talking sex
by Douglas Messerli
Martin
Sherman Bent / Los Angeles, Mark
Taper Forum / the performance I saw with Howard Fox was the August 23, 2015
matinee
A slightly “monogamish” couple, Max
(Patrick Heusinger) and Rudy (Will Taylor in the production I saw) awaken past
noon after a long wild night, Rudy somewhat peeved by his partner’s behavior of
the night before while pretending nonchalance. Max can remember nothing, until
a well-endowed, naked male (Tom Berklund) appears from a back bedroom (how Max
has missed his obvious bedmate is unexplained), as Rudy gradually explains how
Max, completely drunk, first invited all the waiters of the gay club run by the
drag-queen, Greta to come home with him, before falling to the floor upon a
black leathered
young man, Wolf, whom we soon
discover is one of Ernst Rohm’s Sturmabeilung troop members. But it is only
gradually that we discover this fact, and, at first, we might well as be in a
Manhattan apartment, with the two occupants arguing about their messy lives. If
Max is a wild drunken cocaine uses, Rudy is a naïve dancer at the local
cabaret, no more responsible, and even less able to find money to pay the rent,
than his would-be lover.
Wolf, for his part, is eager to join the
two young men at the home in the country which the drunken and drugged Max
(describing himself as the Baron) has promised him a drive in his shiny new
car. Max, in shot, is clever con-man, capable, as he admits, of convincing
people of things that lie outside reality.
In short, the whole first scene plays
like a light-hearted, slightly camp presentation of just what Marcus describes,
and Sherman’s drama, accordingly, reads as a light-hearted comedy. And surely,
when the play first premiered, when few (according to the program notes of this
play*) seemed to know about the Nazi incarceration of homosexuals, the play
must have read even more normative.
Today, at least, when most of know more
about that era—the moment we recognize that this scene is played out in Berlin
in 1934—we perceive that the play is soon to shift in a very different
direction—although the folks sitting behind Howard and I seemed to have no idea
as they guffawed straight through the next few moments, when Nazi soldiers
break down the door and slit the throat of Wolf in continuation of the Night of
the Long Knives (which I describe in the essay above), part of Hitler’s purge
of Rohm and his Brownshirts, a political act which his government obscured as a
crackdown of gay perversion. In terror Max (dressed only in his bathrobe) and
Rudy skitter off to the club.
As if realizing the play has again come
again to a standstill, Sherman offers up his clueless heroes who have gone into
hiding as they attempt to find shelter from the mean-spirited Greta, who has
actually sent the Nazi’s searching out Wolf to their apartment. Although he (as
Greta makes clear, he is safe, since offstage he is a married man) gives them a
bit a cash, he is not convinced that they will be able to escape the new Nazi
purge.
Finally, Sherman’s play begins to settle
into its real subject matter; but it’s already a bit too late. Although the
couple have forced into the forest, camped out in tents, they continue their
gay-life patter, arguing over their limited choices of food, the condition of
living quarters, and complaining about their inability to even touch one
another—appearing as if somehow they still have not completely assimilated the
complete horror of their situation. Rudy is particularly dense, it appears to
me, although I couldn’t be sure that his absurd innocence was due, in part, to
with understudy Taylor’s almost amateurish performance (playing Rudy as a kind Midwestern
American) or whether Sherman simply couldn’t quite create figures that were
convincingly of European birth.
In other words, Sherman has chosen a nearly impossible monster as his hero, whose redemption—in this case by a scrawny pink-triangulated Horst (Charlie Hofheimer), whose major sin is that he signed a petition in support of the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld—appears nearly impossible for the play’s start.
Mysteriously—and this is a continual
problem with Sherman’s seemingly naturalistic tropes—Max gets Horst transferred
to from the brutal tasks of breaking down rocks with a pick-axe, to the nearly existential
task of moving a pile of stones from one place to another before returning them
back to the other, again and again, ad infinitum—a job which, Max.suggests, is
intended to make him mad. Although, I would like to know whether or not Sherman
had any evidence that such a task was really given to prisoners at Dachau, it
seems a kind of perfect metaphor for the madness of the camps themselves.
