THEATER: The Tremendous Tremendous

Coming toward the end of the Great Depression, the 1939 World's Fair was designed to be a tremendous exhibition, one that would celebrate and unite the many different peoples of the world. To this effect, one of the highlights was the Westinghouse Time Capsule (though most of us will have to take Wikipedia's word for that), which captured that singular moment in time. While it's true that the capsule isn't due to be unearthed until the year 6939, that hasn't stopped the Mad Ones from painstakingly recreating one such moment -- the eighty celebratory, real-time minutes following the final performance of the Tremendous Traveling Abbots. What follows -- The Tremendous Tremendous -- doesn't wear itself out or sell itself short. Like their previous work, Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War, the company uses a timeless setting to focus on the minutiae that keep us living and thriving together.

The play opens with a reversal of the usual theatrical norms: the five-member cast is returning from their final performance, a Shakespearean tragedy (done as a comedic vaudeville act), and between triumphant shots of liquor, they go to the sad task of taking off their fake breasts, unstrapping their blood packets, and washing the greasepaint from their faces. What was the Abbotts' finest hour -- the New York Times gave them an energetic five stars -- may have passed, and the future is terrifying. (They're divided over what their next gig should be.) This, in turn, is a second reversal on our expectations: rather than move on, the group attempts to live in the glorious past, the result of which is a gripping and emotional yet largely plot-less play. (Nothing wrong with that, especially if you're a fan of character-focused playwrights like Annie Baker, and particularly impressive, considering that the play was written by the ensemble.)

Of course, nothing is that simple: the future isn't simply the bright and shiny thing the World's Fair promises it will be, nor is the past this grand Golden Age to swoon over. Squid (Michael Dalto), the group's swarthy musician, has only recently joined the group, and the company does their best to avoid mentioning Murray, the fallen legend he replaced. For all their smiles, his death is a matter of contention between the tomboy Lucilla (Stephanie Wright Thompson) and the wry Bald Henry (Marc Bovino), to say nothing of the deeper sorrow this summons up in the serious Charlie (Joe Curnutte), an emotion that their bubbling leader, Tall Henry (Henry Vick, new to the company, though you'd never be able to tell), does his best to soothe. But such specifics are hardly the point; the subtext exists merely to convince us of the deep bonds and history that ties the group (which isn't really related) together: watch the way they rib one another about their barroom flirting, unite to make up stories on the fly (a preposterous explanation of how Charlie lost his leg), and sweetly share gifts with one another. They're so loose, so utterly convincing, that you'll feel like a time-traveling party-crashing voyeur (particularly in the intimate space).

In fact, everything about The Tremendous Tremendous feels authentic, from the type of popcorn they throw into one another's mouths to Sydney Gallas's brilliant costuming; from the silent projection of the World's Fair they marvel over together to the lights studding their dressing-room mirror. Though the Mad Ones bring this aesthetic with them (they're credited as producers and set designers), they're aided by Jeffrey Withers, who, being primarily an actor, is the right sort of director for a piece this loose and character-driven. That is, though the plot drifts -- it's not unusual for two distinct conversations to take place at once -- there isn't a single moment that feels unnecessary, and that applies to the ending, which takes a turn that, while unexpected to we on the outside, seems inevitable to the Abbotts.

So forget the sealed capsule, forget the lifeless exhibits: The Tremendous Tremendous is the thing worth remembering, a testament not only to a time and a people, but to the idea that we can be better than this, and for as long as we choose to make that moment last.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Adult World (I) & (II)"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 76.

You may have noticed by now that many of Wallace's stories don't exactly end. After watching the author struggle within the fiction of "Octet," the logic behind this becomes clearer: to end a story is to, in some way, resolve it; in turn, this can be said to then absolve the reader of any obligation to come to terms with it, much in the same way that when an answer key is provided to a student's mathematics homework (when it is presolved), the student has less motivation to derive a logical/fitting answer. For this reason, Wallace splits "Adult World" into two stories. (I) is a three-part exploration of an "immature, inexperienced, emotionally labile young wife" who, after three-and-a-half-years of worrying that she's hurting his "thingie" when they have sex, has an epiphany that accounts for all the subtext in her dream images and for her husband's peculiar quirks. (II), on the other hand, is the fourth part of the same story, written as a schema (a formal outline often done in shorthand, as Wallace was wont to do), the part that actually explains the nature of the epiphany and details what happens next -- a sort of "ending" that Wallace was apparently unable to force himself to seriously write (as in, as an actual story segment, and not just as the writerly, self-conscious outline of such), and throughout which there are bracketed notes reminding the author to "avoid ez gag."

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THEATER: Bring Us the Head of Your Daughter

Photo/Larry Cobra

"Forgiveness is the easiest way to ignore shit that ain't pleasant!" shouts Dexel (Jordan Tisdale) as he attempts to reinsert himself (after a long estrangement) into the life of his half-sister, Contessa (Mara Lileas). So it's more than a little surprising that Bring Us the Head of Your Daughter -- an early play by Derek Ahonen (revised for this production) -- is filled with so much forgiveness and unpleasantness. As the volume ratchets up, the characters grow more melodramatic, and the situations flaunt plausibility, it becomes all too easy to ignore their motivations and underlying truths, and to fixate on the shock of it all: two lesbians, Contessa and Jackie (Anna Stromberg), have raised a spoiled daughter, Garance (Sarah Roy), who spends her time dressing in blackface and cannibalizing housewives at random. Dexel raped Contessa when they were both fifteen; Jackie is a fall-down drunk who has been enabled by her repressed wife. What needs to be a tragic dissection of American values is instead a comic distortion of them, a play that is so many sheets to the wind that it's barely intelligible.

