombarding the viewer with continuous streams of information demanding attention. Given the small amount of information that human consciousness can attend to at any given moment, the random and rapid-fire nature of television programming seems capable of fostering a chaotic sense of worldly events.
Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Kubey argue that the limited attentional capacity of the human brain has a profound effect on how people experience their world.
Information, the raw stuff of experience, they observe, is in itself devoid of meaning:
“For information to become meaningful, signs must pass through attention.. . .
Attention, then, can be thought of as a general resource for cognitive processing.”*’ Their research indicates that the concerns of media theorists regarding the bombardment of information by television have a sound psychological basis. When compared to other activities, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi have found that television viewing is more likely
** McLuhan 308.
*’ Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Television and the Quality o f Life: How Viewing Shapes Everyday Experience (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990) 2. For similar definitions of “information,” see Davis, Dupuy, and Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication” (cited below, n. 70).
58 to produce a state of passivity within viewers.®* They have also found that viewers experience greater difficulty concentrating after viewing.®’
In terms of attention and attentional capacity, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi’s findings suggest that the problem is not that viewers are not attending to what they view.
Viewers probably are attending, but the amoimt of disparate information presented and the speed at which it is experienced discourage sustained attention. The research thus appears to support Postman’s conception of the “N ow . . . This” mentality fostered by television and Baudrillard’s comment that “I no longer succeed in knowing what 1 want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard.”™ When overloaded or glutted with information (to borrow terms from Klapp and
Shenk), one’s capacity to structure information into meaningful patterns may be greatly attenuated.
Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi observe that psychological well-being depends largely on what they term “reality maintenance.” People depend on regular reassurance that the world is as they conceive it to be.” Roger Silverstone makes a similar observation, arguing that regular and often redundant confirmation of familiar facts and
®* Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 134.
®’ Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 123 and passim.
™ Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” trans. John Johnston, The Anti- Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townshend, WA: Bay Press, 1983)132.
” Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 182-185.
59 ideas serves as a buffer against the “numbing horror of the threat of chaos.”^ In some regards, television and other media serve such a function, offering confirmation that the world outside is as it appears to be. Nonetheless, it seems worth considering what sort of reality is maintained through the mass media, particularly as such media proliferate to the point of becoming an integral environmental component of everyday life. The regular bombardment of disconnected messages and images may simply foster a chaotic sense of the world, particularly when, as Klapp puts it, information turns to noise.”
All of the plays considered in this chapter, besides employing representational devices associated with television programming, depict or refer to characters experiencing different kinds of psychological disorientation, often to a highly pronounced degree. Such disorientation is sometimes accompanied by, and perhaps caused in part by, a physical dislocation. In virtually all instances, however, psychological upheaval is a result of a sense of chaos in the characters’ surroundings and a collapse of familiar systems of meaning. The effects of this disequilibrium vary widely. Some characters express a sense of self-alienation. Others feel a sense of paralysis and ineffectuality. Still others search obsessively for explanations to the chaos that surrounds them.
A common element through the plays is a sense of psychological disorientation caused in part by a physical dislocation. In Reckless, Rachel’s anxiety about the impredictability o f life emerges only after she flees her comfortable home into an increasingly strange world. After Pooty and Tom are poisoned, Rachel and Lloyd follow
^ Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1994) I.
” Klapp 81-104.
60 a nomadic existence, traveling from one town called Springfield to another. After Lloyd drinks himself to death, though, Rachel surrenders to a sense that she has no control over the events in her life. In Formicans, Cathy returns to her childhood home near Denver, but everything has changed from what she remembers. Confronted by an environment in which nothing looks as it did, Cathy finally tells her mother, “This isn’t my home. I gave up my home to come here. Isn’t that a riot? I don’t know who you are, I don’t know who
Dad is, I don’t know—anything” (33-34). In Perpetuity, Dennis Wu, while not expressing as much anxiety as either Cathy or Rachel, nonetheless reveals that his physical dislocation has led to a sense of personal “alienation”:
I came to this country when I was twelve.. . . My father opened a restaurant in the suburbs. Served white-style Chinese food.. . . I became an American. Ran with the brothers. My father said. Do ng gere doe bin gor jee hii nee do. You live like a stranger in this house.. . . Wherever I go in the Chinese world, everyone knows I’m mei kwok wah que: An American. Tone of voice. Gestures. Way I walk. But in America, Americans ask me, what are you? What are you? You Japanese? You Chinese? What are you? . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel like. Marginal. Sometimes I think in English. Sometimes I think in Chinese. I count in Chinese.. . . Nowhere at home. (56)
Other characters in the plays feel a sense of confusion and anxiety without experiencing any physical dislocation. Sometimes this confusion arises from an incapacity to make sense of contradictory information and a feeling that familiar systems and sources of meaning have collapsed. In Formicans, Cathy’s friend Judy reveals a sense of disorientation and abandonment that at times seems more far-reaching than
Cathy’s. Judy enlists Cathy’s help in vandalizing a Corvette that she thinks belongs to
61 her ex-husband, who has stopped paying child support. As the two are attacking the car with propane torches, Judy says to Cathy:
The way I see it, they fucked up in the Sixties, you know? They, like, took away all the values and didn’t put anything in its place. You know—so, like, everything just... coagulated like bad pudding, spoiled pudding, you know, like when the eggs separated and can’t be put together again completely right. So they make this globular pudding or sometimes it happens to clam chowder. Anyway, it must, like of [sic] formed and we re stuck with it. There’s a piece of God and a clump of law and a lot of lumpy, fucked-up pictures and words that don’t hardly mean anything any more. (36)
Moments later, Judy finally capitulates to a sense of powerlessness:
JUDY:... Shit!!! I’m out of propane!
CATHY: So am I.
JUDY: See??! Nothing fucking works!!! (37)
Whereas some characters abandon belief in any sort of causal structure in the world, others search obsessively for some meaning in the chaos surrounding them.
Csikszentmihalyi’s concern that people experiencing confusion or anxiety may embrace any apparently coherent set of beliefs is reflected in Formicans and Perpetuity. In both plays, characters are drawn to grand, if vaguely-defined, conspiracy theories. In
Formicans, Jerry is a conspiracy buff who believes, among other things, that the moon landings were staged in an empty warehouse, and that Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s assassinations are somehow linked together in some sort of nefarious plan. He is not certain who is pulling the strings, though he suggests, “maybe it’s the government” (27).
Or the explanation may be otherworldly: “We’re controlled by aliens. And they’re idiots” (28). Cathy entertains similar notions, wondering if an alien may have erased
62 much of her father’s memory and if her son’s recalcitrant behavior indicates that she was impregnated by an alien. (21-23, 32)
Jerry also finds a sympathetic ear in Evelyn, Cathy’s mother, who has her own share of anxieties. They meet in a laundromat, where Jerry tries to interest Evelyn in his theories. Evelyn is preoccupied with her husband’s condition and her frustration over the machines, many of which do not work properly. Finally, Jerry manages to break through;
EVELYN: They say they’re working on these things. They say, “We’re working on it!” “Lady!” But are they? 1 mean, where are the results?! And for that matter, where are they? Huh? When was the last time you actually saw someone in charge? I mean, in the flesh?
JERRY: On television.
EVELYN: Exactly! On television.
JERRY: On television.
EVELYN: When was the last time you saw the person who owns this laundromat? 1 mean, who is in charge? Who is running this place? Huh?!
EVELYN: (Thinking about JIM and everything) How can a country that sent a man to the moon—
JERRY: Maybe they didn’t. Maybe he didn’t go.
EVELYN: You mean he didn’t go?
JERRY; Maybe.
EVELYN: But we saw it.
JERRY: Where?
EVELYN: (She gets it) On television!... (64-65)
63 Of course, the clearest examples of figures drawn to such notions are found in
Perpetuity, in which both Lyle and Dennis suggest that everyone has a conspiracy theory.
The clearest illustration o f how such theories thrive on anxiety comes fi-om references to figures who never appear in the play: the readers to whom Qwerty and Montage cater.
Qwerty appears in Christine’s office as she is sorting through a stack of paperbacks, all with the name “Dr. Fu Manchu” in their titles.
MR. AMPERSAND QWERTY: White nightmare.
CHRISTINE: Pop literature. Comic books. Movies. Tabloids.
MR. AMPERSAND QWERTY: Symptomatic. They reflect a genuine message. An authentic impulse we ignore at our own risk. The drugstore rack—
CHRISTINE: The airport newsstand—
MR. AMPERSAND QWERTY: The supermarket checkout counter. Thermometers, on which we can read the temperature of our latest fever dreams. (39)
As suggested above, in both Perpetuity and Formicans, such grand narrative schemes are treated with a pronounced sense of irony. Nonetheless, irony is by nature directed', there must be something to be ironic about. The prevalence and appeal of conspiracy theories will be more fully developed in Chapter Four. Nonetheless, it can be pointed out here that, as Csikszentmihalyi suggests, they tend to function as palliatives for anxiety over perceptions of chaos.
64 Conclusion
In all of the plays surveyed in this chapter, the characters’ anxieties are a consequence of disorienting and chaotic experiences, which are likewise reflected in the televisual structure of the plays themselves. Of course, in some regards, the plays do reflect the manner in which events are commonly experienced. In fact, television itself, precisely because of its fundamentally disjointed nature, appears in some ways to reflect daily experience more accurately than do more traditional narrative representations. As
Wellman suggests, everyday experience, far from being a seamless narrative web, is commonly characterized by frequent and irregular disruptions and disturbances.
Yet there is something of a chicken and egg phenomenon at play here. If televisual representation reflects some of the features of everyday life, this is surely due in part to the fact that television and other mass media are an integral part of the modem (or postmodern) environment. As contemporary landscapes become saturated with media characterized by endless streams of largely discontinuous messages, experience of the world is likely to be more fragmentary and disjointed. And if experience of the world is subjected to such a shift, the representations of that world will presumably exhibit similar tendencies. As Marx observed in a different context, quantitative changes of sufficient magnitude become or produce qualitative changes.^'*
Early in Formicans, an alien offers some speculations on the mysterious objects, a table and chair, that stand in the center of the stage. The alien observes that the
Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Great Books of the Western World 50: Marx (Chicago, London and Toronto: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952).
65 “situpons” often have a hole in the back rest, the significance of which is perhaps symbolic: “A breathing hole for the spirit of the sitter, or even the ever-present eye of god.” Furthermore, the alien notes, many chairs often wobble, a feature attributed to
“climate changes . . . or some other entropie reality.” Likewise, “the table legs also wobble—this leading us to theorize that perhaps both examples of the wobble phenomenon are not random but conscious built-in representations of the unreliable nature of existence for this particular species” (1-3).
While humorous, the aliens’ speculations concerning the wobble phenomenon and the unreliable nature of existence seem appropriate not only to Formicans but to the other plays as well. All are filled with characters who find themselves adrift, searching, often desperately, for answers to the chaotic events that surround them. More often than not, they don’t find any. Tellingly, the actors playing the human characters in Formicans also double as aliens by donning matching sunglasses. The sole exception to this rule is the actor playing Jerry, suggesting perhaps that the scene in which he is abducted by aliens is not simply a dream. Congdon has stated, though, that her instructions to double the human and alien roles was intended to suggest that the human figures themselves are alienated firom one another and often from themselves.^* Judging by reviews, this subtlety is not always apparent in production. Yet the similarities between the aliens and the human characters have been observed. Reviewing Formicans, David Richards offers an observation that, with modifications, could be applied to the other plays as well:
^*Mark Chalon Smith, “When is an Alien Not an Alien?,” Los Angeles Times, 13 October 1992: FI.
66 In one respect the intergalactic scientists are no different from the objects of their scrutiny. Congdon’s earthlings can’t make much sense of their own behavior, either. They’re doing their best to cope with divorce, rebellious offspring, Alzheimer’s disease and suburban sprawl. But they’ve lost their direction. Whether at home or on the freeway, the question constantly on their lips is “Which way?”^®
Much of the disorientation experienced by the characters in the plays discussed here seems to have as much to do with the amount of discontinuous information with which they must grapple as with the content of the information itself. Reviewer Dan
Sullivan makes such an observation in regard to the audience’s experience of Formicans when he writes: “By constructing the play in bits and pieces, Congdon gives us a slight case of information anxiety, surely one of the symptoms of the age. By going with the flow, she has created a play that stays on track. We have beheld her aliens and, lo, they are us.’’^
This chapter has been chiefly concerned with the influence of televisual representation on the dramatic structure of some recent plays, as well as on the epistemological and psychological resonances of that influence. The following chapter continues this examination, focusing on some recent performances that deviate even further from traditional dramatic and theatrical models. Besides examining the televisual features of these works, the chapter expands the consideration of how these features combine with depictions of figures experiencing profound psychological upheaval.
David Richards, “Spaced-Out Social Studies” C4.
^ Dan Sullivan, ‘“Lost Formicans’” F6.
67 CHAPTERS
THE INTERSECTION OF TELEVISUAL REPRESENTATION AND
SCHIZOPHRENIFORM EXPERIENCE IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE
Introduction
The preceding chapter ended with an observation from Dan Sullivan’s review of
Tales o f the Lost Formicans that “information anxiety” is one of the symptoms of the present age. Sullivan is not alone in making this assertion. Similar concerns have been expressed by a number of other writers who have argued that the proliferation of the mass media has significant epistemological, sociological, and psychological effects. This chapter considers a number of recent performance works that, like the plays surveyed in the previous chapter, demonstrate associations with televisual modes of representation. It also extends the examination of psychological disorientation, focusing on how some recent performance works, as well as the works considered in the previous chapter, contain figures who experience forms of disorientation similar to schizophrenic symptoms.
In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic o f Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson uses the term schizophrenic to describe the features of postmodernist cultural products and practices. Jameson, borrowing chiefly from Lacan, is careful to apply the term in a
68 figurative rather than a literal sense: “I have found Lacan’s account of schizophrenia useful here not because I have any way of knowing whether it has clinical accuracy but chiefly because—as description rather than diagnosis—it seems to me to offer a suggestive aesthetic model.” Jameson argues that much recent art and literature reflects Lacan’s description of schizophrenia as involving “a breakdown in the signifying chain,” in which
“the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.”'
This abbreviated definition of schizophrenic experience provides a convenient opening for a discussion of the relationship between schizophrenia and some recent theatre. While a more thorough description of schizophrenic symptoms will be provided below, it can here be noted that the works considered in this chapter often tend toward a pronounced loosening o f causal connections between events, to the point that it sometimes becomes difficult even to speak of “connected events” in any traditional sense.
Further, the disorientation exhibited by some of the characters in the plays already considered pales in comparison to that displayed in the works addressed in this chapter.
Yet all of the works addressed to this point contain figures whose experiences are analogous to states of mind associated with schizophrenia.
Like Jameson, I do not intend to use the term schizophrenia in a fundamentally literal, clinical sense. On the other hand, my use of the term will at times be less figurative than Jameson’s. Jameson isolates particular postmodernist cultural products
' Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991)26.
69 and practices and examines how their fragmentary and aleatory qualities are suggestive of the breakdown of signifying chains that is associated with schizophrenia. While I follow
Jameson’s example to some degree, I also consider how the individual characters represented within these works illustrate a schizophrenic experience that is more literal than Jameson’s basically formalist approach allows. Much of the reason for this departure lies in the particular object of study at hand. Jameson is principally occupied with the formal characteristics of such art forms as architecture, poetry, novels, painting, and sculpture. His objects of study might therefore be best said to approximate modes of perception associated with schizophrenia. This study, focusing as it does on theatre and drama, is more centrally concerned with mimetic representations of human activity, behavior, and personality. Such sustained depictions of particular characters offers greater potential for a representation of schizophrenic or schizophreniform experience.
Schizophrenia: Definitions and Symptomatology, and Correlations with Televisual Representation
As noted, Jameson’s definition of schizophrenic experience is highly abbreviated.
A more thorough examination of how schizophrenia and schizophrenic symptoms have been defined, described, and interpreted will help set a theoretical framework for this chapter. One of the first observations that should be made in this regard is that the term schizophrenia is a sometimes problematic one, largely because the condition it describes is not always clearly understood. In popular usage, the term has commonly been misapplied to refer to split personality disorders. E. Fuller Torrey points out that
70 “Schizophrenia is not... a ‘split personality’ in the sense o f‘Sybil’ or ‘The Three Faces
of Eve,’ even though the vast majority of Americans believe this to be so. These ‘split
personalities,’ a very rare psychiatric occurrence, are properly called dissociative
reactions, and they usually occur in people who do not have schizophrenia.”^
Furthermore, even within the psychiatric and clinical psychological communities,
there is disagreement over the term and the condition(s) to which it is applied.^ This
disagreement stems mainly from the extensive range of symptoms that have been
associated with the condition. The broad application of both the term and the concept has
prompted some professionals to question its usefulness as a diagnostic classification."*
Still, with very few exceptions, even those professionals who question the usefulness of the term do not deny the existence of the symptoms that have been gathered under it.
* E. Fuller Torrey, Schizophrenia and Civilization (New York and London: Jason Aronson, 1980) 4-5. Ian Hacking suggests that the confusion may be etymologically based. The literal translation of schizophrenia (“split mind”) may have led to an equation with “split personality.” Hacking notes that “schizophrenia and alternating personality both involve splitting, but splitting of very different sorts. The schizophrenic simultaneously has irreconcilable attitudes, emotions, and behaviors, as well as terrible distortions of logic and sense of reality. The multiple [i.e., one with split or multiple personality disorder] has no logical or reality problems but fractures into successive [personality] fragments.” Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995) 130.
^ The body of literature on schizophrenia is enormous, and I have not attempted an exhaustive reading. I have focused mainly on works about the symptomatology and to some degree etiology of schizophrenia. As the chief concern of this chapter is schizophrenic experience, works on treatment have been largely excluded, as have works marked by highly technical language (on diagnosis, pharmacology, neurophysiology and so on). I have relied mostly on works by early influential writers and later psychologists and psychiatrists whose credentials seem sound.
* Richard Bentall has asserted that “The concept of schizophrenia, though useful in its time, is now so old and tired that it is surely wrong to expect it to bear upon its back the burden of modem scientific research findings.” Richard P. Bentall, “The Classification of Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia: An Overview and Practical Handbook (London: Chapman and Hall, 1992) 37.
71 More than anything else, it is the breadth of the classification that has produced dissatisfaction and a desire to move away from monolithic categorization. Richard P.
Bentall, for instance, who argues that there is probably no “unique schizophrenia syndrome,” nonetheless sees a need for “new ways of thinking about schizophrenic phenomena.”^
Despite disagreements over the validity ofschizophrenia as a clinical classification, there are sufficient commonalities of opinion to render the term useful as an interpretive tool for the purposes of this study. There is, then, general agreement that schizophrenia consists of a complex of symptoms including some or all of the following: first, a loosening of cognitive associations; second, flat or inappropriate affect; and third, hallucinations (most commonly auditory, but occasionally visual as well). Hallucinations may in some instances take on a delusional quality.
I will return to questions of symptomatology, focusing on those general symptoms cited above as well as some variations observed in different patients. First, however, 1 would like to observe that within the psychiatric and psychological professions, the causes (etiology) of schizophrenia are also a source of contention. Some, psychiatrists especially, have insisted on a fundamentally biological basis for the disease. Others, commonly clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts, have argued that environmental and social conditions may be at least partially responsible for the disease. Even among those who argue for a biological basis, however, there is some acceptance that social factors
* Bentall 26, 39. This insistence on a sensitivity to the complexities of the condition has been sounded even by those who support continued use of the term. For many, the blanket term schizophrenia has given way to a more heterogeneous classification, the schizophrenias.
72 may have a role in the development of the disease. At issue is the degree to which social
and environmental factors contribute to the development of the disease within particular
individuals, as opposed to the emergence of the disease itself within larger populations.
This controversy is associated with research suggesting that schizophrenia may be
of relatively recent origin, appearing perhaps only within the last two centuries.® Torrey
suggests that schizophrenia seems to have emerged around the turn of the nineteenth
centiuy; “Whereas up to that point there appear to have been at best a few scattered cases
in the literature, classical schizophrenia was suddenly being described by different people
in different places all at about the same time.” Torrey refers specifically to two separate
1809 accounts of what soimds like “true schizophrenia: a good premorbid personality,
insidious onset in adolescence, classical signs and symptoms, and a chronic deteriorating course.”’ By the turn of the twentieth century, the disease had become common enough
for Emil Kraepelin to give it a name, dementia praecox. The term schizophrenia, which
® Schizophreniform symptoms can be traced back many centuries. Torrey (22-25) and others cite references to insanity in ancient medical texts and other sources, including some dramatic literature. Ajax and Ophelia, for instance, experience a breakdown of associations like that associated with schizophrenia. Yet references to madness from before the turn of the nineteenth century may not be indicative of true schizophrenia, a chronic and progressive condition. Torrey terms Ophelia’s madness acute reactive psychosis, a condition of limited duration caused by a traumatic event (like the death of a parent). Put simply, the main point that Torrey draws from his examples is that up until the nineteenth century, people with schizophreniform symptoms tended to get better (though Ophelia dies before having a chance to recover). Another indication of the transitoriness of acute reactive psychosis may be suggested by the last word of the subtitle of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Hieronimo is Mad Again. Hacking (140) gives a short, if pithy, definition of schizophreniform: “acting like a schizophrenic, but not for too long a time.”
’ Torrey 27, 30.
73 would come to be the preferred term for the disease, was introduced in the first decade of the twentieth century by Eugen Bleuler.*
Controversy lingers over the relationship of social factors to the disease.’ Torrey suggests that changing environmental conditions or medical practices may have created conditions favoring viral contamination. By contrast, Louis Sass, while not entirely discrediting the possibility of a biological basis, wonders if environmental pressures may play a direct rather than precipitatory role in the etiology of schizophrenia. Sass offers the possibility that “the ways of thinking, believing, and feeling characteristic of modem
Western society are prerequisite for the development of the reflexivity and detachment characteristic of both the schizoid and the schizophrenic condition.”'” Sass, using language reminiscent of Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, both of whom he cites at points.
* Bleuler found dementia praecox imprecise, as the diagnostic criteria had come to include “patients whom we would neither call ‘demented’ nor exclusively victims of deterioration early in life.” He also faulted the term because it offered no handy noun form that could be applied to individual patients. Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The Group of Schizophrenias, trans. Joseph Zinkin (New York: International Universities Press, 1950) 7. The term dementia praecox would linger for some time; Tennessee Williams used it in 1958 in Suddenly, Last Summer.
’ There is some indication that the disease may be tied to industrialization. Some researchers have argued that the most highly industrialized nations have shown a correlatively higher incidence of the disease. In an odd case of nationalist rhetoric, the existence of schizophrenia has sometimes been used as a measure of a nation’s degree of development. In some cases, statesmen from developing countries have pointed to the presence of schizophrenia as proof that their countries are indeed “civilized.” See for instance, Torrey 13ff. For a counterargument, see Gottesman, who states that schizophrenia is a universal condition and that variations in incidence and prevalence around the world are minuscule. Irving I. Gottesman, Schizophrenia Genesis: the Origins of Madness (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1991) 79ff.
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modem Art, Literature, and Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1992) 27.
74 notes that “theorists who see Western societies as having moved into a stage of
/705ftnodemity” focus on such developments as
the waning of affect, the dissolution of the sense of separate selfhood, the loss of any sense of the real, and the saturation by images and simulacra detached from all grounding outside themselves; these, obviously, are more than a little reminiscent of certain schizoid and schizophrenic tendencies, and it is not difficult to imagine that such general cultural developments might also influence the modes of experience characteristic of such individuals."
In any event, while there is some evidence of a correlative association between schizophrenia and modernism (or postmodernism), the precise nature of this association, particularly in regard to the etiology of schizophrenia, remains speculative and controversial.
Despite this important caveat, I would like to note some particular affinities between descriptions of schizophrenic symptomatology and of televisual representation.
In particular, assessments of the chaotic and disjointed nature of television flow are analogous to schizophrenic disruptions of thought processes as described by Bleuler:
the process of association often works with mere fragments of ideas and concepts. This results in associations which normal individuals will regard as incorrect, bizarre, and utterly unpredictable. Often thinking stops in the middle of a thought; or in the attempt to pass to another idea, it may suddenly cease altogether, or at least as far as it is a conscious process (blocking). Instead of continuing the thought, new ideas crop up
" Sass 30.
In examining similarities between descriptions of televisual representation and of schizophrenia, I am not suggesting a causal link between the two. Obviously the disease predates the technology. Even if it did not, this study is finally directed toward a particular understanding of some contemporary theatre practices, not toward an elucidation of the causes of schizophrenia.
75 which neither the patient nor the observer can bring into any connection with the previous stream of thought.'^
Similarly, Louis Sass observes that such a loosening of associations can lead to a fragmentation of experience, in which “Objects normally perceived as parts of larger complexes may seem strangely isolated, disconnected from each other and devoid of encompassing context... Both Bleuler's and Sass’s descriptions find close analogues in descriptions of television representation as offered by Postman and Marc, among others.
In a similar vein, Erwin Stransky describes the “disturbance of attention” that is common to schizophrenia. Stransky states that such attentional disturbance is not “a straightforward decline in apperception, but a continual, irregular lability of attention.. . .
This would account for the capriciousness often found in such patients and their distractibility.”'* This passage recalls observations, noted in the preceding chapter, regarding the attentional capacity of the human brain and concerns that the rapid-fire, chaotic nature of television flow may outstrip that capacity. While the human brain can perceive and process enormous amounts of information, the amount that can be consciously attended to at any given moment is quite small. Whereas schizophrenic conditions may be characterized by an “irregular lability of attention,” it would appear
Bleuler 9.
Sass 49-50.
Erwin Stransky, “Towards an Understanding of Certain Symptoms of Dementia Praecox,” The Clinical Roots of the Schizophrenia Concept: Translations of Seminal European Contributions on Schizophrenia, ed. John Cutting and M. Shepherd (Cambridge; Cambridge UP, 1987) 40.
76 that a similar lability may actually be encouraged, or at least reflected, by representational practices marked by constant bombardment of disjointed messages and images.
As a final comment on the schizophrenic breakdown of associations, Bleuler describes a related symptom that is analogous not only to the randomness of television flow but also to the volume of information dispersed by the medium. Bleuler writes that many schizophrenic patients “speak of ‘thought overflow’ (because they cannot hold anything in their minds), of ‘pressure of thoughts,’ of ‘collecting of thoughts,’ because too much seems to come to mind at one time.”'® Such description sounds akin to the information “overload” or “glut” that Klapp and Shenk attribute to contemporary, media- saturated Western cultures.
In regard to the schizophrenic tendency towards flat or inappropriate affect, Irving
Gottesman’s description is typical: “a patient with a flat affect fails to show emotional change under varying circumstances, and one with an inappropriate affect laughs, for instance, when speaking of the death of a loved one, or cries for no apparent reason.””
Particularly in regard to flat affect, this is reminiscent of the “waning of affect” and the
“pastiche” or “blank parody” that Jameson says characterizes postmodern cultural productions and practices.'* Beyond a simple equivalence of terms, it can be suggested that both “flamess of affect” and “waning of affect” have clear associations with television representation and with the literal flamess of the medium itself. Jameson
'® Bleuler 32.
Gottesman 8.
'* Jameson, Postmodernism I Off.
77 identifies superficiality as a chief feature of postmodem art and architecture, in which
“depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces.”” Such superficiality is literally reflected in the two-dimensionality of the television screen.^® In a more figurative application, the rapid dispersal of images across the screen reinforces such superficiality by restricting the duration of any particular image or set of images. The following statement by Jameson recalls Postman’s notion of a “Now . . . This” mentality and thus suggests some of the associations between schizophrenic affective states and televisual representation: “The ideal schizophrenic, indeed, is easy enough to please provided only an eternal present is thrust before the eyes, which gaze with equal fascination on an old shoe or the tenaciously growing organic mystery of the human toenail.”^'
The last major symptom associated with schizophrenia demands perhaps the most figurative interpretation in regard to television culture. Yet the metaphor is not too difficult to draw. J. K.. Wing, citing Kurt Schneider, writes that schizophrenic hallucinations may consist of “thoughts experienced as spoken aloud or echoed or removed or broadcast or alien; voices heard commenting on the patient’s thoughts or coming fi-om some part of the body or making references in the third person... The
” Jameson, Postmodernism 12.
“ And, in some instances, in individual performances. Two relatively successful television personalities, stand-up comedian Steven Wright and game-show host Ben Stein of Win Ben Stein’s Money, often deliver performances so affectless that evendeadpan seems somehow insufficient as description.
