In the second half of its 1994-1995 season, Portland Stage Company offers a new play, an odd play, and an old play- each of which asks a characteristically modern question: given the way the world is, should we laugh or cry?
The new work is Church of the Sole Survivor, a serio-comic fantasy by Keith Curran. The odd play, a bittersweet farce with sixteen possible endings, is Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges. The old play is Mrs. Warren’s Profession, George Bernard Shaw’s scathing satire of Victorian hypocrisy. Each of these works presents a unique dramatic profile to the audience.
In Church of the Sole Survivor we find ourselves at a Cape Cod beach house where a hairless humanoid from the sea is causing emotional convulsions among the residents. Intimate Exchanges explores somewhat familiar territory: the deeply eroded landscape of middle-class, middle-aged marriage. And Mrs. Warren’s Profession invites us to observe a mother and daughter as they clash over the price—and value—of respectability in a dishonest society.
For all their differences, however, these works share one common feature: they all present an unsettling mixture of pain and laughter that creates an emotional roller-coaster ride for the audience.
For example, toward the end of the first scene in Church of the Sole Survivor, the hairless visitor from the deep is jumping “wildly up and down slapping his buttocks” while blathering away joyfully in incomprehensible gibberish. At this moment, a character who has yet to encounter the new arrival enters the stage, takes in the buttock-slapping spectacle, and utters a curtain line (not to be revealed here) that is guaranteed to bring down the house. However, the laughter from this cleverly constructed encounter will have barely died down before we discover the woman who speaks the funny line is a grieving widow whose life is at a standstill while the old man to whom the joke is delivered is also heartbroken, the survivor of a long love affair recently ended by death. And as the play goes on, both laughter and sorrow continue to share the stage, the emotional climate changing as unpredictably as New England weather.
Or consider one of two possible endings of “Love in the mist,” which is one of the eight possible third acts leading to the sixteen possible fourth acts of Intimate Exchanges (Although Portland Stage Company will not in fact be staging this particular third act, its tone faithfully captures the feeling of the work as a whole.) Miles, a married man who has snuck off for an illicit weekend with young Sylvie, runs into every imaginable comic frustration of his guilty desires, including being terrorized by a black sheep he encounters on a foggy cliff-side. As he flees in alarm from the harmless creature, both the audience and Sylvie laugh at his foolishness. But just as we are recovering from our hilarity, Miles sets off for a walk along that same misty cliff, and stumbles over the edge to his death. Again, as in the Church of the Sole Survivor, laughter and pain share the stage.
The same pattern is apparent in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Shaw doesn’t keep us guessing for long about the title character’s line of work. As professions go it is said to be the oldest. And Shaw gets lots of comic mileage out of that embarrassing fact, especially from the surprise encounter between Mrs. Warren and one of her former clients.
But Shaw soon tempers this jolly mood with ugly events and discoveries as the sexual comedy turns to sordidness and revulsion. Mrs. Warren’s daughter, Vivie, after fighting off the crude attempt of Sir George Crofits to buy her in marriage, learns to her horror that she has been on the verge of incest with another character, and ultimately confronts the necessity of ending all of her most intimate relationships. Just as she is considering this bleak prospect, out comes her mother with a punchline: “Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing!” Again, the jokes just keep on coming.
A century and a half ago, Victor Hugo, in struggling to establish a unique identity for modern drama, declared that the newest mission of the playwright was to “strive to do as nature does, to mingle… light and darkness, the sublime and the ridiculous.” This, Hugo assured his readers, was a “principle unknown to the ancients” who, in the name of decorum, liked their plays to be internally consistent in tone and feeling; purely comic or purely tragic throughout - no mixing and matching allowed.
Hugo, rejecting this classical passion for clarity and order, insisted that the “new type [of play] is the grotesque,” a word the dictionary defines as “a strange and incongruous medley, as of things or events”—or, we might extrapolate, of radically conflicting emotions.
Why this modern fascination with incongruity, with the cheek-by-jowl coexistence of laughter and tears? One influential twentieth-century critic, Elder Olson, sees in this “grotesque” approach to dramatic form a “systematic attack upon all the conventional… emotional and moral responses of the audience,” an approach that “undermines the very foundation of their emotions and moral judgements.” Thus, when playwright and audience share common assumptions about ultimate values, they will also agree on dramatic conventions defining what is serious and what is silly. When that collective certainty is eroded, emotional and artistic ambiguity set in. The believer knows whether to laugh or cry at any given moment; it is the skeptic who is always on the emotional fence.
