Mac Wellman

[About a year ago, the New York Times published an article about playwright Mac Wellman (Antigone, 2004; Second-Hand Smoke, 1997; The Hyacinth Macaw, 1994; A Murder of Crows, 1992) as a teacher at Brooklyn College.  His teaching techniques and his tutorial points about playwriting are very reminiscent of his own writing—not just in his play scripts, but also in his essays about theater. 

[I‘ve seen three of Wellman’s plays (Sincerity Forever, 1990; Hyacinth Macaw; Energumen, 1985) and an anti-Iraq war collage called Collateral Damage to which Wellman contributed in 1991.  (I posted a brief report on Energumen in “I’m So Confused . . . !” on 4 July 2012,  Unhappily, there’s no report on Hyacinth Macaw.)  As part of my research on Leonardo Shapiro, the founder and director of The Shaliko Company on whom I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater, I looked into another Wellman play, Whirligig, which Shaliko commissioned.  For that same research, I also read Wellman’s wonderful—but idiosyncratic—essay “A Chrestomathy Of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater,” published originally in Yale School of Drama’s Theater magazine (Vol.  24, No. 1, 1993).

[So I’m going to republish “A Mentor Whose Only Mantra Is Oddity” by Alexis Soloski below and then close this post with my description of Whirligig.  I hope you all will find both (or at least one, please) interesting.}

“A MENTOR WHOSE ONLY MANTRA IS ODDITY”

by Alexis Soloski

[This article first appeared in print in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 18 February 2015.]

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Mac Wellman, the Donald I. Fine Distinguished Professor of Play Writing, sat at the head of a table in a Brooklyn College classroom. It was the first meeting of the semester, and he needed to arrange tutorials with his graduate students. He asked them to draw up a plan for the term’s work: something small, something secret. “Pick something you’re a little afraid of,” he advised in his gentle, raspy tenor.

“Pick something that scares you. Plays that are covered in fur, for instance.”

Since Mr. Wellman joined the Brooklyn College faculty in 1998, he has trained many of New York’s wildest and woolliest playwrights. Annie Baker, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for “The Flick,” studied with him. So did Young Jean Lee, Thomas Bradshaw, Tina Satter and members of Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the National Theater of the United States of America.

This winter and spring [i.e., 2015], JACK, a theater space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, is devoting much of its season to recent graduates of the program. The festival is called Damnable Scribbling, a nod to Mr. Wellman’s favored appellation, the one that graces his website: Damnable Scribbler.

There are other places to study playwriting, of course. And other professors to study it with. No one sniffs at a master of fine arts degree from New York University, a certificate in playwriting from Juilliard. But Mr. Wellman’s program has the distinction of turning out audacious writers with very little in common with him or with one another. Try to find the overlap of Ms. Baker’s empathetic neorealism and Mr. Bradshaw’s scabrous provocations. Look for the intersection between Ms. Lee’s canny deconstructions of identity politics and Sibyl Kempson’s rapturous nonsense. Keep looking.

Mr. Wellman, 69, came to playwriting accidentally. As he explained over a glass of rosé at a cafe near his Park Slope apartment, he was hitchhiking in the Netherlands during a junior year abroad when the Dutch director Annemarie Prins happened to give him a ride. He gave her a few of his poems, and she asked him if he had ever considered writing plays. “No,” he told her. “I don’t like plays.” But she persisted, and he obliged her, writing plays for Dutch radio.

In his own estimation, his early poetical plays “were really pretty awful.” It took him a decade of constant theatergoing and constant practice to learn how to write. Since then, he has won three Obies and numerous grants and awards and has completed more than 80 plays, some epic and one only a single word long (“Psychopannychy”). He has written history plays, mystery plays, biographical plays, political plays, science fiction plays and plays composed of gleefully bad grammar.

He loathes what he calls “the theater of the already known” — the predictable, the formulaic, the tasteful, the complacent. As a consequence, his work is strange. He favors, as an article in the journal Postmodern Culture suggested, “wrongness, ceremony and a bit of demonism.”

