you can’t go home again
Mac
Wellman Second-Hand Smoke (published
in Crowtet 2, Los Angeles: Green
Integer, 2003)
It
must been around 1996, the year in which Mac Wellman’s third work of his Crowtet quartet premiered at Fordham
University, that I co-produced a reading of the play with the theatre company,
Bottom’s Dream, in Los Angeles. When I now look back on that reading, I
remember it fondly, as I did when I reread the play before my Green Integer
publication of the work, along with The
Lesser Magoo in 2003. But reading it again, yesterday, I was struck with
little of this rich text I had assimilated, the experience feeling as if it was
the first time I had encountered it.
I missed what was perhaps a wonderful
production of it in New York in 1997 at Primary Stages, with my friend, the
legendary actor and playwright David Greenspan playing Mr. Glitter, along with
Vera Farmiga as Linda, Johann P. Adler as Susannah, and David Patrick Kelly as
William Hard.
What really struck me this time about
Wellman’s whole Crowtet series is not
only its nostalgic approach to an American landscape which the characters, young and old, can barely
abide and is not-so-slowly destroying them through its vast corporate greed and
incompetency, and the radioactive quagmire into which it has been transformed.
If the inhabitants of the dying community Gradual, Ohio are all rather strange,
chalk it up to the effects of the toxic “smaze” which blankets the region, the
gradual deaths imposed upon its youths in the drudgery boredom of days working
at Days Inn. Is it any wonder that the citizens of the region have all been
transformed into mad bats, pesky rats, and roaming cats?
The local executive Mister Glitter begins
the play buried in pseudo-scientific language which he clearly is unable to
comprehend:
Lever
escapement. An escapement in which
a pivoted
lever, made to oscillate
by the
escape wheel, engages a balance
staff and
causes it to oscillate.
A, impulse roller;
B, notch; C, lever;
D, ruby
pin.
So
engaged in such seemingly meaningless instructions and equations (X=a log (a +
a2 + y + a@ - y) is Mister Glitter that he has no time and certainly no
patience with traveling-salesman-like visitors such as Harry Custom and even
his own employee determined to introduce Glitter to the visitor, Mister Phelan.
Like most busy executives, Glitter is
emphatically self-centered and determinedly rude, brushing off not only Custom,
but the vising Slyvia Palista, a representative of a federal agency of even she
cannot recall the name.. If at first Glitter seems a bit more polite and
inquisitive about the agency guest, it is only because she is an attractive
woman who might bring back a negative report to her agency. But when he finally
challenges her to produce some credentials, she is found not even to be listed
in the agency book, and is even more rudely ousted tham Custom, who has quietly
remained at the center of power.
Suddenly, near the end of the day, all
three remaining men drop their pants, don “fustenellas and the tarboosh,” close
the drapes and dance a “disturbing and gloomy rock song with the lyric”:
Close the drapes
Aunt Wednesday
is
changing.
If in the first play of the Crowtet Susannah and her crow-fixated
father, Raymond, claimed that they donned fezzes and outlandish costumes
because of their having been gypsies in their early lives, the current denizens
of Gradual and nearby hamlets we now learn, according to William Hard in the 3rd
act of this play, that “They ape these things to appropriate what’s
foreign. Foreign-ness.” Like small-town Shriners, the citizens of this festering “Land of Evening” simply make
up the reasons for their strange behavior in their “Quasi-religious,
quasi-mystical, quasi-scientific” Americaness, attempt to regain the “foreign
and forbidden” that was once part of their immigrant pasts.
The more I see and read Wellman’s
theater, the more I realize that he has created a kind of grand world akin to
Oz where nearly anyone and everyone proclaims himself as a kind of wizard, growling
out, as does Mister Phelan in the First Entr’acte, murky conjurations that keep
reality of their not-knowing at a distance.
In the terrifying second “rats” section
of Wellman’s touching inversion of Americana, two young girls challenge themselves
to stay atop Mister Phelan’s house as long as they possibly can, entertaining
themselves and passing the time in absurdly childish and sometimes terrifyingly
witty games that include every maxim, piece of jargon, advertising jingle,
state slogan, and cliché and nonsensical patter that they have overheard from
the surrounding adults. The be-fezzed Mister Phelan peeks through the blinds,
conjuring up a magical weirdness that even these young girls, Linda and Susan,
realize is utterly bizarre. But how else are they to entertain themselves in a
world enveloped in such an “evil cloud.” Their seemingly meaningless banter may
sound, as sound simply to be, as the Variety
reviewer Howard Waxman summarizes, a dialogue that “melts into a jumble of
syllables with mysteries we don’t care to solve,” but how better might they
escape the shopping center realities of the world they inhabit. Indeed, I might
suggest that the rhythmic chattering of these rats sometimes evolves into a
kind a pure poetry that, as William Carlos Williams declared, represents the “pure
products of America” gone crazy.
The play, in fact, ends in a kind of
tragic dirge for howling “cats” as, from the opposite direction the two young
girls’ binocularly-contained gaze, Susannah and William Hard of the previous
two plays, return to the place where their voyage has begun. Having failed in
her attempt to find what Bishop Berkeley describes as “bedazzlement,” to
discover “a totally different place: where / angels sing, and the dialectical
urge / my be laid to rest forever,” the
worn out Susannah is ready to return to “The Junior college at Ping Pong, / …to
study typing, theater arts, and waste management,” to work as all the others
do, changing light bulbs at Days Inn.
Forced by her mentor, Mister William
Hard, Susannah spends the last several stanzas of this sad soliloquy reciting
the renunciations of her would-be teacher. Like the suddenly exposed Wizard of
Oz, Susannah, in Hard’s voice, surrenders her dreams, her magic, her perceived
difference to what she has attempted to leave behind:
I, MISTER WILLIAM
HARD, Doctor of Divinity,
Gradualness and
Equidistance, renounce
both river and
craft. I surrender my
magical powers to
Baron Samedi, Lord of
the Dead. I
renounce both Bug River
and the needle of
its dream. I renounce
slambang what is rigid and straight, and
what wiggles. And
all the craft of Wicca,
whether of the
Tribe of Gradual or the
Tale of the Bug.
I renounce all these because…my
heart is broke.
What Susannah discovers, however, is what
Judy Garland’s Dorothy never quite came to realize: despite one’s fervent
desire, Wellman reiterates, you can never go home again, no matter how many
times you tap the heels of your ruby covered feet. For Susannah, “nothing
happens.” As the always on-the-prowl pedant Mister William Hard exclaims:
This is what
happens,
Susannah, when
the scene is too
big for the frame;
this is what
happens when the frame
can NEVER be
filled.
No
matter how much her heart is broken, no matter how few of her dreams have come
to be realized, Susannah somewhat tragically discovers that her experience is
now too large to allow her to slip back into the confines from which she has
escaped.
Los Angeles,
August 22, 2014
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