Olson is joined in this opinion by Robert W. Corrigan, another distinguished scholar of the modern stage. “All drama, if it is to communicate with an audience, depends on a shared view of what is significant.” Corrigan writes, “Once this shared public truth is shattered… all experience tends to be equally serious or equally ludicrous,” a peculiarly modern condition that Corrigan terms our “mongrel mood.”
Skepticism about conventional morality, suspicion of traditional values, a resistance to any absolute definition of the serious or the trivial: this is the volatile spiritual atmosphere out of which the mixed emotions of our three plays arise.
Thus, in Church of the Sole Survivor, Keith Curran presents us with a collection of characters who are essentially flummoxed by the calamity of existence. Lacking any system of beliefs or any shared sense of morality which might help to assuage their sorrows, these characters deal with pain and loss in a kind of amiable daze, clutching feebly at the straws of twelve step movements and misguided self-help strategies.
We have already encountered the widow whose life has grown stagnant (her name is Alba) and the hopelessly grieving old man (Sinjin). But Mr. Curran has other lost souls up his sleeve. There is Katie, Alba’s younger sister, a “recovering” alcoholic whose gifts as a novelist have also dried out, along with her liver. Rather than writing fiction she records public service announcements urging fellow booze hounds to reform—presumably serious messages which, in fact, exhibit a disorienting sense of bizarre: “Question #1: Do you sometimes wake up in the middle of the afternoon only to discover an odd, unsettling odor on your index finger?”
As we learn more about her character, we see that there is little conviction sustaining her pose of reform “I am very happy now—these days—recently I am finally happy in my life, can’t you see that?” she declares to the humanoid from the sea, evidently working as hard to convince herself as her listener. However, at the mysterious touch of this strange being Katie’s facade of determined adjustedness crumbles: “I AM DYING SO SLOWLY AND I HAVE RUN OUT OF STEPS AND I HATE MY LIFE AND I AM SICK OF PRETENDING,” she declares in capitals and italics supplied by the author.
If the steps in Katie’s recovery program lead nowhere, her daughter Cassie’s attempt at self-healing is even more pointless—grotesquely so, to use Victor Hugo’s term. Having lost a husband to suicide and a desperately desired child to miscarriage, Cassie attempts to heal her wounds by taking up arts and crafts. She makes napkin rings out of toilet paper roles and fashions bottomless ashtrays, trying—laughingly? tragically?—to combat grief and despair with glue and scissors. Needless to say, this strategy works no better than her mother’s twelve steps, and so she too turns to the stranger from the sea seeking release form her pain in the mysterious touch.
Meanwhile, Patrick, whose affiliation with a unique congregation gives the play its name, tries to evangelize for his new faith. “Every member of our church was the only survivor of a major calamity… And we were saved for a purpose… To share. To teach. To let everyone know that this is heaven and that every moment of every day should be lived with love and with gratefulness and with joy.” One might expect that Patrick’s having survived both heroin addiction and a plane crash would lend authority to his message. But as we have noted, churches and faiths lack a certain credibility in much modern theater. Accordingly, Patrick is soon humbled in his attempts to preach a new gospel. After his assertion of the heavenly nature of earthly life is met with incredulous contempt, he is taken down a further peg when Katie informs him that he has completely misread her novel, The Accidental Harbinger, a book he has viewed as a metaphor and a guide for his spiritual quest. “It’s my life,” he asserts.
The new work is Church of the Sole Survivor, a serio-comic fantasy by Keith Curran. The odd play, a bittersweet farce with sixteen possible endings, is Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges. The old play is Mrs. Warren’s Profession, George Bernard Shaw’s scathing satire of Victorian hypocrisy. Each of these works presents a unique dramatic profile to the audience.
In Church of the Sole Survivor we find ourselves at a Cape Cod beach house where a hairless humanoid from the sea is causing emotional convulsions among the residents. Intimate Exchanges explores somewhat familiar territory: the deeply eroded landscape of middle-class, middle-aged marriage. And Mrs. Warren’s Profession invites us to observe a mother and daughter as they clash over the price—and value—of respectability in a dishonest society.
For all their differences, however, these works share one common feature: they all present an unsettling mixture of pain and laughter that creates an emotional roller-coaster ride for the audience.
For example, toward the end of the first scene in Church of the Sole Survivor, the hairless visitor from the deep is jumping “wildly up and down slapping his buttocks” while blathering away joyfully in incomprehensible gibberish. At this moment, a character who has yet to encounter the new arrival enters the stage, takes in the buttock-slapping spectacle, and utters a curtain line (not to be revealed here) that is guaranteed to bring down the house. However, the laughter from this cleverly constructed encounter will have barely died down before we discover the woman who speaks the funny line is a grieving widow whose life is at a standstill while the old man to whom the joke is delivered is also heartbroken, the survivor of a long love affair recently ended by death. And as the play goes on, both laughter and sorrow continue to share the stage, the emotional climate changing as unpredictably as New England weather.
