The
last question in the post-show talkback was “In your opinion, what
was the theme of the play?” Decent question, and one most likely
asked by matriculating theatre students of a certain,
still-in-discovery age. Usually this question gets a scatter-shot
result, with any number of audience members throwing out concepts
with reckless abandon. (“Love!” “Despair!” “You need
zombies!”)
In
this case, as stated conspicuously in the text, the protagonist's
crisis was a “loss of faith.” Decent premise, and certainly can
lead to any number of possibilities.The protagonist, a life-long
dedicated Christian, finds himself suddenly doubting the very
existence of God, the supreme peg on which he's hung his entire life,
the very nexus around which he has structured his beliefs, morals,
and prejudices. And like most inherently good people, he feels this
absence of faith is, not a flaw in the either the deity or the
religion itself, but a flaw in his own system.
The
Christian God is, by its very nature, perfect. And therefore, he
reckons, if god does not exist, or he believes the god does
not exist, the responsibility is not God’s, but most
definitely his. Guilt abounds. Uncertainty. A questioning of the
very nature of the fabric of his existence. So (based on the advice
of his friendly neighborhood pastor to “take a vacation”) off he
goes, like Don Quixote with a midwestern accent, on a quest to find .
. . he knows not what, because before this (and like many
good-hearted folk who put their lives in the hands of their deity)
he's never bothered to examine or question his own existence.
The
non-thinking blind man begins to travel. We await the awakening of
his thinking muscles. Now that hold a promise of good
theatre!
And
the more I think about the play, the more I come back to the remark I
made in the talkback, that by the end of the play, at the point of
catastrophe, just before the oh-so disappointing deus ex
rectum (when the God of Resolution is pulled from the
playwright's nether region to magically tie up the loose ends), I
believe that the protagonist had suddenly and finally found, NO, not
the answer to his question of faith, BUT, more importantly, the
direction in which he was supposed to head in order to achieve his
goal. This is the critical moment. We, the audience, can
assume, as the character begins to wake up… discover… break out
of his self-imposed modes of thinking and self-defeating
reactions, discovers his turning point, that he will
stumble along his way into the light sooner or later. In this and
many other cases, the complete answer, the protracted denouement, the
closure, is not important. Really. Anti-climactic in many
instances, I believe (yes, pun intended).
What is critical
is his breakout moment, that crest-of-the-shark’s fin of
rising action epiphany when he suddenly, surprisingly, and naturally
knee-jerks into a heretofore completely different mindset. And it
worked. The moment was honest, vital, truthful, and OMG so effin’
sexy.
And
yes, most everything had worked up until (and including) that
critical point. But the next scene, the last scene, was the wrap-up,
and I didn't buy it. Nothing up until then even indicated the
resolution the playwright presented. But there we were. Happy ending
achieved. (And as some are aware, “Happy Ending” has more than
one meaning these days. I mention this disreputable definition simply
because a copout ending is metaphorically the same.)
Anyway.
Truth. Helluva concept. Our intrepid hero seeks it, but has no idea
how to find it. His pitiful wanderings are both aimless and fruitless
because he’s never been acquainted with non-linear, instinctive,
self-directed thinking. He doesn’t understand it. It’s not a
language he can speak. So he looks for a clue, something he can
recognize, something he understands the language of. His belief in
God has deserted him, so he instinctually seeks something to replace
it. He seeks a new set of rules he can follow, something that will
give him the answers to Life. And herein lies his real problem: He
seeks to replace his panacea, and does not look at himself. He who
worships icons and subjugates himself to these idols cannot
understand being his own god. He seeks outside direction
and can’t trust his own heart. So he seeks a brand new, simple,
objectively clear answer, just like the ones he’s believed up till
now.
If
life were that easy, drama would not exist. But Truth, like the
sculpture device presented in this play, is representative.
Literalism and objectivity are useless here; what our hero needs to
unlock the door is a metaphor, a non-linear, abstract, figurative
epiphany. When one’s own language fails, Truth must communicate by
abstracts, by emotion.
Truth.
Ya know . . . it sounds great, but . . . its very nature is
a threat. It promises an objectively accurate mirror to one's own
psyche. But who really wants to see who they are? We say we
do, but frankly . . . that shit is terrifying. We spend so much
time in our heads, subconsciously building up an image we can live
with, be proud of, that just gets us through the day. Truth? Dude . .
. absolutely! No problem. Talk to me tomorrow, okay?
And
here I arrive (OMG finally) at the crux of the biscuit: truth in
playwriting. The play I recently saw upon which I base this
circuitous typing exercise was . . . well . . . the story moved, the
characters were (almost) all interesting, and the direction was
solid, imaginative, and visually stimulating. But the play itself —
the text — forsook finding the truth of the dramatic
crisis and settled for an out-of-left-field plot device to steer the
protagonist into a revelation that supposedly settled the
dramatic question. I respectfully say, “Poppycock.”
