the unfortunate truth of my situation
By Douglas Messerli
Richard
Foreman Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A
True Romance) / The Public Theater, New York, the performance I attended
was on Saturday, May 4, 2013
After
years and years of enigmatic and provocative plays, and after having announced
that he was giving up playwriting for filmmaking, Richard Foreman has come back
with a new play that at times almost appears to be a kind of film script, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance).
Like most of his works, this play is set upon a stage decked out with numerous
alphabetical configurations, portraits of “significant” people, numerous odd
props, and the strings that outline the horizontal shell of the stage, a kind
of mix between a metaphorical representation of string theory and an eruv, the defining territory of the
traditional Jewish community that outlines the boundaries through which certain
objects can be moved or carried on holy days. The effect, no matter what
Foreman’s precise purposes, is to draw a line between what occurs on “stage”
and the audience. Above all else, Foreman’s plays are definitely not narrative
representations that draw their audiences into the “romance” of the story, but
are purposefully puzzling brain twisters that demand the audience think about
what is being said and done within the author’s domain.
Even Foreman’s title is enigmatic: what
are “old fashioned prostitutes?” And how can a romance, usually defined as a
form dedicated to idealism and a preoccupation with idealized love, be
“true?” In fact, the central character
of Foreman’s new work, Samuel (theater veteran Rocco Sisto), never once has sex
with the prostitutes he encounters, and although the central figure, Suzie
(Alenka Kraigher) invites Samuel to her room and even spikes his gin, no love
occurs—unless one speaks of the love of language and philosophical speculation.
The only physical contact that Samuel has with anyone is a sudden hug between
Samuel and the mysterious “pimp-like” figure accompanying the two
“prostitutes,” Alfredo (David Skeist).
(Alfredo, Samuel hug)
ALFREDO
Careful
SAMUEL
I
do — beg of you, friend Alfredo ALFREDO
(He grabs Alfredo's lapels) Careful.
—
Convince beautiful Suzie
That
when I speak to her directly
This
is always the unfortunate truth of my situation
Suzie
and Gabriella are not women of love as much as they are women who flirt,
“coquettes,” as Samuel describes them, whose major activities include “sipping
afternoon alcohol under the roar of distant traffic” and attempting to catch
the gaze of passing men.
As Suzie convincingly argues, she is more
a “teacher” than a lover, a woman who shows men the way. And she spends most of
her time in this play grappling with Samuel’s attempt to come to terms with
what “reality” is, what is the self, and what does it all mean in every day
experience.
There is never a clear set of answers or
even a set of codified speculations to precisely what Foreman is arguing for or
against in his provocative plays, but there are often clues to the animus
behind them. In this case Samuel expresses it quite early in the work:
But perhaps, ladies and gentleman,
it
is best never to speak openly about
such
things
But
it did happen
That
travelling these streets
In
bright sunlight
An
old man with white hair
Shabbily
dressed, trudging slowly
In
the direction opposite to the one
In
which I was traveling
Carrying
a large, soiled cardboard box
with
what personal belongings
I
could not guess
But
— whispered hoarsely under his breath
"Go
to Berkeley, make film".
I
did not respond.
But
I frowned
And
a few seconds later
turned
to watch him proceed, slowly
Down
the street (girls giggle)
Later
in the day SUZIE
& GABRIELLA
Lying
on the bed in my hotel room Ooo
I
wondered -- I wondered should I have approached him
To
ask for clarification.
Was
he speaking to me
Or
to himself
—
yet it seemed appropriate to my concerns
And
my possible
Future
GABRIELLA
Go
to Berkeley, my friend
Make
film.
Which
could have meant, not the city in sun drenched
California
SUZIE
But
possibly the long dead Irish GABRIELLA
philosopher
of idealism, Bishop George Berkeley himself, Oooo.
whose
view of reality might be poetically re-imagined
as
a vision of the world in which experience
itself
was but a thin film, spread in illusionary fashion
upon
human consciousness.
SAMUEL
So
that
"Go
to Berkeley, make film", could have meant, go
deeper
into the notion of the world as
a
transparent surface only —
depending
upon the impress of a mental apparatus —
snapping
the world into apparent being only —
Accordingly,
Old-Fashioned Prostitutes does serve
as a kind of “thin film” exploring the “illusionary” experience of
consciousness, a bit like Proust (and the mysterious city in which Samuel
exists reminds me of Paris) steeped in sensual appreciation. Even now and then
a voice cries out “hold,” reminding us a bit of a film command. But of course
it also suggests that the audience might “hold” that idea a bit longer in the
mind.

Since, in Berkeley’s “film of
consciousness,” however, nothing is precisely determinable even the memory of
such experiences and the identity of self comes into question. If Beckett may
lie under Foreman’s Samuel, so too does Foreman’s own persona, Rainer Thompson,
recently appearing in his autobiographical film, I Am Rainer Thompson, and I Have Lost It Completely, which lies behind this play’s character, as
Samuel suddenly declares he is Rainer. And in this sense—although it seems
preposterous to claim this in a oeuvre that has always been highly personal and
autobiographical—Old-Fashioned
Prostitutes seems to be one of Foreman’s most intimate works, a kind of
strange memory play made up of his own and other writer’s intellectual
detritus.
In the end, however, it is nearly pure
Beckett in the final words of a play which has struggled with self-knowing and
reality, with illusion and consciousness:
Emptiness is here
(all to wall, then pause, then back: Music)
VOICE
Imagine
no world but this world
Imagine
no world but this world (THUD)
End
of play. (THUD)
End
of play.
Despite
the play’s declaration of “emptiness,” Foreman, like Beckett, has embraced this
world with his hundreds of questions and speculations over the course of his
career, surely representing a “true romance” with “this world” with which we
have such a difficult relationship.
New York-Los Angeles, May 5-May 13, 2013