Or consider one of two possible endings of “Love in the mist,” which is one of the eight possible third acts leading to the sixteen possible fourth acts of Intimate Exchanges (Although Portland Stage Company will not in fact be staging this particular third act, its tone faithfully captures the feeling of the work as a whole.) Miles, a married man who has snuck off for an illicit weekend with young Sylvie, runs into every imaginable comic frustration of his guilty desires, including being terrorized by a black sheep he encounters on a foggy cliff-side. As he flees in alarm from the harmless creature, both the audience and Sylvie laugh at his foolishness. But just as we are recovering from our hilarity, Miles sets off for a walk along that same misty cliff, and stumbles over the edge to his death. Again, as in the Church of the Sole Survivor, laughter and pain share the stage.
The same pattern is apparent in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Shaw doesn’t keep us guessing for long about the title character’s line of work. As professions go it is said to be the oldest. And Shaw gets lots of comic mileage out of that embarrassing fact, especially from the surprise encounter between Mrs. Warren and one of her former clients.
But Shaw soon tempers this jolly mood with ugly events and discoveries as the sexual comedy turns to sordidness and revulsion. Mrs. Warren’s daughter, Vivie, after fighting off the crude attempt of Sir George Crofits to buy her in marriage, learns to her horror that she has been on the verge of incest with another character, and ultimately confronts the necessity of ending all of her most intimate relationships. Just as she is considering this bleak prospect, out comes her mother with a punchline: “Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing!” Again, the jokes just keep on coming.
A century and a half ago, Victor Hugo, in struggling to establish a unique identity for modern drama, declared that the newest mission of the playwright was to “strive to do as nature does, to mingle… light and darkness, the sublime and the ridiculous.” This, Hugo assured his readers, was a “principle unknown to the ancients” who, in the name of decorum, liked their plays to be internally consistent in tone and feeling; purely comic or purely tragic throughout - no mixing and matching allowed.
Hugo, rejecting this classical passion for clarity and order, insisted that the “new type [of play] is the grotesque,” a word the dictionary defines as “a strange and incongruous medley, as of things or events”—or, we might extrapolate, of radically conflicting emotions.
Why this modern fascination with incongruity, with the cheek-by-jowl coexistence of laughter and tears? One influential twentieth-century critic, Elder Olson, sees in this “grotesque” approach to dramatic form a “systematic attack upon all the conventional… emotional and moral responses of the audience,” an approach that “undermines the very foundation of their emotions and moral judgements.” Thus, when playwright and audience share common assumptions about ultimate values, they will also agree on dramatic conventions defining what is serious and what is silly. When that collective certainty is eroded, emotional and artistic ambiguity set in. The believer knows whether to laugh or cry at any given moment; it is the skeptic who is always on the emotional fence.
Olson is joined in this opinion by Robert W. Corrigan, another distinguished scholar of the modern stage. “All drama, if it is to communicate with an audience, depends on a shared view of what is significant.” Corrigan writes, “Once this shared public truth is shattered… all experience tends to be equally serious or equally ludicrous,” a peculiarly modern condition that Corrigan terms our “mongrel mood.”
Skepticism about conventional morality, suspicion of traditional values, a resistance to any absolute definition of the serious or the trivial: this is the volatile spiritual atmosphere out of which the mixed emotions of our three plays arise.
Thus, in Church of the Sole Survivor, Keith Curran presents us with a collection of characters who are essentially flummoxed by the calamity of existence. Lacking any system of beliefs or any shared sense of morality which might help to assuage their sorrows, these characters deal with pain and loss in a kind of amiable daze, clutching feebly at the straws of twelve step movements and misguided self-help strategies.
We have already encountered the widow whose life has grown stagnant (her name is Alba) and the hopelessly grieving old man (Sinjin). But Mr. Curran has other lost souls up his sleeve. There is Katie, Alba’s younger sister, a “recovering” alcoholic whose gifts as a novelist have also dried out, along with her liver. Rather than writing fiction she records public service announcements urging fellow booze hounds to reform—presumably serious messages which, in fact, exhibit a disorienting sense of bizarre: “Question #1: Do you sometimes wake up in the middle of the afternoon only to discover an odd, unsettling odor on your index finger?”
