Dear Grad School,

Chicago needs a magazine that consolidates serious dramaturgical analysis into one place. It needs such a publication to support the ongoing cultural discussion taking place in its theaters. It is my goal to publish this magazine, and further, to participate in the ongoing discussion realized in it, as both a creative artist and as an artist-critic.

Why does Chicago need such a publication? What do I hope to contribute to Chicago's cultural discussion as a creative artist? And why do I need training from your program?

First, let's consider the question of Chicago's need for a dramaturgical magazine, which I consider to be the most important. Let's consider the living personality of Chicago Theater. It may be absurd to assign human qualities to something as abstract as a city or a scene, but in conversation we do this constantly (I endow Chicago with "need" in my first paragraph). When we use this form of synecdoche, we express, usually unscientifically, our feelings toward abstractions such as cities and organizations. Often these unscientific feelings are entirely accurate.

Chicago is, approximately, an actor. This actor is driven by an irrepressible, super-conscious, organic impulse to create. This actor-leviathan creates a vast amount of cultural material in its theaters every year. It is obsessively driven to perform. It neither fully understands why it is performing nor can it fully see or hear itself. To the extent that it learns and grows, it does so incompletely or not at all. Yet this drive to create is so basic that it stubbornly, obsessively, persists.

What stories does it tell or, (to avoid narrative-centrism) what types of performances does it make? How does it make these performances—how does it, for example, conceive of events on stage? How does it create atmosphere? How does it use rhythm and movement to accomplish its aims?

Like a great organism without well-defined brain functions, it lacks a central consciousness. Partly, this is due to the “neighborhood” culture of the city. But I reject the notion that, because Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, it is somehow, with respect to theater (or in general), not a discrete cultural unit. Its artists and other citizens move across every part of the city in every aspect of their daily pursuits, from day-job, to leisure, to creative endeavors. Even when theater artists work exclusively in standing ensembles, they experience the city comprehensively. If artists rarely left their neighborhood (as is sometimes true of artists in Hyde Park), then I would accept that the diffusion of Chicago's theatrical-aesthetic consciousness is the result of the nature of its neighborhoods.

But Chicago is indeed an integrated, discrete cultural unit, and the only reason it, as a theater artist, lacks a central consciousness is because no one person or organization has made it their goal to foster one. This must be remedied by the establishment of a forum for the analysis of cultural material being incessantly produced by Chicago Theater.

I speak of Chicago as an actor, and this is based on my feel for the scene. While directors and designers of every type prosper artistically in Chicago, it feels, to me like a scene dominated by young actors (since I am a recovering Chicago actor, this likely is not coincidental). Chicago is, in fact, a very attractive destination for young, energetic actors, and this is due to a unique confluence of conditions that only meet in Chicago, and the consequent “mode of production” of theater in Chicago (to borrow a Marxist economic term).

For example, for a major city, rent is uncommonly inexpensive, even near functional public transit. The midwest is nearly unipolar with respect to theater, and the artistic energy of a vast portion of the country collects here for reasons of relative proximity to home. Chicago's economy has boomed in the past 20 years, relative to other industrial midwestern cities. Thus, actors find day-jobs that afford them a relatively balanced lifestyle compared to most U.S. actors starting their careers. Training is accessible, varied and inexpensive. Representation is attainable, and actors who make an effort can, in a short time, work in commercials, voice-overs and industrials. Most importantly, however, actors in Chicago can work constantly, practice and develop as artists.

The conditions that make the (to borrow another economic term) barriers to entry low for young actors also make Chicago an excellent place to start a small theater company. There is an enormous body of young, diverse talent, through which one can cast a variety of shows for little to no pay. Rents for performance and rehearsal spaces are inexpensive, even near good public transit. Further, Chicago has an attentive, consumer-oriented press that reviews every sort of company's work. Chicago has a body of ethnic, neighborhood, and special-interest organizations who support non-profit art groups both as donors and ticket-buyers. The spirit of the city is generally supportive of the arts, as well.

As a result, theater in Chicago is produced by over 200 companies, mostly small-scale, itinerant operators. It is relatively easy to put up basic, technically simple productions in Chicago. The spirit is collaborative, non-profit, low budget, actor-centric, and productive. At any given time there are 50-100 (and sometimes more) productions running.

The non-profit theater scene is divided between two general types of companies. First, there are many companies mostly made up of young actors who, realistically speaking, use their companies as career vehicles, or as an outlet for their basic desire to create something. They believe, implicitly, and not altogether incorrectly, in my view, that the idea of theater is the exhibition and development of acting, in ensemble. This dramaturgical vision is not particularly profound, nor is it commonly consciously considered. Many ensembles consider staging works on the basis of whether a prospective work evokes a vaguely positive sentiment in a majority of its membership. While this collaborative/democratic operation is a step up from strictly commercial motives, it results in work that is, frankly, basic. It is entertaining enough to watch. It is "good enough" and is meant to be. But it is not really ambitious, and it is not really interesting cultural material.

Many companies do, however, seriously engage dramaturgical questions. That is to say: they are innovative in confronting questions of what they do and how they do it, and oftentimes they are very technically innovative on a small budget. They are meditative about questions of what stories should be told or what performances should be made, and they are typically highly cognizant of the dialogue between art and culture. Some of these companies conceive of the Chicago theater community as a discussion amongst different niches—we have historical theater, various ethnic theaters, theater focused on classics, and others. Still others conceive of their role in this discussion more generally and flexibly: they choose seasons that speak to the cultural dialogue that they find important that year.

The scene is so vast and most artists are so hard at work on their own careers that they cannot comprehensively learn from their peers' work throughout the city, industry nights notwithstanding. It is impossible to know what is happening artistically throughout the city, or to, in the words of the African proverb: "see the whole elephant." We are all touching our own small part of the scene, the elephant. There is, therefore, little widespread discussion of trends or dramaturgical standards, even amongst those whose work aspires to participate in such a discussion.

We must find a way to analytically survey the work being done in Chicago theaters each year. To do this we must establish a critical vocabulary and tone that will defy the "consumer reports" nature of what passes for criticism, and strive to give the reader a comprehensive, objective, and yet analytical understanding of what ensembles or directors did and how they did it, throughout the city. This survey must support the dramaturgically serious theaters in their awareness of the cultural material being created by Chicago Theater, and it must support their effort to speak to each other and to the city at large. And this survey must be a first opportunity for theaters that don't profoundly engage such dramaturgical questions to listen to and hopefully take part in the discussion.

Primarily, theater practitioners must write the survey, because the spirit of the thing must be the enrichment of the artistic process—it must consist of artists helping one another to understand the cultural material and cultural discussion produced by the community. Others may profit by adding to or witnessing this discussion, but this discussion must find its center between working artists.

To the question of what I hope to contribute as an artist, the answer is much less developed. That is partly due to the fact that I want to learn from the directors of your program. I am largely driven by the same irrepressible, organic impulse of creation that I feel (probably not altogether coincidentally or unsolipsistically) driving Chicago's theater. And my quest to understand my own artistic nature does, somewhat, drive my quest to understand Chicago.

I do have some firm beliefs, however: I believe strongly that a director or producer must know why they are producing a work of art, and more importantly, why they are producing that work of art now. I believe that art must operate on many levels (while understanding the cultural artifice of the idea of such levels)—metaphysical, political, cultural, domestic, and personal. I am a firm devotee of narrative theater, but I love deconstructed narratives (so long as the narrative is in the first place well-known, as with, for example, Charles Mee's adaptations of classics). I believe in constantly striving to find new ways to create events and affect an audience. I believe in experimenting with new ways to create atmosphere. And I am very open to unconventional and physical rehearsal, ensemble building, storytelling and story-creating processes. I have a very open mind about these “firm” beliefs—precisely because I anticipate that the training and apprenticeship I will receive in grad school will change me personally and the nature of the artistic contribution I wish to make.

As an actor, I have worked in professional theater in Chicago for 7 years. I have trained with Jessica Thebus, Kurt Naebig, Gavin Witt, Curt Columbus, and the Moscow Art Theater at their summer program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have done workshops with both SITI Company and Joanne Akalitis. That work has expanded my vocabulary for describing analytically what happens in performance, from moment to moment. My collegiate training in close readings of fundamental texts has supplied me with a vocabulary with which to discuss close readings of performance in their larger context—as cultural products. I have worked to employ this vocabulary toward the goal of the widespread survey I aim for by starting and writing a blog, chicago-survey.blogspot.com. These efforts, however are not enough. I need training in support of my goals.

I need training in critical and narrative theory (beyond the study of the aesthetic and other texts I handled in college) to develop a tone and vocabulary of criticism that facilitates the necessary sort of discussion. Furthermore, as a working dramaturg, a sharply developed and articulate critical faculty will be necessary in advising directors in production or in the development of texts, productions and seasons. I need training in theater history and theory (beyond what I have taught myself through Marvin Carlson's survey), exposure to texts and analysis (beyond efforts at ongoing literacy), and I need apprenticeship with innovative and imaginative directors (beyond the work of an aspiring actor and dramaturg in Chicago). I need to develop skills as a translator (beyond my collegiate French and Italian, and possibly adding a language). I need to work overseas and in other American cities, and I need to eventually work to bring the work of international and American artists from other cities to Chicago.

These goals are dear to me, because Chicago is is dear to me, and because my creative spirit is the most important thing to me. I believe that through such training I can evolve personally. More importantly, I believe that by working to centralize and enhance Chicago's theatrical-aesthetic consciousness, I can help Chicago evolve culturally. That is an ambitious goal, but it is attainable, and worthy of my effort and your support.

The Pillowman

[Ivan Karamazov]: “...answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architech on such conditions?”

“No, I would not agree,” Alyosha said softly.

--From Volkhonsky and Pevear's translation of The Brothers Karamazov

In his indictment of God's creation, Ivan Karamazov purposely narrows his theme to children (to heighten the starkness of the injustice), and in this preoccupation he shares much with Katurian, the main character of The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, recently produced at the Steppenwolf. Both are chroniclers of anecdotes of the horrible abuses of adults toward children. Dostoevsky's theme is similar to McDonagh's: the suffering that stems from human beings' living representations of good and evil. However, McDonagh specifically explores the role of the storyteller in those representations, and the relationship between humanity and humanity's artists.