Jameson 10.
“ J. K. Wing, “Differential Diagnosis of Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia: An Overview and Practical Handbook ÇLx)néoti: Chapman and Hall, 1992) 9.
78 analogy should not be taken too literally here, yet this description sounds similar to assessments of the effects of regular bombardment of media information. In “The
Ecstasy of Communication,” Baudrillard writes, “Speech is free perhaps, but 1 am less
free than before: 1 no longer succeed in knowing what 1 want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard.” The schizophrenic associations become explicit in a subsequent passage where Baudrillard writes,
with communication and information, with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia. . . a state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.^
Interpretations of Schizophrenic Experience
Before moving to an examination of particular performances, it is worth noting
that the heterogeneity of schizophrenic symptoms has led to widely varying
interpretations of the disease. Despite general agreement on the range of symptoms that
characterize schizophrenia, there is disagreement over what this collection of symptoms
indicates. Some have argued that schizophrenia is a regression to a preverbal or
preconscious condition, suggested for instance by the title of Peter Giovacchini’s book.
^ Jean Baudrillard, “Ecstasy” 132. A similar connection between schizophrenic experience and media saturation (and, to anticipate the next chapter, apocalyptic dread) is made in fictional form towards the end of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. Against the background of an “airborne toxic event” that threatens an entire town, the character Louis Mink falls into a state of schizophrenic terror while mindlessly repeating platitudes from the television set that drones away in his motel room. Throughout the book, other sets in other rooms have spouted other platitudes. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
79 Schizophrenia and Primitive Mental States}* Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari depict the schizophrenic as residing outside the realm of a repressive and overrationalized society.^ Such attitudes appear in the occasional association of schizophrenia with dream states, as for instance in Bleuler: “In dreams, a similar dissociation of thinking occurs: symbolisms, condensations, predominance of emotions which often remain hidden hallucinations—all these can be found in both [schizophrenic and dream] states and in the same way.”^® In this conception, schizophrenia is a fundamentally irrational or non- rational state, an emptying out of consciousness.”
By contrast, Sass argues that such an interpretation evokes “images of a primal and Dionysian chaos” that may not square with the facts. Sass argues that some “central features of schizophrenia do not... seem very consistent with the concept of deficient,
Dionysian, or primitive states of mind.” Sass suggests, first, that flatness of emotion seems at odds with Dionysian conceptions and, moreover, that schizophrenic persons
~* Peter L. Giovacchini, Schizophrenia and Primitive Mental States: Structta-al Collapse and Creativity (Ncrthvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997).
^ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1972).
Bleuler 439.
” Deleuze and Guattari, in a sustained assault on both capitalism and psychoanalysis, celebrate schizophrenic existence: “The schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world. Lenz’s stroll, for example, as reconstructed by Büchner. This walk outdoors is different from the moments when Lenz finds himself closeted with his pastor, who forces him to situate himself socially, in relationship to the God of established religion, in relationship to his father, to his mother. While taking a stroll outdoors, on the other hand, he is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father or a mother, with nature” (2). For a counterargument, see Sass 4 (cited below, n.35).
80 “often display a more deliberative and ideational rather than intuitive or emotional style of acting and problem solving.”^*
Sass also argues that the heterogeneity of the disease runs counter to primitivistic interpretations. He notes that schizophrenics are sometimes “given to unusually abstract modes of cognition,” and that “[t]hey can experience a rushing flow of ideas or a total blocking.” He further observes that schizophrenic patients at times “feel they can influence the whole universe, at other times as if they can’t control even their own thoughts or their own limbs—or, in what is one of the supreme paradoxes of this condition, they may have both these experiences at the same moment.”^’ Such variability,
Sass argues, sits very poorly with cut-and-dried primitivist notions. He instead argues that schizophrenia is perhaps not an absence of consciousness but the product of excessive and frequently hyperreflexive consciousness, brought on by the pressures of modem experience.
Considering the heterogeneity and apparent contradictoriness of schizophrenic symptoms, it may be that these two positions, despite their fundamental opposition, may not be mutually exclusive. In any event, given the frustration expressed by professionals within the psychological and psychiatric fields, it seems unlikely that schizophrenia, taken in the aggregate, will ever be “explained” in any sort of simple fashion. This would seem the case even in the event that a distinct cause of the disease(s) is discovered. Even
Sass 8, 23.
Sass 26, 27.
81 if Torrey’s and others’ assertion of a biological basis is proved correct, this will likely do little to elucidate the condition itself.^®
Before leaving the subject of the interpretation of schizophrenia, it should be noted that some have challenged the notion that schizophrenia or other forms of insanity even exist. Cutting and Shepherd observe that during the 1950s and 1960s, the
“psychological and social formulations” proposed in regard to schizophrenia “were so influential that some authorities even suggested that schizophrenia was an artefact, a construct designed to label misfits as mad, and that the early clinicians had been duped into thinking that their patients were ill.^‘
Without question, definitions of what constitutes insanity are tied up in social and cultural configurations. Some writers have noted that conceptions of, and attitudes towards, aberrant behavior and mental states vary, often widely, from culture to culture.
Torrey writes, “Different cultures and subcultures define the limits of deviancy differently, and a patient that one group may tolerate and humor the next may insist on
Sass (10), quoting Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), notes that “the ‘vulgar mental habit’ of confusing questions about causes and about the nature of phenomena is widespread in the contemporary world: modem mechanistic science has ‘overpopulated our minds with the most successful answers to questions of How, and left little breathing space for questions of What even to be asked without a sense of embarrassment.’ In the medical and psychological professions, this has resulted in a situation where profound issues concerning the nature of these bizarre schizophrenic phenomena... are often ignored, and nearly all attention focuses on issues of their etiology and pathogenesis.”
John Cutting and M. Shepherd, introduction. The Clinical Roots of the Schizophrenia Concept: Translations o f Seminal European Contributions on Schizophrenia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 1. Perhaps the clearest example of this tendency is found in Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Harper and Row, 1961). See also Szasz, Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1970).
82 hospitalizing.”^^ Michel Foucault has argued persuasively that definitions of insanity and the development of institutions to house the insane have often been motivated by political and economic considerations as dominant cultures have attempted to marginalize those who do not conform to acceptable social norms.^^ Ian Hacking further observes that modem scientific descriptions and explanations of psychological disorders constitute an effort—not always disinterested—to reduce particular human experiences, and humans themselves, to “objects of knowledge.”^
Still, as naive as it is to deny the social influences on the classification and treatment of those deemed “mad,” it seems no less naive—and potentially more irresponsible—to argue that ailments like schizophrenia are merely socially determined or politically expedient classifications designed to marginalize “misfits.”^^ Such arguments threaten to turn attention away from the effects of the disease which, to judge by the
32 Torrey 8.
” Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). Despite his detailed examination of the ideological dimensions of the repression of those deemed mad, Foucault nonetheless seemed unwilling to completely abandon belief in the reality of insanity.
^ Hacking passim. For an example of this tendency, one need look no farther than Bleuler who, as noted, objected to the term dementia praecox in part because it could not be readily modified into a noun form applicable to those diagnosed with the disease.
Sass (4) observes that “Various writers in the romantic, Nietzschean, surrealist, and poststructuralist traditions have pointed out the dangers in [the] enshrining of reason, such as how it can splinter the unity and authenticity of the human being, stifling imagination and physical vitality while bringing on the paralysis of overdeliberation and self-consciousness.” Yet he goes on to point out that “Most of these writers have had little or no experience with the realities of chronic insanity, however; and one suspects their glorification of madness may be fueled by motivations other than the purest desire for truth.”
83 accounts of schizophrenics themselves as well as those close to them, are very real, debilitating, and frequently terrifying.^®
Televisualitv and Schizophreniform Experience in Contemporary Performance
Having surveyed some of the literature on schizophrenic conditions, and touched on its affinities with televisual representation, I turn now to an examination of some recent performance works. I deal generally with much of Robert Wilson’s work and the critical evaluation it has received. I then address more specifically two other recent works: 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, a collaborative project by Philip Glass, David Henry
Hwang, and Jerome Sirlin, and The Medium, conceived and created by Anne Bogart and members of the Saratoga International Theatre Institute. All of the works addressed share representational devices akin to those associated with television. They likewise reflect, sometimes very closely, experiential states associated with schizophrenia. Differences exist between the various works. On the one hand, Wilson’s works have often been interpreted as suggestive of (or even conducive to) dream states, recalling the figuration of schizophrenia as a regression to primitive mental conditions. On the other hand, both
1000 Airplanes and Medium offer depictions of figures overwhelmed by a bombardment of stimuli, suggesting the interpretation of schizophrenic states as a surrender to the pressures of modem experience.
^ For an impassioned description of this “absolutely dreadful condition,” see Hacking (138), who notes that some describe schizophrenia as “the worst illness that is now rampant in the Western industrial world.”
84 As noted earlier, the term schizophrenia is often used in this chapter in a more literal fashion than is found in Jameson. Nonetheless, it should be stressed that my use of term is mainly descriptive and analogical, not precisely diagnostic or clinical. The objects of study in this chapter are characters, not people. Diagnosing a fictional construct, even one based on a real person, as having this or that psychological disorder is a questionable endeavor. Nonetheless, the characters in these works experience psychic disturbances and reveal behavioral patterns similar to those associated with schizophrenia proper.
Robert Wilson and Primitivistic Models of Schizophrenia
Robert Wilson’s performance pieces, particularly his later works, demonstrate clear televisual features. While some of Wilson’s early pieces, like Journey to Ka
Mountain, seem more related to the broad environmental theatre works of Peter Brook, his work fi-om the late 1970's and the 1980's exhibits distinct televisual resonances.
Works like the collaborative Einstein on the Beach, probably Wilson’s most famous project, are particularly well-suited for a proscenium stage, and seem decidedly televisual in their spatial and visual arrangement. Tending more towards two-dimensional than three-dimensional spatial arrangements, Wilson’s staging practices are more painterly than sculptural. They also reproduce the two-dimensional configuration of television.
Yvonne Dietrich, referring to “Wilson’s work with spacial [sic] depth,” notes that “in
85 terms of depth perception, only a narrow range is in focus at any moment; if a close-up view is sharp, then the background is less focused.”^’
Nicholas Zurbrugg has explicitly identified a multi-media sensibility in Robert
Wilson’s work, declaring that Wilson has projected postmodern performance into the realm of “multi-linear, multi-media narrative.” Zurbrugg states, “Wilson’s work seems the quintessential child of an age of remotely-controlled, multi-channel cable-television, broadcasting ever-changing images tailored with digital precision,” and suggests that
Wilson, “like other more adventurous Post-Modems, appears admirably sensitive to the positive potential of contemporary media.”^*
Other critics have offered similar observations. In a more ambivalent assessment of Wilson’s work, Johannes Birringer objects to the following statement about Wilson’s alleged departure firom “customary dramatic forms”: “like a dream or hallucination, the action of a Wilson ‘play’ takes shape, dissolves, overlaps, firagments, and reforms. Two or three ‘stories’ may be told simultaneously.. . . ” Birringer responds, “Such dreamwork has been with us for quite awhile, on stage and on the screen, and if the habits of seeing were really an issue, one could as well turn to TV advertisements and video simulations as the revolutionizers of our spatial and temporal perception.”^’
Yvonne Dietrich, Archetypal Dreams: The Quantum Theatre of Robert Wilson, diss., U of Michigan, 1992 (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1992) 183.
38 Zurbrugg 448.
Johannes Birringer, “Postmodern Performance and Technology,” Performing Arts Journal 26-27 (1985): 226. Birringer is citing the promotional material for the American Repertory Theatre’s reproduction of the German section of the CIVIL warS.
86 Dietrich likewise describes Wilson’s pieces in terms suggestive of the dissociative nature of television flow. Dietrich describes the “text for a Wilson scenario” as “not really a dramatic text at all, but an aural collage composed of sentence fragments, rhymes, word play, bits of dialogue, excerpts from letters, personal observations, bits of advertisements, radio and TV jingles and other assorted remnants.”^ Alluding to the visual component of a Wilson performance, Dietrich states that “It is the nature of dramatic structure that as one phase, unit, or scene disappears, the next comes to occupy the audience’s consciousness, and in Wilson’s theater no narrative thread exists to order the sequence of tableaux.’**'
This is not to suggest that Wilson’s works are completely televisual in nature. For one thing, the tempo at which the performances move is often positively glacial by comparison to television flow."*^ Nonetheless, Wilson’s largely lateral staging is reminiscent of the televised image, as suggested by Dietrich’s comments in regard to
“Wilson’s work with spacial depth” above. Furthermore, in terms of relationship between events, Wilson’s pieces recapitulate the disjunctive nature of televisual flow
‘*® Dietrich 60. This assertion presumably rests on the assumption that a “dramatic text” is one that adheres to traditional causally-oriented narrative conventions.
41 Dietrich 183.
‘*^ Even so, Birringer (226) states that “one might argue that our access to the slowed down action, the repetitions, and the structural asymmetry of image, music, sound in Wilson’s work is largely determined by the repetitive reformulations (within the endless flow of text) of unfulfilled desire that we often experience in watching the fragmented and interrupted fiction or sports event on television.”
87 quite closely. Individual scenes do not necessarily link up in any apparently necessary
fashion, and text, image, and sound rarely exhibit any logical connection.
Wilson himself, in reflecting on the process that led him to / was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating, gives an indication of the influence
of television on his process:
I wrote a few pages of dialog at a time in a large notebook with blank pages that I often write and draw in when working on a piece. The language I wrote was more a reflection of the way we think than of the way we normally speak. My head became like a TV, switching from thought to thought (and in writing from phrase to phrase) like flipping a dial from channel to channel. I write when I am alone and work best when there are no interruptions. I sometimes keep a television on at low volume and incorporate phrases I hear into my text, which I write quickly, usually leaving it untouched and in its original order once the words are on the page.'*^
The fragmentary and disassociative quality of Wilson’s work, besides suggesting
the features of television flow, recalls Jameson’s description o f the pure material
signifiers and unconnected moments in time that characterize postmodernist art and
literature. Birringer notes as much when he observes that Wilson’s “multi-media opera
the CIVIL warS . . . wants to be a pure vision, a pure formal construction of its own space
and time with no particular reference to history and the modes and relations of production
that enable it.”^ This description of a “pure vision” without “particular reference to
history” (one could probably say simply “without particular reference”) sounds
Robert Wilson, “ ... I thought I was hallucinating,” The Drama Review 2\. 4 (1977): 76.
** Birringer 224.
88 remarkably like Bleuler’s and others’ description of the breakdown of associations common to schizophrenic experience.
As noted, schizophrenic states have been compared to “primitive mental states,” as in Giovacchini, or to dream states, as in Bleuler. Several critics who have analyzed
Wilson’s works have occasionally focused on their appeal to the preconscious or unconscious mind of the spectator. Gordon Armstrong refers to Wilson’s “oneiric landscapes,” and describes Wilson as “the great dreamer of our theatre, and an architect of dreamscapes on the fringes of consciousness.”^* Referring to neurophysiological research, Armstrong claims that Wilson’s work appeals to the right hemisphere of the brain which, as opposed to the verbal and sequential left hemisphere, is non-verbal and simultaneous in its functionality. “Wilson’s best work,” Armstrong asserts, “is right- hemisphere drama, a theater of images and of spatial relationships that are intuitive and inferential, as opposed to a drama of logical, rational, and linear narrative.”^ Anthony
Kubiak, intrigued by the idea of Wilson’s frequent collaborations with the Brecht- influenced Müller, likewise observes that “In Wilson’s theatre . . . the over-stimulated spectator is lulled from ‘normal’ and presumably restricted consciousness ‘back’ into a liberating state of pre- and even unconsciousness.”^’
Gordon Armstrong, “Images in the Interstice: The Phenomenal Theater of Robert Wilson,’ Modem Drama 31.4 (1988): 571, 572.
46 Armstrong 585.
Anthony Kubiak, “Reforming Content: Meaning in Postmodern Performance,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 24.2 (1991): 29. Critics who have discussed the dreamlike quality and the pre- or unconscious appeal of Wilson’s work have been divided over the “value” of the work. Some, like Armstrong and Dietrich, have, as Kubiak suggests, found liberating potential in
89 Certainly, as Birringer points out, such dreamwork has been around for a long time. Armstrong’s observation that the 1971 Deqfinan Glance prompted Louis Aragon to write a posthumous letter to André Breton declaring Wilson the heir of the surrealist project is clear evidence of this truism."** Still, given the attention to the multi-media qualities of Wilson’s work, to declare him a latter-day surrealist seems only partially accurate—just as it seems only partially accurate to describe the playwrights discussed in the previous chapter as neo-Brechtians. While the surrealist analogy is easily drawn, the proliferation of the mass media in the years since surrealism’s heyday demands that
Wilson’s work be regarded within more complex cultural and social constellations.*’
One final observation might be made in regard to the texts used in many of
Wilson’s performances. Christopher Knowles, an autistic man with whom Wilson has frequently collaborated, has produced many of these texts. While autism and schizophrenia have come to be regarded as distinct conditions, similarities between the
Wilson’s performances. Armstrong, referring to the “freedom In the interstices of the mind” (576), claims that Wilson’s work encourages a form of awareness often discredited or repressed by Western emphases on logical, rational, and linear modes of thinking. Others, like Kubiak and Birringer, have been more skeptical, troubled by the apolitical, ahistorical nature of the work.
48 Armstrong 571.
'*’ Of course. Postman argues that the present media-saturated constellation is surrealistic. Certainly the juxtaposition of disparate images in many commercials and music videos has surrealistic resonances. The linking of dream states with surrealism and with Wilson’s work carries over into descriptions of schizophrenia, but also into discussions of the influence of the mass media. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi (101-102) note that television viewing and daydreaming produce similar brain wave activity. They also argue that the experience of television viewing is sometimes akin to night dreaming and hypnosis.
90 two have often been observed (most commonly in early monographs on schizophrenia).^®
In a subsequent section, I shall examine how the works addressed in this chapter illustrate an interiorization of experience akin to that associated with both schizophrenia and autism (as well as with television viewing). For the moment, I wish to consider
Knowles’s process in generating texts and the ftmction of language within them.
In generating texts, Knowles commonly uses words more for their immediate material qualities than for their referential capacity. Dietrich has noted that Wilson was attracted to Knowles’s tendency to “create visual structures, using words as the building material.”^' Wilson himself has stated,
I was particularly interested in Christopher’s use of the language. Words were like molecules.. . . This was the word Kathmandu. Later it would be Cat; then Cat-man-ru. Later, it would be fat-man-ru, and then it would be fat man, and then it would be fat, and then it would be man or something. He would just be breaking off parts. And every time he used it, he was not afraid to destroy the word... p-
This material treatment of words is common to schizophrenic language. Sass notes that schizophrenic language shows a tendency to
shed its function as a communicative tool and to emerge instead as an independent focus of attention or autonomous source of control over speech and understanding. In what is known as glossomania, for instance, the flow of speech will be channeled largely by acoustic qualities, or by
See Bleuler 62-66. It should be clearly noted that Knowles is not schizophrenic. Bill Simmer records that “Knowles was bora with serious brain damage after his mother contracted toxoplasmosis (a microscopic parasite) during pregnancy.” Schizophrenia is now regarded as distinct from organic brain disorders and autism. Bill Simmer, “Robert Wilson and Therapy,” The Drama Review 20.1 (1976) 106.
Dietrich 60.
Simmer 109.
91 irrelevant semantic connotations of one’s words. When asked to identify the hue of a color chip, one patient responded, ‘Looks like clay. Sounds like gray. Take you on a roll in the hay. Hay day. May day. Help.’^^
This emphasis on the sheer materiality of the word, common to Wilson’s works, echoes through critiques of mass media representation. Douglas Davis, decrying the tendency towards shorter and shorter “sound-bites” in television political campaigning
(down to ten-second “sound-bits”), asserts that such brief segments “do not provide information.”^ Others argue that the mass media effect a dissociation between information and meaning, as messages dispersed by television and other media, due to their brief duration, rapid displacement, and sheer volume, are emptied of much of their content and referential capacity.^^ Dana Polan, in a slightly different context, has likewise described an “the evacuation of sense” in the mass media.
Sass 178. Sass is citing B. D. Cohen, “Referent Communication Disturbances in Schizophrenia,” in S. Schwartz, ed.. Language and Cognition in Schizophrenia (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1978) 29. This passage refers to the production of language in schizophrenia. Sass (178-179) notes that the schizophrenic experience of language is similar; “Instead of grasping the overall meaning of something read or heard, schizophrenics will often attend to material qualities of the signifier, to the sounds of words or their graphic appearance on the page.. . Another patient stated, “Words have textures and so do objects, but sometimes the words don’t have the same texture as what they refer to” (Sass 51).
^ Davis 69. Davis presumably means that they provide no meaningful information.
For example, Baudriilard (“Implosion” 95): “We are in a universe where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” Also Klapp (89): “Transience and decay of media messages add another dimension to degradation of information.... Fleetingnesss lessens the ability of the audience to comprehend messages.” See also Klapp 98-103.
Dana Polan, “Brief Encounters: Mass Culture and the Evacuation of Sense,” Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana UP, 1986).
92 Contemporary Performance and Schizophrenic Hvperconsciousness Section I: WOO Airplanes on the Roof
If Wilson’s work often shows a tendency towards those dreamlike states that correspond to conceptions of schizophrenia as a regression to primitive mental states, other recent work tallies nicely with Sass’s conception of schizophrenia as the product of an excess of consciousness and hyper-reflexivity. In both 1000 Airplanes on the Roof and
The Medium, a central figure experiences psychological pressures and disturbances strikingly similar to those associated with schizophrenia. Moreover, both works demonstrate structural features similar to televisual representation.
1000 Airplanes on the Roof \s a collaborative performance work created by composer Philip Glass, playwright David Henry Hwang, and designer Jerome Sirlin.
John Howell states that “Unlike more typical stage works, 1000 Airplanes is one-third music, one-third text, and one-third design, each element maintaining its own intensity
[sic: integrity?] while complementing and interacting with other aspects to produce a theatrical hybrid, a modem gesamskunstwerk [sic] that unites all arts in one theatrical form.”*’
1000 Airplanes employs televisual representational features while representing experiences associated with schizophrenic experience. Glass has observed that 1000
Airplanes has features associated with technological media, though he refers not to television but to cinema: “It’s also modeled on the idea of a movie. The idea of having a
*’ John Howell, introduction, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof: A Science Fiction Music-Drama, by Philip Glass, David Henry Hwang, and Jerome Sirlin (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Publishers, 1989) 9.
93 sound effects track is something that comes from the cinema, not theatre or opera.”**
Judging by the book that documented the production (containing Hwang’s text as well as numerous photographs of the slide projections created by Sirlin), the production was as televisual as cinematic. Sirlin’s scenic effects are marked by an often extreme discontinuity between images. Some projections, often cityscapes, have an expansive, vista-like quality common to cinema. Many others, though, consist of layered geometric shapes or conglomerations of images. The photographic record also indicates that the performer (there is only one) seems contained within the projections, rather than simply appearing before them as before a conventional backdrop. Howell records that Sirlin
“uses a special projection system that allows the play’s character to move in and out of dissolving and overlapping scenes with magical ease.”*’ The overall effect seems more akin to some music videos than to any cinema (save possibly the surrealist experiments of
Dali and Bunuel).
Howell describes 1000 Airplanes as a parable surrounding “M.”, an
“Everyperson” who
is apparently abducted by an alien spaceship, then returned to Earth and told to forget about the event. But rather than tell a conventional story, WOO Airplanes simulates in its form the experience that is its subject matter. The external recounting of anecdotes is only a framework for the
** Howell 7.
*’ Howell 7. John Istel, tracing theatrical applications of slide projections from Meyerhold and Piscator through Svoboda and up to the present, refers to several recent productions that have achieved effects similar to those in WOO Airplanes. At performances of George Coates’s Better Bad News, for example, audiences wearing polarized glasses were suspended in what Coates called “a total immersive surround.” John Istel, “The Persistence of Vision: The Ephemeral Art of Projection Desi^,” American Theatre October 1995: 32-41.
94 true story at its core; the mental anguish of someone who believes that he or she has been abducted and examined by extra-terrestrials—was it real or a hallucination?^
1000 Airplanes is divided into four parts. M is the only character and the text consists of his narration of past and present experiences.®' In Part One, M states that though he once was a lawyer and lived in a converted farmhouse, he now works in a
Copy Shop in New York City.®^ Much of Part One is devoted to a description of the previous night’s events, when M’s date with a woman was interrupted when his building seemed to disappear in front of him. M was overcome by an experience of a “collective intelligence” and of a “silverball... the size of a BB” inserted into his nostril and pressed into his skull (19). The experience was presumably an unbidden memory of an abduction experience, though M did not recognize it as such. “When the earth re-appeared aroimd [him],” M fled to his apartment, where he woke up the following morning (20). M says that while he usually recalls nothing of his prior experiences, memories press upon him and sometimes, “I barely remember that one day, many years ago, the skies split open. And from the hole where the sky had been, descended a sound .
.. I still fight to forget” (23). M speaks three times of losing any sense of time: “And
®° Howell 8. Howell gives the character’s name as “M.”; for the sake of readability, I have eliminated the period in all subsequent references to the character.
®' The part of M is written to be performed by either a man or a woman, and the part has been played by both male and female performers. Use of the masculine pronoun in reference to Hwang’s text reflects the content of the published version in which both text and photographs depict M as a man.
®^ David Henry Hwang, text to 1000 Airplanes on the Roof: A Science Fiction Music-Drama, by Glass, Hwang, and Sirlin: 13ff. Subsequent passages from Hwang’s text will be cited parenthetically, using page numbers only.
95 time leaves me. I step temporarily outside its domain” (24, 26). Finally, M succumbs to the pressure o f his memories:
I surrender! I can no longer hold the universe at bay. There is a universe in my mind, struggling to make its way out. Memories slip between the cracks. The trickles become a torrent, carrying me away. At this moment. I’ve lost my job. I’ve lost any sense of the world beyond me. And, worst of all. I’ve lost the will even to hope—that her life, the beating of her heart, could drown out these sounds! What choice do I have? No place could be as alien as this world has become.
I’ve run everywhere to escape my memories, everywhere but into my mind itself. (27)
Part Two recounts M’s efforts to remember his abduction, and contains his description o f events following that abduction. While attempting to recall his experiences, M hears
a voice—no, not sound waves. Something in my head, speaking in the voice of my own conscience:
It is better to forget. It is pointless to remember. No one will believe you. You will have spoken a heresy. You will be outcast. (30)
Yet M recalls some of his experience, including a conception of''''Hives. Thousands o f creatures working as one. It is impossible to determine whether these are many beings conforming to one, or one being split into many’’’ (32). He also recalls that one day, after the night the sky opened, he was drawn to a beehive on the farm where he lived. Stung by the bees, he later awoke in a hospital bed. Now, he says, “I must return to the hive. In order to understand.” But the voices insist that he must not try to recall his experience, repeating the warning that he will have spoken a heresy and will be outcast (34-35).
96 M finally remembers the moment of his abduction:
The sky burst open, and the rains came down, like slivers of sound, surrounding me, falling onto my face, fusing into one whole thing, until 1 stood at the center of a solid pillar of sound. It pushed in on me, gently, like soft rubber, against my face and body. The sound was . . . as if, on the roof, there had been . . . a thousand airplanes. A thousand airplanes on the roof. (36)
In Part Three, M returns, now aware of his past encounters: “1 have been visited by beings from other worlds. They come to earth and, on several occasions, they have taken me away” (39). Immediately afterwards, he is taken away again. But this time, he can describe the experience as it occurs. The sound returns and carries him away: “No more apartment. No more City. No more people. Gone, all gone. I see the sound. 1 taste the sound. And, so, absorbed into sound, 1 am taken along with it” (41).
M also recalls experiences that he had not understood at the time but that now become clear. He remembers that once, at work, he had absentmindedly drawn a picture of “a machine”:
Like a blueprint. Doodled to precision over five dimensions. 1 couldn’t begin to understand what my hand had drawn.... Now, my eyes see what my hand had remembered. The architecture of the visitors is built to precise specifications over five dimensions. Walls which are straight in the third dimension, appear curved in the fourth. (41)
One of M’s previous experiences reoccurs: “The silver globe. Up—oh, god—up again—into my right nostril. The one that bleeds. My head starts to ache. I feel the flesh—behind my eye—stretched. My eye! It’ll pop out of its socket! It’s breaking!
