When George Bernard Shaw, the Portland Stage Company's leadoff playwright this year, died in 1950 he was generally acknowledged as the pre-eminent dramatist of the English-speaking world. By the 1960s, that distinction had passed to Samuel Beckett, whose Happy Days inaugurates the second half of the season. This transition from Shaw to Beckett marks a revolution in the aims and methods of modern drama, for between these two expatriate Irishmen the artistic contrasts could scarcely be greater.
If Shaw was a realist, then Beckett belonged to a new school of playwriting defined by the poet Apollinaire when he declared that the stage should no more resemble life than a bicycle wheel does a leg. There is of course a similarity between wheel and leg, but it does not lie on the surface and has nothing to do with photographic fidelity. Rather the resemblance is analogical or metaphorical: the wheel is to the bicycle as the leg is to the body. Between Beckett's plays and the world outside the theater the relationship is likewise indirect--and radically different from the realism of Shaw. With Beckett's ascendancy, in fact, anti-realism was enshrined as one of the dominant new paradigms of the twentieth-century stage.
But holding the mirror up to nature is an ineradicable instinct in theater. By the late 1970s, when David Mamet came to national attention as a playwright, critics were already beginning to notice a return to realism on the part of American dramatists. Mamet's play, Oleanna, and Constance Congdon's Losing Father's Body--the two works that conclude this season--represent a continuation of the realistic tradition associated with Shaw, but a continuation marked by conspicuous difference. Beckett introduced new possibilities, virtually a new language, to theater. Both Mamet and Congdon inhabit a world shaped by those innovations, and we can see in their work how realism itself now bears the marks of Beckett's influence.
Shaw's realistic theater is about progress, specifically about individual choices characters make that bring about change, thereby advancing the ongoing transformation of society. He reproduces on stage the evolutionary thrust of a "Life Force" whose purpose is to bring about heaven on earth. Because the universe shaped by this dynamic force is, and always has been, bursting with interesting people making important decisions, Shaw was a dramatic maximalist, seeking to cram as much of that dynamism from as many different historical periods as possible onto the stage. His writing for the theater fills six volumes of some seven hundred pages each, and his plays seem to grow longer and more philosophically ambitious as his career develops. Thus Arms and the Man, an early work, weighs in (with preface) at a mere 87 pages, confines itself to a single house during a four-month period, and occupies a conventional two hours on stage. Thirty years later, Shaw gave the world Back to Methuselah, a dramatic behemoth five times longer than Arms and the Man, with a plot that spans all of human history from its origins in the Garden of Eden to the restoration of paradise some thirty thousand years in the future. Shaw's credo is, "Let there be more!" More characters; more scenes in more different historical and geographical locations; more hours of playing time; above all, more words devoted to the sublime purpose of explaining and advancing the mission of the Life Force.
To move from Shaw's world of moral optimism and dramatic plenitude to Beckett's universe is to confront the virtual reinvention of theater. Vanished are Shaw's sense of social engagement, his belief in progress, his hope for earthly salvation, his conviction that the dramatist writes to advance a cause. Instead we confront Beckett's assertion that for the artist, as for humanity in general, "there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."
Beckett's nihilism, however, is not what sets him most distinctively apart from his predecessors. After all, the dark view of life as a "tale told by an idiot," and the somber sense that "never to have lived is best" have been proclaimed from the stage since Shakespeare and Sophocles. What distinguishes Beckett is not the novelty of his ideas, but the way he expresses them, the revolutionary use he makes of his medium. Gone is Shaw's abundance, and in its place is an audacious minimalism that drives Beckett towards an ever more profound theatrical economy.
Unlike Shaw, Beckett's works for the stage contract from play to play. Waiting for Godot, his first successful drama, is two hours long. Endgame shrinks to about eighty minutes; Krapp's Last Tape to half an hour; Not I to fifteen minutes; other later works dwindle to a page or two of dialogue—perhaps five or ten minutes of playing time.
Beckett whittles his dramatic population down to the barest essentials as well. Many of the later playlets contain no more than a single speaker and one voiceless listener; while in Not I even that seeming minimum is further reduced: we see not the speaker herself, but only her ceaselessly babbling mouth.
Beckett's passion for reduction is clearly the outcome of the expressive paradox quoted above: if there really is nothing to say, and if we nonetheless cannot keep silent, then let us at least be brief about it. Or as Winnie says in Happy Days, "There is so little one can speak of. . . . One speaks of it all." The only reason Beckett's characters engage in any talk is because to stop would mean confronting their own nullity, a terrifying and painful prospect. So they speak just as they might drink or use drugs: out of habit. And habit, as another of Beckett's characters remarks, is a great deadener. The elements of Beckett's universe, then, are awesomely simple: a mouth, an ear, and a surrounding void. For Beckett, these are the essentials of the human drama: someone speaks and, knowing she is heard, goes on—postponing for a little while longer the triumph of nothingness.
The speaker in Happy Days is Winnie, "a woman about fifty" who is "imbedded up to above her waist in exact centre" of a low mound that rises from an "expanse of scorched grass" on an "unbroken plain." Behind the mound, sometimes lying asleep, sometimes sitting up reading, is Willie, Winnie's husband, "a man about sixty." Each morning, "a bell rings piercingly," summoning Winnie back to consciousness, at which point she begins to speak, filling the empty air with her words until it is time to sleep again. Thus we have the speaker, the listener, and the world's encompassing vacuum: elements of a simple process endlessly repeated.
The only audience for Winnie's daily monologues is Willie, who himself contributes little to their marital conversation. As Winnie says, "Oh I know you were never one to talk, I worship you Winnie be mine and then nothing from that day forth. . . ." Not quite nothing, as Winnie acknowledges. Willie does quote "titbits" from his newspaper, says the odd word or two, and at a crucial moment calls her name, an utterance that provides the climax of the play's constricted action.
Winnie's greatest challenge is simply to pass the time, to make her way as painlessly as possible through another "happy day." Willie's presence--and the verbal transactions it allows--is of course the major palliative. "I may say at all times," Winnie tells him,
even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, Something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do-for any length of time. . . . That is what enables me to go on. . . .
But there are other aids for which Winnie can be grateful when, as she says, "words fail":
What is one to do then until they come again? Brush and comb the hair, if it has not been done, or if there is some doubt, trim the nails if they are in need of trimming, these things tide one over. . . . That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by . . . without some blessing. . . in disguise.
In addition to these useful tasks, "There is of course the bag. . . . There will always be the bag," a "capacious black" purse that keeps her company on the mound, and from whose recesses she withdraws objects of interest to distract her when the need arises.
And so Winnie conducts her life, consoled as we all are by words, by routine activities, and by things. She wakes to the bell, says her prayers, talks to Willie and herself, attends to her toilet, and searches the bag--among whose contents, always rising inexplicably to the top, is a pistol: the ultimate recourse when words fail.
The play's two acts allow us to view two of Winnie's awakenings, identical except for one terrifying detail: on the second of her "happy days" the mound in which she is embedded has risen—or perhaps she has sunk—up to her neck. The freedom she had at the outset to move head, arms, and torso has been replaced by absolute immobility—except for her eyes. The earth—"abode of stones" as Lucky calls it in Waiting for Godot—seems to be sucking Winnie into non-existence.
Thus further immobilized in Act II, Winnie can no longer take advantage of brush, comb, or bag. Instead, she inventories those parts of her own face she can actually see: her nose, her lips, the tip of her tongue. She cannot turn to gaze on Willie behind the mound, and he fails to answer her calls. With no way to confirm his presence, she must confront the awful possibility that he is gone. And so she is reduced to an utter dependence on her own words, becoming both speaker and listener as she tells herself a story about a little girl and her doll. And yet, through it all, Winnie carries on, cheerfully thankful for the "great mercies" with which existence constantly blesses her.
Is this really drama? It is the power of Beckett to provoke this question that makes his work so revolutionary. He forces us to reconsider our conventional expectations about an ancient art form by his masterful refashioning of its elements. He does this in three ways. First, as a minimalist, he refuses the great temptation of the stage: overstatement. Instead, like an illusionist who hides an elephant behind a lamp-post, Beckett conceals enormous dramatic forces behind the skimpy contents of his world.
Winnie's situation is a case in point. The character herself abets our doubts about the dramatic interest of her experience, declaring that, "something has seemed to occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all." But is she right? What drama offers is an imaginative structure in which a character pursues an objective, encountering obstacles along the way, either surmounting them or not. Out of the conflict between character and obstacle arises crisis as the push and shove grows more intense, and finally, at the moment when one force or the other prevails, comes the climax. So long as these elements exist, drama exists; and the drama will be great in proportion to the greatness of these parts.
Has Winnie an objective of considerable magnitude? In fact, hers is the universal human desire, fundamental to the species: to live and to pursue happiness. (A Shavian might even recognize a kind of "life-force" at work here, an irrational will to survive.) Does a formidable obstacle stand in her way? Only the devouring indifference of the universe, sucking her into non-existence. What is at stake should the universe prevail in this conflict? Desolation and death. What is the likelihood that the universe will be thwarted? The question answers itself.
This brief catechism confirms the presence in Happy Days of far more than a static spectacle of repetition and despair: it reveals a dramatic action whose harrowing intensity and inevitable outcome deserve to be called tragic.
On the other hand, Winnie's drama deserves to be called comic as well, and this brings us to the second of the ways Beckett revolutionizes the stage. Like all the great modernists, and especially his mentor, James Joyce, Beckett finds his way to tragic sublimity indirectly, through irony and anticlimax, through the mundane and ridiculous, in effect fooling us into tears. Together with Chekhov, Beckett is one of the great practitioners of the art of broken-hearted laughter known as tragicomedy, a term he explicitly applied to Waiting for Godot, his first successful play.
This hybrid variant combines elements of the two primal versions of dramatic form. On the one hand, tragedy represents individuals of great moral stature confronting mortal peril--treason, murder, revenge--and grandly suffering as a result. On the other, comedy presents characters distinctively less exalted who face discomfort rather than serious danger, and who survive to enjoy a happy ending to their woes. Happy Days gives us a little of each. In garrulous Winnie, blathering her way through an endless succession of trivial tasks, we have a figure shaped and scaled for comedy, someone whose problems—she can't read the label on her toothbrush, her parasol catches fire, her husband reads the paper all the time—we might, and often do, laugh at because they strike us as basically unserious. And yet, at any moment the awareness of the crushing emptiness of the world can and will break in on her dogged optimism, bringing with it suffering worthy of Lear. In this constant oscillation between the ludicrousness of the clown and the pity and fear aroused by the tragic hero lies the essence of tragicomedy, and the emotional signature of Beckett's world.
The third of Beckett's revolutionary measures is to do away with any attempt to lure us into a scenic environment that photographically resembles the world outside the theater. Instead, Beckett creates a physical universe on stage whose inhuman, abstract character seems to repel identification. In doing so he exemplifies a general tendency in modern art: the attempt, described by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, "to 'realize' the metaphor. . . . to make [ideas] live." Thus, while a different playwright might have merely put into words the idea that each day of life sinks us into a deeper hole, Beckett takes that image and literally embodies it on stage. Winnie embedded in her mound is that metaphor brought to tangible life. Aristotle tells us that metaphor is the most powerful poetic tool available to the playwright; Beckett augments that power by translating a figure of speech into a three-dimensional universe.
And the fact is that each of us exercises something like that same power in our daily lives. During how many of our domestic conversations have we cried out, "What am I doing here, talking to the walls?" Or, "I've had it up to here [hand under chin] with this mess!" At such moments we become Beckett-like playwrights of our own lives, casting ourselves as Winnie, seeing our unresponsive spouses as Willies, and feeling the engulfing world rising around us. From this perspective we can see that Beckett's metaphorical universe, far from being dry or abstruse, is in fact stunningly vivid, a far more direct realization of our emotional lives than conventional realism.
