fear of sleeping
by
Douglas Messerli
John
O’Keefe All Night Long / directed
(with scenic design) by Jan Munroe at Open Fist Theatre Company at the Atwater
Village Theater / the performance I saw with Pablo Capra and Christina Carlos
was opening night, September 14, 2018
Although
I published John O’Keefe’s 1980 play, All
Night Long, in the anthology From the
Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama, edited by Mac Wellman
and me in 1998, I had never before seen a production of the play. Thankfully,
Open Fist Theatre Company determined to present it at Atwater Village this
season, and I immediately put it on my schedule.
I don’t think it’s the kind of comedy/drama
that one might describe through plot for those who have never seen it. First of
all, the “plot,” such as it is, keeps shifting, events happen without
explanation (for example, at one moment Eddy’s [John Patrick Daly] previously-loving
family turn on him, sending him out into the night for the punk rockers to get
him, yet he soon after reappears through an upstairs wall; the family’s eldest
daughter, Tammy [Caroline Klidonas], seems to be sleeping with her father Jack [Philip
William Brock], but at other times it all just seems to be a joke or even a
game; although this family stays up, so it appears, the entire night, terrified
to go to bed, hours go by in minutes and occasionally slip back in illogical
reversals of time).
The publicist and director refer to this
play as a “surreal” work. And, indeed, it does often remind one of Thornton
Wilder’s surrealist American comedy, The
Skin of Our Teeth, suggested by comments by Tracey Paleo, writing in a
review.
Yet I might characterize it a bit
differently, as a sort of absurdist mash-up of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night with the 1950s television family-oriented
The Donna Reed Show, along with
elements of other such TV situation comedies as Father Knows Best and Leave
It to Beaver. Costume designer Kharen Zeunert even hints at the standard
pearl necklace worn by actress Barbara Billingsley with the mother Jill’s
(Alina Phelan) outré necklace. Certainly Jill represents the implacableness of
Donna Reed, Jane Wyatt, and Billingsley; nothing quite ever perturbs her sunny
outlet of a kind ditsy housewife view of the world except when, challenged by
her son, she claims all the contents of the house to be “hers,” declaring her
son as not only having a voracious appetite (a bit like All in the Family’s “Meathead”)—throughout the plays he downs masses
of bologna and ham, at one point even retrieved from the stage floor, a task
that no actor might ever have imagined; the entire cast dines on blue jello!—and
proclaiming:
You! You twerp! You don’t
even have the stuffing to be a homosexual!
You pre-ejaculatory
squirt! You’re the one that really fucked up my life!
Born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1940 (just 7
years before I was born in that same city, perhaps at the same hospital), O’Keefe
lived throughout most of World War II, a jarring time for children, mostly in
state juvenile homes since his mother had basically abandoned him, showing up,
as he once told me, for brief periods that only complicated matters. In those
days boys in such state institutions were often sent out to work, at various
times, on local farms, the experience of which he recounts in his terrifying
and also funny work, Reapers, in
which the young state school laborer is treated to homoerotic like “startlements”
by the farmer’s son. Is it any wonder that, growing up when and how he did,
that O’Keefe’s view of family life is someone distorted?
Yet, for all that, in their pared down and often
frantic pronouncements, father, mother, son, and daughters do make clear their
fears, their values, and sometimes even their dreams in a not-so-acclimatable
world. And by play’s end, they greet the new day with a kind of Beckett-like sense
of “going on,” even if they feel that that can’t, the mother serving up her own
body, symbolically, as their breakfast.
As a woman behind me suggested in the
intermission, this all makes so much more sense in the context of where we are
now in a society having to deal with Trump. I’d agree, but perhaps we should
recall that the US has always been a strange and scary place, particularly in
the post-War years in which O’Keefe was simply trying to survive as a child.
The very pulls of the society of 1950s, between content affirmation of family
and familial roles (I’ve long argued that women, despite their having to deal
with the hubristic idea of male domination, were often really the forces of
power in those years) and the horrible political terrors of the “Red” threat
and all that might be associated with that, are well represented in O’Keefe’s
powerful play, beautifully realized by the direction and scenic design, at the
Atwater Village Theater, by Jan Munroe.
The acting, in all cases, is exceptional,
and the company expresses in this revival of the San Francisco Magic Theater
production the freshness of this 38-year-old play. O’Keefe himself, remains,
perhaps a little more grizzled than when I last saw him, a powerful and
intelligent figure who seems, at the moment to be making a kind of comeback,
with another play, Don’t You Ever Call Me
Anything But Mother appearing this fall at Zombie Joes Underground.
Los Angeles,
September 17, 2018
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