Something is breaking through!” (41). Finally, M becomes aware of a being touching him and manipulating the globe.
97 In the voice of my conscience, I ask, “What are you doing to me?”
In the voice of my conscience, he answers, “Smell. Smell... and you will remember.” (42)
M looks into the eyes of the visitor and sees his own reflected face. He says that he sees
“behind my skin—into my temporal lobe—the seat of all consciousness,” and asks the being, “Why do you travel this distance? And why are you interested in me?” (44). In response to his question, M is transported “past rows of faces”: his ancestors and descendants and others from “before the time of humans” and forward into the future
(46). The globe disappears and M once again looks at the being, “Seeing in his eyes, a mirror reflecting myself. And, all this time, he has been looking into my eyes, and he, too, has seen himself’ (47). M now understands why the beings travel: “We are all visitors. We all travel. We all ask questions. We all hope one day, looking into the eyes of another, to find part of an answer.” He declares that when he returns home this time he will “understand . . . and remember” (48,49).
In Part Four, M returns to find a “grey cloud hanging over New York.” Ash, from fires in West Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, has drifted to New York, where “It looks like the earth has fallen into nuclear winter.” Now aware of what has been happening to him, M is not frightened by “the fact that the city is fluid, that faces appear and disappear in its walls and gratings” (51). Yet when he goes to the Copy Shop, he leams from his boss that he has been gone longer than he had thought: “What is this? I have a beard. My clothes are unwashed. I’m still in my pajamas! God, I’ve soiled my
98 pants front and back. My hands are covered with filth. I stink. ‘Where have I been?’
For four days?” (52).
M is taken to a hospital where a doctor asks him where he has been. M starts to
say that he has been on a spaceship, but the voice of his conscience returns: “/f is better to forget. It is pointless to remember. No one will believe you. You will have spoken a
heresy. You will be outcast." M heeds the wanring and merely says, “Four days? I’ve
been sick. I bumped my head” (53, 54). Just after speaking, M begins to doubt his
memories.
What I remember, couldn’t possibly have happened.
Then it must’ve been a dream.
I’ve had dreams before; that was no dream.
Then, there’s only one explanation—if it can’t have happened, it didn’t. And my memories?
They’re at odds with what happened. Are you crazy?
I’m not crazy!
Then you can’t have such memories.
I don’t. Whatever they were—I forget them.
The doctor finds my explanation incomplete. He says. Lying here you talked in your sleep. A fantastic story.
It... must be a dream, I reply. (54, 55-56)
The doctor asks more questions: has M’s apartment building ever disappeared?
Does he understand the mechanics of the fourth or fifth dimensions? Does a silver globe
99 mean anything to him? Has he ever doodled machines beyond his comprehension? M answers no to all of the questions. Finally, he is released:
The doctor tells me I may return to the world. I will no longer tell stories which cannot be verified. I will wear clothes which are not soiled with myself. I will shave my face and dress in conservative colors. When I look out the door into the sky, I will see only the glow of neon.
1 had a bad day. I was confused because I once lived on a farm. But, no longer. Now, I live in New York City. And the lights are always bright. And the people are always present. And my mind . . . my mind is calm. With, yet, with only . . . just a little pulse, a little throbbing someplace, hardly noticeable, behind my nostrils in the front of my brain. Just a minor thing.
The throbbing grows. It threatens to become sound. There is a universe in my mind, struggling to break out. And I’m a normal man. A normal man, running. (60-63)
Many of M’s experiences find close, even literal, parallels in descriptions of schizophrenia. Peter Goodman, reviewing a 1988 production at the Beacon Theatre in
New York, wrote that M “might be schizophrenic or a drug addict.”^^ From the initial onset (the “abduction”) through his eventual but only partial memory loss, M’s experiences read like a litany of schizophrenic symptoms. Hwang himself has spoken of the work in terms that loosely recall some of the experiences associated with schizophrenia: “The line between UFO abduction experiences and what we would call paranormal experiences is very slim, so it is possible that while people believe that
Peter Goodman, “A Sci-Fi Drama Set to Music,” Newsday, 16 December 1988: 13.
100 they’re relating to beings from other worlds, what they are actually relating to is something more in the ghost world here.”^
The clearest example of the correlation between M’s experiences and schizophrenic symptomatology has to do with auditory hallucinations. The abduction experience itself is presaged by an overwhelming sound. Kraepelin observes that early signs of the onset of chronic schizophrenia include “headache [and] buzzing in the ears.”*^ The clearest examples, though, are the voices that M hears. M says that he hears the “voice of [his] own conscience.” Once he becomes aware of the vaguely-defined being manipulating the globe, however, M realizes that the being is the source of the messages: “In the voice of my conscience, he explains ...” and, “In the voice of my conscience, he answers ...” (42,44). The voice comes from within M, but the content of the message comes from outside. Bleuler observes that “Almost every schizophrenic who is hospitalized hears ‘voices,’ occasionally or continually [which] threaten, curse, criticize and console in short sentences or abrupt words”^ The source of such voices may vary. As noted. Wing describes “thoughts experienced as spoken aloud or echoed or removed or broadcast or alien; voices heard commenting on the patient’s thoughts or coming from some part of the body or making references in the third person...
Howell 8.
Emil Kraepelin, “Dementia Praecox,” Cutting and Shepherd 16-17.
66Bleuler 95, 96.
Wing 9. Wing also notes that a chief symptom is the “feeling that the patient’s bodily functions, movements, emotions or will are under the influence or control of some external force or agency,” a description that closely matches M’s sense of his abduction experiences.
101 Bleuler notes that voices may be “localized in the near or far surroundings . . . [or] within the body.”"*
Bleuler also notes that while “tactile hallucinations are relatively rare,” “delusions and illusions . . . related to the different body organs” are almost as common as auditory hallucinations, and can produce a wide variety of “hallucinations of bodily sensations”:
“The patients are beaten or burnt; they are pierced by red-hot needles, daggers or spears; .
.. their bodies have become like accordions, being pulled out and then again pressed together.. . . Their eyes flicker, as do their brains.... A cartridge ball rolls around in a spiral inside their skull from base to vertex.”"’ These experiences recall M’s sense of the sound pressing down on him, and more precisely of the BB inserted into his skull.
Finally in this regard, there may be delusions that unknown or hostile forces, perhaps the patient’s enemies, are at work. These forces “make the voices; they cause him every conceivable, unbearable sensation.” Most patients care less about learning how these agents accomplish their goals than with “why so much trouble is being taken to do all this to him.”™ M is only slightly concerned with the techniques used against him.
M asks, “What are you doing to me?” as the being manipulates the globe upward until it penetrates his brain. Yet M’s principal concern is with why the being is interested in him Receiving no clear answer to his first question, M proceeds to ask, “But why? Why
"* Bleuler 99.
"’ Bleuler 95, 100, 101. Bleuler does not classify such hallucinated bodily sensations as “tactile hallucinations,” which he defines as a sensation of some external object touching the body, for example the feeling of snakes on or in one’s skin.
™ Bleuler 118.
102 do you travel this distance? And why are you interested in me?” (42,44). It is this information that he is most interested in, and he becomes engrossed in the answer he receives. The concern with the particulars of what the being is doing is abandoned.
M’s experiences bear further similarities to schizophrenic states. The onslaught of recollections that M describes is identical in many ways to a kind of memory disturbance identified by Bleuler: “During (an acute or chronic) delirium old memories . . . emerge or obtrude themselves in all their fieshness.... [0]ne may almost speak of a ‘compulsion to remember.’” Some memories may go back to earliest childhood, others to more recent but still remote events.^' Once a delirium has passed, memories of events that happened during that delirium may be blocked by a form of amnesia, only to resurface during a later delirium.^ M exhibits both a compulsion to remember and subsequent amnesia. At the end of Part Two, M declares, “All right, then! I surrender! I can no longer hold the universe at bay. There is a universe in my mind, struggling to make its way out.
Memories slip between the cracks. The trickles become a torrent, carrying me away”
(27). Yet after M awakens in the hospital in Part Four, and once he begins to answer the doctor’s questions, he begins to forget all that has happened.
Yet some residual memory remains, despite M’s statement that he has begun to forget. Indeed it is unclear how much M remembers. Speaking to the doctor, M denies everything that he spoke about in his sleep, but his final words indicate that he may
Bleuler notes that “Such memories may also express themselves as hallucinations instead of as thoughts” (138-139).
^Bleuler 139.
103 merely be attempting to repress the memories. Peter Giovacchini discusses a schizophrenic patient of his who told family and co workers that he often experienced
“soul traveling” and that a being within him coached him in tennis. After losing his job and spending a year in treatment, the man was briefly institutionalized. Upon his release, he declared that he had abandoned belief in his delusions. Under questioning by
Giovacchini, the patient revealed that he persisted in his beliefs and that he had denied them in order to placate those around him for fear that he would be hospitalized again.^
Sass, citing Karl Jaspers, observes that schizophrenics often experience a sense of tremendous understanding consistent with M’s sudden awareness of the complexities of the fourth and fifth dimensions. Sass writes, “schizophrenics [often] feel not farther from the truth but closer to truth and illumination.” He also cites Jasper’s observation that schizophrenics “often come to believe that ‘they have grasped the profoundest of meanings; concepts such as timelessness, world, god and death become enormous revelations which when the state has subsided cannot be reproduced or described in any way.’ One patient spoke . . . of his experiences as having a ‘cosmic character’ and ‘a character of the infinité.’”’"*
” Giovacchini 25-26. Even if M’s memory loss is not a sham, the closing comments suggest that at least a vague memory of his abduction remains. Bleuler (137-138) states that persistence of delusions is common to schizophrenia. Uncorrected delusional ideas may recede in consciousness as they lose their “emotional valence” or cease to hold the patient’s interest. Yet Bleuler states that as a rule such ideas simply lie dormant to be “taken up again in subsequent exacerbations as if nothing had happened in the meantime.”
’* Sass 6, 7. Jaspers asks why schizophrenia is so often “a process of cosmic, religious or metaphysical revelation.” Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1963). One schizophrenic patient’s description of her experiences is similar to what M feels during his abductions: “Should I let anyone know that there are moments. Just moments, in the schizophrenia that are ‘special’? When I feel that I’m
104 In addition to memories of his abduction experiences, M’s “real world” behavior is consistent with psychotic breaks associated with schizophrenia. The Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual o f Mental Disorders—Revised (DSM-UI-R), includes among the symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia the following: “During the course of the disturbance, functioning in such areas as work, social relations, and self-care is markedly below the highest level achieved before onset of the disturbance.”’* M himself expresses anxiety over his “social relations” skills. During Part One, M says that he hopes that as a lawyer he “defended the innocent against the guilty.” He fears, though, that he did not, which is why is now being “punished.” He says that he wanted to tell his date this,
. . . but when 1 opened my mouth, the only words that came out were those of a man who had been bom and raised to work in a Copy Shop.
And, 1 realized that I’d been wearing this disguise for so long, it had seeped through my skin:
“I see your watch is telling the correct time.”
“That building once killed a woman under construction.”
“Have you ever drunk a lot of beer?”
“And over there is one of New York’s premiere sex clubs.”
“Are you some kind of psychopath?”
This is the question she asked me, as we walked by Macy’s. I admired her forthrightness. 1 wasn’t sure, however, what she meant by “some kind” of psychopath. Is there more than one kind? 1 wanted to use this as an traveling to someplace I can’t go to ‘normally’? Where there’s an awareness, a different sort of vision allowed me? ...” M. E. McGrath, “Where Did I Go?”, Schizophrenia Bulletin (1984): 638-640. Cited in Gottesman 43.
” Cited in Gottesman 21.
105 opportunity to tell her the truth. No, I’m not a psychopath. But, yes, I am disturbed. No, I’m not cruel or dangerous. But, yes, I am on the run. But, of course, I said nothing like that. Of course, I said, “Me? A Psychopath? What are you talking about?” Which is, of course, exactly how a psychopath would answer. (16-17)’*
There are also indications that in regard to work and self-care, M is functioning
poorly. In Part Four, when M returns to work after the latest abduction, his boss asks him
where he has been for the past four days. Shocked to learn that he was gone for so long,
M runs his hand over his face and finds that he has a beard. His clothes are unwashed, he
is still in his pajamas, he has soiled his pants, and his hands are covered with filth.
One last observation indicates how 1000 Airplanes resonates with issues associated both with televisuality and schizophrenia. As noted, the photographic record
shows M thoroughly imbricated within the scenic projections. Veronica Hollinger writes that 1000 Airplanes is “perhaps the ultimate replacement of ‘content’ by spectacle on the postmodern stage, as Glass’s beautiful score and Jerome Sirlin’s breathtakingly high-tech
sets completely overwhelm the rather weak narrative line concerning the capture of a character, ‘M.,’ by aliens.”^ The saturation is so pronounced as to recall Baudriilard’s
identification of a schizophrenic “state of terror” specific to contemporary mediatized culture: “a state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity o f everything which touches, invests and penetrates without
The self-reflexive nature of this statement suggests the ideational seif-reflexivity that Sass identifies as a hallmark of schizophrenic thought.
” Veronica Hollinger, “Playing at the End of the World: Postmodern Theatre,” Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modem Drama, ed. Patrick D. Murphy, Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 54, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992) 193.
106 resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.”’* This comment is even more apropos to discussion of The Medium, a performance piece that incorporates passages from the same article from which the above quotation is drawn.
Contemporary Performance and Schizophrenic Hvperconsciousness Section H: The Medium
The Medium, a performance piece created by Anne Bogart and members of the
Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITT), offers a more explicit examination of a figure (here, a character modeled on Marshall McLuhan) imbricated within, and sometimes overwhelmed by, a media-saturated environment. Again, devices reminiscent of televisual representation combine with features analogous to schizophrenic symptomatology. Yet while the influence of television and other media is more overt in
The Medium than in 1000 Airplanes, the former piece does not offer so explicit a representation of individualized schizophreniform experience. This is attributable in large part to differences in point of view. Each work centers on a central narrator who experiences profound psychological upheaval. 1000 Airplanes, however, consists of a wholly subjective accounting of personal experience, whereas The Medium only rarely incorporates descriptions of personally-experienced events. More commonly, the text consists of objective pronouncements on the sociological, psychological, and epistemological influences of the mass media.
’* Baudriilard, “Ecstasy” 132.
107 In describing The Medium as “schizophrenic,” then, one must draw a bit closer to
Jameson’s more figurative use of the term; the piece can more properly be said to exhibit features analogous to schizophrenic objective perception (what the world looks like) than to represent an approximation of subjective schizophrenic experience (what the world feels like). Only a bit closer, though; the piece still accommodates a more literal application of the term than Jameson allows. McLuhan is the central figure of the piece, and the schizophreniform perceptions it depicts exist largely in relation to him. A subjective point of view, though never made as explicit as in 1000 Airplanes, is yet implied. Furthermore, that the term schizophrenic may here be used in more than a figurative sense is indicated by a statement inserted almost parenthetically into the text:
“Everyone lives schizophrenically today.”’’
“Based on the life and predictions of Marshall McLuhan,”*® The Medium is a loosely-arranged series of vignettes featuring McLuhan and other figures within quickly- changing scenarios. The piece begins with an actor playing McLuhan alone on the stage, welcoming the audience and offering some observations on the effects of “electric technology” on contemporary society. This introduction is followed by a series of scenes in which the actor playing McLuhan is joined by other performers who assume a great
™ Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI), The Medium, conceived and directed by Anne Bogart, created by James “Will” Bond, Mark Corkins, Ellen Lauren, Kelly Maurer, Tom Nelis (New York: SITI, 1993) “Family Show.” References for The Medium are to an unpublished script forwarded to the author by Megan Wanlass, Production Stage Manager of SITI, via electronic mail. Page numbers are not given. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically, using particular scene titles (e.g., “Family Show”) as they appear in this script.
*® SITI, Title and Credits Page.
108 variety of personae. With few exceptions, the titles of scenes have clear associations with television. Some titles are those of particular television programs, others of familiar types of programs. Examples include “Firing Line” and “The Dating Game,” but also generic titles like “Talk Show,” “TV Evangelist,” “Cooking Show,” Western,” and “Ventriloquist
Act.” Individual scenes, however, do not normally consist of dialogue that would customarily be associated with such programs. Rather, the “dialogue,” a term which must be used rather loosely here, consists of observations on media and other technological developments and their effects on human behavior, social institutions, and the like. Both the text and the staging are marked by frequent repetition, as observations introduced in one scene are reintroduced in later scenes and as physical activities, most often those involving McLuhan, are occasionally repeated.
The performance, while scripted, does not consist of a developing narrative in any traditional sense of that word. It is not really a “play,” but rather a series of monologues and exchanges between performers. Likewise, while the performance contains numerous personae represented by performers, there is little “character development” in the traditional sense. The only clearly sustained character is McLuhan, played by a single actor throughout the piece. Other performers take on a variety o f roles. Aside from
McLuhan, the piece contains recognizable character types, such as a western gunslinger and a ventriloquist and his dummy. Even so, each of these “characters” typically appears
in only one or two scenes. Furthermore, character types are often identifiable only by virtue of costume pieces and physical mannerisms used by the performers. In a vignette titled “Western,” for example, the gunslinger is revealed as such through the use of
109 costume pieces like a westem-style vest and stereotypical gunfighter behavior, like a swaggering entry through an imaginary set of swinging saloon doors.
That The Medium is more consciously modeled after television flow than is 1000
Airplanes is obvious, given that most of its content derives directly from speculations on the influence of mass media. Gregory Gunter, Company Dramaturg with SITI, records that of the various figures in The Medium, the only named character is McLuhan. Gunter notes that the rest of the characters, who “are dead or part of [McLuhan’s] memory,” spend much of their time in “’television land.’” At other times, they, like McLuhan, exist in a “techno world of pop philosophy” into which they were hurled “primarily through
McLuhan’s exploration of television.”*'
Most of the text is derived from McLuhan’s own writings, but there are some additional sources. Baudriilard’s “Ecstasy of Communication” is quoted directly, for example. There are also distinct references to some of Robert Wilson’s works. There are for instance two “Knee Plays,” reminiscent of the “Knee Plays” from Einstein on the
Beach, and consisting mostly of a single passage repeated several times, a device common to Wilson’s works. The passage itself furthers the discussion of mass media:
I grew up in a small town in Texas and as I was growing up my father never allowed us to watch TV. I went away to a university and then when I came back I was surprised to see my father was watching TV constantly. He would sit with a remote control and watch all the channels at once. He would watch a bit of this, a bit of that, and this fascinated me. (“Knee Play I”; Knee Play fl”)
*' Gregory Gunter, “Imaging Anne: A Dramaturg’s Notebook,” Anne Bogart: Viewpoints, ed. Michael Bigelow Dixon and Joel A. Smith (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1995) 51.
110 This marked intertextuaiity recalls Klaver’s description of television as constituted of a “boundless megatext,” consisting of myriad intersecting references.*^
One of the more unusual of these references is drawn from Hamlet. The description of
Ophelia’s death is incorporated into “Knee Play II.” Within the broader context of an interrogation of the effects of media saturation, the passage carries a curious resonance;
. . . Her clothes spread wide And, mermaid like, a while they bore her up; Which time she chanted snatches of old logs [sic]. As one incapable of her own distress. Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element; but long it could not be Til that her garments, heavy with their drink. Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. Drowned, drowned. (“Knee Play H”)
The Medium shows other associations with television flow, both within individual scenes and through the entire development of the piece. Within particular scenes, word and action rarely show any clear relationship. For example, the text for “Ventriloquist
Act,” shared by two performers playing a ventriloquist and his dummy, consists of a discussion of the distinction between “hot” and “cool” media, further observations on the social effects of “electric media,” and comments on natural law, morality, and the
“Freudian concept of repression.” There is little if any mutual reference between the spoken text and the staging. Further, much of the “dialogue” of this scene consists of repeated passages introduced earlier in the piece, suggesting a distinct interchangeability of passages. Between scenes, there are likewise few apparent connections, other than the
The passage cited above seems to be a direct quote from Wilson, who grew up in Waco, Texas. It also appears in BOB, SITI’s more recent work based on Wilson. I have been unable to locate this passage elsewhere.
I ll occasional repetition of particular phrases or passages. Scenes follow one another sequentially, but no necessary connections obtain between them. With a few exceptions, chiefly those at the very end when McLuhan begins to lose control over his consciousness, most scenes could be repositioned within the series with no noticeable effect.
Aside from the text, the structure, staging, and performance conventions are suggestive of televisual modes of representation. The passage from the “Knee Plays” cited above is suggestive of the overall flow of the piece: “He would sit with a remote control and watch all the channels at once.” The rapid scene changes are reminiscent of remote-control surfing, an activity that the character of McLuhan sometimes engages in, manipulating the performances of the other figures on the stage. Furthermore, within individual scenes, correspondences between image and text are frequently tenuous at best.
One might finally observe that, as Dietrich notes in regard to Wilson’s performances, the staging of The Medium is mostly lateral with little depth of field.
Another feature of The Medium closely analogous to television representation is the frequent repetition of both textual passages and blocking patterns. Passages and movements reappear throughout the piece, rearranged into different combinations.
McLuhan introduces himself several times, declaring, “Hello, I’m Marshall McLuhan. 1 haven’t seen you before. Are you new here?”*^ Dozens of other passages are repeated
This introduction, in whole or in part, appears in roughly one-half of the twenty scenes. James “Will” Bond, who played McLuhan in Columbus, Ohio in November 1996, delivered this greeting in an exuberant, if clearly affected, manner suggestive of a zealous on-location television reporter.
112 throughout the piece, as are some blocking patterns, as for example when the performers, aside from McLuhan, cross slowly and rigidly across the stage dragging chairs behind them. As noted in the previous chapter, much television programming is highly repetitive. Commercials provide the clearest example, being aired for set periods of time, from as little as a few days in the case of trailers for upcoming programs to weeks or months in the case of advertisements for products. Beyond the example of individual commercials, and despite content changes in weekly programs, the basic structure of television programming is highly formulaic and repetitive. Regular programs feature familiar characters, locales and situations episode after episode, and commercials for different products commonly recycle particular tropes, sometimes for years.*^ In this regard, much programming appears simply as variations on themes.
Clearly then. The Medium, to a greater degree than 1000 Airplanes provides an examination of a figure surrounded by a heavily saturated media environment. While much more “low-tech” than 1000 Airplanes, the piece is more overtly focused on media technology and its cultural, psychological, and epistemological effects. At the same time, and like 1000 Airplanes, the piece centers on a central figure—here, McLuhan—who experiences a severe psychological disturbance that carries with it many of the symptoms associated with schizophrenia.
It must be noted that while McLuhan experiences a sudden and eventually debilitating psychic disturbance, there is no overt suggestion that it is specifically
^ Klaver (“Postmodernism” 72) notes that the Energizer Battery commercials, in which a toy bunny “keeps going and going” through different mediascapes, first aired in October 1989.
113 schizophrenic. Bogart notes that the piece takes place at the moment of one of the strokes that McLuhan suffered late in his life.** Nonetheless, in its sustained depiction of a specific breakdown, and its attempt to stage a subjective experience heavily influenced by broader social experience, the piece moves beyond an objective depiction of the effects of a stroke (as one might find for instance in a more traditional work like Arthur Kopit’s
W ings).^ Given the overall content of the piece, the objective seems to use the stroke as a means of entry into an examination of the effects of media saturation on contemporary
Western culture.
The psychological disorientation that McLuhan experiences shows parallels with schizophrenic symptomatology. Within moments of the beginning, towards the end of his introductory monologue, McLuhan is subjected to the first of a series of schizophreniform disturbances. Bleuler notes that early onset of chronic schizophrenia is sometimes presaged by a buzzing in the ears, a symptom that heralds McLuhan’s stroke in The Medium:
Instead of scurrying into a comer and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond beautifully to such resolute treatment and soon become servants rather than masters.
What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzing? (“Introduction”)
** Michael Grossberg, “Tuned to the Times,” The Columbus Dispatch, 6 November 1996: 12E.
*® Attilio Favorini describes The Medium, which he saw in Pittsburgh in October 1996, as reminiscent of Wings. There is obviously some justification to this comment, but I would argue that the differences outweigh the similarities. Attilio Favorini, “The Medium,” Theatre Journal 49.3 (1997): 357.
114 The following series of vignettes shows little concern with the development of a causally-oriented narrative. What is shown is rather a representation of McLuhan’s subjective experience, conditioned by his stroke, of the disjunctive nature of a media- saturated society. While the performance by necessity consists of a sequential series of events, no apparent causal connections obtain between those events. It also is not entirely clear whether McLuhan’s own experience of events is similar to the audience’s experience. Towards the end of the performance, McLuhan begins to lose his capacity for verbal communication, indicating a progression of his breakdown. But throughout the bulk of the piece it is unclear whether the events, though presented to the audience in linear fashion, exist for McLuhan sequentially or simultaneously.^ Whether sequential or simultaneous, such a condensation of experience is akin to the immediacy of experience commonly associated with schizophrenia.
Aside from McLuhan himself, the other “characters” exhibit another symptom common to schizophrenia, the tendency towards flat or inappropriate affective states. In performance. The Medium is marked by clear tendencies in this direction. That all the figures in the piece are subject to some disorientation is indicated by Bogart’s own statement that “In a sense, everyone onstage is having a stroke.”** Ben Brantley describes the milieu of the production as “a mechanistic universe of brain-scrambled automatons,” and states that
*’ Grossberg (“Tuned to the Times”) quotes Bogart as asking, “Why not root the play in the moment of the stroke, when perhaps his whole life flashes before his eyes, with all his notions?”
** Steven Winn, “‘The Medium’ is Director’s Message,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, “Datebook,” 23 April 1995: 29.
115 While McLuhan (Tom Nells) spouts gnomic epigrams, the other four performers . . . act out a jerky, robotic ballet that gives the lie to the pundit’s optimism. Wearing Gabriel Berry’s graphic Mod costumes, they cross the stage in hunched postures suggesting windup Quasimodos, respond to zapping noises as if they were frogs and collapse stiffly onto brightly colored vinyl chairs.
Brantley continues, “The cast, even at its most anesthetized, exudes a compelling,
expertly harnessed energy.”*’
The description of the cast as anesthetized automata suggests the schizophrenic
symptom of flat or blunted affect.’” In regard to inappropriate effect, particular
performances often run counter to the otherwise impersonal language of the text. A
striking example appears in “The Ventriloquist.” The text for this scene deals with,
among other things, effects of mass media and, tellingly, Freud’s concepts of repression.
There is a clinical quality to the language (“. . . a cartoon is low in definition or cool
because the rough outline drawing provides very little visual data and requires the viewer to fill in or complete the images himself. . . ”). The performers, though, particularly the
woman playing the Ventriloquist’s Dummy, show a barely restrained franticness.’' While
*’ Ben Brantley, “McLuhan’s Old Message, As the Medium Mutates,” The New York Times, 17 May 1994: C20.
’” Favorini (358) states that “as an emotional experience. The Medium remains simply cold.”
’' Descriptions of performances are based on a single viewing in Columbus, Ohio in November 1996. The program did not identify performers with particular characters. The text from which I am working suggests that Kelly Maurer played Ventriloquist’s Dummy, yet this is clearly a working text. Different parts are distinguished by initials only. In most instances, these apparently refer to cast members (“KM” presumably = Kelly Maurer). Yet several lines are attributed to “JA” but no one with those initials is listed on the credits page. Also, McLuhan’s lines are identified “MM”: by character, not performer. Finally, parts may have been shuffled between SITl members. McLuhan was played by Tom Nelis in New York, but by James “Will” Bond in Columbus.
116 spouting her own “gnomic epigrams,” the performer fans her arms woodenly and rolls her eyes about, creating an eerie sense of a possessed or psychotic doll.
The tendency towards automaton performance is no doubt partly due to the absence of traditional character development and the predominance of precisely orchestrated physicaiity. This, coupled with a text consisting almost entirely of impersonal observations on media and technology, produces an overall effect far removed from affect-laden “method” acting. This departure from psychologically-oriented realistic acting is suggested by Porter Anderson, who has stated that “Bogart’s specific goal is to free her theatre of the curse of the American Method developed from the Stanislavsky system.”’^ What is instead produced are more superficial performances reminiscent of the waning of affect and the play of surfaces that Jameson finds in postmodern art and literature. I have observed how these characteristics are likewise suggestive of television programming. It seems also worth noting that the presentational and frequently ironic nature of the performance suggests an ideational self-reflexivity, which Sass argues is common to both schizophrenia and modernism (or postmodernism).