There’s an exacting attention to language — every sentence, every word, every syllable — that would seem exhausting if the works weren’t so mischievous, so exultant, so fun. (He signed a scheduling email, “See you tamale!” This was not a case of autocorrect.) And he’s fond of impossible stage directions like “something strange happens” or “a furry pause.”

To Mr. Wellman’s annoyance and delight, his students tend to treat him as a cross between a favorite uncle and a minor deity. He teases them, mispronouncing their names or kidding them when they turn serious, but when he offers one of his playwriting koans — “The theater is a very strange and elusive thing to do,” he told his seminar participants — they reach for their notebooks.

Mr. Wellman and his colleague Erin Courtney, who graduated from the program in 2003, design an individual curriculum for each student. They’ll assign readings in philosophy, poetry, structural anthropology, nonsense or an early American novel about a murderous ventriloquist.

Ms. Kempson, who graduated from the program in 2007, wrote in an email: “He taught me that we have the right to read whatever the hell we want, and write whatever the hell we want, whether we’re smart, dumb, worthy, irresponsible, interesting, boring, pious, satanic or confused, and whether we ‘get it’ or not. And he’s right.”

He asks students to write bad plays, to write plays with their nondominant hands, to write a play that takes five hours to perform and covers a period of seven years. Ms. Satter recalled an exercise in which she had to write a play in a language she barely knew.

“I wrote mine in extremely limited Russian,” she wrote in an email. “Then we translated them back into English and read them aloud. The results were these oddly clarified, quiveringly bizarre mini-gems.”

Mr. Wellman explained: “I’m not trying to teach them how to write a play. I’m trying to teach them to think about what kind of play they want to write.”

Alec Duffy, the artistic director of JACK, enthusiastically described the work that emerges from the program as “plays that don’t really behave like plays, plays that feature an adventure in form.”

Mr. Bradshaw, who graduated in 2004, said in an email that Mr. Wellman is “an expert at helping you unlock your mind.”

“He’s not interested in getting you to write like him,” he added. “He never attempts to force a particular aesthetic down your throat. He wants everything that’s unique about you to emerge on the page.”

And once that singular voice emerges, Mr. Wellman will champion it. He follows the careers of his current and former students avidly. He mentioned a dozen or so in the course of an hourlong conversation. Then he sent a follow-up email mentioning more. Then a second email. Then a third. Then a fourth. At the end of the last one, he wrote that he loses sleep worrying about all the writers who haven’t yet received “the attention they deserve!”

Mr. Wellman’s own work no longer receives the attention it once did, although he’s still writing plays, as well as poetry, novels and opera librettos. He’d like to see these new works staged, though he worries about taking opportunities away from young writers like his students.

“I’ve had a lot of productions,” he said as he finished his wine. “I would like to have more. But if it means somebody I think highly of can’t get a production, I don’t need it.”

[Alexis Soloski is a contributor to the New York Times and the theater review-writer for the U.S. edition of The Guardian.  She’’s a reviewer former  for the Village Voice, and a writer for American Theater and Capitol New York. She’s a lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University.]

*  *  *  *

WHIRLIGIG (1989)

[I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater about Leonardo Shapiro and his work with The Shaliko Company, his East Village experimental theater company.  While the company began reimagining classic plays (Children of the Gods, based on several Greek tragedies; Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts; and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, included in the first part of my “Faust Clones,” posted on 15 January 2016) and ended with company-built pieces (Strangers, examined in “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 March 2014; The Yellow House; Mystery History Bouffe Goof), in between Shaliko commissioned works by contemporary playwrights.   In the spring of 1989, Shapiro staged Whirligig by Mac Wellman at the Cooper Square Theatre in New York City (producer:  MaryEllen Kernaghan, music:  Charlie Morrow, set designer:  Kyle Chepulis, scenic artist:  Polly Walker, cast:  Geza Kovacs – Man, Cecil MacKinnon – Sister, Elena Nicholas [Prischepenko] – Girl, Michael Preston – Bus Man, Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann – Girl Huns).  The play premièred from 5 April to 7 May 1989, right after Doctor Faustus.  From my research on Shapiro and Shaliko, I compiled a brief examination of this sci-fi-based play.]

