Postcard from New York 3
Sleep No More, Tony Bennett and Lady
Gaga, Hand To God, The Flick, David Greenspan/Gertrude Stein
My final week in New York was overshadowed by the email I
had received from my wife in the cinema on the Sunday, and the flurry of communications
that followed over the next five days.
Without going into details: after ten years, my marriage was
over, much as my previous marriage had ended fifteen years previously. Once
again I was completely blindsided, although in retrospect I should have seen it
coming. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell: to lose one wife may be regarded as a
misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. This is not the place to
expand further on the immediate circumstances or the underlying causes of either separation, except to say
that both were to some extent unconsciously self-engineered if not exactly self-inflicted. Now I veered from one emotion to another as the total and irrevocable nature of
my current loss gradually became apparent.
In what follows, I make no effort to separate my impressions
of the city itself or the theatre I saw there that week from my somewhat
unhinged state. It had indeed become a hell of a town, and my vision was as clouded
by shock, pain, grief and despair as one who wanders through the underworld –
like Orpheus, to emerge at last alone.
In the words of Clive James’s recently published translation
of Dante, which I carried with me on my travels:
How harsh and bitter
that place seemed to me –
Merely to think of it
renews the fear –
So bad that death by
only a degree
Could possbily be
worse. As you shall hear
It led to good things
too, eventually.
*
After a sleepless night in my sweltering third-floor box
room in Williamsburg, I decided to head into Manhattan and
spend the day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If nothing else, continuous access to
free wi-fi would at least keep me in potential communication with my wife, from
whom I hadn’t heard since tentatively replying to her still somewhat veiled email the
previous day. This led to a morning of torture, as delays in the subway saw me
stranded underground and in a state of mounting panic and paranoia about my
marriage (all my fears being subsequently confirmed when I finally heard from her
again).
When I got to the Met, its glories were imbued with a
dawning sense of loss. I wandered the Greek and Roman galleries, and then the
even more spectacular Ancient Egyptian wing, overwhelmed by feelings of regret,
remorse and grief: how my wife would have loved these collections; how I should
have asked her to come to New York with me; how we would never share such
experiences again. I had taken too little care of this – and other things. And
now it was too late.
Just before five o’clock – upstairs in the Italian
Renaissance rooms, but unable to take in the paintings around me – I received
another email from her, this time spelling things out with terrible clarity. I
hastily composed a reply, attempting to bargain with her, while an amplified
voice overhead announced that the museum was now closing.
Outside on the crowded steps I could no longer access wi-fi,
so I dialled her number and began leaving an incoherent voicemail message,
before my voice and words failed me. Then my phone
battery died.
I got into a cab and began heading blindly downtown.
*
That night I had a ticket to see Sleep No More: the famous long-running immersive production by
English company Punchdrunk at McKittrick’s Hotel. Despite my increasingly
frantic state, I decided to go ahead and see the show.
This turned out to be a disastrous mistake. To be honest, I
don’t think I would have enjoyed it in any event. As the title would suggest,
it’s based on Macbeth, and takes
place over multiple floors in the hotel (in this respect, much like Then She Fell, reviewed in my last
Postcard). Unlike that show, however, Sleep
No More plays to a much larger crowd (there were at least a hundred of us the
night I saw it), and is much more chaotic: the audience, left to its own
devices, rapidly fragmented and followed the action, chased the actors or
explored the floors, rooms and their contents at will. Moreover, every audience
member was issued with a neutral mask, which had the effect of encouraging a level
of display and irresponsibility which I found irritating, as people pushed past
each other, interposed themselves as part of the action and got in the way of
the actors. I had the impression that there was an in-crowd of afficionados who
came regularly in order to hog the limelight and show off in front of the other
spectators.
Conversely, unlike Then
She Fell or other more properly interactive works, the audience didn’t seem
to have any designated role, and were largely ignored by the performers. In
other words, it could have all happened without us; there was a kind of
conventional ‘fourth wall’, which seemed to cut through the heart of the work
and disconnect us from what we were watching. I found this lack of connection
frustrating, and felt it added to the level of hyperactivity among certain
members of the crowd.