Discussing the experiences that normally herald the onset of a schizophrenic
“break,” Sass refers to the “truth-taking stare” (translating from the German die
Wahrnehmungstarre). This condition accompanies the Stimmung, a perceptual and emotional experience in which “everything is totally and uncannily transformed: the fabric of space seems subtly changed; the feeling of reality is either heightened, pulsing
” Porter Anderson, “The Meat of the Medium: Anne Bogart and the American Avant-Garde,” Anne Bogart: Viewpoints, ed. Michael Bigelow Dixon and Joel A. Smith, (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1995) 115.
117 with a mysterious, unnameable force, or else oddly diminished or undermined—or, paradoxically, things may seem (as one patient put it) both ‘unreal and extra-real at the same time.
Sass (as well as Jameson and many others) refers to a description in The
Autobiography o fa Schizophrenic Girl, a memoir written by “Renee,” a schizophrenic patient who had such experiences throughout her illness. Her description of the experience, while understandably more intense than what is shown in The Medium sounds nonetheless similar, especially in light of Brantley’s description:
For me, madness was . . . a country, opposed to Reality, where reigned an implacable light, blinding, leaving no place for shadow; an immense space without boundary, limitless, flat.. . . People turn weirdly about, they make gestures, movements without sense; they are phantoms whirling on an infinite plain, crushed by the pitiless electric light.^
Other areas of schizophrenic experience find analogues in the performance.
Bleuler notes that schizophrenic patients often “speak of ‘thought overflow’ (because they cannot hold anything in their minds), of ‘pressure of thoughts,’ of ‘collecting thoughts,’ because too much seems to come to mind at one time.”’^ The experience into which McLuhan falls would certainly appear to produce such a pressure of experience.
As one of the characters points out, “As the load of information stresses your mental capacity, you sense that you’ve come down with infomania” (“Firing Line”).
” Sass, 44, 45.
^ Marguerite Sechehaye, ed.. The Autobiography o f a Schizophrenic Girl (New York: New American Library, 1970) 19. Cited in Sass 47.
” Bleuler 32.
118 Furthermore, closely linked with the experience of “thought overflow,” some schizophrenics report a total or near-total blocking of thoughts.’® Late in the performance, McLuhan reaches that stage, apparently as a result of his stroke, when his capacity to express himself in language is suddenly cut short:
What is happening? What is happening? There...what is happening?
There is no...is no...is happening...is no...is no There is no...there is no... There is no in...there is no in...no in...
There is no inev...there is no inev... There is no inevitable...is happening... Happening...ing...ing is...ing is... There is no inevitability as... No inevita6f/ity as...no inevitaZ>//ity as...
There is no...inev...itab...il...it...y...a...z... Long...asz...there...isza...will...a... Will...a will...a...a...a...wi...wi...wi...wi...will... Ing...ling...ling...ingne...ingne... Ingness... ingnest... ingnest... ingnest... T...t...t...to...to...to...to...CON...TEM...PLA...TE... What is ha.. .ha.. .ha.. .ha.. .pening... What is... What... Wha...wha...wha...wha...wha (“McLuhan's Aria”)
Sass also notes that many schizophrenics “sometimes feel they can influence the whole universe, at other times as if they can’t control even their thoughts or their own limbs—or, in what is one of the supreme paradoxes of this condition, they may have both
^ See Bleuler 14, 35.
119 these experiences at the same moment.”’’ McLuhan himself demonstrates this tendency at moments throughout the performance. On the one hand, he frequently seems at the mercy of the various figures who appear before him and occupy his consciousness. On the other, he occasionally seems to be running the show, wielding a remote control device and governing the actions and words of those characters.
Despite its precise orchestration. The Medium, as Brantley notes, possesses a subterranean energy that continually threatens to burst forth as the piece moves toward
McLuhan’s eventual breakdown. The disciplined physicaiity for which SITI is known generates a tension that hovers just at the breaking point of control. James “Will” Bond, who played McLuhan in the production in Columbus, Ohio, maintained a rigid physical and vocal attitude, giving McLuhan a high-strung, almost manic disposition, though he occasionally fell into a more relaxed and even playful demeanor, as for example when manipulating the remote control. Towards the end of the piece, as McLuhan’s control over his consciousness begins to slip. Bond seemed to surrender to the tension that had been present from the beginning of the piece, employing jerky physical mannerisms and a strangled vocal delivery to create an image of a malfunctioning mechanism. The other figures on stage, representatives of McLuhan’s own experience, and in a sense his own constructions, accelerated through a rapid rewind of the previous events, as though all the restraints, stretched too far, had finally given way.
The potential for this breakdown was present from the beginning, barely kept at bay throughout. On the one hand, there is something reminiscent here of descriptions of
” Sass 26.
120 schizophrenic “breaks,” the occasional psychotic episodes suffered by many chronic schizophrenics. At the same time, there is something akin to Elizabeth Klaver’s description of television as a medium: “Television is explosive, always on the verge of flying apart, of losing control. . . . This centrifugal force is partly the result of the construction of a borderless television megatext, a loose assemblage of dramatic forms that play among, interrupt and perforate each other.”’* In The Medium, a potentially explosive tension is coupled with a rapidly-shifting kaleidoscope of figures and situations that, like elements of the television megatext, constantly intersect and collide.
Despite his eventual collapse, the term “schizophrenic” must be applied more figuratively to McLuhan than to his counterpart in 1000 Airplanes. Even so. The
Medium, to a greater degree than 1000 Airplanes, seems to extend its range of concern beyond a single figure and into a surrounding media-saturated environment. Besides the comment that everyone today lives schizophrenically, many passages are couched in the second person, rather than the first person, which dominates 1000 Airplanes. As a result, though it is McLuhan whose breakdown is staged, the work gestures toward broader shifts—social, psychological, epistemological—attendant on media saturation. McLuhan
says, “The basic thing to remember about the electric media is that they inexorably transform every sense ratio and thus recondition and restructure all our values and
institutions” (“Detective Drama”).
Thus the psychic disorientation (or reorientation) is presented as extending
beyond McLuhan into the surrounding culture. The experience of the truth-taking stare is
’* Klaver, “Postmodernism” 70.
121 implied in the statement, “We can link brains with computers, we can expand consciousness so much that a human being can take in all the information in the fuckin’ universe and see relationships” (“The Cyberspace Lounge”; “The Western”). The schizophrenic breakdown of referentiality, the perception of one’s surroundings in all their immediacy as pure material signifiers, is suggested by the assertion that “Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness” (“The Family Show”; “The Dating Game”). It is made more explicit by the following passage from Baudrillard, which is included in
“Western to Ventriloquist”;
Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theater, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake in the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication, and this ecstasy is obscene.’’
Schizophrenic Alienation and Media Isolation
To this point, this chapter has been concerned with similarities between characteristics of televisual representation and schizophreniform symptomatology. One further feature of schizophrenic experience, more specifically analogous to television consumption than production, is worth considering. As noted in the previous chapter, television, by virtue of the conditions under which it is conunoniy viewed, has been accused of fostering social fragmentation by isolating viewers frrom one another. Such
assertions are suggestive of descriptions of the schizophrenic tendency towards
interiorization and a radical individuation of experience. Coupled with this tendency is
” This passage, from “The Ecstasy of Communication,” differs slightly from the translation that appears in The Anti-Aesthetic (130).
122 an isolation or alienation of the self from the broader realm of social intercourse. It is this feature that I wish to focus on to conclude this chapter.
In terms of a representation of a sense of isolation and alienation, perhaps the clearest example is found in 1000 Airplanes. Besides the very obvious fact that M is the only character, 1000 Airplanes is largely a depiction of a fundamentally isolated subject.
Howell notes that, like Hwang’s other plays, 1000 Airplanes explores “a person’s search for identity in a bewildering world,” a comment that Hwang echoes: “The element it shares with my previous work has to do with a concern for identity.. . . To me, all the really interesting human dilemmas are basically internal searches.. . In any event, throughout the piece, and despite the throngs of people who surround him, M is cut off from significant human contact. M describes his first contact with his “girlfriend”:
When I saw her. . . something came over me and I thought, ‘This is my chance.’ She might help me escape. If I could just find another life, then my days of running would be over. And 1 wouldn’t even need the City anymore, the City which anyway only betrays me and leaves me exposed, always alone, with what 1 fear most—the sound of my memories. (14)
Throughout the entire text, M seems incapable of forming any significant relationships with others. In fact, his sense of alienation extends to the point that he no longer can identify himself: “I ran into my apartment. Slammed the door, heard its comforting
‘thud,’ tore off all my clothes, and looked in the mirror. My body was glowing, my skin red like a briquette. I stared at my face, and a stranger stared back. 1 remember my doctor, telling me I have the organs of an eighty-year old man” (22).
Howell 8-9.
123 Eugene Minkowski observes that such forms of alienation are common in schizophrenia. He cites examples of schizophrenic patients becoming almost wholly withdrawn from human contact, and notes that such alienation may extend to the self.
Schizophenics often demonstrate an eerily objective regard for their own reflections.
Minkowski records the response of a patient asked to identify the face she saw in a mirror: “I know who it is, but this is merely an observation, there is nothing inside; it’s a queer face; it has a fixed look, oblique and cold.”"" Another patient described a similar experience: “The reflection in the store window—it’s me, isn’t it? 1 know it is, but it’s hard to tell. Glassy shadows, polished pastels, a jigsaw puzzle of my body, face, and clothes, with pieces disappearing whenever 1 move. And, if 1 want to reach out and touch me, I feel nothing but a slippery coldness. Yet 1 sense that it’s me. I just know.”'“
In The Medium, this sense of isolation is stated less explicitly than in 1000
Airplanes. Yet the piece is fiumed completely around a single character’s experience.
The figures who surround McLuhan are not clearly delineated characters but rather cliched and two-dimensional “types” (which are moreover revealed primarily through costume and movement rather than dialogue). Furthermore, these “characters” appear largely as reflections of McLuhan’s own experience and thought. As Bogart notes,
“McLuhan finds himself amidst all these TV programs Rather than the language of
Eugene Minkowski, “The Essential Disorder Underlying Schizophrenia and Schizophrenic Thought,” Cutting and Shepherd 197.
M. E. McGrath, cited in Gottesman 41.
124 these shows being the language of television, his own theories are thrown back at him by a stand-up comedian, a televangelist, a news anchor and other characters.”'®^
In regard to Wilson’s performances, both the creative process and the experience of a Wilson performance arise from and reflect a clearly isolated subject position.
Wilson’s own descriptions of his creative process clearly point to a highly individualized, idiosyncratic approach.'®^ This tendency is highlighted by Wilson’s frequent collaboration with Knowles. Ed Knowles, Christopher’s father, has suggested that the assumption that autistics are incapable of effective communication may indicate an incapacity or unwillingness on the part of others to perceive how such people communicate. Ed Knowles has said o f Wilson’s work with his son, “You can say it is therapy, but I think the real significance of it is that Bob has the perspicacity and the genius to see that there are many different ways to communicate. And there are many different ways for phenomena to be understood by people, whether they be verbally or visually, or whatever.”'®* Still, it is generally accepted that autism is characterized by highly individuated experience. Bill Simmer writes that Wilson realized early on that
“Knowles dealt with the world more on interior than exterior screens.”'®^ And while
'®^ Grossberg, “Tuned to the Times” 12E.
'®^ See for example Armstrong 574-575, and Wilson, “ ... I thought I was hallucinating”
'°* Quoted in Simmer 100.
'°® Simmer 107.
125 schizophrenia and autism have come to be regarded as distinct conditions, a tendency towards autistic states has often been observed within schizophrenics.'”’
In addition to the process involved in their creation, Wilson’s performances seem to aspire to appeal to highly individualistic experiences within its viewers. The appeal to the pre- or unconscious that some critics have attributed to Wilson’s works would
likewise indicate an appeal to the presocial (this assuming that language is a principal vehicle for social cohesion). Further, the absence of logical cohesion between the various elements, what Michal Kobialka, citing Deleuze, terms “haptic representation”) w o u l d seem necessarily to demand individualized interpretations (or simply experiences).
Armstrong, who argues this position, cites Wilson himself: “1 don’t want the audience to wander around in my mind, or in the minds of the actors. 1 want them to wander around
in their own minds.”"”
Of course, the conditions under which a theatrical performance is experienced differ fi-om the more socially isolated conditions under which television is commonly
received. Yet this tendency towards the individualized experience associated with
Wilson’s performances recalls the individuation of experience that media theorists like
Marc and Baudrillard have linked to the proliferation of television. Wilson’s own
description o f his goals is akin to an assessment offered by the National Institute of
107 See especially Bleuler 62ff.
Michal Kobialka, “Of Lost Memories and Nomadic Representational Practices,” Journal o f Dramatic Theory and Criticism 10.1 (1994): 179-180.
Richard Dyer, “Wilson’s LARGER-than-life works,” The Boston Globe, 24 February 1985: A4; Robert Wilson, A.R.T. News, February 1986; 10. Cited in Armstrong 579.
126 Mental Health in 1982 of how television is experienced even within a communal family
setting: “Television seems to have changed the ways in which family interaction occurs.
When the set is on, there is less conversation and less interaction.. . . There is more
privatization of experience; the family may gather around the set, but they remain isolated
in their attention to it.”"° In similar fashion. Mac Wellman, who associates such
dramaturgical devices as “affective fantasy” with dream states, expresses concern that the
use of such devices may not guarantee effective and affective communication, but also that they may not guarantee effective communion.
Klaver, among others, observes that the postmodern era is “a time characterized
by proliferation o f media and information systems, as well as by a general trend toward
fragmentation and decentralization.”” * The arguments advanced by media theorists like
Marc and Baudrillard suggest that these tendencies, rather than being merely coincidental,
are thoroughly intertwined.”^ The proliferation of television and other information
systems, coupled with the relatively isolated circumstances under which they are most
commonly experienced, leads to a paradoxical condition. On the one hand, mass media
and information systems expand social space by facilitating communication across
physical space (at least for those who can afford the technology). Yet there is a
National Institute of Mental Health, Television and Behavior: Ten Years o f Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties Vol. 1 (Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1982). Cited in Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 108.
Ill Klaver, “’Coming Attractions,” 111.
Marc asserts that television “narrowcasting” encourages such fragmentation. For an example of the acme of narrowcasting, see Kyle’s The Monogamist, discussed in the appendix.
127 simultaneous contraction as individuals become physically more isolated. David
Bianculli’s assertion that “there’s a lot to be said for the shared communal experience of a simultaneous national broadcast,” indicates that for Bianculli at least, the necessary and sufficient conditions of “the communal” no longer include actual physical proximity."^
While this is a topic that lies outside the scope of this study, some reconsideration of the relationship between social and physical space is in order, as well as some examination of how individual human subjects are positioned within those spaces.
In considering the schizophrenic qualities of the works addressed in this chapter, I have passed over two representative features of schizophrenic thought and experience.
The first is an obsessive tendency to regard and interpret surrounding events as somehow interconnected in some grand, if vaguely-defined scheme. The second is an occasional sense of impending catastrophe, often on a global or even cosmic scale. These features will be picked up in the following chapter, which focuses on the prevalence of apocalyptic and millennial motifs in recent drama and theatre.
Bianculli 105.
128 CHAPTER4
APOCALYPTIC SENSIBILITIES IN CONTEMPORARY DRAMA:
INTERSECTIONS WITH SCHIZOPHRENIC EXPERIENCE
AND TELEVISUAL REPRESENTATION
Introduction
I turn now to a discussion of a third tendency in recent drama and performance, and in other contemporary representational practices, a preoccupation with apocalyptic and/or millennial issues and themes. Much of this chapter is concerned with a recent work with decidedly apocalyptic and millennial featiues, José Rivera’s Marisol. Yet in addressing the issue of apocalyptic and millennial resonances in contemporary drama and theatre, I will also refer back to all of the works discussed in previous chapters. This chapter is largely intended to demonstrate how televisually-oriented dramaturgical devices, representations of schizophreniform experience, and preoccupations with apocalyptic anxieties, despite being distinct tendencies, intersect and coalesce in a variety of recent theatre and drama.
Apocalyptic features are not a novel development within Western drama and theatre. Precedents can be found within German Expressionism after the First World War and in French Absurdism following the Second. Even earlier examples can be found, for
129 example in nineteenth-century American melodrama.' Nonetheless, the particular inflections that such themes have assumed, and the cultural constellations in which they have appeared, have varied greatly from period to period. German Expressionism, while informed by earlier European developments, emerged against the background of the horrors of the First World War and the economic privations that followed it, increasing industrialization, and a politically volatile Europe. French Absurdism likewise must be regarded within a particular social context framed by the devastation of the Second World
War, revelations of the extent of wartime atrocities, and the emerging threat of nuclear annihilation as the Cold War and the arms race intensified.
Similarly, nineteenth-century American melodrama is best regarded within a social context informed by millenarian aspirations and expectations informed by notions like Manifest Destiny. Some writers have asserted that American literature in general has been characterized by apocalyptic motifs from the beginning. Douglas Robinson, for instance, argues that the very history of America and the New World is apocalyptic, and that from the beginning American writers engaged an apocalyptic ideology “very much concerned with the end of old eras and the beginning of new eras.”" Nonetheless, despite his compelling arguments, the novels and poetry that Robinson cites seem to offer up apocalyptic resonances of a more figurative and metaphorical nature than is found in the works discussed in this chapter and throughout the entire study.
' See, for example, Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City, U of Iowa Press, 1992).
^ Douglas Robinson, American Apocalypses: The Image o f the End o f the World in American Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985) 2.
130 Without question, many of the events and developments that informed earlier apocalyptic-themed drama and theatre have continued to echo well into the post-war period. Yet many of those echoes have certainly begun to fade, and other anxieties have emerged in the years since the rise and fall of Absurdism (which in any event surfaced in
America only in attenuated form). The proximity of the year 2000 must be considered as a contributing factor in the continuing preoccupation with apocalyptic themes. Clearly, though, there are more than simple calendricai issues to be considered. Abiding concerns over potential global catastrophes ranging from the threat of nuclear annihilation to continuing nationad, ethnic, and religious strife, environmental degradation, deadly viruses, overpopulation, and a host of other anxieties must also be regarded as influences.
Still, no simple inventory of material pressures, however extensive, will suffice in itself to explain apocalyptic anxieties, no matter how extensive or tangible those pressures are. Apocalyptic fears (or desires) arise on a psychological terrain that cannot be adequately mapped simply by the presence of threats like those listed above. Stephen
O’Leary observes as much when he notes the radical differences that sometimes exist between the social contexts in which apocalyptic concerns flourish:
The early Christians who responded favorably to the book of Revelation were, by most historical accounts, subject to intense persecution that included execution and public torture. If the largely middle-class group of fundamentalist Christians in the United States who today form the core of Hal Lindsey’s readership believes itself to be similarly persecuted, this is surely a rhetorically induced perception; for there is an obvious difference between being tom apart by lions in front of cheering crowds and being
131 forced to endure media onslaughts of sex, violence, and secular humanism/
This is but one example. The popularity of contemporary television programs and films with apocalyptic and millennialist resonances likewise suggests a complex psychological and sociological dimension. A substantial proportion of the audiences for programs like
The X-Files or Millennium are decidedly affluent in comparison to most o f the population of the nineteenth-century United States, inter-war Germany, and post-WWH France.'* The appeal of such entertainments for a relatively affluent audience suggests the mutability of apocalyptic anxieties.
Apocalyptic and Millennialism: Definitions and Interpretations
To set the theoretical fiamework for this chapter, it is necessary first to consider the features of millennialist and apocalyptic thought. Central to this consideration will be an examination of how millennialism and apocalypticism both assume a breakdown of received and conventional systems of meaning. Also of interest is the manner in which such perceived breakdowns are interpreted. In a sense, it is the breakdown of meaning
(or, more precisely, the perception of such), and responses to this perception, that inform the core of this entire study. In discussing the perception and interpretation of a chaotic
^ Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory o f Millennial Rhetoric (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994) 11.
* I make this assertion on a mostly inferential basis, having seen no precise demographic information on the audiences for these programs. Nonetheless, the commercials inserted into these programs indicate that advertisers regard their viewers as relatively well off. Among commercials for fast food, credit cards, and nonprescription medicines are ads for higher-ticket items like mid-range automobiles.
132 breakdown of received systems of meaning, this chapter will refer back to material introduced in the preceding chapters regarding media theory and schizophrenia.
In distinguishing between apocalypticism and millennialism, 1 follow the example o f recent writers who have studied these related areas of thought and discourse.
Generally speaking, millennialism can be regarded as a subset of the larger field of apocalypticism. Millennialism, which by its nature carries religious associations, is generally regarded as the anticipation of the second coming of Christ, though its features can be identified in other religious traditions including the pre-Christian Jewish prophetic tradition. Millennialism has furthermore been divided into two subsets, premillennialism and postmilleimialism. O’Leary defines the two as referring
to the temporal position of the second coming of Christ: either before or after the millennial kingdom, a thousand-year period of peace, prosperity, and holiness. Premillennialism holds that the return of Christ would precede and actually inaugurate the millennium, while postmillennialism advocates a temporal scheme in which Christ’s physical return would follow the millennium, conceived in more spiritualized terms as a time when God’s rule over the earth would be progressively established through missionary activity.^
Premillennialism also frequently assumes a period of tribulation directly before the advent of the second coming.®
® O’Leary 235, n. 52.
® Daniel Wojcik also offers a distinction between millennialism and millenarianism: “Millennialism is more commonly used to characterize Christian beliefs; millenarianism is frequently employed to designate any belief system or movement that includes expectations of a future age of perfection and salvation.” Daniel Wojcik, The End o f the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (fiew York: New York UP, 1997) 218.
133 Apocalypticism, on the other hand, while commonly associated with millennialism, is in chief regards a different notion. Derived from the Greek apokalupsis, an apocalypse is an unveiling, a revelation of some hidden mystery. Apocalyptic is a mode of address that reveals some hitherto hidden truth or secret, typically involving some inevitable catastrophe. The religious overtones are distinct, and the earliest manifestations of apocalyptic thought are indissociable from religion, but the connection between apocalyptic and religious discourses is not total. Further, as in the case of schizophrenia, the terms apocalyptic and apocalypse, and the concepts they stand for, have become broader and less precise in popular usage.
Through the last half of this century, for instance, the notion of the apocalypse has frequently shed many of its religious associations to emerge as more of a “secular enterprise.”^ Barry Brummett observes in Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric that apocalyptic discourse, especially in the last half of the twentieth century, has often assumed a wholly secular nature. As two examples, Brummett refers to General Sir John
Hackett’s prediction of the imminent threat of “World War Three” and economist Ravi
Batra’s prediction of an inevitable economic depression in 1990, both of which were couched in purely secular terms.* Brummett finds in both works what he identifies as the chief characteristics of apocalypticism. The first is the revelation of a formerly obscured
’ James V. Schali, “Apocalypse as a Secular Enterprise,” Scottish Journal ofTheology 29 (1976): 357-373.
* Barry Brummett, Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric (New York: Praeger, 1991). Brummett focuses chiefly on secular apocalyptic scenarios with premillennial resonances. For an example of how postmillennial notions have emerged within secular, economic scenarios, see Francis Fukuyama, The End o f History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
134 truth, indicating imminent catastrophe, and including an explanation of how the signs of that catastrophe can already be seen in surrounding events. The second characteristic is advice on how to avoid or at least endure that catastrophe.
Lois Parkinson Zamora refers not only to the evacuation of religious associations from much contemporary apocalypticism, but also to the loss of a sense of meaning and order that characterized earlier American apocalyptic ideas. Zamora argues that the
“millennial optimism” that once characterized “America’s sense of its apocalyptic historical destiny” seems to have given way to a “foreboding suspicion of the imminence of great cosmic disaster in which the world may be annihilated, with no possibility of anything beyond the cataclysm.”’ This suspicion, Zamora suggests, frequently carries no observable religious valence.
Daniel Wojcik offers a similar observation on the distinctions between religious and secular manifestations of apocalyptic concerns. Wojcik is primarily concerned with how the presence of potential disasters such as nuclear annihilation, “environmental catastrophes, overpopulation, or technological collapse” has influenced apocalyptic thought.W ojcik observes that whereas “Religious and secular apocalypticists may agree that the world is characterized by uncontrollable crisis, evil, and the threat of imminent disaster . . . they assign different meanings to the present turmoil.” In most instances, Wojcik states, secular apocalypticism is “not marked by the belief that current
’ Lois Parkinson Zamora, introduction. The Apocalyptic Vision in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on Myth and Culture, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982).
'“ Wojcik 3, 10.
135 crises are meaningful or that a plan imderlies historical events. Predicted cataclysms such as nuclear annihilation, societal breakdown, economic collapse, or environmental disasters are regarded as meaningless events brought about by human ignorance, error, or corruption.” By contrast, religious apocalypticism insists “that a controlling and meaningful plan underlies all things. By placing current crises within a divine pattern, religious apocalyptic beliefs explicitly address feelings of helplessness and uncontrollability, converting them into an optimistic vision of worldly redemption and salvation.”"
Brummett objects to Zamora’s description of secular apocalypticism, insisting that a discourse that does not explain the reasons for the coming disaster or offer a course of action that one may take to weather its effects is simple doomsday prediction and not apocalyptic at all.'" He would presumably object to Wojcik’s definition on the same grounds. Still, while this argument may be etymologically sound, Zamora’s and Wojcik’s definitions are consonant with some prevailing notions of “the apocalypse.” The term is often used simply to refer to overwhelming devastation, often on a global scale, and often as a result of nuclear war or some other technology-related disaster. Since the Second
World War, and perhaps especially in the past three decades, there have been numerous
" Wojcik 142.
As with schizophrenia, terminology is sometimes an issue in discussion of apocalypticism. Robinson (25) cites a passage from David Ketterer’s New Worlds For Old that recalls Bentall’s dissatisfaction with the term schizophrenia. Ketterer, working from a conviction that the term apocalypse necessarily carries religious resonances, asserts that, “the atomic bomb completed the process of secularization that apocalyptic thinking has undergone since medieval times. Consequently I submit that either the word apocalyptic has lost its meaning entirely and should become obsolete, or, if not, that it can be used coherently only in the sense defined by this book.”
136 “apocalyptic” or “post-apocalyptic” films and books'^. Many of these fall into the “cult” category but many others have found wider currency.
This is not to suggest that millennial apocalyptic discourses have given way to purely secular ones. O’Leary notes that The New York Times recognized premillennialist
Hal Lindsey as the best-selling author of the 1970s, and observes that other millennialists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout the
1980s.'* Millennialism and politics have also frequently coincided. Former Presidential hopeful and premillennialist Pat Robertson’s books on the coming apocalypse are now available in an omnibus edition. And O’Leary and others refer to the use of apocalyptic millennialist rhetoric by former President Reagan and members of his administration to defend policy decisions. Clearly, millennial apocalypticism continues to enjoy popularity. Nonetheless, as Brummett, Zamora, and others have noted, the term
I define a “post-apocalyptic” scenario as one that follows on a catastrophic global event such as a nuclear cataclysm or environmental disaster.
An exhaustive listing would fill pages. Wojcik refers to films like On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, A Boy and His Dog, the various Planet of the Apes and Mad Max films. Judge Dredd, and Waterworld. One could add Terminator, Total Recall, Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, Blade Runner, The Postman, Independence Day, Deep Impact, Armageddon. The various Star Trek films have clear postmillennialist resonances. Recent novels marked by apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic themes include Walter Miller’s Canticle for Liebowitz, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and William Gibson’s “cyberpunk” novels. Some recent television programs likewise have a decidedly apocalyptic tenor. The X-Files and Millennium have already been noted. Paramount Television’s UPN Network will launch in 1998 a new series.Seven Days, about a team of time travelers given the task of retroactively preventing a series of assassinations and attacks that have plunged the world into chaos. Jeanne McDowell, “UPN Goes After the Boys with Bangs and Bucks,” Time, 6 July 1998: 30.
'* O’Leary 7.
137 “apocalypse” has acquired broader applications, indicating that apocalypticism now has a currency that extends beyond its more narrowly defined millennial subsets.'®
Regardless of its religious or secular inflections, one of the chief features of apocalypticism, and apparently one of the necessary conditions for its emergence, is a sense of a breakdown of conventional systems of meaning and order. Brummett, who among others has examined apocalyptic address as a rhetorical strategy, argues that apocalyptic discourse, whether religious or secular, tends to attract people experiencing a sense of anomie, confusion, or isolation, often due to a sense of chaotic and uncontrollable surroundings. For such an audience, Brummett argues, apocalyptic rhetoric imposes order on chaos, or at least offers the reassurance that such chaos is a transitory phase and the harbinger of a decisive event that will restore order and security.
