the survivor
by
Douglas Messerli
Wallace
Shawn (author), André Gregory (director) The
Designated Mourner / Los Angeles, Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts
Theater) / the performance I saw was on Thursday, May 11, 2017
It’s easy to see why Wallace Shawn and director AndrĂ© Gregory might wish to revive Shawn’s 1996 play, The Designated Mourner, which is currently being performed at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Redcat) in downtown Los Angeles.
When the play originally appeared, with
its major theme of intellectuals working within a society that is determined to
destroy their kind, critics felt that the unnamed country of the play was
surely some Latin American city in a country such as Argentina or Chile in
which precisely such things had happened. Today, incredibly, we can see it as a
statement about what might possibly happen in the US under President Trump.
Yet, Shawn’s play is not truly centered on
the intellectuals such as the elderly poet-thinker, Howard (Larry Pine) and his
beloved daughter, Judy (Shawn’s real-life companion Deborah Eisenberg), but on
Judy’s lover, Jack (Shawn), who begins the play pretending to be one of them,
but gradually shows himself as a totally selfish and lazy being who actually has
no intellectual aspirations whatsoever.
As for many of neo-cons and populists, the
world of art, literature, and poetry is perceived as an artificial elitist
pursuit, in which its advocates spend most of their days dismissing and dishing
friends and enemies whom they perceive as not worthy of their own pursuits. And
Shawn makes that world real enough in his several long monologues, that, at
first, we’re not so sure that he isn’t right. Certainly, I’ve been guilty of
the same sins, and presumably anyone who might attend a Shawn/Gregory
production might be expected to feel some justifiable remorse.
Throughout the first act, we gradually
begin to perceive how Jack, at times literally “in bed” with his intellectual
friends, begins to doubt their perceptions and honesty. Bit by bit, we see this
man turning over the few ideas he really has in order to reveal that he is not
comfortably “highbrow,” but pleasantly “lowbrow,” a man who truly prefers, as
he describes it, to be a rat—not in the sense of one who snitches (although
given the increasing political changes throughout the play, he might well be
one of the populace, who like Russian and East German citizens collaborated
with police to destroy their fellow citizens), but the sleek small-headed
survivor who doesn’t mind eating whatever is put before him.
Jack, given Shawn’s seeming intense
populism, seems even somewhat convincing. Do these intellects truly know what
they claim to? Is someone like the great poet Donne really worth reading in
this day and age? Mightn’t one simply sit at home and watch television while
jacking off to porno without being seen as some kind of creep? Aren’t ordinary
citizens as valuable as the highly intelligent readers and thinkers amongst us?
Indeed, Jack is so convincing that by the
end of that first act, we might ask ourselves these very same questions. After
all, those are similar Trump put to his audiences which allowed him to build
his slim electorate who happened to be in states that gave him his victory.
Shawn’s subtle satire begins reasonably
enough. But soon those same questions begin to read a bit like shocking
Swiftian insistences, particularly as the new government in power begins to
arrest and even kill the intelligentsia. Jack removes himself from his former
friends—and Judy—just in time, as they begin to hear the nightly gunfire,
seeing people near them getting shot, and, finally, themselves being arrested.
As Judy asks: “How could this have happened?” “How can that have happened?!”
“Why, it seems impossible!” And yet, the answers to those questions are quite
obvious. People like Jack run off. Friends pretend to no longer know each
other. The challenges of an intellectual life become too demanding. As Judy
expresses it: “If you try to swat a fly,
it moves out of the way. And humans are the same. They step aside when they
sense something coming, about to hit them in the face.”
Even when the police come for her, her
father, and friends, she is surprised by how meek and accepting she and the
others are about it. Sentenced to five years each, many do not survive
the prison
internment, and when those who survive come out, like her father, they are still
exterminated. Jack later sees that some others of his former friends have been
killed in another kind of group execution, including Judy.
By now, however, the meek populist, just
an ordinary man with no pretensions, has no feelings left. Even if he is a bit
startled at first, he can no longer open up his mind and heart to feel
anything. His only solution is to see himself as a kind of “designated
mourner,” as someone, who having known about their values, might mourn their
passing, including the end of a poet such as Donne. His stupid paper pyre
celebrating the now exoteric past is a pointless thing, like the celebration of
dead man’s passing by putting a candle on a cupcake.
By play’s end, the confessor of these
terrible sins, Jack, feels no recriminations, insisting that life has indeed
“gotten better,” that sitting on a park bench he can still enjoy the setting
sun, the smells of nature, etc. So what if all attempts to transcend the
ordinary with intelligence and wit have been killed off. Is life truly any
worse for those of us who perceive we are simply ordinary? The barbarians are
us always.
My only criticism of Shawn’s quite bitter
satire is that he presents Jack’s (and perhaps Trump’s selfish populist cause)
so convincingly that some, in this age when satire and irony have been
seriously lost, might interpret his character’s statements as being those of
the author himself. Peering through the strange and perverse lens of today’s
political cynicism, things that might once have seemed impossible are now
probable. And that, I believe, is Shawn’s point. The bizarre, the horrific
quickly become—we know this particularly from the great wars of every century—daily
events. The important thing is not to see them as permissible or merely banal. They
are horrific and need to be addressed as such.
Los Angeles, May
12, 2017
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