Perhaps the best response to the trio of theatrical events assembled for the first half of Portland Stage Company’s 1994-1995 season is a delighted double-take. Is that Pierre Corneille up there on stage with Tony Kushner and Avner the Eccentric? And why is Donald Margulies’ disturbing drama about artistic integrity rubbing shoulders with a juggling clown and a neoclassical romance? What we have in Corneille’s The Illusion, in the performance work of Avner Eisenberg, and in Margulies’ Sight Unseen is a veritable sampler of theatrical richness, an array of styles and subject matter ranging from Baroque poetry through farcical rope dancing to the disturbing portrait of a painter’s struggle with the demons of fame and riches. There is diversity aplenty in this half-season, a head-turning abundance of it. Can we discern any underlying unity?
Once we recover from our double-take, we might begin looking for the underlying elements that tie these disparate theatrical events together into a coherent season by reviewing the context from which they all spring: the history of theatrical modernism.
By World War I the realistic revolution inaugurated by Ibsen had itself hardened into just another convention. Thirty-five years after Nora slammed the door on her doll’s house, middle-class audiences had come to expect dramas that applied seamless psychological and narrative logic to situations reflecting their own lives on a stage resembling home. Obviously the time had come for artists to find a new way of challenging a complacent public.
Enter the spirit of anti-realism, an approach to art-making that seems to dismantle the conventions of Ibsenite representation. Anti-realism breaks the mirror that art had been holding up to nature in pursuit of two related goals. First, the anti-realist wants to see what the world would look like when reflected on a shattered surface, while reminding us that the seemingly solid face of ‘reality’, like the mirror of art, is itself only a fragile construct. Second, the anti-realist is sick to death of the photographic prosiness of the images captured by the conventional mirror. He wants to demolish these and recapture theater’s primal poetry: the language of bodies and gestures that enlivens popular performance, and the exalted speech and action of the classical stage. With this renewed hunger for theatrical poetry comes a new interest in the figure of the artist as himself a compelling subject of dramatic representation.
With something like the first objective—the shattered mirror—in mind, Luigi Pirandello in 1921 offered the European public Six Characters in Search of an Author, a work that took seriously the Shakespearean maxim that “all the world’s a stage.” The six characters of the title approach a theatrical troupe with the request that the director and actors transform their lives into a play. The problem is that none of the six can agree on the meaning of the choices and events that bind them together. For the director to embrace any one character’s account of their six-fold experience would be to falsify each of the other five versions clamoring for recognition. In this play, Pirandello gives definitive expression to the mirror-breaking impulses of anti-realism, exposing the inability of the cracked and distorting medium of art to convey an ultimate truth.
And why can’t art confidently grasp and represent a unified world of human experience? Perhaps, Pirandello suggests, because life itself, like the theater that tries to represent it, is an incoherent construct of conflicting roles and irreconcilable meanings. Pirandello thus establishes one of the central preoccupations of anti-modernism: reflexiveness. Art contemplating its own strategies and limits parallels the human mind grasping the problematic nature of identity and experience.
During the decade following Pirandello’s Six Characters, two other seminal figures in the anti-realist movement, usually thought of as artistic opposites, were in fact arriving at certain parallel conclusions about the contemporary theater. Antonin Artaud, French actor, director , and theoretician, yearned for theater that would confront the audience with the primal cruelty of the universe, pummeling the spectator into a state of cathartic exaltation and ecstasy. For Artaud, the way to achieve this was “to break through language in order to touch life.” The theater must rediscover its origins in non-verbal action. The stage must be recognized as “a concrete physical place which asks… to be given its own concrete language,” a discourse of “gesture and mime… wordless pantomime… postures, attitudes, objective intonations.”
At virtually the same moment in history, German playwright Bertolt Brecht was also rebelling against realistic plays that presented audiences with emotionally absorbing representations of sympathetic characters. Like Artaud, who saw in the ancient art of mime a tool for theatrical rebirth, Brecht wished to revive what Martin Esslin called “a wide range of old theatrical conventions and traditions,” including the “techniques of clowns and fairground entertainers” and the perspectives of primitive folk plays. Thus we find both Brecht and Artaud, literally ignorant of each other’s work, in virtual agreement about the means for bringing the theater back to life. According to both, the stage urgently needed to reclaim its roots in the raw energy of pre-verbal physical action and rowdy popular entertainment.