There is another helpful context within which to understand McDonagh's methods: The history of the Israelites following the destruction of the first Temple. The first Jewish Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E.--however, before that, Ancient Israel had national rituals and habits (such as could be called "national", then) and had a religion, in which priests transacted one's business with God, and which dictated certain legal and ethical norms. The state was almost uniformly Israelite, without the intense social mixing and interacting that largely define our picture of civilizations in the ancient world.

In 586, the Persians destroyed the temple, took the priests and various other nobles and their families captive, exiled some other common Israelites, and proceeded to administer the government of the area. The change provoked a huge influx of language and culture, and forced the Israelite people to confront the idea of their own identity separate from the old order. Surely, various ideas of religion were propagated, in replacement of the priestly view. And, of course, new ethical and legal norms were being lived out.

Three generations later, Persia quit the conquest of Israel, and the captives were returned. Ancient Israel was in recovery from a massive trauma, and was left with profoundly difficult questions of their future as a people.

The priests and their families had another experience of the trauma—they witnessed Israel misdirected, religiously, from the path of the established religious norms (centering on the temple cult) and they themselves were traumatized by a different sort of experience, namely that of being taken captive. By 445 B.C.E., the Mosaic scripture (the five books of Moses, or Scriptural Torah) was collected and propagated. The priest's response to what they saw as the key questions of the day? Literature (storytelling).

According to Jacob Neusner's indispensable Introduction to Judaism, their system of religion saw Judaism as a) an intense and distinct identity, b) a specially elected people, with a special relationship with God, and c) a people subject to a covenant with God. They saw the temple as the center of the religion. They collected ancient stories and built those stories around a simple narrative form: purity, disobedience, exile, repentance, and redemption. This narrative form is repeated throughout the Mosaic scripture, and it both spoke to them personally as a class, but also informed ancient Israel's resettled sense of self. While exile was not the personal experience of many Israelites, the Pentateuch's treatment of exile adequately articulated many questions of identity that they faced. And it also happened to make sense of the experience of catastrophe—and most importantly to the priestly class, it reinforced their systemic understanding of the true religion.

Whatever the original audience's reasons for the resonance of the Torah (and whatever the motivations of its propagators), it, obviously, emerged as one of the central and enduring tenets of Jewish identity through the ages. As a narrative structure, it is one of the most dominant in human history.

It's fairly clear to anyone studying the history of the settlement of the modern state of Israel that the Jewish people largely acted out, politically, the narrative to which they as a people clung for two millenia. Now, did the Jewish people perpetuate the redemption narrative due to the existence of the narrative or due to cultural norms that gave rise to the narrative? Or some mixture of the two?

The question of Israel's history is a pertinent restatement of a contemporary problem: the relationship between real world violence and violence in mass media. Do images of violence necessarily cause violence? What are the artist's responsibilities to his audience/subject?

McDonagh, in The Pillowman, directed by Amy Morton, gives life to the problem in the forms of Katurian K. Katurian (his full legal name; played by Jim True-Frost) his brother, Michal (Michael Shannon), and the detectives who have arrested them, Tupolski (Tracy Letts) and Ariel (Yasen Peyankov). McDonagh casts Katurian in the role of the “priest-artist-chronicler” and his brother Michal in the role of “suffering everyman”.

The Pillowman deals with interaction of the witness to suffering with the sufferer himself, almost a contemporary reenactment of the aftermath of the first exile. The action is relatively simple—Katurian, an author of obscure short stories, and his brother, Michal, are arrested on suspicion of child murder. Michal confesses to having killed the children at the inspiration of his brother's stories. Katurian, in response, murders his brother in custody. Katurian agrees to confess to the murders of the children (although, in reality, he played no direct part in the murder of the children), his brother and his parents as a bargain for the saving of his stories. He is then murdered by the police (the play is set in a fictitious totalitarian state), but his stories are saved.

The play is set with the stage from an old vaudeville/movie house, painted with gold foil, in the background. In the foreground is a vast police warehouse, with a portrait of the Fearless Leader (a Bashar Assad looking fellow), and flags on the wall. Great steel balconies suggestive of a steel mill run high up. There are old crates, old works of art, law books, and filing cabinets lining the floor, suggestive of the key Apollo and Dionysis dualism at the heart of the production—art and order, side by side. (And the relegation of law books to a warehouse?) There is no house music. A great chandelier, suggestive of the old vaudeville, stares down at the audience from above.

I was a little disappointed that the totalitarian regime was so clearly suggested by the portrait. One nice thing about the Broadway production is how we as an audience were forced to piece together, like detectives, the nature of what we were seeing. The introduction of the totalitarian state and its implications happened at McDonagh's pace—unfolding grimly, yet hilariously. Katurian is obsessed with staying apolitical as a writer, and with a portrait of Assad in the background, we know why. But without it, his protestations of disdain for politics resonate with our understanding of the Hollywood screenwriter or the big city cynic—i.e. archetypes we can readily associate with artists we know.

The play opens to Katurian being led, blindfolded, into a dimly lit room from one direction. Then the detectives exit and reenter through another door, disorienting Katurian. Tupolski “demands” to know who left Katurian's blindfold on (when it was him), introducing him as the “good cop”. The lighting here actually delineated the boundaries of the detectives' office, suggestive of the countless interrogations we've seen in popular culture feature a lamp shone directly over the suspect's head. Ariel proceeds to pull a lamp directly over Katurian's head here, completing the image, and introducing him as the “bad cop”.

The rhythmic scoring of the action from the police at the top was fantastically aggressive, intimidating, and disorienting. When Tupolski seeks intimacy with Katurian by joking about how he needs information to fill out a form (which he subsequently tears in half) the rhythm slows, and his tool for acquiring intimacy with the suspect is clear. When Ariel loses his temper at being told he can draw his own conclusions, the action ramps up to such a frenzy that we can feel Katurian's torture in our bones. We become intimidated and confused as the detectives rattle through details of Katurian's first story (of a little girl who carves little apple soldiers stuffed with razors) and of questions about visits in the “Jew quarter” (even in McDonagh's bizzarely representational alternate universe the Jew is the other and is coralled into a ghetto). As Katurian learns that his brother has been arrested, his panic raises his rhythm from laconic to frenzied.

It would be easy for a production of this play to simply allow the storytelling that takes place to transpire at a haphazard pace. In this production stories are told at a wonderfully simple yet unsaccharine pace. As a result the audience has time to make sense of Katurian's allegories. To wit: the little girl with apple soldiers. This story is key to how Katurian, despite his protests, makes sense of storytelling. An abused little girl with a crass, piggish father, carves little apple soldiers, stuffed with razors, and gives them to her father as a gift, warning him not to eat them. He does, and dies, choking on his own blood. As the little girl sleeps, the soldiers invade her dreams and crawl down her throat, killing her. The story is, abstractly, a melding of Katurian and his brother's experiences. But it is clearly written from his point of view: the girl is abused, and then creates something deadly in response—we can imagine that she knows full well that her crass, gluttonous father will eat the apples. The deadly creation eventually kills her.

Now the murder of a parent is not specific to Katurian per se. And certainly, later in the production, we see Michal, as a response to abuse, construct a creative action (by acting out the stories) that will end destructively—perhaps both abstractly and specifically acting out the story. But I believe that the story is about creating works that depict violence and knowing that those depictions will result in real world violence. And as such this story is Katurian's own personal and specific meditation on violence in art. The little girl's only response to the violence is the creation of these deadly soldiers—and it eventually destroys both her abuser and herself.

As we hear the story of “Three Gibbet's Crossing”, (a caged man shot without understanding why) we feel the rhythmic dissonance between Katurian and the detectives ease. They establish a banter. We hear another story, a midrashic interpretation of the Pied Piper story, in which a boy, who accepts his poverty and ostracization, and offers his measly sandwich (his only dinner) to a traveler who passes by. The traveller thanks him by chopping off his toes. It turns out that by crippling the boy, he has saved him from the fate of the other children of Hamlin, who will be led off by the Pied Piper, the traveler, later.

Soon, the air in the room depletes as we hear the sounds of Katurian's brother screaming next door. The rhythm crawls. And then, the detectives strike, and the room throbs. There have been two children murdered, and there is a third missing. The two children were murdered in an apparent imitation of Katurian's unpublished stories, pointing the finger at him. The detectives want confessions. In a grim moment that caused the couple beside me to cringe, the detectives confront Tupolski with a box of toes that apparently comes from an imitation of the Pied Piper story. There is a certain staged quality here to Ariel and Tupolski's schtick, that becomes apparent as Tupolski implores Ariel not to feed the toes to Katurian. This is welcome comic relief.

Then, in a chilling moment, scored at a snail's pace, Ariel growls that “to kill a writer”, as they are planning to do (police station executions are routine in this state), “sends a message. And that message is that YOU CAN'T GO AROUND KILLING LITTLE FUCKING KIDS.”

Katurian responds, with dignity, that he refuses to say another word with seeing his brother. Perhaps the potential for a prisoner's dilemma type of subterfuge has occurred to him. But the even dignity with which True-Frost delivers those lines clearly articulates the love that he has for his brother. He is left alone as Ariel goes to retrieve electrodes.

Here we see the giant vaudeville stage and the fabulous crystal chandelier slide out from the background, to the sound of a foghorn. Katurian addreses us as a spotlight follows him (perhaps echoing the vaudeville theme). And in a very astute choice, we see the story of Katurian and Michal's childhood unfold directly before us, on a stage near to the one on which the preceding action takes place, suggesting, implicitly the equality between the two tales. On Broadway the action of Katurian's past unfolds on a balcony high above the stage, behind a scrim. In this production the story unfolds as near to us as everything that has transpired until now.

We learn the story of a boy writer, Katurian, showered with love and affection by his parents and recognized for his stories. As the boy matures, he begins to hear sounds of torture through the wall (akin to Michal's screams earlier). The screams through the wall are also suggestive of the Republic's allegory of the cave, in which the philosopher's job is seen as discourse on the nature of the shadows of formal reality that compose everyday life. In McDonagh's world, suffering is reality and the writer is the philosopher, whose job is to discourse on the shadows he witnesses thereof. Michal's experience is the direct opposite—he experiences the shadows of a joyous reality through the wall. Were Michal the storyteller, we can imagine that his stories would be inversions of Katurian's.

When the boy enters the room adjacent to his, he finds his parents have played a joke on him, with sounds that mimic suffering. Eventually, Katurian discovers that his brother is indeed being tortured. True-Frost as the nerdy writer seems almost like Crispin Glover here, in disturbingly describing, at a very even pace, the murder of his own parents, in response to the torture.