From the demons of Hell in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shaliko shifted to demons from space in Whirligig, commissioned from Mac Wellman in 1989.  Described by photographer and writer Allen Frame in a Bomb interview of Shapiro as “William Inge meets Rod Serling meets The Three Stooges,” Shaliko’s Whirligig was a display of pyrotechnical language and sight gags featuring a green-haired runaway girl at a bus station (Elena Nicholas) who meets a metallic spaceman (Geza Kovacs).  Visiting Earth to discover why we are so happy, the Man, known as a Weird, had escaped a marauding band of female space warriors, the Girl Huns (Cathy Biro and Tess Kahmann), and the Girl had run away from her goody-goody, materialistic sister (Cecil MacKinnon).  Alisa Solomon characterized the play in the Village Voice as Wellman’s “wry look at our hopeful fascination with the final frontier.” 

Not that the plot was so easy to follow, or so significant to begin with.  (The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold disparaged it as “nonsense . . . like having the first act of The Tempest suddenly followed by two reels of a schlocky Cinecittà flck about women warriors.”  The Show Business reviewer, Martin Blake, dubbed the plot “whimsical” but “at times unfocused.”)  It was Wellman’s language and the political satire, biting if sometimes obscure, that drove this production.  As James Rasenberger wrote in City Paper: “As a respected poet, Wellman understandably delights in linguistic trickery: his characters speak with twisted eloquence, turning the American idiom inside out and upside down.”  Calling the play’s language “an amazement,” Martin Blake insisted that Wellman “is a poet of formidable power and biting wit,” asserting, “Poets can make great playwrights if they pay as much attention to form and structure as they do words”—though I’m not convinced that Wellman would buy the caveat.

Like all Shaliko work, Whirligig is political—the bus stop in the middle of nowhere is Wellman’s stand-in for a fascist universe.  When the Girl describes her sister, she is describing Wellman’s idea of the American middle class:

This is my good sister, Jennifer.

Jennifer, meet Xuphus.  Xuphus meet

Jennifer.  Jennifer is a normal American

cunt.  She can’t stand the idea someone

might not want to be like her.  She hates

anybody is different, or looks different,

or aspires to strange gods.  She thinks

the Arabs should unilaterally accept UN

resolution 242.  She thinks South Africa

is America’s best friend in Africa.  She

believes in god, Somoza, Swaggart and Margaret

Thatcher.  Look at her, Xuphus, she’s a closet

religious maniac who wants to be reborn so

badly she’d blow the world up gladly.  Pleasure

is lost on her, simple fun means nothing to her.

Human life horrifies her unless it’s a famine

on TV that reminds her how much America is not doing. . . .

Further on, in a speech by the Man, Wellman evoked what is clearly his vision of the rules governing American society:

God curse those who do what is

Forbidden.  And chief among the things

which are forbidden are the combing of hair

not our way, the eating of food not to our

taste, the enactment of dramatic scenes not

to our liking, and the rubbing out of our

very being, when we have merely been

engaged in the working out of our destiny,

as described in the Big Book of Tlooth,

who you may not reckon as amounting to

a pot of piss compared to your god

Tengri, but I assure you it is not so,

because Tlooth [. . .]

is called Tlooth for good reason.  For Tlooth

is truth made manifest and angelic and eternal.

And the truth is eternal, that is why it is

called truth [. . .].

Politics aside, Whirligig was also a very physical play like much of Shaliko’s work.  The small cast included Cecil MacKinnon and Michael Preston, veteran circus performers, and Wellman created a piece for this group.  The playwright had actually been working on something very different when Shapiro told him Shaliko had gotten a grant to commission a play from Wellman. 

I met with Leo’s company, which at that time consisted of the two women, Cecil and Elena, and basically talked with them about what they wanted to do—what sort of theater they liked to do—and tried to figure out a play that . . . .  Both of them were fairly interested in physical theater.  Cecil in particular: she has a background in clown work.  So I tried to figure out something that would do that and then also allow me to do what I wanted to do with language.  And we worked on it, and the result was Whirligig.