In Ahonen's previous shows for the Amoralists, conventions have always been subverted for some deeper reason -- the uniting religion of Amerissiah; the passions of Happy in the Poorhouse; the utopianism of their best work, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side -- but with Daughter, which purports to be about the necessity of family, the sight of a cannibal giving a rapist a massage is just that, and nothing more. To be more accurate, when the theatrical Garance finally makes her appearance and is given the opportunity to explain her actions, she simply screams at the top of her lungs -- as she did as a child at piano recital -- and sticks out her tongue. It's a cry for attention for the sake of attention, and has as much to do with the lack of a father figure in her life as her insistence on speaking with an English accent has to do with her "hatred" of America. Under all that, Ahonen is struggling with America's paradoxical split between puritanical and excessive values, but by so easily resolving the absurd dramas of the play -- Oh, let's just move to Israel; Say, let's find that daughter I left at the adoption agency -- we don't rubberneck long enough to feel involved or implicated.

Ahonen's direction shows an awareness of the play's breakneck speed, and frequently slows down, but this inadvertently has the opposite effect as intended, for it exaggerates the comic portions -- see Garance, sneaking around like a ninja in her burqua -- while telegraphing and diminishing the serious portions. Significance isn't created by placing a hideously lengthy pause between two characters: it is earned. This extends to the cast, as well, which needs to find reasons for their actions beyond their being directed to do so. Ms. Lileas approaches Contessa -- rightly so -- with a strong backbone and resilience, but is time and time again forced to abandon that strength for the sake of physical comedy, so much so that she ends up a cipher. As for Ms. Stromberg and Ms. Roy, who are asked to play "drunk" and "crazy": they come across as well-acted but motivation-less moods, not characters. Only the repentant Mr. Tisdale, whose AIDS-afflicted Dexel realistically struggles with reasons to stay and put up with all this shit, comes across as a character in full, which is all the more a shame given how rich Alfred Schatz's kitchen/living-room set and noisy Brian Lazuras's sound design is.

The Amoralists have the components to put on good, original theater, and have boldly widened their company in this, their fifth straight year of productions, but at this point, they seem to be running on fumes. Bring Us the Head of Your Daughter still has the manic energy of their past work, but it lacks the head-rolling conviction that made me fall for them in the first place.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Octet"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 92.

As a fiction writer myself (specifically an unpublished fiction writer), I am RIGHT THERE with Wallace's self-professed "honest" struggles to salvage the metabelletristic fiasco of these eight pop-quiz interrogations (only three of which he's actually included, a fourth of which is a revision of one of the earlier pieces) by introducing a "ninth" pop quiz that begins as such: "You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces, pieces which as it happens are not contes philosophiques and not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables, exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as 'short stories'..." Through the duration of this lengthy and heavily annotated "final" quiz, Wallace stresses the importance of honesty, that being the key that will save the story from being simply a "cute formal exercise in interrogative structure and S.O.P. metatext." He also points out the thin thin line on which the story skates, that it must be

...both grotesquely funny and grotesquely serious at the same time, [lest] any real human urgency in the Quiz's scenario and palpations is obscured by what appears to be just more of the cynical, amusing-ourselves-to-death-type commercial comedy that's already sucked so much felt urgency out of contemporary life in the first place...

Yes, this point's been made in Infinite Jest, but given how raptly readers have been poring over interviews with Wallace's editors and colleagues circa that 1994 publication, they might just as well hear it from the self-conscious author himself, some five years later. The internal struggle of the author is on full display here, and although it does sometimes tip too far into manipulation or "ironic undercutting" -- particularly in the footnotes warning us about the use of terms like "relationship," "to be," and "feelings" -- these flaws are what we're being asked to empathize with in the first place, re: the whole interrogatory quiz structure, and the more he (= Wallace) contorts to himself understand what he cannot find a way to write, the more he, in his unclear clarity, succeeds in convincing us that there is in fact something to be salvaged from his failure.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace \ (More) Short Shorts (Exclusively) from "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"

If you're writing a very short story, it may be because you don't have much to say, but that doesn't mean you can't at least say it creatively, as Wallace does in one of his odder classics, "Datum Centurio." The "story" is written as an entry from Leckie & Webster's Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage © 2096, one that's looking specifically at the third definition of the noun form of "date." He offers us two forms, one for a "soft date" (in which one "voluntarily submit[s] one's nucleotide configurations and other Procreativity Designators to an agency empowered by law to identify an optimal female neurogenetic complement for the purposes of Procreative Genital Interface") and one for a "hard date," which involves "the creation and/or use of a Virtual Female Sensory Array," and is derived from "hardware date."

In tracing the history and usage of this future term, Wallace explains that as our culture grows more emotionally distant (or "hard"), we will require the antonymic "soft" term in order to connote tender sentiments. There's some clever stuff in here, too, about the divide between the predominantly male-centric view of the purposes of a 20th C "date" and the supposedly female one: "(B) the unilateral pursuit of an immediate vigorous, and uncodified episode of genital interface without regard to neurogenetic compatibility or soft offspring or even a telephone call the next day." This is where Wallace's technical prose comes in handy, for it forces us to really look and consider our actual terms and uses (and purposes) for the language we use today, when we throw "fuck" around without anything behind it, and perhaps already cheapen the idea of dating. This is, like much of Wallace's fiction at this phase, cautionary, and in this case, the warning is loud and clear. [72/100]

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