Meanwhile, as Pirandello, Brecht, and Artaud were experimenting with revisions in theatrical technique, other artists were exploring a fascinating new subject of dramatic attention. Turning away from the familiar trials and tribulations of the middle class, many twentieth-century playwrights began to focus instead on the struggle of the artist-protagonist to understand experience and to communicate thoughts and feelings in an increasingly problematic world. Pirandello's actors, Beckett’s storytelling Hamm, Sartre’s Kean, Osborne’s Entertainer, Bond’s Shakespeare, and Peter Schaffer’s Mozart and Salieri come to mind as artist-heros and anti-heros in the modern era. Nor was the stage the only medium in which artistic characters were strutting and fretting. James Joyce puts Stephen Dedalus, the artist as a young man, at the center of his most important work. Likewise Lawrence, Mann, Gide, Broch, and even Irving Stone make artists central figures in their fiction.
Looking again at the first half of Portland Stage Company’s 1994-1995 season, we begin to see more clearly what these three theatrical events have in common: each bears one or more of the most prominent features of the anti-realist movement in the arts.
Corneille’s The Comic Illusion (1636) announces its subject in the title: like Pirandello’s work, this is a play about plays, theater scrutinizing itself. In Tony Kushner’s ‘free’ adaptation, called simply The Illusion, this theme is emphasized even more strongly than in the original. As the play beings, Pridamant, a lawyer, has been estranged from his son for fifteen years. Grieving, he seeks the service of Alcandre, a magician who can raise visions of absent persons and far off places. Perhaps the wizard can restore Pridamant’s missing son (at least in appearance) and fill the void left in the old man’s life by his departure.
Alcandre accepts the challenge and in a succession of magical scenes presents three crucial moments in the young man’s life. In the first, we see Pridamant’s son as a lover named Calisto, poor and exiled from his father’s house, striving to win the love of Melibea, a rich young lady. His rival, Pleribo, is favored by the lady’s father, and is easily defeated by Calisto. But just as we are about to witness the dramatic results of the frustrated father’s wrath, the vision is interrupted and we are transported back to the magician’s cave. A second vision follows, in which Calisto is now named Clindor and his beloved is Isabelle, and then a third in which Clindor becomes Theogenes and Isabelle is transformed into Hippolyta. What is going on here?
Corneille, prodded by Kushner, is being turned into a proto-Pirandello. As we watch the father watching his son, we are reminded that no one is getting the whole picture. Pridamant’s impressions of his offspring are filtered through the screen of Alcandre’s magic, which shows us only a succession of partial, selective views of his son’s life. The more we witness of these plays-within-the-play, the harder it becomes to assemble them into a coherent portrait of Calisto/Cindor/Theogenes. Alcandre’s art doesn’t dispel the mystery of the missing son's adventures: rather it deepens it, adding to our perplexity about the identities and motives of these shadowy figures in the theater of the wizard’s cave. When these conflicting images are finally resolved at the play’s end, we find ourselves plunged even more deeply into illusion.
In addition to embodying the contemporary obsession with reflexiveness, The Illusion also follows through on the re-appropriation of the past advocated by Brecht and Artaud. However, Tony Kushner supplies Corneille with a twentieth-century sensibility, creating a much darker-minded figure than is visible in the original seventeenth-century drama. Two small details illustrate this tendency. First, in Kushner’s version Alcandre’s servant, The Amanuensis, is deaf and dumb. The magician proudly declares his responsibility for these afflictions, saying “I did the surgery myself… I keep his tongue in a jar. He serves me devotedly, all the better since I had his eardrums pierced.” In Corneille, the character of The Amanuensis does not exist, much less the grisly business about his maiming. Next we notice that in Kushner’s version Alcandre invites Pridamant to enter his son’s “shadowy habitation.” Pridamamnt declines, and Alcandre responds, “No, no of course not, consumption, spectation, scrutiny, not participation, a wise choice, mi padrone.” In Corneille, no such exchange occurs.
What do these alterations tell us about Kushner’s use of this particular classic text? For one thing, Alcandre is turned into a ruthless businessman, protecting the secrets of his trade by any expedient, including the mutilation of his employees. For another, Pridamant becomes the paradigm of capitalist consumer, watching rather than participating in life, buying vicarious experience from the manufacturer of illusions. Kushner thus transforms the fundamental situation of Corneille’s play into a late twentieth-century political parable: The magician becomes a ruthless media-manipulator, the grieving father a well-heeled couch potato, and Corneille a critic of late capitalist culture.
