Roughly a century separates George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, the first play of the Portland Stage Company's 1993-94 season, from the next two shows: Holiday Memories and Three Postcards. This hundred-year span embraces every thematic obsession and stylistic innovation we think of as "modern drama," a term denoting not so much a unified body of works and ideas as a furious discordance of voices all clamoring together in the same historical space. Shaw's comic debunking of romantic illusion sounds one of the most frequently heard notes during these hundred years: the wake-up call of realism. By contrast, Holiday Memories and Three Postcards play a vastly different tune, but one heard just as often: the music of fantasy and imagination, the songs we can sometimes hear beyond or beneath the clamor of reality. Among them, then, these three plays offer a small anthology of modern theater.
The contrasting tendencies embodied in these plays have often been associated with the names of two playwrights already famous by the time Arms and the Man opened on a spring evening in 1894: Ibsen and Strindberg. When Shaw stepped onto the stage of the Avenue Theater to accept the wildly enthusiastic applause of his first-night audience, these founding figures of the modern drama were still at the height of their powers. Ibsen was publishing a new drama every other Christmas to capture the holiday book market, while Strindberg, in the midst of a four-year bout with insanity, was gathering material for his last thirty-six plays. Between them, these two innovators established the poles around which theatrical modernity would turn right down to our own time. On the one hand, Ibsen was patiently constructing a gallery of portraits of middle-class life, apparently photographic in their fidelity to external experience, yet profoundly disturbing in their ability to disclose bizarre secrets. Portland audiences will remember the PSC's productions of Ghosts in 1989 and Hedda Gabler in 1991 as brilliant examples of Ibsen's method of revealing what he took to be the core of bourgeois life by scrutinizing its surface with uncanny precision. Strindberg, on the other hand, in plays like To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata, would transform the stage from a mirror of external reality to a window into the unconscious, a diorama of the dreaming mind.
If we were to have asked Shaw on that night in 1894 which of these nascent, and contrasting, traditions he saw himself embracing in Arms and the Man, he would undoubtedly have in identified his play--and himself--as Ibsenite to the core.
Three years earlier, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, a tract about his own ideas masquerading as a discussion of the Norwegian playwright, Shaw had defined the quintessentially Ibsenite drama as a play remarkably similar to Arms and the Man: one whose action shows the destruction of stale ideals and their replacement by a fresh perception of reality. Through such a plot, Shaw argues, the theater represents the very rhythms of human spiritual evolution, the inner workings of the Life Force. Especially Ibsenite (meaning especially Shavian), according to Shaw, was the dramatization of a woman's liberation from obsolete ideals and her deliverance from the self-betrayal always associated with them--in other words, a story much like Raina Petkoff's.
Why this preoccupation with the destruction of ideals in Shaw's dramatic theory and practice? Aren't ideals to be cherished rather than mocked and repudiated? Not if we understand the meaning of the term as Shaw did. For him, ideals were nothing but pretty masks slapped over the ugly faces of oppressive social institutions. Thus, to believe as Raina does in the first act of Arms and the Man that fighting battles is a matter of heroic posing and operatic gallantry is to succumb to an ideal—that is, a piece of pretty fakery--that helps maintain the ugly institution of war.
Moreover, by attaching us emotionally to abominable institutions, ideals strengthen that other great social contrivance for the propping-up of the status quo, the sense of duty. Idealism and duty are two related mechanisms, each designed to keep us in thrall to a world-order that deserves to be destroyed. As Shaw says, "The point to seize is that social progress takes effect through the replacement of old institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step."
For Shaw no ideals were more fun to smash, and no duties more delightful to flout, than those pieties surrounding the biological and economic facts of marriage and reproduction, better known to the Raina we first meet dreaming in her bedroom as love and romance. In a chapter of The Quintessence entitled "The Womanly Woman," Shaw insists that the interlocked conventions of "womanhood" and "the family" as they were understood by his Victorian contemporaries were nothing but a tissue of idealistic deceits supporting a code of self-destroying duties, especially onerous for the "womanly woman." This unfortunate creature, Shaw tells us, is like a caged parrot who convinces itself that "the mission of a parrot is to minister to the happiness of a private family by whistling and saying Pretty Polly, and that it is in the sacrifice of its liberty to this altruistic pursuit that a true parrot finds the supreme satisfaction of its soul."