Beyond this, the performances and choreography were much
less impressive than Then She Fell,
and in comparison with the latter the whole production had less to say. In
short, the immersive form was more like a gimmick that had been imposed on the
ghost of Shakespeare’s play – whose plot, scenes and characters were diluted to
the point of cliché. The overall atmosphere, mood and design also felt clichéd:
a kind of contrived decadent 1920s world that, again, seemed to have no intrinsic
connection with the material.
After an hour of mindless to-ing and fro-ing in search of
something interesting to watch, I’d had enough. I was also feeling increasingly
trapped in my own internal immersive nightmare. It took me another fifteen minutes
to find my way back to the floor I’d entered from and escape. I re-entered the
underworld of the subway, and made my way back to my box room in Williamsburg,
where another sleepless night awaited me.
*
The next morning there was another painfully honest email from my
wife. I replied straight away, and we arranged to meet in London on the weekend to talk things through. Then I went out for a walk, found a park and lay down under the
trees, letting my body and mind catch up with the events of the past two days.
That night for a treat I took myself out to see Tony Bennett
and Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall, on tour after their recent album Cheek to Cheek. They delivered a solid
set of jazz, swing, lounge and cabaret standards from the 20s to the 60s,
backed by two separate bands and a shared orchestra. At 88, Bennett ruled the
stage like an old king, relaxed and comfortable but still in great voice and
more than capable of belting it out, especially in the big solo numbers, the
lion’s share of which fell to him. In this context, Gaga somewhat uncharacteristically
played second fiddle, but still held her own as a Broadway-trained baby, shifting
as effortlessly from idiom to idiom as she did from frock to frock during
Bennett’s solos. I let the onslaught of sentiment wash over me, enjoyed the grandiose
sense of occasion, and admired the effortless artistry and stylishness of two
very different but eminently compatible master-performers. We shall not see
their like again.
*
Wednesday proved more challenging again, emotionally and
theatrically. Once more I braved the subway to midtown Manahttan, to see a
matinee of Hand to God: a Broadway
revival at The Booth Theatre of Robert Askins’s dazzling new play, which was
originally produced at The Ensemble Studio Theatre in 2011. As with Fun Home, this was a revival of the
original off-Broadway production, energetically directed by Moritz von
Stuelpnagel and featuring a central tour-de-force
from Steven Boyer as the nerdy teenager Jason and his foulmouthed handpuppet
alter-ego Tyrone, who apparently becomes possessed by the devil, leading to
scenes of mounting chaos – sexual, aggressive and finally bordering on the
psychotic and even supernatural.
To an even greater degree than Fun Home or Hedwig, Hand to God is both a challenge and a
tribute to Broadway’s capacity to confront Middle America. Mostly set in a Christian
puppetry workshop in a school basement room in Texas, the play mocks not only
religious and cultural hypocrisy but the entire human project to subdue, civilize
or demonize our shadow-selves. In short: it gradually transforms from being a hilarious
black comedy to a terrifying satire of truly Swiftian proportions.
Boyer’s facility with the puppet and his capacity to play
two opposing characters (or dual aspects of the same personality) simultaneously
had me spellbound – and finally covering my eyes in horror during a final scene
of frenzied mayhem, when Jason took a hammer to his own right hand in an
attempt to save himself and others from its increasingly deranged clutches.
This was preceded by a graphic handpuppet-sex-scene between him and his equally
mild-mannered girfriend (wearing her own insatiable handpuppet for the occasion), which the
audience found side-splitting but I found almost unbearable to watch, now firmly
in the grip of my own demons.
I sat in the auditorium shaking until
everyone else had left, then stumbled out into the crowded streets. I had nowhere to go, but I couldn’t face the maelstrom of people and traffic, so
I headed back into the maw of the subway, feeling like a drowning man being
dragged down by the undertow.
I finally emerged again on the Lower West Side in the
more peaceful ambience of Greenwich Village, not far from a small off-Broadway venue
where I had a ticket to see another play a few hours later – although
at this point I couldn’t imagine ever setting foot inside another theatre again. Instinctively I headed for a park in Washington
Square; as I entered its green haven, the tears came, and I sank down onto a
lawn under the trees. People were sitting around me on the grass listening to a
jazz trio busking nearby; no one seemed disturbed by the man weeping uncontrollably
in their midst. It felt like a river that would never run dry; words, images
and thoughts dissolved in the flow of feelings. Eventually this too came to
an end, and I stopped crying, got up, dropped a five-dollar note into the
trumpet-player’s instrument case, and walked off to find something to eat
before the show. Life goes on.