Just as Tony Kushner incorporates a modern perspective into a French classic, so Avner Eisenberg puts a contemporary spin on one of the most ancient modes of theatrical art, the silent clowning of the comic mime. First reported in Greece, silent clowning in the west flourished during the long ascendency of Rome, passed over to Byzantium where a mime named Theodora married the emperor Justinian, survived the middle ages and all the succeeding centuries and made its way right down to the final decade of the second millennium. For the better part of three thousand years silent clowns have been enacting scenes of everyday folly and frustration while performing all manner of physical and acrobatic feats including rope dancing and walking on stilts as well as juggling, balancing, and swallowing improbable and often dangerous objects.
Thus in terms of the long history of the theater, what Avner does on stage is anything but “eccentric.” On the contrary, his act is virtually coeval with theater itself. Wherever and whenever there have been audiences, there have been performers like Avner.
What is it about this silent art that has kept it alive through the centuries and recommended it to modern sensibilities like Artaud and Brecht? To answer this question, we need to look at what Avner actually does on stage. Here is a representative moment: Avner enters with a broom as if to sweep the theater. He pauses for a smoke only to drop the cigarette. He bends down to pick it up, and the rest of the cigarettes fall from the pack. While gathering these up, he drops his broom, which leads to dropping his hat, then his matches, and so on in a seemingly endless successions of minor mishaps. Every material object in the universe lines up in opposition to Avner’s simple desire for a cigarette. The world, it seems, is the enemy of human intention. This, in fact, is the fundamental stuff of drama: character, goal, obstacles. And we watch attentively because we want to know who wins out in the end. Moreover, there can hardly be anyone who has ever lived who hasn’t acted Avner’s role in this fundamental dramatic clash between will and world: flat-tire, broken shoelace, clogged toilet. This is truly theater at its most universal, hence the durability and popularity of the silent clown.
But there is also a specific contemporary appeal to Avner’s work. The hapless clown has loomed incongruously large in the dramatic imagination of this century. One version of this figure, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, became the first entertainer in history to reach a world-wide audience, while other stumblebums, such as Brecht’s Gayly Gay, appealed to a more limited public. Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, waiting in their bowler hats and baggy pants for Godot, become the virtual poster boys of modern drama. Why the clown’s appeal to the twentieth-century sensibility? Here we need merely remind ourselves of what has become the philosophical commonplace of our time: human beings are dwarfish creatures surrounded by an irrational immensity. Brecht would call the hostile environment we inhabit predatory capitalism, Artaud would see it as a fundamentally cruel cosmos, Beckett as an absurd universe. In any case, whether we are the victims of fate or of society, we often end up looking a lot like Avner. Indeed, in his hands the spectators become direct participants in the universal farce as the clown wordlessly draws members of the audience onto the stage and weaves them seamlessly into the purposes and patterns of his comic design.
Behind the facade of incompetence, Avner, unlike us, really knows what he is doing and truly controls his world. The cigarettes don’t spill out of the packet, Avner spills them as part of a tightly managed routine directed toward a clear artistic end. It is our awareness of this control that gives Avner’s performance an exhilarating double edge: it seems to be an exhibition of human insignificance, but it is actually a display of human mastery.
In a sense, then, Avner’s performance is about this own artistry, his ability to come before an audience and speechlessly control its responses for an entire evening. Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen is also about an artist’s ability to control his medium. Halfway through the play, Jonathan Waxman, an enormously successful American painter, is arguing about his work with his former lover Patricia and her husband Nick. “Use your imagination.” Jonathan says as the other two look with confusion and hostility at his most celebrated painting:
Once we recover from our double-take, we might begin looking for the underlying elements that tie these disparate theatrical events together into a coherent season by reviewing the context from which they all spring: the history of theatrical modernism.
By World War I the realistic revolution inaugurated by Ibsen had itself hardened into just another convention. Thirty-five years after Nora slammed the door on her doll’s house, middle-class audiences had come to expect dramas that applied seamless psychological and narrative logic to situations reflecting their own lives on a stage resembling home. Obviously the time had come for artists to find a new way of challenging a complacent public.