Thanks to her romance with Sergius--a perfect example of idealistic folly--Raina is well on her way to becoming just such a caged bird when we first encounter her in Arms and the Man. We can see that she is headed for trouble when she praises Sergius' idiotic cavalry charge as a validation of their "heroic ideals." Worse still, she literally falls to worshipping his picture, vowing that she will never again be "unworthy" of this husband to-be--meaning she will never question his claims to exalted spiritual status, however far-fetched they might seem to a person of common sense. When she and Sergius meet again for the first time following the war, their reunion is more like performance of a bad melodrama than the encounter of two real people:
The contrasting tendencies embodied in these plays have often been associated with the names of two playwrights already famous by the time Arms and the Man opened on a spring evening in 1894: Ibsen and Strindberg. When Shaw stepped onto the stage of the Avenue Theater to accept the wildly enthusiastic applause of his first-night audience, these founding figures of the modern drama were still at the height of their powers. Ibsen was publishing a new drama every other Christmas to capture the holiday book market, while Strindberg, in the midst of a four-year bout with insanity, was gathering material for his last thirty-six plays. Between them, these two innovators established the poles around which theatrical modernity would turn right down to our own time. On the one hand, Ibsen was patiently constructing a gallery of portraits of middle-class life, apparently photographic in their fidelity to external experience, yet profoundly disturbing in their ability to disclose bizarre secrets. Portland audiences will remember the PSC's productions of Ghosts in 1989 and Hedda Gabler in 1991 as brilliant examples of Ibsen's method of revealing what he took to be the core of bourgeois life by scrutinizing its surface with uncanny precision. Strindberg, on the other hand, in plays like To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata, would transform the stage from a mirror of external reality to a window into the unconscious, a diorama of the dreaming mind.
If we were to have asked Shaw on that night in 1894 which of these nascent, and contrasting, traditions he saw himself embracing in Arms and the Man, he would undoubtedly have in identified his play--and himself--as Ibsenite to the core.
Three years earlier, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, a tract about his own ideas masquerading as a discussion of the Norwegian playwright, Shaw had defined the quintessentially Ibsenite drama as a play remarkably similar to Arms and the Man: one whose action shows the destruction of stale ideals and their replacement by a fresh perception of reality. Through such a plot, Shaw argues, the theater represents the very rhythms of human spiritual evolution, the inner workings of the Life Force. Especially Ibsenite (meaning especially Shavian), according to Shaw, was the dramatization of a woman's liberation from obsolete ideals and her deliverance from the self-betrayal always associated with them--in other words, a story much like Raina Petkoff's.
Why this preoccupation with the destruction of ideals in Shaw's dramatic theory and practice? Aren't ideals to be cherished rather than mocked and repudiated? Not if we understand the meaning of the term as Shaw did. For him, ideals were nothing but pretty masks slapped over the ugly faces of oppressive social institutions. Thus, to believe as Raina does in the first act of Arms and the Man that fighting battles is a matter of heroic posing and operatic gallantry is to succumb to an ideal—that is, a piece of pretty fakery--that helps maintain the ugly institution of war.
Moreover, by attaching us emotionally to abominable institutions, ideals strengthen that other great social contrivance for the propping-up of the status quo, the sense of duty. Idealism and duty are two related mechanisms, each designed to keep us in thrall to a world-order that deserves to be destroyed. As Shaw says, "The point to seize is that social progress takes effect through the replacement of old institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step."
For Shaw no ideals were more fun to smash, and no duties more delightful to flout, than those pieties surrounding the biological and economic facts of marriage and reproduction, better known to the Raina we first meet dreaming in her bedroom as love and romance. In a chapter of The Quintessence entitled "The Womanly Woman," Shaw insists that the interlocked conventions of "womanhood" and "the family" as they were understood by his Victorian contemporaries were nothing but a tissue of idealistic deceits supporting a code of self-destroying duties, especially onerous for the "womanly woman." This unfortunate creature, Shaw tells us, is like a caged parrot who convinces itself that "the mission of a parrot is to minister to the happiness of a private family by whistling and saying Pretty Polly, and that it is in the sacrifice of its liberty to this altruistic pursuit that a true parrot finds the supreme satisfaction of its soul."