Katurian's story is Mosaic in nature; he lives idyllically, then suffers, then repents, then is redeemed. Michal's is directly opposite.

The stage and chandelier retract, and we find Michal alone on stage. On Broadway, Michal was depicted as Katurian's eternal little brother; fat, childish, plaintive. Here, he is depicted as Katurian's doppleganger, physically. As we see him respond to the sounds of Katurian's torture through the wall, we recognize his responses as rather adult responses. He has stubble, and just as any two brothers who are contemporaries have resentments, he resents Katurian—and we sense it immidiately, as Katurian is thrown on stage. The brothers have a rhythmic rapport, and their interactions feel deeply rooted in their decades-old relationship. The rhythm of their interactions is the baseline for normalcy in the production.

Michal reveals that he told the detectives whatever they wanted to avoid torture. Michal jokes that he might blame the whole thing on Katurian. Michal's banter with here is akin to a petulant adolescent, not to the eight year old characterization presented on Broadway. He's not a savant, and he's not a child. He rather resembles a frat boy with tattered clothes. He begs to hear the story of The Pillowman, which Katurian tells at an easy pace.

The Pillowman is the allegorized rendering of a storyteller whose stories prompt his audience/subject (they are the same character) to self-destruction, and whose sometime failure initiates a story he tells himself, prompting his own self-destruction.

The Pillowman's stories are all told to a child living in an idyllic scene in the past (echoing the Mosaic nature of Katurian's sense of personal narrative). The storyteller tells the child of the impending corruption of the future and the futility of living (these are future lonely suicides). The stories prompt the children to destroy themselves as children (and disguise the suicides as accidents) so as to spare themselves from the horror of the corrupted future. Finally, the storyteller, The Pillowman, by failing to convince a future rape victim to self-destroy as a child (the storytelling by True-Frost builds to a fevered crescendo), becomes despondent, and goes back to his own self as a child, and tells his child self the story of his future lonely suicide, and convinces his child self to immolate himself. As the grown Pillowman disappears, he hears the screams of the people whose childhood self-destruction spares them from a horrific future. Herein is contained Katurian's message to himself as a storyteller: though my stories may incite self-destruction and pain, they are truthful, and in the end, more humane than a life of untrue illusion. The story is Katurian's affirmation of his life of suffering as the chronicler of human misery, and of the ultimate value of the enterprise, so long as his stories (destructive, but true) survive. Humanity may destroy itself as a result of his stories, but this is the best of all possible outcomes.

The story finishes. Michal confesses to having actually killed the boy by cutting off his toes. He DID tell the police what they wanted to hear—but he also happened to kill the kids. Michal asserts that he killed because his brother told him to. (At this point several audience members left). Katurian accuses his brother of being a “sadistic asshole.” Michal has convinced himself of an informal critical theory. Art causes violence, and therefore I did violence. Michal has critiqued Katurian's work by killing in response. He points out that as a result of the murders, Katurian will become a famous writer, to which Katurian responds that the most likely outcome will be the destruction of the stories. He tell his brother he would rather be burnt alive, and have Michal burnt alive before having the stories burnt.

Michal is obsessed with his brother's stories—he wants his brother and the stories to be famous. Yet if he is sophisticated enough to act out murder to further that result, he is surely sohpisticated enough to realize that he will destroy his brother. As an adult in this production (and again, not as the Broadway production's child), he makes an adult choice, springing from complex motives. I'm convinced that, in this production, he hates and resents his brother, and at the same time, longs for his brother's success and the success of the stories.

Why? Every story in the play can be recognized as Katurian's meditation on his own suffering as a witness to his brother's pain or Katurian's meditation on his brother's pain itself. The relationship between the chronicler (the artist) and the subject forms the foundation of this Cain and Abel story, because the artist, Katurian, grasps for meaning from the suffering he has witnessed, and his brother makes sense of his own experience via Katurian's stories. As a result of Morton and Shannon's choice to characterize Michal as an adolescent, we see a being whose understanding of the world has taken shape as a teenager.

This makes sense. If Michal is the older brother, and is liberated from his parents' torture at, say, age eleven or twelve, we can safely assume that he is taught or learns to read (he can read) in the subsequent few years. He is socialized during those years and educated otherwise. But most importantly, he can come to hear and comprehend (for Shannon's Michal, as opposed to the Michal on Broadway, CAN comprehend) fully his brother's representation of the world in story.

There is deep resentment in the relationship. On Broadway, the relationship was portrayed as a George/Lenny relationship. That is to say: Katurian is in no wise Michal's peer. The resentment in the relationship, therefore, is of a child complaining before his God. Katurian, on Broadway, is the settled authority in the relationship, and Michal destroys him unknowingly, as a child might break an antique vase. In Morton's production, the two men contend with each other, as peers. There is resentment in Michal, but his resentment is proud and spiteful. If Katurian is Michal's God, then Michal is Katurian's Miltonic Satan, a tragic hero, an angel, who has come to see himself as a God.

This is a remarkable artistic statement from Morton. If Katurian is the artist as God, delivering contemporary revelation through fiction, and Michal is a symbol of mankind, suffering uncomprehendingly, and deriving meaning and direction from story, then the portrayal of Michal becomes the director's meditation on the nature of mankind and his suffering. Forgiving the superficial elitism of McDonagh's casting of mankind as a Faulknerian idiot (at least great writers come by this elitist portrayal of mankind honestly), I feel that Morton does her best to present Michal less as an idiot than as a damaged adolescent genius. Michal is intelligent, angry, and most importantly, an adult. In New York, mankind is portrayed from the ultimate parental elitist perspective: as a child. Recalling the stereotypical cultural elitism of New York's cultural and intellectual congonscenti, we might not find this all that surprising. Chicago's portrayal of man's contention in life is a dignified one, and one for which Morton should be proud. It cannot be emphasized clearly enough—portraying Michal as an adult was a masterstroke.

Soon after Michal's confession, we learn that the third, undiscovered, child was the victim of a reenactment of Katurian's story “The Little Jesus.” We can only imagine, in horror what that entails. Katurian reacts furiously at the idea of the reenactment of such a gruesome story. (Actually, his reaction here was far more interesting than Billy Crudup's on Broadway. Crudup reacted instantaneously to Michal's revelation. In True-Frost, we actually see the information land and be processed).

Michal reassures Katurian that everything will be okay—and that they will “hang out in heaven.” When Katurian points out that child killers go to hell, and that it is most certainly a hell in which their parents' abuse is revisited on them, Michal loses control, flopping on the floor, at a frenzied pace, in an act of physical play that bespeaks Morton's mastery as a director of physically free acting. In the post-show discussion True-Frost mentioned that much of the physical acting was improvisational. In this moment of the production it was also moving.

All Michal has, he says, are Katurian's stories. We can imagine that he wants better stories. His beef is critical. But he has already accomplished what he set out to accomplish. It's all over but the shouting. He settles down for a nap—which, as he points out, is sensible, considering the torture that he may about to endure. Katurian points out that the torture may be unbearable, and in crystal-clear moment of the Michal's resentment, Michal reminds Katurian that Katurian has no idea of the pain that Michal knows how to endure.

Then Michal demands to hear the story that he enjoys. This moment was timed perfeclty. It seemed that the tension in the piece became unbearable just before Michal made this demand. Another masterstroke from Morton—as the audience is getting uncomfortable, and might think to demand to hear another story themselves (viz. leave the theater at the impending intermission), Michal expresses the same sentiment.

Before Michal he can nod off, he begs to hear his favorite story, The Little Green Pig. He liked being green—even though he was different, and ostracized by the other pigs. The farmer, noticing the difference, snatches the pig, and dips him in special pink paint that can never be painted over and never washed off. The little green pig is unhappy—his only claim to dignity painted over. Subsequently, a special green rain falls, making the other pigs green, and making the little green pig special again.

I believe that this is Michal's piece for a very good reason: it is the only one written exclusively from his own point of view. The pig starts out exceptional, but suffering.
He is important even in pariahdom. He is then removed, and forcibly made to conform to the other pigs.

It is a story about someone exceptional in pariahdom who is then removed, from without, from that pariahdom and then made to conform. The pig's suffering is alleviated, but his sense of dignity is diminished. Then, as the rain falls, he realizes a new dignity. To me, this is the perfect meditation on Michal's experience from Michal's perspective as the direct recipient of suffering, and not from Katurian's perspective as the indirect witness to suffering. We can imagine a fourteen year old Michal hearing his brother's stories and making sense of the outside world (the other pigs) through them. Through his brother's stories, Michal's understanding of the world that assumes that every child experiences suffering akin to Michal's prior to his salvation by his brother (i.e. is green just like the little green pig used to be). Michal's understanding of the world is that his dignity (recognized retroactively, through the story) as a child, was a false dignity, because he was not truly exceptional in his suffering (viz. his greenness). His new dignity, as one who has been saved from suffering, is true—the other pigs experience the biblical cycle of innocence corrupted and subsequent suffering (to be followed by repentance and redemption). Michal's dignity is as one whose torture ends as he enters maturity and whose redemption follows directly. Michal's experience is the direct inversion of the biblical narrative.

As he socialized following his grisly experience, the sense of alienation must have been profound. He sees Katurian as a God, and wonders why, given their equal innate intellectual faculties (they both come from the same sick genius parents), he was not given the power and the pleasure. He heard sounds of enjoyment behind that wall every bit as surely as Katurian heard suffering. In this production Michal both loves and hates his brother, and we understand the reasons. His love stems from the direct relief of his suffering initiated by his brother—his brother is the savior. His hate stems from his resentment at being the freak brother and from his critical distatste for his brother's portrayal (or lack thereof) of his life. He hates that the stories are arranged incorrectly or portray things inaccurately. And most horribly both to Michal and Ariel, they incite people to violence—and this incitement has led to their suffering. He hates the fact that violence in stories causes violence and he hates Katurian for perpetuating violence, through him and through others, like their parents. When Michal accuses Katurian of being “like them” (the parents) he equates Katurian's words depicting the tortures of hell with the parents enactment of those tortures, setting the matter before the audience clearly. Words are deeds. They inspire others to violence and they inspired Michal, with his own critical permission, to it.

Inasmuch as Michal's experience is the inversion of Katurian's, it is appropriate that his actions lead to the destruction of the stories. Michal's act of destruction is the ultimate active inversion of his brother's act of creation, yet interestingly he rationalizes it as the means by which Katurian will become famous and through which the stories will survive.