Enter the spirit of anti-realism, an approach to art-making that seems to dismantle the conventions of Ibsenite representation. Anti-realism breaks the mirror that art had been holding up to nature in pursuit of two related goals. First, the anti-realist wants to see what the world would look like when reflected on a shattered surface, while reminding us that the seemingly solid face of ‘reality’, like the mirror of art, is itself only a fragile construct. Second, the anti-realist is sick to death of the photographic prosiness of the images captured by the conventional mirror. He wants to demolish these and recapture theater’s primal poetry: the language of bodies and gestures that enlivens popular performance, and the exalted speech and action of the classical stage. With this renewed hunger for theatrical poetry comes a new interest in the figure of the artist as himself a compelling subject of dramatic representation.
With something like the first objective—the shattered mirror—in mind, Luigi Pirandello in 1921 offered the European public Six Characters in Search of an Author, a work that took seriously the Shakespearean maxim that “all the world’s a stage.” The six characters of the title approach a theatrical troupe with the request that the director and actors transform their lives into a play. The problem is that none of the six can agree on the meaning of the choices and events that bind them together. For the director to embrace any one character’s account of their six-fold experience would be to falsify each of the other five versions clamoring for recognition. In this play, Pirandello gives definitive expression to the mirror-breaking impulses of anti-realism, exposing the inability of the cracked and distorting medium of art to convey an ultimate truth.
And why can’t art confidently grasp and represent a unified world of human experience? Perhaps, Pirandello suggests, because life itself, like the theater that tries to represent it, is an incoherent construct of conflicting roles and irreconcilable meanings. Pirandello thus establishes one of the central preoccupations of anti-modernism: reflexiveness. Art contemplating its own strategies and limits parallels the human mind grasping the problematic nature of identity and experience.
During the decade following Pirandello’s Six Characters, two other seminal figures in the anti-realist movement, usually thought of as artistic opposites, were in fact arriving at certain parallel conclusions about the contemporary theater. Antonin Artaud, French actor, director , and theoretician, yearned for theater that would confront the audience with the primal cruelty of the universe, pummeling the spectator into a state of cathartic exaltation and ecstasy. For Artaud, the way to achieve this was “to break through language in order to touch life.” The theater must rediscover its origins in non-verbal action. The stage must be recognized as “a concrete physical place which asks… to be given its own concrete language,” a discourse of “gesture and mime… wordless pantomime… postures, attitudes, objective intonations.”
At virtually the same moment in history, German playwright Bertolt Brecht was also rebelling against realistic plays that presented audiences with emotionally absorbing representations of sympathetic characters. Like Artaud, who saw in the ancient art of mime a tool for theatrical rebirth, Brecht wished to revive what Martin Esslin called “a wide range of old theatrical conventions and traditions,” including the “techniques of clowns and fairground entertainers” and the perspectives of primitive folk plays. Thus we find both Brecht and Artaud, literally ignorant of each other’s work, in virtual agreement about the means for bringing the theater back to life. According to both, the stage urgently needed to reclaim its roots in the raw energy of pre-verbal physical action and rowdy popular entertainment.
Meanwhile, as Pirandello, Brecht, and Artaud were experimenting with revisions in theatrical technique, other artists were exploring a fascinating new subject of dramatic attention. Turning away from the familiar trials and tribulations of the middle class, many twentieth-century playwrights began to focus instead on the struggle of the artist-protagonist to understand experience and to communicate thoughts and feelings in an increasingly problematic world. Pirandello's actors, Beckett’s storytelling Hamm, Sartre’s Kean, Osborne’s Entertainer, Bond’s Shakespeare, and Peter Schaffer’s Mozart and Salieri come to mind as artist-heros and anti-heros in the modern era. Nor was the stage the only medium in which artistic characters were strutting and fretting. James Joyce puts Stephen Dedalus, the artist as a young man, at the center of his most important work. Likewise Lawrence, Mann, Gide, Broch, and even Irving Stone make artists central figures in their fiction.
Looking again at the first half of Portland Stage Company’s 1994-1995 season, we begin to see more clearly what these three theatrical events have in common: each bears one or more of the most prominent features of the anti-realist movement in the arts.
Corneille’s The Comic Illusion (1636) announces its subject in the title: like Pirandello’s work, this is a play about plays, theater scrutinizing itself. In Tony Kushner’s ‘free’ adaptation, called simply The Illusion, this theme is emphasized even more strongly than in the original. As the play beings, Pridamant, a lawyer, has been estranged from his son for fifteen years. Grieving, he seeks the service of Alcandre, a magician who can raise visions of absent persons and far off places. Perhaps the wizard can restore Pridamant’s missing son (at least in appearance) and fill the void left in the old man’s life by his departure.