Thanks to her romance with Sergius--a perfect example of idealistic folly--Raina is well on her way to becoming just such a caged bird when we first encounter her in Arms and the Man. We can see that she is headed for trouble when she praises Sergius' idiotic cavalry charge as a validation of their "heroic ideals." Worse still, she literally falls to worshipping his picture, vowing that she will never again be "unworthy" of this husband to-be--meaning she will never question his claims to exalted spiritual status, however far-fetched they might seem to a person of common sense. When she and Sergius meet again for the first time following the war, their reunion is more like performance of a bad melodrama than the encounter of two real people:
RAINA. My hero! My king!
SERGIUS. My queen! . . .
RAINA. I think we two have found the higher love. When I think of you, I
feel that I could never do a base deed, or think an ignoble thought.
SERGIUS. My lady and my saint!
And so on.
The problem with heading for marriage with one's eyes so firmly shut is that shortly after the ceremony one is likely to open them on scenes somewhat less edifying. We can see what's in store for Raina as we watch Sergius in action the moment her back is turned: unsatisfied with the "higher love," he seizes his first opportunity to make a little lower love to the maidservant, Louka.
After a year of "ideal" marriage with this particular "hero" and "king," Raina will almost certainly have devolved into the betrayed wife of a philandering husband, all the while feeling duty-bound to keep up appearances in her domestic cage by "whistling and saying Pretty Polly," a perfect realization of Shaw's parrot-like "womanly woman."
Raina is saved from this idealistic fate by the arrival of the Swiss Captain Bluntschli. A mercenary and hotel-keeper--which is to say, a man who makes a profession of soldiering and a business of keeping house--he is a walking repudiation of the myths of military gallantry and domestic romance, and thus the polar opposite of Sergius. As the first person who talks sense to Raina--and who expects sense from her in return--he offers her the sober prose of real life rather than the inflated rhetoric of idealism. Raina's passage from the worship of Sergius to the appreciation of her Swiss "chocolate cream soldier's" homelier virtues forms the most compelling dramatic thrust of Arms and the Man, a story about the triumph of "un-womanliness" that Shaw told many times during the sixty-odd years of his playwriting life. Characters like the mathematical Vivie Warren in Mrs Warren's Profession, or the crusading Barbara Undershaft in Major Barbara, or the wised-up Ellie Dunn in Heartbreak House, or the truly heroic Joan of Arc in Saint Joan are all sisters of Raina Petkoff, and they all attest to Shaw's enduring fascination with the drama of a woman's embrace of clear-eyed realism.
Of course, not everyone has supported the war on romance waged in Arms and the Man. Sitting in that cheering first-night audience was Shaw's fellow Irishman, the world-class romantic William Butler Yeats, whose own play, The Land of Heart's Desire, served as the evening's curtain-raiser. Said Yeats, "I listened to Arms and the Man with admiration and hatred. It seemed to me inorganic, logical straightness and not the crooked road of life. . . . . Presently I had a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing-machine, that clicked and shone, but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually." Shaw as a smiling machine, manufacturing logical jokes at the expense of life's "crooked" ways is a familiar image; familiar too is the sense that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy.
Truman Capote, as he addresses us in Holiday Memories, seems immediately to be running athwart Shaw's credo of realism and progress. Are memories, after all, real, Shaw might ask. And even if they are, he would certainly mock the nostalgic look backward, rather than the clear-eyed contemplation of the here-and-now and the bold anticipation of the future.
"I am always drawn back to places where I have lived," Capote writes in the opening words of Breakfast at Tiffany's, a story about a worldly young woman who remains romantic and naive enough to believe she can achieve fame and riches without losing her soul. "I want to still be me," Holly Golightly tells the narrator, "when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's." When Capote wrote the two stories on which Holiday Memories is based--"The Thanksgiving Visitor" and "A Christmas Memory”--he had been "breakfasting at Tiffany's" for a long time, having embarked on the road of fame and riches in 1948, the year his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, became a best-seller. Perhaps through these Holiday stories--in which he recreates events from his boyhood in Alabama--he was, like Holly, staking a claim to the continuing possession of his own soul. "Moments of those few years," Capote informs us, "turned out to be the happiest part of an otherwise difficult childhood." And when the central figure of those years dies, Capote feels the "severing from me of an irreplaceable part of myself."