As we learn more about her character, we see that there is little conviction sustaining her pose of reform “I am very happy now—these days—recently I am finally happy in my life, can’t you see that?” she declares to the humanoid from the sea, evidently working as hard to convince herself as her listener. However, at the mysterious touch of this strange being Katie’s facade of determined adjustedness crumbles: “I AM DYING SO SLOWLY AND I HAVE RUN OUT OF STEPS AND I HATE MY LIFE AND I AM SICK OF PRETENDING,” she declares in capitals and italics supplied by the author.
If the steps in Katie’s recovery program lead nowhere, her daughter Cassie’s attempt at self-healing is even more pointless—grotesquely so, to use Victor Hugo’s term. Having lost a husband to suicide and a desperately desired child to miscarriage, Cassie attempts to heal her wounds by taking up arts and crafts. She makes napkin rings out of toilet paper roles and fashions bottomless ashtrays, trying—laughingly? tragically?—to combat grief and despair with glue and scissors. Needless to say, this strategy works no better than her mother’s twelve steps, and so she too turns to the stranger from the sea seeking release form her pain in the mysterious touch.
Meanwhile, Patrick, whose affiliation with a unique congregation gives the play its name, tries to evangelize for his new faith. “Every member of our church was the only survivor of a major calamity… And we were saved for a purpose… To share. To teach. To let everyone know that this is heaven and that every moment of every day should be lived with love and with gratefulness and with joy.” One might expect that Patrick’s having survived both heroin addiction and a plane crash would lend authority to his message. But as we have noted, churches and faiths lack a certain credibility in much modern theater. Accordingly, Patrick is soon humbled in his attempts to preach a new gospel. After his assertion of the heavenly nature of earthly life is met with incredulous contempt, he is taken down a further peg when Katie informs him that he has completely misread her novel, The Accidental Harbinger, a book he has viewed as a metaphor and a guide for his spiritual quest. “It’s my life,” he asserts.
KATIE: It’s about a black, lesbian domestic who hallucinates a migration with the birds to the Galapagos Islands.
PATRICK: On the surface.
Once again a punchline and a punch arrive simultaneously, and once again we discover that it hurts when we laugh. And so it goes blow after blow landing on this hapless prophet of heaven-at-hand, until he is reduced to tears and confusion.
What Mr. Curran seems to be telling us in this saga of useless cures and failed creeds is that life’s a bitch, and there is no church—no band of the faithful—that can help us. Instead, the road to whatever happiness is possible is one we travel alone, sole survivors of our individual sorrows, and it runs through the world of private—and unshared—revelations whose gatekeeper is not an angel with a flaming sword, but a naked, hairless, pseudo-human whose language is gibberish.
The read through Intimate Exchanges is equally problematic, not only because of the emotional pitfalls along the way, but also because each reader or producer is faced, not with a single path of action, but with a plotline that branches disconcertingly in alternate directions whenever a main character makes a crucial choice. Will he or she decide on “A” or “B”? Ayckbourn traces the divergent consequences that ensue, literally writing a different play for each choice. As readers, we are free to follow one or the other set of results, or both.
Thus, there are two possible first acts (deriving from a choice made at the moment the curtain rises), each of which has two different endings, again depending on the decisions of the characters. These four possible conclusions lead to four different second acts, each of which again ends in two different ways, thus branching into eight possible third acts, and finally proliferating into sixteen possible fourth acts.
Although one might need a scorecard while watching the play, it is quite possible for a reader of to follow the branching choices presented at the various beginnings, middles, and ends of the plot, and thus to learn all the outcomes of all the options—an almost God-like experience that allows us to look down on this self-contained little universe of infidelities, reconciliations, marriages, and deaths as if we were the eyes of fate itself, reading the roadmap of everyone’s alternative futures.
By contrast, a producer of this play faces serious constraints. To present all of the Intimate Exchanges (which fills two volumes of 200 pages each). Portland Stage Company would, in effect, have to produce sixteen different evenings of theater. Because this is a practical impossibility, it falls to the director of the play to pick out one or two of the available pathways through the action— making him, in effect, Mr. Ayckbourn's co-author.
What sort of play can such a collaborator extract from Ayckbourn’s many options? At first glance, given all the choices available to readers and directors, not to mention the characters in the play, it is tempting to regard Intimate Exchanges as a kind of monument to the concept of free will. The director, it might seem, is at liberty to make the characters and the plot do whatever he wants. A closer look, however, begins to reveal some significant limitations on the freedom that Ayckbourn’s complex structure allows either its inhabitants or its interpreters.
