It’d been a long time, since last December, since I’d been
to the Signature Theatre to see a show.
But Diana, my frequent theater companion, and I met at the Pershing
Square Signature Center on Theatre Row on Friday evening, 6 March, to see the
revival of Charles Mee’s Big Love,
part of Signature’s Legacy season. (Mee
was STC’s playwright-in-residence for the 2007-08 season.)
I’m not a follower of Mee’s work. In fact, not counting a fragment that was
part of the anti-war collage Collateral
Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars) at La MaMa in 1991,
I’ve only seen one other Mee play, a 1996 revival of Trojan Women: A Love Story produced by the site-specific troupe En Garde Arts. (Staged in and around the disused East River
Park Amphitheatre, that production had also been directed by Tina Landau, who
has directed Big Love for STC.) Now,
I don’t feel as ill-disposed to Mee’s playwriting as Ben Brantley seems to,
from the impression I get from his review of Big Love in the New York Times. He said that Mee’s “plays
often suggest a collagist who’s gone crazy with the scissors,” strongly
intimating that he isn’t a fan.
Written originally for the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre
of Louisville in 2000, Big Love has
been produced many times by many companies across the country. Mee based the play on one of the oldest
existing Greek tragedies, Aeschylus’ The
Suppliant Woman (it has several English titles), written in about 492 BCE
as the first part of a tragic trilogy; the second and third plays (The Egyptians and The Daughters of Danaus or The Danaides) and a satyr
play (Amymone) are lost. The plots of Aeschylus’ tragedy and Mee’s
tragicomedy are parallel (except for location and time), so I won’t recap the
Greek version; it’s too easy to look up.
STC’s Big Love, which started
previews on 5 February and opened on 23 February, was presented in the Irene
Diamond Stage, STC’s 294-seat proscenium house.
The show, which closed on 15 March, ran about 95 minutes without an
intermission.
Big Love, which
has nothing to do with Mormonism, polygamy, or the late cable TV series, tells the story of 50 sisters, represented
on stage by just three, who’ve been contracted to marry their 50 cousins
against their wishes. They’ve fled their
Grecian homeland on their wedding day and come to Italy to ask for asylum at
the seaside villa of Piero (Christopher Innvar), the “connected” son (one of
13—large families are a staple of Big
Love) of Bella (Lynn Cohen) and uncle of Giuliano (Preston Sadleir). Sister Thyona (Stacey Sargeant) is adamant
from the outset to reject on feminist principle any agreement resulting in
marriage; Olympia (Libby Winters), who rather likes men in general, is easily
manipulated by one or another of her sisters.
Sister number three, Lydia (Rebecca Naomi Jones), the most reasonable of
the siblings, seems actually to have fallen in love with her designated husband-to-be,
Nikos (Bobby Steggert). At first Piero
waffles about granting his protection to the women, but agrees in the end. Until, that is, the 50 cousins arrive by
helicopter, garbed in full combat flight gear like so many air-cav rangers,
represented by Constantine (Ryan-James Hatanaka), the most macho and aggressive
of the fiancés who believes “Life is rape”; Oed (that’s “Ed,” as in . . . well,
Oedipus, I guess; Emmanuel Brown); and Nikos—who all just happen to be the
prospective grooms of (can you guess?)—the three runaway brides. Piero reverses his decision on asylum and decides
to negotiate with the Greek-born, American-raised cousins, but Thyona
belligerently refuses any accommodation, while Olympia ping-pongs back and
forth and Lydia finds she has true feelings for Nikos as he does for her. Thyona, who declares that “the male is a
biological accident” and that “Boy babies should be flushed down the toilet at
birth,” wrings a bloody pact from her sisters, and the play ends in a gory and
violent melee, the outcome of which I won’t relate. (Fight choreography in Big Love is credited to the father-and-son fight directors Rick
Sordelet and Christian Kelly-Sordelet.)
(By the way, it’s easy to discover the play’s ending because
Mee posts his scripts for free on his website, the (re)making project, http://www.charlesmee.org. The
writer invites people “to take the plays from this website and use them freely
as a resource for your own work,” though he now charges a royalty for any
producer who uses the scripts “essentially or substantially as I have composed
them.” He’s the only playwright to make all his work freely available on
the Internet.)