Minimalism, metaphorical staging, and tragicomedy, then, are the hallmarks of Beckett's theatrical world. Using these techniques, he seems to lead us outside of history. The tramps waiting for Godot, Krapp playing and replaying the tape recordings of his youth, Winnie in her mound: these are emblems of the permanent condition of humanity, not figures commenting on current events. In their absolute removal from the tides of politics and social conflict, they seem to inhabit a dramatic universe completely different from the world portrayed in David Marnet's Oleanna. There, a college professor in his forties and his twenty-year-old female student confront each other over the most current of issues on the American campus, the question, as the professor puts it, of "political correctness." This term from the lexicon of the headline and the sound bite locates the action of Mamet's work in the realistic here and now, a realm of Shavian social commentary apparently light years removed from Beckett's a-historical universe.
And yet, Beckett does seem to have left his imprint even on so socially-engaged a work as Oleanna. Consider the minimalism of its means: all that is necessary to stage this play are three pieces of furniture, two actors, and a telephone. And virtually all that happens amidst these spare surroundings is that people talk. For three brief scenes John, the professor, and Carol, the student, confront each other across a desk. But, as with Winnie, mere talk is the vehicle for enormous dramatic change.
As the play begins, John is on top of his world, awaiting the imminent bestowal of tenure, negotiating to buy a new house, and grandly debunking the myths of higher education for the benefit of Carol, an undergraduate doing poorly in his course who has come seeking his help. She, miserable, mousey, self-despising, dutifully takes notes on every pedantic word. Two scenes later, this situation will be turned upside-down, as Carol and John trade places in a classic reversal straight out of Aristotle.
Power and the ways people acquire and maintain it have been central themes in Mamet's work. The petty criminals of American Buffalo are as desperate for stature on the street as for money; the real-estate salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross are addicts of self-aggrandizement through one-upsmanship; the movie promoters of Speed the Plow revel in their ability to make or break deals and people. The pursuit of power in these plays almost always involves deceptive manipulation: lying to oneself as a way of denying weakness; lying to others as a means of controlling their behavior. And repeatedly Mamet explores the idea that the ultimate in such control, and thus the ultimate in self-empowerment, lies in the destruction of another.
The repetition of these themes and patterns in play after play suggests that Mamet may not be pursuing a social-realist agenda after all, but rather that his deeper concern is human nature—those behavioral constants that are destined to appear regardless of social circumstance. Which brings us back to Beckett. For Beckett the fundamental human drama lies outside history in the pathos of desperate speech endlessly repeated; for Mamet the essential action is the game of manipulation and power. Beckett embodies his drama in the interplay of the speaker, the listener, and the void. Mamet's vision is similarly economical, requiring only a hustler, a dupe, and a stake. And for Mamet, like Beckett, a stark view of human nature entails ever greater theatrical simplicity. From Glengarry Glen Ross, set in two locations and populated by half a dozen characters, Mamet has moved to Oleanna, two people and a room.
According to the professor, what occurs in that room is a consequence of "political correctness." Meaning what? Political correctness--P.C. for short--as practiced on the contemporary campus is founded on a theory about power, particularly culture and power. According to P.C., all cultural institutions, artifacts, and relationships share one overriding purpose: to increase the political and economic power of one group at the expense of another. Thus, the purpose of white male heterosexual culture is to increase white male heterosexual power; of black culture, to increase black power; woman culture, woman power; and so on. It is pointless to ask about a cultural object or relationship: what is its inherent merit? Is it moral? Beautiful? Truthful? Such questions are without meaning because inherent merit is an illusion. Power is the only value. The worth of any cultural phenomenon is purely relative: if it increases my power, or the power of my race, or sex, or class, I will think it refulgent with morality, beauty, and truth; if not, not. Consequently, the only meaningful cultural question for the P.C. critic is: what is the impact of this phenomenon on the balance of power; cui bono? Everything else, as Henry Ford said about history, is bunk.
This sounds pretty tough-minded, and it is meant to be. P.C. is the RICO-Act of academe, a prosecutorial tool fashioned to reveal the vast deception of Western culture, to expose it as nothing more than a corrupt organization, the white man's racket for dominating the rest of the world. Armed with P.C., the non-white and non-male can evaluate every book, every idea, every classroom comment, every campus encounter for its power quotient: is this oppressing me or making me stronger? And if the former, the victim is authorized to demand radical change, since in a world in which power is the only value, disempowerment is the only sin.
Whatever its merits as cultural analysis, P.C. clearly offers fertile possibilities for a dramatist with Mamet's obsessions. Oleanna has been widely interpreted as a condemnation of political correctness. It might be more accurate to see it as the dramatic confirmation of P.C.'s basic proposition, that all human relationships are reducible to transactions of power.
If the elements of Mamet's power games are a hustler, a dupe, and a stake, then John, the professor, begins this play as the perfect dupe, the man who is conning himself. He thinks he inhabits a benign world in which he is enjoying the rewards of his own merits. In his mind, the tenure he is about to receive is a fitting reward for excellent work. He imagines he has something valuable to say, that his books are admiringly read and his teaching gratefully received by eager students. He is convinced he has transcended the insecurities that dogged his youth, when, believing he was stupid, he conspired in his own failures. Above all, he feels that when he puts his arm around the frustrated, confused, despairing young woman sitting in his office he is only trying to be helpful.
Carol knows better. For her, John is the source of misery: of difficult words she does not understand and a confusing book she cannot grasp; of baffling lectures, demanding assignments, and bad grades that rain down on her like volcanic ash. John is authority, oppression, power incarnate. What is the ultimate expression of male power over female vulnerability? That arm around her shoulder answers the question, expressing, as Carol comes to see it, something quite different from benign pedagogical warmth.