Michal falls to sleep, and then, as Katurian did their parents, he smothers Michal with his pillow. As he does it, and Michal struggles and dies (at uncomfortable length), Katurian whispers, repeatedly, that it's not Michal's fault.

This key moment, in New York, was portrayed as a mercy killing—of the smart brother sparing his idiot brother more torture. The idiot accidentally came across the wrong stories and now has to die for having acted them out. Better that his brother should do it. In this production, of course, the disagreement between the brothers is a critical one, and much darker. Katurian's murder, Cain slaughtering Abel, is all at once mercy, yes, but also revenge. Michal resented his brother and destroyed himself, Katurian, and Katurian belives, his stories. And the stories call out “from the ground” for justice.

Katurian finished the murder and goes to the door to announce his confession to six murders. He has only one condition—it concerns his stories. At those words, the lights go black and we head to intermission trying to make sense of 90 minutes of the most dense literary theater we have ever seen.

When intermission ended, approximately 20% of the Saturday night audience had defected—electing to hear other stories for the rest of the evening. As we enter, the chandelier is low and the vaudeville stage is out. We transition gradually into story time.

There once was a little girl who was convinced that she was Jesus. She had good parents and she went around acting Christ-like. Following one of her shenanigans, her parents are tragically beheaded in an auto accident. (Hilariously portrayed in shadow by Morton, and a bit of self-parody from Katurian and McDonagh). She is then transferred to horrible foster-parents who lied about their horribleness on the form (more comic relief). They abuse her horribly and goad her with her belief in her own divinity. They test her by putting her through Christ's trials and by crucifying her and burying her alive. The story ends to the sound of her scratching the top of the coffin.

As I recall, this story was also told, on Broadway, on the same balcony as Michal and Katurian's story. And it was told from behind a scrim, giving the audience comfort and safety in the distance and concealment of the acts. Again, in this presentation, the action is put right before us, and we see the little girl lowered into the coffin and we see her scratching at its top.

Of course, this is paralyzingly unpleasant, but the larger issue is not of how unpleasant we feel, but why Katurian wrote this story. I believe that this story is Katurian's allegorized personal history, every bit as much as The Little Green Pig is Michal's. As a gifted young writer, he was loved and encouraged, just as the little Jesus. After his discovery that his parents are monsters (i.e. the old, kind parents were killed and replaced by the evil foster parents), they test his resolve to be an author by confronting him with the ultimate horror and torture. The sounds of the girl's scratching are Katurian's stories, written in the darkness, heard only by a passing stranger.

At one point in the story, the little girl's foster parents goad her: “You still want to be Jesus?!” The little girl replies: “I don't want to be Jesus, I fucking am Jesus.” The Little Jesus was distinguished in this production by the interpretation of the line: “I fucking AM Jesus!” In In New York, in keeping with the picture of humanity as children, this line was uttered innocently, and our laughter stemmed from the absurdity of such a thing coming from the mouth of a child. In Chicago, the laughter stems from the little girls grown-up wrath. She IS Jesus, dammit, and she is furious that you would question it!

The Mosaic narrative structure of the idyllic beginning corrupted is in place here. That Katurian, egoistically, sees himself as a Christ figure when he has only been the witness to his brother's suffering (of course sufferning in a different way, subsequently) is rather ludicrous, but here McDonagh is having fun with the writer's sense of self-importance. It is also ironic that later in the play Katurian specifically disavows biographical fiction. His stories, while allegorical, are almost exclusively autobiographical. Perhaps McDonagh is portraying the author's unawareness of the nature of his own creation. Perhaps Katurian is having a joke on us all—disclaiming all autobiographical storytelling, but secretly loving it.

It is appropriate that Michal's coup de grace of resentment/destruction/promotion of the stories lies in the performance of The Little Jesus. (Interesting that Michal's story should be The Little Green Pig, while Katurian gets to be The Little Jesus). If anyone has a claim to sinless suffering, it is Michal, not Katurian. We can imagine him reading this story and seething—yet feeling a sense of dignity that his suffering has resulted in some meaningful representation. Katurian reacts severely to the revelation that his brother has acted out The Little Jesus. We can imagine (from this production) that this is just what Michal intended.

Following the portrayal of The Little Jesus, we are taken back to the office. Katurian has offered to confess to an active role in his parents' murders, the murder of his brother, and the murder of all the children, in exchange for the preservation of his stories. Ariel, recounting the story of The Little Jesus, shreiks primally: “Why does there have to be people like you!” Again, Morton's casting of the two detective roles, especially Ariel, as simple everyman types as opposed to clever detective-genius types (typical to the crime genre, as dueling good and evil, cop and criminal reveal each other most interestingly in the most brilliant shades). Rather, Peyankove and Letts are men whose hearts drive their desires, even as their minds facilitate those desires. They are, deep down, pre pubescent boys. Ariel hates Katurian, because he supposes that Katurian is a child abuser. But even more deeply, he hates Katurian for writing about it and thus promoting others to it. Then Ariel is faced with the realization that he is himself an admixture of Katurian and Michal.

Ariel exits to “get some sweets.” (A wonderfully childish impulse). He reenters, bent on not showing Katurian any sympathy, preparing to torture him. As Ariel prepares to torture Katurian to perform his own idea of justice, Katurian astutely notices Ariel's response to Katurian's having murdered his parents to relieve his suffering. We learn that Ariel was abused by his father and murdered his father in response. As an admixture of the two brothers he is a more fully realized human being, while remaining a symbol character in the dualistic structure of the play. He sympathizes with Katurian. He hates Katurian. He finds himself largely in the position that Michal finds himself: he blames Katurian for his suffering and wants to destroy him; yet, the stories represent Katurian's attempt to give meaning to his suffering.

Actually, as detectives, in this totalitarian state, Tupolski and Ariel embody both the role of the chronicler and the everyman. They are responsible for taking the swirl of experience and building it into a narrative. And they are responsible as the executioners for active justice.

In New York, Ivancek's rendering of Ariel was rather intellectual, and thus, at this point, (the point of Ariel's inner conflict) the passion did not read honestly. In Morton's production I implicitly understood the nature of Ariel's sympathy and hate for Katurian.

After Tupolski humorously confirms Ariel's secret, Ariel stalks off painfully. Tupolski sips tea elegantly, playing the role of the detective-genius. Ariel retorts, resentfully, to Tupolski that the Commissioner likes him better, and that he should be made the number one on the case and run it. Tupolski retorts by deducing, in humorous short order, that Katurian cannot confirm that the little girl used in the reenactment of The Little Jesus was dead or alive at the time of her live burial. Tupolski then informs the squad cars rushing to the scene where Katurian described the little girl's burial (Michal told Katurian and Katurian, in his fictitious confession, told the detectives) to move more quickly.

Ariel storms off. Tupolski, preparing to executed Katurian, discourses with him at a leisurely pace about the story he himself wrote—the title of which contains far to many words and punctuation marks to be recalled accurately here. It is the story of a deaf little Chinese boy walking alone a long set of railroad tracks along a long plain. Tupolski addresses the audience as he informs us that a train is coming and that the little boy will not hear it—and thus will be killed. An old Chinese man (Tracy Letts, as Tupolski, employs some hilariously savage racial humor here) sees, from afar, the boy strolling innocently on the tracks and correctly concludes that the boy will be killed. We can assume that this is why the story is set in China, Tupolski, like Katurian, has license to assign himself whatever role that he in his vain self-image likes. For Tupolski the archetype of wisdom and intellectual fortitude is the Old Chinese Man.

The old man calculates the speed of the train and the point at which the deaf boy would be struck (Katurian correctly points out the hole in the story: how can the old man know that the boy is deaf? Tupolski brushes this detail aside—the sympolism is most important to our detective-author). He then, nonchalantly, folds the paper with which he made the calculation into a paper airplane, in just the right spot to distract the boy and pull him away from the tracks.

Tupolski, at the beginning of the story time with Katurian, gives him license to speak. When Katurian criticizes Tupolski's title, he revokes the freedom of speech (illuminating some of the resentment Katurian felt for his brother/critic). Katurian flatters Tupolski that he loves the story. And, as an allegory for the protector-detective, the character of the nonchalant Old Chinese Man is very expressive of Tupolski's own character, and illuminative of how McDonagh conceives of the act of storytelling. Each character in this play has stories that give his life expression and meaning, except Ariel. But Ariel's stories take a different form, as we will see.

Following story time, Tupolski describes the process by which Katurian will be executed. Ariel enters—they found the little girl, only not dead. She is painted green, like the pig. In this production Michal's final creative/destructive act was darkly humorous. He killed as little as possible in order to make his point. He lied about it, knowing that his lie would be exposed, and that this exposure would reveal his cunning and possible mental equality to his brother. As Ariel exposes Katurian's plot to deceive the detectives we come to realize that Tupolski has a greater level of actor (as opposed to intellectual) than he lets on. Peyankov here does a fantastic golf swing after putting it together in front of Tupolski's wondering eyes.

Tupolski starts a fire in the tall trash can in the office (in New York it was a tiny paper basket; here a full aluminum alley can). The deal was that Katurian would be honest in his confession, and that his honest confession would earn him the preservation of the stories. Tupolski's vanity as a wise detective has been wounded. His pride as an author has been wounded by Katurian's criticism. He wants to hurt Katurian in the only way he knows how, and “as an honorable man” (as he constantly refers to himself, and as Katurian constantly refers to him) he is within his rights, within the context of the bargain, to burn the stories.

Ariel pleads on Katurian's behalf to save the stories. Tupolski then initiates the execution by placing a black hood on Katurian (Abu-Graib-esque). Stanislavski, in My Life in Art recalls, as a demonstration of tempo/rhythm (internal/external action) a portrayal of Mary Stuart going to a beheading. Her internal rhythm is frenetic. But, to maintain royal bearing, her external rhythm is easy. I was reminded of this when I saw True-Frost's portrayal of Katurian's final moments—as he says “I was a good writer.” Tupolski, after explaining that Katurian would be shot following a countdown, shoots him on four. Tupolski excuses himself to go “warn the parents”, but we can imagine that this is to save face. Ariel has pleaded on behalf of Katurian's stories and Tupolski is leaving them in Ariel's hands.

Before the play ends, two things happen. First, in the seconds prior to his execution, Katurian imagines a story for his brother. It is one in which Katurian, as the Pillowman, tells his brother, as a child, of the future that is about to transpire, in hopes that his brother will destroy himself as a child. His brother, citing the stories that will survive as the result of their mutual suffering, refuses to un-wish his life.

That Michal's place in Katurian's story is as a living, suffering instrument of story production highlights the justice in Michal sense of grievance. Every story except The Little Green Pig is a direct meditation of Katurian's experience as the witness to suffering, as opposed to a consideration of Michal's experience. While Michal's torture is germane to the stories, he is not, except, abstractly, in The Little Green Pig, the subject of the stories. Herein lies Katurian's, and the artist's, failure: preoccupation with the self as a witness to the action of humanity, rather than with humanity itself.

The other thing that happens is that Ariel proves himself to be the real good cop: he saves the stories, and they become his stories. Where he was the only character without any meaningful narrative interpretation of his life as detective (chronicler)/sufferer/actor, he will find, in Katurian's stories, his own story. And in the preservation of the stories he will find some measure of hope. Bizarrely, in the world of The Pillowman, this constitutes a happy ending.

Steppenwolf wisely holds post-show discussions following every production of The Pillowman—helping an audience process, together, the disturbing material they have just shared. One criticism of the show was that the evil in the world of the play was unexplained, and that this was somehow a cop-out. I disagreed. The parents who initiate the suffering in the play never betray their motives, and as such, as gods, they give us no theodicy. But mankind and mankind's artists are portrayed as responsible for the creation of their own God in this production. McDonagh charges mankind with responsibility for deciding how to read and understand art and charges artists with responsibility for creating relevant, truthful art. Mankind thus constructs his own sense of meaning in his suffering in The Pillowman, and perhaps a way to save himself.

In Martha Lavey's (the Steppenwolf artistic director) introductory notes, she addresses the issue of dualism in the play: “two rooms, two brothers, two detectives”. What is so fascinating about The Pillowman (and this production specifically) is how deeply opposite those dualisms run, and how the intimacy between the doubles illuminates them and their shared dialectics of obsession. Katurian experiences the exact opposite of Michal—an idyllic childhood interrupted by the discovery of suffering, and thus, ensuing suffering. Michal experiences suffering until he is discovered and relieved of it. Katurian and Tupolski, by being portrayed both as adults (and rather similar looking, in shape and face, at that), are contemporaries. The same is true for Tupolski and Ariel, who, as mentioned previously at length, in this production are played as ruddy, rugged, strong men, as opposed to Broadway, where they were played as intellectuals (no one, I think mistakes Jeff Goldblum and Zelko Ivancek for ruddy or rugged). Tupolski is the one obsessed with reason and structure, and Ariel is the one obsessed with acting out justice (i.e. torture). The two sets of men are themselves doubles, as Katurian is obsessed with giving the world's experiences order through story, and Michal is obsessed with acting impulsively. And yet, Michal's action, the murder of the children, is ultimately what gives, us, through the action of the play a sense of the true meaning of his experience. Ariel's actions lead to the discovery of the little girl at the end of the play, and his ability to reason leads to the preservation of the stories. Even their names, Katurian and Tupolski (cold sounding last names) and Ariel and Michal (gentle sounding first names) suggest this dualism of duals. The brothers are criminals and the detectives are cops. But, just as Nietzsche does in The Birth of Tragedy (with the orderly Apollo and the drunken Dionysis), The Pillowman, beautifully, outlines the boundaries of McDonagh's view of the world, through its opposites—cop and criminal, artist and humanity, suffering and joy, and others.

Humanity makes a critical choice in this production that is the key to McDonagh's view of good and evil: people (Michal) justify evil actions by choosing to believe, critically, that narrative causes violence and that they are helpless to stop it. They use their critical resentment to deny the idea of free will. How can we blame them? The stories themselves seem to concede the point. The little girl knows or is willfully ignorant of the fact that her apple men will kill her father. The Pillowman knows that his stories will destroy his subjects. Michal's parents were prompted by a bizarre literary fascination to torture Michal, and Katurian's stories prompt Michal to violence. Ariel's believes that his father's abuse (and all abuse) is rooted in representations of that abuse in media, and Ariel's narratized self-representation of that abuse (along with, we can imagine media representations of vigilanteism) inspires the violence that he undertakes. Humanity is both a sufferer and a critic in this production, and humanity's critical beliefs inform its performance of evil.

But this critical choice is just that, critical, and therefore normative. The hope in this production lies in the possibility that the artist can fixate more clearly on his subjects, and that his subjects can learn a critical lesson, namely, that stories of abuse don't necessarily lead to real abuse. And that hope is underscored in Michal's (possibly rosy) ending as imagined by Katurian, and Ariel's choice to preserve Katurian's stories. He and Katurian's imagined Michal affirm the possibility that representations of evil may have a function beyond an incitement to more evil.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan's Grand Inquisitor indicts Christ for having denied Satan's three temptations in the desert, thus denying man certainty in faith and food as incentive for that faith. The basis for the indictment is that mankind is too weak to withstand the suffering inherent to such spiritual freedom (i.e., man's faith is not bought). McDonagh demands a truthful artistic freedom over a false, socially balmy constriction. He wonders at the spiritual freedom inherent to artistic freedom, and hopes that man need not continue to suffer.

King Lear

1-“O, do not love too long
Or you will grow out of fashion,
Like an old song.”

2-“A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of Love
The folk who are buying and selling
The clouds on their journey above
The cold, wet winds ever blowing
In the shadowy hazel grove
Where mouse grey waters are flowing
Threaten the head that I love.”

3-“But what if excess of Love
Bewildered them until they died?”

(All 3 by WB Yeats. 1-O Do Not Love Too Long, 2-The Pity of Love, 3-Easter 1916—as suggested by Harold Bloom in “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human”)

I don't feel qualified to write about this or any production of King Lear. It exists on such as scale as a piece of literature that I literally am awestruck at the prospect of trying to unravel it. However the Goodman's recent production was so provocative and interesting that any survey of Chicago theater during the year 2006 that doesn't attempt to depict it is doing its readers a disservice. With that caveat, I'm happy to try to do so.

A few weeks ago, in the midst of a highfalutin conversation with a fellow UChicago alum about the virtues and downfalls of life in Chicago, we hit upon an interesting point: one of the liberating things about living here is the easygoing manner in which one can put forth political and social opinions without feeling ostracized for having crossed some line of political correctness. In other words, people in Chicago aren't so uptight.

On the other hand, we realized, talk in Chicago is very cheap. Contrast this with the atmosphere in Washington, DC, the city in which I was born, and in which my sister works as a congressional aide. A few weeks ago, while out drinking beers with her coworkers, I immediately felt the difference. I was a novelty because I would brashly pontificate on any political or social subject without feeling worried about saying the wrong thing. These people work in an environment in which arguments made today affect opinions tomorrow, which affect policy for the most power nation on earth. The sense of responsibility and power surrounding words is awesome.

Why is talk so cheap in Chicago? We posited that the nature of politics in this city made it so. You could make all the arguments you wanted about policy, but this is a machine city, based on neighborhood ethnic and other organizations in which loyalty and blood are invested in authorities who make decisions about the perceived best-good for their constituents. Tocqueville it ain't. But Chicago is decently run, I suppose, even if offices are handed down from father and son and from paisan to paisan.

Robert Falls' production of King Lear is set, in time for the Borat movie, in a repressive Eastern/Central European dictatorship. As we enter the theater, Stacey Keach's (Lear) Charles Foster Kane-like portrait looms down on the house. Lear is hailed in song at the opening banquet as “papa”.

For a while throughout the first two acts, questions of the design conceit nagged at me: why was it necessary to place Lear in such a setting? I made a connection, and I wonder at its validity, but here goes: Lear's kingdom is ruled as Chicago is, on the basis of ethnic or tribal organizations that are connected directly to families. In other words, it is a society organized around the love that holds a family together. I am loyal to my neighborhood ethnic group, just as I am to my family. And as I am loyal to my ethnicity, I am loyal to our political boss. Lear is papa, just as, for many Chicago Irish in the 50s, Daley was papa. It's a family affair, and arguments don't count for as much here as elsewhere. When Todd Stroger is set to inherit his father's office, with precious little democratic imprimatur, the atmosphere is pertinent.

Given such a political environment, the rationale for setting Lear, the consummate play about the nature of love and loving, in such a state is apparent, even if this diminishes its effect somewhat. If familial love is the glue that holds this society together, what happens when that love turns tragic?

In King Lear, the answer is simple: War. Robert Falls' production is a visual feast in this regard, and he creates events and images in dialogue with Shakespeare's text that are gripping, haunting, and frankly, distracting from the text itself. That it was difficult for me to follow the meditations of Lear and Gloucester thanks to the feast of ideas profferred by the design is both a detraction and a note of high praise for this ambitious production.

One other question nagged at me after seeing the production: If Lear is a Milosevic-type torturer, murderer, etc., then why should I care if his daughters steal from him? If these are archetypes of trashy European gangsterdom, then why should I feel for them? In the text, the play is set generations before King Arthur, a mythological setting in which Lear is at worst benign (though tragically flawed) and at best a just old King. From a revisionist perspective we of course know all about authoritarian rulers and the torture that underpins them, but I cannot say I think that the text is eager to paint Lear as a Stalinist leader. I believe that we are supposed to feel him to be a full and just papa.

Harold Bloom posits that Lear defies criticism. In my mind this is true because love and our need for it spring from such a deep and unknown place within us, in which all of our basic emotional beliefs about ourselves and our validity and value as human beings live. As someone who's recently been brutally dumped, I can speak from personal experience: Lear is an abstration in which we see our own love. Why does Lear need the over the top reassurance of his daughters? Why is Edgar so naïve in his faith in his brother's love for him? Why can't Edmund feel any love whatsoever, and does this give him the power to direct the events in the play? Why do Goneril and Regan need him so passionately, and why do they destroy themselves for him? And what do “father”, “mother”, and “lover” mean to us?

This production treats these questions abstractly—that is to say that our experience of love informs our reading of these motivations. If I associate the Citizen Kane portrait with brutality, that is MY reading of the design. As an audience we are never lead deeply into the text to find the answers. But I found some moments of the play tremendously moving as a confluence of images and personal associations with them. As a visual comment on the text and as a work of art, the play worked magnificently.