Charles L. Mee, Jr., 76, was born in Evanston, Illinois. He contracted polio at 14, the impact of
which he recounts in his 1999 memoir, A Nearly Normal Life (Little, Brown). (The playwright asserts that his plays are
exceedingly physical because “it’s a vicarious life.” He loves athleticism, but he can’t perform it
so “I get to just write it down and other people do it for me.”) He graduated from Harvard in 1960 and moved
to New York City where he became part of the Greenwich Village theater scene
that gave birth of Off-Off-Broadway. (I
posted an article on this bit of theater history on 12 and 15 December 2011.) From 1962 to 1964, his plays were presented
at such theaters as Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa E.T.C., Caffé Cino, Ralph
Cook’s Theatre Genesis, and Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater. In 1965, to support himself, his wife, and
baby daughter (Mee now has five children and a granddaughter), he left
playwriting and began writing books on history, starting with Lorenzo
De’Medici and the Renaissance,
published in 1969.
Also in the ’60s,
Mee became a political activist, campaigning against the war in Vietnam. In the 1970s, he co-founded the National
Committee on the Presidency, calling for Pres. Richard Nixon’s impeachment. (Nixon, of course, became the only president
to resign his office in 1974, just ahead of a vote to impeach in
Congress.) His work in this area of
politics led Mee to write several important books on political history, most
prominently 1975’s Meeting at Potsdam (about the 1945 summit conference
at the end of World War II with Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, and Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin),
which was adapted by David Susskind for film and television. Mee’s last published book on history was
the 1993 Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change
the World.
Even as he continued to write history books and work as an editor
(Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts for American Heritage; Tulane Drama
Review, now simply TDR; and
at Rebus, Inc., a consumer
health publisher), in 1985, Mee returned to playwriting with the
libretto for Martha Clarke’s dance drama Vienna: Lusthaus. (He revised the show’s book in 2002 and it
was revived as Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited); Mee and Clarke collaborated again in 2004 on Belle Époque.
I saw a staging of Vienna; Lusthaus in 2002 and I reported on another
Clarke production, Chéri, on 20 December 2013.)
In 1991, Mee
collaborated with director Anne Bogart and En Garde Arts, the
site-specific performance company, on Another Person is a Foreign Country,
the first of many joint productions. In
1992, Robert Woodruff directed Mee’s Orestes at the University
of California, San Diego, and Anne Bogart staged it at the Saratoga
International Theatre Institute (SITI) in upstate New York. (It was later revived that summer by Tina
Landau and En Garde Arts as Orestes 2.0 on an abandoned
pier on the Hudson River.) This was the
first of 10 plays for which Mee used classical Greek texts as “scaffolding” onto
which he would hang his original elements and then “throw the scaffolding away
and call whatever remained the script.”
In other works, in addition
to Greek tragedies, Mee used Shakespeare, Molière, Anton Chekhov, Bertolt
Brecht, René Magritte paintings, Bollywood musicals, and his own writing as
sources. In his memoir, the dramatist
lays out his dramaturgical principle with respect to his borrowed material: “smash
it to ruins, and then, atop its ruined structure of plot and character, write a
new play, with all-new language, characters of today speaking like people of
today . . . . Plays filled with song,
dance, movement, beauty, heartache. . . .” In some recent
plays, the playwright explores the culture and history of 20th-century America
through the perspective of visual artists such as painter and graphic
artist Robert Rauschenberg in bobrauschenbergamerica (2001), sculptor
and assemblage-maker Joseph Cornell in Hotel Cassiopeia (2006), installation
artist Jason Rhoades and painter-illustrator Norman Rockwell in
Under Construction (2009), and Scottish sculptor James Castle in
soot and spit (the musical) (2013).
In addition to having been the Signature
playwright-in-residence in 2007-08, Mee, who now has written 51 plays, is the
only resident playwright of Anne Bogart’s SITI Company. In 2005, the American Academy of Arts
and Letters awarded the playwright its Gold Medal for lifetime achievement in
drama; he’s also won two OBIE Awards (Vienna: Lusthaus, 1986,
and Big Love, 2002), the
PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama (2000), and the Richard B. Fisher
Award given by the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He currently teaches playwriting at the
Columbia University School of the Arts.
