art simply facilitates persuading

Martin: What would we do here?
Eddie: Well, you could uh-- tell each other stories.
Martin: Stories?
Eddie: Yeah.
Martin: I don't know any stories.
Eddie: Make 'em up.
Martin: That'd be lying wouldn't it?
Eddie: No, no. Lying's when you believe it's true. If you already know it's a lie, then it's not lying.
--True West

People often talk about the experience of going to the theater; the immediacy, the singular moment of the delivery of a line; the sense that anything can happen. It is true, that a great play, even in the hands of mediocre (but not terrible) actors has a poetry that is often lost on the page. For a while I was obsessed with plays, they were all I read for close a year while in college. I've always been drawn to dialogue, and a writer's ability to capture conversation with all of its imperfect starts and stops. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my two favorites playwrights are Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill and I have been lucky enough to see my favorite by each performed on stage. It hasn't seemed like it, because I usually only go to one or two plays a year, but going through the archives, I realized, I've actually managed to catch quite a few of my favorite plays.

Just a partial list of my favorites (and I was surprised when looking at the cast lists how many movie and TV actors starred) in addition to Long Day's Journey and After the Fall, Sam Shepard's True West (with Gil Bellows [of all people], 1993), O'Neill's Anna Christie (with Liam Neeson, 1993), David Auburn's Proof (with Jennifer Jason Leigh, 2001), Lanford Wilson's Burn This (with, sigh, Edward Norton, 2002).

The only play that I truly miss not having seen, and it was unfortunately out last year, is Shepard's Fool for Love. And if you are familiar that play, and with more than one of those others, you'll note certain themes; love, desire & repulsion, lies and the mind's truth, memory, and point of view. Shepard wrote Fool for Love after a divorce. Shepard described his play as "the outcome of all this tumultuous feeling I've been going through this past year … it's a very emotional play and in some ways embarrassing for me to witness but somehow necessary at the same time." The beauty of Fool for Love is its ability to bridge all different levels, from its soap opera elements to its sensationalistic topics. It's a beautiful allegory of love lost and a vision of it as personal drama--particularly ill-fated love. The other element that always struck me is how the characters deal with their shared past, and how different their interpretations of that past is; how crucial that remembrance is with regard to how each of them manages to (or doesn't) get through their life. And how memory, deep memory--the sort that shapes you--places you. How you become stuck with who you are based on how you've chosen to remember your life and what you are able to do with that remembering.

You see this kind of self-deception a lot in plays, I think it's intrinsic to the medium in a way that no other allows, because unlike a movie, or even a book, everything is so dependent upon the word and character that the result has nowhere else to go but into the mind of the players on the stage. In Burn This, the characters confront desire that is pushed far down, to initially be released as anger and blame; and in Long Day's Journey, the final scene sees Mary Tyrone, no longer able to keep the past or the lies she has had to create in order to survive it, down. And that is only brought to bare--and she is only barely able to survive the recognition--because of her drug-induced state. After the Fall is just a memory. It is the thought and denial--the excuse of memory. Miller's opening stage direction instructs this: "The action takes place in the mind, thought, and memory of Quentin ..." It is the waiting room of the mind where those we have known and who have gone from us appear again and again--the past, and how we blame ourselves and others; missed communication, and conversations not had; or the conversations we force ourselves to believe we've had in order to fool us into thinking all that could have been done was and get through the next days.

"We are freed, at the end ... not because the playwright has arrived at a solution, but because he has reconciled us to the notion that there is no solution—that it is the human lot to try and fail, and that no one is immune from self-deception.” -- David Mamet on Arthur Miller