by Rivka Galchen
[As you’ll read, more than any other culture save perhaps our own, the Germans have had almost an obsession with the American West and the American Indian for centuries. Germany even produced its own literature of the Old West, the most prominent writer of which was Karl May (1842-1912), whose books about Winnetou, the Native American chief, and his friend “Old Shatterhand” are more popular than almost any other German author. Books that are over a century old are still read today and have never been out of print.
[My own experience with German culture’s focus on the Old West began in the early 1960s when I lived in West Germany while my father served as a Foreign Service Officer there briefly. The radio played cowboy songs regularly—not what we call today country-western music, but old-time cowboy music: Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter. The theme song from Bonanza was a special favorite. (The TV series was available on German television in a dubbed version. There’s nothing as funny as Hoss, Adam, and Little Joe speaking German! A decade later, I was stationed in West Berlin in the army and I used to watch the dubbed version of Raumschiff Enterprise—that’s Star Trek in German—and even Spock and Sulu auf Deutsch wasn’t as hilarious as the Cartwrights.) At the movies, the American westerns were among the most popular and I even had a pair of cowboy boots I bought off a German classmate. I never went to any of the Karl May events or the museum devoted to his memory, but it doesn’t surprise me to learn that they are as popular as they are, or that they are still among the best-attended events and sites even so many years after May’s death.
[A friend who knew of my interest in May, told me about this New Yorker article by Rivka Galchen, published in the “Life and Letters” section of the 9 April issue, which discusses the fascination with Native Americans within German culture. Galchen addresses her experience attending the Karl May Festival in Bad Segeberg, which celebrates the Native American themes of May's books and the film adaptations of those books. She also notes the success of May's Western fiction, the character Old Shatterhand in his work, and the censorship of May's works by East Germany.]
Why do cowboys and Indians so captivate the country?
The northern German town of Bad Segeberg is renowned for two things: a vast cave visited each winter by twenty-two thousand bats, and an annual Karl May Festival visited each summer by three hundred thousand people. Karl May (pronounced "my") is an adventure writer from the late nineteenth century whom most Americans have never heard of but whose stories of the American West are to this day better known to Germans than the works of Thomas Mann. His books have sold more than a hundred million copies. Though May never visited the American West, he told everyone that he had, and he wore a necklace of bear teeth, as if in proof. All his life, he was a confabulator, even when it was of no benefit to him.
May's most beloved characters are a noble Apache leader named Winnetou and his blood brother, Old Shatterhand, a German immigrant to the United States. The good friends feature in fifteen of May's eighty-odd works and are central in a series of films from the nineteen-sixties which were so successful that they are said, with only some exaggeration, to have saved the West German film industry. Most Germans can hum the theme music. In 2002, in a copyright case before the German Federal High Court, it was held that Winnetou was no longer a mere character in a novel; he had become "the name for a certain human type, that of the noble Indian chief."
In the summer, you can ride a diesel "steam" train from Bad Segeberg's central square to the Karl May Festspiele grounds, which are up near the Kalkberg, the steep hill that was once home to the town's castle. There are faux log cabins labelled Pony Express, Sheriff's Office, Barber Shop, Saloon. One sign reads, in English, "Cold Drinks, Hot Food, and Pretty Girls." You can buy a buffalo burger, hang out in a tepee, and watch children play at panning for gold. Antique handcuffs and at least five kinds of toy gun are for sale, as are tomahawks, feathered headdresses, and all of Karl May's novels and stories, most of which are available in at least seven editions, including green-covered volumes from the century-old Karl May Verlag--a press that prints only books by and about Karl May.
In a vast outdoor amphitheatre atop the bat cave, seven times a week, one finds the festival's central attraction: the staging of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand stories. In addition to handsome and often bare-chested actors, the spectaculars feature live horses, live chickens, gunfights, flaming-spear fights, and tumbling from roofs. There are thousands of children in the audience, many in face paint and feathers--most come as Indians, though a small number dress up as cowboys--and many with parents and grandparents who attended as children. Not to have fun at the festival--a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts, with all five senses attended to--would require a real dedication to joylessness.
Europeans have long been fascinated by Indians. In 1616, Pocahontas, the "princess of the Indians," was brought to England and invited to visit the court of King James I. At Whitehall Palace, she saw a performance of Ben Jonson's masque "The Vision of Delight," in which Harmony, Grace, and Laughter greeted Spring; Europe watched Pocahontas watch. Travelling expositions of "natives" existed even earlier. In sixteenth-century France, the city of Rouen honored the newly crowned King Henry II with a re-creation of a jungle landscape, displaying three hundred Brazilian Indians. Or, rather, fifty Brazilian Indians and two hundred and fifty naked local peasants, painted brown and adorned with stone jewelry. Indians also crossed the ocean in stories. By the mid-nineteenth century, James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales" were best-sellers in Europe as well as in America. Franz Schubert is said to have expressed the wish, on his deathbed, to live long enough for the next installment of Cooper's series. European colonialism, it has been observed, involved not only the decimation of native populations but also the veneration, adumbrated by fantasy, of their cultures and special powers.
By Karl May's time--most of the Winnetou novels are from the eighteen-nineties--easier transport made travelling pseudo-ethnographic shows, often put on at zoos, much more common. "They were a popular entertainment, almost like opera," Eric Ames, a professor of German history at the University of Washington, told me. "But the shows staked their appeal on claims of authenticity; a native woman breast-feeding was a major act." At the same time, people came to see what they already knew through books; if an Indian show didn't fit the image people already had of Indians, which was largely based on Cooper's work, it tended to fail. "There was a show of Bella Coola Indians travelling at the same time as a Sioux Indian show," Ames said. "The Bella Coola were from British Columbia and looked very different physically. Scientists loved it. But commercially the Bella Coola show was a complete flop."
When Buffalo Bill Cody went to Munich in 1890 with his Wild West show--which featured two hundred cowboys and Indians, Sioux Ghost Dance performances, and reënactments of the battle of Little Bighorn with "the people who were there!"--hopeful attendees camped out overnight to get tickets. King Ludwig attended. The arena, which seated five thousand, sold out for each of the eighteen shows. The shows were advertised in the same sorts of magazines in which Karl May was serially publishing his tales of Kara Ben Nemsi, an adventurer-at-large in the Ottoman Empire. The Winnetou and Old Shatterhand stories followed shortly thereafter.
May was born in Saxony, in 1842, the fifth of fourteen children of a poor weaver. In later life, he claimed that he had been blind until age six, when he was mysteriously cured; the story has a typically May-like ring of both truth and falsehood. He was certainly underfed. When May's family came into a tiny inheritance, his father decided to become a pigeon dealer. His first investment was in two pairs of expensive "blue-striped" pigeons, whose feathers, he learned too late, had been glued on. His next was a pigeon that turned out to be blind from old age.
In his teens, May was kicked out of school for stealing candles; his autobiography claims that he merely wanted to give his sister scraps of candle wax as a Christmas present. He was later fired from a teaching job for stealing a pocket watch. May spent six weeks in jail, his reputation further damaged by rumors of an affair with a married woman.
During a four-year jail term in his twenties--for stealing furs--May ran the prison library, where he read a lot of Baedeker. Though he did not write stories, he did write a list of synopses of stories he might one day write. Finally, in his thirties, May actually wrote. There were further incarcerations for petty crimes, but he managed to make a modest living writing pulp fiction--crime stories and romances and tales of travel. He also wooed and married a girl, Emma Pollmer, whose grandfather didn't approve of the lowly Saxon suitor, so she ran away to Dresden to join him. May often wrote under a pseudonym, which enabled him to publish (and get paid for) the same story under different titles, in different magazines. In 1893, when he was fifty-one, he published his first Winnetou and Old Shatterhand novel; this was his late, big break. But, by that time, his marriage was falling apart, he was having a hard time getting royalties from earlier works, and his health was deteriorating. Soon, he was attacked in the press for having written for Catholic magazines as a Protestant, for having obfuscated his criminal past, and for having lied about where he had and hadn't travelled. May never escaped financial and reputational distress, even after becoming rich and famous. His money went to lawyers and his last years went to proclaiming his honesty.
In 1910, two years before his death, at the age of seventy, Karl May published Volume I of his autobiography, "My Life and My Efforts." It resembles a defense statement in a trial. "Does not 'My Life and My Efforts' already read like a fairy-tale?," he complains. "And are there not almost innumerable fables and fairy-tales, my opponents have built up around me! And whenever I protest against this, I am believed just as little as some people believe in the fairy-tales. But as for every genuine fairy-tale, there will finally come the time, when its truth will be evident, so all of my truth will eventually become evident."
It is perhaps not a coincidence that May's fiction often involves wrongful accusations being cleared, and justice prevailing. In the first volume of the Winnetou series, "Winnetou, the Apache Knight," Old Shatterhand works as a surveyor for a railroad company that plans to build (unbeknownst to him) on Apache land; the Apache think he is a thief, "just like the rest of the pale-faces." Trouble ensues, including false alliances with the no-good Kiowa Indians, but eventually Winnetou brings peace among the Indians and the whites. Most important, Old Shatterhand's true character is exposed: twice, he bravely saves Winnetou's life.
May's prose is less purple, and less populated with good cowboys, than the writing of Zane Grey, the famous American author of Wild West stories. May's work has a chatty, as-told-to narrative voice, and a wit reminiscent, at times, of another American, Mark Twain. Yet, for all their echoes of setting and voice, May's stories read as distinctively German, not only because of their occasional greenhorn errors. (The Apache and Kiowa were allies and not enemies, for example.)
Nineteenth-century German literature often explores the extreme. While the English were thinking about upper-middle-class Dorothea at home in a middling marriage in Middlemarch, and the Americans were grounded in the naturalism of country folk drifting into city life, German writers thought about Kaspar Hauser, a man raised in dungeonlike isolation, almost completely unexposed to human language. E. T. A. Hoffmann's early seminal story "The Sandman" is about a man who falls in love with an automaton; Hoffmann also wrote a novel from the alternating perspectives of a mad composer and a cat. These are the descendants of the revered poet Hölderlin, who embraced the role of madman and wrote his poems while living isolated in a tower. It's as if for the Germans character is revealed only in extreme situations; only there do you find out who you really are.
In Karl May's work, that extreme situation is the American West. Back home in Germany, Old Shatterhand was Jack Hildreth, a fourth child, and, by his own confession, "a dull kind of person, especially on a rainy day when I have to sit in the house alone with him." But then he goes West. He earns his new name. One pressured situation after another makes clear, to others but also to himself, Old Shatterhand's true and extraordinary nature: "And so I found myself in a new and strange life, and beginning it with a new name, which became as familiar and as dear to me as my own."
For Americans, the West was a frontier and a place of new rules, but it could never be as distant a land of wonder and transformation as it was for May; it just wasn't far enough away. Which may be part of why Karl May's stories have never met with much success in English translation. "Americans would be more likely to get the stories if they were set on another planet," Michael Michalak, the head of Nemsi Books, a South Dakota press that publishes Karl May in English, said. Michalak told me that it is German immigrants to the U.S. whose children can't read German who most often thank him for his work. Even in America, May is enjoyed mostly by Germans.
Readers in May's time were often confused about whether Old Shatterhand was an alter ego of Karl May. The same doubts attended the travel writings of Herman Melville, Daniel Defoe, and, as the story goes, Dante. But May's response to the confusion was distinctive. He commissioned a gunsmith to make two of the rifles imagined in his novels--Winnetou's Silberbüchse and Old Shatterhand's Bärentöter. He claimed to understand "more than 1,200 languages and dialects." He was fond of dressing up in a fringed leather frontiersman's jacket and wide-brimmed felt hat. For anyone with remaining doubts as to the veracity of his stories, he said, "I really am Old Shatterhand . . . and have experienced the stories I tell." Flaubert may have said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," but he never went so far as to wear a housedress.
Once May became famous, when real Indians came through Germany in Wild West shows May not only avoided them but defamed them as "outcasts from their tribe" who played "vile, lying roles." Meeting travelling Indians might have been awkward for May, especially if he couldn't speak their language. In 1898, May told admirers that Buffalo Bill was responsible for the death of May's "companions" (a.k.a. characters) Old Firehand and Old Surehand. In his autobiography, he cites two books as having been most influential in his life: one was a collection of folktales that his grandmother read to him; the other was a tale of a split soul, given to him by a good priest while he was in prison. Neither book exists, it turns out, though both almost certainly were big influences on him. Just ten days before May died, he travelled to Vienna and gave a lecture attended by thousands. "What I have created up to now, I regard as preliminary studies, as études," he said there. "I have, in a manner of speaking, tested my audience. Only now, I want to approach the actual work of my life." He obfuscated to the very end.
It goes without saying that both Buffalo Bill and Karl May purveyed farragoes of historical misrepresentation. May's idealizations and errors have inspired countless fans to undertake detailed cultural investigations. At the festival, I found myself talking to an older woman from Lübeck who wore a Yellowstone National Park sweatshirt over a handmade patchwork skirt. She explained the distinction between the Ho-Chunk tribe of the Winnebago and the tribe known simply as the Winnebago; she had had visitors from both tribes over for a barbecue. She went on to tell me that certain battles from the Indian wars that May presents as having taken place in the eighteen-sixties actually happened in the eighteen-tens. A housewife from Koblenz pointed out to me that the two totem poles marking the entrance to the outdoor amphitheatre were problematic, because Winnetou was a Plains Indian and Plains Indians did not make totem poles. (Of course, as an Apache Winnetou was not even a Plains Indian.) Another woman, and she was not alone in this, explained that although Winnetou is an Apache, Winnetou's characteristics really suggest those of a Sioux. Part of being a Karl May fan, it seems, is correcting Karl May.
A number of German and Austrian towns have Karl May festivals, but the festival in Bad Segeberg is the largest, the most magnificently staged, and probably the most financially successful. It began in 1952, a year after the Wagner festival was revived in Bayreuth.
Mining of gypsum from the town's Kalkberg, or chalk mountain, created a natural outdoor amphitheatre. Officials of the Third Reich decided to build a Thingplatz there, a gathering place where Volk could congregate to watch Thingspiele--Nazi-favored theatricals--and other völkische events. After the war, occupying Brits staged boxing matches. A few classics were put on. "Then someone had the idea of doing Karl May," Ute Thienel, the current director of the festival, told me. "It was a huge success."