In his program notes to Trojan
Women, Mee wrote: “This piece was developed . . . the way Max Ernst made
his Fatagaga pieces at the end of World War I: incorporating shards of our
contemporary world, to lie, as in a bed of ruins, within the frame of the
classical world.” Ernst, a Dadaist and
Surrealist, made photo collages in the 1920s with his collaborator Hans Arp in
which they used pictures from multifarious sources, sharing the creation so
that no one artist’s personal imprint was detectable. Then Ernst photographed the assemblage to
erase the evidence of the cut-and-paste, further denaturing the final art
work. (Fatagaga, a nonsense word that Ernst and Arp invented for the name
of these works, is an acronym of “fabrication de tableaux garantis
gazométriques”—manufacture of pictures guaranteed to be gasometric.) Mee, who bluntly states on his website,
“There is no such thing as an original play,” aims at a similar effect,
creating theater collages by sampling texts from many sources, principally here
the classic Greek tragedies, and then reworking them so that the seams are no
longer detectable. (For Big Love, Mee lists a slew of
other sources and inspirations: Klaus Theweleit, a German sociologist and writer;
American author and motivational speaker Leo Buscaglia; American child and
adult psychiatrist Gerald G. Jampolsky; Valerie Solanus, an
American radical feminist writer; Maureen Stanton, an American nonfiction
writer; English novelist Lisa St. Aubin de Teran; Sei Shonagon, a
10th-century Japanese author and court lady; American writer Eleanor Clark;
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, an American journalist, essayist and memoirist; and
Polish-born American author Kate Simon, among others.)
“What Ernst did, in effect,” explained Mee, “is what I’m
saying I’d like to do: he took scissors and he cut texts out of daily
newspapers and catalogues of other things, and then he rearranged them on a
page and glued them down and did a little drawing and painting around them to
make them into his view of something. So,
in effect, he took the unedited material of the real world and rendered it as
hallucination. And that’s what I think
I’m doing all the time. I think Max
Ernst is my dramaturg.” (Making his
texts available for further adaptation is a continuation of this practice: just
as Mee assembled his plays from many outside sources, others should be free to
use his plays to create more collages.) “All
this,” wrote one critic of Mee’s work, “is geared towards replicating Mee's
sense that his plays are written to and from the culture at large.”
The playwright not only uses various texts to assemble his
scripts, but “a combination of music and movement and text,” what he refers to
as “all the elements of American musical comedy but in a different way”—an
affinity he shares with Tina Landau, a frequent collaborator. Furthermore, his structure is . . . well,
non-Aristotelian. Mee explains:
In a work of art that occurs in
time, like a novel or a play, you usually need a plot line so people don’t
wonder what’s going on and where they are.
But with a lot of things, like choreography and music, there isn’t a
story line. Big Love has a plot line, but it also uses these other, unconscious
techniques of coherence: morning, afternoon, night, gloom, awfulness, dawn, or
no dawn. Or chaos and confusion, sweetness,
disaster. There are all of these ways of
structuring things that I find wonderful, and more like the complicated lives
that we actually live.
Mee turned to Aeschylus’ ancient tragedy for Big Love, he says, in celebration of the
millennium: “I’ll go back and take one of the oldest plays in the world, and
see if it still speaks to us today,” he decided in 2000. What he determined (true to his flower-child
youth, it seems to me) is that if the Aeschylus trilogy that had survived as
the model for human conduct was The
Danaids instead of The Oresteia,
the Western world would be devoted not to a cycle of justice and revenge but to
“forgiveness and compassion and social love.
And that way we can arrive at peace, and a livable society.” The title, he explains, comes from the notion
that in order to survive the bloody turmoil depicted in the end of the play (in
both Aeschylus’ and Mee’s telling), it takes “huge forgiveness”: “There has to be big love.”