To begin with, along whatever route the director chooses, laughs will abound. As we saw earlier, even death is surrounded by hilarity in Ayckbourn’s world. Moreover, Ayckbourn has written this monstrous work for a cast of two—one male and one female—who are required to play out all the destinies of all the characters. That means, for example, that the same actress will play both her husband’s wife and his lover, or that the same actor will play both halves of a pair of best friends, one of whom betrays the other in an act of marital infidelity. Apart from requiring extraordinary talent on the part of the performers, this tactic has strong thematic implications. We may be tempted to conclude that despite the varied appearances and follies of the many characters who populate the play’s thirty acts, all of the men are in fact one man, and all the women on woman. Beneath the apparent diversity of human identities and destinies lies a fundamental unity, powerfully suggesting that all the travelers along life’s many roads are the same.
Indeed, once we start following the various plot strands to their conclusions, we begin to notice that there is, as well, an overarching similarity in the roads themselves: no matter which fork a character chooses, the path leads ultimately to unhappiness.
For example, “Love in the Mist,” one of the third acts mentioned earlier, ends as we have seen; with the death of Miles. However, this is only one of the act’s two possible outcomes. Ayckbourn provides an alternative ending in which Miles decides to drive home with his wife rather than walk along the misty cliff. Now, an undead Miles obviously requires a different fourth act. No longer is he being commemorated by the erection of a garden shed. Instead, five years after his abortive fling with Sylvie, we come upon him and his wife, Rowena, outside the church on the day of Sylvie’s wedding, with Miles about to stand in as father of the bride. But isn’t this a happy ending? Much happier, at any rate than a memorial service for a dead man? Of course it is –relatively speaking. It’s less terrible for Miles to have to hand Sylvie over to someone else than it is for him to be dead; but it is, nonetheless, for Miles a heartbreaking climax to an awful day.
That day begins on a suitably inauspicious note as Rowena lays out the wrong suit for Miles, one belonging to her long-time adulterous lover. Then, when Miles asks Sylvie whether she recalls their illicit weekend –the hut, the sheep?—her answer is, “I don’t remember a thing.” Has Sylvie asked Miles to act as a father-of-the-bride out of sentimental fondness? Not according to her. “It was just difficult, you know, finding someone… I mean, you’re the only man I know well enough who’s old enough.” “Ah,” responds Miles, a world of laconic British misery crammed into that short sigh. And when, finally, Rowena sends Miles into the church to carry out his role as surrogate father, we see the full measure of Chekhovian melancholy that Ayckbourn has built into this “happy ending”:
What Mr. Curran seems to be telling us in this saga of useless cures and failed creeds is that life’s a bitch, and there is no church—no band of the faithful—that can help us. Instead, the road to whatever happiness is possible is one we travel alone, sole survivors of our individual sorrows, and it runs through the world of private—and unshared—revelations whose gatekeeper is not an angel with a flaming sword, but a naked, hairless, pseudo-human whose language is gibberish.
The read through Intimate Exchanges is equally problematic, not only because of the emotional pitfalls along the way, but also because each reader or producer is faced, not with a single path of action, but with a plotline that branches disconcertingly in alternate directions whenever a main character makes a crucial choice. Will he or she decide on “A” or “B”? Ayckbourn traces the divergent consequences that ensue, literally writing a different play for each choice. As readers, we are free to follow one or the other set of results, or both.
Thus, there are two possible first acts (deriving from a choice made at the moment the curtain rises), each of which has two different endings, again depending on the decisions of the characters. These four possible conclusions lead to four different second acts, each of which again ends in two different ways, thus branching into eight possible third acts, and finally proliferating into sixteen possible fourth acts.
Although one might need a scorecard while watching the play, it is quite possible for a reader of to follow the branching choices presented at the various beginnings, middles, and ends of the plot, and thus to learn all the outcomes of all the options—an almost God-like experience that allows us to look down on this self-contained little universe of infidelities, reconciliations, marriages, and deaths as if we were the eyes of fate itself, reading the roadmap of everyone’s alternative futures.
By contrast, a producer of this play faces serious constraints. To present all of the Intimate Exchanges (which fills two volumes of 200 pages each). Portland Stage Company would, in effect, have to produce sixteen different evenings of theater. Because this is a practical impossibility, it falls to the director of the play to pick out one or two of the available pathways through the action— making him, in effect, Mr. Ayckbourn's co-author.
What sort of play can such a collaborator extract from Ayckbourn’s many options? At first glance, given all the choices available to readers and directors, not to mention the characters in the play, it is tempting to regard Intimate Exchanges as a kind of monument to the concept of free will. The director, it might seem, is at liberty to make the characters and the plot do whatever he wants. A closer look, however, begins to reveal some significant limitations on the freedom that Ayckbourn’s complex structure allows either its inhabitants or its interpreters.