Alcandre accepts the challenge and in a succession of magical scenes presents three crucial moments in the young man’s life. In the first, we see Pridamant’s son as a lover named Calisto, poor and exiled from his father’s house, striving to win the love of Melibea, a rich young lady. His rival, Pleribo, is favored by the lady’s father, and is easily defeated by Calisto. But just as we are about to witness the dramatic results of the frustrated father’s wrath, the vision is interrupted and we are transported back to the magician’s cave. A second vision follows, in which Calisto is now named Clindor and his beloved is Isabelle, and then a third in which Clindor becomes Theogenes and Isabelle is transformed into Hippolyta. What is going on here?
Corneille, prodded by Kushner, is being turned into a proto-Pirandello. As we watch the father watching his son, we are reminded that no one is getting the whole picture. Pridamant’s impressions of his offspring are filtered through the screen of Alcandre’s magic, which shows us only a succession of partial, selective views of his son’s life. The more we witness of these plays-within-the-play, the harder it becomes to assemble them into a coherent portrait of Calisto/Cindor/Theogenes. Alcandre’s art doesn’t dispel the mystery of the missing son's adventures: rather it deepens it, adding to our perplexity about the identities and motives of these shadowy figures in the theater of the wizard’s cave. When these conflicting images are finally resolved at the play’s end, we find ourselves plunged even more deeply into illusion.
In addition to embodying the contemporary obsession with reflexiveness, The Illusion also follows through on the re-appropriation of the past advocated by Brecht and Artaud. However, Tony Kushner supplies Corneille with a twentieth-century sensibility, creating a much darker-minded figure than is visible in the original seventeenth-century drama. Two small details illustrate this tendency. First, in Kushner’s version Alcandre’s servant, The Amanuensis, is deaf and dumb. The magician proudly declares his responsibility for these afflictions, saying “I did the surgery myself… I keep his tongue in a jar. He serves me devotedly, all the better since I had his eardrums pierced.” In Corneille, the character of The Amanuensis does not exist, much less the grisly business about his maiming. Next we notice that in Kushner’s version Alcandre invites Pridamant to enter his son’s “shadowy habitation.” Pridamamnt declines, and Alcandre responds, “No, no of course not, consumption, spectation, scrutiny, not participation, a wise choice, mi padrone.” In Corneille, no such exchange occurs.
What do these alterations tell us about Kushner’s use of this particular classic text? For one thing, Alcandre is turned into a ruthless businessman, protecting the secrets of his trade by any expedient, including the mutilation of his employees. For another, Pridamant becomes the paradigm of capitalist consumer, watching rather than participating in life, buying vicarious experience from the manufacturer of illusions. Kushner thus transforms the fundamental situation of Corneille’s play into a late twentieth-century political parable: The magician becomes a ruthless media-manipulator, the grieving father a well-heeled couch potato, and Corneille a critic of late capitalist culture.
Just as Tony Kushner incorporates a modern perspective into a French classic, so Avner Eisenberg puts a contemporary spin on one of the most ancient modes of theatrical art, the silent clowning of the comic mime. First reported in Greece, silent clowning in the west flourished during the long ascendency of Rome, passed over to Byzantium where a mime named Theodora married the emperor Justinian, survived the middle ages and all the succeeding centuries and made its way right down to the final decade of the second millennium. For the better part of three thousand years silent clowns have been enacting scenes of everyday folly and frustration while performing all manner of physical and acrobatic feats including rope dancing and walking on stilts as well as juggling, balancing, and swallowing improbable and often dangerous objects.
Thus in terms of the long history of the theater, what Avner does on stage is anything but “eccentric.” On the contrary, his act is virtually coeval with theater itself. Wherever and whenever there have been audiences, there have been performers like Avner.
What is it about this silent art that has kept it alive through the centuries and recommended it to modern sensibilities like Artaud and Brecht? To answer this question, we need to look at what Avner actually does on stage. Here is a representative moment: Avner enters with a broom as if to sweep the theater. He pauses for a smoke only to drop the cigarette. He bends down to pick it up, and the rest of the cigarettes fall from the pack. While gathering these up, he drops his broom, which leads to dropping his hat, then his matches, and so on in a seemingly endless successions of minor mishaps. Every material object in the universe lines up in opposition to Avner’s simple desire for a cigarette. The world, it seems, is the enemy of human intention. This, in fact, is the fundamental stuff of drama: character, goal, obstacles. And we watch attentively because we want to know who wins out in the end. Moreover, there can hardly be anyone who has ever lived who hasn’t acted Avner’s role in this fundamental dramatic clash between will and world: flat-tire, broken shoelace, clogged toilet. This is truly theater at its most universal, hence the durability and popularity of the silent clown.