Clearly, a spectator’s or a reader’s response to a Charles
Mee play is dependent on an affinity for his kind of collagist dramaturgy. It seems that Brantley of the Times doesn’t care for it, or at least
not in Mee’s hands. I, on the other
hand, don’t have a fundamental problem with well-constructed collages or even
pastiches. But the result has to have
something worthwhile to say. (Remember,
you long-time ROTters, my criteria
for good theater: it has to be theatrical—and a well-done collage meets that
requirement—and it must have something to say above merely telling a
story.) Well, that’s where Big Love falls short for me. (I’ll have a word or two to say about the
theatricality as well, but we’ll let that slide for now.) It’s a cliché—or several clichés strung
together—and it’s not at all revealing or terribly interesting. Love, of course, is Mee’s topic here, but he
doesn’t add anything to that well-plumbed rumination, the preoccupation of
poets, playwrights, songwriters, sculptors, and painters since civilization
began. He does cover all the
permutations (especially if you throw in plain ol’ sex, which Mee does):
boy-girl, boy-boy (Giuliano is gay: he collects Kens and Barbies), girl-girl,
old-young, mother-son (ahem, maternal,
not incest), casual, romantic, physical, experimental/fetishist, lost/nostalgic—you
name it, Mee gets it in.
The characters fit all the stereotypes, too. Among the three principal would-be couples,
there’s the true romantic (Lydia), her boy-next-door male counterpart (Nikos),
the woman-without-a-man-is-like-a-fish-without-a-bicycle militant feminist
(Thyona), the girly-girl fembot (Olympia), the hyper-macho hunk (Constantine),
and the studly jock who’s struggling a bit with what it means to be a man (Oed). The point Mee makes is, simply, Love Conquers
All (even murder, but we won’t go there).
He also pretty much says Love Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry
(and just to be sure we get that, the theme from Love Story, “Where Do I
Begin?,” is prominently played in the background). I’ve said this before in other contexts, but
this play strikes me as a case of the writer having a plot-and-structure
concept first and then devising a theme as an excuse to use it. Mee doesn’t have much to say about his chosen
topic that we need to hear (again)—and if you’re familiar with The Suppliant Women, even the plot
provides no surprises.
So what’s the use of presenting Big Love? Well, if you like
theatrical high-jinks, it’s all on Landau’s staging. I don’t know what the production at ATL, directed
by Les Waters, was like, of course, or any of the intervening revivals, but the
STC production was loaded with theatrical gimmickry. If you like that kind of theater
pyrotechnics, you’d love Big Love. I don’t know how much of the production
spectacle was Mee’s concept and how much was Landau’s input, but the show was a
smorgasbord of effects and staging gags,
from projections and videos to sound FX to background music and songs (mostly
of the vintage pop variety) to WWF wrestling moves (lots and lots) and football
training routines. All in all, it was
quite a workout—but, like the platitudes about love that serve as Mee’s theme,
the production’s theatricality seemed essentially pointless—a lot of flash to
fill the time and stage but to little purpose.
Some of that flash was even spectacular, as in the entrance
of the three fiancés: to the sounds of a hovering helicopter, the men, dressed
in flight suits and helmets, rappelled down thick ropes from door-like openings
high up the back wall. (The wall was a
photo rendering of a blue sky with soft, wispy clouds floating in it and a
rippling turquoise sea below. The
openings turned it into a Magritte-like vision.
I didn’t say the theatrics weren’t clever.) They even stripped off their flight suits,
like Sean Connery taking off his wetsuit in Dr.
No, to reveal tuxedos beneath. The (almost
antiseptically spare) sets at STC were designed by Brett J. Banakis, with
lighting by Scott Zielinski, sound by Kevin O’Donnell, and projections by
Austin Switser, all of whom, along with costume designer Anita Yavich, did
magnificent jobs making an essentially shallow vessel seem full of life and
moment. O’Donnell, in particular,
livened up the performance with his orchestration of the music designated by
Mee, which included Pachelbel’s Canon,
Handel’s Largo, Ocean Suite by Steven Halpern, and “Machine” from William Bolcom’s Fifth Symphony, among other selections. (The production also included performances by
cast members of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” sung by the three sisters;
Michael Jackson’s “Bad”; and Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm
Yours,” all staged by Landau as presentational “concert” turns with hand-held
mikes and Motown-like footwork.)
The performances, as usual at Signature, were excellent. Everyone devised strong, individuated
characters even from Mee’s shallow script.
Especially fine were Jones’s Lydia, who took a role that could easily be
wishy-washy and made her a strong, independent, and even valiant woman;
Sadleir, whose Giuliano is more complex and delightful than the slightly fem
gayboy probably ought to have been (he did a terrific little silent bit in a
wedding gown while other, more intense issues were unfolding center stage); and
Cohen as the apparently tradition Italian mama from a past generation, who, if
she’s a little clichéd, still took control and put an end to the turmoil. Sergeant and Winters, as Thyona and Olympia, were
fine but couldn’t rise above their characters’ single notes. (They also seemed to have been cast for their
looks as much as their acting talent.
Sergeant has the build of not only an athlete, but an MMA fighter and
her hair and make-up enhanced her facial resemblance to one of those really
fierce masks you see in African art museums.
Winters has the slightly puffy physique of a baby-doll woman—not unlike
the one played by Carroll Baker in the Tennessee Williams film of that title,
as a matter of fact—and the long, blond hair of a popular high school girl.) Sergeant was required to play at one, high level
of intensity, always at top force and volume.
Winters, whose Olympia goes whichever way the wind is blowing (even unto
a little lesbian dalliance with Eleanor, the married American houseguest played
by Ellen Harvey who lives by the principle that What Happens In Italy, Stays In
Italy), is the sister whose first concern after arriving at Piero’s villa is
that there aren’t enough “products”— “Soaps, you know, and creams”—available for
their use.
As for Landau’s direction, aside from the spectacle she
sewed into the performance text, it didn’t so much enhance Mee’s script as trick
it out. She cast the play well, of
course, but I can’t point to any well-considered guidance she seemed to have
provided her actors that helped make Mee’s points or developed his ideas beyond
the bromides they were at the outset. She
didn’t do anything wrong, mind you; she just did for the staging what Mee did
for the dramaturgy: put up a lot of what we used to call “eyewash” in the army—showy
touches (visual aids, charts, hand-outs) we’d add into a briefing to make it
seem more substantial than it really was but which were essentially
meaningless.
As for the published press notices, I’ve already mentioned
how Brantley seems to feel about this playwright’s work. The Timesman
continued that Mee “has been praised and dissed for riffing wild on venerable
works . . . with what usually registers more as hellbent madness than
discernible method.” In fact, Brantley,
with whom I’ve often had differences, fairly summed up what I’ve been saying:
Granted, he talks a lofty game. About his RKO-musical-style version of “The
Trojan Women,” on which he collaborated with Ms. Landau in 1996, he explained
he was “incorporating shards of our contemporary world to lie, as in a bed of
ruins, within the frame of the classical world.” I guess you could say that’s what he’s doing
with “Big Love,” too. But to what end?
The Times reviewer
also observed that Mee’s points about love are “well-recycled opinions” which
the characters expound on “at tedious length.”
In the end, though he allowed that “there’s sure a lot to look at,” he
concluded that “for all this hyperkineticism, ‘Big Love’ fails to generate any
genuine friction.”
In the New York Post,
Elisabeth Vincentelli, despite Mee’s return to ancient Greece for his plot,
stated that “the story’s impact isn’t lessened—far from it.” Indeed, Vincentelli added that because Landau
“does a good job channeling the play’s anarchic energy,” the review-writer
found that “the Greek-tragedy stuff actually feels less dated than some of the
pop references.” The Daily News’s Joe Dziemianowicz affirmed
that “the star of the show is Landau’s imaginative staging” despite the “very
good and game for anything” cast. The Newsman concluded, “In the end the message
that ‘love trumps all’ is pretty straightforward stuff—sort of like finding a
toaster in a Tiffany box. But it’s fun
watching the wrapping, ribbons and bows get torn off.”