To begin with, along whatever route the director chooses, laughs will abound. As we saw earlier, even death is surrounded by hilarity in Ayckbourn’s world. Moreover, Ayckbourn has written this monstrous work for a cast of two—one male and one female—who are required to play out all the destinies of all the characters. That means, for example, that the same actress will play both her husband’s wife and his lover, or that the same actor will play both halves of a pair of best friends, one of whom betrays the other in an act of marital infidelity. Apart from requiring extraordinary talent on the part of the performers, this tactic has strong thematic implications. We may be tempted to conclude that despite the varied appearances and follies of the many characters who populate the play’s thirty acts, all of the men are in fact one man, and all the women on woman. Beneath the apparent diversity of human identities and destinies lies a fundamental unity, powerfully suggesting that all the travelers along life’s many roads are the same.
Indeed, once we start following the various plot strands to their conclusions, we begin to notice that there is, as well, an overarching similarity in the roads themselves: no matter which fork a character chooses, the path leads ultimately to unhappiness.
For example, “Love in the Mist,” one of the third acts mentioned earlier, ends as we have seen; with the death of Miles. However, this is only one of the act’s two possible outcomes. Ayckbourn provides an alternative ending in which Miles decides to drive home with his wife rather than walk along the misty cliff. Now, an undead Miles obviously requires a different fourth act. No longer is he being commemorated by the erection of a garden shed. Instead, five years after his abortive fling with Sylvie, we come upon him and his wife, Rowena, outside the church on the day of Sylvie’s wedding, with Miles about to stand in as father of the bride. But isn’t this a happy ending? Much happier, at any rate than a memorial service for a dead man? Of course it is –relatively speaking. It’s less terrible for Miles to have to hand Sylvie over to someone else than it is for him to be dead; but it is, nonetheless, for Miles a heartbreaking climax to an awful day.
That day begins on a suitably inauspicious note as Rowena lays out the wrong suit for Miles, one belonging to her long-time adulterous lover. Then, when Miles asks Sylvie whether she recalls their illicit weekend –the hut, the sheep?—her answer is, “I don’t remember a thing.” Has Sylvie asked Miles to act as a father-of-the-bride out of sentimental fondness? Not according to her. “It was just difficult, you know, finding someone… I mean, you’re the only man I know well enough who’s old enough.” “Ah,” responds Miles, a world of laconic British misery crammed into that short sigh. And when, finally, Rowena sends Miles into the church to carry out his role as surrogate father, we see the full measure of Chekhovian melancholy that Ayckbourn has built into this “happy ending”:
ROWENA: Off you go then (gently)
Go and give her away.
MILES: Yes.
What Miles gives away here is the dream of happiness that drew him to Sylvie in the first place; and what he settles for instead is the certainty of endless heartache with his faithless wife. While death may be a calamity in Ayckbourn’s world, it is also an escape from the prolonged disappointment of life..
Thus, whatever path a director chooses through this maze of possibilities, the outcome will be darkened by sadness. The production at Portland Stage Company offers its audiences two different combinations from the thirty acts of the complete Intimate Exchanges, neither of them including “Love in the Mist” or its fourth act sequels. And yet, the endings at which the two Portland Stage Company productions will arrive will be strikingly similar to the results rolling off that foggy cliff: one of the Portland Stage Company fourth acts will bring us to the graveside of a major character, and one will show us a failed attempt to start life over with a new love and fresh hope.
Is this stuff of comedy? Not as it has been classically understood. We have historically expected comedy to arrive at happy endings as a result of the pursuit of love leading to marriage. In this sense, Ayckbourn scarcely seems to believe in comedy at all. Far from affirming love and marriage as the ultimate sources of comic joy, Intimate Exchanges seems to insist that sexual relationships are more likely to result in chronic malaise, if not death. This is not a new perception (see Ibsen and Strindberg), but it is novel to treat it laughingly. Ayckbourn’s work reminds us of our collective cultural and emotional malaise: we no longer know exactly what we feel about love and marriage. A recent British survey, for example, asked whether people believed they should marry before having children. Only 42% said yes. As a result of this kind of ambivalence, it is impossible for us to decide whether to treat love and marriage on stage as comic or tragic. Instead we respond dissonantly as Ayckbourn does in Intimate Exchanges, a play that is too painful to be comedy and too funny to be a tragedy.
George Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, knows exactly what he thinks about everything and he wants you to know too. History’s most opinionated playwright never misses an opportunity to beat the biggest drum he can find in behalf of his favorite social causes; or to ridicule, debunk, and defame whatever ideas stand in their way. Unlike the authors of Church of the Sole Survivor or Intimate Exchanges, Shaw has no trouble separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to religion, morality and personal values. The problem is that everybody else doesn’t share his views - a flaw in the world that Shaw is determined to correct.
The emotional dissonance in Shaw’s universe is the sound of demolition as the playwright tears apart the mistaken ideals of both the misguided characters in his plays and the backward-looking members of his audience; the roar of shock and laughter as characters and spectators are forced to confront the ludicrous falsehood, baseness, and folly of their most cherished beliefs and their most sacred values.
Shaw’s method is the spinning of paradox, turning a truism upside down to create a scandal. Dip into the works of Shaw and you will discover that religion corrupts, education stultifies, marriage debauches, ideals defile, parents and children are natural enemies, women are sexual predators, men are sexual victims, those who uphold law and custom serve the devil, and revolutionaries are saints. By now, of course, many of these attitudes have developed into cliches, commonplaces of the cultural left. But when freshly-uttered and saucily dramatized, they have the power to stir anger, and even anguish, in the theater-going public.
It was precisely because it provoked such high-octane emotion that Mrs. Warren’s Profession, although written in 1894, was kept completely off stage in England until 1902, when it was performed privately, and out of the public theater until 1925. Acknowledging the discomfiting nature of the work, Shaw published it in 1898 in a collection called Plays Unpleasant. In the preface, Shaw tells us just how unpleasant his contemporaries found it. It drove “the press into an hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic.” Indeed, even his greatest supporter in years past recoiled from the play in disgust, saying “I cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it.”
What made for this level of outrage and rejection? In Shaw’s view, the answer is (of course) clear. People are shocked, he asserts, because “my characters behave like human beings instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage.” In other words, his characters and plots violate those dramatic conventions which are based on conventional values. Thus, people are shocked when Vivie Warren treats her mother in a way that offends the norms of filial devotion, or when Frank Gardner subjects his father, the Rev. Samuel, to “pitiless ridicule and unsympathetic criticism.”
Now, there is nothing new about representing on stage venomous relation between parents and children, Shakespeare having shaped King Lear out of that tortured material. What is unusual is Shaw’s insistence that the cruelty of children is a kind of virtue since it helps to secure the emancipation of the young from their repressive elders, a step in the direction of social progress. This kind of conflict delights Shaw, especially if it fails to delight the backward-looking members of the audience; and if indeed the playwright’s idea of comic liberation strikes the playgoer as a mortifying transgression of all that is good and true, then so much the better. Shaw wants the stage to be a mirror that reflects the absurdity of our most cherished beliefs.
Of all the reflexive attitudes that assaulted in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, perhaps none is more offensive to Shaw than the willingness of the “sanctimonious British public… to throw the whole guilt of Mrs. Warren’s profession on Mrs. Warren herself.” Who, then, is culpable? “(T)he whole aim of my play,” Shaw tells us, “is to throw the guilt on the British public itself.” Shaw thus makes it impossible for any member of that public either to condemn or to forgive Mrs. Warren’s behavior, since everyone, including Vivie, has been living on the wages of her sins.
We have all discovered things we would rather not known about the people we love, including ourselves. Vivie for the first time sees her mother and herself in the light of truth, and it’s an ugly sight. But for Shaw, that moment of painful discovery is also deeply comic, at least in the promise it holds of future liberation—specifically for Vivie, liberation from dishonest relationships in a corrupt system. Such a comic regeneration, however, is inseparable from the pain of moral surgery, of having ignorance, illusion, and mistaken ideals ruthlessly sliced away.
Hurting but healing is the condition Shaw’s protagonists find themselves in at the end of his plays. Vivie’s situation recalls the characters in Church of the Sole Survivor and Intimate Exchanges. Like them, she is suspended between tears and laughter - a curiously modern position in which the members of the audience at Portland Stage Company will also find themselves as they follow these emotionally turbulent plays.
Thus, whatever path a director chooses through this maze of possibilities, the outcome will be darkened by sadness. The production at Portland Stage Company offers its audiences two different combinations from the thirty acts of the complete Intimate Exchanges, neither of them including “Love in the Mist” or its fourth act sequels. And yet, the endings at which the two Portland Stage Company productions will arrive will be strikingly similar to the results rolling off that foggy cliff: one of the Portland Stage Company fourth acts will bring us to the graveside of a major character, and one will show us a failed attempt to start life over with a new love and fresh hope.