But there is also a specific contemporary appeal to Avner’s work. The hapless clown has loomed incongruously large in the dramatic imagination of this century. One version of this figure, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, became the first entertainer in history to reach a world-wide audience, while other stumblebums, such as Brecht’s Gayly Gay, appealed to a more limited public. Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, waiting in their bowler hats and baggy pants for Godot, become the virtual poster boys of modern drama. Why the clown’s appeal to the twentieth-century sensibility? Here we need merely remind ourselves of what has become the philosophical commonplace of our time: human beings are dwarfish creatures surrounded by an irrational immensity. Brecht would call the hostile environment we inhabit predatory capitalism, Artaud would see it as a fundamentally cruel cosmos, Beckett as an absurd universe. In any case, whether we are the victims of fate or of society, we often end up looking a lot like Avner. Indeed, in his hands the spectators become direct participants in the universal farce as the clown wordlessly draws members of the audience onto the stage and weaves them seamlessly into the purposes and patterns of his comic design.
Behind the facade of incompetence, Avner, unlike us, really knows what he is doing and truly controls his world. The cigarettes don’t spill out of the packet, Avner spills them as part of a tightly managed routine directed toward a clear artistic end. It is our awareness of this control that gives Avner’s performance an exhilarating double edge: it seems to be an exhibition of human insignificance, but it is actually a display of human mastery.
In a sense, then, Avner’s performance is about this own artistry, his ability to come before an audience and speechlessly control its responses for an entire evening. Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen is also about an artist’s ability to control his medium. Halfway through the play, Jonathan Waxman, an enormously successful American painter, is arguing about his work with his former lover Patricia and her husband Nick. “Use your imagination.” Jonathan says as the other two look with confusion and hostility at his most celebrated painting:
Patricia: The woman is being raped.
Jonathan: Ah ha. Is she?
Patricia: Well, yes, look at her hands. They’re fists.
Nick: They aren’t necessarily fists; they’re just poorly drawn hands.
Jonathan is contemptuous of this response, expressing exasperation at Nick’s fixation on details of style and technique. Yet without a command of those elements, his painting remains terminally ambiguous, unfocused, unresolved in viewer’s eyes. For Jonathan, however, these problems are unimportant. He regards his work as “responding to situations that exist in American society that are bleak… but I’m presenting them in allegorical ways that I hope are provocative.” The ideological message of his art is what seems most significant to him, not its visual truthfulness or its fidelity to observed experience.
However, this was not always the case for Jonathan’s art. Visiting Patricia after fifteen years, he discovers in her possession a portrait of her that he painted when they first met. Jonathan is smitten by this student effort, acquires it from Patricia, and includes it in a retrospective exhibition of his work being given in London. There a critic praises it for its “openness… the way the model engages the viewer… her penetrating, unwavering eye contact. Nowhere else in your work does one find that kind of… connection.” When the critic asks Jonathan “Who was that woman? What role did she play?” he gives a response that reveals with shocking suddenness his deficiencies as a human being and as an artist: “I have no idea.”
Jonathan, it seems, has stopped seeing the world and the people around him. The connection with living experience manifested in the painting of Patricia has been replaced by mere visual rhetoric, art that exhibits political ideas rather than talent. Because this is the kind of painting that brings Jonathan fame and money, he exchanges his youthful insight for a trademark style and predictable content, becoming a reliable artistic commodity rather than a self-fulfilling artist.
It was Jonathan's surrender as an artist to the power of Patricia’s presence that gave his youthful work emotional resonance. But, the play suggests, Jonathan was ultimately terrified of this power. Patricia came from a world vastly different from Jonathan’s, a separateness summed up in his identity as a Jew and hers as a Gentile. In refusing to cross the gulf between them, in repudiating her as a lover, he succumbed to the fundamental weakness that would corrode his artistic vision: he backed away from the unknown. Jonathan closed his eyes to Patricia, and by extension to the world of immediate experience represented by her presence. The disturbing consequence is that Jonathan becomes a purveyor of fragmented and ultimately unsatisfying images, an artist for whom a direct, spontaneous, and coherent vision of life remains unseen.