Carol experiences what John is too ingenuous to perceive: that their relationship is defined not by some idealistic model of ideas exchanged, of wisdom offered and understanding achieved, but by the subjection of weakness to power. She experiences this, but she doesn't understand it until she encounters her "group," an unnamed campus organization that provides her with a politically correct interpretation of their relationship. Supported by an account of her experience in which John is the male oppressor, and the arm around her shoulder the first step in a sexual advance, Carol is in an impregnable position, that of the victim. She brings an accusation against John before the tenure committee, accusing him of being "closeted with a student," of having "told a rambling, sexually explicit story," of having "moved to embrace said student," of having said to her "I'd asked you to my room because I quote like you." And to his face, she berates him for assuming the right to "strut, To posture. To perform. . . . to play the Patriarch in your class." Not a word of any of these allegations is false; on the contrary, strutting, posturing John has supplied a rich mine of irritating attitudes and behavior which Carol has plausibly transformed—manipulated--into a damning indictment. John responds with continued self-deception, assuming that he is charming and smart enough to reason Carol out of her rage at his power and her weakness. By the second scene, the elements of the familiar Mamet game are in place: John dupes himself; Carol has learned the hustle; and the stake for both of them is in sight. For John, it is a matter of survival; for Carol, revenge against John and the system that created her and him unequal.
As we watch this dance of power in which Carol learns to achieve dominance by demonstrating her subordination, we marvel at the brilliant use Mamet has made of the p.c. phenomenon. He has done with this material what major artists always do: translated current events into an affirmation of his own obsessions, into further evidence for his view of human nature.
In Constance Congdon's Losing Father's Body, which is receiving its world premiere production at the Portland Stage Company, the view of the human condition is more benign, although it takes a missing corpse to reveal that consoling fact.
Scott Anderson has died suddenly, while on a fishing trip in the north woods with his brother, Cecil. The surviving Andersons--Pauline, the widow, Scott Jr., the son, and Kim, the daughter--gather in the family home to perform the conventional rituals of upper-middle-class grieving--with the emphasis firmly on the conventional and the upper. The norms of restrained feeling and controlled behavior that have guided this family throughout their lives together continue to be faithfully, even compulsively, observed. Death is no excuse for going overboard.
If the house has always been "an immaculately-kept," smoke-free environment, then the Andersons will not allow mere mortality to introduce disorder. All pillows will be fluffed, all dishes washed, and all smoking will be done outside on the patio. The personal routines of the survivors will run in orderly channels as well. On the night of the death, Scott flirts with the prospect of omitting his daily run, but resists the temptation: "I am gonna jog," he decides. "I get a little down when I miss a day." And Kim, likewise loath to disrupt her schedule, announces, "I've got an article I'm working on, so I'd better use what time I've got."
The social rituals also remain on track. On the morning following the death, Scott tells Kim that he has bumped into some old friends, Todd and Michele: "They said sorry of course. . . . Want to know if we can meet them for doubles. . . . Cocktail time. . . . We could eat at the club." The reality of their father's death does keep intruding, as Scott suddenly asks his sister, "It was quick, wasn't it?" "Must have. . . been," she reassures him. And Scott then explains the reason for his question: 'Todd and Michelle wanted to know." Such maudlin curiosity, Scott wants his sister to understand, would never occur to an Anderson. In fact, the strongest emotion exhibited during the first quarter hour of the play is Kim and Scott's "frozen" sense of sacrilege when the family lawyer unthinkingly lights a cigarette in the inviolate sanctuary of the living-room.
Of course, there is something unnatural about such coolness in the face of death, some depth of denial that cannot be healthy. The strain of maintaining this facade tells earliest and most pathetically on Pauline, the dead man's widow. The dramatic essence of this world is revealed in a powerful image of the conflict between her inner pain and the appearance of composure that this family seems obliged to maintain. As Pauline sits on her patio while a visiting beautician administers a facial treatment, she is overcome by panic. She calls out to her daughter, but she can't speak clearly because the beauty formula drying on her face is setting into a stifling mask. Helpless, she begins to cry, the silent tears offering the only evidence of the suffering self underneath her hardening facial compound. Completely disoriented by this unprecedented display of feeling, the beautician's only response is to point her blow dryer at Pauline's face in an attempt to make her unseemly tears disappear by evaporating them.
At this moment Pauline, stuck behind her mask with a dryer blowing at her pain, reminds us of Beckett's Winnie, likewise metaphorically entrapped. And as in Beckett, the interplay between farcical external events and inner suffering gives rise to the experience of tragicomedy.
Metaphorical staging and tragicomic emotion notwithstanding, Congdon's dramatic world is fundamentally different from Beckett's: she offers her characters hope for escape from their confining predicament, emphasizing the comical aspect of the tragicomic hybrid. When Uncle Cecil decides that the price of renting an airplane to fly his brother's body home is simply exorbitant, and that instead he will bundle the corpse into a canoe, strap that onto the roof of the station wagon, and make the trip overland, he makes a ludicrous choice whose ultimate outcome is to set the family free from the bondage of their sterile world. During a stop for coffee, the station wagon is stolen, father's body is lost, and a train of events ensues that leads all the emotionally-stunted survivors to a moment of revelation in the woods. At the end, each emerges from behind a spiritual shell no less oppressive than the facial mask that smothered Pauline.
If the power that had been holding all these people in emotional bondage can be called tradition--the expectations and habits of family and class--then what liberates them is the opposite of that force. The Andersons achieve their rebirth thanks to the thieves who stole the car and their father. Clarence and Alice, another brother and sister, are a pair of Native Americans on their way to New York City. When they discover the silent passenger in their stolen car, their first instinct is to leave the body in the woods. But fundamental decency prompts them to return to the corpse and lay it properly to rest. When they ultimately encounter the Andersons, Clarence and Alice organize a funeral ritual which they call a tradition, but which in reality is an improvisation involving the canoe, the lake, and the surrounding pine trees. From this spontaneous invention, this anti-tradition, the Andersons derive a sense of release that the suffocating routines of home had denied them.
Congdon and Mamet are both sharp observers of the contemporary world, the one dissecting for us the hidden logic of emotional impoverishment among the middle-class, the other detecting beneath the political fads of campus life enduring patterns of human nature. Both practice dramatic realism, and yet, when we view their work in the context of Beckett's achievement, we can see quite clearly how they have absorbed the influence of this landmark figure of anti-realist aesthetics. It is one of the functions of a thoughtful theater season to suggest such revealing comparisons among disparate works. By connecting Beckett, Mamet, and Congdon through this sequence of productions, the Portland Stage Company contributes to our understanding of the inner conjunctions and subtle continuities that underlie the diversity of contemporary theater.