The production was also loaded with special effects—low tech, though they may have been.  A body, for example, manages to turn up repeatedly and inexplicably in bus station lockers—among other sight gags.  Show Business’s Blake characterized the FX as “remarkable, featuring an outerspace ride to rival the Hayden Planetariums’ [sic] splashiest shows.”

With a backdrop painted by artist Polly Walker and real bus station lockers designer Kyle Chepulis found somewhere, the production ended with what City Paper reviewer called “one of the most transporting theatrical sights I’ve ever seen.”  In an interview I did with the director in 1992, Shapiro described that moment as we looked through some production photos:

The end of that show—you can’t see it, the pictures don’t show it because it was so dark . . . .  The Ride of the Valkyrie thing was done . . . .  The backdrop, you see, is these stars which are—I don’t remember what they are.  I don’t know if there were holes in the canvas or light bulbs.  I think they were light bulbs.  Anyway, at the end what I did was, I had a strobe go off and over the whole set we dropped black, velvet drops—covered the whole set.  The set disappeared [. . .] and they were covered with stars cut out of glow-tape.  And we had hit them with two strobe flashes so that it lit them as stars for five minutes.  And the last scene took five or six minutes and it was done totally in the dark with these stars, and it was totally illusionistic.  Nobody had any idea how we created this.  Nobody would have guessed it was glow-tape— something so low-tech.  And they did their choreography . . . .  They had helmets that were made out of plexiglass with tubes that had light-emitting diodes in them so their antler-things were lit.  And there was a little light on their eyes that was made by a little, tiny flashlight inside the helmet.  So their faces were lit and their antlers were lit but you couldn’t see their bodies at all.  And they’re in this infinite black and their riding horses.  [. . . .]  And the horses’ heads were hollow and they had a light inside—a colored light—and they were made by Polly.  So you could see the glowing horses’ heads and the faces and the antlers, and they’re doing this sort of riding choreography.  But they’re floating in space.  One is on a chair and one is down and low, and you can’t tell where they are, and so there’s an illusion of infinite space with these things.  It was really beautiful, but it doesn’t show up in any photographs or video because there’s literally no light.  There’s no light that goes out of anything.

           

The press, however, showed little interest.  Frame felt  that Shaliko’s Whirligig, a “highly original satire of the American scene,” was “a sleeper” that had been “underrated by critics.”  The playwright thought that had Whirligig been delayed until the fall of 1989, after he had done Bad Penny in Central Park, Whirligig would have attracted much more press attention.  After liking his first play, Wellman contended, the New York Times “didn’t like a couple of things, then they wouldn’t review me for four years during which time I did Whirligig.”  After Bad Penny, however, Wellman’s work had gotten good coverage. 

Those reviewers who did come, including Feingold of the Voice, mostly conceded that they did not understand the play, but some enjoyed the theatrics anyway; Feingold was not among these last, though Wellman recalled that other Voice critics—Erika Munk and Alisa Solomon—liked the production but did not publish full reviews.  Solomon published a capsule notice in the “Voice Choices” section of the paper in which she described the production as “[b]ending language like blues guitarists bend notes.”  In his notice, Feingold declared that “Whirligig, like earlier acts of Wellmania. rapidly reduces itself to repetitive trash entertainment, in this case the comic-book scit-fi kind.”  The play, lamented the Voice reviewer, “could have been developed into something witty, scathing, painfully true.” 

In City Paper, James Rasenberger affirmed that “the play fully lives up to its title: its plot is convoluted, its meanings obscure—Whirligig is dizzying.”  The reviewer continued, “But this is not the kind of stupefying experimental theatre that leaves one feeling numb.  You may not ‘get’ Whirligig—I sure didn’t—but it is so entertaining and electrifying that it doesn’t matter.”  In TheaterWeek, Neal E. O’Hara wrote that “boy is my head spinning” and reported that once MacKinnon’s Jennifer “arrives on the scene, the dramaturgical fireworks ignite.  And it’s not even the Fourth of July.”