The happiness of those years comes from the lessons in life taught by that central figure, Capote's eccentric cousin Sook, a woman in her sixties who retains the innocence and sensibility of a child. Shy and lonely in the world of adults, she forms an intimate friendship with young Capote, calling him by the name of a long-dead childhood friend: Buddy. Each of the stories, and each half of the play fashioned from them by Russell Vandenbroucke, presents an experience of luminous moral insight available only to those who, like Sook, exercise the power of imagination, the capacity to see what reality conceals from the ordinary observer.
"A Thanksgiving Visitor," dramatizes Buddy's first encounter with the moral imagination, the ability to discover in our enemies the same humanity we cherish in ourselves. When Cousin Sook decides to invite Odd Henderson, Buddy's bullying classmate, to Thanksgiving dinner so that the boys can "know each other a little," and so put their fighting to an end, Buddy stubbornly resists the idea. He clings to his hatred of Odd, lapsing into morose jealousy when the visiting boy charms his Thanksgiving hosts by his spirited singing of "Red, Red Robbin." When Buddy sees a way to humiliate Odd, he seizes it, but the unexpected consequences force him to face the paradox that his enemy has "emerged--how? why?--as someone superior to me, even more honest." More importantly, Sook teaches Buddy a lesson about his own culpability. "What you did was . . . deliberate," she reminds him. "There is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty."
If the first half of the play shows the acquisition of moral imagination--seeing ourselves in another's place--the second reveals the power of the aesthetic imagination to transform the everyday world into an arena of transcendent beauty.
When cousin Sook awakens on a late November morning to the discovery that "it's fruitcake weather," she and Buddy embark on a ritual of preparations that carry them from forest to town as they make ready for the coming of Christmas. Picking pecans, counting pennies, buying whiskey, baking fruitcakes, chopping down a Christmas tree: each of these activities is transformed into a moment of beauty or adventure by the power of imagination. As they approach the pine woods where they will fell their holiday tree, Sook asks Buddy, "can you smell it? . . . It's a kind of ocean." And Buddy, startled into a fresh apprehension of the world, responds "with surprise": "It is a kind of ocean." Sook is constantly surprising Buddy, and us, by her capacity to transfigure experience, to make us encounter, as if for the first time, the oceanic delights of daily life.
Flat broke in Depression-era Alabama, Sook and Buddy must rely on imagination rather than money to provide Christmas presents for one another. This year, as in years past, each builds the other a kite. For Buddy, Sook creates a magical object that is "blue and scattered with gold and green Good Conduct stars." And on Christmas Day, their kites aloft in a winter wind, Sook shares with Buddy a tremendous religious insight, one worthy of a poet. Which is of course what this eccentric cousin is, and what she is teaching Buddy to become through her lessons in imagination.
In Arms and the Man Bluntschli shows everyone that life is something quite "sensible." In Holiday Memories, Sook demonstrates the opposite, that life is a kind of perpetual revelation. In Three Postcards, Craig Lucas and Craig Carnelia remind us that the most ordinary events--say, dinner in a restaurant with friends--are charged with so much secret poetry, with so many hidden emotions and distant memories waiting to erupt into song, that life may finally be unknowable.
For example, at one moment the three friends of the play--Little Jane, Big Jane, and K.C.--are considering whether "dogs actually know when you say their name that it's their name." This Far Side-like discussion is abruptly silenced, and supplanted by a song, sung by Bill, the restaurant pianist who has hitherto been sitting quietly on the periphery of the action, self-effacingly playing his piano. More shocking than the sudden transition--by this point we have grown accustomed to a kind of dramatic cross-cutting as the defining texture of the play--is the erotic intensity the song displays toward one of the three diners, Little Jane. "I've been thinking about your legs," Bill sings, “. . . . I've been thinking about your panties. . . . /And it's giving me the shakes."
Meanwhile, Little Jane offers a bite of her mousse to K.C., unperturbed by Bill's smoldering fantasies because she hasn't heard them. Only we in the audience have been privy to these parallel, and contrasting, universes of prosaic table-talk and raging desire, recognizing as we watch that every human moment is composed of such multiple layers of expressed banality and inexpressible yearning.