*
The play I saw that night at the intimate Barrow Street
Theater was a sweetly subtle relief after the lurid horror show of Hand to God. Moreover, I was in
Greenwich Village, and off-Broadway at last; it was almost like being in Carlton
or Fitzroy, and going to a familiar Melbourne independent theatre venue like La Mama or Eleventh
Hour.
Annie Baker’s The
Flick was first staged at Playwrights Horizons in 2013, and won the
Pulitzer Prize last year. The remount at the Barrow featured the same cast (Alex
Hanna, Louisa Krause and Aaron Clifton Moten), designer (David Zinn) and
director (Sam Gold), whose similarly understated approach to Fun Home distinguished him as one of
that rare breed of directors who put their playwrights and actors ahead of their
own creative egos.
Indeed, direction, writing and performances in The Flick were so understated that I
felt like I could have been watching an off-Broadway equivalent to Tsai
Ming-liang’s arch, slow-burning Taiwanese masterpiece of minimalist cinema Goodbye Dragon Inn, which like Baker’s
play is set in a run-down old movie house. Unlike Tsai’s film however – the
continuous action (or inaction) of which is set in a cinema in Tapei during its
last 90-minute screening, during which it follows various patrons and employees
in and out of the auditorum and elsewhere around the building, using long
static shots and almost no dialogue – The
Flick is set in a cinema in Massachusetts, consists of a discontinuous
series of long and largely static scenes (almost all of which take place inside
the auditorium after various movie screenings), focuses on just three
characters (who are all employees), and is all talk (albeit of the most deadpan
and desultory kind). Behind both works of course lurks The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich’s haunting cinematic ode to small-town
life, growing up, nostalgia and indeed cinema itself – as crystallized in the form
of the local independent, single-screen movie house, typically specializing in
cult, arthouse or recent release re-runs. In the case of The Flick, this image was simply but brilliantly realised in Zinn’s
design by putting a hyperrealistic auditorium onstage with rows of seats facing
the theatre audience so that the fourth wall became a virtual movie screen.
Perhaps there’s something about the vanishing institution of
the movie house, the medium of the moving image, and even the materiality of
film itself that uniquely suits the theme of time’s passing as their
privileged subject-matter. If so, Annie Baker’s play and Sam Gold’s production
(the two seem inseparable) seize on this elective affinity between cinema and
time, and bend it towards their own highly original theatrical ends. Certainly
the studiously slow pace of this production apparently divided audiences and
critics alike during its previous run. The first act alone ran for ninety
minutes; the entire show including interval came down at just over three hours;
but the real challenge and beauty of play and production lay in their quietly
observational tone. For me however there was nothing gratuitious or enervating about
this measured pace and tone, which perfectly captured the situation of three
lonely people suffering from a very contemporary form of melancholia and trying
to connect with each other in the context of a workplace and an economy that
seemed to be relentlessly dissolving all traditional forms of connection, solidarity,
value or meaning – a condition which the sociologist Durkheim analysed in the
late 19th century under the concept of ‘anomie’, particularly in his
study of suicide.
No doubt my own situation made me even more receptive to the
mood of this work. Not that it made me suicidal: on the contrary I found it
strangely restorative after the hallucinatory vortex of Hand to God. Paradoxically, it gave me a context for the loss of
connection, solidarity, value or meaning which I was currently experiencing in
the dissolution of my marriage, especially in the heightened circumstances in
which I found myself – doubly alone, so to speak, and infinitely isolated in
this vast unfamilar city where I knew almost no-one.
After the madness of the afternoon, I went home calmly that evening; but for the third night running, I still couldn’t sleep. The demons raised by Hand to God continued to torment me.
After the madness of the afternoon, I went home calmly that evening; but for the third night running, I still couldn’t sleep. The demons raised by Hand to God continued to torment me.
*
The next day, there was another sad but resolute email from my wife. I responded as best I could, bowing to the inevitable. Then I headed back into Greenwich Village and met up with the
one friend I had in New York, an Australian actor who’d lived there for
the last ten years. She sized me up, then announced
that she’d meet me again that evening outside the theatre where she was
performing and give me some of her husband’s sleeping pills. She also insisted
that I move out of my box room in Williamsburg the next morning and spend the
day at her apartment on the Lower East Side before I flew out of New York that
night to meet my wife in London the following day.