Thienel is from Bad Segeberg, but for many years she lived and worked in Munich and Berlin. When friends asked her if she planned on returning, she would joke, "I'll come back if a Karl May job shows up." Then it did, and she returned. "The first show cost just fifty thousand Deutsche marks to put on"--then about twelve thousand dollars--"and it was done with local actors and local livestock and local housewives sewing the costumes." Today, the budget is about 3.9 million euros.
I asked her about the actors, most of whom are famous from German movies or television. "Winnetou is being played by Erol Sander," she said. "He's a Turkish actor; he was also a model for Jil Sander." (No relation.) "The oil prince is Marek Erhardt. The other Apache leader is played by the German actor Nicolas König. The Colombian actress Clara Vélez--she lives in Hamburg now--she is the Indian princess, Shara-Noa. And Lisa Fitz--she's this wonderful Bavarian actress; she has a cabaret background, and everyone knows her from television--she's playing Rosalie Ebersbach, the German settler."
In the West German Karl May movies of the sixties, the French actor Pierre Brice played Winnetou, and the American actor Lex Barker played Old Shatterhand; the movies were filmed in Croatia. Brice also played the Bad Segeberg festival for a number of years; then the Winnetou of the East German films, Gojko Mitić, a Serb, played the part. Thienel said that Native American actors had performed in the festival, but it was hard to find people willing to be away from home for the whole season.
The show that night was "The Oil Prince," a tale of an evil man who sells rights to oil he does not have, and then kills off the buyers so he can sell the rights again. I attended with Ingrid Altner, a woman in her sixties who has lived in Bad Segeberg for thirty years and is now the chairperson of the city council. "Sometimes the shows are romantic, and sometimes they are about what we call Indian philosophy, and sometimes they are comedies," she told me. "I like the romances best. This show is really a comedy, but it has a little bit of everything." The sun hadn't quite set over the background of real and fake red rock when the first banker to buy from the oil prince died in a fiery explosion. Approaching hoofbeats--"Palomino horses!" Altner exclaimed--heralded the players in the primary subplot: the Nijora and Navajo Apache tribes have been warring, and the Nijora want to kill Winnetou, because he "makes peace with the palefaces."
As hostilities are being coördinated, Winnetou, in fringed and beaded leather, arrives on horseback and on musical cue. We all cheer. His long black hair is held off his olive-skinned face with a thick red headband; he is not smiling. My companion's hand goes to her heart. "He's so handsome," she says. "All of us German women between thirty and seventy love him, because he also plays in a really romantic soap opera." Winnetou's devoted protector, an eagle named Manitou, flies in. Finally, Old Shatterhand--in fringed but not beaded leather--rides in; again we cheer. Old Shatterhand announces that his heart is full of joy, because he is meeting his brother again. Conflict is briefly averted; we see early bits of a Romeo and Juliet story of Indian lovers from the opposing tribes. There is a burst of Prokofiev. Then the German settlers arrive on the scene, unaware that they have entered hostile territory. "This is the comic part," Altner tells me. One of the settlers, Matthäus Aurelius Hampel, comes in, with a donkey he calls Rigoletto, singing a song proclaiming his courage, to the tune of "Oh! Susanna." He has come to the Wild West because he is going to write an epic opera about it. Lisa Fitz, the Bavarian cabaret star playing Rosalie, also gets a cheer. Altner tells me, "She says she's come to Arizona because it's too boring to stay in Germany." When a cuckoo clock sounds from the stagecoach, Rosalie shoots it. There are other settlers, too, and, just as they start to sing and dance, bandits arrive, there are gunshots and the scent of gunpowder, the stagecoach is set on fire, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou return, there is a musical reprise. This is the first ten minutes of the show.
A couple of months earlier, I had visited Radebeul, a small town in the former East Germany which suffers from a problem all German towns seem to have: the overwhelming number of notable Germans. Goethestrasse, Kantstrasse, Schillerstrasse, Einsteinstrasse, Gutenbergstrasse, Anne-Frank-Strasse--two blocks in, Hölderlinstrasse turns into Karl-May-Strasse, where one finds the Karl May Museum, in his former home, Villa Shatterhand. Behind Villa Shatterhand is Villa Bärenfett, a log-cabin structure modelled after a place imagined in one of May's books. There I met André Köhler, the museum's public-relations manager. He was wearing a white button-up shirt with an Indian-head bolo tie, Wranglers, a mustang belt buckle, and leather moccasins.
"I like to say," he said, "there's been the Empire, the Weimar, the Third Reich, the G.D.R., and now the Bundesrepublik; Karl May's stories have survived them all." The Karl May Museum was founded in 1928, by May's widowed second wife, Klara, and Patty Frank, a former stablehand for Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. From 1956 to 1984, it was called the Indianer Museum, because Karl May and his work were not favored by the German Democratic Republic; for the same reason, the East German Westerns made in parallel to the West German Winnetou films were mostly presented as "Indianer" films, unrelated to the work of Karl May. "I think there were three reasons the G.D.R. didn't like Karl May," Köhler told me. "One is that the books made people want to travel to places where they weren't able to travel. Two is that there was too much Christianity in the books." Much of this was edited out of various editions, and to the modern reader the religious imagery and asides seem much milder than those in, say, C. S. Lewis's Narnia books. "Finally," he continued, "it was known that Hitler had liked Karl May's books. Albert Einstein also liked Karl May, and so did many of the Communist leaders, but no one ever bothers to mention that. They always just mention one of Karl May's fans: Hitler. I hate that."
The G.D.R. did not forbid the reading of Karl May, but one could not print or sell his books. (Just before the Wall went up, the Karl May Verlag, which had been in Radebeul, quickly relocated to Bamberg, in the West.) "You would only loan a Winnetou book," Köhler told me, "to a very, very good friend." One West German woman who had family in East Germany recalled mailing Karl May books to Prague, where her relatives would travel in order to pick them up. She also remembered smuggling the pieces for a Winnetou jigsaw puzzle in a box for a puzzle of a picture of rabbits. But gifts went from East to West as well. In an expression of empathy for people they saw as victims of capitalist imperialism, some East Germans sent care packages of food and clothing to Native Americans living on reservations in the United States.
Köhler suggested that we go to see May's grave. On the walk over, he told me how the May museum regained its original name. "In the nineteen-eighties, the G.D.R. took an interest in figures it had previously written off--Martin Luther, Otto von Bismarck, King Friedrich II, and also Karl May. They came up with new ways of thinking about these people, officially. May wrote about the West, so that could be problematic, but they said, Here was this impoverished Saxonite; he came from the oppressed class and he rose to glory. And he wrote about the Indians, an oppressed people who resisted.
"The G.D.R. allowed some Karl May books to be printed again," he went on. "I imagine they needed the money. They printed two hundred and fifty thousand copies; I think it was 'The Treasure of Silver Lake.' They sold out in something like a day. My father was lucky in that he was working at a factory, and there was a factory bookstore, and he knew the woman there; so I had 'The Treasure of Silver Lake' under my Christmas tree in, let's see, I think it was 1982."
I asked Köhler how old he was, meaning how old he was when he got the book.
"I was born a hundred years and one week after the death of Winnetou," he said.
Karl May's grave is a four-columned pavilion with a high relief of a woman being received by an angel at the gates of Heaven. There were fresh flowers there. Two marble rectangles mark the remains of May's wives. Köhler told me that, in 1942, to celebrate May's hundredth birthday, a ceremony had been planned at the grave. Nazi officials were expected to attend. Then authorities found out that May's dearest friend, buried next to him, was Jewish, and so "the event was cancelled," Köhler said. The friend's remains were removed to another cemetery, in Dresden.
Back at Villa Shatterhand, Köhler introduced me to René Wagner, the director of the museum, who has been there since 1985. Wagner, an honorary citizen of Tombstone, Arizona, took off his cowboy hat to sit down and talk with me. He showed me the building plans for a new visitor center. They had recently had a great event with Sitting Bull's great-grandson, he said, attended by more than three hundred people. I asked Wagner if he had a favorite exhibit or event from all his years.
"Well, there are shows, and there are shows," he said. When the G.D.R. reclaimed May, the museum put on an exhibit centered on him, after years of almost no mention of him. "The opening day was in February. The line to get into the exhibition went down to the end of the street. People waited in the cold for three hours." Wagner's eyes teared up. "We had four thousand visitors a day." Before the Wall fell, the museum drew about three hundred thousand annually; now it's about sixty thousand. "Until 1990," Wagner said, "the Karl May Museum was maybe the only source of knowledge we had about American Indians. Now Germans can go and travel to the real America." Many ranches and reservations have special arrangements with German tourist agencies.
Much of the cultural tourism is coördinated by Native Americans living in Germany, or by Germans living in the American West. (Köhler, for example, did an internship at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, in Wyoming.) A number of Native American soldiers stayed in Germany following the Second World War and married German women. During the G.D.R., some East Germans, especially women, did political work with the American Indian Movement, and hoped to be able one day to move to a reservation, marry a Native American, and have Native American children, but getting a visa out of the country was nearly impossible. "Hobbyist" groups developed, in which people would get together to study Indian crafts and languages, and dress up and role-play in Indian clothing, usually of their own making. A native of the tiny Kaska tribe of the Yukon told me of recently visiting a classroom of German primary-school students who greeted him in his native tongue.
"Today the relationship is complicated," Wagner said. "We have a man here who is an expert at making Native American flutes. Native Americans in the United States buy them. He went there to teach people how to make them. But it can make people angry if a German hobbyist sells his work in a Native American craft fair. They say it's not genuine, and maybe in a sense that is right. The relationship was more simple during the G.D.R."
Of the relation between Native Americans and Germans today, the historian H. Glenn Penny, of the University of Iowa, told me, "When Germans think through certain problems, they also think about those problems through and in terms of Indians. So in the nineteen-sixties this thinking had a lot to do with political protest, with the image of Indians as resisters. In the anti-nuclear protests of the nineteen-seventies, they flew in a lot of Indians from the Pine Ridge Reservation. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, the esoteric Indian was hot--the idea of the medicine man, of a deep knowledge of nature. Now it's Green politics. In some ways," Penny said, "the Indians are being instrumentalized, but also they get to shape their own image, at least somewhat." At the 2009 Berlinale film festival, plans were announced for another Winnetou film, one that would feature mostly Native American actors, but plans have since stalled, in large part over disagreements over how Native Americans would be depicted in the film.
A few weeks before my visit to Radebeul, a professor and students at a university in nearby Mittweida had put together a seven-week around-the-clock reading of the entire corpus of Karl May. They chose the time frame because it matched the amount of time that May had spent in prison there, in 1870, for (among other things) pretending to be the American ambassador. The students divided the May corpus into twenty-minute sections. In the beginning, they had to read many of the sections themselves, especially through the night, but as word of the project spread--it was streamed on the Internet--more and more volunteer readers arrived. Some were children, some were octogenarians, some were Czechs, and some were people who travelled seven hours from Frankfurt, read, and then took the train back.
I asked Wagner if he thought May might again become as popular with young people as he had been for his generation.
"There will be another peak," Wagner said. "Maybe this time with his late books. They are probably the most well-written--the fantasy books." These are stranger, sadder, and less popular stories. They take place on the warring planet of Sitara. Sitara can be reached, the novels explain, by travelling from Earth three months to the Sun and then another three months further--which sounds a lot like a round trip.
In 1908, when he was sixty-six, May at last made some of the travels that he had claimed already to have made. He didn't make it out West, but he did visit upstate New York. He met Indians at a reservation near Niagara Falls. On his return, May wrote the last volume of his Winnetou series. In it, Old Shatterhand helps plan a monument for the murdered Winnetou.
While I lived in Germany, a number of Germans asked me why there was a museum of the Holocaust in Washington, D.C., but no museum about slavery or about the Native American genocide. When I returned from Bad Segeberg to New York, I saw that a new series of Shepard Fairey posters had gone up on East Twenty-second Street in Manhattan. They showed a Native American standing alongside a horse, and announced, simply, "We Are Still Here." That poster would make no sense in Munich, where such a basic assertion goes without saying.
It has been said of the Karl May festivals that they are expressions of repressed homosexual longings, and it has been said that they are a working through of the trauma of the Nuremberg trials. It has been said that they tap into fascist nationalist sentiment; that they provide a positive blueprint for dealing with the Other; that they don't provide a positive blueprint for dealing with the Other. It has been said that they are an escape from the troubling ethnic tensions of Germany today. This is all probably true.
As Americans, we tend to find the German infatuation with Native Americans campy and naïve. But the comfort of Karl May fans with May's historical inaccuracies surely comes in part from their confident knowledge of the actual history. Whereas we know almost nothing. We do not proclaim our innocence; we do not feel we are on trial.
[I myself have never been a reader of May’s fiction. But my father was, and that’s how I learned about the writer. Dad told me about May when we went to live in Germany in the early and middle 1960s, when I was a teenager. He’d learned German as a boy when he used to spend afternoons with his paternal grandmother, who never learned English because she hadn’t wanted to come to America in the first place. (My great grandparents had fled the Ukraine in the late 19th century to escape the poverty and the anti-Jewish pogroms, bringing their children, including their young son, Jacob, my grandfather. He became a pharmacist and worked in his drug stores until after my father got home from school, so Dad would spend the afternoon with his German-speaking grandmother.) Though Galchen remarks that the American-born children of German-speaking immigrants read the English translations of May’s books, my dad read the original German versions. Of course, he was growing up with the traditional American vision of the Old West, so he found the unintended humor in the dichotomy between May’s imagination and the native-grown mythology. In particular, Dad was amused by the German approximations of the Western slang we all know from the Hollywood renditions of the imaginary frontier. One May line he used to quote to me sort of sums it up: Hände hoch oder du bist ein Kind von Tot! It translates literally as: “Hands high or you are a child of death!” but is an attempt to render into German some phrase like, “Hands up or you’re a dead man!” How many Western gunslingers, either good or bad guys, have we heard say something like that in a movie or a TV show from the 1930s right on into the 21st century? It’s a commonplace, almost unnoticeable. May’s version is so . . . I don’t know . . . so German!]