MARTIN ANDRUCKI is Professor of Theater and Chair of the Department of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College.
If Shaw was a realist, then Beckett belonged to a new school of playwriting defined by the poet Apollinaire when he declared that the stage should no more resemble life than a bicycle wheel does a leg. There is of course a similarity between wheel and leg, but it does not lie on the surface and has nothing to do with photographic fidelity. Rather the resemblance is analogical or metaphorical: the wheel is to the bicycle as the leg is to the body. Between Beckett's plays and the world outside the theater the relationship is likewise indirect--and radically different from the realism of Shaw. With Beckett's ascendancy, in fact, anti-realism was enshrined as one of the dominant new paradigms of the twentieth-century stage.
But holding the mirror up to nature is an ineradicable instinct in theater. By the late 1970s, when David Mamet came to national attention as a playwright, critics were already beginning to notice a return to realism on the part of American dramatists. Mamet's play, Oleanna, and Constance Congdon's Losing Father's Body--the two works that conclude this season--represent a continuation of the realistic tradition associated with Shaw, but a continuation marked by conspicuous difference. Beckett introduced new possibilities, virtually a new language, to theater. Both Mamet and Congdon inhabit a world shaped by those innovations, and we can see in their work how realism itself now bears the marks of Beckett's influence.
Shaw's realistic theater is about progress, specifically about individual choices characters make that bring about change, thereby advancing the ongoing transformation of society. He reproduces on stage the evolutionary thrust of a "Life Force" whose purpose is to bring about heaven on earth. Because the universe shaped by this dynamic force is, and always has been, bursting with interesting people making important decisions, Shaw was a dramatic maximalist, seeking to cram as much of that dynamism from as many different historical periods as possible onto the stage. His writing for the theater fills six volumes of some seven hundred pages each, and his plays seem to grow longer and more philosophically ambitious as his career develops. Thus Arms and the Man, an early work, weighs in (with preface) at a mere 87 pages, confines itself to a single house during a four-month period, and occupies a conventional two hours on stage. Thirty years later, Shaw gave the world Back to Methuselah, a dramatic behemoth five times longer than Arms and the Man, with a plot that spans all of human history from its origins in the Garden of Eden to the restoration of paradise some thirty thousand years in the future. Shaw's credo is, "Let there be more!" More characters; more scenes in more different historical and geographical locations; more hours of playing time; above all, more words devoted to the sublime purpose of explaining and advancing the mission of the Life Force.
To move from Shaw's world of moral optimism and dramatic plenitude to Beckett's universe is to confront the virtual reinvention of theater. Vanished are Shaw's sense of social engagement, his belief in progress, his hope for earthly salvation, his conviction that the dramatist writes to advance a cause. Instead we confront Beckett's assertion that for the artist, as for humanity in general, "there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."
Beckett's nihilism, however, is not what sets him most distinctively apart from his predecessors. After all, the dark view of life as a "tale told by an idiot," and the somber sense that "never to have lived is best" have been proclaimed from the stage since Shakespeare and Sophocles. What distinguishes Beckett is not the novelty of his ideas, but the way he expresses them, the revolutionary use he makes of his medium. Gone is Shaw's abundance, and in its place is an audacious minimalism that drives Beckett towards an ever more profound theatrical economy.
Unlike Shaw, Beckett's works for the stage contract from play to play. Waiting for Godot, his first successful drama, is two hours long. Endgame shrinks to about eighty minutes; Krapp's Last Tape to half an hour; Not I to fifteen minutes; other later works dwindle to a page or two of dialogue—perhaps five or ten minutes of playing time.
Beckett whittles his dramatic population down to the barest essentials as well. Many of the later playlets contain no more than a single speaker and one voiceless listener; while in Not I even that seeming minimum is further reduced: we see not the speaker herself, but only her ceaselessly babbling mouth.
Beckett's passion for reduction is clearly the outcome of the expressive paradox quoted above: if there really is nothing to say, and if we nonetheless cannot keep silent, then let us at least be brief about it. Or as Winnie says in Happy Days, "There is so little one can speak of. . . . One speaks of it all." The only reason Beckett's characters engage in any talk is because to stop would mean confronting their own nullity, a terrifying and painful prospect. So they speak just as they might drink or use drugs: out of habit. And habit, as another of Beckett's characters remarks, is a great deadener. The elements of Beckett's universe, then, are awesomely simple: a mouth, an ear, and a surrounding void. For Beckett, these are the essentials of the human drama: someone speaks and, knowing she is heard, goes on—postponing for a little while longer the triumph of nothingness.
The speaker in Happy Days is Winnie, "a woman about fifty" who is "imbedded up to above her waist in exact centre" of a low mound that rises from an "expanse of scorched grass" on an "unbroken plain." Behind the mound, sometimes lying asleep, sometimes sitting up reading, is Willie, Winnie's husband, "a man about sixty." Each morning, "a bell rings piercingly," summoning Winnie back to consciousness, at which point she begins to speak, filling the empty air with her words until it is time to sleep again. Thus we have the speaker, the listener, and the world's encompassing vacuum: elements of a simple process endlessly repeated.
The only audience for Winnie's daily monologues is Willie, who himself contributes little to their marital conversation. As Winnie says, "Oh I know you were never one to talk, I worship you Winnie be mine and then nothing from that day forth. . . ." Not quite nothing, as Winnie acknowledges. Willie does quote "titbits" from his newspaper, says the odd word or two, and at a crucial moment calls her name, an utterance that provides the climax of the play's constricted action.
Winnie's greatest challenge is simply to pass the time, to make her way as painlessly as possible through another "happy day." Willie's presence--and the verbal transactions it allows--is of course the major palliative. "I may say at all times," Winnie tells him,
even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, Something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do-for any length of time. . . . That is what enables me to go on. . . .
But there are other aids for which Winnie can be grateful when, as she says, "words fail":
What is one to do then until they come again? Brush and comb the hair, if it has not been done, or if there is some doubt, trim the nails if they are in need of trimming, these things tide one over. . . . That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by . . . without some blessing. . . in disguise.