“Under the direction of Mee’s longtime collaborator, Tina
Landau, all eleven fine actors communicate vividly,” wrote the reviewer
for the New Yorker in its capsule
notice in “Goings On About Town.” Calling
the play “epic in scope and open of heart” in Time Out New York, Adam Feldman reported, “There are striking
monologues in verse” in the “postmodern approach” that permits Mee “frequent
jokey anachronisms, musical interludes and opportunities for spectacle” (some
of which “seem trite “). Feldman complained, “Yet although these
elements come across clearly in Tina Landau’s busy revival, they don’t quite
come together,” citing that the “rush of flat activity gets tiring, and Mee’s
philosophizing can seem shapeless.” The
man from TONY concluded (much as I
did): “The production is admirable, but I wasn’t fully taken.”
In the cyber press, Elyse
Sommer of CurtainUp called Big Love a “kooky spin on” Aeschylus’
tragedy which is “being given an enchanting production” at Signature. “[W]ith musical interludes and eye popping
stage business,” Sommer reported, Landau turned the Greek tragedy “into an
exhilarating paean to love,” which the director and her design team accomplish
with “great flair.” On TheaterMania, David Gordon christened
Landau’s “explosive” staging of Big Love
“Fearless” because, he asserted, it “isn't afraid of anything.” Of the playwright’s classical source
material, Gordon stated, “In Mee's hands, it's scary how relevant it is,” in
spite of the fact that it “is more of a collage than a play.” It’s a “a well-run circus that is seemingly
spinning violently out of control,” Gordon wrote, in “Landau’s unapologetically
chaotic vision.” Even as the production
includes “frenzied physicality that extends into the auditorium,” the cyber
reviewer found that “Landau skillfully guides her first-rate company through
this crazy world.”
On New York Theater,
Jonathan Mandell called the STC production of Big Love an “astonishing revival” that “surrounds us with a
soothing and soaring beauty” and “is, in turns, playful, funny, sexy, chaotic,
bloody, and shocking.” New York Arts Review’s Greg Bauer complained that Mee’s “attempts to
mix myth, music, and modern entertainment with poor results” meant that “the
incoherent stretches of the play, though well-staged, are sunk by the few
moments of lucid dramaturgy.” Bauer concluded,
“The Signature Theatre threw an impressive array of technical theatre craft at
this production . . . . However, all efforts are thwarted by the author’s
shortcomings at telling a simple tale. The result is that Big
Love remains a thesis, but offers no logic or satisfaction at its
final curtain.” In contrast, pronouncing
the production and play “Excellent. Most
excellent” on New York Theatre Guide,
Tulis McCall noted that “Charles Mee lives on a planet very near the one that
Bill Irwin calls home” and observed that at the end of Big Love, “we are left to screw our heads and hearts back into
place” because Mee “switches your head and heart positions.” McCall concluded that “the best part is that
you never QUITE get them back in place the way they were before.” On Theatre Pizzazz!, Carol Rocamora described
STC’s presentation of “Mee’s playful version” of The Suppliant Women as “a dazzling production” given “wildly
expressionistic, exuberant” staging by Landau.
Rocamora’s conclusion was that “Mee’s lavish treatment of this eternal
topic remains unapologetic and enduring, owing to its originality, vitality,
and heart.”
I have no gripe against collage, pastiche, or bricolage, as
I said, but I object to theater that has little or nothing to say and expends a
lot of energy to say it. Mee’s chosen
style of dramaturgy is fine with me—if he can manage to make a worthwhile point
with it. As far as I’m concerned, Big Love isn’t in that category. If you like flash, then Big Love might engage you.
[For reasons I can’t explain,
a number of my usual sources of published reviews apparently didn’t run notices
of STC’s Big
Love.
Variety, which normally covers
Signature shows, may have decided, after reviewing several regional productions
over the years, not to review another revival of the 15-year-old play—even
though this was the New York première.
The same rationale shouldn’t apply, however, to New York magazine, Long Island’s Newsday, and the Village Voice, which habitually cover productions at
major New York rep companies like Signature.
Also absent from my search was Entertainment Weekly, as well as Broadway World and Talkin’ Broadway, websites
that have seemed to cover nearly everything that appears in New York City
theaters.