15 September 2012
10 September 2012
'Heartless'
I don’t know why it worked out this way, but my frequent theater companion Diana and I saw our first play in the Signature Theatre Company’s 2012-13 season before the last play in our subscription for 2011-12. We’ll see Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver on 7 September, but we were at the Irene Diamond Stage in the Pershing Square Signature Center on Friday evening, 31 August, for the world première production of Sam Shepard’s Heartless. I’m afraid that the experience was disappointing, especially upon reflecting on the début of last season, an exciting and revealing performance of Fugard’s Blood Knot (see my report of 28 February on ROT). (Last season, Diana and I took our four-play subscription out for the company’s Residency One series, three plays by Fugard, plus the single Legacy Program presentation, Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque, reported on ROT on 19 March. This season, Residency One is devoted to the work of David Henry Hwang and Diana decided to go with the four Legacy presentations, of which Heartless is the first. I’m going to try to see the three Hwang plays in the season as well, so keep in touch for reports on those as the season develops.)
Heartless, a two-hour play with one intermission, started previews at the Signature’s year-old complex on 42nd Street at 10th Avenue on 7 August and opened to the press on Monday, the 27th. Its original closing was scheduled for 16 September, but the play has been extended now through 30 September. The Diamond is the largest of the three stages at the Signature Center, a 299-seat proscenium formerly called the End Stage. (I reported on the architecture and construction of the new complex in “The Signature Center,” 18 February.) Shepard, who was the focus of the Signature’s 1996-97 season and whose The Late Henry Moss premièred in the company’s Tenth Anniversary Season, 2001-02, says that he began writing Heartless at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, which the playwright describes as “a think tank trying to find if there’s an inner dialogue between different pursuits: science and art and within science itself . . . .” Shepard and novelist Cormac McCarthy are the only writers in residence at the institute where, he says, he has “dialogues” with the scientists but writes on his own.
The Heartless story’s about a cranky, but shrewd invalided old lady, Mable Murphy, who lives in a huge house in the Hollywood Hills overlooking Los Angeles where she’s cared for by her elder daughter, Lucy, and her mute nurse, Elizabeth. Sally, Mable’s younger daughter comes to stay for a while, bringing Roscoe, her much-older lover. The family tensions and the presence of a stranger open cracks out of which spurt some family facts—or purported facts—that aren’t usually talked about. Shepard says he was inspired to write Heartless when he was in L.A. “really high up and you can see the entire city,” which Mable calls “the abyss.” “You feel like you’re not exactly of the city,” the playwright explains. “You’re outside it.” He continues:
Then I’d been thinking for a long time about wanting to write an intrinsically female play, with female characters. I was staying in a place where until very recently there had been a dowager—an old woman—who had been there for a long, long time, who died. And she was being cared for by many different people. I never met her, but that played a part in it.
Shepard began to “mess” with the plot elements to assemble what he saw as “a funny tapestry.” One of the secrets that’s revealed is that Sally had a heart transplant when she was ten—at the very start of the play, Sally gets out of bed bare-breasted, revealing the long, red, as-yet-unexplained scar—and Shepard had begun to wonder about “this in-between world that someone might find themselves in if they had a heart transplant.” He imagined that “if you were walking around with somebody else’s heart, it’s likely that you would have thoughts of the other person and what that person’s life might have been like. So it puts the possessor of the new heart in a funny relationship to the donor who’s, of course, dead, but always with them.” That, the playwright proclaimed, was the concept that launched Heartless, whose title in part refers to this idea. It sounds to me as if his intended theme is an examination of the “in-between existence where you have the sensation that we’re somehow between life and death. And maybe the dead are even around in a way we don’t understand.”
Well, all that certainly sounds intriguing: a little mystical, a little philosophical, a little spooky—not to mention the melodrama of the revelations of the family secrets. The trouble I had, however, was that Heartless doesn’t end up being any of those things. When we left the theater, Diana characterized the play as “simplistic.” I said that wouldn’t have been the adjective I’d have chosen and asked her what she meant. The play, she explained, was scattered, a bunch of uncooked ideas all thrown haphazardly into the pot. Okay, that may be, but though Diana wouldn’t give Shepard any credit for having had an idea or theme from which to work, I decided, this being Sam Shepard and not some first-time baby dramatist who didn’t know his beans, that I’d allow that he had some point in mind but just never got it into the script intelligibly. Simply put, I have no idea what Shepards trying to tell me. (One reviewer says the play explores “the human failure to connect with one another.” Not only is that awfully broad, the basic theme, I’d say, of most modern dramas, but even if “failure to connect” is on display, it’s not really explored.) Now, that’s a pretty major flaw, I’d say. When I taught writing, it was a cardinal sin to fail to make your point clear; an even greater sin was not to have a point. That's the whole reason for writing an essay or a report. I feel the same about a play: it’s got to say something. (For those who’ve read my theater reports before, you know that criterion number two is that a good play makes that point in a theatrical manner.) Shepard doesn’t admit to not having a point, but he does say, “It always confuses me a little bit when people ask what a play is about.” This is how he explains his approach:
A good play has resonance. Ideas come without you forcing them. Saying “I’m going [to] write a play about the Civil War,” or “I’m going write a play about Republicans or Democrats” . . . it’s so boring. But, on the other hand, when you let things go—when you allow the characters and you allow the situation to have a life of its own—things come.
He continues along this line, describing how the content of the play just develops out of “the predicament and the situation,” and the writer’s there “to help it along,” but not by “bringing [an outside idea] . . . into the room and saying let’s write a play” about it. My observation, however, that this form of freewriting (or maybe Shepard would see it as what the Surrealists called automatic writing) just results in a jumble of vaguely connected ideas and thoughts. As a writing exercise, a way to get the juices flowing, it works initially, but the writer then has to do more than “help it along”; he has to get in there and shape, edit, revise, cut, winnow, and develop. I think he has to point it at something, getting at the center the way Michelangelo said he got to the sculpture that’s hidden within a block of marble—by chiseling away everything that isn’t part of it. Not doing that is a form of self-indulgence and gets you nowhere creatively. As Frank Scheck of the New York Post bluntly puts it, “[N]othing really happens beyond Shepard’s usual blend of magical realism and heavy-handed symbolism” and “what it all means is anybody’s guess.” Shepard acknowledges that he reshaped the drafts of the script—but maybe he was just too enamored of what Jack Kerouac called “spontaneous bop prosody” to do enough shaping and pointing.
But lack of a clear point isn’t the only problem I have with Heartless. There are two other biggies: first, the play’s contrived and second, it deliberately obfuscates. That last is $25 word that means it keeps secrets. (I’ll work backwards and get to the contrivance issue in a bit. Stick around.) Now, Harold Pinter made a career out of writing plays that keep secrets from the audience—and those who’ve gotten to know me some by now know that I have serious difficulties with Pinter because of this. But Pinter was a past master at obscurantism and he used the tactic to create tension and insert an element of threat and menace into this plays, for which he was also famous. He was better at it than . . . well, everybody, including Shepard. Nevertheless, it makes me feel manipulated and annoys the crap out of me. It’s a game the playwright plays and we have no say in it. If I’m being annoyed, then I’m not really getting into the play. In fact, I feel as if I’m being tossed out of it. So I sat through the entire first act of Heartless wondering what was going on and why Shepard was keeping secrets from me for what seemed to me to be no good reason. It was as if everyone on stage were taking the Lord Voldemort/He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gambit far too seriously. (Of course, in Harry Potter, everyone knows who He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is and, what’s more, it’s a children’s story.) So, I began sneaking surreptitious peeks at my watch about 45 minutes into the hour-long first act—and that ain’t a good sign.
The issue of contrivance is pretty straightforward. An awful lot of the plot devices seemed set up to me. In this case, Shepard isn’t manipulating the audience, but the characters, making them do things they have no business doing in order to make the story go the way he wants it to. I’ll give you one illustration. In act two, when Roscoe’s had enough of being bashed one way then another by all the women in the house, he decides to leave. Now, Roscoe’s a college prof of Spanish lit specializing in Cervantes and Borges. I assume Shepard wants us to know he’s not stupid. He may be a little “lost in the woods”—he’s left his wife and children (though not his dog, which he’s brought along) and is tagging along with Sally because he has nowhere else to go—but he’s not slow. So he pulls out a suitcase and starts filling it with his few belongings, stashed under his bed. No sooner has he gotten a few books and bits of clothing into the suitcase than one of the women comes over and grabs it and dumps the contents on the floor. He’s stunned for a moment, but he starts again, picking up the strewn clothes and tossing them back into the suitcase. Whadaya think—another of the women crosses up, grabs the bag, and dumps it again. He starts over, and the third woman starts to approach him and we all know what she’s going to do—but what does Roscoe do? Guard the bag? Hold onto it as he picks up his stuff? No. He goes on picking up the scattered clothes, leaving the suitcase vulnerable—and sure enough, she grabs it and dumps it out again. It’s all set up so that Roscoe can be maltreated by all three women, look like a zhlub, and end up leaving without his things so we can see he’s been defeated. The play’s full of bits like that. Roscoe’s dog (unseen but heard off stage) serves no real purpose except to be left behind when Roscoe goes so Sally and Mable can have a conversation about what to do with it and what a dead dog smells like. The dog’s a McGuffin written into the play for the sole purpose of setting up the final dialogue.
Now, all this would be bad enough in terms of dramaturgy. But Shepard states that the play grew organically, without planning or shaping by him. “I’m always looking for the play that writes itself,” he says. “And I think Heartless comes as close as anything I’ve ever written to being a play that writes itself, in the sense that moment by moment you are not guiding it and trying to put it through its acrobatics.” Obviously, I can’t speak for the way Shepard felt as he composed his play, but his assertion conflicts diametrically with what I saw on the Diamond stage that Friday night. The author also acknowledges, however, that the script went through “three definitive drafts” of which only “the first 10 pages” remained from his earliest version. Somewhere during those “many transformations,” apparently, those perceived contrivances and manipulations sneaked in.
With one exception, the acting isn’t remarkable, but my impression is that the direction sabotaged the actors’ efforts. Daniel Aukin, the 41-year-old former artistic director of Soho Rep (1998-2006), is what the New York Times labeled “a furiously in-demand New York stage director.” He’s been working at many of the rep companies here in New York as well as at troupes all over the country—it’s a wonder I haven’t caught one of his productions before now, though I’ll be making up for that deficiency later in the fall a little. Aukin’s directing Melissa James Gibson’s What Rhymes With America in November, the second play in the Atlantic Theater Company’s new season, which I’ll be seeing in December, and Joshua Elias Harmon’s Bad Jews at the Roundabout Underground in October. Some directors like to allow the actors to experiment in early rehearsals and give them room to fail and then try something else before locking them into a performance. When you have the luxury to experiment, it’s beneficial to follow Samuel Beckett’s advice: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The tactic, however, can be counterproductive if allowed to go on too long or to proceed without any input from the director. It can cross the line into self-indulgence or aimlessness, and Aukin has been characterized as “a man of few words” on the set. (One director I knew followed this improvisational process but discovered occasionally that he’d spent “four weeks chasing this rabbit down the hole.”) And though New York magazine’s Scott Brown found it an enjoyable experience, he describes the result the way I saw it (with less pleasure): Aukin “has no idea what to do with the trunkful of body-parts Shepard has parked in his driveway, so he gives his fantastically hambone ensemble free reign.”
Aukin takes this exploratory process a step further, it seems. He wants his actors to fail: “Daniel really wants you to make mistakes,” explains Julianne Nicholson, who plays Sally in Heartless. His intention, according to a writer whose play Aukin directed in 2008, is “to explore the farthest emotional or dramatic boundaries of a scene.” Shepard says, “He allows the actor to set sail. Then he finds where it’s necessary to cut back.” Aukin says that he’s looking for the “room between those places” which have to be staged in a specific way, the room where he can bring his vision to bear. In a New York Times profile of the director, Rob Weinert-Kendt wrote that Aukin “has few contemporary rivals in finding texture and resonance in a play’s stillness and silence,” which may account for all the artificial Pinterisms that bothered me so much in the production. There were lots of pauses, which Ben Brantley called “air-devouring” in the New York Times, but they never felt organic whether Shepard put them in or the director inserted them. In the end, it seems to me that what we have is an unfocused, diffuse script staged by a director who likes to let his actors explore their own impulses, potentially to the extreme, and then focus on the holes. Maybe that works for Aukin more often than not—I may find out a little better in December—but it seems to have compounded the innate problems of Heartless. He was so focused on the silences and stillnesses, an already disjointed script just shatters along the fault lines.
Aukin’s directing raises questions about the acting in this production, as I hinted earlier. Aside from Lois Smith, who portrays Mable, no one in the cast is believable or really convincing in the fraught situation Shepard created. In the Daily News Joe Dziemianowicz characterizes the acting as “all over the map—tinny and flat to too declamatory.” Granted, the roles and the circumstances are tough to grip, even if an actor approaches them as absurdist or surreal, but the director’s supposed to provide guidance and help in entering the universe of the play. Failing that, an actor has to find her own resources to negotiate the script, but there needs to be a commitment to something the actor gets hold of to anchor the performance in that universe. Only Smith, whom I’ve now seen a number of times on stage in different kinds of roles (not to mention several TV and film performances), manages to inhabit a world within the play. The other four cast members all seem tentative and uncertain. The most inadequate is Gary Cole as Roscoe, the lone male on stage. I’d never seen Cole on stage before—his program bio doesn’t list many stage credits and only one in New York—so I mostly know his work from television where my impression of him has been that he’s a lightweight with not much range or depth. My opinion of him based on Heartless hasn’t changed. When Roscoe hesitates in answering questions about his literary specialties, I had the impression he was faking his credentials. But it isn’t Roscoe who’s faking—it’s Cole. The first thing I noticed is that when some of those many pauses occur early in the play, and they come after his lines—he just stops speaking. No one has interrupted him, no thought seems to have made him pause, there’s no logic behind the silence that I could see. He just runs out of words and waits. Like there’d been a stage direction. The script told him to stop. Or the director. The first time Cole did this, I thought, ‘Oh, a bit of bad timing. What a shame.’ But then he kept on doing the same thing. No one else does that—at least not as bluntly. Even if it’s a conventional technique Shepard or Aukin put into the performance text, that should be communicated to us so we know how to read it. This just looks like bad acting to me.
Cole’s work is only the most salient of the four other cast members. None of them, including the three younger women (Nicholson’s Sally, Jenny Bacon’s Lucy, Betty Gilpin’s Elizabeth), seem to inhabit their characters or to have absorbed the situation. (And before anyone jumps in to ask, there’s nothing remotely Brechtian going on in Heartless. Phony Pinter, yes; Brecht, no.) Nicholson, who’s worked with Aukin at least twice before, comes the closest of the four, but even she seems a little adrift when Sally makes one of the sudden behavioural shifts that each of the young women makes at least once in the play. (I also know Nicholson’s work only from TV: among other roles, she was one of the later detectives on Law & Order: Criminal Intent.) Granted, the parts are written to defy easy logic, and from an acting perspective that’s a huge problem, but when, for instance, Roscoe decides it’s time for him to leave, Sally joins Lucy and Elizabeth in trying to prevent him from going in the suitcase-dumping scene. But she’s just been incensed with him because she caught him screwing the beautiful Elizabeth and has essentially thrown him out, so why does she want him to stay now? The switch comes out of nowhere and is unconvincing. (Lucy didn’t want Roscoe there in the first place, so why’s she trying to keep him around? And she eventually even leaves with him—a move that, curiously, can be justified as an escape from her servitude to her mother.) As straight-up Absurdism, the dog-leg turn might be justified theatrically, but the production hasn’t been played that way for the most part. Anyway, it’s not a dramaturgical explanation that’s lacking—intellectually I get that the women don’t really want Roscoe to leave—it’s an acting question, and Nicholson, no more than the rest of the younger characters, doesn’t make me believe Sally’s for real, whether I understand her motives or not. As for Gilpin’s nurse, Brantley says the part “isn’t really there” and that’s pretty accurate. We never do find out Elizabeth’s story—as if Shepard was planning to go somewhere with that but abandoned the idea—though it’s not the fault of Gilpin, who does a magnificent silent scream to rival Nancy Walker’s in Murder by Death. This is the first time that I can recall, by the way, that I’ve had problems with Signature acting, even in plays that I haven’t liked. I don’t know, though, if the acting seems so inadequate because I couldn’t get into the spirit of the play, or if I couldn’t get into the production because the actors aren’t fully invested in their roles and circumstances. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the end.
I’ve scrupulously tried to distinguish between the younger characters in Heartless and Mable Murphy, Lois Smith’s character. That’s because, as I’ve hinted, she pulls her quirky and even alienating character off with total conviction. Perhaps I’m just prejudiced because I’ve seen Smith in so many different roles over the past several years and I’ve liked every one of her performances immensely, so maybe I just don’t want her to fail even once. I don’t think so, though. Mable’s pretty nuts as well as being paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, but Smith negotiates each change, shift, lie, misconception, and rant with such commitment that no matter how far off the rails Shepard seems to have gone sometimes, Mable always rings true. I don’t care if her behaviour meets the standards of the shrinks’ rulebook or not, Smith makes me believe a real person’s up there. Unfortunately, she contrasts with the other performances around her, but Smith does her job even if the others fall short. (Nearly every review I read, save Scott Brown of New York, contends that Smith salvages the production from whatever failings the reviewer diagnoses.) Mable can be talking along, having what seems to be a rational, if idiosyncratic, conversation—really an interrogation, even a dissection—with Roscoe, and then turn on a dime and start ranting and yelling like a demented banshee—and it’s perfectly believable. I might wonder what set her off, but I’m never in doubt that there was something. That’s an actor’s job: I don’t have to know what a character’s up to as long as I know she’s up to something. (In a past play report, I said of the actress: “I don’t think Smith can deliver anything less than a credible and warm performance . . . .” By “warm,” of course, I meant ‘warm-blooded,’ ‘alive’—and I’m doubling down on that assessment here. At the risk of overpraising her, I think Lois Smith is an honest-to-God living national treasure.)
(I have to insert a wonderful—and irrelevant—little sidelight concerning Smith here. In one of Mable’s final speeches, she explains how she got paralyzed. We knew she fell out of a tree when she was younger, but we don’t know the circumstances; Mable’s daughters were both very young when it happened. It turns out that she’d climbed a pine tree to see into a drive-in theater to watch a James Dean movie. She describes the episode and a scene in the movie, and it’s clear—if you watch old movies on TV—that the film, which Mable doesn’t name, had been East of Eden from 1955. Shepard says that when he wrote that speech for Smith, he didn’t know one amazing coincidence: the actress made her film début in that movie when she was 25!)
My appraisal of the physical production is a split decision. Kaye Voyce’s costumes, which Back Stage describes as “subtly stylized,” are fine without being spectacular. Elizabeth’s crisp, white nurse’s uniform, right down to the white stockings, shoes, and that little cap they all used to wear, is a throw-back to the 1950’s—or to old porn flicks that often featured naughty nurses (or so I’m told). It helps enhance the sense that Elizabeth—who we’re told just showed up out of nowhere and may be from Newcastle, England (where they make the brown ale, Mable informs us), or from Nebraska—isn’t entirely on the up-and-up. Voyce dresses Lucy like a slightly less dumpy Gladys Ormphby, Ruth Buzzi’s spinster from Laugh-In (from the black-outs with Arte Johnson as the dirty old Walnetto masher), but without the hair net. Lucy’s all in shades of gray (not quite 50, though), down to gray stockings and a charcoal cardigan. If she wore horn-rimmed glasses, she’d pass for Agnes Gooch, Peggy Cass’s character in Auntie Mame.
The set, however, designed by Eugene Lee and lit by Tyler Micoleau “in Stygian gloom,” according to Variety, entirely confounded me. (Director Aukin follows the same working process with designers as he does with actors: brainstorming design concepts “through set model after set model.”) Except for one element, it’s fragmentary Realism: two mismatched, white-painted, metal-framed beds—the sort you might see in an old-time hospital or psych ward—mid-stage, a white metal patio table and chairs down front, and two lonely palm trees, one on each side of the set. But the location is ambiguous. The front half of the stage is two levels, all dark-stained wood, the downstage portion a step below the mid-stage part. The two beds, one for Roscoe and the other for Sally, are on the same level, headboard-to-headboard, but it’s not clear if they’re in separate rooms or one, and their relationship to what seems to be a deck is also unclear. Above the upper level of the house is a steeply raked wooden slope that’s apparently out the back of the structure and ends at a cliff that looks out over the San Fernando Valley. (The back wall of the stage is exposed just beyond the hill.) The wooden slope is studded with slats to allow the actors to scamper up it, so a realistic terrain is not intended (despite the presence of the realistic-looking palms). There’s a ramp from the middle level at stage right down to the lower platform to accommodate Mable’s wheelchair, and another ramp up to a look-out at the far-left edge of the stage where Mable is wheeled so she can “gaze out into the abyss” of the city. Now, I’m fine with suggested sets; I don’t need Realism. But it helps if I can figure out what I’m supposed to be looking at, what it’s supposed to represent.
In the press, Variety’s Stasio laments that Heartless “lacks . . . a dramatic showdown and suffers for it” but praises Shepard’s “distinctive lyrical voice” which she declares the play has “in spades.” In the Times, Brantley calls Heartless a “murky new play” that “provides only flashes of the glorious theatrical glee and anguish that animate” the writer’s earlier, stronger works. Of the production, Brantley declares that it “calls ponderous attention to its great metaphysical themes” and that “its symbols stand out like road signs on those lonely stretches of highway that Mr. Shepard so loves to write about.” The Timesman does, however, praise Shepard for the “reversed gender ratio” of Heartless. Newsday’s Linda Winer calls the play a “haunting if not entirely satisfying new mystery” that “is not a play for people who need answers more than questions.” Despite “early heavy-handed scenes” that “drag into the self-conscious,” though, Winer concludes, once Lois Smith takes over, “we feel the playwright moving into gripping new territory.” According to Dziemianowicz of the Daily News, Heartless is a “hazy new meditation on life and death and what’s in-between.” It “isn’t abysmal,” he warns, though “it does become tedious.” Then Dziemianowicz adds that “it also occasionally surges with offbeat humor,” though it’s not enough to be “satisfying.” Heartless “feels rather like an abyss, one devoid of coherent meaning,” writes the New York Post’s Scheck. The play “lacks the emotional resonance and sheer entertainment value,” he proclaims, and “the mysteries seem shapeless, the conflicts arbitrary.” In Time Out New York, David Cote suggests that Shepard “seemed to be drawing inspiration anew from theater-of-the-absurd influences” but ended up with “a piece lacking most major organs, not just the blood-pumping one.” Cote does add, in apparent contrast to Linda Winer, “It’s a credit to this handsome, atmospheric production that the thinness and vagueness of the script only rankles in the second act.” In the end, however, he concludes that the writer’s effort “doesn’t make this wan exercise in lyrical weirdness any more compelling.” Despite being “visually arresting, beautifully directed . . ., and well-acted,” affirms Erik Haagensen in Back Stage, Heartless “lacks a sufficiently rigorous internal logic that would allow Shepard to communicate his ideas and emotions in a way that makes them palpable.” In fact, Haagensen confesses, as if echoing my own complaint, “I’m honestly not sure what Sam Shepard is up to with ‘Heartless.’” He ends by calling the play an “airless symbolic drama” and declares that it “fails to accrete in a persuasive way.” In New York, Brown dubs the play a “headless black-comedy” that feels like one of Shepard’s earlier scripts that’s been “reworked, overworked, and worked-over.” Focusing on the presentation, the New Yorker’s Hilton Als writes that the production “removed us from feeling in any traditional way. ‘Heartless’ has been bled of melodrama’s passions.”
In the Village Voice, however, Michael Feingold says delightedly that “Heartless is a Sam Shepard play,” emphasizing that he hasn’t seen a real one since Fool for Love in 1982. What Feingold seems to mean is that he loves all the things most others had trouble with in the play: the non-linear storytelling, the absence of logic, the characters that don’t make sense outside the play. “Shepard,” Feingold insists, “twists reality, he disrupts its surface, he delights in presenting contradictory data”—and that’s all good for the Voice review-writer, even as it “has already started to make those who pursue logical explanations extremely unhappy.” In sum, he declares that the play contains “wonder and charm” which derive “from the very real passion behind it and poetry within it.” Finally, former New York Times reviewer Wilborn Hampton writes in the Huffington Post that this is Shepard’s “most inspired and imaginative work in years” and declares that to ask “what was that all about?” as I have, risks diminishing “Shepard's accomplishment in this lyrical and mysterious play.”
In my own defense, I’ll add that I don’t have a problem with Absurdism. I like Albee and Ionesco, and I’ve even declared Beckett a genius and Waiting for Godot a masterpiece. So it isn’t simply a lack of ordinary logic that has turned me off with Heartless. I don’t even have trouble with unanswered questions—though I prefer that I can hear the questions. But even Absurdism means something (and it has an internal logic, too, though that’s not important here). Tiny Alice, The Bald Soprano, and End Game all have a point a spectator (or a critic) can draw out. Even hybrids of Absurdism can appeal to me, as I revealed in my report on Fugard’s Blood Knot back in February. Told I shouldn’t be asking what a play means or what the playwright’s saying, whether by the dramatist or the reviewer from the Village Voice, irks me. Not only do I have a perfectly good right to ask such questions of any work of art, but no one has any business telling me I don’t. I immediately get an emperor’s-new-clothes feeling in the pit of my stomach (along with a sense of irritation): if they don’t want me to know what the play’s saying, then maybe it’s not saying anything. Godot’s full of meaning—probably more than I’ll ever figure out—which is why I say it’s a masterpiece; Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, another of my favorite plays, is only slightly less meaningful that Godot; and Blood Knot makes powerful statements about a number of important topics. In addition, the Absurdism makes its own point. With Heartless, I was just left confused and adrift. Someone telling me I should be satisfied with that doesn’t convince me of much, Michael Feingold and his iconoclasm notwithstanding.
[In addition to the anecdote about Lois Smith and the reference to the movie East of Eden, I was reminded of something else that's not the least bit significant, but it’s a curiosity that occurred to me during the performance. During one scene, Mable says something about a museum that had Roy Rogers's horse Trigger stuffed and on display. (It was at the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in Branson, Missouri, until it was sold at auction when the museum closed.) Well, when I was at Washington and Lee University, the skeleton of Robert E. Lee's horse Traveller was in the basement of my freshman dorm! When my dad, also a W&L alumnus, was a student in the ’30s, the skeleton was on display in the science building, but it had deteriorated over the years and decades of students had scratched their initials on the bones, so it was removed some years before I arrived and stored beneath the old freshman dorm, where I lived my second semester. Students, of course, didn't have access to the storage room under the dorm, but Traveller, called Lee's favorite horse, stayed there for many more years until he was buried in 1971 in a marked grave near the Lee Chapel on the front campus where Lee and his family, including Robert E. Lee’s father and Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, are interred and which now houses a Lee museum and his preserved office as it was when he left it. (For those who don’t know their post-Civil War trivia, Robert E. Lee accepted the presidency of what was then Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, in 1865 and remained there until his death in 1870. The college, which bore the name of Lee’s fellow Virginian George Washington because of a huge gift the first U.S. president had given the school in 1796, was renamed Washington and Lee University in Lee’s honor and in recognition of the contributions he made to the school during his tenure.)]
Heartless, a two-hour play with one intermission, started previews at the Signature’s year-old complex on 42nd Street at 10th Avenue on 7 August and opened to the press on Monday, the 27th. Its original closing was scheduled for 16 September, but the play has been extended now through 30 September. The Diamond is the largest of the three stages at the Signature Center, a 299-seat proscenium formerly called the End Stage. (I reported on the architecture and construction of the new complex in “The Signature Center,” 18 February.) Shepard, who was the focus of the Signature’s 1996-97 season and whose The Late Henry Moss premièred in the company’s Tenth Anniversary Season, 2001-02, says that he began writing Heartless at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, which the playwright describes as “a think tank trying to find if there’s an inner dialogue between different pursuits: science and art and within science itself . . . .” Shepard and novelist Cormac McCarthy are the only writers in residence at the institute where, he says, he has “dialogues” with the scientists but writes on his own.