Like Brummett, Ronald Reid suggests that “Apocalypticism has been accepted widely only during periods when substantial munbers of people were dissatisfied deeply with their present and faced an uncertain future.”'^ In regard to the particular appeal of
'® Millennialism itself has sometimes shaken off its religious features. As O’Leary notes, the millennium itself is anticipated as a period of peace and prosperity. In The End o fHistory and The Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the collapse of the USSR presaged an imminent globalization of capitalist democracy, which would lead directly to lasting global prosperity. Couched in secular terms, though informed by Hegelian teleological notions, the book is not precisely millennialist (a liberal interpretation of millenarianism might accommodate it). Yet the title alone has millennialist resonances, and Fukuyama’s projections seem the secular counterpart to O’Leary’s description of conceptions of the millennium “as a time when God’s rule over the earth would be progressively established through missionary activity.”
Ronald Reid, “Apocalypticism and Typology: Rhetorical Dimensions of a Symbolic Reality,” Quarterly Journal o f Speech 69 (1983): 237. O’Leary (10) questions the usefulness of Reid’s assertion, suggesting that “One might ask the critic to point to a time when substantial numbers of people were not deeply dissatisfied with the present, or when the future has not seemed uncertain.” This is a valid point, but even if Reid’s (and Brummett’s) observations are very generally applicable, that does not mean that they are groundless.
138 apocalyptic rhetoric, Brummett, O’Leary, and others observe that it is the perception, not necessarily the fact, of chaos or impending disaster that makes an audience susceptible to apocalyptic discourses. Brummett notes that Ravi Batra’s book predicting an imminent and inevitable economic depression was reissued soon after the 1987 stock market plunge. Brummett suggests that the reissue seemed timed “to exploit. . . a sense of disorder and confusion nationally. For many investors . . . the ‘crash’ signaled a failure of established systems of meaning and a time of confusion and chaos concerning what was happening economically.”'*
Another distinguishing feature of apocalypticism is its dependence on interpretation. Brummett and others note that the rhetorical and persuasive impact of apocalyptic rhetoric springs largely from the fact that it typically consists of revealing what was “obvious” all along. Turning on a mechanism more precisely interpretive than revelatory, apocalypticism usually consists of identifying within existing conditions evidence of an impending disaster and/or prophetic fulfillment. The argument, in short, is that the evidence is there, open for all to see; the apocalyptist simply provides the interpretive key that reveals the significance of the evidence. The apocalyptist’s auditors must share a familiarity of context (an awareness of prophecy or a knowledge of economic principles), but the rhetorical strategy nonetheless amounts to asserting that the fact that upheaval is imminent is clear to anyone who will only read the signs.
Wojcik notes that both secular and religious apocalypticism are characterized by a sense o f fatalism. Wojcik does not use the term in a pejorative sense but more neutrally.
'* Brummett 140.
139 simply to refer to the sense of a fated and thus inevitable catastrophe. Within such a conception, human activity or intervention is generally seen as insignificant in the face of imminent and inevitable cataclysm. Still, this fatalistic sense is not necessarily negative or nihilistic. Wojcik notes that religious and secular apocalypticism differ in the meaningfulness attached to such a catastrophe. Religious apocalyptic beliefs, by virtue of being figured into some divine plan, “affirm that the cosmos is ordered, that evil and suffering will be destroyed, that human existence is meaningfiil, and that a millennial realm of peace and justice ultimately will be created.” On the other hand, most secular attitudes towards apocalyptic cataclysm “lack this sense of meaning and moral order . . .
[and] are devoid of the component of worldly redemption and therefore tend to be characterized by a sense of hopelessness and despair.”” Hence, while both religious and secular apocalypticism imply a fatalist worldview, they offer, respectively, optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on this worldview.*®
This sense of fatalism is related to the concept of “locus of control,” which
Wojcik uses to characterize both religious and secular apocalyptic beliefs. This concept is “used by psychologists to study the sense of control that individuals feel over their environments.. . . [and] to identify the ways that people interpret events, as either determined and controlled by one’s own efforts ('internal locus of control’) or externally
19 Wojcik 4.
See also O’Leary’s distinction between comic and tragic “frames of acceptance” (borrowed from Kenneth Burke) of apocalypse (200-201).
140 determined by forces outside of oneself (‘external locus of control’).”^' Wojcik argues that both religious and secular apocalyptic beliefs, because o f their fatalistic dimension, are generally marked by a sense of an external locus of control. Whether regarded in millenarian terms as a period of tribulation prior to a revitalization of the world in accordance with a divine plan, or in secular terms as a meaningless cataclysm brought on by irreversible human ignorance, error, or corruption, the concept of apocalypse tends to place individuals in a helpless position in which events are visited upon them by some external source.-
In any event, the fatalistic tendency of apocalyptic thought and the notion of an
“external locus of control” inform many of the works already examined in this study, as well as the theoretical writings that have been offered as a context in which to view them.
The work o f several media theorists discussed in this study, including Postman,
Baudrillard, and Marc, reveals a fatalistic sense that consumers of mass media are manipulated by forces beyond their control, or perhaps even comprehension. Likewise, while Csikszentmihalyi does not use the specific term “locus of control,” the concept is central to his notion of psychological flow. For Csikszentmihalyi, the sense of personally-directed meaningfulness and control that characterizes the flow state depends on an internal locus of control. Further, his concern over the influences of external loci of control surfaces in his statement that “If we have become so dependent on television, on
Wojcik 134-135.
^ This description might with slight modification be applied to melodrama, which as McConachie observes has often assumed apocalyptic dimensions. Some of the works described in this study carry melodramatic qualities.
141 drugs, and on facile calls to political or religious salvation, it is because we have so little to fall back on, so few internal rules to keep our mind from being taken over by those who claim to have the answers.”^ Schizophrenia is also frequently characterized by a sense of an external locus of control, though as Sass notes, schizophrenics may vacillate between a sense of absolute powerlessness and one of absolute powerfulness.
As the field of apocalypticism has expanded to accommodate secular inflections, its features have been identified in several areas of thought and discourse. Richard
Hofstadter has argued for the connection between apocalypticism and conspiracy theories.*"* Alien abduction theories likewise resonate with apocalyptic themes, as suggested for instance by Carl Sagan in his The Demon-Haunted World.^ Wojcik also argues that through the second half of the twentieth century, “beliefs about UFOs and extraterrestrials have been characterized by expectations of imminent worldly destruction and salvation by superhuman beings, and these apocalyptic themes have been increasingly emphasized as the year 2000 approaches.”^ One might also argue that alarmist theories concerning the effects of media, as advanced for example by Baudrillard and Postman, reveal apocalyptic sensibilities.
23 Csikszentmihalyi 128.
Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965): 3-40.
^ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Random House, 1995).
“ Wojcik 10.
142 Of course, if the notion of apocalypticism is applied indiscriminately, the concept loses much of its precision. Nonetheless, and as will be suggested in the following pages, conspiracy theories, beliefs about UFOs and ETs, and concerns over media saturation all partake of the chief distinguishing features of apocalypticism. All assume a sense of some external controlling force, and all involve a sense of chaotic breakdown of systems of meaning. Furthermore, each turns on an interpretive process that purports to explain the meaning and significance of the chaos.
This survey of the features of apocalypticism and its narrower, though common, millennialist inflections reveals some shared features. Apocalypticism surfaces largely in response to a perception of chaos or the breakdown of received systems of meaning.
Within apocalyptic thought and discourse, such chaos and breakdowns are perceived as harbingers of some vast, imminent upheaval, perhaps on a global scale. Apocalypticism commonly entails some revelation of the causes and implications of these chaotic events.
And, while apocalypticism in general will accommodate concerns and explanations of a secular nature, millennialism is preoccupied with religious and cosmological issues.
Regardless of whether the apocalypse is conceived in secular or religious terms, however, and regardless o f whether some hope for salvation is held out, a precondition for apocalyptic thought appears to be a sense of confusion, isolation, or anomie in the face of chaotic and uncontrollable events.
143 Apocalyptic Resonances in Contemporary Drama Section I: Marisol
The tendency towards apocalypticism, in both its millennialist and simple
“cataclysmic” forms is clearly reflected in much recent drama and performance. Aside from the works addressed in this and preyious chapters, there are other examples. The most highly yisible example in recent years is unquestionably Tony Kushner’s Angels in
America, but other writers, including Heiner Müller, Caryl Churchill, Kathy Acker, and
Mac Wellman haye addressed apocalyptic concerns in their works. In the following section, 1 examine Marisol, a recent work by José Riyera with distinct millennialist characteristics. Following this examination, 1 return to the other works already addressed in this study and examine the different apocalyptic and millennialist resonances in each.
José Rivera’s Marisol, which premiered in 1992 at the Actors Theatre of
Louisville, depicts an apocalyptic scenario that carries most of the features of premillennialism. The play offers no suggestion of a second coming, but nonetheless ends with an indication of the dawning of a new millennium conceived of in more than calendrical terms. Throughout the play, various apocalyptic motifs emerge, ranging from regular references to consumption by fire to a perception of a breakdown of established sociological, technological, and even cosmological orders.
As the play opens, Marisol Perez is riding the subway home to the Bronx. The audience can see, though Marisol cannot, that she is being watched by her Guardian
Angel, a ’’'‘young black woman in ripped jeans, sneakers, and black T-shirt. Crude silver
144 wings hang limply from the back o f the Angel's diamond studded black leather jacket."^^
Soon after the scene begins, Marisol is confronted by The Man With Golf Club. Golf
Club tells Marisol that he was visited by his guardian angel the night before. He explains the gravity of the situation and realizes that Marisol, who does not understand him, is in the same trouble:
GOLF CLUB: [The Angel] creeped into my box last night. .. waking me up with the shock, the bad news that she was gonna leave me forever ...
MARISOL (Getting freaked)-. Man, why don’t you just get a job?!
GOLF CLUB: Don’t you see? She once stopped Nazi skinheads from setting me on fire in Van Cortlandt Park! Do you get it now, lady?! I live on the street! I am dead meat without my guardian angel! I’m gonna be fo o d ... a fucking appetizer for all the Hitler youth and their cans of gasoline .. .
(The Man lunges at Marisol and rips the newspaper from her. She's on her feet, ready for a fight.)
MARISOL (T0 God)'. Okay, God! Kill him now! Take him out!
GOLF CLUB (Truly worried): That means you don’t have any protection either. Yoiu- guardian angel is gonna leave you too. That means, in the next four or five seconds, I could change the entire course of your life.. . . (7)
Golf Club attacks Marisol but her Guardian Angel intervenes, allowing Marisol to escape and make it home. In Scene Four, after again saving Marisol by turning a would- be attacker into salt, the Angel appears to Marisol in a dream and tells her that she is abandoning her role as Marisol’s protector. The Angel tells Marisol that “The universal body is sick.. . . [T]he infected earth is running a temperature, and everywhere the
José Rivera,Marisol, in Marisol and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997): 5. Subsequent passages will be cited parenthetically, using page numbers only.
145 universal mind is wracked with amnesia, boredom, and neurotic obsessions.” The Angel also reveals the reasons behind the collapse: “God is old and dying and taking the rest of us with Him” (15). And she explains that she called a meeting in which she
urged the Heavenly Hierarchies—the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Archangels and Angels—to vote to stop the universal ruin . . . by slaughtering our senile God. And they did. Listen well, Marisol: angels are going to kill the King of Heaven and restore the vitality of the universe with His blood. And I’m going to lead them. (16)
The next day, at the Manhattan publishing house where she works, Marisol’s coworker June shows her a newspaper article about a Marisol Perez who was murdered the night before. This Marisol, who was the same age and lived on the same street as
Marisol, was beaten to death on the subway by a man with a golf club. Marisol is upset but reassures June that it was another Marisol Perez.** Through the rest of the first act,
Marisol goes to June’s home and meets June’s brother Lenny, a deeply troubled man obsessed with Marisol. June, tired of caring for Lenny, kicks him out and asks Marisol to move in. Marisol agrees and goes home to pack. Lenny returns to the apartment and beats June with a golf club. He then goes to Marisol’s apartment and tells Marisol what happened and that June is wandering the streets. Lenny attacks Marisol, who smashes him with the golf club and flees into the street. As the act ends, she looks up and sees the
^* Sass (17), describing the “sheer strangeness o f ... schizophrenic experiences .. . with their uncanny mutation of all normal relationships between self and world,” refers to the “seeming nonsensicality, the logical impossibility, of the following passage from the diary of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown in his late twenties: ‘Once I went for a walk and it seemed to me that I saw some blood on the snow. I followed the traces of the blood and sensed that somebody who was still alive had been killed.’”
146 Angel dressed in ""regulation military fatigues, complete with face camouflage and medals. She looks like a soldier about to go into battle. The Uzi is strapped to her back^'
(39). The Angel has removed her silver wings of peace, which she drops to the street.
Marisol picks them up and asks, “War?” The wings dissolve in Marisol’s hands as the act ends.
As Act Two begins, Marisol is rediscovered on stage exactly where she was at the end of Act One. There is now a "weird difference” about the surroundings that Marisol notices. Rivera’s description of the set introduces a post-apocalyptic scenario that informs the entire second act.
The entire set now consists o f the brick wall and a huge surreal street that covers the entire stage. .. . On this street, reality has been altered. . . . We see a metal trash bin, overflowing with trash, and a fire hydrant covered in rosaries. There are several large mounds o f rags on stage; underneath each mound is a sleeping homeless person. (41)
Disoriented, Marisol spends much o f the act trying to get her bearings. Many familiar landmarks are gone and those that Marisol can see, such as The Empire State
Building, are not where she thinks they should be. She encounters Woman With Furs, who says she was picked up and tortured by the Citibank police for exceeding her credit limit.’’ Marisol also encounters Man With Scar Tissue, who says that he was an air traffic controller but had to quit when angels began appearing on his control screen. He ended up on the street and was set afire by skinheads in Van Cortlandt Park. She finally meets Lenny, who is now pregnant with what he claims is Marisol’s child. He offers her
The character is eerily familiar; it is as though Rachel from Reckless, albeit a bit sawier, has stumbled into Marisol’s world.
147 an apple that he says came from the planet’s sole surviving apple tree in the Pentagon, but on biting into it Marisol discovers that it is pure salt. Lenny gives birth to a still-born child which he buries under the sidewalk at the base of a fire hydrant in a tiny wooden box he finds there:
The city provides these coffins. . . . The city knows how we live.. . . These are babies bom on the street. Little girls of the twilight hours who never felt warm blankets around their bodies. Never drank their mothers’ holy milk. Little boys bom with coke in their blood. This is where babies who die on the street are taken to rest. You never heard of it? (61)
A Skinhead who earlier in the act had set fire to a homeless person on the stage reappears and pours gasoline over Marisol and Lenny. Marisol sees that the Skinhead is
June, who says that she “started out burning hobos and ended up torching half the city!
. . . It’s fire on a massive scale! Buildings all melted down! Consumed! Ashes of those evaporated dreams are all over the fucking place!” (63, 64). June has heard that the water in Central Park Reservoir is salty because angels, transformed into salt when they die, are falling into it. June finally recognizes Marisol, who tells her and Lenny that they are going to find and fight alongside the angels.
Woman With Furs enters with an Uzi and says, “Sorry, Marisol. We don’t need revolution here. We can’t have upheaval at the drop of a hat” (66). She shoots Marisol, who falls. After a blackout, Marisol reappears, standing in her own light. She says, “I’m killed instantly.. . . My soul surges up the oceans of the Milky Way at the speed of light.
At the moment of death I see the invisible war” (67). The rebel angels are in retreat, she says, and it seems that the revolution is doomed. As she says this, a homeless person is
148 revealed upstage, ‘‘‘^angrily throwing rocks at the sky. The homeless person is joined by
Lenny and June” (68). Marisol continues:
. . . then, as if one body, one mind, the innocent of the earth take to the streets with anything they can find—rocks, sticks, screams—and aim their displeasure at the senile sky and fire into the tattered wind on the side of the angels . . . billions of poor, of homeless, of peaceful, of silent, of angry . . . fighting and fighting as no species has ever fought before. Inspired by the earthly noise, the rebels advance!
(A small moon appears in the sky, far, fa r away.)
New ideas rip the Heavens. New powers are created. New miracles are signed into law. It’s the first day of the new history . . .
(There's a few seconds of tremendous noise as the war hits its climax. Then silence. The Angel appears next to Marisol, wingless, unarmed, holding the gold crown in her hands. The Angel holds the crown out to the audience as Marisol looks at her.)
Oh God. What light. What possibilities. What hope.
(The Angel kisses Marisol. Bright, bright light begins to shine directly into the audience's eyes~for several seconds~and Marisol, the Angel, June, Lenny, and the homeless people seem to be turned into light. Then, all seem to disappear in the wild light o f the new millennium—blackout.) (68)
Marisol illustrates most of the features of apocalypticism and millennialism described in the passages above. This of course is self-evident: the play is about the
“apocalypse” and the dawning of a new millennimn. Yet the play contains numerous references to a perception of chaos, a breakdown of established systems of meaning, and a sense of imminent cataclysm, all of which have been identified as key features of apocalyptic anxieties. Rivera has said that “There’s a feeling that people have lost their way, that the basic rules of civilization have been suppressed. The millennium has a big
149 role in that.”^° Throughout the play, various characters express concern over the inexplicable events that surround them, fearing that they are harbingers of some inexplicable but imminent catastrophe. During her dream, Marisol says to the Angel,
What's going on here, anyway? Why is there a war on children in this city? Why are apples extinct? Why are they planning to drop human insecticide on overpopulated areas of the Bronx? Why has the color blue disappeared from the sky? Why does common rainwater turn your skin bright red? Why do cows give salty milk? Why did the Plague kill half my friends? AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MOON? Where did the moon go? How come nobody’s seen it in nearly nine months . . . ? (14)
Other characters express similar concerns. A Radio Announcer reports that the
“president’s psychics” believe that the moon has drifted off to Satum and that the
Pentagon is working on a plan to tow it back (18). June says to Marisol, “There’s a prevailing sickness out there. I’m telling you, the Dark Ages are here, Visigoths are climbing the city walls, and I’ve never felt more like raw food in my life” (20).
There is throughout the play an ironic and sometimes humorous self- consciousness about the chaotic events. Jime says that she thinks Marisol’s dream is like the moon’s disappearance: “It’s all a lot of premillennium jitters. I’ve never seen so much nervousness. It’s still up there but paranoia has clouded our view.” Marisol coimters, “I don’t think the moon’s disappearance is psychological. It’s like the universe is senile, Jime. Like we’re at the part of history where everything breaks down. Do you smell smoke?” What follows is indicative of some of the wry humor directed toward the situation:
Karen Pricker, “Another Playwright Confronts an Angel and the Apocalypse,” The New York Times, 16 May 1993: Bl.
150 JUNE: Wait! It’s nine-thirty! They’re expecting the smoke from that massive fire in Ohio to reach New York by nine-thirty.
(June and Marisol look out the window. The lights go darker and darker.)
Jesus! Those are a million trees burning!
(June and Marisol calmly watch the spectacle.)
Christ, you can smell the polyester. . . the burnt malls . . . the defaulted loans . . . the unemployment. . . the flat vowels . . .
(Lights begin to go up. Marisol and June stand at the window and watch the black smoke begin to drift toward Europe. Silence. They look at each other. The whole thing suddenly strikes them as absurd—they laugh.) (22)
Such wry humor turns up even in the more desolate surroundings of Act Two. Man With
Scar Tissue tells Marisol that the world is upside down: “Word on the street is, water no longer seeks its own level, there are fourteen inches to the foot, six days in the week, seven planets in the solar system, and the French are polite ..(53).
Such humor undercuts some of the gravity of the events depicted, but the play nonetheless depicts a world askew. The characters are buffeted by forces beyond their control. The reasons for the upheaval range from the sociological and technological to the cosmological. The Radio Announcer reports in Act One that cows may be giving salty milk because the grass is contaminated (18), but by Act Two, when Marisol complains that the apple Lenny gave her is all salt, he responds, “There isn’t a single food group in the world that isn’t pure salt anymore! Where the fuck have you been?!” (58).
Man With Scar Tissue was set afire by Nazi skinheads in Van Cortlandt Park, but the source of his troubles is not only sociological. Like Marisol, he was visited by a guardian angel who told him she was deserting him. As indicated in the passage above, he senses
151 that all familiar systems of meaning are unraveling. And the second act contains moments when ‘‘‘’odd streaking lights rake the skÿ' and the sounds of distant explosions
{^‘bombs, heavy artillery') can be heard, as the war in heaven escalates (54, 55).
Other apocalyptic motifs surface in Marisol, including regular references to consumption by fire. The massive fire of a million trees burning in Ohio is one example.
The frequent references to skinheads setting fire to homeless people is another.
June/Skinhead describes how she started torching hobos and ended up burning down much of the city. The devastation is also reinforced through frequent references to things and people being reduced to salt. There are even fleeting references to conspiratorial organizations. In Act One, June and Marisol wonder aloud about the dark building across the street, and Lenny informs them that it is a torture center for people who exceed their credit limits. June chalks this up to Lenny’s paranoid delusions but in Act Two Woman
With Furs claims to have been tortured at such a center after being picked up by the
Citibank police.
It is hazardous to suggest that Marisol is entirely about some approaching apocalypse. The play is very much occupied with immediate social concerns and offers some suggestion that the apocalypse has already happened and the tribulations already here. Tina Landau notes that the term “magic realism” is commonly applied to Rivera’s works.^' Given this description, which seems apt in regard to Marisol, both the apocalyptic and millennial features of the play assume a metaphorical dimension as
^‘Tina Landau, foreword, Marisol and Other Plays, by José Rivera (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997): x.
152 contemporary political issues regarding class, race, and sex are played out against a fantastic post-apocalyptic scenario. The play is marked by biting social commentary and is thus more about the present than some imagined future.
Still, the apocalyptic tones are very real, as suggested by Lenny’s observation that the city knows how the homeless live, and by the brutalized living conditions represented even in the first act, before the “apocalypse.” At points, the catastrophic character of the play is actually reinforced, rather than undercut, by humor. Rivera works in some ironic humor early on, and through juxtaposition indicates the severity of the problems that his play addresses. Golf Club tells Marisol that the Angel had crawled into the box he occupied in the Bronx: “I was sleeping: nothing special walking through my thoughts
‘cept the usual panic over my empty stomach, and the windchill factor, and how, oh how, was I ever gonna replace my lost Citibank MasterCard?” (7).
Responses to Marisol have been mixed. Some reviewers have responded positively to what they perceive as a fresh and innovative work. Others have found both the politics and the aesthetics shopworn. “Apocalyptic” is understandably one of the most common words used by reviewers, some of whom describe Marisol as illustrative of a larger trend. Of the 1996 Alley Theatre production, Everett Evans wrote, “Despite flaws—and provided you don’t feel you’ve visited this apocalyptic territory once too often—Marisol conjure up a distinctive and gripping vision of urban hell.”^^ Jackie
Campbell, reviewing the 1995 Denver Center production, commented, “The angel motif
Everett Evans, “‘Marisol’ Offers Vision of Urban Hell,”The Houston Chronicle, 2 March 1996: Houston 1.
153 is everywhere you look these days, including, increasingly, theater stages. In addition to angels, an armageddon syndrome seems to afflict many contemporary playwrights.””
The disjointed structure of the play has invited quite a lot of commentary, suggesting that while Marisol is not as overtly televisual in its form as is Formicans it nonetheless produces a similar effect through frequent scene changes coupled with random shifts in events. David Richards, who reviewed the 1993 New York Public
Theatre production said that Rivera “seems a latter-day embodiment of the Absurdists of the 1950's and 60's . . . who literally turned the world topsy-turvy in their works, cast logic to the dogs and depicted humanity as a collection of raving madmen or empty- headed puppets dangling on strings.”” Jan Stuart found the conclusion of the 1992
Humana Festival production unsatisfying “less for its utter bleakness than for the ways in which Rivera wreaks havoc with his own anarchic system of dramatic logic.’”^ The televisual features of the play are further suggested by Aime Marie Welsh, who reviewed the 1992 La Jolla Playhouse production and wrote that Marisol “reads like ‘Paradise
Lost’ rewritten by Ionesco and dished up on ‘Saturday Night Live.’””
” Jackie Campbell, “‘Marisol’ Succeeds Artistically, But Fails Philosophically,” Rocky Mountain News, 1 May 1995: A64
” David Richards, “Good Breeding Can Be the Death of You.” The New York Times, 30 May 1993: B5.
Jan Stuart, “A Bronx Apocalypse,” Newsday, 24 March 1992: 51.
” Anne Marie Welsh, “‘Marisol’ Playwright creates his own reality,” San Diego Union- Tribune, 15 September 1992: Dl. Along with Overmyer, Rivera is one of the playwrights who also write for television mentioned in Cavander, “The Art and Craft of Jumping Fences.”
154 Reactions to the choppiness of the plot have sometimes accompanied descriptions of the work as hallucinatory, suggesting a schizophreniform quality to the piece. Ernest
Tucker, writing on the Equity Library Theatre’s production in Chicago, called the plot
“hallucinatory and totally bizarre.”^’ Richard Christiansen felt that this production failed to achieve a “consistent hallucinatory style” that would have been fitting for the play’s
“freewheeling fantasy.”’* The schizophrenic associations are explicit in Lloyd Rose’s review of the Potomac Theatre Project production: “There are two kinds of people in this play; Bad People, who are easy to spot because they carry briefcases; and Good People, who are all schizophrenic and homeless.”*’
Marisol diverges from traditional conceptions of the apocalypse in one chief regard. As the ending of the play indicates, the fatalism that Wojcik lists as a feature of apocalypticism is finally undercut. Human intervention, first by a single homeless person throwing rocks at the heavens, and then by the collective actions of the “innocent of the earth” inspires the rebel angels to advance towards victory. As suggested, the play functions more as social critique than as an effort to stage traditional notions of
*’ Ernest Tucker, “‘Marisol’ Wages Battle for Our Souls,” Chicago Sun-Times, 5 August 1994: 835.
** Richard Christiansen, “‘Marisol’ Has Rapid Start, But Turns Far Too Serious,” Chicago Tribune, 10 August 1994: News 20. Other reviewers have termed the play hallucinatory. See Malcolm L. Johnson, “Play Goes Nowhere Fast and Furiously,” Hartford Courant, 1 March 1993: A9; Jerome Weeks, “Heavenly Armies Mount Revolution in ‘Marisol,’”Dallas Morning News, 13 May 1994: A3 3.
*’ Lloyd Rose, “Stage Far Left: ‘Marisol’: Potomac Theatre’s Apocalypse Now,” The Washington Post, 17 January 1995: C8. Rose also refers to some characters as “sanctified psychotics.” The review is largely an ad hominem broadside against leftist politics.
155 millennial apocalypse. A rather figurative treatment of both apocalypse and the millennium allow for the depiction of efficacious human action in the face of tribulation.
Despite this deviation, Marisol is still the most overtly “apocalyptic” of the works addressed throughout this study. Yet as the following section shows, similar themes surface in all of the works discussed in previous chapters.
Apocalvptic Resonances in Contemporarv Drama Section II
Many of the works considered in previous chapters resonate with clear and firequently explicit apocalyptic and/or millennialist concerns."*” As in Marisol, one of the more common motifs is destruction by fire. Beyond the rather mundane example fi’om
Perpetuity, in which Dennis and Christine light bowls of matches signifying things and people they hate, a preoccupation with consumption by fire appears in many of the works discussed in previous chapters. Late in 1000 Airplanes, M describes a vast cloud of smoke over New York;
There is a grey cloud hanging over New York. And flakes, tiny particles, illuminated by the rising sun, glowing as they fall. It looks like the earth has fallen into nuclear winter. A radio voice blares fi’om someone’s window 7:15 A.M. The pavement is intact, steps beneath me, solid.
■*” Binelli, evokingAngels in America, says of Formicans, “As for the play’s fantasy and comedy, its meditation on our fragmented society, its overweening sense of doom, building to an apocalyptic climax ... sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?” Binelli finds Formicans “the more solid, and original, piece of work” and states that Congdon “spotlights the absurdity, uncertainty and desperation of life as that millennium approaches.” Of Perpetuity, Koehler (“‘Perpetuity’”) writes, “Overmyer is working in novelist Thomas Pynchon’s nocturnal zone of paranoia-as-virus and deliberately flat characters, where the worst apocalyptic horrors are perhaps not made manifest, but that doesn’t mean they’re not coming.”