The show opens in a fabulous banquet hall, covered by Lear's image. Facing us is a men's urinal attended to by a woman whose job is possibly the worst in all of the kingdom. The strains of 50s era Slavic songs, in the vein of Yeats' out-of-fashion songs play from an old radio. Is it 1955 or 2005? It's not immediately clear. As Gloucester, Edmund and Kent (Edward Gero, Steve Pickering, and Jonno Roberts) relieve themselves, Edmund's status as a bastard is made clear, as is the wear and age of the ruling class. Their bathroom is worn and as we watch them piss, we find them to be worn. In a beautifully constructed act of generousity, the soon-to-be villainous Edmund leaves the beleaguered bathroom attendant a huge tip.

We find ourselves in a breathtaking gold banquet hall lined with red linen. The guests enter—a trashy bunch of European gangster-types, with ugly, tacky hair and clothes, getting down to the new music—European dance hall hip-hop, spun by none other than Oswald, Goneril's steward and lover. He preens on his stand costumed in saggy pants and protruding boxer shorts, and the best knockoff hip-hop fashions. He beat-boxes, spins and raps and runs the party. AK-47s wave, vodka is gulped. The king is introduced.

Lear enters in a fabulous light blue suit, gladhanding and backslapping like a charismatic pro. He shakes hands and kisses his daughters—Goneril in gaudy purple sequin, Regan pretty in pink. He sits beside Cordelia, who, in blue jeans, rather resembles Jeanine Garofalo's character from The Truth About Dogs and Cats. In a shocking event that further confirms Lear's status as a brutal dictator, he jokingly pulls out an enormous pistol and mocks shooting himself, only to subsequently shoot at the ceiling. He wheels out a cake, representing his kingdom, and professing to divest himself of rule, would carve it up to give his lands to his daughter. He takes the mic and, in the spirit of a drunken wedding toast gone awry, asks which daughter loves him best.

Goneril a redhead, in a demure fashion, well-suggested by her evening gown, takes the mic and professes effusively. Regan a blond, as suggested by her prissy, girlish dress, plays dumbly at following her sister's act. Cordelia the brunette, lacking concern with appearances in the first place, refuses to play along.

Falls' take on this scene seems to be that the refusal to maintain appearances is what sets the action of the play in motion. This is a cogent point within the design framework of the piece, as we certainly sense the way in which apostate politicians are routinely destroyed for not towing a party line. So there seemed to be a contemporary resonance in the microphone wielding PR failure. But for me, the question of love and Lear's overabundance in it and need for it could have been addressed in a much more intimate manner. However, I had to appreciate the spirit of the interpretation—the coercion of someone with a microphone forcing one to say something.

At Cordelia's refusal, Lear becomes incenced, cuts her off from an inheritance and stabs the cake. Kent, for attempting to reason with Lear is nearly murdered before our eyes. The scene closes with Burgundy's refusal to accept Cordelia as a mate without a dowry, and France's acceptance of her, as “she is herself a dowry.”

We are then introduced to the Edmund, whose conservative gray suit is a welcome relief from the gaudiness we've just witnessed. This is the young man who tipped the bathroom attendant. We don't think of him as a villain, and this is another beautifully executed aspect of the production—Edmund seems perfectly humane as a potential ruler. We see him set his plan to usurp his father's lands into action—as his father falls for Edmund's lies, hook, line and sinker. Directly following, we see his brother, dressed similarly to Oswald, buying coke from Oswald at the DJ stand. Our white, middle class audience thinks to itself: “Who's the bastard around here?” Joaquin Torres' Ed Grimley-esque portrayal of the naïve Edgar gives us a visceral sense of the injustice that Edmund experiences and that drives him. Roberts' performance as the cool-headed villain Edmund sings. We are literally putty in his loveless hands.

There is, however, a flip-side to this portrayal of things. Edgar is almost so adolescent and naïve that it becomes difficult to see the possibility of his becoming the mature avenger of the final act. As a stylistic touch to set the audiences sensibility, it works. It doesn't necessarily agree with the text.

The play is filled many such touches. We viscerally experience Goneril's lust as we witness Oswald performing oral sex on her and her throwing him off her in the midst of sex, with obvious blue-balls. The commentary on her nature as a lover is explicit.

We are then introduced to a Sid Caeser-esque personality, the fool, one of Shakespeare's most baffling characters. Lear refers to him in the text as a child, and he refers to Lear almost exclusively as “Nuncle.” He appears to us as a character out of Pirandello or Beckett, with white clown makeup on, a sort of 50s avant-garde jester. At the fool's witty comic commentary, without which he has denied Cordelia her inheritance, he vows to retake the shape of a King, even as his daughters move to disarm him of his knights (in this production, they are police in riot gear).

As the play progresses, we see the conflict deepen into civil war. Some amazing design touches—an early model Benz filled with cigarette smoke pulls onto stage and Regan, trailed by a line of Luis Vuitton luggage enters Gloucester's home (girded dazzlingly by a huge iron gate). Kent, after getting into a second scrape on Lear's behalf is duct-taped, stuffed into two tires, covered with gasoline, and nearly lit ablaze. The danger of the moment was palpable.

As we face Edgar's exile, we see him strip down to his ridiculous red underwear and take to the underground sewer, below the stage. As Lear orders Kent freed from the tires, in which he's been trapped all night, he is revealed to be a blustering old man, growling and shouting, but no longer capable of inflicting fear. As Edgar descends into madness, and disguise himself as the lowest street urchin (Poor Tom), we see Lear begin to do the same. As the storm hits, and the metaphysical reality of Lear's and Edgar rejection becomes clear, we see them rant at the thunder. We see Edgar running around naked. Gimme Shelter, perhaps the ultimate music of foreboding, and recently used again cinematically in The Departed plays as they dance naked in the rain and thunder—literally disdaining shelter in their madness. Following their exile to Dover, we never see the Fool again, and from this production we can only assume that he is another victim of the civil war.

We see Cornwall smoke crack from Edmund's gun, in alliance with his recent takeover of Gloucester's estate. We see trash fall from the sky into Lear's new domicile, and a mock trial in which Regan is compared to a used bidet. Gloucester leads the exiled party to Dover to run from the Lear's warring daughters.

Following intermission we find ourselves in Gloucester's home, and in a a jarring event, see his eyes pulled out by Cornwall, Regan's husband, played as a Michael Chikliss-looking thug by (Christopher Genebach). In the text, Gloucester's eyes are gouged out by a boot. In this production, we see them brutally wrenched from his head. Poetically the point is clear—Love's tragedy is both Gloucester's blindness and Lear's madness. In the text, Cornwall is wounded by a servant loyal to Gloucester (he later dies, off-stage). In this production, Cornwall is strangled to death by Edgar (with a tie!), in what might seem to be an immediate act of revenge for the blinding. He makes love to Regan, the new widow, directly following.

We are then transported to a burned-out, smoldering cityscape. Edgar, as Poor Tom, finds his blind father, and leads him, without revealing himself. We subsequently see Goneril's husband Albany (Kevin Gudahl, who will soon appear as Uncle Vanya in Court's production) rape Goneril from behind, in an ugly attempt to wrench power from her. She laughs.

Cordelia leads masked, Al-qaeda looking stormtroops in a flak jacket. Oswald is nearly seduced by Regan as he delivers her a letter from her sister. Between these interactions we see, in the background, Gloucester and son wandering toward Dover. That loyalty is the backdrop of what transpires. It is this visual journey of these two that informs our understanding of Edgar's progress from child to King-to-be.

Lear enters as a bum in long, filthy white beard, with a roll-cart behind him. He meets Gloucester, and in a fantastic growl, impersonates “a dog obeyed in his office.” The French army arrives, and claims Lear. Oswald finds and captures Gloucester and then is summarily shot in shockingly cold blood by Edgar.

Roberts, as Edmunds, oozes with cold blood in the “Which of them shall I take” monologue, which Falls sets between the two sisters on either side of him. Lear and Cordelia are reconciled as Lear, freshened and all in white is seen in restraints in a wheelchair. Falls' equation of Lear with a contemporary homeless person reads clearly. In perhaps the most indelible image of the piece, we see Gloucester in the midst of dozens of corpses dragged on stage by the ensemble, and dumped into a pit. Although Shakespeare denies his audience Gloucester's recognition of his son, Falls gives it to us in the midst of the mass-grave. Gloucester falls dead upon such recognition, and is dumped into the pit with the other victims.

The question arising from a reading of the play might be: Why does Edgar conceal himself from his father for so long? This production asks the question: Is Gloucester's death of the same nature as the countless other victims of this civil war?

In the midst of an ever-widening post-apocalyptic scene, Albany embraces Edgar, and challenges Edmund. Edgar challenges Edmund, and much as he did Oswald, shoots him coldly. The finality of gunshots leaves a mark on the audience. Edgar has become someone capable of the most final and definitive destructive act. Goneril, rather than poisoning, strangles her sister to death with a plastic bag. Subsequently, she, in a shockingly final moment of her own shoots herself in the head, as huge warm lights escalate behind the action toward the plays conclusion.

I didn't feel that Edmund's progress to troubled contrition read very clearly, but after witnessing a series of events such as the audience witnesses after the intermission, it isn't hard to understand why. We are numb from the violence and war, and the evolution of Edmund's character is peanuts by comparison. In the end, Edgar's triumph lives in this light—he wins, but in the light of such brutality is it any victory to be savored? Edgar's final words, as he grabs the mic (back to scene 1) is to implore us to “speak what we feel, not what we ought.” Falls' message, on the expression of love publicly and the dangers of love as a social fabric comes through clearly.

I was exhillerated by this production—warts and all. For its deficits, it does something that one doesn't often see in theater in this town: engage in a conversation with the text and highlight events to diverge from a traditional, balanced rendering. As a piece of contemporary art, it works.

Stacy Keach is thrilling as Lear, even if the nuances of his performance are overshadowed by the scale Falls' design. Keach's growling, snarling, blustering Lear is a character that, along with this production, I will never forget.

Yeats' theme, in harmony with the text of Lear, is that the tragedy of excessive love turns us into static, stone-like creatures, around whom the world swirls, as we sit oblivious to the torment surrounding us. In this production, we find ourselves in our security and our personal sense of love turned to stone, as the swirl of civil war unfolds around us. When the play expires, we live through the pathos of the living human beings on stage whose love left them incapable of mastering those changes, and we are left wondering at the extent to which love can make victims of us all.

Clay

In Genesis, in the beginning, before God creates the earth, or the sun, He creates light. It's a little odd. Before there's a sun to create light, before there's fire, and before there are even photons or eyes against which those photons could bounce, God creates light.