Show Business’s Blake asserted that Whirligig succeeded “mostly because of [Wellman’s] masterful and imaginative use of language.”  He specified: “His monologues are not merely emotional episodes or opportunities for  character development, but twisters of words that fill the theater and set the atmosphere.”  The trade weekly’s review-writer pronounced, “The audience is hypnotized . . . .”  Comparing Whirligig with the work of Twilight Zone’s Serling, “whose influence is palpable,” Blake applauded how well, through Shapiro’s direction and design, the play “communicates a marvelous creepiness.” 

[My quotations from Whirligig were taken from the unpublished text used in the 1989 Shaliko production, but Wellman’s play was published in 1989 by the Theatre Communications Group as part of its Plays in Process series and subsequently in The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).]

“I’m So Confused . . . !”

[In my recent ROT report on John Patrick Shanley’s Storefront Church (published on 16 June), I commented on three performances I’d seen in the past where I couldn’t really understand what the writers were trying to say. In the Shanley report, I said, “Sometimes I’m just not the optimum audience for the material; sometimes, I’m just not in a very receptive frame of mind (or I’m plain obtuse) and I miss it all; and sometimes the production just doesn’t work for me.” I named three shows that fit the circumstances I specified, and I’ve decided to post those two reviews and one performance report on ROT, mostly as curiosities but also as examples of one way to handle covering plays a reporter or reviewer doesn’t fully comprehend.]

THE RUG OF IDENTITY

[The first review, The Rug of Identity by Jill W. Fleming, staged at the Village Theatre, was part of my column entitled "Family Problems" in the New York Native on 15 May 1989. (I would have seen the show a few weeks earlier.) I was assigned to cover the performance, but as soon as it began, I realized that I was not the intended audience for this material. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable writing a critical appraisal of the play, so I acknowledged my position and tried to describe my experience and allow the readers to form their own opinions of the production.]

It’s hard to know what to say about Jill W. Fleming’s Rug of Identity, not because it is innately bad or even badly played, but because its intentions are so confounding. Though I’m possibly not the best judge of this material, it may very well mean something more to committed feminists or lesbians—however, I have doubts about that; Rug isn’t a play for, say, the WOW Café [RICK: Women’s One World, a lesbian venue]. Perhaps if I try to summarize the plot, you can draw your own conclusions.

On “Death Row” a half hour before her hanging, Mona (Yvonne Clifford), a convicted murderer, receives a visit from her daughter, Joanna (Deborah Wren), a writer of thrillers. Since she has not seen her daughter for a long time, Mona reveals, rather matter-of-factly, two startling facts about Joanna’s life, pulling the “rug of identity” out from under her feet. First, the murder for which Mona has been convicted is not her first. She is a hired assassin for women who have been dumped on in life. In fact, Joanna’s stories, which she heard as a child from her mother, were accounts of Mona’s jobs.

Joanna’s second discovery is that she was not conceived by artificial insemination, but is the product of an anonymous quickie in the “Gents’” (the play is British) at Charing Cross Station. Never having known she actually had a father, Joanna determines to find him. Mona, however, wants her daughter to write her, Mona’s, story and sends her to find the client who turned her in, a woman who wears around her neck “the middle finger of a left hand rolled in gold.”

In her search for her identity, both sexual and familial, and her mother’s betrayer, Joanna moves in with a friend, Laurie Proctor (Anne Capron), whose mother (Joyce Sozen) isn’t sure whether she wants to be a man or a woman—she has been saving for a sex-change—and is clearly not welcome in Laurie’s life. Mrs. Proctor’s confused sexuality is an extreme counterpart of that of Joanna, an avowed but unconsummated lesbian; Mona, a heterosexual who doesn’t like men and has fallen in love with her female jailer; and Laurie, ostensibly straight, but after one night of passion with Joanna is so fulfilled she is ready to become her slave. The final scene, in the Charing Cross “Gents’,” provides a confrontation of Mona’s ghost with her betrayer and Joanna with her father. Gender identities and affiliations have shifted several times and promise to shift more after the play ends.