156 Knock, knock. The radio says fires have broken out all over West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, winds have blown the ashes thousands of miles to New York. 7:15 A.M. I head off for work. (51)
In Formicans, Cathy and Evelyn, standing on a hill overlooking Formican, watch a microcosm of suburban American culture erupt into a fiery furnace:
CATHY: Look! It’s Elvis Presley flying overhead!
EVELYN: Yeah. He’s really burning.
CATHY: Uh-oh.
EVELYN: He’ll catch those shake shingles—they’ll go iikc—{Snaps her fingers)--xhdl.
CATHY: They should’ve used fake ones like Denny’s.
EVELYN: Is that the Pizza Hut that just went up?
CATHY: No, Mom, that's the somethingorother church.
EVELYN: Too near the mall. Big mistake.
CATHY: (Just noticing): The dumpster at Roy Rogers! Look, it’s caught the roof!
EVELYN: There goes the Flea Market! Those booths go up fast.
CATHY: The wind is carrying it. Look! All the recliners are smoldering.
EVELYN: It’s getting very close—They won’t be able to keep it out. They won’t be able to keep it out. Look at the sparks—
CATHY: Down the air conditioning vents.
EVELYN: Only a matter of time.
CATHY: Flaming gas running into the redwood flower boxes.
EVELYN: It’s surrounded.
157 CATHY; It’s glowing from the inside. It went up so fast.
EVELYN: The mall is burning.
CATHY: The mall is burning. (76-77)
Other motifs associated with apocalyptic thought surface in several of the works discussed. As noted, conspiracy theories are commonly linked with apocalypticism.
Conspiracy theories are a form of unveiling that reveals a hitherto obscured truth. That
Truth” reveals a pattern to seemingly disconnected events, offering an explanation for their occurrence. Customarily, this pattern is conceived on a broad, even global, scale.
In In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe, Lyle Vial’s pursuit of the provenance of the chain letter suggests a search for a transcendent consciousness behind that letter, though the appearance of the Joculatrix explodes the very notion of such an omniscient and authoritative source of knowledge. More centrally, Mr. Ampersand Qwerty’s conspiracy theories carry two of the chief features of apocalyptic thought. Qwerty’s books contain revelations of hitherto concealed “truths” that can be deciphered through an interpretation of otherwise chaotic events. Further, these truths, such as the machinations of the Zionist Occupation Government and the resurgence of a pervasive
“Yellow Peril,” signal imminent social upheaval with cataclysmic, if vaguely-defined, consequences. Similarly, Buster, who believes, among other things, that D. B. Cooper is
Idi Amin’s bowling coach, is confident that apparently disconnected events are bound up in some grand unifying plan, though she never declares exactly what or who is the architect of that plan.
158 Likewise, in Formicans, Jerry finds significance in the coincidences between certain major historical events:
Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Kennedy was elected president in 1960. Both men were involved in civil rights for Negroes. Both men were assassinated, on a Friday, in the presence of their wives. Each wife had lost a baby, a male child in fact, while they were living at the White House. Both men had a bullet wound that entered the head &om behind. Both men were succeeded by vice-presidents named Johnson who were southern democrats and former senators. Both Johnsons were bom one hundred years apart—in 1808 and 1908 respectively. Lincoln was killed in Ford’s Theatre. Kennedy was killed while riding in a Lincoln convertible made by the Ford Motor Company. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald were bom in 1839 and 1939, respectively, and had the same number of letters in their names. The first name of Lincoln’s private secretary was John—the last name of Kennedy’s private secretary was Lincoln. (38-39)
Something or someone is pulling the strings, whether the government or aliens. As noted in an earlier chapter, Jerry also finds a sympathetic ear in Evelyn, who comes to share his anxiety over the manipulative function of the mass media. Though certainly less pronounced, a similar tendency barely emerges in Reckless. Rachel asserts that things just happen, and seems justified in doing so, as all the things that happen to her seem unorganized random events. By the end of the play, however, a contradictory picture emerges, as all the events in Rachel’s life are revealed as uncannily related.
This obsessive tendency to search for an overarching scheme behind apparently disconnected events is common not only to apocalypticism in general, but also to paranoid schizophrenia. Bleuler and others have reported that a chief characteristic of paranoid schizophrenia is a tendency to interpret events so as to find causal connections
159 between seemingly unconnected details. Sass defines this as the “apophanous mood,” “a certain abnormal awareness of meaningfulness or of significance,” in which
no object or occurrence can seem accidental; everything is ‘just so.’ That something happened the way it did—the fact that a person in one’s vicinity coughed three times, for instance—will seem not a random event but somehow necessary, and perhaps deeply significant, even though one would have had this same experience if the event had happened in some other way (if, for example, there had been one or two or four coughs).^'
This obsessional interpretation may take on grand, even cosmological proportions. Karl
Jaspers notes a patient who devised a numerical system for interpreting surrounding events: “Newspaper accounts of deaths, accidents, etc., were an occasion for him to prove that they had to happen. He devised combinations of figures from the names, circumstances, etc., which he said showed that what the papers reported as accident had in fact been inevitable.”^"
This is not the only point at which apocalypticism and schizophrenia intersect.
Sass notes that one feature of schizophrenic experiences of the world is “the nearly indescribable ‘world catastrophe,’ the fantastical experience in which the entire universe seems to have been, or to be about to be, destroyed. External reality seems to die, to collapse into utter chaos, or to lose all substance and be transformed into passing
Sass 52. This sense of meaningfulness does not always produce precise knowledge of what things really mean. Sass (53): “‘Every single thing “means” something,’ said one patient of this mood of ‘delusional tension.’ ‘This kind of symbolic thinking is exhausting.. .. I have a sense that everything is more vivid and important.... There is a connection to everything that happens—no coincidences.’ So freighted with the presence of meaning, yet simultaneously so devoid of any particular, specifiable meaning, the symbols experienced during the Apophany might be called ‘symbol symbols,’ for the sole referent of these ubiquitous semiotic pointers seems to be the sheer presence of meaningfulness itself.”
Jaspers 296-297.
160 images.”^^ This schizophrenic sense o f world catastrophe seems devoid of any clearly interpretive foundation to support it and thus cannot be said to be millennialist or precisely apocalyptic. Even those apocalyptic worldviews that do not assume some divine or transcendent plan are yet based on explication of evidence. In short, apocalyptic notions follow a certain logic that cannot be precisely identified in the schizophrenic sense of catastrophe. Still, the overwhelming sense of imminent and unavoidable disaster suggests that the structures of feeling of apocalypticism and schizophrenia share some features, though the schizophrenic “structure” is of a more amorphous sort. Max
Loppert’s review of 1000 Airplanes at Sadler’s Wells illustrates how apocalyptic dread combines with schizophreniform paranoia. Loppert described the work as “a string of doomsday-type sci-fi cliches joined up end to end, a combination of confessional psychobabble and classic New York City paranoid fantasy.”^
It should be noted that while both Formicans and Perpetuity contain references to conspiratorial influences with distinct apocalyptic intimations of impending upheaval, this sensibility is often treated in a humorous and ironic fashion. In Formicans, there is a clear sense of detached bemusement, as the events are depicted as a retrospective presentation by extraterrestrial anthropologists. In Perpetuity, Dennis, Christine, and
Maria Montage maintain a skeptical regard toward the conspiratorial narratives that
Sass 271. See also 300-323. As with the previous footnoted material (n. 41), there is in this description something faintly reminiscent the notion of “simulacra,” as applied for instance by Baudrillard to media representation. For further illustrations of the schizophrenic apprehension of impending catastrophe, see Jaspers 294-296.
^ Max Loppert, ‘“ 1000 Airplanes on the Roof,’” The Financial Times of London, 25 October 1989:123.
161 Qwerty dishes up in his books. Qwerty himself takes his own theories with several grains of salt, apparently regarding them simply as an effective means of selling books to gullible readers:
MR. AMPERSAND QWERTY: We want something which will ignite the imagination. The popular imagination.
CHRISTINE: Yellow Emperor: The New Dr. Fu Manchu.
MR. AMPERSAND QWERTY: Brilliant, Miss Penderecki. Brilliant. Genius stroke. We knew you were the ghostwriter for us.
CHRISTINE: A fairy tale. Czar of new Indo-Chinese Mafia. Murder, drugs, gun-running. It’s a potboiler.
MR. AMPERSAND QWERTY: And how brilliant of you to rescue the Yellow Peril from the trash heap of fiction fashion. A coup.
CHRISTINE: It’ll never fly.
MR. AMPERSAND QWERTY: America’s ready for it. America’s in the m ood.. . . (40-41)
Still, most of the characters within the two plays express some concern over the chaotic nature of their surroimdings and often experience some anxiety regarding their futures.
Several struggle to find some pattern in the chaos around them. Furthermore, even though such attitudes are often depicted ironically, their mere presence as central issues indicates an attempt to capture some sense of their significance.
As noted above, the proliferation of reports of UFO sightings and alien abductions have also been linked with apocalypticism. According to Wojcik, beliefs about UFOs and extraterrestrial beings (ETs) “often reflect apocalyptic anxieties and millennial yearnings, asserting that extraterrestrial entities will play a role in the destruction.
162 transformation, salvation, or destiny of the world.”^* Accounts of UFOs and ETs vary widely in their content but commonly partake of apocalyptic anxieties or expectations.
Further, UFO lore often intersects with conspiracy theories, as government or military agencies are figured as being engaged in a conspiracy of silence to conceal, eliminate, or distort evidence about the existence of ETs and alien spacecraft.^ Certainly Tales o f the
Lost Formicans exhibits all of these tendencies, albeit with a marked sense of irony.
1000 Airplanes also couples apocalyptic and millenarian hopes and fears with beliefs about alien visitation and abduction.
The Medium likewise reveals apocalyptic and millennial resonances. As noted, the perception of a breakdown of received systems of meaning, common to schizophrenic experience, is also a chief feature of apocalypticism. Also, if millenarianism is occupied with the beginnings and ends of eras, the entire piece can be said to exhibit millenarian sensibilities, as it traces some of the presumed revolutionary effects of media saturation on individuals and societies. One might note that the writings of the real McLuhan occasionally exhibit a secular inflection of postmillennial attitudes towards history.
McLuhan's notion of a global village was not conceived of in religious terms, but its sociological dimensions reflect religious projections of millennial expectations. Finally,
Wojcik 175. See also Sagan, passim, who argues that reports of alien abductions are the twentieth-century equivalent of medieval accounts of demonic possession.
^ “The truth is out there" is the signature line for the popular television program The X-Files, which occasionally deals with UFOs and ETs in conjunction with stories of governmental or military conspiracies of silence. The program Millennium has not, in my experience, dealt with UFOs or ETs, but traffics in millennial and apocalyptic themes. Millennium also includes references to a “Millennium Group” which has the characteristics of a conspiratorial organization. The program's central figure, Frank, also has quasi-prophetic clairvoyant abilities.
163 the performance piece, with its scattershot delivery of words and images, suggests a sensibility informed as much by the likes of Baudrillard and Postman as McLuhan.
Stephen Watt has identified an apocalyptic tenor in Baudrillard’s assessments of mass media/’ Postman demonstrates similar tendencies. To judge by The Medium, the optimistic millenarian projections of McLuhan have to some degree given way to a more ambivalent or negative regard for the mass media that occupies the region of pessimistic secular apocalypticism to which both Zamora and Wojcik refer.
Robert Wilson’s w ork demonstrates a problematic relationship toward apocalypticism. Birringer and others find in Wilson’s works not only an apolitical but also an ahistorical dimension. This would seem to remove Wilson firom the field of apocalyptic-themed work. The very notion of apocalypse, after all, depends on a preexisting conception of historical progression that the apocalypse would rupture. On the other hand, both the apocalypse and the millennium occupy a position outside of or beyond “normal” history."'^ Thus the ahistorical quality of Wilson’s performances may actually align those works with an apocalyptic sensibility. Veronica Hollinger’s description of Einstein on the Beach suggests the difficulty of the relationship: “In
Einstein on the Beach. Wilson stages the apocalypse as postmodern spectacle; the beach of the title is the terminal beach of the nuclear age. For all its recognition of our situation
Stephen Watt, “Baudrillard’s America (And Ours?): Image, Virus, Catastrophe,” Modernity and Mass Culture, James Naremore and Patrick Brantiinger, eds. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991) 135-157.
Thus Fukuyama titles his book The End of History, suggesting that histoiy ceases when the dialectical movement is completed.
164 within technology. howe\ or. Einstein on the Beach avoids any real engagement with history.”^’
Certainly some critics and reviewers have found Wilson’s vision fundamentally apocalyptic in nature. Frank Rich has referred to Wilson as “apocalypse-minded,” and has described The Golden Windows and Deajman Glance in apocalyptic terms.*” Eugene
Ionesco said of Deafman (hat "the whole of existence has been condensed here into four hours which bring us to an apocalyptic end.”*' Hedy Weiss refers to Ionesco as a direct influence on Wilson’s work, and simultaneously indicates the connection between
Wilson’s work and television culture:
The direct influence of Ionesco and his fellow absurdists can be seen in the work of sc\ eral generations of artists—from Harold Pinter and Edward Albee to Robert Wilson, John Guare, David Mamet and David Lynch (‘Twin Peaks'). And by extension, these playwrights set the discombohulating tone for everything from the Who’s ‘Tommy’ to the deconstructed universe of MTV.*^
Arthur Holmberg refers to the apocalyptic conclusion of Wilson’s production of
Euripides’ Alcestis at the American Repertory Theatre: “Admetus wanders off alone in a lunar landscape. Red lights flood the stage, and the industrial city in the back explodes.
Laser beams sear through the mountain that crumbles into an avalanche. The audience
49 Hollinger 193.
*” Frank Rich, “W ilsonGolden Windows,”’ New York Times, 28 October 1985: C l3; “Robert Wilson’s ‘Deafmun. " New York Times, 20 July 1987: C16. Cf. Mel Gussow, “‘Golden Windows’ Reveals a Drenm World in Miniature,” New York Times, 3 November 1985: B3.
*' Quoted in James Lardncr, “The World’s His Stage, All the World’s His Stage: Robert Wilson’s Operatic Extravaganzas,” The Washington Post, 26 February 1981: Dl.
*^ Hedy Weiss, “Ionesco Helped Shape the Way We View Art,” Chicago Sun-Times, 31 March 1994: B41.
165 leaves the theater with the sound of dry leaves scratching its ears.” Holmberg also quotes
Wilson as saying, “In ‘Alccstis,’ ‘The Civil Wars,’ and ‘Einstein on the Beach’ 1 was concerned with the biological instinct for destruction and self-destruction. It’s a real possibility that we may blow ourselves up. The terror of war is its beauty. To shock people back to sanity, you have to make the death drive as seductive as possible.”*^
Wojcik asserts that both secular and religious apocalypticism are generally characterized by a fatalistic sense that worldly events are beyond the control of individual human beings. To vary ing degrees, this sense of fatalism, with an accompanying notion of an external locus of control, imbues all of the works examined throughout this study.
While the figures in the w orks discussed in earlier chapters assign different meanings to the events that surround them, there is still a sense that those events are visited upon them rather than being the result of their own actions. In Reckless, this fatalistic sense is neatly summed up in Rachel’s statement that “things just happen.” Although causal connections may surface after the fact, giving some explanation for why those things happened, these connections appear only retrospectively. At the moment of their occurrence, these events, like the various attempts on Rachel’s life, seem inexplicable and arbitrary.
Likewise, in Fonuicans, the characters are frequently depicted as unable to control their own destinies. Even in those scenes in which characters attempt to impose their own will on events, they are met with frustration and defeat. At one point in the play, Judy and Cathy are torching a Corvette that Judy believes is her ex-husband’s.
Arthur Holmberg, “Greek Tragedy in a New Mask Speaks to Today’s Audiences,” New York Times, 1 March 1987: Bl.
166 When Judy runs out of propane, she shouts, "'’Shit!!! Fm out of propane!” To Cathy’s response, “So am I,” Judy answers, "’’See??! Nothing fucking works!!T (37). Within two pages, Judy and Cathy are shown worrying over the consequences of their actions. The
Corvette they torched belonged not to Judy’s ex but to, in her words, “some skinny oriental guy” (40). Thus, even in those instances in which the characters attempt to take some control over the events that surround them, they have little to show for their efforts.
In Perpetuity, some characters attempt to exercise some personal agency, for example when Christine and Dennis bum the manuscript of Qwerty’s latest book.
Throughout the play, however, there are many instance in which characters express a sense that events are out of their control. Lyle reveals that sometimes even his own behavior seems about to slip from his control under the pressure of a barely-controllable tendency towards self-destruction. He tells Dennis and Christine that on his way to the agency he was overcome w ith a desire to caress a strange woman on the train with him.
“Obviously,” he says, i didn’t do it. I wouldn’t be standing here telling you about it now. I’d be calling you from Riker’s Island.” Yet he says
I have these moments. Rimaway impulse. Stroke a stranger. Shoplift. Turn the wheel at 75 into the center divider. Late night moments of derangement. She would have screamed. Rightly so. She would have called for help. Called the police.. . . All I had to do was slip my hand between her legs, caress this stranger for a moment, and my life would be over. My life as I know it. And I realized how you can throw your life away. Like that, in an instant.
(Silence)
DENNIS: 1 his just happened?
LYLE: My life is a mystery to me. (25-26)
167 In both o f the work s discussed in Chapter Three, this fatalistic sense emerges. In
1000 Airplanes, M has no sense of control over the events that surround him. In The
Medium, McLuhan is occasionally represented clutching an anachronistic remote-control pad and controlling the actions of the television characters and personalities. Yet this control gradually slips away and McLuhan is eventually overwhelmed and absorbed by the medium that he had once been able to manipulate.
Finally, through most of Marisol, the characters are presented as having little direct control over their circumstances. The sociological and cosmological forces at work in the play remain beyond even their full comprehension. Nonetheless, and somewhat ironically, Marisol, the most overtly apocalyptic of the works considered in this study, holds out the possibility ot effective human agency as the play ends. In fact, the suggestion of possibilities and hope to which Marisol refers after her death seems to have been made possible precisely by the intervention of the “innocent of the earth.” Jane
Armitage, who directed a production at Oberlin College, stated, “To me, this is not a play about the death of God, of religion, of the world. It is a cry for help. There is still time.”"
Conclusion
The works surv eyed throughout this study indicate how a variety of dramaturgical and theatrical tendencies have intersected and coalesced within particular plays and
" Karen Schaefer, ‘’Angels Speak to Us in Surreal Play,” The Plain Dealer, 7 October 1994: ‘Friday” 40.
168 performances. The trajectory followed in this study has stretched from formal matters concerning televisual representational practices to content-based issues relating to representations of schizophreniform experience and apocalyptic sensibilities. This, however, should not be taken as a suggestion of a one-way causal pattern with televisual representation posited as producing the other effects. Such a suggestion would carry some implication that television itself, because of the representational practices associated with it, is responsible for producing schizophrenic experience and fostering apocalyptic attitudes. While there seems little hazard in granting some credence to notions of technological determinism, the case should not be overstated. Schizophrenia and schizophreniform experience, like apocalyptic sensibilities, have been around for centuries. The proliferation of television, and the frequently chaotic nature of television programming may certainly have epistemological and psychological—and by extension sociological—influences. \'et to attribute all such shifts to any communications medium would be grossly reductix e. It may be more worthwhile to consider the relationship between these various tendencies not in terms of any straight-line causality but in terms of shared features and perhaps reciprocal influence. This is the chief purpose of the following chapter, which examines how the tendencies addressed throughout this study are emblematic of some chief features of postmodernist thought.
169 CHAPTERS
CONCLUSION
The works examined in the preceding chapters are by no means representative of all contemporary dramatic and theatrical practices. Nonetheless, to borrow a set of terms from Raymond Williams, the works addressed in this study suggest some emergent tendencies within a context informed by older, residual tendencies.’ Among these emergent tendencies are: first, an incorporation of structural features analogous to televisual representation; second, a focus on psychological pressures and disequilibrium akin to that associated with schizophrenia; and third, a preoccupation with apocalyptic and millennial issues.
1 have pointed out how the various tendencies described in the preceding chapters can be regarded not simply as unrelated developments but as frequently interconnected.
As noted earlier, this study is concerned with how such developments coalesce into constellations of thought and practice. To continue the metaphor, 1 do not propose to offer a unified field theory to explain all of these developments. Nonetheless, 1 will describe some of the common features of the tendencies described in this study. 1 also
’ Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chadra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1991) 31-49.
170 attempt to expand the parameters of the constellation to incorporate some additional extra-theatrical developments, as a means of situating these tendencies within a larger cultural context.
Despite variations in both form and content, all of the works addressed in this study, and all of the theoretical contexts into which they have been situated, relate variously to questions of narrative continuity and coherence. As suggested in earlier chapters, narrative, both the term and the category to which it is applied, is frequently problematic. It seems safe to assert that narrative is a form of representation employed to render experienced events intelligible. It also seems safe to identify an at least inunanent linear and causal coherence as one of the chief distinguishing features of narrative representation. Whether this form of representation is a legitimate means of representing experience, however, has proven more controversial. David Carr argues forcefully that there is a prethematic and pretheoretical dimension to narrative representation. In short, he argues not merely that narrative representation is a legitimate form by which human experience can be represented; he actually argues that human experience is experienced in narrative terms. Carr thus moots the question, while nonetheless allowing the possibility that particular narrative instances may be only artificial retrospective constructions of events. By contrast, if narrative representation in general is regarded only and always as artificial (re)construction, this moots the question of how truth values might be applied to any given narrative account. This problematic relationship informs current discussion of the so-called "postmodern condition,” a topic I will return to in a moment.
171 I will not attempt here to resolve the question of the validity of narrative structure as a means of representing experience. In fact, I will come to suggest that the question of the epistemic validity of narrative is likely undecidable. Nonetheless, it can be noted that all of the extra-theatrical contexts discussed in this study reveal a paradoxical or contradictory relationship to narrative. To begin with media criticism, those writers who have most aggressively attacked the manner in which television (re)presents experience share a perception that television representation taken in the aggregate rejects many of the principles of narrative continuity and coherence. The root concern for such writers as
Postman and Marc is an epistemological one, based in the anxiety that the naturalizing effects of such anti-narrative principles may compromise viewers’ apprehension and comprehension of the causal forces behind events. This of course rests on an assumption that such forces exist and can be identified, which indicates a preexisting assumption about the legitimacy of narrative principles. In any event, there is a certain irony in the fact that television, one of the most pervasive purveyor of narratives today, has been described as fundamentally anti-narrative.
The relationship of definitions of schizophrenia to notions of narrative coherence is in some ways analogous to concerns about television representation, and reveals a similar paradox. Descriptions of the breakdown of associations common to schizophrenic experience illustrate, via negativa, the commanding power of narrative representation as an epistemological and philosophical mechanism. The associative
172 collapse removes the schizophrenic from the field of narrative continuity.^ On the other hand, schizophrenic tendencies toward obsessional interpretation, however delusional such interpretation might be. contradicts this picture. Such an impulse reveals a desire for or an impulse toward exhaustive causal explanation and thus places the schizophrenic firmly within the boundaries of narrative experience.
Finally, apocalyptic notions, whether or not millennialist, partake wholly of narrative conceptions of history. In its narrower and more precise usage as an unveiling, the apocalypse is the revelation of the “authentic” narrative principle behind worldly events. Even so, as suggested by Fukuyama’s book, the apocalypse is the event that would arrest or suspend history and thus obviate its narrativity. In its more popular application as a cataclysmic event, “the apocalypse” has a difficult relationship to narrative. On one hand, the notion of narrative continuity is a necessary precondition for the notion of apocalypse. The apocalypse is a singular terminal event, an ending, and as such it must be an ending of something. Without some preexisting sense of historical narrativity, the apocalypse is stripped of its singularity and becomes just another isolated incident within a collection of similarly isolated incidents. It makes no sense to speak of such an incident as being apocalyptic. On the other hand, as cataclysm, the apocalypse ruptures the narrative, replacing continuity with chaos: Après moi le déluge.
A preoccupation with narrative coherence informs all of the works considered in this study, with the possible exception of Wilson’s performances. Rachel in Reckless and
^ Though as noted in Chapter Three, the interpretation and valuation of this removal varies widely. Either it is a problem to be remedied through therapy and medication or, as with Deieuze and Guattari, it is a healthy response to an alienated and alienating world.
173 Cathy and Judy in Formicans express anxiety over the apparent lack of any intelligible and meaningful pattern to the events they experience. In both Formicans and Perpetuity, characters construct elaborate narrative schemes that connect and explain surrounding events and conditions. In 1000 Airplanes, M struggles to retrieve memories of his/her abductions in order to situate those experiences into a coherent pattern. The Medium deals generally with a paradigmatic shift in perception, fostered by the mass media, that subverts traditional notions of narrative continuity. And Marisol, an overtly apocalyptic play, centers on the breakdown of one imagined cosmological narrative and the emergence of a new one.
The sole exception to this assertion of a preoccupation with narrativity might be found in Wilson’s works, in which as Dietrich notes, no narrative thread orders the sequence of tableaux.^ Even so, that critical response to Wilson’s works has included references to an apocalyptic sensibility suggests that some nascent gestures toward narrative have been detected. Of course, that something is inferred does not mean it was implied; if Wilson’s work is seen as apocalyptic, this may reveal more about the sensibilities of his critics than about the works themselves. Nonetheless, the very title
Einstein on the Beach carries overt apocalyptic resonances, suggesting a gesture toward narrative conceptions, though the work itself deviates from traditional narrative principles. One might also note that Wilson’s rejection of such principles is largely calculated. Anne Bogart’s and SITI’s recent work BOB, constructed entirely out of statements from Wilson himself, includes a humorous indication of Wilson’s attitude
Dietrich 183.
174 toward conventional narrative-based play structure. Wilson is quoted as saying that while he has not seen many Broadway productions, he did see a revival of Death o f a Salesman.
Toward the end of the performance, Kate Reed, playing Linda Loman, was very upset over Willy’s death. Wilson is quoted as saying, ‘T wanted to stand up and say, ‘Lady, relax. We knew it was coming. On mv ticket it says Death o f a Salesman.' It’s all tied up in a little box with string.”^ Much of the rest of the piece illustrates Wilson’s pointed, and conscious, rejection of traditional dramatic narrative structure.
Narrative Representation and Postmodernism
Such problematic relationships to narrative representation reflect one of the chief hallmarks of elaborations of postmodernism. It is probably not surprising, then, that considerations of postmodernism have frequently carried apocalyptic and schizophrenic resonances, as well as with concerns over the epistemological effects of the mass media.^
As in these fields, postmodern critical theory has exhibited a paradoxical relationship to narrativity, particularly in regard to expanded conceptions of narrative as a philosophical and epistemological mechanism applicable to the representation and explanation of
'* Anne Bogart and SITI, BOB, We.xner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 5 February 1998. I have been unable to find the source of this quote and must take the assertion that it is from Wilson at face value. It sounds consistent with other of Wilson’s statements.
* The application of schizophrenic and apocalyptic characteristics to the postmodern condition has already been cited in regard to Jameson and Baudrillard. For further examples of the apocalyptic tenor of postmodernism, see Jacques Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” trans. John Leavey, Jr., Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) 117-171; also “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 14.2 (1984): 20-31.
175 experience and existence. In this area, individual narrative instances are o f less moment than are overarching grand narrative schemes applied to existential questions (of the type, for instance, to which Qwerty’s theories aspire).
Lyotard, one of the first to attempt a sustained and systematic definition, defines postmodernism negatively, in contrast to modernism. For Lyotard, a discourse is modernist if it legitimates itself through an appeal to a grand récit, a “metadiscourse” or
“metanarrative” that precedes and stands above it. Such metanarratives serve to explain existence and legitimate social practices and institutions. According to Jameson, metanarratives (Jameson uses the term “master narrative”) are validated by notions of
“expressive” or “mechanistic” causality, whereby historical events or narrative instances are figured as effects or reflections of a necessary and prior cause or Prime Mover (God,
Human Nature, Political Necessity, Manifest Destiny, The Invisible Hand of the
Marketplace, and so on). Jameson writes that the fullest form of expressive causality proves to be “a vast interpretive allegory in which a sequence of historical events or texts and artifacts is rewritten in terms of some deeper, underlying, and more ‘fundamental’ master narrative.”^ The relationship between a metanarrative and the “texts and artifacts” associated with it is thus reciprocal and symbiotic; the metanarrative gives rise to particular texts and artifacts which in turn provide the key to interpreting and thus substantiating the metanarrative. Thus individual narrative instances, by naturalizing
* Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981) 28.