Yet Sherman is not a writer of someone
like Beckett’s stature, and in the first of what are far too many scenes in
which the actors are forced to heft stones back and forth across the stage,
returns us to the kind of catty gay couple arguments of the “comedy” that Bent begin as. And later, as his
character’s conversations increasingly become infused with talk of sex, the
author does not share Beckett’s abilities to transform the inane into a
poetically rich language.
There is something almost thrilling,
particularly the first time through, when this odd couple attempts to make love
while standing next to but apart from one another through the art of speech. It
reminded me, a little, of those early network chatrooms wherein participants talk
about sex in order to actually experience it. But in front of a primarily
heterosexual audience, which I assure you the elderly Taper patrons mostly
consist of, the scene seemed at once more prurient and tamed-down than any
actual sexual act performed on stage might have been perceived. Later, when the
freezing and sickly Horst lamely refuses to go through the same verbally sexual
encounter, Sherman reaches to the bottom of his often jokey quips—“I have a
headache”—in response, turning what might have been a someone creative dramatic
trope—particularly for a basically voyeuristic audience—into a sit-com
situation.
Again, some of the audience members,
chirruping at this and other cheap quips, laughed half-way into the final scene
where the Nazi guard commanded Horst (whose cough proves that the medicine Max
had obtained from him through the present of a blow-job to the Nazi guard was
actually intended for his co-worker) to throw his hat at the nearby high-voltage
electric fence. We have already been told that such a command doomed whomever
it was directed, for if the individual chose not to retrieve the hat, which
would surely cause his death by electrocution, he would be shot. So we are not
surprised when the events are inevitably played out.
What we are surprised about is that Max—whom we have finally come
believe has truly begun to understand love as something different from mere
sex—once more stands by without being compelled to aid his friend. That he is
forced to bury him and, at the very moment of the pieta like enactment wherein
he begins to carry his dead lover to his grave, he is forced to stand still
while looking forward (a ritual described as “rest time” dictated by the timed
screeches of a whistle) while holding Horst’s body before him, gives evidence
to the fact that this is the first time in this play (except perhaps for the
cabaret dance—but even if you look at the photo above, it does appear the
directly Moisés Kaufman forced his figures keep to keep their hands off one
another) where anyone has actually touched anyone else. When the whistle signals
a resumption of action, he seemingly puts Horst into the ditch with the
voiceless howl of Brecht’s Mother Courage. Just as with Rudy, Max has in large
part, once again, in this man’s death.
We
must conjecture that he will no longer to be able to live with himself, so that,
accordingly when after moving a few rocks, he returns to the ditch to remove
Horst’s shirt with the pink triangle, and, removing his own yellow starred
garment, puts it on—although it is a truly moving moment, an acceptance not
only of his sexuality but of his recognition of love—there is something empty
in the act. A small group of the audience members could not resist this
symbolic transformation of character and applauded the event.
But for the others of us in the audience,
I believe, that symbolic expression comes simply too late. No matter how Max
has been transformed, his recognition—in part because of the author’s literary
devices—has simply come too late. And even his rush into the wall of electrified
death at play’s end, seems to be a melodramatic aftermath. Perhaps if he had
really dared death earlier on, had actually reached out to touch the other
instead of simply imagining him, we might have truly been able to celebrate
what Sherman’s play certainly intended to convey: W. H. Auden’s contention that
“We must love one another or die.”
*Although
I may be mistaken, I am almost certain that I had long before 1979 known that
homosexuals were imprisoned and killed in the Nazi camps. Surely, I and others,
might have known the details, but I can’t believe that Sherman’s play was the
first to actually brooch this subject. Perhaps in the popular theater, yes, but
not if one read one’s history.
Los Angeles,
August 25, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment