[Frequent ROT guest-blogger Kirk Woodward this time contributes a rumination on the
dramaturgy of Mississippi-born playwright Beth Henley, focusing in particular
on her 2007 play, Ridiculous Fraud. Aside from a discussion of the play itself,
which Kirk believes is underappreciated by critics and theater artists alike,
Kirk, a playwright himself and a native of Louisville, Kentucky, also examines what
it means to be a “Southern playwright.” As
I usually promise in my prefaces to Kirk’s ROT postings, I know you’ll find his remarks informative and provocative. ~Rick]
Some time ago I was invited to write an article about the
playwright Beth Henley (born in 1952). The project never got past the draft
stage, but it did introduce me to Henley’s plays. In particular, it introduced
me to a play I think deserves more attention than it’s gotten, so I’m going to
do my bit for it here.
Beth Henley was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1952. She
is often referred to as a “Southern playwright.” Most, but not all, of Henley’s
plays are set in the South, including the majority of works in her two volumes
of Collected Plays, and two later plays, Ridiculous
Fraud (2007) and The Jacksonian
(2013). (Her most recent play, Laugh,
first produced in 2014 and scheduled for its premiere by the Studio Theatre of
Washington, D.C., in March 2015, seems not to be specifically related to the
South.) Her best known plays, both of which have been turned into movies, are Crimes of the Heart (1978) and The Miss Firecracker Contest (1984),
both, again, set in the South.
I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and when I
was growing up, the idea of “regional playwriting” interested me. How would a
play that reflected, say, life in Louisville differ from any other play, other
than in its setting? That’s not to say that there was much regional drama
around to experience at the time. Kermit Hunter (1910-2001) wrote one of his
“symphonic dramas,” Bound for Kentucky
(1961) for the city of Louisville, but it wasn’t a success. My father admired
and introduced me to Marc Connelly’s The
Green Pastures (1930), a lovely play that tells the story of the Old
Testament in what would then have been called Negro dialect – but Connelly was
from Pennsylvania, and for decades Pastures
has been impractical to mount, so I (and most people today) have never seen it.
As for Tennessee Williams, he was only a slightly disreputable name to me while
I was growing up.
Today the situation has changed, and the South in particular
is associated with a number of playwrights. Williams, Horton Foote (a Texan,
actually), and Marsha Norman (from Louisville, Kentucky) come to mind; another is Beth Henley. What does it mean, exactly, to
be a “Southern” playwright? We can try to answer that question while looking at
Henley’s play Ridiculous Fraud, both
because it provides a good basis for a discussion of what makes a play “regional,”
and because I think it’s a worthwhile play, much more interesting and worthy of
production than one would guess from its history and, in general, reviews.
About the play: Ridiculous
Fraud takes place in Louisiana. Its action moves from the family home in
New Orleans, to a farmhouse in the backwoods, to a cabin deep in the swamp,
hidden from civilization, and then, at the end, back to New Orleans, not to the
crowded part of the city but to a cemetery. The plot of the play is a little
complicated. In Act One Scene One, which takes place in the summertime, the
Clay family, including brothers Andrew and Kap; Andrew’s wife, Willow; and
their uncle, Baites (who has picked up Georgia, a one-legged homeless woman,
that same day) are reacting to the collapse of the wedding of the youngest
brother, Lefcad, who ran away before the ceremony. Lefcad turns up, and, scared
that he’ll get beaten to a pulp for his cowardice, runs away again. Scene Two,
set in the fall, finds Lefcad hiding out in his uncle Baites’s cabin,
surrounded by plenty of other family turmoil: Willow is having an affair,
Baites’s girlfriend seems to be robbing him, and nobody likes Andrew.
Act Two Scene One finds the family still deeper in the
woods, in Kap’s cabin. Georgia has
left Baites. Kap and Andrew taunt him about it,
Andrew accidentally stabs Lefcad with an arrow and has a fistfight with Kap,
who also gets his face cut with a knife by Willow’s father. In Scene Two the
family, gathered at its cemetery plot after the death of the brothers’ father,
finds that Georgia has returned to Baites, Willow’s affair is over, Andrew has
learned a bit of humility, and the brothers seem more determined to tolerate
each other. Even Lefcad seems to be in a better mood.
I wonder how this plot summary will strike someone reading
about the play for the first time. Obviously I’m leaving out many details, but
my description probably makes it clear why Henley’s plays are sometimes
described as “gothic,” which can be critical shorthand for “violent.” I hope my
summary also gives an idea of the complexity of the story and the importance of
the relationships in it. What I can’t summarize quickly is the quality of the
experience of the play, so I’ll try to describe that.
First, though, about the history of Ridiculous Fraud: It was first performed at the McCarter Theater in
Princeton, New Jersey, from May 5 through June 11, 2006. Later that same year,
in November, it was performed in Costa Mesa, California. I haven’t found
evidence of any other productions of the play, and the reviews for these two
were mixed to poor, including the New
York Times, where Charles Isherwood called it “confused… all cracks and
precious little comedy” (May 16, 2006). On the other hand, Naomi Siegel (in the
Sunday Times) did call it “splendidly
acted and directed . . . an affirmation of Family with a capital F” (May 21,
2006). Similarly divided reviews greeted the Costa Mesa, California,
production, and in general the play’s reception seems to have been grim. Emily
Mann, the Artistic Director of the McCarter Theatre, wrote me in an email: “I
think Beth is an authentic southern voice and except for a couple of her plays,
northerners don’t get it. I love this play . . . It was in some ways a rocky
first production with some cast problems so I think we would have gotten much
further with the production if that had not been true.”
I haven’t seen the play in performance. Just from reading
it, though, I feel it more than deserves a further look. I find the elements of
the play both interesting and deeply dramatic.
First, something about the title. I’m not certain it’s
appropriate, although Fraud does
include an element of literal fraud – the unseen father of the family has gone
to jail for it. There are definitely metaphorical elements of fraud – that is,
deception or self-deception – in the actions of the three brothers, Lefcad,
Andrew, and Kap, whose lives form the center of the drama. What I’m not sure
about is how the term “ridiculous” applies to the mounting complexity of the
relationships of the three brothers and their wives and in-laws, as they
attempt to navigate their unfortunate family dynamics that drive them, both
symbolically and literally, deeper and deeper into a dark woods, and ultimately
to a cemetery, possibly the loneliest setting of all. The characters have
ridiculous aspects to them, I suppose; but they and the play are by no means
silly.
Where does Ridiculous
Fraud fit in the realm of dramaturgy? For any Southern playwright,
comparisons with Tennessee Williams are inevitable; we seem to hear the
cadences of Williams’ dialogue, for example, in this speech from another of
Henley’s plays, Lucky Spot:
An extravaganza! This was supposed
to be an extravaganza! Instead it’s a farce, it’s a flop. A dream so shattered
I can’t even remember what the pieces are.
But Ridiculous Fraud
brings one earlier playwright in particular to mind. It’s not the one I think
of in connection with Henley’s better known plays Crimes of the Heart and The
Miss Firecracker Contest. Those both tell a more or less straightforward
story, in the course of which at least one major secret is revealed. That’s a
pattern of drama associated with the later “social” plays of the Norwegian
playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), and an extremely influential pattern in
drama today – a climax in which something deeply hidden comes to light. This
kind of dramatic device has been central to Western drama at least since the
social plays of Ibsen were first performed; it informs the plays of writers as
different as Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward, and of course is a staple of television
drama as well.
Secrets are also revealed in Fraud, but not in the sense of startling revelation as much as of a
developing understanding of the characters, as the action of the play carries
them increasingly further into the murky places of personality. Secrets imply
history, and the South is a land tightly linked to history, retaining memories
of its formative years, of the Civil War, and of the period following that
stretches all the way to today. Much of the resonance of Henley’s plays comes from
a sense that history exists in close relationship with the present.
The playwright that Ridiculous
Fraud brings primarily to mind is the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov
(1860-1904). The form of Fraud is
Chekhovian – definitely an American version of it, but still, like many of
Chekhov’s mature plays, a family portrait, in which the events of the play do
not overshadow the significance of the family unit itself, including the
family’s comic elements and its inability to advance itself in the way it feels
it ought.
The Chekhovian tone in Fraud
is unmistakable:
I can’t believe I’ve lied to him.
My own brother. Everything’s falling apart. I’ve been lying. I’m not a liar; so
it’s impossible. But love makes you do the things you do.
Fraud tells a story
unified by a movement from assumptions to reality. The characters make
assumptions about themselves and their worlds, and they attempt to force those
assumptions on others, but in the end they find that reality imposes different
conclusions. This pattern also can be labeled Chekhovian. The resolutions of
the play are not completely beneficent or healing, any more than it is in
Chekhov’s major plays. But in general, Henley’s characters tend to retain at
least a bit of hope as they move into the clearer realities of their futures,
and as a result these plays may be categorized in some sense as comedies,
bittersweet comedies, or semi-comedies. However, the movement from assumption
to reality in these plays is arduous, and the realities are none too comforting.
All these comments can be applied to Chekhov’s plays as well.
Writers, it is frequently said, write about what they know.
(Henley set her more recent play The
Jacksonians in the town where she grew up.) One may be tempted to say that
Henley’s plays criticize, or even make fun of, the South. This view is not
necessarily fair. Any playwright is going to choose difficult moments to write
about – that’s the nature of the art. Just because a play presents a particular
group of people in a conflict situation, may not imply an unfavorable opinion;
no one thinks of Hamlet as a critique
of the Danes. A playwright may set a drama in a particular region, not for the
purpose of criticizing that region, but for the purpose of using it to
emphasize the humanity of its truths. I would say that Henley is writing about
conflict among characters she has imagined, using whatever instruments are
available to her, including locale, characterization, ways of speaking, and so
on. In other words, she’s not a reporter but an imaginative artist.
In Ridiculous Fraud
Beth Henley does make its regional – in this case, Southern – character clear.
Beginning with the obvious, the Southern settings of Henley’s plays give an
occasion for colorful names that appear to be more likely to be encountered in
the South than elsewhere: Lafcad, Willow, Kap, Georgia, and the child
affectionately (perhaps) known as Little Butterball. Fraud is full of telling social details related to what we may
assume is life in the deep South, like a practical joke in the play that
involves “eating a bug,” or the duck hunts that Kap stages for people with
money who want the primal feeling of hunting. We hear people refer to “Daddy”
and “red neck bubba.”
The South is not shown as a necessarily poor environment.
However, the physical South that Henley portrays is not a financially upbeat
area like the Atlanta suburbs, but a more primal area, less protected by social
conventions, more representative of basic emotions. The family home we see in
Act One of Fraud is genteel, although
definitely not lavish. But the backwoods farmhouse in Act Two is a basic sort
of structure, and Kap’s cabin in the woods in Act Three is downright primitive.
This progression of settings suggests a reality in the play that becomes increasingly
gritty. (Race relations however are only peripherally present in the play, as
in a casual comment that Lefcad, the brother who fled his own wedding, will
probably be “lynched.” Henley isn’t preaching about social problems. However,
she is clearly aware of them.)
Poverty is by no means unique to the South, but setting the
play in that locale does add complexity to the social background in the sense
that having almost no money may not be a barrier to social acceptance, as shown
in the way Andrew is trying to win respect for his family through his political
career. A character can be down at heel and still hope for social redemption
and a return to an assumed deserved station in society. The importance of
family is another significant social element in the plays under consideration.
In many areas of the South, family can be a defining characteristic both of
individual identity and of social standing. In Fraud the father is in jail, and as noted Andrew wants to raise the
family’s prestige by running for State Auditor. If his family problems provide
him with a goal, they also give him his burden, since no one else in the
family, including but not limited to his father, behaves in any way like a
model citizen. In particular his brother Lefcad, scheduled to be married to a
woman he doesn’t love, abandons her at the altar and hides out with the family.
“I must hold this family all together myself without glue,” Andrew says, but he
can’t.