The Heartless story’s about a cranky, but shrewd invalided old lady, Mable Murphy, who lives in a huge house in the Hollywood Hills overlooking Los Angeles where she’s cared for by her elder daughter, Lucy, and her mute nurse, Elizabeth. Sally, Mable’s younger daughter comes to stay for a while, bringing Roscoe, her much-older lover. The family tensions and the presence of a stranger open cracks out of which spurt some family facts—or purported facts—that aren’t usually talked about. Shepard says he was inspired to write Heartless when he was in L.A. “really high up and you can see the entire city,” which Mable calls “the abyss.” “You feel like you’re not exactly of the city,” the playwright explains. “You’re outside it.” He continues:
Then I’d been thinking for a long time about wanting to write an intrinsically female play, with female characters. I was staying in a place where until very recently there had been a dowager—an old woman—who had been there for a long, long time, who died. And she was being cared for by many different people. I never met her, but that played a part in it.
Shepard began to “mess” with the plot elements to assemble what he saw as “a funny tapestry.” One of the secrets that’s revealed is that Sally had a heart transplant when she was ten—at the very start of the play, Sally gets out of bed bare-breasted, revealing the long, red, as-yet-unexplained scar—and Shepard had begun to wonder about “this in-between world that someone might find themselves in if they had a heart transplant.” He imagined that “if you were walking around with somebody else’s heart, it’s likely that you would have thoughts of the other person and what that person’s life might have been like. So it puts the possessor of the new heart in a funny relationship to the donor who’s, of course, dead, but always with them.” That, the playwright proclaimed, was the concept that launched Heartless, whose title in part refers to this idea. It sounds to me as if his intended theme is an examination of the “in-between existence where you have the sensation that we’re somehow between life and death. And maybe the dead are even around in a way we don’t understand.”
Well, all that certainly sounds intriguing: a little mystical, a little philosophical, a little spooky—not to mention the melodrama of the revelations of the family secrets. The trouble I had, however, was that Heartless doesn’t end up being any of those things. When we left the theater, Diana characterized the play as “simplistic.” I said that wouldn’t have been the adjective I’d have chosen and asked her what she meant. The play, she explained, was scattered, a bunch of uncooked ideas all thrown haphazardly into the pot. Okay, that may be, but though Diana wouldn’t give Shepard any credit for having had an idea or theme from which to work, I decided, this being Sam Shepard and not some first-time baby dramatist who didn’t know his beans, that I’d allow that he had some point in mind but just never got it into the script intelligibly. Simply put, I have no idea what Shepards trying to tell me. (One reviewer says the play explores “the human failure to connect with one another.” Not only is that awfully broad, the basic theme, I’d say, of most modern dramas, but even if “failure to connect” is on display, it’s not really explored.) Now, that’s a pretty major flaw, I’d say. When I taught writing, it was a cardinal sin to fail to make your point clear; an even greater sin was not to have a point. That's the whole reason for writing an essay or a report. I feel the same about a play: it’s got to say something. (For those who’ve read my theater reports before, you know that criterion number two is that a good play makes that point in a theatrical manner.) Shepard doesn’t admit to not having a point, but he does say, “It always confuses me a little bit when people ask what a play is about.” This is how he explains his approach:
A good play has resonance. Ideas come without you forcing them. Saying “I’m going [to] write a play about the Civil War,” or “I’m going write a play about Republicans or Democrats” . . . it’s so boring. But, on the other hand, when you let things go—when you allow the characters and you allow the situation to have a life of its own—things come.
He continues along this line, describing how the content of the play just develops out of “the predicament and the situation,” and the writer’s there “to help it along,” but not by “bringing [an outside idea] . . . into the room and saying let’s write a play” about it. My observation, however, that this form of freewriting (or maybe Shepard would see it as what the Surrealists called automatic writing) just results in a jumble of vaguely connected ideas and thoughts. As a writing exercise, a way to get the juices flowing, it works initially, but the writer then has to do more than “help it along”; he has to get in there and shape, edit, revise, cut, winnow, and develop. I think he has to point it at something, getting at the center the way Michelangelo said he got to the sculpture that’s hidden within a block of marble—by chiseling away everything that isn’t part of it. Not doing that is a form of self-indulgence and gets you nowhere creatively. As Frank Scheck of the New York Post bluntly puts it, “[N]othing really happens beyond Shepard’s usual blend of magical realism and heavy-handed symbolism” and “what it all means is anybody’s guess.” Shepard acknowledges that he reshaped the drafts of the script—but maybe he was just too enamored of what Jack Kerouac called “spontaneous bop prosody” to do enough shaping and pointing.
But lack of a clear point isn’t the only problem I have with Heartless. There are two other biggies: first, the play’s contrived and second, it deliberately obfuscates. That last is $25 word that means it keeps secrets. (I’ll work backwards and get to the contrivance issue in a bit. Stick around.) Now, Harold Pinter made a career out of writing plays that keep secrets from the audience—and those who’ve gotten to know me some by now know that I have serious difficulties with Pinter because of this. But Pinter was a past master at obscurantism and he used the tactic to create tension and insert an element of threat and menace into this plays, for which he was also famous. He was better at it than . . . well, everybody, including Shepard. Nevertheless, it makes me feel manipulated and annoys the crap out of me. It’s a game the playwright plays and we have no say in it. If I’m being annoyed, then I’m not really getting into the play. In fact, I feel as if I’m being tossed out of it. So I sat through the entire first act of Heartless wondering what was going on and why Shepard was keeping secrets from me for what seemed to me to be no good reason. It was as if everyone on stage were taking the Lord Voldemort/He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gambit far too seriously. (Of course, in Harry Potter, everyone knows who He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is and, what’s more, it’s a children’s story.) So, I began sneaking surreptitious peeks at my watch about 45 minutes into the hour-long first act—and that ain’t a good sign.
The issue of contrivance is pretty straightforward. An awful lot of the plot devices seemed set up to me. In this case, Shepard isn’t manipulating the audience, but the characters, making them do things they have no business doing in order to make the story go the way he wants it to. I’ll give you one illustration. In act two, when Roscoe’s had enough of being bashed one way then another by all the women in the house, he decides to leave. Now, Roscoe’s a college prof of Spanish lit specializing in Cervantes and Borges. I assume Shepard wants us to know he’s not stupid. He may be a little “lost in the woods”—he’s left his wife and children (though not his dog, which he’s brought along) and is tagging along with Sally because he has nowhere else to go—but he’s not slow. So he pulls out a suitcase and starts filling it with his few belongings, stashed under his bed. No sooner has he gotten a few books and bits of clothing into the suitcase than one of the women comes over and grabs it and dumps the contents on the floor. He’s stunned for a moment, but he starts again, picking up the strewn clothes and tossing them back into the suitcase. Whadaya think—another of the women crosses up, grabs the bag, and dumps it again. He starts over, and the third woman starts to approach him and we all know what she’s going to do—but what does Roscoe do? Guard the bag? Hold onto it as he picks up his stuff? No. He goes on picking up the scattered clothes, leaving the suitcase vulnerable—and sure enough, she grabs it and dumps it out again. It’s all set up so that Roscoe can be maltreated by all three women, look like a zhlub, and end up leaving without his things so we can see he’s been defeated. The play’s full of bits like that. Roscoe’s dog (unseen but heard off stage) serves no real purpose except to be left behind when Roscoe goes so Sally and Mable can have a conversation about what to do with it and what a dead dog smells like. The dog’s a McGuffin written into the play for the sole purpose of setting up the final dialogue.
Now, all this would be bad enough in terms of dramaturgy. But Shepard states that the play grew organically, without planning or shaping by him. “I’m always looking for the play that writes itself,” he says. “And I think Heartless comes as close as anything I’ve ever written to being a play that writes itself, in the sense that moment by moment you are not guiding it and trying to put it through its acrobatics.” Obviously, I can’t speak for the way Shepard felt as he composed his play, but his assertion conflicts diametrically with what I saw on the Diamond stage that Friday night. The author also acknowledges, however, that the script went through “three definitive drafts” of which only “the first 10 pages” remained from his earliest version. Somewhere during those “many transformations,” apparently, those perceived contrivances and manipulations sneaked in.
With one exception, the acting isn’t remarkable, but my impression is that the direction sabotaged the actors’ efforts. Daniel Aukin, the 41-year-old former artistic director of Soho Rep (1998-2006), is what the New York Times labeled “a furiously in-demand New York stage director.” He’s been working at many of the rep companies here in New York as well as at troupes all over the country—it’s a wonder I haven’t caught one of his productions before now, though I’ll be making up for that deficiency later in the fall a little. Aukin’s directing Melissa James Gibson’s What Rhymes With America in November, the second play in the Atlantic Theater Company’s new season, which I’ll be seeing in December, and Joshua Elias Harmon’s Bad Jews at the Roundabout Underground in October. Some directors like to allow the actors to experiment in early rehearsals and give them room to fail and then try something else before locking them into a performance. When you have the luxury to experiment, it’s beneficial to follow Samuel Beckett’s advice: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The tactic, however, can be counterproductive if allowed to go on too long or to proceed without any input from the director. It can cross the line into self-indulgence or aimlessness, and Aukin has been characterized as “a man of few words” on the set. (One director I knew followed this improvisational process but discovered occasionally that he’d spent “four weeks chasing this rabbit down the hole.”) And though New York magazine’s Scott Brown found it an enjoyable experience, he describes the result the way I saw it (with less pleasure): Aukin “has no idea what to do with the trunkful of body-parts Shepard has parked in his driveway, so he gives his fantastically hambone ensemble free reign.”
Aukin takes this exploratory process a step further, it seems. He wants his actors to fail: “Daniel really wants you to make mistakes,” explains Julianne Nicholson, who plays Sally in Heartless. His intention, according to a writer whose play Aukin directed in 2008, is “to explore the farthest emotional or dramatic boundaries of a scene.” Shepard says, “He allows the actor to set sail. Then he finds where it’s necessary to cut back.” Aukin says that he’s looking for the “room between those places” which have to be staged in a specific way, the room where he can bring his vision to bear. In a New York Times profile of the director, Rob Weinert-Kendt wrote that Aukin “has few contemporary rivals in finding texture and resonance in a play’s stillness and silence,” which may account for all the artificial Pinterisms that bothered me so much in the production. There were lots of pauses, which Ben Brantley called “air-devouring” in the New York Times, but they never felt organic whether Shepard put them in or the director inserted them. In the end, it seems to me that what we have is an unfocused, diffuse script staged by a director who likes to let his actors explore their own impulses, potentially to the extreme, and then focus on the holes. Maybe that works for Aukin more often than not—I may find out a little better in December—but it seems to have compounded the innate problems of Heartless. He was so focused on the silences and stillnesses, an already disjointed script just shatters along the fault lines.
Aukin’s directing raises questions about the acting in this production, as I hinted earlier. Aside from Lois Smith, who portrays Mable, no one in the cast is believable or really convincing in the fraught situation Shepard created. In the Daily News Joe Dziemianowicz characterizes the acting as “all over the map—tinny and flat to too declamatory.” Granted, the roles and the circumstances are tough to grip, even if an actor approaches them as absurdist or surreal, but the director’s supposed to provide guidance and help in entering the universe of the play. Failing that, an actor has to find her own resources to negotiate the script, but there needs to be a commitment to something the actor gets hold of to anchor the performance in that universe. Only Smith, whom I’ve now seen a number of times on stage in different kinds of roles (not to mention several TV and film performances), manages to inhabit a world within the play. The other four cast members all seem tentative and uncertain. The most inadequate is Gary Cole as Roscoe, the lone male on stage. I’d never seen Cole on stage before—his program bio doesn’t list many stage credits and only one in New York—so I mostly know his work from television where my impression of him has been that he’s a lightweight with not much range or depth. My opinion of him based on Heartless hasn’t changed. When Roscoe hesitates in answering questions about his literary specialties, I had the impression he was faking his credentials. But it isn’t Roscoe who’s faking—it’s Cole. The first thing I noticed is that when some of those many pauses occur early in the play, and they come after his lines—he just stops speaking. No one has interrupted him, no thought seems to have made him pause, there’s no logic behind the silence that I could see. He just runs out of words and waits. Like there’d been a stage direction. The script told him to stop. Or the director. The first time Cole did this, I thought, ‘Oh, a bit of bad timing. What a shame.’ But then he kept on doing the same thing. No one else does that—at least not as bluntly. Even if it’s a conventional technique Shepard or Aukin put into the performance text, that should be communicated to us so we know how to read it. This just looks like bad acting to me.
Cole’s work is only the most salient of the four other cast members. None of them, including the three younger women (Nicholson’s Sally, Jenny Bacon’s Lucy, Betty Gilpin’s Elizabeth), seem to inhabit their characters or to have absorbed the situation. (And before anyone jumps in to ask, there’s nothing remotely Brechtian going on in Heartless. Phony Pinter, yes; Brecht, no.) Nicholson, who’s worked with Aukin at least twice before, comes the closest of the four, but even she seems a little adrift when Sally makes one of the sudden behavioural shifts that each of the young women makes at least once in the play. (I also know Nicholson’s work only from TV: among other roles, she was one of the later detectives on Law & Order: Criminal Intent.) Granted, the parts are written to defy easy logic, and from an acting perspective that’s a huge problem, but when, for instance, Roscoe decides it’s time for him to leave, Sally joins Lucy and Elizabeth in trying to prevent him from going in the suitcase-dumping scene. But she’s just been incensed with him because she caught him screwing the beautiful Elizabeth and has essentially thrown him out, so why does she want him to stay now? The switch comes out of nowhere and is unconvincing. (Lucy didn’t want Roscoe there in the first place, so why’s she trying to keep him around? And she eventually even leaves with him—a move that, curiously, can be justified as an escape from her servitude to her mother.) As straight-up Absurdism, the dog-leg turn might be justified theatrically, but the production hasn’t been played that way for the most part. Anyway, it’s not a dramaturgical explanation that’s lacking—intellectually I get that the women don’t really want Roscoe to leave—it’s an acting question, and Nicholson, no more than the rest of the younger characters, doesn’t make me believe Sally’s for real, whether I understand her motives or not. As for Gilpin’s nurse, Brantley says the part “isn’t really there” and that’s pretty accurate. We never do find out Elizabeth’s story—as if Shepard was planning to go somewhere with that but abandoned the idea—though it’s not the fault of Gilpin, who does a magnificent silent scream to rival Nancy Walker’s in Murder by Death. This is the first time that I can recall, by the way, that I’ve had problems with Signature acting, even in plays that I haven’t liked. I don’t know, though, if the acting seems so inadequate because I couldn’t get into the spirit of the play, or if I couldn’t get into the production because the actors aren’t fully invested in their roles and circumstances. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the end.