We said goodbye, she left to pick up her son from school,
and I went back to Washington Square Park and listened to the same jazz trio
under the trees. A couple of hours later I met my friend outside the theatre a
few blocks away and collected the sleeping pills as instructed. Then I walked a
few blocks further through the heart of the downtown off-Broadway district to
the Connelly Theater in the East Village, where Target Margin Theater were
presenting a Gertrude Stein season. Tonight’s offering was Composition…Master Pieces…Identity: two lectures and a poem, all
written by Stein, and presented by off-Broadway legend David Greenspan.
‘Composition as Explanation’ was a lecture given by Stein in
1926 about the paradoxical relationship between artists and their era.
Greenspan recited it from memory, neatly dressed in a button-down shirt and
pants, and sitting in a chair. His somewhat feline delivery and demeanour made
no attempt to imitate Stein, but he held me captivated, even as my mind
alternately wrestled and danced with her words.
Stein’s language typically combines a kind of abstract
prose-poetry, biting wit, passages of lucid analysis and what might clinically
be termed ‘perseveration’ – in this case the repetition of words and phrases
beyond their apparent terms of reference, relevance, appropriateness, logic or
even grammar. The opening sentences of the lecture, for example, read as
follows (the entire text can easily be found on the internet):
There is singularly nothing that makes a
difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except
that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By
this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference
which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this
is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody
knows it because everybody says it.
If this looks dry and even opaque, Greenspan’s
playful delivery brought out shades of meaning and musicality that had me
hanging not just on every word but every inflection and flicker of expression,
from his voice to his face and hands.
The second piece, ‘What Are Master-Pieces, and
Why are There So Few of Them?’, was a lecture dating from 1936, and delving
more deeply into the psychology of creation, and in particular what might be
called the antinomy between artistic creation and personal identity. As a
striking passage from the lecture has it:
The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one
has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is
recognition, you know who you are because you and others remember anything
about yourself but essentially you are not that when you are doing anything. I
am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog
knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what
destroys creation.
Greenspan simply read this lecture seated behind a
table. As he read, though, the spirit of Stein and her words began to inhabit
and intoxicate me, and I felt increasingly liberated – from myself and at least
potentially from my own creative and psychological habits. I had a sense too of
Stein as the great enabler, to whom the greatest Modernist writers and painters–
from Pound to Picasso – were so singularly drawn.
The final piece, ‘Identity – A Poem’, also from 1936,
was the only one actually written for theatrical performance (although of
course lectures are also performances of a kind). Broken up into a series of randomly
numbered ‘acts’ and ‘scenes’, it continued and developed the themes of the
earlier lecture, including the repeated refrain: ‘I am I because my little dog
knows me.’
This time Greenspan was on his feet, his whole body
and voice fully animated, like a kind of marionette possessed by the soul of
Stein herself. There was still not the slightest trace of impersonation or even
‘acting’, at least in the sense of ‘characterisation’; but I felt in the
presence of a master performer who had timed the formal development of the show
and the progressive revelation of his craft to perfection.
I found this final work, and the accumulated impact of
the whole evening, exhilarating and deeply moving. The final ‘scenes’ and lines
of ‘Identity’ spoke to me very directly, not just about creativity, but about life’s transitions:
Act 1 Scene 1.
The necessity of ending is not the necessity of
beginning.
Chorus: How finely that is said.
Scene II.
An end of a play is not the end of a day.
Scene IV.
After giving.
*
With those abrupt and enigmatic last words, the
performance itself was over; but as I walked out onto East 4th
Street, I had the glimmer of a sense that things might not be over for me,
if I could find the need to begin again.
Back in my box room in Williamsburg, I took a sleeping
pill and blessed my friend. Tonight I would sleep; there would be no demons.
Tomorrow I would pack my things, take a cab across Williamsburg Bridge to her apartment,
and spend the day there, recuperating. And tomorrow night I would leave New
York – wonderful town, helluva town – and fly across the Atlantic to face my wife, and my future.
*
Humph will be resuming his regular Postcards from Perth as of next week.