Is this stuff of comedy? Not as it has been classically understood. We have historically expected comedy to arrive at happy endings as a result of the pursuit of love leading to marriage. In this sense, Ayckbourn scarcely seems to believe in comedy at all. Far from affirming love and marriage as the ultimate sources of comic joy, Intimate Exchanges seems to insist that sexual relationships are more likely to result in chronic malaise, if not death. This is not a new perception (see Ibsen and Strindberg), but it is novel to treat it laughingly. Ayckbourn’s work reminds us of our collective cultural and emotional malaise: we no longer know exactly what we feel about love and marriage. A recent British survey, for example, asked whether people believed they should marry before having children. Only 42% said yes. As a result of this kind of ambivalence, it is impossible for us to decide whether to treat love and marriage on stage as comic or tragic. Instead we respond dissonantly as Ayckbourn does in Intimate Exchanges, a play that is too painful to be comedy and too funny to be a tragedy.
George Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, knows exactly what he thinks about everything and he wants you to know too. History’s most opinionated playwright never misses an opportunity to beat the biggest drum he can find in behalf of his favorite social causes; or to ridicule, debunk, and defame whatever ideas stand in their way. Unlike the authors of Church of the Sole Survivor or Intimate Exchanges, Shaw has no trouble separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to religion, morality and personal values. The problem is that everybody else doesn’t share his views - a flaw in the world that Shaw is determined to correct.
The emotional dissonance in Shaw’s universe is the sound of demolition as the playwright tears apart the mistaken ideals of both the misguided characters in his plays and the backward-looking members of his audience; the roar of shock and laughter as characters and spectators are forced to confront the ludicrous falsehood, baseness, and folly of their most cherished beliefs and their most sacred values.
Shaw’s method is the spinning of paradox, turning a truism upside down to create a scandal. Dip into the works of Shaw and you will discover that religion corrupts, education stultifies, marriage debauches, ideals defile, parents and children are natural enemies, women are sexual predators, men are sexual victims, those who uphold law and custom serve the devil, and revolutionaries are saints. By now, of course, many of these attitudes have developed into cliches, commonplaces of the cultural left. But when freshly-uttered and saucily dramatized, they have the power to stir anger, and even anguish, in the theater-going public.
It was precisely because it provoked such high-octane emotion that Mrs. Warren’s Profession, although written in 1894, was kept completely off stage in England until 1902, when it was performed privately, and out of the public theater until 1925. Acknowledging the discomfiting nature of the work, Shaw published it in 1898 in a collection called Plays Unpleasant. In the preface, Shaw tells us just how unpleasant his contemporaries found it. It drove “the press into an hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic.” Indeed, even his greatest supporter in years past recoiled from the play in disgust, saying “I cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it.”
What made for this level of outrage and rejection? In Shaw’s view, the answer is (of course) clear. People are shocked, he asserts, because “my characters behave like human beings instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage.” In other words, his characters and plots violate those dramatic conventions which are based on conventional values. Thus, people are shocked when Vivie Warren treats her mother in a way that offends the norms of filial devotion, or when Frank Gardner subjects his father, the Rev. Samuel, to “pitiless ridicule and unsympathetic criticism.”
Now, there is nothing new about representing on stage venomous relation between parents and children, Shakespeare having shaped King Lear out of that tortured material. What is unusual is Shaw’s insistence that the cruelty of children is a kind of virtue since it helps to secure the emancipation of the young from their repressive elders, a step in the direction of social progress. This kind of conflict delights Shaw, especially if it fails to delight the backward-looking members of the audience; and if indeed the playwright’s idea of comic liberation strikes the playgoer as a mortifying transgression of all that is good and true, then so much the better. Shaw wants the stage to be a mirror that reflects the absurdity of our most cherished beliefs.
Of all the reflexive attitudes that assaulted in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, perhaps none is more offensive to Shaw than the willingness of the “sanctimonious British public… to throw the whole guilt of Mrs. Warren’s profession on Mrs. Warren herself.” Who, then, is culpable? “(T)he whole aim of my play,” Shaw tells us, “is to throw the guilt on the British public itself.” Shaw thus makes it impossible for any member of that public either to condemn or to forgive Mrs. Warren’s behavior, since everyone, including Vivie, has been living on the wages of her sins.
We have all discovered things we would rather not known about the people we love, including ourselves. Vivie for the first time sees her mother and herself in the light of truth, and it’s an ugly sight. But for Shaw, that moment of painful discovery is also deeply comic, at least in the promise it holds of future liberation—specifically for Vivie, liberation from dishonest relationships in a corrupt system. Such a comic regeneration, however, is inseparable from the pain of moral surgery, of having ignorance, illusion, and mistaken ideals ruthlessly sliced away.
Hurting but healing is the condition Shaw’s protagonists find themselves in at the end of his plays. Vivie’s situation recalls the characters in Church of the Sole Survivor and Intimate Exchanges. Like them, she is suspended between tears and laughter - a curiously modern position in which the members of the audience at Portland Stage Company will also find themselves as they follow these emotionally turbulent plays.