In addition to these useful tasks, "There is of course the bag. . . . There will always be the bag," a "capacious black" purse that keeps her company on the mound, and from whose recesses she withdraws objects of interest to distract her when the need arises.
And so Winnie conducts her life, consoled as we all are by words, by routine activities, and by things. She wakes to the bell, says her prayers, talks to Willie and herself, attends to her toilet, and searches the bag--among whose contents, always rising inexplicably to the top, is a pistol: the ultimate recourse when words fail.
The play's two acts allow us to view two of Winnie's awakenings, identical except for one terrifying detail: on the second of her "happy days" the mound in which she is embedded has risen—or perhaps she has sunk—up to her neck. The freedom she had at the outset to move head, arms, and torso has been replaced by absolute immobility—except for her eyes. The earth—"abode of stones" as Lucky calls it in Waiting for Godot—seems to be sucking Winnie into non-existence.
Thus further immobilized in Act II, Winnie can no longer take advantage of brush, comb, or bag. Instead, she inventories those parts of her own face she can actually see: her nose, her lips, the tip of her tongue. She cannot turn to gaze on Willie behind the mound, and he fails to answer her calls. With no way to confirm his presence, she must confront the awful possibility that he is gone. And so she is reduced to an utter dependence on her own words, becoming both speaker and listener as she tells herself a story about a little girl and her doll. And yet, through it all, Winnie carries on, cheerfully thankful for the "great mercies" with which existence constantly blesses her.
Is this really drama? It is the power of Beckett to provoke this question that makes his work so revolutionary. He forces us to reconsider our conventional expectations about an ancient art form by his masterful refashioning of its elements. He does this in three ways. First, as a minimalist, he refuses the great temptation of the stage: overstatement. Instead, like an illusionist who hides an elephant behind a lamp-post, Beckett conceals enormous dramatic forces behind the skimpy contents of his world.
Winnie's situation is a case in point. The character herself abets our doubts about the dramatic interest of her experience, declaring that, "something has seemed to occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all." But is she right? What drama offers is an imaginative structure in which a character pursues an objective, encountering obstacles along the way, either surmounting them or not. Out of the conflict between character and obstacle arises crisis as the push and shove grows more intense, and finally, at the moment when one force or the other prevails, comes the climax. So long as these elements exist, drama exists; and the drama will be great in proportion to the greatness of these parts.
Has Winnie an objective of considerable magnitude? In fact, hers is the universal human desire, fundamental to the species: to live and to pursue happiness. (A Shavian might even recognize a kind of "life-force" at work here, an irrational will to survive.) Does a formidable obstacle stand in her way? Only the devouring indifference of the universe, sucking her into non-existence. What is at stake should the universe prevail in this conflict? Desolation and death. What is the likelihood that the universe will be thwarted? The question answers itself.
This brief catechism confirms the presence in Happy Days of far more than a static spectacle of repetition and despair: it reveals a dramatic action whose harrowing intensity and inevitable outcome deserve to be called tragic.
On the other hand, Winnie's drama deserves to be called comic as well, and this brings us to the second of the ways Beckett revolutionizes the stage. Like all the great modernists, and especially his mentor, James Joyce, Beckett finds his way to tragic sublimity indirectly, through irony and anticlimax, through the mundane and ridiculous, in effect fooling us into tears. Together with Chekhov, Beckett is one of the great practitioners of the art of broken-hearted laughter known as tragicomedy, a term he explicitly applied to Waiting for Godot, his first successful play.
This hybrid variant combines elements of the two primal versions of dramatic form. On the one hand, tragedy represents individuals of great moral stature confronting mortal peril--treason, murder, revenge--and grandly suffering as a result. On the other, comedy presents characters distinctively less exalted who face discomfort rather than serious danger, and who survive to enjoy a happy ending to their woes. Happy Days gives us a little of each. In garrulous Winnie, blathering her way through an endless succession of trivial tasks, we have a figure shaped and scaled for comedy, someone whose problems—she can't read the label on her toothbrush, her parasol catches fire, her husband reads the paper all the time—we might, and often do, laugh at because they strike us as basically unserious. And yet, at any moment the awareness of the crushing emptiness of the world can and will break in on her dogged optimism, bringing with it suffering worthy of Lear. In this constant oscillation between the ludicrousness of the clown and the pity and fear aroused by the tragic hero lies the essence of tragicomedy, and the emotional signature of Beckett's world.
The third of Beckett's revolutionary measures is to do away with any attempt to lure us into a scenic environment that photographically resembles the world outside the theater. Instead, Beckett creates a physical universe on stage whose inhuman, abstract character seems to repel identification. In doing so he exemplifies a general tendency in modern art: the attempt, described by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, "to 'realize' the metaphor. . . . to make [ideas] live." Thus, while a different playwright might have merely put into words the idea that each day of life sinks us into a deeper hole, Beckett takes that image and literally embodies it on stage. Winnie embedded in her mound is that metaphor brought to tangible life. Aristotle tells us that metaphor is the most powerful poetic tool available to the playwright; Beckett augments that power by translating a figure of speech into a three-dimensional universe.
And the fact is that each of us exercises something like that same power in our daily lives. During how many of our domestic conversations have we cried out, "What am I doing here, talking to the walls?" Or, "I've had it up to here [hand under chin] with this mess!" At such moments we become Beckett-like playwrights of our own lives, casting ourselves as Winnie, seeing our unresponsive spouses as Willies, and feeling the engulfing world rising around us. From this perspective we can see that Beckett's metaphorical universe, far from being dry or abstruse, is in fact stunningly vivid, a far more direct realization of our emotional lives than conventional realism.