I’ve scrupulously tried to distinguish between the younger characters in Heartless and Mable Murphy, Lois Smith’s character. That’s because, as I’ve hinted, she pulls her quirky and even alienating character off with total conviction. Perhaps I’m just prejudiced because I’ve seen Smith in so many different roles over the past several years and I’ve liked every one of her performances immensely, so maybe I just don’t want her to fail even once. I don’t think so, though. Mable’s pretty nuts as well as being paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, but Smith negotiates each change, shift, lie, misconception, and rant with such commitment that no matter how far off the rails Shepard seems to have gone sometimes, Mable always rings true. I don’t care if her behaviour meets the standards of the shrinks’ rulebook or not, Smith makes me believe a real person’s up there. Unfortunately, she contrasts with the other performances around her, but Smith does her job even if the others fall short. (Nearly every review I read, save Scott Brown of New York, contends that Smith salvages the production from whatever failings the reviewer diagnoses.) Mable can be talking along, having what seems to be a rational, if idiosyncratic, conversation—really an interrogation, even a dissection—with Roscoe, and then turn on a dime and start ranting and yelling like a demented banshee—and it’s perfectly believable. I might wonder what set her off, but I’m never in doubt that there was something. That’s an actor’s job: I don’t have to know what a character’s up to as long as I know she’s up to something. (In a past play report, I said of the actress: “I don’t think Smith can deliver anything less than a credible and warm performance . . . .” By “warm,” of course, I meant ‘warm-blooded,’ ‘alive’—and I’m doubling down on that assessment here. At the risk of overpraising her, I think Lois Smith is an honest-to-God living national treasure.)
(I have to insert a wonderful—and irrelevant—little sidelight concerning Smith here. In one of Mable’s final speeches, she explains how she got paralyzed. We knew she fell out of a tree when she was younger, but we don’t know the circumstances; Mable’s daughters were both very young when it happened. It turns out that she’d climbed a pine tree to see into a drive-in theater to watch a James Dean movie. She describes the episode and a scene in the movie, and it’s clear—if you watch old movies on TV—that the film, which Mable doesn’t name, had been East of Eden from 1955. Shepard says that when he wrote that speech for Smith, he didn’t know one amazing coincidence: the actress made her film début in that movie when she was 25!)
My appraisal of the physical production is a split decision. Kaye Voyce’s costumes, which Back Stage describes as “subtly stylized,” are fine without being spectacular. Elizabeth’s crisp, white nurse’s uniform, right down to the white stockings, shoes, and that little cap they all used to wear, is a throw-back to the 1950’s—or to old porn flicks that often featured naughty nurses (or so I’m told). It helps enhance the sense that Elizabeth—who we’re told just showed up out of nowhere and may be from Newcastle, England (where they make the brown ale, Mable informs us), or from Nebraska—isn’t entirely on the up-and-up. Voyce dresses Lucy like a slightly less dumpy Gladys Ormphby, Ruth Buzzi’s spinster from Laugh-In (from the black-outs with Arte Johnson as the dirty old Walnetto masher), but without the hair net. Lucy’s all in shades of gray (not quite 50, though), down to gray stockings and a charcoal cardigan. If she wore horn-rimmed glasses, she’d pass for Agnes Gooch, Peggy Cass’s character in Auntie Mame.
The set, however, designed by Eugene Lee and lit by Tyler Micoleau “in Stygian gloom,” according to Variety, entirely confounded me. (Director Aukin follows the same working process with designers as he does with actors: brainstorming design concepts “through set model after set model.”) Except for one element, it’s fragmentary Realism: two mismatched, white-painted, metal-framed beds—the sort you might see in an old-time hospital or psych ward—mid-stage, a white metal patio table and chairs down front, and two lonely palm trees, one on each side of the set. But the location is ambiguous. The front half of the stage is two levels, all dark-stained wood, the downstage portion a step below the mid-stage part. The two beds, one for Roscoe and the other for Sally, are on the same level, headboard-to-headboard, but it’s not clear if they’re in separate rooms or one, and their relationship to what seems to be a deck is also unclear. Above the upper level of the house is a steeply raked wooden slope that’s apparently out the back of the structure and ends at a cliff that looks out over the San Fernando Valley. (The back wall of the stage is exposed just beyond the hill.) The wooden slope is studded with slats to allow the actors to scamper up it, so a realistic terrain is not intended (despite the presence of the realistic-looking palms). There’s a ramp from the middle level at stage right down to the lower platform to accommodate Mable’s wheelchair, and another ramp up to a look-out at the far-left edge of the stage where Mable is wheeled so she can “gaze out into the abyss” of the city. Now, I’m fine with suggested sets; I don’t need Realism. But it helps if I can figure out what I’m supposed to be looking at, what it’s supposed to represent.
In the press, Variety’s Stasio laments that Heartless “lacks . . . a dramatic showdown and suffers for it” but praises Shepard’s “distinctive lyrical voice” which she declares the play has “in spades.” In the Times, Brantley calls Heartless a “murky new play” that “provides only flashes of the glorious theatrical glee and anguish that animate” the writer’s earlier, stronger works. Of the production, Brantley declares that it “calls ponderous attention to its great metaphysical themes” and that “its symbols stand out like road signs on those lonely stretches of highway that Mr. Shepard so loves to write about.” The Timesman does, however, praise Shepard for the “reversed gender ratio” of Heartless. Newsday’s Linda Winer calls the play a “haunting if not entirely satisfying new mystery” that “is not a play for people who need answers more than questions.” Despite “early heavy-handed scenes” that “drag into the self-conscious,” though, Winer concludes, once Lois Smith takes over, “we feel the playwright moving into gripping new territory.” According to Dziemianowicz of the Daily News, Heartless is a “hazy new meditation on life and death and what’s in-between.” It “isn’t abysmal,” he warns, though “it does become tedious.” Then Dziemianowicz adds that “it also occasionally surges with offbeat humor,” though it’s not enough to be “satisfying.” Heartless “feels rather like an abyss, one devoid of coherent meaning,” writes the New York Post’s Scheck. The play “lacks the emotional resonance and sheer entertainment value,” he proclaims, and “the mysteries seem shapeless, the conflicts arbitrary.” In Time Out New York, David Cote suggests that Shepard “seemed to be drawing inspiration anew from theater-of-the-absurd influences” but ended up with “a piece lacking most major organs, not just the blood-pumping one.” Cote does add, in apparent contrast to Linda Winer, “It’s a credit to this handsome, atmospheric production that the thinness and vagueness of the script only rankles in the second act.” In the end, however, he concludes that the writer’s effort “doesn’t make this wan exercise in lyrical weirdness any more compelling.” Despite being “visually arresting, beautifully directed . . ., and well-acted,” affirms Erik Haagensen in Back Stage, Heartless “lacks a sufficiently rigorous internal logic that would allow Shepard to communicate his ideas and emotions in a way that makes them palpable.” In fact, Haagensen confesses, as if echoing my own complaint, “I’m honestly not sure what Sam Shepard is up to with ‘Heartless.’” He ends by calling the play an “airless symbolic drama” and declares that it “fails to accrete in a persuasive way.” In New York, Brown dubs the play a “headless black-comedy” that feels like one of Shepard’s earlier scripts that’s been “reworked, overworked, and worked-over.” Focusing on the presentation, the New Yorker’s Hilton Als writes that the production “removed us from feeling in any traditional way. ‘Heartless’ has been bled of melodrama’s passions.”
In the Village Voice, however, Michael Feingold says delightedly that “Heartless is a Sam Shepard play,” emphasizing that he hasn’t seen a real one since Fool for Love in 1982. What Feingold seems to mean is that he loves all the things most others had trouble with in the play: the non-linear storytelling, the absence of logic, the characters that don’t make sense outside the play. “Shepard,” Feingold insists, “twists reality, he disrupts its surface, he delights in presenting contradictory data”—and that’s all good for the Voice review-writer, even as it “has already started to make those who pursue logical explanations extremely unhappy.” In sum, he declares that the play contains “wonder and charm” which derive “from the very real passion behind it and poetry within it.” Finally, former New York Times reviewer Wilborn Hampton writes in the Huffington Post that this is Shepard’s “most inspired and imaginative work in years” and declares that to ask “what was that all about?” as I have, risks diminishing “Shepard's accomplishment in this lyrical and mysterious play.”
In my own defense, I’ll add that I don’t have a problem with Absurdism. I like Albee and Ionesco, and I’ve even declared Beckett a genius and Waiting for Godot a masterpiece. So it isn’t simply a lack of ordinary logic that has turned me off with Heartless. I don’t even have trouble with unanswered questions—though I prefer that I can hear the questions. But even Absurdism means something (and it has an internal logic, too, though that’s not important here). Tiny Alice, The Bald Soprano, and End Game all have a point a spectator (or a critic) can draw out. Even hybrids of Absurdism can appeal to me, as I revealed in my report on Fugard’s Blood Knot back in February. Told I shouldn’t be asking what a play means or what the playwright’s saying, whether by the dramatist or the reviewer from the Village Voice, irks me. Not only do I have a perfectly good right to ask such questions of any work of art, but no one has any business telling me I don’t. I immediately get an emperor’s-new-clothes feeling in the pit of my stomach (along with a sense of irritation): if they don’t want me to know what the play’s saying, then maybe it’s not saying anything. Godot’s full of meaning—probably more than I’ll ever figure out—which is why I say it’s a masterpiece; Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, another of my favorite plays, is only slightly less meaningful that Godot; and Blood Knot makes powerful statements about a number of important topics. In addition, the Absurdism makes its own point. With Heartless, I was just left confused and adrift. Someone telling me I should be satisfied with that doesn’t convince me of much, Michael Feingold and his iconoclasm notwithstanding.
[In addition to the anecdote about Lois Smith and the reference to the movie East of Eden, I was reminded of something else that's not the least bit significant, but it’s a curiosity that occurred to me during the performance. During one scene, Mable says something about a museum that had Roy Rogers's horse Trigger stuffed and on display. (It was at the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in Branson, Missouri, until it was sold at auction when the museum closed.) Well, when I was at Washington and Lee University, the skeleton of Robert E. Lee's horse Traveller was in the basement of my freshman dorm! When my dad, also a W&L alumnus, was a student in the ’30s, the skeleton was on display in the science building, but it had deteriorated over the years and decades of students had scratched their initials on the bones, so it was removed some years before I arrived and stored beneath the old freshman dorm, where I lived my second semester. Students, of course, didn't have access to the storage room under the dorm, but Traveller, called Lee's favorite horse, stayed there for many more years until he was buried in 1971 in a marked grave near the Lee Chapel on the front campus where Lee and his family, including Robert E. Lee’s father and Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, are interred and which now houses a Lee museum and his preserved office as it was when he left it. (For those who don’t know their post-Civil War trivia, Robert E. Lee accepted the presidency of what was then Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, in 1865 and remained there until his death in 1870. The college, which bore the name of Lee’s fellow Virginian George Washington because of a huge gift the first U.S. president had given the school in 1796, was renamed Washington and Lee University in Lee’s honor and in recognition of the contributions he made to the school during his tenure.)]
05 September 2012
Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic
by Kirk Woodward
[Once again, Kirk Woodward comes in with an interesting take on a familiar figure, this time the great Irish playwright, critic, and writer-thinker George Bernard Shaw. Shaw is one of the cultural personalities whom Kirk esteems above most others, an interest he’s had since before I knew him. He’s read and seen many, if not most, of Shaw’s plays—and I confess that his works are among my most favorite, too, though I don’t know nearly as much about the man and the artist as Kirk does. For instance, though I have also read or seen (and even performed in) a number of Shaw’s plays, I’ve only read a little of his criticism. Kirk has made a point over many years of digging into writers, composers, and thinkers about whom he’s curious and in whom he’s interested. What little criticism of Shaw’s I’ve read has been limited pretty much to his theater writing—he was a drama critic and reviewer long before he started writing plays himself—but Kirk’s read his music criticism and much of his other writing as well. In other words, this is one more case in which Kirk knows something about his subject that’s well worth listening to. And once again, he takes his ideas into a somewhat unexpected direction. ~Rick]
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is best known as a playwright, but he excelled in so many other fields that it's hard to keep track of them. In particular, he was a remarkable reviewer, covering, over a period of years, the subjects of books, pictures, music, and theater. His theater reviews, collected as Our Theatre in the Nineties (Constable and Company Limited, London, 1954, in three volumes), stand out in my mind above everything else of its kind, and some consider his music reviews to be even better. One reason is that Shaw refused to be confined to just the contents of the art he was reviewing.
It is odd that I would praise this characteristic of his writing, because in my book The Art of Writing Reviews (available at Lulu.com) I insist that a reviewer should focus directly on the work being reviewed, without reference to its history, the personality of its author, its production background, and so on – that a reviewer should tell us what this work is like, and then, having understood it, if desired make some judgment about it.
However, most of us aren't Shaw – none of us, actually. Shaw was uniquely equipped by experience and knowledge to do exactly what he urged the theater of his time to do – to bring the world around it into the theater, to write plays that reflect life as it is rather than life as other plays have portrayed it.
In demonstrating how this should be done, Shaw brought into his work – not just his plays, but all his writing and speaking – elements of economics, politics, morality, religion, social relationships . . . whatever seemed to him to pertain to the world that was related to the work at hand. In the course of his theater reviews he definitely does give a strong sense of what the play in front of him is like. But he doesn't review it in a vacuum. He gives his work the context of the life around it.