I
tell my basic playwriting students this: that a denouement does not
have to wrap things up tightly. And here is where I see what kind of
people my students are. Life, I pontificate sonorously, is a really
long and mostly boring story. Nearly every play you see is the last
part of a section of someone’s life. Could be the very last
section, in which they die. Could not be, in which case they go on.
But, in well-crafted plays, they go on changed. Irrevocably. Some
students get this in theory, others completely shut it off. For them
Truth means absolute closure; everything all tidied up with no flaps
sticking out anywhere. And this forces them into a mode of
playwriting that can easily deny the very essential truth of human
existence: that the imperfect nature of humanity denies, nay, abhors
a clean wrap-up.
So,
the poor befuddled students ask me, how do you end a play?
Truthfully,
I reply. You’ll know it when it happens. Blank looks ensue,
possibly scorn. I try again. Let the play tell you, I say.
Let the play write itself. Now the looks range from one or two quiet
“I got it” smiles to notebooks petulantly slamming closed.
Explication:
The stimulating device in the play in question was the protagonist’s
dying mother. There were three scenes featuring her, but her element
was never truly utilized. Her illness never had the emotional weight
to sway our intrepid yet quixotic hero into seeking the truth of his
own dilemma. No interaction, no action at all, really, between
near-catatonic Mom and our intrepid hero. No, it is not our job to
assume what he felt, how he was affected. How did he feel about her?
All we ever saw of her was her death. That wasn’t special; mothers
die all the time. Yes, it’s tragic, but without seeing the
relationship itself how can we judge the effect of the passing? Did
he love her? Was there a long-standing resentment? We don’t know.
So her passing could not sway us to understand his final decision.
He
says he suddenly no longer believes in God; fair enough. What does he
do to rectify that dilemma? Does he seek spiritual answers in a quest
for religious truth? No, he gets drunk, does drugs, falls in with
ne’er-do-wells, and tries to learn sculpting. While on this hejira
he deserts his wife (a cipher in the play; does she have a
personality? We never find out. She is the true Stepford wife,
dutiful, and nearly without identity/dialogue), leaves his dying
mother to slowly fade away, and abandons both his daughters, only one
of whom will have anything to do with him (another issue raised but
never examined). But hey ... the mother's death brings him home,
instills cosmological hope, and makes him beg for the love of his
wife. Ooooo-kay.
Truth.
It doesn't happen here. Not in this play. It comes sooooo close, then
diverges at the 1:54 mark. A breakthrough—a true
breakthrough--happens and then the play leads, no it LEAPS, to
something that should have taken another 43 minutes to get to. Truth
is the biggest demon for a storyteller.
The
protagonist was not searching for his lost faith in God. That was
his symptom. In any journey story, heroes travel through
discoveries, and almost inevitably the greatest discovery is the one
where the hero realizes that his/her original crisis was a symptom of
a different problem. In this case his loss of faith in God is really
a questioning of his entire life, a midlife crisis, a creeping sense
of the fruitlessness of one's avocation, marriage, beliefs. The
approach to and the inevitable realization of the truth of the
matter: What the Fuck Am I Doing? How the Fuck Did I Get Here? What
the Fuck Do I Do Now???
Taken
generically, midlife crises are mundane. Boring. Dime a dozen. Its
not his dilemma; It’s how our hero attempts to solve his dilemma
that makes him interesting. Whether he does or doesn’t is
essentially immaterial; it’s his choices along the way that tell
the story, show who he is, and keep our interest. Truth is in the
action.
Truth,
like the sculpture that was produced by our regretful, sorrowful,
emotionally traumatized protagonist at the top-of-the-shark-fin
catastrophic moment, is not objective but representational. It shows
a unique glimpse of a thing beyond true representation, beyond
diagramming. We get a slim slice of a vision of the nature of grief,
the simple yet earth-shaking nature of the ache in our hearts.
Essential truth doesn't come in a chaptered book full of answers and
step-by-step solutions. It comes as images, fleeting moments,
epiphanies, subjective representations that speak the language for
which there is no verbal equivalent, where emotions like love, joy,
fear, and despair dwell. We’re not even sure our hero gets it all
himself, but his breakthrough comes as he finally understands how to
express himself representationally, instead of trying to replicate a
moment precisely and accurately. Instead he learns that life and love
and pain are instances, indescribables, non-diagrammable, unable to
be boxed and labeled. His breakthough, where he finally looks into
himself and sees his agony, comes in the form of a twisted clay
figure that reaches to the sky, its head thrown back, and is so
simple, so open, so honest, that it could have been done by a
third-grader.