Minimalism, metaphorical staging, and tragicomedy, then, are the hallmarks of Beckett's theatrical world. Using these techniques, he seems to lead us outside of history. The tramps waiting for Godot, Krapp playing and replaying the tape recordings of his youth, Winnie in her mound: these are emblems of the permanent condition of humanity, not figures commenting on current events. In their absolute removal from the tides of politics and social conflict, they seem to inhabit a dramatic universe completely different from the world portrayed in David Marnet's Oleanna. There, a college professor in his forties and his twenty-year-old female student confront each other over the most current of issues on the American campus, the question, as the professor puts it, of "political correctness." This term from the lexicon of the headline and the sound bite locates the action of Mamet's work in the realistic here and now, a realm of Shavian social commentary apparently light years removed from Beckett's a-historical universe.
And yet, Beckett does seem to have left his imprint even on so socially-engaged a work as Oleanna. Consider the minimalism of its means: all that is necessary to stage this play are three pieces of furniture, two actors, and a telephone. And virtually all that happens amidst these spare surroundings is that people talk. For three brief scenes John, the professor, and Carol, the student, confront each other across a desk. But, as with Winnie, mere talk is the vehicle for enormous dramatic change.
As the play begins, John is on top of his world, awaiting the imminent bestowal of tenure, negotiating to buy a new house, and grandly debunking the myths of higher education for the benefit of Carol, an undergraduate doing poorly in his course who has come seeking his help. She, miserable, mousey, self-despising, dutifully takes notes on every pedantic word. Two scenes later, this situation will be turned upside-down, as Carol and John trade places in a classic reversal straight out of Aristotle.
Power and the ways people acquire and maintain it have been central themes in Mamet's work. The petty criminals of American Buffalo are as desperate for stature on the street as for money; the real-estate salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross are addicts of self-aggrandizement through one-upsmanship; the movie promoters of Speed the Plow revel in their ability to make or break deals and people. The pursuit of power in these plays almost always involves deceptive manipulation: lying to oneself as a way of denying weakness; lying to others as a means of controlling their behavior. And repeatedly Mamet explores the idea that the ultimate in such control, and thus the ultimate in self-empowerment, lies in the destruction of another.
The repetition of these themes and patterns in play after play suggests that Mamet may not be pursuing a social-realist agenda after all, but rather that his deeper concern is human nature—those behavioral constants that are destined to appear regardless of social circumstance. Which brings us back to Beckett. For Beckett the fundamental human drama lies outside history in the pathos of desperate speech endlessly repeated; for Mamet the essential action is the game of manipulation and power. Beckett embodies his drama in the interplay of the speaker, the listener, and the void. Mamet's vision is similarly economical, requiring only a hustler, a dupe, and a stake. And for Mamet, like Beckett, a stark view of human nature entails ever greater theatrical simplicity. From Glengarry Glen Ross, set in two locations and populated by half a dozen characters, Mamet has moved to Oleanna, two people and a room.
According to the professor, what occurs in that room is a consequence of "political correctness." Meaning what? Political correctness--P.C. for short--as practiced on the contemporary campus is founded on a theory about power, particularly culture and power. According to P.C., all cultural institutions, artifacts, and relationships share one overriding purpose: to increase the political and economic power of one group at the expense of another. Thus, the purpose of white male heterosexual culture is to increase white male heterosexual power; of black culture, to increase black power; woman culture, woman power; and so on. It is pointless to ask about a cultural object or relationship: what is its inherent merit? Is it moral? Beautiful? Truthful? Such questions are without meaning because inherent merit is an illusion. Power is the only value. The worth of any cultural phenomenon is purely relative: if it increases my power, or the power of my race, or sex, or class, I will think it refulgent with morality, beauty, and truth; if not, not. Consequently, the only meaningful cultural question for the P.C. critic is: what is the impact of this phenomenon on the balance of power; cui bono? Everything else, as Henry Ford said about history, is bunk.
This sounds pretty tough-minded, and it is meant to be. P.C. is the RICO-Act of academe, a prosecutorial tool fashioned to reveal the vast deception of Western culture, to expose it as nothing more than a corrupt organization, the white man's racket for dominating the rest of the world. Armed with P.C., the non-white and non-male can evaluate every book, every idea, every classroom comment, every campus encounter for its power quotient: is this oppressing me or making me stronger? And if the former, the victim is authorized to demand radical change, since in a world in which power is the only value, disempowerment is the only sin.
Whatever its merits as cultural analysis, P.C. clearly offers fertile possibilities for a dramatist with Mamet's obsessions. Oleanna has been widely interpreted as a condemnation of political correctness. It might be more accurate to see it as the dramatic confirmation of P.C.'s basic proposition, that all human relationships are reducible to transactions of power.
If the elements of Mamet's power games are a hustler, a dupe, and a stake, then John, the professor, begins this play as the perfect dupe, the man who is conning himself. He thinks he inhabits a benign world in which he is enjoying the rewards of his own merits. In his mind, the tenure he is about to receive is a fitting reward for excellent work. He imagines he has something valuable to say, that his books are admiringly read and his teaching gratefully received by eager students. He is convinced he has transcended the insecurities that dogged his youth, when, believing he was stupid, he conspired in his own failures. Above all, he feels that when he puts his arm around the frustrated, confused, despairing young woman sitting in his office he is only trying to be helpful.
Carol knows better. For her, John is the source of misery: of difficult words she does not understand and a confusing book she cannot grasp; of baffling lectures, demanding assignments, and bad grades that rain down on her like volcanic ash. John is authority, oppression, power incarnate. What is the ultimate expression of male power over female vulnerability? That arm around her shoulder answers the question, expressing, as Carol comes to see it, something quite different from benign pedagogical warmth.
Carol experiences what John is too ingenuous to perceive: that their relationship is defined not by some idealistic model of ideas exchanged, of wisdom offered and understanding achieved, but by the subjection of weakness to power. She experiences this, but she doesn't understand it until she encounters her "group," an unnamed campus organization that provides her with a politically correct interpretation of their relationship. Supported by an account of her experience in which John is the male oppressor, and the arm around her shoulder the first step in a sexual advance, Carol is in an impregnable position, that of the victim. She brings an accusation against John before the tenure committee, accusing him of being "closeted with a student," of having "told a rambling, sexually explicit story," of having "moved to embrace said student," of having said to her "I'd asked you to my room because I quote like you." And to his face, she berates him for assuming the right to "strut, To posture. To perform. . . . to play the Patriarch in your class." Not a word of any of these allegations is false; on the contrary, strutting, posturing John has supplied a rich mine of irritating attitudes and behavior which Carol has plausibly transformed—manipulated--into a damning indictment. John responds with continued self-deception, assuming that he is charming and smart enough to reason Carol out of her rage at his power and her weakness. By the second scene, the elements of the familiar Mamet game are in place: John dupes himself; Carol has learned the hustle; and the stake for both of them is in sight. For John, it is a matter of survival; for Carol, revenge against John and the system that created her and him unequal.