In the process of writing, Shaw became, among other things, what I have not seen him acknowledged as being: a culture critic. More precisely: Shaw is a remarkable critic of popular culture, noticing many phenomena that often escape notice because they are so familiar to us, and being one of the first to do so. A few illustrations:
* On articles, polls, and shows that rank artists in some sort of best-to-worst sequence (American Idol can serve as an example):
But this business of giving orders of merit to artists as if they were boxing for points is silly. (Letter to the Arts Gazette, 31 January 1920)
* On artists who feel the need to show off at the expense of already worthwhile pieces:
Confronted with a Shakespearian play, [the director] stares into a ghastly vacuum, yet stares unterrified, undisturbed by any suspicion that his eyesight is failing, quite prepared to find the thing simply an ancient, dusty, mouldy, empty house which it is his business to furnish, decorate, and housewarm with an amusing entertainment. (“The Dying Tongue of Queen Elizabeth,” Saturday Review, 11 February 1905)
* On the Internet, with “social media” and with all the other recent and dramatic ways that the availability of art has blossomed – the proliferation of means of communication was beginning in his era, and Shaw was conscious of it. He saw that the infant communication revolution meant a huge boost for popular interest in many kinds of art:
Thanks to the development of the literary and artistic sides of the daily newspapers, to the gramophone, the pianola, and wireless, the supply of journalists with a knowledge and love of art, and a cultivated sensibility to refinements in artistic execution, is much greater than it was. (Saturday Review, 7 November 1925)
So he would not have surprised by the effect of the Internet on reviewing, where every purchaser of a DVD on Amazon is invited to think of herself or himself as a critic.
Those few examples of criticism of popular art demonstrate that Shaw knew his subject, and knew how to write about it. However, he was not just an observer – he was a thinker, and he thought in an organized way about popular culture.
What exactly do we mean in talking about “popular” culture and popular art? We are essentially talking about money, and not just enough money to support life in a garret, but significant amounts of dough. It is worth noticing at the beginning of this discussion that Shaw does not make a distinction between commercial and "real" art. We are often tempted to dismiss, say, television sitcoms as "not real art" because the main motive for their creation is profit.
Shaw will have none of that, as reflected in his famous remark to Samuel Goldwyn that "You're only interested in art, I'm only interested in money." Goldwyn had money, so he could afford highfalutin' attitudes about art if he wanted them. Shaw wanted to make money, and did his best to. In particular, he managed the profits of his plays as though he were a penny-pinching industrial tycoon.
But notice that the distinction between “commercial” and “good” art is not the same as the distinction between “popular” and “high” art. Shaw rejects the first distinction, but embraces the second. What’s more, he sees relationships between the two. Shaw's view of “commercial” and “high” art as related to each other has implications for both kinds of art. For popular art, Shaw’s attitude insists that high standards are possible within it. For high art, Shaw’s attitude destroys pretention and insists on grounded thought.
Whether one works in the field of high or popular art, it does not seem sensible to Shaw that an artist might not care about being paid; such an attitude would strike him as an affectation or a pathology. Here, as in so many other areas, I believe he's correct. There is no reason that the purest artist shouldn't want to eat. A much saner attitude is that expressed by Noel Coward, who said that, like Shakespeare, he wrote his plays for two purposes: to do work of which he was proud, and, by so doing, to earn his living.
For Shaw, bringing Shakespeare into the discussion only confirms his point. Shaw has no patience with those who doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays associated with his name. Those who wonder how the merchant's son from Stratford could have written Those Great Plays, Shaw would say, are overlooking the very reason that he did write them: because he wanted a career, wanted his theater to prosper, wanted fame and recognition for his work. Why not? Who doesn't?
. . . an author is a person who has to eat and drink and clothe himself, and . . . therefore they must not perform a play without paying a little at any rate to the man who wrote it. (“Playwrights and Amateurs,” 1933)
Shaw’s interest in the relationship between art and money is one of his strengths as a critic of popular culture. He understands the relationship on a practical level, as illustrated by his facility for examining box office returns for trends. This may sound prosaic, but Shaw was deeply interested in where his theater was going, and he knew that this meant “following the money.” Shaw frequently reports on the economics of the West End theater of his time, with a thorough understanding of the conditions in which theaters, including small “independent” theaters, operate. “I have to think,” he wrote to The New York Times (2 June 1912),
of my pocket, of the manager’s pocket, of the actors’ pockets, of the spectators’ pockets, of how long people can be kept sitting in a theatre without relief or refreshments . . . I have to consider theatrical rents, the rate of interest needed to tempt capitalists to face the risks of financing theaters, the extent to which the magic of art can break through commercial prudence . . . in short, all the factors that must be allowed for before the representation of a play on the stage becomes practicable or justifiable . . . .
The best contemporary example of commentary of this sort that I know of is William Goldman’s The Season, an indispensible book about one Broadway season (1967-1968), seen from every angle. Shaw anticipates Goldman in his focus on the tangible foundation of cash that art is built on.
What does Shaw see when he examines the accounts of the theaters of his time? He sees that in the short run, popular art makes money where high art does not. At the same time, not all popular art makes money. Why doesn’t it? Ordinarily we don’t ask this question; we just assume that some shows, films, etc., succeed and others don’t. But if popular art really is popular, why doesn’t it always succeed? What’s the problem? Shaw’s answer is that in general popular art has limited vision. It tends to look at other popular art for its content – in other words, it tends to be derivative and imitative. Its subjects seem sure-fire, but they only go so far.
What are the subjects of popular art? One extremely common subject, Shaw says, is the idea that love is the be-all and end-all of everything, “in unquestioning obedience to the law of the realm of romance, that love is strong as death and jealousy cruel as the grave” (Saturday Review, 30 November 1895). He has no patience with this notion:
As I have already had to point out in criticizing romantic dramas, love can be more easily baffled and jealousy more safely braved than any of the other passions, in spite of the fact that both social discipline and criminal law are sentimentally relaxed to an alarming degree in favor of people who act on the romantic theory, even to the extent of committing murder.
Obviously many people disagree with Shaw about the central place of love in art, but a look at popular art in general suggests that he’s correct, both in his observations that love, usually meaning romantic love, is at the heart of most of it, and that after a while the subject may get the slightest bit boring through repetition, leaving the door open for other subjects frequently encountered in popular art, such as sex; patriotism and its close companion, military valor; crime and the fear of being arrested; religion, especially if connected with the idea of punishment (for somebody else); and sentimental views of motherhood and children.
Could works of art about topics other than Love Love Love, and the other familiar staples of popular art, succeed? It’s a continuing question. Shaw dedicated his career to demonstrating that they could.
Shaw, then, sees no necessary artistic distinction between commercial art and art that doesn’t bring in much money; but he does distinguish between popular (sometimes he says “low”) and high art. He also sees a difference between worthwhile and poor art:
You cannot draw a line and say, “On this side is professional work, and on the other is amateur.” The only meaning that the words ever had is that on one side there is bad work and that on the other there is good work. (“Playwrights and Amateurs,” 1933)
It’s out of the scope of this essay to elaborate on what Shaw considers high art to be. I will only suggest his approach through a quotation from a review dated 11 April 1896:
. . . though plays have neither political constitutions nor established churches, they must all, if they are to be anything more than the merest tissue of stage effects, have a philosophy, even if it be no more than an unconscious expression of the author’s temperament.
High art, then, takes us into a greater understanding of life (“a philosophy”), where popular art tends to repeat already-established, second-hand attitudes toward life. The difference is significant, and we feel we know it when we see it.
But Shaw also sees that the difference between popular and high art expresses itself in curious ways. Shaw is the first observer I am aware of who noticed the odd phenomenon that a piece of popular culture may be massively popular, and then suddenly and completely lose its appeal, with almost no transitional period. I have experienced this with many television shows that I have watched for seasons, and suddenly cannot watch for love or money, for example “Mad About You” and “Rosanne,” both popular and worthwhile shows that I cannot imagine wanting to see again, ever. Writing in 1910 in a letter (“Mr. Trench’s Dramatic Values”) to the Saturday Review, Shaw responds to a remark by Irish poet F. H. Trench that inferior art can outsell finer products, in the way that (my illustration, not Shaw’s) Abie’s Irish Rose had a longer initial run than St. Joan. Shaw notes that such a phenomenon can occur, and then acutely continues:
But to all wildly popular things comes, suddenly and inexorably, death without hope of resurrection. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot set the street pianos playing Nancy Lee again, though the tune is as good as ever it was, and they once played nothing else. No book within our recollection had so made a vogue in America as Du Maurier’s Trilby; the elders of Trilby’s day said there had been nothing like it since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But the American booksellers still talk of the miracle of Trilby’s death. They aver that the demand stopped in one day.
Art that is popular only because it is popular, Shaw suggests, is art that will come and go. The power to last is a power given only to great art. We still care about Shakespeare; we can barely remember the new TV shows of last year, or what won last year’s Academy Award for Best Song.
Shaw demonstrates that popular and high art have important relationships with each other, but he does not pretend that they are the same. They have their own spheres and their own audiences:
All forms of art rise with the culture and capacity of the human race; but the forms rise together: the higher forms do not return and submerge the lower. . . . The success of [the higher] plays depends upon the exercise by the audience of powers of memory, imagination, insight, reasoning, and sympathy, which only a small minority of the play going public at present possesses. To the rest the higher drama is as disagreeably perplexing as the game of chess is to a man who has barely enough capacity to understand skittles . . . (Appendix to The Quintessence of Ibsenism, first edition, 1891)
But, Shaw points out, they also influence each other. Using the example of Ibsen’s impact on the theater of his time, he writes:
In the drama then, we may depend on it that though we shall not have another Ibsen, yet nobody will write for the stage after him as most playwrights wrote before him. (Appendix)
The point Shaw makes here is a crucial one. We might assume that popular art will always drive out high art, because it brings in more money; and often that seems to be the case. But, as Shaw puts it, popular art is of one sex, and sterile; it tends to repeat itself, imitating other popular art, as we continually see in television, where a show called “innovative” is usually just cruder or more violent than its peers. So fatigue, boredom, even contempt is built into popular art over the long haul.
Great art, on the other hand, Shaw says, is the result of contact between art and actual life, and opens new territory for the mind, heart, and spirit. So high art is where art gets its newness, even if popular art doesn’t want to acknowledge the fact. Popular art depends on high art to show it the way to new forms and new ideas.
Popular art ordinarily tries to keep its distance from great art, but it can’t help noticing that there’s something new there, and trying to absorb some of it. The result is that even if great art is unpopular, it influences popular art, and in so doing, nourishes it. We see this phenomenon all the time, for example in music, where no one after the Beatles could write as well as they did, yet no one could write without an awareness of what the Beatles had done; or in film, where the innovations of, say, D. W. Griffith were impossible to ignore by anyone who made films after him.
But, Shaw notes, just because popular art is influenced by great art does not mean that great art replaces it:
No one need fear on this account that Ibsen will gradually destroy melodrama. It might as well be assumed that Shakespeare will destroy music-hall entertainments, or the prose romances of William Morris supersede the Illustrated Police news. All forms of art rise with the culture and capacity of the human race; but the forms rise together: the higher forms do not return and submerge the lower. (Appendix)
So popular art owes high art a debt, Shaw suggests. He then draws the somewhat radical conclusion that popular art should support high art because it is nourished by it. Popular art owes high art a debt, Shaw says, and it ought to pay that debt.
So, Shaw says, why should theaters, in his example, not be organized so that “high” and “popular” art can exist together? In a review dated 30 January 1897, he writes that, for example:
If Mr. [George] Alexander [an actor and manager], instead of handing over Magda to fail in the evening bill at another theatre, had produced it and [German playwright Hermann Sudermann’s] Sodom’s Ende and so forth at a series of matinees of the Saturday Pop class, financing them from the exchequer of the kingdom of Ruritania [in other words, by using some of the proceeds of more popular plays], and aiming solely at the nourishment of the drama and the prevention of stagnation in public taste, he might have laid the foundations of a genuine classic theatre, in which the cultivated people who never dream of going to the theatre now would take their boxes and stalls by the season, and the hundred thousand people who go to the St James’s twice a year would be represented financially by four thousand going once a week.
The same point may be made today, and to some extent Shaw’s advice has been taken. (The Shubert organization, for example, Broadway’s largest producing entity, invests a certain amount of money each year in less conventional theater through the Shubert Foundation.)
The bigger problem today is an attitude of indifference toward the importance of art in much of society, particularly in the related areas of politics and education, an attitude that has been documented by Rick in this blog. Shaw lived in a similar era. He saw the problem, but he did not give up hope.
It is a tribute to Shaw’s importance that his views on popular art are as interesting as his plays, and that both are vital today. He was able both to diagnose the relation between popular and high art, and to do something about it by creating art that straddled both worlds. We might perhaps try to profit from his example.
[The quotations in this article are taken from the following books: Bernard F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw, Director (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971); Bernard Shaw, Our Theatre in the Nineties (three volumes) (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1954); E. J. West, ed., Shaw on Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958).
[One commercial note, so to speak: Kirk mentions his book, The Art of Writing Reviews, which I suggest is worth a read. But what I really want to point out here is that I spent four posts on ROT commenting on the book back on 4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009. In addition to reading Kirk’s book itself, it might be worth having a look at my side remarks—they’re like marginalia except I typed them up for public consumption. (I think of it as a kind of Talmud to Kirk’s Torah—though I doubt he’d see it quite that way!)
[Now, a personal note on Shaw. I suggested that he’s one of my favorite playwrights, and when I was trying to be an actor, I thought I could make a life just doing his plays—Eugene Marchbanks in Candida when I was still in my 20’s; Napoleon in The Man of Destiny (whom I did get to play!) when I was in my 30’s, Undershaft in Major Barbara or Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion when I was graying. I never got to do enough of his work—I probably couldn’t have gotten to do enough; there’s no such thing—but I loved every chance I got to do one. I liked doing Shakespeare, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, the great Americans Tennessee Williams and George S. Kaufman (among others), Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Molière, and so on, as well as the moderns and the contemporaries. But I could have lived and died doing Shaw. A number of years ago, I got to go up to Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario for a week at the annual Shaw Festival. I think I saw eight shows there—hog heaven for me—and two were Shaws, including one of my absolute favorites, Arms and the Man (Bluntschli’s another part the playwright wrote for me), and one I’d never seen, Too True To Be Good.