There is some humor pervading all this—a kind of attenuated, sexually explicit Tracey Ullman sketch. An example is Mona’s remark to Joanna, “I’ve always known you had a limited imagination. You had trouble with Tampax as a teenager.” Also, for reasons unclear to me, director Pat Golden has the sound effects—ringing phones, slamming doors, creaking prison gates—spoken by the actors while they mime the doors and gates (the phones are real).

While the performances and the direction all seem competent and, even, apt, I wonder why Rug has been brought from England, where it apparently received good notices. The production, in the style of conventional farce, isn’t outrageous enough to be theatrically dynamic, and the script, with all its variations on the theme of confused sexuality and lost identity, seems to have forgotten its point in its search for comedy. I’m sure a good, funny play could be constructed around gender confusion and the search for identity, but, from my perspective, The Rug of Identity isn’t it.

THE CEZANNE SYNDROME

[The second play I mentioned in the Storefront Church report was The Cezanne Syndrome by Normand Canac-Marquis, produced by Soho Rep at Greenwich House in the West Village. This was a relatively conventional play, certainly by comparison to Rug of Identity, but I still couldn’t grasp the writer’s point. I see this as an instance of my just not being tuned into the playwright’s mindset. This assessment was part of the column "Drinking & Driving" in the New York Native on 13 February 1989.]

As part of its New Wave of Québec Festival, a series of French Canadian works, Soho Rep is presenting the U.S. premiere of Normand Canac-Marquis’s The Cezanne Syndrome, translated by Louison Danis. In keeping with Soho Rep’s tradition, the play is anything but a straightforward narrative and is not easy to follow or interpret. The events, characters and even time-line fold back on themselves as the play progresses through flashbacks, dreams and imaginings.

The Cezanne Syndrome, directed by Liz Diamond, purports to be about an auto mechanic, Gilbert (David Strathairn), whose common-law wife, Suzanne (Caris Corfman), and infant son have been killed in a car accident which Thomas Wancicovski (Edward Baran) of the Quebec provincial police is investigating. The play takes place in Gilbert’s kitchen, where he does his auto repair work on the table and counter tops, and in Wancicovski’s office, where a graphic of the accident scene is painted on the wall like a Pentagon situation map. The kitchen is a cluttered, realistic set whose back wall is a scrim behind which is Wancicovski’s giant map.

When the play opens, Gilbert, working with a blowtorch on a car fender, begins talking, first to himself in an extended, somewhat self-conscious monologue, then to a disembodied female voice coming over a loudspeaker, and finally to a voice over a telephone which is still on the hook. He seems disturbed and to want to be left alone, but it is not clear why. When Suzanne first appears, it is as if from nowhere; the kitchen has no visible entrances. Their conversation—really an argument—ranges, in a strained, formal language that sounds artificial, from topic to topic without apparent logic. There is an obsession with cigarettes and smoking and Gilbert constantly tips his cigarette ashes on his knee. The subject of cigarettes returns again and again, and though I thought I had figured out its significance at one point, I determined finally that I hadn’t.

During this conversation, both Gilbert and Suzanne talk to their child, who is apparently present but invisible to the audience. Not until the first scene of the policeman at his map does it become clear that both Suzanne and the child are dead. From this point on, the details of the accident are revealed bit by bit, along with selected details of the strange, obsessive lives of Gilbert and Suzanne. Finally, Canac-Marquis presents a revelation that, rather than making the play clear, piles on more questions.

Over the 75-minute performance, I reinterpreted the play and pieced together its convoluted logic no less than three separate times. In the end, however, I was not only wrong, but was left with insufficient clues to decipher the experience. Other spectators seemed equally puzzled, and I noticed one or two leaving before the end. Soho Rep does not do theater for the masses.