As we watch this dance of power in which Carol learns to achieve dominance by demonstrating her subordination, we marvel at the brilliant use Mamet has made of the p.c. phenomenon. He has done with this material what major artists always do: translated current events into an affirmation of his own obsessions, into further evidence for his view of human nature.
In Constance Congdon's Losing Father's Body, which is receiving its world premiere production at the Portland Stage Company, the view of the human condition is more benign, although it takes a missing corpse to reveal that consoling fact.
Scott Anderson has died suddenly, while on a fishing trip in the north woods with his brother, Cecil. The surviving Andersons--Pauline, the widow, Scott Jr., the son, and Kim, the daughter--gather in the family home to perform the conventional rituals of upper-middle-class grieving--with the emphasis firmly on the conventional and the upper. The norms of restrained feeling and controlled behavior that have guided this family throughout their lives together continue to be faithfully, even compulsively, observed. Death is no excuse for going overboard.
If the house has always been "an immaculately-kept," smoke-free environment, then the Andersons will not allow mere mortality to introduce disorder. All pillows will be fluffed, all dishes washed, and all smoking will be done outside on the patio. The personal routines of the survivors will run in orderly channels as well. On the night of the death, Scott flirts with the prospect of omitting his daily run, but resists the temptation: "I am gonna jog," he decides. "I get a little down when I miss a day." And Kim, likewise loath to disrupt her schedule, announces, "I've got an article I'm working on, so I'd better use what time I've got."
The social rituals also remain on track. On the morning following the death, Scott tells Kim that he has bumped into some old friends, Todd and Michele: "They said sorry of course. . . . Want to know if we can meet them for doubles. . . . Cocktail time. . . . We could eat at the club." The reality of their father's death does keep intruding, as Scott suddenly asks his sister, "It was quick, wasn't it?" "Must have. . . been," she reassures him. And Scott then explains the reason for his question: 'Todd and Michelle wanted to know." Such maudlin curiosity, Scott wants his sister to understand, would never occur to an Anderson. In fact, the strongest emotion exhibited during the first quarter hour of the play is Kim and Scott's "frozen" sense of sacrilege when the family lawyer unthinkingly lights a cigarette in the inviolate sanctuary of the living-room.
Of course, there is something unnatural about such coolness in the face of death, some depth of denial that cannot be healthy. The strain of maintaining this facade tells earliest and most pathetically on Pauline, the dead man's widow. The dramatic essence of this world is revealed in a powerful image of the conflict between her inner pain and the appearance of composure that this family seems obliged to maintain. As Pauline sits on her patio while a visiting beautician administers a facial treatment, she is overcome by panic. She calls out to her daughter, but she can't speak clearly because the beauty formula drying on her face is setting into a stifling mask. Helpless, she begins to cry, the silent tears offering the only evidence of the suffering self underneath her hardening facial compound. Completely disoriented by this unprecedented display of feeling, the beautician's only response is to point her blow dryer at Pauline's face in an attempt to make her unseemly tears disappear by evaporating them.
At this moment Pauline, stuck behind her mask with a dryer blowing at her pain, reminds us of Beckett's Winnie, likewise metaphorically entrapped. And as in Beckett, the interplay between farcical external events and inner suffering gives rise to the experience of tragicomedy.
Metaphorical staging and tragicomic emotion notwithstanding, Congdon's dramatic world is fundamentally different from Beckett's: she offers her characters hope for escape from their confining predicament, emphasizing the comical aspect of the tragicomic hybrid. When Uncle Cecil decides that the price of renting an airplane to fly his brother's body home is simply exorbitant, and that instead he will bundle the corpse into a canoe, strap that onto the roof of the station wagon, and make the trip overland, he makes a ludicrous choice whose ultimate outcome is to set the family free from the bondage of their sterile world. During a stop for coffee, the station wagon is stolen, father's body is lost, and a train of events ensues that leads all the emotionally-stunted survivors to a moment of revelation in the woods. At the end, each emerges from behind a spiritual shell no less oppressive than the facial mask that smothered Pauline.
If the power that had been holding all these people in emotional bondage can be called tradition--the expectations and habits of family and class--then what liberates them is the opposite of that force. The Andersons achieve their rebirth thanks to the thieves who stole the car and their father. Clarence and Alice, another brother and sister, are a pair of Native Americans on their way to New York City. When they discover the silent passenger in their stolen car, their first instinct is to leave the body in the woods. But fundamental decency prompts them to return to the corpse and lay it properly to rest. When they ultimately encounter the Andersons, Clarence and Alice organize a funeral ritual which they call a tradition, but which in reality is an improvisation involving the canoe, the lake, and the surrounding pine trees. From this spontaneous invention, this anti-tradition, the Andersons derive a sense of release that the suffocating routines of home had denied them.
Congdon and Mamet are both sharp observers of the contemporary world, the one dissecting for us the hidden logic of emotional impoverishment among the middle-class, the other detecting beneath the political fads of campus life enduring patterns of human nature. Both practice dramatic realism, and yet, when we view their work in the context of Beckett's achievement, we can see quite clearly how they have absorbed the influence of this landmark figure of anti-realist aesthetics. It is one of the functions of a thoughtful theater season to suggest such revealing comparisons among disparate works. By connecting Beckett, Mamet, and Congdon through this sequence of productions, the Portland Stage Company contributes to our understanding of the inner conjunctions and subtle continuities that underlie the diversity of contemporary theater.
MARTIN ANDRUCKI is Professor of Theater and Chair of the Department of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College.