Margulies organizes this exposition of artistic self-betrayal as a sequence of scenes that defy chronological order. Like Alcandre in his cave, he conjures relevant moments from wildly disparate periods of the subject’s life. Now we see Jonathan as a forty year old appearing suddenly in Patricia’s kitchen; now we see Nick and Patricia anticipating the visit that Jonathan has already made in the first scene. As he moves in defiance of time from moment to moment, Margulies reminds us of the artist’s power over his material. Jonathan’s life makes whatever sense Margulies wants to give it; he reveals meaning through the conspicuous shaping and shuffling of events that his a-chronological structure calls to our attention. When he concludes the play with the earliest moment of Jonathan and Patricia’s relationship, thereby disclosing the hidden connection between beginnings and endings in the configurations of life, he reclaims some of the theater’s power to make sense of human experience. Regardless of Pirandello, Margulies seems to be saying, this flawed theatrical mirror can still show us the truth about ourselves.
In offering us these three theatrical events, Portland Stage Company reminds us of the complex legacy drawn on by works in the modern theater, where the shadow of Pirandello hovers over a play by Corneille, where the clowning of antiquity meets the twentieth-century sense of the absurd, and where the interplay on insight and blindness in the life of an artist becomes an emblem of our common struggle to understand the world around us.
However, this was not always the case for Jonathan’s art. Visiting Patricia after fifteen years, he discovers in her possession a portrait of her that he painted when they first met. Jonathan is smitten by this student effort, acquires it from Patricia, and includes it in a retrospective exhibition of his work being given in London. There a critic praises it for its “openness… the way the model engages the viewer… her penetrating, unwavering eye contact. Nowhere else in your work does one find that kind of… connection.” When the critic asks Jonathan “Who was that woman? What role did she play?” he gives a response that reveals with shocking suddenness his deficiencies as a human being and as an artist: “I have no idea.”
Jonathan, it seems, has stopped seeing the world and the people around him. The connection with living experience manifested in the painting of Patricia has been replaced by mere visual rhetoric, art that exhibits political ideas rather than talent. Because this is the kind of painting that brings Jonathan fame and money, he exchanges his youthful insight for a trademark style and predictable content, becoming a reliable artistic commodity rather than a self-fulfilling artist.
It was Jonathan's surrender as an artist to the power of Patricia’s presence that gave his youthful work emotional resonance. But, the play suggests, Jonathan was ultimately terrified of this power. Patricia came from a world vastly different from Jonathan’s, a separateness summed up in his identity as a Jew and hers as a Gentile. In refusing to cross the gulf between them, in repudiating her as a lover, he succumbed to the fundamental weakness that would corrode his artistic vision: he backed away from the unknown. Jonathan closed his eyes to Patricia, and by extension to the world of immediate experience represented by her presence. The disturbing consequence is that Jonathan becomes a purveyor of fragmented and ultimately unsatisfying images, an artist for whom a direct, spontaneous, and coherent vision of life remains unseen.
Margulies organizes this exposition of artistic self-betrayal as a sequence of scenes that defy chronological order. Like Alcandre in his cave, he conjures relevant moments from wildly disparate periods of the subject’s life. Now we see Jonathan as a forty year old appearing suddenly in Patricia’s kitchen; now we see Nick and Patricia anticipating the visit that Jonathan has already made in the first scene. As he moves in defiance of time from moment to moment, Margulies reminds us of the artist’s power over his material. Jonathan’s life makes whatever sense Margulies wants to give it; he reveals meaning through the conspicuous shaping and shuffling of events that his a-chronological structure calls to our attention. When he concludes the play with the earliest moment of Jonathan and Patricia’s relationship, thereby disclosing the hidden connection between beginnings and endings in the configurations of life, he reclaims some of the theater’s power to make sense of human experience. Regardless of Pirandello, Margulies seems to be saying, this flawed theatrical mirror can still show us the truth about ourselves.
In offering us these three theatrical events, Portland Stage Company reminds us of the complex legacy drawn on by works in the modern theater, where the shadow of Pirandello hovers over a play by Corneille, where the clowning of antiquity meets the twentieth-century sense of the absurd, and where the interplay on insight and blindness in the life of an artist becomes an emblem of our common struggle to understand the world around us.