Actually, God doesn't create any physical, tangible light whatsoever. His first act in presiding over creation? Calling light into being: “Let there be light.” Before there can be anything physical, before there can be a concept of light as a distinguisher from the primordial void, God must speak. God must use language. Words come first. To make sense out of the idea of light from the swirl of unformed chaos that comes before, God must call it forth.

I thought of this last night, when I saw Clay at the Lookingglass (in a coproduction with About Face). Well, this and one other thing. A few months ago some friends of mine and I were carrying on a really highfalutin argument about which was the first art. It's the sort of question that ties you into impossible knots and which says more about your philosophical and personal understanding of art and its definitions than anything else. Being a devoted pretentious so and so (Aristotelian), I said rhythm, as the Aristotelian idea is that art begins in imitation, and I imagine that without rhythm there is nothing to imitate.

Okay. Enough first principles. Clay got me thinking about these ideas because, for a one man hip-hop musical, it is at heart a philosophical and kinesthetic meditation on the soup of experience and how we make sense of it in order to create lives for ourselves. Further, it uses these meditations to illustrate contemporary realities about hip-hop, the American experience, and larger narrative ideas that come from Shakespeare.

It opens on a stage draped in red velvet curtain with a man on stage who calls himself Sir John, hyping up a crowd for the much ballyhooed arrival of the star of the show, Clay. But this is not just Clay's announcer for the night introducing us to the star of our show. Sir John is the master of ceremonies for a fictitious concert at which Clay is to perform his hit single. Clay is the newest hip-hop sensation.

But that fiction and the reality we witness on stage are constantly confused. And this is the first of the many hip-hop conventions Clay introduces his mostly white and affluent audience to. He articulates the confusion of fictitious and real identities and the irrelevance of those distinctions according to the hip-hop form. Whether we see Clay, Matt Sax (Clay's real-life persona and the writer and performer of the show), or Clifford, the boy out of whom we see Clay emerge, what we see is from a “true place” as Sir John might put it.

A note on conventions: when artists misuse them, they're called cliches. When used appropriately, they are homage or narrative convention. And Matt Sax uses many conventions. Beyond hip-hop, he operates in the popular contemporary convention of the one-man show, which is becoming a popular vehicle for talented young actors and others who want to control the way they present themselves artistically. Actually, the popularity of the one-man show is an interesting prism through which to examine the experience of the contemporary American actor, but I digress.

As the play unfolds we see a boy in an idyllic childhood experience the downfall of that childhood (convention!). We witness the boy reinvent himself as an MC (microphone controller) and become renamed as an MC (convention!). We see plenty of what would seem conventional sex and violence, too.

What makes Clay special is that he aspires to illustrate to his white, affluent audience that hip-hop is not simply the conventional sex and violence to which they are accustomed to seeing on Cable. He aspires to unite the hip-hop universe with narrative ideas emblazoned on our culture by Shakespeare.

Harold Bloom, in “Shakespeare—The Invention of the Human” posits that certain emotions that we experience were first introduced to us, culturally, by Shakespeare's ideas. That may be true of certain emotional sentiments, but Shakespeare uses the vessel of certain mythological conventions to carry those emotional ideas to our culture. Amongst these are the Mentorship, the Coming Of Age, the Renaming, and the Return of the Prodigal. We get many of these most profoundly through Henry the IV. Furthermore, from Shakespeare we have received very strong ideas about filial duty, vengeance, parental replacement, and parental-sexual associations through Hamlet.

These conventions are woven into the part hip-hop, part monologue narrative of Clay. Obviously, Sir John is an open homage to Sir John Falstaff, Prince Hal's gargantuan mentor. And Clay is part Hal-part Hamlet. His father is part Claudius. His mother is part King Hamlet. And his stepmother is part Gertrude.

Following the introduction by Sir John (in which he uses a beautiful meditation on the inadequacy of language in communicating), Clay appears to us, and we are introduced to Clifford, Clay as a boy, and his crass, obnoxious father (the father as a failure; a hip-hop convention). We are introduced to his sedate mother, smoking cigarettes, and presented in a vaguely saintly light. Of course the ghostly pale of Clay's mother is a meditation on Hamlet's relationship with his father as a ghost. Subsequent events and the telling of stories determine the nature of our ghosts. It is clear that we are seeing a representation of the past through an evolved context. That is to say: Clay might not have told this story this way when he was a boy, but part of the story is the story itself. Clay's understanding of the context of life has come to him through the telling of stories and through a prism defined by his later experience.

We are then confronted with Clay's parents' divorce and the court proceedings at which he is asked to choose between them. We see Clay bribed by his father and implicitly corrupted by the choice of his father over his mother. We later learn that Clay's father was a traveling businessman, compounding the travesty of Clay's choice of this absentee father for custody. The moment of childhood lost and first implication in evil is of course a biblical idea, but it is strongly echoed throughout hip-hop, and a major theme in Clay.

Directly thereafter we are taken backstage as Sir John begs Clay to appear on stage. We see Clay's face is covered with blood. We are then transported to Clay's memory of his mother's over-the-phone suicide (including a reference to Notorious B.I.G.'s “Suicidal Thoughts”), his subsequent misunderstanding smile, his grief, his guilt, and his journey several years later from the curtained theater of Manhattan to the exposed brick (he actually pulls the curtains back to expose the brick) of the hip-hop Eden, Brooklyn.

Clay's father is the Claudius murdering his mother. His mother's ghost is the narratized memory that Clay has come to after discovering hip-hop. Clay can only see his guilt and responsibility to his mother through memories accessed and articulated by hip-hop. And here is where we see him introduced to hip-hop.

He wanders into Sir John's bookshop, with Sir John in full control of the mic—and telling his story. He asks for help to learn hip-hop. Sir John quizzes him, humorously, on music from Wu-Tang to Michael Jackson—neither of which Clay has any idea of. Sir John teaches him rhythm before anything else—by asking Clay to repeat his rhythms. In a thrilling sequence, we see Clay go from total novice to rhythmic expert.

Hip-hop starts simply—through rhythmic call and repeat. It is primal, and it applies basic meaning to the swirl of experience living in our memories. Subsequently Clay starts rapping, but at first, all he does is recite what Sir John (and Sax, I imagine) considers crass, commercialized hip-hop conventions: money, bitches, blunts, and hos. When Sir John asks about whether Clay has ever met a prostitute, he makes the point clear—hip-hop, for John, is about the definition of our experiences through rhythm, and not the gangsta rap that has found its home in the hearts of suburban white kids for a generation now. Instead, real hip-hop has to come from a “true place.”

Clay finds that “true place” in love...a love affair with his stepmother, who we learn then, married Clay's father “hard upon” (to quote the Bard) Clay's mother's suicide. We are taken to Clay's house following a soccer practice in which Clay's stepmother walks in and ogles his naked body. His father is on the road. The affair ensues as the stepmother performs oral sex on Clay. And following that, she orders him to the bathroom to shave.

As Clay shaves, he contemplates how he got to the point where choosing to shave, that symbol of becoming a man, became the choice to betray his father by sleeping with his wife. We feel the vulgarity and the exploitation of his stepmother's actions, and we also understand the underpinning emotions of hate and revenge that compose Clay's choice. Again, it is clear that this understanding comes to Clay through the retelling of the story.

Following the seduction, we're transported to Brooklyn again (though the sliding curtains), to hear Sir John's story. Hip-hop replaced his parents, who were killed tragically when he was young. The narrative parallels between Clay and John are made clear. Hip-hop is therapy. John begs Clay to allow him to train him to be a famous MC. Confused, Clay storms out, back to Manhattan, where his father soon returns to discover the affair. This section features a fantastic sequence in which Clay and his stepmother make love as Clay's father leaves a message on the machine. Upon his father's discovery of the affair, Clay is thrust into a whirlwind, without a father. For a moment, I thought that Clay might emerge from Clifford in this moment—in an act of self-renaming and self-fatherhood. Rather, Clifford returns to John's bookshop and is renamed by John, his only true father. As we see him perform, the lighting of Clay goes from directly overhead, special lighting, to followspot “entertainer” lighting.

Thus, a hip-hop convention, the rebirth/renaming through hip-hop, meets Falstaff, Hal, and Hamlet. We are then transported back to the backstage of the present time, and Clay's face covered in blood. Clay takes us into the scene a few moments earlier, as his father comes to him, humiliated, begging for money (a hip-hop convention—the betraying old friends seeking a handout). As Clay rejects him, a fight ensues in which Clay stabs his father in the neck, achieving his mother's revenge, and destroying (and purifying) himself at the same time.

The blood purifies him of the stain of the betrayal of his mother—and the stage is washed in a shockingly bright light. Of course as, the show closes to the sounds of Outkast's Chonkyfire, we are left to wonder at Clay's destruction—but it is a destruction that is nothing short of tragic. Clay's heroic quality, the ability to create meaning from the flux of experience, through rhythm and rhyme, leads him to the inescapable conclusion that he must murder his father and destroy himself to attain purification.

Matt Sax is an electric performer, who assumes, convincingly, several characters in the show. His narrative technique, which constantly shifts the audience's attention from one compelling scene to another time and place manages a frenetic pace, which allows him to create meaningful events from small alterations in rhythm. Of course, having an expertly produced and contagiously energetic sound design doesn't hurt, either.

For Matt Sax and Eric Rosen (who co-developed and directed the project with Sax) to undertake a project like this is admirable. The questions “why?” and “why now?” are shockingly clear from the moment we leave the theater. Hip-hop as an art form is so deeply misunderstood, especially by the white elite in our country, yet it is the essential sound of the zeitgeist of the moment. If you want to hear and feel what's in the air, in the cities, tune into a streaming broadcast of any college radio station playing non-commercial hip-hop.

But, as this art form of the moment is misunderstood, so are the stories of those who practice it. Clay, in a theater, accomplishes one of the things that Eminem has: he has drawn the parallels between the hip-hop experience and the universal experience. While Eminem focuses his energy on poverty and middle-class hypocrisy, Clay strives to draw parallels between the experience of a neglected, middle-class white kid, the hip-hop experience, and ultimately the grand narrative themes that we have inherited from Shakespeare. He elevates both his experience and hip-hop's, and in so doing, elevates his audience's cultural understanding.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Theater is the most ephemeral of all arts, and, at the same time, it also has the greatest capacity to entertain. Stanislavski meditates in My Life In Art on this combination of qualities as the reason for the lack of aesthetic development of the theater when compared to other media (like literature, music, painting and sculpture, all of which had been turned on their ears repeatedly when Stanislavski was working). It is simply too easy for artists in the theater to get by by entertaining their audiences, or, to put a finer point on it, it is too hard for them not to. An audience walks into a theater expecting a less formally aesthetic experience. Theater exists in time, as life does, and is gone in a moment, just as events in life are. Acting exists in the minds of much of the audience as entertaining diversion and realistic imitation, thanks to television and film—where other arts are more clearly (and obviously) formal and at times abstractly imitative. And, until recently, audiences would only pay for theater that gave them exactly what they expected.