We noted earlier that Shaw's Ibsenite credentials included dramatic characters developing in a clear direction from an addiction to fantasy to the sharp-eyed perception of reality. But another way of representing human beings on stage was staked out by Strindberg, who envisioned characters as "vacillating, disintegrated . . . conglomerations of past and present . . . bits from books and newspapers, scraps . . . patched together as is the human soul."
Like the psychological mosaics imagined by Strindberg, the characters in this play are composed of many contrasting bits and pieces, moving in many contradictory directions. Friends since kindergarten, the women share memories and experiences that include adolescent self-discovery, sexual misadventure, and emotional crisis. Reflecting this density and variety, the play is structured around sharp transitions from the spoken to the unspeakable, from the present to the past and future, from the outer life to the inner, from shared moments to moments of utter privacy, from speech to song, from the ordinary to the extraordinary--and in every case, back again.
Every instant these characters spend in each other's presence, the authors seem to be telling us, is composed of so many, and such varied, pieces that only a kind of dramatic kaleidosocpe can begin to approach the quality of the experience. But even such a kaleidoscope may ultimately be inadequate to capturing the texture of human consciousness.
Strindberg writes about characters composed of "scraps" from "the past," and of "bits from . . . newspapers." Throughout the evening, Little Jane is haunted by a pair of visions--one a personal memory, the other an idea sparked by a newspaper article--that seem to define the impossibility of truly representing the manifold levels of experience.
In the personal memory, Jane recalls "standing . . . in the middle of this empty room and . . . I just have this feeling . . . It's like I understand my whole existence or something." However, the moment of understanding is evanescent, as Jane realizes when she says "it changes . . . whenever I try to describe it."
The newspaper story that has impressed Little Jane is "about these subatomic particles actually changing . . . when the scientists started watching them." K.C. grasps the implications of this discovery, and the two friends share a moment of cosmic recognition:
The problem with heading for marriage with one's eyes so firmly shut is that shortly after the ceremony one is likely to open them on scenes somewhat less edifying. We can see what's in store for Raina as we watch Sergius in action the moment her back is turned: unsatisfied with the "higher love," he seizes his first opportunity to make a little lower love to the maidservant, Louka.
After a year of "ideal" marriage with this particular "hero" and "king," Raina will almost certainly have devolved into the betrayed wife of a philandering husband, all the while feeling duty-bound to keep up appearances in her domestic cage by "whistling and saying Pretty Polly," a perfect realization of Shaw's parrot-like "womanly woman."
Raina is saved from this idealistic fate by the arrival of the Swiss Captain Bluntschli. A mercenary and hotel-keeper--which is to say, a man who makes a profession of soldiering and a business of keeping house--he is a walking repudiation of the myths of military gallantry and domestic romance, and thus the polar opposite of Sergius. As the first person who talks sense to Raina--and who expects sense from her in return--he offers her the sober prose of real life rather than the inflated rhetoric of idealism. Raina's passage from the worship of Sergius to the appreciation of her Swiss "chocolate cream soldier's" homelier virtues forms the most compelling dramatic thrust of Arms and the Man, a story about the triumph of "un-womanliness" that Shaw told many times during the sixty-odd years of his playwriting life. Characters like the mathematical Vivie Warren in Mrs Warren's Profession, or the crusading Barbara Undershaft in Major Barbara, or the wised-up Ellie Dunn in Heartbreak House, or the truly heroic Joan of Arc in Saint Joan are all sisters of Raina Petkoff, and they all attest to Shaw's enduring fascination with the drama of a woman's embrace of clear-eyed realism.
Of course, not everyone has supported the war on romance waged in Arms and the Man. Sitting in that cheering first-night audience was Shaw's fellow Irishman, the world-class romantic William Butler Yeats, whose own play, The Land of Heart's Desire, served as the evening's curtain-raiser. Said Yeats, "I listened to Arms and the Man with admiration and hatred. It seemed to me inorganic, logical straightness and not the crooked road of life. . . . . Presently I had a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing-machine, that clicked and shone, but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually." Shaw as a smiling machine, manufacturing logical jokes at the expense of life's "crooked" ways is a familiar image; familiar too is the sense that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy.
Truman Capote, as he addresses us in Holiday Memories, seems immediately to be running athwart Shaw's credo of realism and progress. Are memories, after all, real, Shaw might ask. And even if they are, he would certainly mock the nostalgic look backward, rather than the clear-eyed contemplation of the here-and-now and the bold anticipation of the future.
"I am always drawn back to places where I have lived," Capote writes in the opening words of Breakfast at Tiffany's, a story about a worldly young woman who remains romantic and naive enough to believe she can achieve fame and riches without losing her soul. "I want to still be me," Holly Golightly tells the narrator, "when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's." When Capote wrote the two stories on which Holiday Memories is based--"The Thanksgiving Visitor" and "A Christmas Memory”--he had been "breakfasting at Tiffany's" for a long time, having embarked on the road of fame and riches in 1948, the year his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, became a best-seller. Perhaps through these Holiday stories--in which he recreates events from his boyhood in Alabama--he was, like Holly, staking a claim to the continuing possession of his own soul. "Moments of those few years," Capote informs us, "turned out to be the happiest part of an otherwise difficult childhood." And when the central figure of those years dies, Capote feels the "severing from me of an irreplaceable part of myself."
The happiness of those years comes from the lessons in life taught by that central figure, Capote's eccentric cousin Sook, a woman in her sixties who retains the innocence and sensibility of a child. Shy and lonely in the world of adults, she forms an intimate friendship with young Capote, calling him by the name of a long-dead childhood friend: Buddy. Each of the stories, and each half of the play fashioned from them by Russell Vandenbroucke, presents an experience of luminous moral insight available only to those who, like Sook, exercise the power of imagination, the capacity to see what reality conceals from the ordinary observer.
"A Thanksgiving Visitor," dramatizes Buddy's first encounter with the moral imagination, the ability to discover in our enemies the same humanity we cherish in ourselves. When Cousin Sook decides to invite Odd Henderson, Buddy's bullying classmate, to Thanksgiving dinner so that the boys can "know each other a little," and so put their fighting to an end, Buddy stubbornly resists the idea. He clings to his hatred of Odd, lapsing into morose jealousy when the visiting boy charms his Thanksgiving hosts by his spirited singing of "Red, Red Robbin." When Buddy sees a way to humiliate Odd, he seizes it, but the unexpected consequences force him to face the paradox that his enemy has "emerged--how? why?--as someone superior to me, even more honest." More importantly, Sook teaches Buddy a lesson about his own culpability. "What you did was . . . deliberate," she reminds him. "There is only one unpardonable sin--deliberate cruelty."
If the first half of the play shows the acquisition of moral imagination--seeing ourselves in another's place--the second reveals the power of the aesthetic imagination to transform the everyday world into an arena of transcendent beauty.
When cousin Sook awakens on a late November morning to the discovery that "it's fruitcake weather," she and Buddy embark on a ritual of preparations that carry them from forest to town as they make ready for the coming of Christmas. Picking pecans, counting pennies, buying whiskey, baking fruitcakes, chopping down a Christmas tree: each of these activities is transformed into a moment of beauty or adventure by the power of imagination. As they approach the pine woods where they will fell their holiday tree, Sook asks Buddy, "can you smell it? . . . It's a kind of ocean." And Buddy, startled into a fresh apprehension of the world, responds "with surprise": "It is a kind of ocean." Sook is constantly surprising Buddy, and us, by her capacity to transfigure experience, to make us encounter, as if for the first time, the oceanic delights of daily life.
Flat broke in Depression-era Alabama, Sook and Buddy must rely on imagination rather than money to provide Christmas presents for one another. This year, as in years past, each builds the other a kite. For Buddy, Sook creates a magical object that is "blue and scattered with gold and green Good Conduct stars." And on Christmas Day, their kites aloft in a winter wind, Sook shares with Buddy a tremendous religious insight, one worthy of a poet. Which is of course what this eccentric cousin is, and what she is teaching Buddy to become through her lessons in imagination.
In Arms and the Man Bluntschli shows everyone that life is something quite "sensible." In Holiday Memories, Sook demonstrates the opposite, that life is a kind of perpetual revelation. In Three Postcards, Craig Lucas and Craig Carnelia remind us that the most ordinary events--say, dinner in a restaurant with friends--are charged with so much secret poetry, with so many hidden emotions and distant memories waiting to erupt into song, that life may finally be unknowable.
For example, at one moment the three friends of the play--Little Jane, Big Jane, and K.C.--are considering whether "dogs actually know when you say their name that it's their name." This Far Side-like discussion is abruptly silenced, and supplanted by a song, sung by Bill, the restaurant pianist who has hitherto been sitting quietly on the periphery of the action, self-effacingly playing his piano. More shocking than the sudden transition--by this point we have grown accustomed to a kind of dramatic cross-cutting as the defining texture of the play--is the erotic intensity the song displays toward one of the three diners, Little Jane. "I've been thinking about your legs," Bill sings, “. . . . I've been thinking about your panties. . . . /And it's giving me the shakes."
Meanwhile, Little Jane offers a bite of her mousse to K.C., unperturbed by Bill's smoldering fantasies because she hasn't heard them. Only we in the audience have been privy to these parallel, and contrasting, universes of prosaic table-talk and raging desire, recognizing as we watch that every human moment is composed of such multiple layers of expressed banality and inexpressible yearning.
We noted earlier that Shaw's Ibsenite credentials included dramatic characters developing in a clear direction from an addiction to fantasy to the sharp-eyed perception of reality. But another way of representing human beings on stage was staked out by Strindberg, who envisioned characters as "vacillating, disintegrated . . . conglomerations of past and present . . . bits from books and newspapers, scraps . . . patched together as is the human soul."
Like the psychological mosaics imagined by Strindberg, the characters in this play are composed of many contrasting bits and pieces, moving in many contradictory directions. Friends since kindergarten, the women share memories and experiences that include adolescent self-discovery, sexual misadventure, and emotional crisis. Reflecting this density and variety, the play is structured around sharp transitions from the spoken to the unspeakable, from the present to the past and future, from the outer life to the inner, from shared moments to moments of utter privacy, from speech to song, from the ordinary to the extraordinary--and in every case, back again.
Every instant these characters spend in each other's presence, the authors seem to be telling us, is composed of so many, and such varied, pieces that only a kind of dramatic kaleidosocpe can begin to approach the quality of the experience. But even such a kaleidoscope may ultimately be inadequate to capturing the texture of human consciousness.
Strindberg writes about characters composed of "scraps" from "the past," and of "bits from . . . newspapers." Throughout the evening, Little Jane is haunted by a pair of visions--one a personal memory, the other an idea sparked by a newspaper article--that seem to define the impossibility of truly representing the manifold levels of experience.
In the personal memory, Jane recalls "standing . . . in the middle of this empty room and . . . I just have this feeling . . . It's like I understand my whole existence or something." However, the moment of understanding is evanescent, as Jane realizes when she says "it changes . . . whenever I try to describe it."
The newspaper story that has impressed Little Jane is "about these subatomic particles actually changing . . . when the scientists started watching them." K.C. grasps the implications of this discovery, and the two friends share a moment of cosmic recognition:
LITTLE JANE.--and I thought wouldn't it be incredible . . . If all the secrets of the universe were aware when we started to--
K.C. To get close to them.
LITTLE JANE. Yes. And they changed.
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What would be a depressing thought for a nineteenth-century realist stands as the fundamental premise of Three Postcards: what's out there in the world is not a fixed, objective reality, but a universe of innumerable, cagey particles, of human souls fashioned out of bits and pieces, each guarding its secret essence by constantly changing shape and meaning even as we watch.
This makes for absorbing theater because the fundamental element of dramatic action, as all the textbooks tell us, is souls in motion--a dance allowing endless variations. In one play, we watch Raina's transformation from a giddy romantic to the fiancee of a sober Swiss mercenary—a classical arc of dramatic change. In another, we observe the daily bursts of revelation experienced by Capote's poetic innocents. And in Three Postcards we witness the vacillation and indeterminacy of souls like sub-atomic particles. As these moving figures succeed one another at the Portland Stage Company, we are enabled to experience some of the major strands in the complex fabric of modern drama. |
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION TITLES.
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