Much of the energy, and the comedy, in Henley’s plays come
from the unsuitability of family members for each other. She presents the South
as a place where eccentricity can seem normal. Many of her characters simply
seem unsuited for their chosen tasks. In Fraud
we meet a duck hunter inept at shooting ducks, a bridegroom who is possibly
homosexual, and a new girlfriend who seems to have no history and no trace of
dependability. Some reviewers have suggested that Henley arbitrarily places her
characters in inappropriate roles that they would not assume in real life. On
the other hand, it may be the case that in the more marginal areas of the
country, round pegs do not always have to fit into round holes. A relaxed
social atmosphere may make it possible for people to exist for years in ways of
living that are unsuitable for them. Henley’s characters frequently are not
only unsuited for their states of being by their interests and ambitions, but
also by their personal characteristics. The backgrounds of many characters
include behavior that is worse than eccentric, but in fact is close to
dangerous and destructive, as shown by the violence in Fraud.
Every family has a history. In Fraud an important family member (the father) is in jail, to the
distress and embarrassment of the others. That’s a major part of the family’s
history. Behind family specifics, forming a background, is the history of the
South, which Henley indirectly, by reference and evocation, in the sense of
decline and decay that surrounds the characters, and the sense that something
more worthwhile used to exist and that now “the storm’s coming.” There are
suggestions that the past was more glorious, and that its remnants exist today,
for example in the code of revenge that Ed feels he must follow when he cuts
Kap’s face over Kap’s involvement with his wife, a sort of half-remembered code
of honor. But those remnants are isolated, floating in space; they are not part
of an intelligible code but strange survivals of a previous and more primal era
that can now hardly be understood.
A sign of the hollowness of history in Henley’s plays is the
pretenses of her characters. A major motivation in many of her plays is the
desire to seem different than one really is – in particular, to seem more
socially prominent than one is, as if social prominence could somehow make up
for a damaged past. Henley’s characters frequently let the past drive their
behavior, rather than learning to live in the moment as much as possible. That
past is often presented as problematic, yet it shapes the present, often in
destructive ways. This kind of presentation of the hand of history on the life
of people of today is surely easier to dramatize in a setting soaked in history
like the South. Henley uses the tradition-remembering, family-linked South to
evoke how heavy the hand of the past can be.
On the other hand, a prominent characteristic of Henley’s
characters is that in the face of grievous and overwhelming difficulty, they
retain hope for a better existence. The family in Fraud that wants to hold up its name goes from bad to worse. Still
the characters dream of and plan for a future. Obviously hope is not always
realistic. The family in Fraud is not
notably benefited by Andrew’s success in politics, which seems to have been
made possible by voter indifference more than widespread acceptance of the
family. But love, or what passes for love, can and often does bring hope, even
if that hope is not likely to be realized.
Why do people continue to fight and strive for a happy life
against overwhelming odds? Henley’s play raises this question but doesn’t
answer it. Instead it leads us to look at the mystery that lies behind our
refusals to accept defeat and give up entirely. The play’s shadowy settings,
like the forest where Kap’s cabin is located in Fraud, hint of mystery, and life at its heart, Henley seems to
suggest, is most definitely a mystery. Mystery is mystery because it offers no
pat answers. It may lead to confusion and bewilderment. It may lead to Andrew’s
bewildered sense in Fraud that life
is a dream. Sometimes, though, it may also lead to rebirth, as in the sense of
giddiness pervades the last scene of Fraud
despite all the disaster and the literal presence of death in the graveyard
where the family has gathered. In the midst of death, we are somehow in life.
We keep going.
I hope this look at Ridiculous
Fraud makes it clear why I think the play deserves further attention. I
think the South provides a rich and useful background for a playwright who
wants to capture the varied and contradictory natures of individuals struggling
with the mysteries of life. Other geographic or cultural areas perhaps offer
similar opportunities for a playwright; as already noted, Henley has written
plays set in other areas of the United States. But the South, with its rich
history and its evocative spaces, offers unique opportunities for a playwright
like Beth Henley to give us provocative evocations of the strangeness of our
existence.
[Kirk’s last contributions to
ROT are “Bertolt Brecht and the Mental Health Players,”
posted on 21 October, and “Bullets
Over Bullets Over Broadway,” 29 August.
He also has some work in progress for upcoming postings, so come back
often to catch his latest.]
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