James Tyrone (played in the Gift's production by Gary Wingert, whose face seems the archetypal aging Irish actor), the central character of Long Day's Journey Into Night, is an ephemeral man. He worked his way up from desperate poverty to prominence as an actor. As he ages, he is living with the regret that he sacrificed any chance of serious artistic work (for him, this means attaining status as a “great” Shakespearean) for financial security. Security is his chief concern in life—to live on a solid foundation, so that he never runs the risk of returning to the poverty in which he was raised. To that end, he endlessly sinks his money, over the objections of his family, into land investments. His summer home, in which the play is set, is bathed in fog, and a foghorn keeps his addled wife up at night, a fact to which he is brutally senseless. He lives in a self-induced haze of delusion and alcohol, and he cannot allow himself to see the solid truth about himself or his family.

The play is itself largely about Tyrone and the other members of his family (who are to varying degrees living in the same haze that envelops James) forcing themselves and one another to run aground upon the realities that they deny to get by. It is a metaphysical piece, in which the forces of time and nature themselves are allegorically illustrative of the story. As the forces of nature conspire to run these tortured characters aground on the rocks of their delusions, we see them sink themselves deeper into addiction and recrimination.

At the risk of being labeled a complete lackey of Robert Brustein, I quote him again, this time in his review of The Iceman Cometh: “the length of the play contributes to its impact, as if we had to be exposed to virtually every aspect of universal suffering in order to feel its full force.” I would actually go further: because O'Neill wrote such metaphysical work, I believe that his style (the long, dense interior drama) is actually meant create a different theatrical context in which the audience experiences things in time. It is meant to use time to make the audience sense, in their bodies (through the natural change that physically occurs in several hours) the passage of time, and to link that physical sense of the passage of time to characters—in order to elevate those characters to the level of archetypes. We make emotional realizations, in time, and this elevates these emotions to a different context from others we experience in drama. It is as such that he has created such a lasting impact on American theater.

However, therein lies a dilemma, in addition to the inherent dilemmas of making theater. If O'Neill's (novelistic in scope) work is set close to or at real time, how should it be presented? Should we stage it realistically (or as O'Neill himself said “holding the old family Kodak up to ill-nature)? Should we present it in real time, at the risk of alienating our audience?

Fortunately, O'Neill is a master storyteller, who is constantly supplying his audiences with fresh and interesting events, actions, and conflicts, all the while endowing his audience with a sea of facts from which they can make very rich inferences about the world of characters in the play and the emotional stakes for those characters. All the same, an O'Neill play is not for the faint of heart, or for that matter, of backside. Audiences should know what they're getting going in.

The Gift has chosen to stage the piece in a very realistic, well-constructed, setting. The Tyrone summer home is a spartan, wooden building, complete with shutters at the top of the walls, with manly swords and busts and paintings of Shakespeare and Booth, woven rug, wood floor, and dirty windows. It is lit warmly, in the morning of the first act, through slots between the wooden wall panels, creating a very nice effect.

The first two acts are scored at a very fast pace, as we see the family men's attempt to insulate Mary Tyrone, the mother of the family (Alexandra Main, cast as a woman easily 20 years her senior), from the strife that consumes them. She has recently returned (we discover later from a cheap clinic, being treated for morphine addiction) and everyone wants to protect her. This quickly disintegrates as James accuses his sons of laziness, drunkenness, lechery, and leeching. Jamie (John Kelly Connolly), the eldest son, is quick to respond with accusations of James' cheapness and cruelty, while Edmund (Brendan Donaldson), the effete and sickly youngest son, tries to stay clear of the punches. The characters in this play, in addition to doing yard work, visiting doctors, eating, and napping are constantly trying to define the past in conversation to blame each other for the misery in which they find themselves.

The play follows a pattern of accusation, recrimination, repentance, incomplete forgiveness and incomplete peace, followed shortly thereafter by more accusations. In this production, the events in the first two acts, as O'Neill is informing us about the world into which we have entered, are not well articulated. Some of the most horrible accusations and recriminations pass without the tempo of the piece altering. The events are not well bracketed. Perhaps this is meant to emphasize the hazy banality of the fighting. Perhaps this is to emphasize the dynamism of the fourth act, in which the key event, of Edmund's accusation of his father of willful neglect runs him aground on reality. In any event, the acting was fast, and I was unable to discern what director Michael Patrick Thornton conceived to be events in the flurry of the information rushing at me.

The third act opens to the family's temporary servant, fresh Irish immigrant Catherine (Sue Redmond, using an excellent brogue) and Mary chatting in the aftermath of another of Mary's relapses into morphine abuse. Catherine is getting drunk on James' whiskey, and lapping it up, at Mary's urging. Mary needs the company, as she is all alone, in a house she despises, without any roots surrounding her or companionship. Catherine's energy in this production alters the stasis of tone achieved by the family's fighting in the first two acts, and is also an interesting quiet counterpoint to Mary's cascade of illusions about her own childhood and the source of her addiction. O'Neill is charitable to Mary, exposing her to the moral indictment to which all other characters in this piece are subjected, but chiefly using Catherine's charming skepticism to call the bullshit. The tempo of the piece is dramatically altered here. And when Edmund returns from the doctor's office with news that he indeed has consumption (TB) and will have to be hospitalized, his confrontation with Mary is very evocative.

The fourth act, however, is made to stand out in this production. I suspect it is presented in boldface because in it, we are presented with accusations and admissions that happen once in a lifetime and alter the lives of the characters forever. It is, in this production, the only act in which major events transpire. It is intense, dynamic, and built around Edmund's accusation that his father is willfully neglecting him, possibly to death, in the treatment of his consumption. The men are all drunk, and their drunkenness gives them real license to say what needs to be said. James paints the bleak picture of his childhood that Edmund is accustomed to hearing, but he then admits that his stinginess and fear of the poor house led him to destroy his artistic potential, by allowing himself to be typecast lucratively. This is another key event, as we experience the pathos of regret with the hypocritical, cheap, cruel father. Jamie returns and drunkenly confesses his secret wish to destroy his brother, as well as his love for his brother. The play ends with Mary's recounting of a story in which she was rejected from the convent, to test her religious devotion in the secular world, and with a tunnel of light on Edmund, as the fulcrum upon which the family has now shifted.

The lighting in the piece (Heather Gilbert) is fairly straightforward, with Thornton using a special to create a tunnel of light on Mary at various moments in her downturn. The lighting suggests, very subtlely, shifts in mood in the third and fourth act, and the darkness that envelops the house as the day wears down. The costumes (Kimberly G. Morris) evoke the period well, and James' rubber-band billfold is one of many nice touches (another is the collection of Kipling's poems that were aptly a part of James' library). I found myself straining to hear over the air conditioner at various points in the piece, a price one pays at storefront theaters. The changes in scenes were marked by Brahms-esque piano sonatas, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and the show closes to Pachelbel's Cannon. (Sound was co-designed by Bob Mihlfried, Jr. with his brother Kenny, who also composed the original music). In the third and fourth acts we get some very nice atmospheric sound—of crickets and of the water and sea bells in the distance.

The script is so rich in themes: it explores the American need to establish and maintain oneself individually. It is also an examination of the animating hypocrisy of those caught in addiction—who obsess over moderation and willpower, but whose obsession in that regard is indicative of their deep fixation on those qualities as inadequacies. But it is, chiefly, a metaphysical work, aided by the brothers' fixation on post-enlightenment writers and literature. By the art they admire and strive to create, they are wresting the future of American culture from those like James, who has spent his life groping for solidity in the mists of uncertainty. They are more comfortable with a future without absolutes, and the art and culture of the past fifty years has borne out O'Neill's view of the world changing. Of course, the enduring power of the story is that is is generational in nature—with the old reaching for certainty as they face mortality, and the young embracing it.

The work in the fourth act was so powerful that I was left speechless. A question nagged at me, however, as I drove home from Jefferson Park (in addition to questioning the casting of such a young woman as Mary, opposite such a powerful older actor like Wingert): Why? Why was this play staged, now? The Gift Theater has a wonderful reputation as an acting repertory, and many of the scenes in this play are meaty enough for a tight ensemble and director to display their acting chops (to mix metaphors). Of course, any time an actor ascends the stage his embodiment is itself a representation living in the present time—as such the actor’s interpretation is itself, upon close examination, a commentary on the here and now. And of course, O’Neill’s play itself is rich enough that one can find apt metaphors pertaining to the current degeneration of society under vice and the attendant recriminations (amongst others) to one’s interpretive heart’s delight. But these interpretations are at their heart general, and based upon abstractions, and not the basis for any firm statement in a dialogue between the artist and his culture.

Indeed, there is little to no suggestion provided by Thornton’s production about why O’Neill’s work is relevant today. The production could have fixated on any of the relevant themes in the script as a focus for engaging contemporary issues. However, I could very easily see the same production having been staged in the mid-nineties, or at any time in the past forty years. There is something to be said for a “light touch” in the creation of art theater, and for providing a venue in which the actor’s art can by itself provide commentary enough on society—and this is what the Gift achieves, for better or worse. Directors of Shakespeare’s plays are constantly working to expand their productions’ cultural context—I wonder if it is possible for a director working with O’Neill’s behemoth literary masterpiece to do the same.

The fourth act was diverting, but it was the apex of a show whose power was more or less as an actor's piece—and relatively ephemeral. O'Neill's literature is itself rich enough to create atmosphere without the construction of a period set to make it tangible. I wonder if a staging that would have embraced the key metaphysical uncertainties which compose the play's obsessions would have been more effective than one that strives to reach for an elusive sense of security. What I mean to suggest is that a realistic staging may actually render the piece less effective than one that suggests a critical context in which the piece should be viewed as social or cosmic commentary.

James Tyrone's regret is that his legacy is totally ephemeral. A realistic staging may be clear, comfortable, and reassuring to unsteady audiences, but if this play is staged only as an actor's piece, then its power is itself ephemeral, and its tragedy is the same as James Tyrone's—that in striving for security, it eradicates any chance for a lasting impact and legacy.