176 particular sequences of events, work to reconstitute the metanarratives (such as the
“historical myths” to which Hall refers) from which they arose.
Lyotard defines as postmodern any discourse marked by incredulity or skepticism toward metanarratives.^ In a passage that illustrates the sort of skepticism to which
Lyotard refers, Jameson argues that the very notion of metanarrative “is associated with the Galilean and Newtonian world-view, and is assumed to have been outmoded by the indeterminacy principle of modem physics.”* Lyotard, also referring to quantum mechanics and indeterminacy, argues that while “we no longer have recourse to the grand narratives ... the little narrative{petit récit) remains the quintessential form of imaginative invention, most particularly in science.” This petit récit is linked to the notion of “paralogy,” an unexpected “move” by an individual against an established organizational system. Examples of paralogy can be found in the actions of Copernicus or Galileo. Scientists, Lyotard observes, have often made moves that were “ignored or repressed . . . because [they] too abruptly destabilized the accepted positions.” Then, in a rebuttal of Jurgen Habermas’s argument in favor of universal consensus, Lyotard argues that “consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end. Its end, on the contrary, is paralogy.”’
’ Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. GeofF Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1984)xc/v.
* Jameson, Political Unconscious 25. It should be noted that Jameson, somewhat grudgingly, allows mechanistic causality a “purely local validity” in cultural analysis. It might also be noted that Jameson himself exhibits a desire for a return to a Marxist metanarrative, albeit one more multivalent than the one commonly associated with classical (“vulgar”) Marxist thought.
’ Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 60, 63, 65-66.
177 The elaborations of postmodernism offered by Lyotard and Jameson show a
paradoxical relationship to notions of narrative and metanarrative. Substituting petit récit
for grand récit or the indeterminacy principle for the Galilean/Newtonian world-view
simply installs a new metanarrative and leaves the modernist mainframe intact. Jameson
cites the indeterminacy principle to support his (and Louis Althusser’s) refutation of
metanarratives based on the principle of expressive causality.'® In doing so, he posits a
metanarrative that dispenses with the very notion of metanarrative. By both Lyotard’s
and Jameson’s definitions, the postmodern condition is the site of a philosophical
impasse. Lyotard addresses that impasse by figuring the postmodern as a transitory
condition, suggesting that to become modem a discourse must first be postmodern."
In a sense, while postmodernism may be postmodern, definitions of
postmodernism, by definition, cannot be. David Bennett notes that “all periodizing
theories of postmodemity as a global phenomenon are . . . by their own definitions
modem rather than postmodern.”'- In a related context, Derrida acknowledges much the
same thing when he states that "''There is no sense in doing without the concepts of
'° This creates a curious dilemma. Jameson seems primarily interested in refuting notions of mechanistic (“billiard-ball”) causality on the grounds that such notions are reductive. But by turning to the indeterminacy principle, which obtains at the most local level known, that of subatomic activity, Jameson may be resorting to an argument even more reductive than those he is critiquing.
" Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 79. If there is any distinction between this conception and older notions of the avant garde, it would appear to be that Lyotard radicalizes the avant garde, making it an end unto itself and thus removing it from the aegis of the dominant culture or mainstream. Even so, this still amounts to the installation of a new metanarrative.
David Bennett, “Postmodernism and Vision: Ways of Seeing (At) the End of History,” History and Post-war Writing, ed. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam: Ropoli, 1990) 263.
178 metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to context."'^ Given such a paradox, as Auslander has observed,
“no monolithic description or evaluation [of postmodernism] is possible, for postmodernism as a historical configuration or structure of feeling has given rise to mutually contradictory, antagonistic, and just plain different manifestations."'"
This study does not purport to offer another definition of what postmodernism is.
Nonetheless, it is worth noting that as a barometer, theories surrounding postmodernism show a relationship to narrative as problematic as those associated with televisual representation, schizophrenia, and apocalyptic anxieties. Jameson, who describes postmodern culture as schizophrenic, echoes Postman’s concerns about television when he argues that the cultural productions of postmodern society are marked by “a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory.”'* Likewise, Dana Polan suggests that to the list of characteristics of postmodern culture, one should add
^^incoherence, in the literal sense of the inability or unwillingness of culture to cohere, to follow an evident logic.” Polan wonders
'^Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” The Languages o f Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970) 250.
'" Auslander 7.
'* Jameson Postmodernism 25.
179 what notion of the television dramatic series as inheritor of the ostensible narrative and representational goals of the nineteenth century novel could really account for the conceit by which the television show Dallas, can substitute one actress (Donna Reed) for another (Barbara Bel Geddes) in the role o f a central character (Miss Ellie)? . . . I would suggest that such specific incoherences become acceptable because culture and everyday life in general has made incoherence part of the norm.'*
One might also note here that the individuation of experience associated with television viewing, schizophrenic experience, and even the anomie that can foster apocalyptic sensibilities has also been linked with postmodernism as a structure of feeling. Lyotard, who is less extreme than Baudrillard in his assessment of the loss of social cohesion, writes that
This breaking up of the grand Narratives leads to what some authors analyze in terms of the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity o f Brownian motion. Nothing of the kind is happening; this point of view, it seems to me, is haunted by the paradisiac representation of a lost “organic society."
Nonetheless, postmodern society, by Lyotard’s definition, exhibits a potentially fragmentary nature. Lyotard’s notion of paralogy is coupled with a suggestion that each individual self “exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than
'* Dana Polan, “Brief Encounters: Mass Culture and the Evacuation of S&asQ," Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 181-182. As a barometric indicator, this passage is reminiscent of many found in Postman. As with Postman, though, one must be on the watch for hyperbole. One might object that Polan is conflating actor and character and that viewers, acknowledging the program as fiction, are more concerned with character consistency than with actor continuity. “Dick Sargent. Dick York. Sergeant York,” says Wayne (Mike Myers) in the popular 1992 film Wayne's World, and then wonders aloud why Samantha on Bewitched never noticed that she suddenly had a new husband. Wayne's World began as a skit on Saturday Night Live, a television program that Marc refers to as illustrating television’s eventual turn toward self-reflexivity(Demographic Vistas 149fF).
180 ever before.. . . A person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be.”'^
Narrative Representation and the Phvsical Sciences
Considerations of postmodernism, like those offered by Jameson and Lyotard, have commonly included reference to schema borrowed from the physical sciences.
William Demastes has offered a discussion of the relationships between theatre and the physical sciences that is analogous to modernist and postmodernist conceptions of narrative. Demastes argues that the development of dramatic and theatrical realism was groimded in part on assumptions about the material world as represented through
Newtonian physics. Demastes states that Newton’s representation of the material world confirmed “a belief in the objective reality of existence and trigger[ed] an age of confidence in perception not seriously called into doubt for another two hundred years.”'®
Newtonian physics supported the belief that the world was governed by immutable laws that human cognition could discover and define. Especially in the nineteenth century,
Demastes claims, this governing principle was reflected in the drama. Influenced by this
Newtonian conception of the universe, the playwright functioned as “an eye/god whose clear insights into objective realities of existence directed him to preach how an imperfect social world could be improved if only it would follow the prescriptions of this
” Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 15.
'* William Demastes, “Of Sciences and the Arts: From Influence to Interplay Between Natural Philosophy and Drama,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 24 (1991): 76.
181 eye/playwright.”'’ Demastes cites Zola. Shaw, and Chekhov as exemplars of this movement.
Demastes continues his argument to suggest that the rejection of traditional narrative structure in much twentieth-century drama has been accompanied by growing skepticism within the scientific community toward the mechanistic conceptions of causality that Newtonian physics presumed. The “pervading sense of rational, logical order and purpose” that characterized the Newtonian world-view was disturbed by
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the advent of quantum physics, which “challenges both our sense of objective possibility and our faith in common-sense logical conclusion in its analysis of the subatomic universe, the foundation of all reality as we know it.”“
Demastes deploys a description of quantum physics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to illustrate the function of indeterminacy in contemporary drama and theatre.
Similar illustrations are provided by Dietrich and Auslander. Dietrich considers Robert
Wilson’s work in terms taken from quantum physics. Auslander uses the term quanta to describe the individual segments of Laurie Anderson’s performance pieces.^' He borrows the term from the parlance of television programming (which is significant in itself), where it is applied to the most basic bits of television programming segments (like phonemes, say). Nonetheless, the associations with particle physics is unmistakable.
” Demastes 79.
Demastes 79.
Auslander 71-72.
182 A detailed examination of the relationship of contemporary scientific thought to theatrical practice lies beyond the scope of this study. Yet one last observation from
Demastes may help further to illustrate some current tensions surrounding notions of causality and by extension narrativity. If one turns to scientific paradigms for legitimation, it is worth noting that Newtonian physics has not been entirely discredited.
Demastes notes that “it is not entirely clear to what extent either quantum theory or the absurd does or should influence daily, mundane existence.. . . When dealing with the macro-world of things and facts, the world of our daily existence/perceptions, Newtonian physics still serves admirably to explain existence.”^
Demastes's article illustrates another way in which theatrical and extra-theatrical concerns intersect. A similar illustration is offered by Anne Bogart, who states that she hit on the idea for what would become the SITI performance Going, Going, Gone after reading an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine stating that “recent discoveries in quantum and astral physics are so significant and powerful that they must necessarily have consequences in our daily lives.”^ Both Lyotard and Jameson have used discoveries in physics to enhance their positions on social and historical process and have thus conferred some legitimacy on the proposition that the principles of quantum physics have a bearing on human congress.*^ Technically speaking, however, Bogart’s
“ Demastes 85.
^ Anne Bogart, Going, Going, Gone, Humana Festival '96: The Complete Plays, ed. Michael Bigelow Dixon and Liz En gel man (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1996) 41.
It might also be noted that Lyotard’s definition of an “energetic theatre” resonates with notions associated with quantum theory.
183 statement does not indicate that quantum and astral physics must necessarily have consequences in our daily lives; rather, it indicates that it is the discoveries that exert such an influence.^ This is an important distinction. Gravity, as it controlled the motions of the tides, had an influence on human activity long before Newton identified it. If quantum mechanics itself influences daily life, then that influence presumably predated the discoveries of quantum principles. There is probably no way absolutely to confirm or disprove that quantum physics did or did not have as much an influence in say, medieval
England as it does or does not exert in late twentieth-century America.
On the other hand, the very existence of works like Going, Going, Gone and Tom
Stoppard’s Hapgood offers clear evidence that the discoveries (or more precisely accounts of those discoveries) have had an influence outside the realm of the physical sciences. Yet this is an indication less that quarks have a more direct influence over human affairs than they had a century ago than that the discourse of the new physics, and the models generated by that discourse, are being deployed in other contexts. Demastes notes that quantum mechanics may not have any measurable effect outside the subatomic realm in which it functions. Thus the statement to which Bogart refers may actually be begging the question; one might wish to know exactly why “discoveries in quantum and astral physics . . . must necessarily have consequences in our daily lives.” This of course
^ There is an amusing irony in the ambiguity of Bogart’s statement, appearing as it does in a discussion of a work that grew out of ruminations on a subject characterized by indeterminacy. The work itself, in which statements from physicists and various literary sources were grafted onto the framework of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, was similarly indeterminate. For descriptions, see Steven Winn, “‘Going’ Gets a Charge from the Physics of Love,” San Francisco Chronicle, 13 May 1997: El; Judith Egerton, ‘“Going, Going, Gone.’” Louisville Courier-Jotimal, 23 March 1996: S23.
184 is not to say that they won’t. Earlier discoveries in atomic physics led to technological developments that have had pronounced effects on the daily lives of billions and there is no way to predict the effects of developments in the new physics. Even so, distinctions should be made between scientific discoveries and technological developments that proceed from those discoveries. It is probably more accurate to say that the most direct influences on daily life will come from applications of discoveries in quantum physics.
It is nonetheless hazardous to argue that scientific endeavors have no influence on worldly events. Various twentieth-century apocalyptic anxieties can be traced directly to scientific developments and the technology that has followed on them. By the same token, statements from Bogart, Jameson, and Lyotard show how the discourses of the physical sciences have influenced conceptions not merely of the structure and functions of the physical universe but of social and historical processes as well. Quantum physics, like most of the rest of the physical sciences, aspires to some degree of ontological certitude.'® By contrast, the application of the terms of scientific discourse to social and historical matters, whether that application be metaphoric, metonymic, or synecdochic.
■® Even so, the legitimacy of the '‘hard” sciences to such a claim has been called into question by writers who propose that scientific activity is conditioned by social contexts and that science does not discovertruth so much as generate knowledge. See for example Helen E. Longino, “Subjects, Power, and Knowledge; Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science,” Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993): 101-120. An illustration of how scientific inquiry is conditioned by social pressures appears in the Soviet Union’s disastrous adherence to Lysenko’s Lamarckian theories of biology and agriculture. Of course, the Lysenko debacle was in large part a simple example of bad science. It nonetheless shows how scientific research can be conditioned by influences outside the particular discipline in which the research is conducted. For an extended discussion of how scientific activity is constrained by the very paradigms that it seeks to elaborate, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1962).
185 happens on epistemological terrain. This is true whether the discourse is Newtonian or
Heisenbergean in nature.
Even if the physical sciences are capable of achieving some degree of ontological certitude, the act of interpreting or representing human-oriented matters in the language of scientific discovery does not amount to a transmittal of that certitude. Questions about the nature and function of causality in human affairs or the validity of narrative as a means of understanding and representing human experience are epistemological through and through. As such, they are precisely circumscribed within the limits of human perception and cognition, the very features that they would seek to comprehend. Any attempt to provide an onto logically definitive answer to such questions must presume to employ epistemological tools in a manner for which they are wholly inadequate.
Narrativity and the Limits of Epistemology
Christopher Nash writes, “Probably no century has ever been so good as ours at producing reasons for being in doubt about what we can know and how we can ever know anything.”” This may in part indicate an anxiety over the failure of epistemology to yield demonstrably and universally truthful answers about the nature of existence.
That anxiety, in turn, may be the product of a cultural environment heavily conditioned by logical positivism, with its aspirations to absolute, ontological truth and concomitant
Christopher Nash, “Literature’s Assault on Narrative,” Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature, ed. Christopher Nash (London: Routledge, 1990)200.
186 rejection of any proposition that cannot be unambiguously verified.^* Regardless of whether this is a wholly adequate explanation, it is noteworthy that Jameson, in casting doubt on notions of mechanistic causality, as they are applied to historical and social processes, seeks legitimation from the physical sciences. Another, subtler, illustration of this tendency is found in Frank Kermode’s critical assessment of the validity of narrative and David Carr’s critique of Kermode’s position.
Kermode, whose principal object of study is literary fiction, argues that narrative is imposed on experience by human imagination in an effort to translate unbroken chains of events into intelligible patterns with well-defined beginnings, middles, and ends.
Human beings, who are always “in the middest” use narrative form to impose order on chaos: “It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers.”^® As an illustration of how narrative form is imposed on experience, Kermode uses the simple example of a clock. A clock, Kermode writes, does not actually say “Tick-tock.” “Tick-tock” is an anthropomorphism imposed on the clock’s undifferentiated sound that makes it speak human language. It is also a nascent narrative. The interval between tick and tock is the
■* For an example of such dismissal, see Friedrich Waismann, “Verification and Definition,” trans. J. Schulte and B. McGuiness, Essential Readings in Logical Positivism, ed. Oswald Hanfling (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1981) 27-32. Other examples are given in the same source. More recently, however, Lyotard has insisted that the legitimacy of even the pursuit of “truth” has given way to insistence on maximum performativity, so that the most pressing question asked of any statement today is not, “Is it true?” but “What is it worth?” A different anxiety, perhaps, with the same result.
Frank Kermode, The Sense o f an Ending (New York: Oxford UP, 1967) 64. Kermode incidentally notes how “Schizophrenics can lose contact with ‘real’ time, and undergo what has been called ‘a transformation of the present into eternity’” (55).
187 “organized and limited” middle that connects beginning and end, whereas the interval between tock and tick is neither organized nor limited; it falls outside the narrative. Yet of course the clock does not tell a narrative, but rather has a narrative told onto it.
Kermode expands from this position to Identify narrative plotting as what
“[psychologists] call ‘temporal integration'—our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future, in a common organization.
Within this organization that which was conceived of as simply successive becomes charged with past and future...
The argument is persuasive, yet David Carr has countered it by demonstrating how Kermode’s clock example effectively excludes particularly human experience from the picture. Carr has no fundamental problems with the proposition that “tick-tock” is an imposed anthropomorphism, yet he argues that narrative may be more precisely said to represent not the object experienced but the experience of the object. Carr thus shifts the terrain of the debate from ontology, where Kermode had placed it, to epistemology. In simple terms, Carr suggests that while “tick-tock” does not accurately represent the sound of the clock it may accurately represent the experience of the sound:
Kermode’s mistake lies in calling the organization ‘fictional’ and opposing it to the ‘reality’ of the ‘mere’ sequence. Where is reality here, and where fiction? The reality of our temporal experience is that it is organized and structured; it is the ‘mere sequence’ that has turned out to be fictional, in the sense that we speak of a ‘theoretical fiction.’^'
30 Kermode 46.
David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 25. Carr further argues that if human temporal experience is by nature organized and structured—if it is narrativized—this is largely because not all events are merely successive. This, Carr argues, is
188 Carr claims that narrative representation (in the broadest sense) is a universal feature of human existence, indicating at least some ontological pretensions. In any event, while both Kermode’s and Carr’s arguments merit consideration, the point may be mooted by the insufficiency of epistemological tools to ontological questions. It can, however, still be observed that the case of postmodernism indicates that even within a period said to be marked by an incredulity toward metanarrative, a proclivity toward narrativity itself continues.
If from an ontological perspective debate over the naturalness or artificiality of narrative representation is moot, the epistemological effects of particular narrative instances still warrant continued examination. Stuart Hall’s reference to the “historical myths” on which the BBC drew in its reconstruction of the Falklands conflict, echoed a broader statement offered by Kermode on fictions and myths. While the term metanarrative never occurs in Kermode, he was concerned about what may happen when a particular narrative assumes metanarrative proportions:
We have to distinguish between myths and fictions. Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive. In this sense anti-Semitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth; and Lear is a fiction. Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change.
especially true in regard to human actions. Carr offers the simple example of serving a tennis ball. One must “intellectualize beyond recognition the simple action of hitting a tennis ball” in order to argue that the action of striking the ball is unrelated to the ball’s crossing the net an instant later (35).
189 Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent.^^
Here the chief concern is with the content of fictions or narratives that assume mythical or metanarrative dimensions. Rivera, incidentally has stated that a like concern motivated his writing of Marisol:
This is the first play I've written with an eye on the next generation. We need to find new heroes and new myths for our society—the old ones just aren’t working. The God we know now is a right-wing, white male, corporate god, in whose world racism, sexism and political injustice are rampant. As the millennium nears, I am amazed these things are still valid.^^
Yet Kermode’s concerns are not limited to matters of content of particular fictions. He is also concerned with the form that fictions take. Human beings, Kermode writes, are bom and die “in the middest" of worldly events, and “to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to their lives... This fosters the narrative tendency toward definitive endings. This tendency coupled with the translation of fictions into myths is to Kermode what gives rise to apocalyptic imaginings: “Fictions, notably the fiction of apocalypse, turn easily into myths; people will live by that which was designed only to know by.”^^
Kermode 39.
Pricker B1.
Kermode 7.
Kermode 112. Kermode’s particular anxieties are expressed in an earlier passage: “When you read, as you must almost every passing day, that ours is the great age of crisis- technological, military, cultural—you may well simply nod and proceed calmly to your business; for this assertion, upon which a multitude of important books is founded, is nowadays no more surprising than the opinion that the earth is round. There seems to me to be some danger in this situation, if only because such a myth, uncritically accepted, tends like prophecy to shape a
190 Form and content thus coincide in end and ending. The same has held true for the works addressed throughout this study, as rapid shifts and dislocations in plot and staging have coincided with descriptions and expressions of anxiety over chaotic surroundings.
An abiding issue in these works is how. in such “extremely fast and extremely dense times,”^*^ to filter a coherent sense of existence out of an information-saturated environment. The mutual absorption of form and content illustrate how what one experiences and how one experiences are not always separable. Auslander argues that much postmodern performance inhabits the realm of mediatized culture to pursue an
“aesthetics of resistance” from within. Elizabeth KJaver claims that Coming Attractions
“functions as a performance of media culture and a contestation of such a culture,” though she observes that the work “cannot thoroughly distance itself from its satirical object; instead, in postmodernist fashion it enacts a complexity which illustrates the impossibility of fully impacking a system from the inside.”^^ Auslander and Klaver may be correct in arguing that the replication of the tropes, and even technology, of the mass future to confirm it” (93-94). Kermode nonetheless suggests that there is nothing really new here: “It is seems doubtful that our crisis, our relation to the future and to the past, is one of the important differences between us and our predecessors. Many of them felt as we do. If the evidence looks good to us, so it did to them. ... [I]t would be childish to argue, in a discussion of how people behave under eschatological threat, that nuclear bombs are more real and make one experience more authentic crisis-feelings than armies in the sky. There is nothing at all distinguishing about eschatological anxiety; it was, one gathers, a feature of Mesopotamian culture, and it is now a characteristic, often somewhat reach-me-down in appearance, of what Mr. Lionel Trilling calls the ‘adversary culture’ or sub-culture in our society” (95). Despite his skeptical regard for apocalyptic projections, Kermode’s anxiety about self-fulfilling prophecy suggests its own trace of apocalypticism. Derrida points out that all language on apocalypse is apocalyptic and cannot be separated from its object (“No Apocalypse, Not Now”).
Sm, “Talk Show.”
Klaver,'‘‘‘Coming Attractions" 112, 113.
191 media may offer an effective means of negotiating the terrain of postmodern society or even of contesting some of the features of media-driven consumer capitalism.
On the other hand, while Auslander faults certain media theorists for their pessimism, one could counter that more optimistic theorists may not have a firmer handle on things. Nicholas Zurbrugg declares that Wilson, in his production of Hamletmachine, showed that he was sensitive to the positive potential of contemporary media. Yet while
Zurbrugg lists some of the features of these media (they are “multi-linear,” “intertextual,”
“ebullient”), he stops short of explaining what exactly gives these features positive potential, or even what “positive potential” means. Given his dismissive take on Müller’s
“rather tired, rather European anti-narrative,” it seems that the positive potential may simply be that it is new. In the realm of television criticism, David Bianculli has celebrated what he calls teleliteracy, “the demonstration of fluency in the language and content of TV.”^* His argument that television is an important medium and that teleliteracy is thus a positive attribute is on one level indisputable. Fluency in the major communications media of any age is obviously a vital skill, whether the principal medium is television, print, or the spoken word. Yet this argument by itself has little bearing on the desirability of the medium itself. Bianculli’s impassioned defense of television is focused thoroughly on content, and thus fails to counter arguments directed more toward formal concerns. The title of one chapter of Bianculli’s book promises some attention to television’s structural features; “Marshall McLuhan Was Wrong: The
Bianculli 7.
192 Medium Is Not the Message.”” The chapter, however, turns out to be principally about differences between cable and network television. As Marc has suggested, the advent of cable had significant effects on the production and consumption of television.
Nonetheless, in focusing on distinctions between delivery systems, Bianculli ignores the formal features of television programming in general.
Most assertions about the mass media, optimistic or pessimistic, may be fated to remain at the level of mere assertion. Yet concerns about the epistemological and psychological resonances of the proliferation of the mass media, concerns reflected in various ways by the works surveyed in this study, may have some validity. It is possible that the “aesthetics of resistance” to which Auslander refers may be preempted by the very representational practices embraced by the artists pursuing that aesthetic. Once such performance enters into what Baudrillard terms the “economy of the sign,” what Postman calls the “Now... This” mentality of television culture, any resistance it offers may be absorbed, diffused, defused.
Predictions are always hazardous, and become more so as the scope of the prediction expands. Nonetheless, some earlier predictions about the influence of the media have already been bome out. For instance, Baudrillard's prediction that images and representations of the real would outstrip any more immediate reality, has come literally true, albeit in limited fashion, as “virtual signage,” computer-generated
” Bianculli 98-106.
193 advertising, has been incorporated into televised sporting eventsIn virtual ads, a computer programmed to recognize blank spaces on walls or racetracks inserts an image
into each space whenever it appears on the screen. The features and placement of the
image remain consistent; objects passing in front of or over the space (players, automobiles) “occlude” parts of the image. By report, few viewers recognize that the ads
are not part of the actual space being televised. Such practices are not unique to the
1990s or television. Josef Stalin had hundreds, if not thousands, of photos altered to remove party figures and others who had fallen out of favor.'*' There is nonetheless a striking difference in degree here. The explosive proliferation of television and other mass media, their capacity for instantaneous delivery, and the volume and speed by which they disseminate information raises the likelihood of distortion."**
In regard to aesthetics of resistance, there is also something instructive in the
following passages. On 20 February 1998, an article in Autoweek declared:
They’re right—the Apocalypse really is nigh. Sources from Revelation to Sports Illustrated have been warning us of the imminence of the Apocalypse, and now we’re seeing signs of our own: Mercedes-Benz, in its TV advertising, is using Blue Oyster Cult as a reference point to connect with its customers (we guess that’s because Budweiser is already
■*° William Power, “Virtual Ads Not Visible at the Ball Game,” The Wall Street Journal, 31 July 1998: C6.
■*' David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997).
■*^ Another issue, though again an old one, is the question of control. Television has great potential to function as what Althusser called an Ideological State Apparatus, as illustrated in fictional form by Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, which also exhibited some Baudrillardrian resonances. Even so, more ostensibly “democratic” media do not necessarily promise greater accuracy. The World Wide Web contains a huge amount of information, but anyone with the right resources and technical skills can create a web page.
194 using Frampton Comes Alive). Obviously, Mercedes is going after that younger. New Yuppie audience, striving to be to the ‘90s what BMW was to the ‘80s. M-B must know that ex-hippies have aged enough that they’re now potential M-B owners; next thing you know, the company will be using Janis Joplin’s “Oh, Lord, won’tcha buy me a Mercedes-Benz” in an upcoming ad.'*^
The prophecy may have been disingenuous. A new Mercedes ad using the Joplin song had been announced exactly one week earlier in Branchveek.** A month later, an article in
Business Week mused on the irony of the co-optation: “But isn’t a Woodstock-generation sendup of capitalism a strange way to sell a luxury automobile? Mercedes doesn’t see anything odd about it. ‘Hey, whatever the song might have meant back then, it’s a different time, it’s a different car,’ says Lee Garfinkel, 40, chairman of the New York ad agency . . . which produced the commercial.”^^ Of course, one must consider the variety of viewers who saw the commercial. Those who were already familiar with the song and its ironic tone would have instantly detected the greater irony of Mercedes’ use of it. Yet for others, it was presumably not just a different time and car but a different song as well.
The saturation of information and the “allatonceness” that have attended the proliferation of television and other media may have a significant impact on both individual and collective awareness of historical and social processes. Michal Kobialka refers to a 1993 Robert Wilson installation, “Memory/Loss” that offers a metaphorical recapitulation o f the anxieties articulated by several of the media theorists referred to in
“Out Takes” Autoweek, 20 February 1995: 11.
“News Roundup,” Brandweek, 13 February 1995: 5.
Larry Armstrong, “Janis Joplin, Material Girl,” Business Week, 20 March 1995: 40.
195 this study. “Memory/Loss” consisted of a mostly empty room containing a sculpture of the torso of a man, brightly lit and wearing a tight-fitting skull cap. Kobialka explains that Müller had sent Wilson a letter in 1987 describing a text about a Mongolian torture designed to turn captives into slaves. A helmet made from the skin of a camel was placed on a captive's bald head and allowed to dry in the sun. The result was a headpiece so tight that the hair was forced to grow back into the skull. Kobialka quotes from Müller’s letter: “The tortured prisoner lost his memory within five days, if he survived and he became, after this operation, a laborer who did not cause trouble, a ‘Mankurt’ . .. There is no revolution without memory.’”’*
One need not go so far as to invoke revolution. Memory is an integral part of any sustained project. The degree to which predictions about the effects of the proliferation of the mass media will be bome out is yet to be seen. Yet there is no question that technology, a result of human activity, can come to influence human behavior. The atomic bomb is a twentieth-century emblem of that statement. In regard to communications technology, Eric Havelock has considered how the transition from oral to written language can influence memory and thought processes.'*^ Such precedents indicate that concerns about the epistemological, psychological, and sociological effects of media saturation, voiced both by media critics and theatre artists, should not be dismissed lightly.
