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July
23, 2003, 10:00 a.m. |
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(A small theater on W. 42nd Street, in NEW YORK CITY. Time: early evening, early summer, early 21st century. The theaters of Broadway, given over to spectacle-hungry suburbanites and gay aficionados of musicals, are several blocks, and quantum levels of success, away. We are in the shadow of the Port Authority bus terminal, among the small venues sustained by public subsidy and cheap production values, where dreams and talents are tried out: Broadway's back offices, television's sweatshops, the Bangalore outsourcing of Hollywood. Tonight's performance is a reading of a new play.
THE STAGE has all the accoutrements of the theater of beggary. It is a small, obviously subdivided space, whose ceiling, walls, and floor are all painted a dead black. Seven or eight black metal spots hang from the ceiling, providing the light. A few large black boxes, either for storage or to suggest furniture, sit stacked and ignored in a corner; they will not be touched. An air-conditioner is set in the back wall; it rumbles like a crop-duster, and so must be turned off as soon as the action begins. Other outside sounds come through quite clearly however: stomping feet from the room above (dance practice? sexual harassment?); bass lines amped by the sound systems of SUVs on the street; a flushing toilet.
THE SEATS are raked at a steep incline. They look cannibalized and recycled, as if they had migrated here after some Broadway renovation. (With luck, the play will make the same journey in reverse.) They are tightly packed and a little unsteady; sitting in them is more comfortable than flying coach, less comfortable than a commuter train.
For THE LOBBY, there is nothing but the offices of the little theater company that is hosting tonight's event. Cheap phones, a poster or two. Even so, there is a table set with cheese, wine, and plastic cups. For every premiere, however simple, there must be communion. This is my work: take, eat.
As the room fills, we see THE PLAYWRIGHT, a young middle-aged man, forty or thereabouts. He will always be youthful; now he is beginning to show wiriness. In T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, he looks like half the people on the subway — perhaps because half the people on the subway in New York are playwrights. He is friendly and intelligent, but a bit nervous, with reason: In a few moments he will take his seat in the front row, and watch his thoughts be drop-kicked from ACTORS to AUDIENCE.
THE AUDIENCE, which numbers about twenty, soon fills the little space almost to capacity. Most of them look much like THE PLAYWRIGHT, with here or there a tweak of race or sex; a FRIEND from an earlier period of THE PLAYWRIGHT's life, who is not a theater person, is conspicuous in brown-and-white spectators, as if he had expected a photographer. He sits by THE PLAYWRIGHT's AUNT and MOTHER. Family solidarity, the glue of drama, from Oedipus to the Tyrones. THE PLAYWRIGHT and his family are Jewish; what will New York do for entertainment, besides charity balls and the lottery, if the Jews ever leave?
Eight chairs stretch across the stage in a slightly bowed line. The chair stage left, which sits behind a small black table, is for the man who will read the STAGE DIRECTIONS. The conventions of a faded modernism give this expedient a Peter Brooks-ish air: Brechtian distancing. If this were a late play by Yeats, the reader of STAGE DIRECTIONS would be called An Old Peasant.
The other seven seats will be occupied by THE ACTORS. Already some of them are in place, going over exchanges in undertones. They have two acts and three hours ahead of them; mindful of the soon-to-be-silent air-conditioner, many clutch bottles of water. Their scripts lie in their laps, showing THE AUDIENCE, upside down and at a distance, highlighted blocks of text. The actors are an average lot of New Yorkers, averagely dressed, yet soon, without the help of costume, make-up, or gesture, they will change. One will become a girl; one will lose his mind; two (the madman's wife and his friend) will become lovers. They will discuss music, passionately and intelligently, without playing or hearing a note. Not for the first time, THE FRIEND will marvel at how much talent there is in the world. Every day we hear businessmen, teachers, or politicians talking, and what an awful gargle most of them make of it: listless, uninflected, unconvincing. Recorded telemarketers sound better. Most people cannot even play themselves in public. But actors, unlike God, create men and women not in their own image.
The principal characters of the play that is being premiered are CLARA and ROBERT SCHUMANN, and a young JOHANNES BRAHMS. BRAHMS is the great surprise. To those who remember him at all, BRAHMS is the sturdy troll whose white plaster beard graced the shelves of an older generation of piano students, along with sleek Mozart and scowling Beethoven. This BRAHMS, though, is young and sexy. The details of the play need not concern us now, since it is about to begin, though one aspect of it deserves mention, because of the light it casts on the setting.
The mid-19th-century Germans, like the modern New Yorkers, were artists, with all that that implies. Artists are probably not crazier than the average person, though they dramatize it more. We will see several illicit passes, one of them caught for a sexual touchdown. Then as now, artists dabble in weirdo religions and the occult. The divine spark singes; we will see a seance. The most important trans-generational bond between artists is their sense of embattlement, and their battles with one another. THE SCHUMANNS and their friends will rail at Philistines; they will rail equally loudly against the garde that is more avant than they are, the offstage Liszt and Wagner.
What sad tics. Why spend more time than is absolutely necessary among such people? Because, sometimes, they hear and capture the most wonderful music.
The play begins.)