[A word about the reviews above: the Native, a gay-oriented weekly newspaper in New York City, commonly ran columns by writers like me, stringers, containing reviews of two performances. I’ve excised the companion piece in each case here as those reviews were unconnected to the ones I want to revisit. The curious can find the archived copies of the paper in a library and look up the columns to see what other play I covered that week. My editor was Terry Helbing, who had run a theater in Chelsea in the 1970s when I was trying to break into acting. (I knew who Terry was, but didn’t actually know him. I never acted at his theater, though I auditioned there the same way I did at scores of other little theaters in those years.) He made the reviewing assignments without regard to the reviewer’s potential connection to the material.]

ENERGUMEN

[At the end of the period when I was taking graduate courses at NYU, I worked with a former teacher who was hoping to form a playwrights’ theater run by dramaturgs. The new company would focus on new plays from the U.S. and the U.K., with facilities and staff in both New York City and London to make exchanges of scripts, productions, and talent, possible. (An early name considered was Theatre Exchange, but I believe someone else was already using that.) Theatre Junction, known among the incipient staff as TJ, never launched (money, don’t you know), but while my former teacher, the founder and artistic director, was exploring all possibilities, she often asked me to scout out performances, performers (I saw Danitra Vance do stand-up before she hit SNL), scripts (I spent months tracking down the English translation and the stage adaption of an Israeli novella by the only Nobel laureate in literature who wrote in Hebrew, S. Y. Agnon) and writers (lots of readings, staged and otherwise). Working from a tip, which was typical, my boss asked me to cover what we thought was a reading but turned out to be a showcase production of Energumen by Mac Wellman presented by Soho Rep at an auditorium at Bellevue Hospital. (I had a bit of a time finding the place. The troupe had lost its original home in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan and was wandering in the wilderness, not for 40 years but long enough.) I saw Energumen, the first Wellman play I’d ever seen, on 29 March 1985, and couldn’t make head or tails of it. I’d heard of the playwright, an important emerging theater writer at the time, but the play confounded me totally. I confessed my confusion in my memo, and I present it here as an example of an attempt to report on a play the viewer can’t really sort out.. (Please remember that this report was never intended for public consumption—just my boss. You’ll notice that I’m a little more direct—ummm . . . honest?—than in a conventional review, or even an ROT report.)]

This was not a reading as you thought, but a fully mounted showcase production. That means, of course, that any production by TJ would be a revival, not an original. In my estimation, that's no loss.

Giving a plot synopsis would be both difficult and fruitless. The story has to do with the attempt by two "deprogrammers" to take a young woman away from the religious cult called The Seat of Bliss and Perfect Understanding run by a phony guru named The Master of Many Perfections. The problem is that the man who hired them, claiming to be the young woman's father, isn't, the guru is a former computer genius and an old friend of one of the deprogrammers, and the girl is really a communist revolutionary. That's the best I can do—the rest is either too convoluted or too silly to relate.

My feeling is that this is puerile inanity masquerading as high art. The only two moments of any theatrical interest to me were a brief bit in which four Santa Clauses (!) sang "The Internationale" and a recorded bit of a dog barking "Jingle Bells." In a production of only an hour and a quarter, this was precious little to keep my interest—and it didn't. In this case, 1¼ hours was far too long, and I kept looking at my watch hoping I could get out soon. If there had been an intermission, I'd have left at it. Soho Rep was smart not to schedule one.

Just to be complete about this, the best I could do with the theme is that Wellman is somehow saying that the following are really all the same: communism, revolution, Santa Claus (possibly the Volunteers of America), demonic possession, intrigue (poli¬tical, diplomatic and industrial), capitalism, government(s), religion(s), cults, business, and the establishment. The "ener¬gumen" of the title, as the program points out, means "A fanatical enthusiast," referring, I presume, to the relation of the characters to the things on my list. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, they were neither "fanatical" nor "enthusi¬astic." I got the feeling that none of the actors could really get up a head of steam for this nonsense. I don't blame them.

I heard members of the audience deploring the show in very explicit terms as we exited. Betty Osborne, Jim Leverett [RICK: staffers at the time at the Theatre Communications Group] and Robert Blacker from La Jolla [RICK: dramaturg of California’s La Jolla Playhouse at the time] were there if you want additional reactions. (I didn't ask them what they thought; I just said goodbye and came home.)