46 Kobialka 180-181.
Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986).
196 APPENDIX
TELEVISUALITY IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY
AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Illustrations of the influence of television and the mass media on American theatre and drama are varied. As indicated in Chapter 2, a number of recent plays are marked by dramaturgical devices analogous to features of televisual representation. Similar tendencies can be seen in the area of less traditional text-centered performance, as illustrated by the works considered in Chapter 3. The following pages list a handful of recent plays and performances suggesting the range of televisually-informed theatre and drama. It also touches on some other issues, such as the occasional focus on apocalypticism or schizophreniform experience, as well as on the troublesome distinction between the televisual and the cinematic.
Televisualitv in Recent American Dramaturev
The Monogamist, by Christopher Kyle, centers around television and video technology. Premiering in 1995 at Playwrights Horizons, The Monogamist centers on
Dennis Jensen, a poet facing a mid-life crisis. Distraught over his college professor wife’s affair with one of her students, and fearful that his preoccupation with the written
197 word is rendering his poetry obsolete, Dennis embarks on an affair with Sky, another college student, and begins work on a videotaped “multimedia poem.” He becomes obsessed with taping and editing his poem, retreating from real human contact. The closing scene finds Dennis completely absorbed in his narcissistic fascination with the video image. Alone in a darkened room, lit only by the light “from several TV monitors on rolling stands,”' Dennis plays and replays a videotape of himself and (now ex-wife)
Susan repeating one of their first dates for the camcorder.
The principle of monogamy figures large in Kyle’s play. In the first scene, Dennis is interviewed by Jasmine Stone on her cable-access program “Poetry Beat.” Discussing his latest book of poetry, Dennis reveals that the principal focus of the book is on monogamy. The play likewise deals with the subject, as both Dennis’s and Susan’s adulterous affairs are central to the play’s development. Yet as Dennis withdraws further into his narcissistic absorption with the videotaped image, the title acquires an ironic spin.
By the time the play ends, Dennis has alienated himself from all the other characters, and is left alone with only his television monitors and videotapes. His preoccupation with the video image renders him thoroughly monogamous. The play thus reflects some concerns about obsessions with televised images and the socially isolating influence of television.
It offers an illustration of the acme of what Marc terms “narrowcasting”: a program specifically tailored for an audience of one.
By comparison to some other contemporary drama and theatre. The Monogamist retains a relatively tight, causally-oriented narrative structure. Ben Brantley used the
' Christopher Kyle, The Monogamist, American Theatre (March 1996): 39.
198 phrase “mechanical chain of encounters” to describe much of the plot.^ Still, though not as fragmented as some of the other works addressed by this study, the play recapitulates some of the principles of a televisual representational style, with a number of very short scenes and rapid changes in locale (there are 15 scene changes). Furthermore, the playwright’s notes include the advice that in production the use of “multimedia materials that evoke this period [the end of the Bush administration]—the Hill/Thomas hearings, the
Gulf War, increased interest in ‘Generation X,’ and so on—will add to the flavor of the play and are encouraged by the author.”^ Scott Elliott, who directed the premiere production, was largely responsible for much of the multimedia accoutrements. Brantley said of the production, “Mr. Elliott has created a dazzlingly fluid, multimedia camouflage for a mere sketch of a play.”
Seventy Scenes o f Halloween, by Jeffrey Jones, is set in a living room in an unspecified location during Halloween night. The set consists simply of a sofa, a television down center facing upstage, a window, an open entryway into an offstage kitchen, and doors leading outside and into a closet. Lawrence Bommer’s synopsis effectively captures the general content of the piece:
As an announcer calls out the scenes in unchronological order, a bland suburban couple, Jeff and Joan, spend a domestic evening, engrossed in TV, looking for candy com for the trick-or-treaters or quarreling over who gets to answer the door. Slowly Jones escalates this central scene into an absorbingly surreal sitcom. Joan threatens Jeff with a knife she says needs sharpening. Though squeamish about violence, he pictures himself
- Ben Brantley, “Portrait of a Man Losing His Beliefs,” The New York Times, 10 November 1995: C3.
^ Christopher Kyle, The Monogamist, American Theatre (March 1996): 25.
199 eviscerating the trick-or-treaters; later he ghouiishly plays with a headless chicken. A mysterious shoe box shows up on the TV. Joan finds ants in the kitchen and a refiigerator crawling with putrescence. Jeff blurts out confessions of infidelity.*
In addition to Jeff and Joan, two non-human figures, a Witch and a Beast, appear
sporadically, peering through windows and ducking into and out of closets. As Bommer
indicates, scenes do not build on each other but are rather self-contained playlets of no more than a few minutes’ duration each; some can be played in less than a minute.
Scenes are annoimced by a stage manager offstage (e.g., “Forty-Six, Go!”), but are not meant to be presented in any particular order. In the published version, the sixty-fifth scene follows the fifty-second scene and precedes the thirty-ninth scene. (Contrary to the title, the play actually consists of only 66 scenes).
The televisual quality of the work is indicated by several reviewers’ comments.
Joe Pollack notes that the play contains “more quick cuts than a Quentin Tarantino m o v ie .A n n e Marie Welsh compares Jones to Wellman and Jenkin and writes that all three “favor irony, pastiche and playfulness over linear storytelling.” She describes the play as a “collage, with a Cubist slant. Scenes are repeated, firom different angles, or with different characters, or in contexts that make the dialogue illogical.. . . Non sequitur rules, as in messy real life.”^ Dominic Cavendish said of the play, “It’s as though David
* Lawrence Bommer, “4 Frantic Actors: 66-Playlet ‘Halloween’ a Tour-de-Force,” The Chicago Tribune, 11 November 1993: HI9.
* Joe Pollack, “At the Theater,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 16 October 1994: C4.
* Anne Marie Welsh: “Tricky 70 Scenes is Mostly an Intelligent Treat,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, 31 October 1997: E8.
200 Lynch has commandeered an amateur production o f ‘Scooby-Doo’” and notes that,
“lacking any real middle or beginning, ‘Seventy Scenes’ is . . . a series of endings—the nominal ‘end’ feels arbitrary.. . . ’ Cavendish offers a number of other observations that illustrate the televisual quality of the piece, including one that recalls Postman’s critique of the inconsequentiality of television news programming:
The 70* scene in Seventy Scenes o f Halloween . . . consists solely of a banner with the words “The End” daubed in crude strokes of stage-blood. It’s Jeffrey M. Jones’s little joke, at once acknowledging his work’s resemblance to a cheap horror movie and re-summoning, at the 11* hour, the conventional narrative spirit which the previous 68 scenes have all but exorcised.... [T]he American playwright’s cut-up technique, by which the order of proceedings is seemingly determined at random, has disorientated us so much that we no longer expect fatal actions to be of any consequence.’
Gogol, A Mystery Play, by Len Jenkin, centers on Dr. Mesmer, a self-admitted charlatan whose healing baths have earned him fame from Paris, France to Grand Island,
Nebraska. Mesmer is reviled by his fellow medicos, who retain Inspector Bucket to capture him. Meantime, the play’s title character invites Mesmer to his home for an evening of theatrical entertainments. Accepting the invitation reluctantly (and mostly by chance: he ducks into Gogol’s theatre to escape Tarr and Fether, Bucket’s helpers),
Mesmer gets caught up in the actions on stage and at one point shoots and kills an actor playing Pontius Pilate with a gun that he had been assured was loaded with blanks. As the play ends, Gogol, thinking he is dying, persuades Mesmer to try to cure him. When
’ Dominic Cavendish, “On the Fringe: ‘Seventy Scenes of Halloween’; ‘Get Out of Hear!’; ‘It Took More Than One Man.’” The Independent, 5 March 1997: Arts Reviews 27. Cavendish indicates that the production he saw contained sixty-nine scenes; this may have been a different version than that published in Theatre of Wonders.
201 that fails, he convinces Mesmer to kill him with a dagger. Seconds later. Bucket arrives and demands to know where Mesmer is. He is shown the body of Gogol by the newly resurrected Mesmer-Gogol. The Resurrection Man, who appears sporadically throughout the play, attempts to set Bucket right, but Bucket ignores him and tells Tarr and Fether to take the body away.
Gogol employs several devices analogous to televisual representation. In terms of structure, there is an arbitrary quality to the arrangement of scenes, many of which are quite brief. This jump cut quality is emphasized through the occasional use of scenes depicting simultaneous actions in different locales. In regard to content, the “boundless megatext” that Klaver identifies as characteristic of television programming is reflected by the play’s pronounced metatheatricality and intertextuality. Characters and situations are lifted from such disparate sources as Taming o f the Shrew and Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Body Snatchers. There are allusions to Beckett, Aristophanes, Wilder,
Dickens, Genet, and perhaps Witkiewicz. The play likewise demonstrates a pronounced emphasis on imagery. At the end of the opening scene, after Gogol has introduced himself to the audience, he smears the blood that has started welling through his coat across his face before exiting on the back of a large turtle that slowly crosses the stage
(perhaps a gesture toward Robert Wilson). Other scenic demands include a transparent globe that contains the (speaking) head of Magellan and which can be dispelled instantly; and two bears that serve as Gogol’s assistants.
Richard Christiansen described Jenkin’s play as a “melange of vaudeville and the avant-garde,” and wrote, “One waits patiently for all the odd bits and pieces of ‘Gogol: A
202 Mystery Play’ to come together in some vaguely coherent form, but they never do.” He continued, “even in its own dreamlike terms of imagination, the play doesn’t create a cohesive cosmos.”* Robert Koehler also found the work arbitrary at points, writing that
Bucket’s pursuit of Mesmer is part of “a subplot out of another universe.” There was a faintly Baudrillardian flavor to Koehler’s review, which compared Gogol to a Chinese box or a Mobius strip. Koehler stated that if the play is to work, “it has to be grounded in something more than the idea of illusions.”’
Hot ‘n Throbbing, by Paula Vogel, deals with domestic violence and violence against women in general, and considers the relationship between pornography and violence. Charlene, divorced mother of a teenaged boy and girl, makes a living writing what she terms “adult entertainment” for a primarily female readership. The play initially centers on Charlene’s attempts to control her children. The focus shifts when her ex- husband, Clyde, arrives at the house in violation of a restraining order. Through the remainder of the play, Charlene shoots Clyde and then tends to his wound. After Clyde reveals that he came to the house because he hadn’t had enough money for a prostitute,
Charlene consents to have sex with him. Clyde ends up beating and then strangling
Charlene. The play ends with Charlene’s daughter sitting at the computer, taking up the writing of erotica.
* Richard Christiansen, “There’s No Mystery about Why ‘Gogol’ Doesn’t Work: The Author Did It,” The Chicago Tribune, 18 November 1987: C2.
’ Robert Koehler, “Lots of Trickery but Little Magic in Gimmicky ‘Gogol.’” The Los Angeles Times, 5 June 1991: F8.
203 The play has with reason been described as cinematic but has some televisual features as well. The stage consists of two settings simultaneously present. In the center of the stage is a platform construction of a living room. Surrounding it is the interior of a nude dance hall, on either side of which are glass enclosures, one containing The Voice-
Over, a female sex worker who speaks the text that Charlene is writing, the other containing The Voice, the dance hall DJ who also provides voiceovers throughout the play.'°
The work is marked by rapid shifts of locale, as well as fantasy sequences and flashbacks. Voiceovers are provided throughout by The Voice-Over and The Voice. The clearest indication of the cinematic features of the play is the introduction of scenes by
The Voice-Over, with language such as “CUT TO; EXTERIOR. We see the door of the house burst open and—” (266) and “FLASHBACK-THREE YEARS AGO” (274)."
Sound effects include the clap of film slates. Of the London production, Jeremy BCingston wrote, “The play itself goes in for jump-cuts and re-takes, splicing ecstatic moans of five years ago with today’s howls of pain.”'- The production at American Repertory Theatre,
All descriptions are taken from notes on characters and set given in the play. Paula Vogel, Hot ‘n ' Throbbing, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996) 232-233. Subsequent passages are cited parenthetically using page numbers only.
" While the notes on character state simply that The Voice-Over recites the text Charlene is writing. The Voice-Over’s descriptions of scenes commonly match the onstage action, suggesting that Charlene is in some sense interpellating herself into her fictions. Charlene, incidentally, is referred to simply as Woman in the cast of characters and line headings.
Jeremy Kingston, “Pom-Broker with Few Redeeming Features,” The London Times, 8 November 1994: Features.
204 directed by Anne Bogart, was described in similar terms; Kevin Kelly wrote that
Charlene’s “troubles with Clyde and her children are detailed directly—with cinematic jump cuts, close-ups, shifts in POV announced by a man in a booth stage right.”'^ Iris
Fanger commented that the production “plays more like a film than a drama which moves though time and space with no obstacles to impede its flow.”''*
Even so, the play is a bit more freewheeling than most film, suggesting a logic at least partially televisual. There is an overall trajectory to the play, but narrative threads are frequently interrupted and reestablished, as indicated by Janet I-Chin Tu’s review of a production at the Open Circle in Seattle: “much of the show never really achieves emotional power or narrative momentum.” “The rapidly shifting moods prevent us from having any emotional identification with the characters.”'^
Below the Belt, by Richard Dresser, is a satirical allegory on corporate greed and treachery. The play centers on three men who work in a vaguely-defined factory in a desert in some vaguely-defined country, checking the “units” that the factory produces.
Dobbitt, the newest arrival, shares duties and a room with Hanrahan. Both work under
Merkin, who tries to pit them against each other by fostering paranoid suspicion.
Descriptions of the factory environment have a post-apocalyptic feel. On both sides of
Kevin Kelly, “ART’s Startling, Scorching ‘Hot,’” The Boston Globe, 19 April 1994: Living 23.
''* Iris Fanger, “Weighty Problems, No Solutions,” The Boston Herald, 18 April 1994: Arts and Life 30.
'* Janet I-Chin Tu, “‘Throbbing’: Lust in a Familial Setting,” The Seattle Times, 18 November 1997: E5.
205 the chain link fences that surround the factory and are patrolled by guards, prowl unidentified yellow-eyed animals, presumably mutants created from the effluent from the factory which has so polluted the river running through the compound that it catches fire during the play.
Though short on action, the plot is chronological, and follows a reasonably uninterrupted trajectory throughout, though at least one reviewer found the ending incomplete.'*^ Nonetheless, the play consists mostly of brief scenes and quick shifts in locale, prompting Vincent Canby to write that while Below the Belt “has a narrative of sorts . . . it’s essentially a succession of sketches.. . The rapid succession of scenes combines with a plot that reviewers have described as absurdist or surrealistic. Kyle
Lawson called it a “comic-strip of a play” with a “surreal setting and absurdist situations.”'* Everett Evans wrote, “Dresser rises to the sort of nonsense promulgated by the stubborn folk Alice encountered in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Logic and illogic chase one another in circles until the brain swims.”'’
Dimly Perceived Threats to the System, by Jon Klein, has been described as an
“... end-of-the-millennium comedy about a family on the verge of a nervous
Nancy Chumin, “Dark Comedy that Hits ‘Below the Belt,”’ Los Angeles Times, 6 June 1997: F23.
Vincent Canby, “Exiles Lost Beyond Love,” The New York Times, 15 March 1996: Cl.
'* Kyle Lawson, “‘Below the Belt’ is a Workplace Comedy—Really,” The Arizona Republic, 8 March 1998: G3.
'’ Everett Evans, “‘Below the Belt’ Proves to be a Notch Above,” The Houston Chronicle, 20 April 1998: Houston 10.
206 breakdown.”^® Aside from millennial resonances, reviewers have described the work in terms suggesting both televisual features and psychological disequilibrium. Sarah
Kaufman referred to the play’s “farcical, surreal and psychotic atmosphere” and noted that "'‘Dimly Perceived is splintered into 19 separate scenes, each requiring musical transitions and distorted voice-overs for the psychobabble titles projected on screens.”^'
Lloyd Rose wrote that
Most of the comedy comes from the way each character shifts in and out of fantasy. So Josh imagines Megan is coming on to him, and Christine momentarily believes Mr. Sykes is planning to perform an in-office lobotomy on her.... The play gets more freewheeling and cohesive as it goes along, transforming from a series of clever skits into something with real dramatic weight.”
And J. Wynn Rousuck stated that “It’s Klein’s use of fantasy sequences that makes the play so theatrical (these may remind you of TV’s less-polished ‘Ally McBeal’).”^
Televisualitv in Recent Performance
Social Amnesia: A Live Movie (1986), by Impossible Theater of Baltimore, combined live actors with “a mixed-media cascade generated by a ‘nine-projector computerized dissolve slide system’ and accompanied by electronically tailored sounds
■° J. Wynn Rousuck, “A Family’s Funny Flights of Fancy,” The Baltimore Sun, 3 February 1998: 3E.
Sarah Kaufman, “‘System’s’ Surreal Sound Effects,” Washington Post, 6 March 1998: N40.
^ Lloyd Rose, “Funny Valentine: Arena Affectionately Dissects the American Family,” Washington Post, 30 January 1998: Dl.
^ Rousuck 3E.
207 [and] makes a case that [sociopolitical] theater can be combined with the audiovisual hi]inks that are now in vogue.”'"* Joe Brown noted that Impossible Theater has been
“likened to ‘political MTV.’” He described Social Amnesia as “a complex collage of live performance, electronic sound and startlingly beautiful imagery” produced by a “constant flow of evolving and dissolving images, involving more than 2,400 coordinated light and sound cues, plays tricks with perspective like a Robert Wilson spectacle at fast- forward.”^
Leaving formal features aside. Social Amnesia offers an apocalyptic vision with a faintly conspiratorial ring. Brown describes the content of the piece:
Derived from historian Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’, with additional thoughts from Helen Keller, Jack London, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus and others, ‘Social Amnesia’ argues that governments train citizens to covet wealth and accept deplorable living conditions and atrocities as ‘necessary prices to pay for progress’. . . . The cavalcade begins with an image of a ruined Tower of Babel and a parable of a lost city of people who ignore warnings and are led off a cliff by their leaders. To an insistent, echoed rhythm, Sioux chieftain Black Elk warns his people: ‘Christopher Columbus is on the horizon/He’s a brand new breed of businessman . . . He wants to poison you with smallpox blankets . . . He wants to sell you the Used World.” “Put your ear to the ground,” Black Elk says, or “you’ll do the Ghost Dance.” “The future is heard from on a newscast: a teen cult called the Auto-Lemmings has sprouted, its alienated young disciples flinging themselves under moving cars to protest the oppressive Permanent Wartime Economy.
■"* David Sterritt, “Experimental Plays with Ideas Ride Hospitable ‘Next Wave,”’ Christian Science Monitor, 12 November 1986: Arts and Leisure 44.
Joe Brown, “‘Social Amnesia’: Techno Wizardry,” The Washington Post, 21 February 1986: Weekend 11. Social Amnesia is among the productions addressed in Istel, “The Persistence of Vision.” An accompanying photograph suggests high color saturation.
208 Twisted Pairs and Box Conspiracy: An Interactive Sho, by George Coates, are indicative of theatre pieces, commonly with a strong musical component, that Coates has been creating at his Performance Works theatre in San Francisco over the past two decades. Both works explicitly address concerns about mass media like television and the Internet. Coates, who has been called “the P. T. Bamum of multimedia performance.”^^ combines live performers with computer-generated projected images.
Polarized glasses worn by audience members create a three-dimensional effect. Coates is quoted as saying that he uses video technology “to bring a new kind of magic into the theatre, with a dimension of real time you can’t get in film.”^’ Calvin Ahlgren says that
Coates “startling combinations of visual, sonic and terpsichorean grandeur [are] informed by a logic of movement more than by the strict movement of logic.”^*
Laura Evenson describes Twisted Pairs (1996) as “a parody of life online” and “a feast for the senses [which] serves up glitzy technopop music, technosawy puns, projections of online contributions from audience members in cyberspace and eye popping stage sets that come alive with the aid of 3-D glasses.” There is apparently a random quality to the work as well, as Evenson asserts that it contains “too many
Jesse Hamlin, “’’Coates Boots Up with Online Cast,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 14 December 1994: El. Coates’s work is addressed in Istel, “The Persistence of Vision.”
Dan Hulbert, “‘Box’ Turns Seductive Technology into Monstev” Atlanta Journal and Consitution, 30 May 1994: B11.
■* Calvin Ahlgren, “George Coates’ Latest Bom in the Rubble of the Quake,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 21 October 1990: Sunday Datebook 33.
209 disjointed themes/’ In the work, an Amish girl turns to an “online para-media militia” run by Flame Smith for help in escaping a stalker. Evenson continues the summary:
The militia plans to turn the girl into a ‘celebrity Web star’ who can be used as bait—but for what is never really made clear. Flame hints that the girl might be used to raise ransom money to finance her plans to subvert conventional media, but she’s also used to ensnare a homy cyber missionary. . . . As the plot wends along, the militia co-opts a beer- guzzling Alaskan TV station director . . . and Derek 2.0, who’s invented a way to give TV viewers control of the evening news Teleprompter.. . .”’®
Box Conspiracy {\992>) couples similar performance technology with anxieties about media saturation, allusions to conspiracy theories, and subtle apocalyptic resonances. Isabel Hornsby signs her family up for an interactive 5,000-channel interactive cable system that allows the family to order goods and services. The conspiratorial features of the system emerge as the medium extracts more and more information about the family. According to Steven Winn, Box Conspiracy “broadcasts a
‘Brave New World’ warning through a home shopping network mouthpiece.” The
Homsbys’ “pattern of ordering artery-clogging double sausage pizzas on their home- dining channel results in a jump in their insurance premiums.”^® Winn’s description suggests similarities between Box Conspiracy and both 1000 Airplanes and The Medium:
“Sitting in an eerie suburban castle she can’t afford to furnish . . . Isabel appears to float among and occasionally into the seductive phantoms of her enormous TV screen. The
Laura Evenson, “Plot Twists Knock ‘Pair’ Off Line,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 20 February 1996: Dl. The scripts for Coates’s productions have not to my knowledge been published. I am basing all descriptions on newspaper accounts.
Steven Winn, “Coates’ ‘Box’ an Interactive Jungle,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 12 November 1993: C5.
210 overlay of video images, scrim projections and live action create some inspired medium- as-message images.” There is also a faint hint of schizophreniform mentation. Isabel’s daughter Olivia is “a young woman diagnosed with attention deficit disorder—a kind of collective condition in ‘Box Conspiracy’. . . . ” Dan Hulbert, who called the work a
“wacky Orwellian tale,” notes that the work addresses concerns about the social fragmentation associated with the mass media: “Although ‘Box’ suffers a bit from what it warns against—the lulling effect of lush electronic images—it’s energized by outrage at the insularity of the wired world.”^'
Other Coates works that incorporate similar features, though without such overt consideration of the influence of media include The Nowhere Band (1994); The Desert
Music: A Live Sho (1992);Invisible Site: A Virtual Sho (1992); andActual Sho (1988).
Octavia Roca compared Nowhere Band to Wilson’s work and to 1000 Airplanes}' Jesse
Hamlin states that the work is “about a little girl... who comes from 10 billion years in the future to stage a musical about a magic bird that teaches people to fly,” but fi-om
Hamlin’s description. Nowhere Band sounds to have been mostly an aural and visual smorgasbord with scant concern for narrative coherence. Coates used “performers who appear[ed] onscreen via high-speed computer communication lines wired into the Internet
Hulbert Bll. Hulbert’s comment about the ambivalent relationship between Box Conspiracy and the technology it critiques is reflected in a similar comment by Evenson about Twisted Pairs'. “‘Pairs’ comes across as just another of Coates’ experiments in his ongoing love- hate relationship with new technologies. Ironically, the very technologies he parodies are the ones that generate ideas and box-office revenues for him as well as co-sponsorship by such groups as the Well, the Sausalito-based online service organization.” Evenson Dl.
Octavia Roca, “Coates Goes ‘Nowhere,’” The San Francisco Chronicle, 16 December 1994: Cl.
211 from as far away as Australia.. . . A giant computer-generated bird is beamed onto the screen and sent flying over to [an image of a guitarist transmitted from San Jose to San
Francisco] who reaches out and appears to feed it.... [A] bagpiper beaming in from
Australia gets a big hypodermic needle in the ear to inoculate him against a computer virus.'’ Internet connections were updated every four seconds, moving in “jerky spurts.””
Another connection with Wilson and 1000 Airplanes is suggested by Actual Sho, which Michael Kilian described as “structured anarchy or anarchized structure.” “Using translucent screens and a wealth of projectors,” Kilian wrote, “Coates has been able to duplicate the most illusory special effects of which modem television and motion pictures are capable.”” In regard to content, Pamela Sommers advised readers, “Don’t go looking for a plot, or even a clear schematic thread.”"^ Kilian described the overall trajectory of the work:
The only speaking part is that of [a] Babbitt-like character, a dead minister [much of whose life was] devoted to officiating at weddings where they serve chicken dinners afterward, and he succumbed to one—a chicken bone catching in his throat. He appears first speaking to the audience upside down on a tilted gumey, which is righted by a pair of miniskirted nurses. He is equipped with backpack, hard hat, miner’s lamp and metal detector, and set afoot to search for, what? Eternal truth? Another chicken dinner? The final blackness? He speaks improbably to the audience from time to time, at one point reciting statistics on the chemical content of medicated fowl. At another point, he becomes as menacing as the Kissinger
” Hamlin El.
” Michael Kilian, “Really Big ‘She’: It’s Something Special, But What’s Going on Here?,” The Chicago Tribune, 14 June 1988: Tempo 3.
Pamela Sommers, ‘“Actual Sho,’ Grand Trip,” The Washington Post, 3 June 1988: N12.
212 character in John Adams’ opera ‘Nixon in China.’ In the end, he disappears for good, replaced by a stately lady who’s wheeled forth on a gumey and set on the same journey.
House/Lights, by the Wooster Group coupled Gertrude Stein’s 1939 opera libretto Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights with a 1964 soft-pom cult movie, Olga's House of
Shame. A highly mediated work, House/Lights is performed on a “technostage filled with lighting gizmos and monitors that play the Olga movies, distort them, intercut live-action video and even become metaphors. In one section, two women are stretched upside down on boards and two video monitors are angled to look down their dresses in the ultimate act of media voyeurism.”^*
Company member Kate Valk has stated, “We began structuring the play cinematically, using the logic of film: pans, swoops, long shots. We foimd a physical language, a very quirky way of moving in space.” Another company member, Roy
Faudree, also used the term cinematic to describe the Woosters’ approach, but also employed a term more closely associated with remote control television viewing, as well as a comment on social fragmentation: “We bring in our own public views of reality as well, the cinematic way we look at things, the notion of channel switching, the fragmentation of life, the lack of logic in it all yet the way we eventually make sense of the shards.”^’
Mike Steele, “Combination of Stein, Soft Pom is Beguiling,” Minneapolis Star Tribime, 22 November 1997: E4.
Mike Steele, “Experimental Theater Group Brings Order Out of Chaos,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 18 November 1997: El.
213 Reviewers have described the work in terms suggestive of televisual representation, noting its fragmented structure and general disregard for narrative cohesion. Achy Obejas wrote that House/Lights “is a marvel of technology, a bravura performance, and pretty much incoherent.. . . [T]he Woosters’ bombardment of references and fragmented realities doesn’t do much for narrative cohesion.”^* Michael
Grossberg was dismayed by the lack of narrative causality: “these particular emperors of the experimental seem to revel in their nakedness—and don’t even pretend to clothe their piece in such Aristotelian banalities as plot, character, theme, a real beginning or an end.”^’ Mike Steele described the experience in terms reminiscent of Orrin Klapp, stating that House/Lights offered an “overload of information, what with video, lights, film and sound effects.”^®
Achy Obejas, “Wooster Group Stuns the Crowd with ‘House/Lights.’” The Chicago Tribime, 14 November 1997: Tempo I.
Michael Grossberg, “Naked Truth: ‘House/Lights’ Fails, Columbus Dispatch, 9 October 1997: E7.
Steele, “Combination of Stein, Soft Pom is Beguiling.”
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