[Shaw is also the author of one of the best statements on freedom of expression I may ever have read. It’s from the 1913 revision of The Quintessence of Ibsenism: “The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but it is absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often. But it is not good for people to be garotted occasionally, or at all. That is why it is a mistake to treat an atheist as you treat a garotter, or to put ‘bad taste’ on the footing of theft and murder.” It’s why I’m a First Amendment absolutist.]
[Once again, Kirk Woodward comes in with an interesting take on a familiar figure, this time the great Irish playwright, critic, and writer-thinker George Bernard Shaw. Shaw is one of the cultural personalities whom Kirk esteems above most others, an interest he’s had since before I knew him. He’s read and seen many, if not most, of Shaw’s plays—and I confess that his works are among my most favorite, too, though I don’t know nearly as much about the man and the artist as Kirk does. For instance, though I have also read or seen (and even performed in) a number of Shaw’s plays, I’ve only read a little of his criticism. Kirk has made a point over many years of digging into writers, composers, and thinkers about whom he’s curious and in whom he’s interested. What little criticism of Shaw’s I’ve read has been limited pretty much to his theater writing—he was a drama critic and reviewer long before he started writing plays himself—but Kirk’s read his music criticism and much of his other writing as well. In other words, this is one more case in which Kirk knows something about his subject that’s well worth listening to. And once again, he takes his ideas into a somewhat unexpected direction. ~Rick]
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is best known as a playwright, but he excelled in so many other fields that it's hard to keep track of them. In particular, he was a remarkable reviewer, covering, over a period of years, the subjects of books, pictures, music, and theater. His theater reviews, collected as Our Theatre in the Nineties (Constable and Company Limited, London, 1954, in three volumes), stand out in my mind above everything else of its kind, and some consider his music reviews to be even better. One reason is that Shaw refused to be confined to just the contents of the art he was reviewing.
It is odd that I would praise this characteristic of his writing, because in my book The Art of Writing Reviews (available at Lulu.com) I insist that a reviewer should focus directly on the work being reviewed, without reference to its history, the personality of its author, its production background, and so on – that a reviewer should tell us what this work is like, and then, having understood it, if desired make some judgment about it.
However, most of us aren't Shaw – none of us, actually. Shaw was uniquely equipped by experience and knowledge to do exactly what he urged the theater of his time to do – to bring the world around it into the theater, to write plays that reflect life as it is rather than life as other plays have portrayed it.
In demonstrating how this should be done, Shaw brought into his work – not just his plays, but all his writing and speaking – elements of economics, politics, morality, religion, social relationships . . . whatever seemed to him to pertain to the world that was related to the work at hand. In the course of his theater reviews he definitely does give a strong sense of what the play in front of him is like. But he doesn't review it in a vacuum. He gives his work the context of the life around it.
In the process of writing, Shaw became, among other things, what I have not seen him acknowledged as being: a culture critic. More precisely: Shaw is a remarkable critic of popular culture, noticing many phenomena that often escape notice because they are so familiar to us, and being one of the first to do so. A few illustrations:
* On articles, polls, and shows that rank artists in some sort of best-to-worst sequence (American Idol can serve as an example):
But this business of giving orders of merit to artists as if they were boxing for points is silly. (Letter to the Arts Gazette, 31 January 1920)
* On artists who feel the need to show off at the expense of already worthwhile pieces:
Confronted with a Shakespearian play, [the director] stares into a ghastly vacuum, yet stares unterrified, undisturbed by any suspicion that his eyesight is failing, quite prepared to find the thing simply an ancient, dusty, mouldy, empty house which it is his business to furnish, decorate, and housewarm with an amusing entertainment. (“The Dying Tongue of Queen Elizabeth,” Saturday Review, 11 February 1905)
* On the Internet, with “social media” and with all the other recent and dramatic ways that the availability of art has blossomed – the proliferation of means of communication was beginning in his era, and Shaw was conscious of it. He saw that the infant communication revolution meant a huge boost for popular interest in many kinds of art:
Thanks to the development of the literary and artistic sides of the daily newspapers, to the gramophone, the pianola, and wireless, the supply of journalists with a knowledge and love of art, and a cultivated sensibility to refinements in artistic execution, is much greater than it was. (Saturday Review, 7 November 1925)
So he would not have surprised by the effect of the Internet on reviewing, where every purchaser of a DVD on Amazon is invited to think of herself or himself as a critic.
Those few examples of criticism of popular art demonstrate that Shaw knew his subject, and knew how to write about it. However, he was not just an observer – he was a thinker, and he thought in an organized way about popular culture.
What exactly do we mean in talking about “popular” culture and popular art? We are essentially talking about money, and not just enough money to support life in a garret, but significant amounts of dough. It is worth noticing at the beginning of this discussion that Shaw does not make a distinction between commercial and "real" art. We are often tempted to dismiss, say, television sitcoms as "not real art" because the main motive for their creation is profit.
Shaw will have none of that, as reflected in his famous remark to Samuel Goldwyn that "You're only interested in art, I'm only interested in money." Goldwyn had money, so he could afford highfalutin' attitudes about art if he wanted them. Shaw wanted to make money, and did his best to. In particular, he managed the profits of his plays as though he were a penny-pinching industrial tycoon.
But notice that the distinction between “commercial” and “good” art is not the same as the distinction between “popular” and “high” art. Shaw rejects the first distinction, but embraces the second. What’s more, he sees relationships between the two. Shaw's view of “commercial” and “high” art as related to each other has implications for both kinds of art. For popular art, Shaw’s attitude insists that high standards are possible within it. For high art, Shaw’s attitude destroys pretention and insists on grounded thought.
Whether one works in the field of high or popular art, it does not seem sensible to Shaw that an artist might not care about being paid; such an attitude would strike him as an affectation or a pathology. Here, as in so many other areas, I believe he's correct. There is no reason that the purest artist shouldn't want to eat. A much saner attitude is that expressed by Noel Coward, who said that, like Shakespeare, he wrote his plays for two purposes: to do work of which he was proud, and, by so doing, to earn his living.
For Shaw, bringing Shakespeare into the discussion only confirms his point. Shaw has no patience with those who doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays associated with his name. Those who wonder how the merchant's son from Stratford could have written Those Great Plays, Shaw would say, are overlooking the very reason that he did write them: because he wanted a career, wanted his theater to prosper, wanted fame and recognition for his work. Why not? Who doesn't?
. . . an author is a person who has to eat and drink and clothe himself, and . . . therefore they must not perform a play without paying a little at any rate to the man who wrote it. (“Playwrights and Amateurs,” 1933)
Shaw’s interest in the relationship between art and money is one of his strengths as a critic of popular culture. He understands the relationship on a practical level, as illustrated by his facility for examining box office returns for trends. This may sound prosaic, but Shaw was deeply interested in where his theater was going, and he knew that this meant “following the money.” Shaw frequently reports on the economics of the West End theater of his time, with a thorough understanding of the conditions in which theaters, including small “independent” theaters, operate. “I have to think,” he wrote to The New York Times (2 June 1912),
of my pocket, of the manager’s pocket, of the actors’ pockets, of the spectators’ pockets, of how long people can be kept sitting in a theatre without relief or refreshments . . . I have to consider theatrical rents, the rate of interest needed to tempt capitalists to face the risks of financing theaters, the extent to which the magic of art can break through commercial prudence . . . in short, all the factors that must be allowed for before the representation of a play on the stage becomes practicable or justifiable . . . .
The best contemporary example of commentary of this sort that I know of is William Goldman’s The Season, an indispensible book about one Broadway season (1967-1968), seen from every angle. Shaw anticipates Goldman in his focus on the tangible foundation of cash that art is built on.
What does Shaw see when he examines the accounts of the theaters of his time? He sees that in the short run, popular art makes money where high art does not. At the same time, not all popular art makes money. Why doesn’t it? Ordinarily we don’t ask this question; we just assume that some shows, films, etc., succeed and others don’t. But if popular art really is popular, why doesn’t it always succeed? What’s the problem? Shaw’s answer is that in general popular art has limited vision. It tends to look at other popular art for its content – in other words, it tends to be derivative and imitative. Its subjects seem sure-fire, but they only go so far.
What are the subjects of popular art? One extremely common subject, Shaw says, is the idea that love is the be-all and end-all of everything, “in unquestioning obedience to the law of the realm of romance, that love is strong as death and jealousy cruel as the grave” (Saturday Review, 30 November 1895). He has no patience with this notion:
As I have already had to point out in criticizing romantic dramas, love can be more easily baffled and jealousy more safely braved than any of the other passions, in spite of the fact that both social discipline and criminal law are sentimentally relaxed to an alarming degree in favor of people who act on the romantic theory, even to the extent of committing murder.
Obviously many people disagree with Shaw about the central place of love in art, but a look at popular art in general suggests that he’s correct, both in his observations that love, usually meaning romantic love, is at the heart of most of it, and that after a while the subject may get the slightest bit boring through repetition, leaving the door open for other subjects frequently encountered in popular art, such as sex; patriotism and its close companion, military valor; crime and the fear of being arrested; religion, especially if connected with the idea of punishment (for somebody else); and sentimental views of motherhood and children.
Could works of art about topics other than Love Love Love, and the other familiar staples of popular art, succeed? It’s a continuing question. Shaw dedicated his career to demonstrating that they could.
Shaw, then, sees no necessary artistic distinction between commercial art and art that doesn’t bring in much money; but he does distinguish between popular (sometimes he says “low”) and high art. He also sees a difference between worthwhile and poor art:
You cannot draw a line and say, “On this side is professional work, and on the other is amateur.” The only meaning that the words ever had is that on one side there is bad work and that on the other there is good work. (“Playwrights and Amateurs,” 1933)
It’s out of the scope of this essay to elaborate on what Shaw considers high art to be. I will only suggest his approach through a quotation from a review dated 11 April 1896:
. . . though plays have neither political constitutions nor established churches, they must all, if they are to be anything more than the merest tissue of stage effects, have a philosophy, even if it be no more than an unconscious expression of the author’s temperament.
High art, then, takes us into a greater understanding of life (“a philosophy”), where popular art tends to repeat already-established, second-hand attitudes toward life. The difference is significant, and we feel we know it when we see it.
But Shaw also sees that the difference between popular and high art expresses itself in curious ways. Shaw is the first observer I am aware of who noticed the odd phenomenon that a piece of popular culture may be massively popular, and then suddenly and completely lose its appeal, with almost no transitional period. I have experienced this with many television shows that I have watched for seasons, and suddenly cannot watch for love or money, for example “Mad About You” and “Rosanne,” both popular and worthwhile shows that I cannot imagine wanting to see again, ever. Writing in 1910 in a letter (“Mr. Trench’s Dramatic Values”) to the Saturday Review, Shaw responds to a remark by Irish poet F. H. Trench that inferior art can outsell finer products, in the way that (my illustration, not Shaw’s) Abie’s Irish Rose had a longer initial run than St. Joan. Shaw notes that such a phenomenon can occur, and then acutely continues:
But to all wildly popular things comes, suddenly and inexorably, death without hope of resurrection. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot set the street pianos playing Nancy Lee again, though the tune is as good as ever it was, and they once played nothing else. No book within our recollection had so made a vogue in America as Du Maurier’s Trilby; the elders of Trilby’s day said there had been nothing like it since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But the American booksellers still talk of the miracle of Trilby’s death. They aver that the demand stopped in one day.
Art that is popular only because it is popular, Shaw suggests, is art that will come and go. The power to last is a power given only to great art. We still care about Shakespeare; we can barely remember the new TV shows of last year, or what won last year’s Academy Award for Best Song.
Shaw demonstrates that popular and high art have important relationships with each other, but he does not pretend that they are the same. They have their own spheres and their own audiences:
All forms of art rise with the culture and capacity of the human race; but the forms rise together: the higher forms do not return and submerge the lower. . . . The success of [the higher] plays depends upon the exercise by the audience of powers of memory, imagination, insight, reasoning, and sympathy, which only a small minority of the play going public at present possesses. To the rest the higher drama is as disagreeably perplexing as the game of chess is to a man who has barely enough capacity to understand skittles . . . (Appendix to The Quintessence of Ibsenism, first edition, 1891)
But, Shaw points out, they also influence each other. Using the example of Ibsen’s impact on the theater of his time, he writes:
In the drama then, we may depend on it that though we shall not have another Ibsen, yet nobody will write for the stage after him as most playwrights wrote before him. (Appendix)
The point Shaw makes here is a crucial one. We might assume that popular art will always drive out high art, because it brings in more money; and often that seems to be the case. But, as Shaw puts it, popular art is of one sex, and sterile; it tends to repeat itself, imitating other popular art, as we continually see in television, where a show called “innovative” is usually just cruder or more violent than its peers. So fatigue, boredom, even contempt is built into popular art over the long haul.
Great art, on the other hand, Shaw says, is the result of contact between art and actual life, and opens new territory for the mind, heart, and spirit. So high art is where art gets its newness, even if popular art doesn’t want to acknowledge the fact. Popular art depends on high art to show it the way to new forms and new ideas.
Popular art ordinarily tries to keep its distance from great art, but it can’t help noticing that there’s something new there, and trying to absorb some of it. The result is that even if great art is unpopular, it influences popular art, and in so doing, nourishes it. We see this phenomenon all the time, for example in music, where no one after the Beatles could write as well as they did, yet no one could write without an awareness of what the Beatles had done; or in film, where the innovations of, say, D. W. Griffith were impossible to ignore by anyone who made films after him.
But, Shaw notes, just because popular art is influenced by great art does not mean that great art replaces it:
No one need fear on this account that Ibsen will gradually destroy melodrama. It might as well be assumed that Shakespeare will destroy music-hall entertainments, or the prose romances of William Morris supersede the Illustrated Police news. All forms of art rise with the culture and capacity of the human race; but the forms rise together: the higher forms do not return and submerge the lower. (Appendix)
So popular art owes high art a debt, Shaw suggests. He then draws the somewhat radical conclusion that popular art should support high art because it is nourished by it. Popular art owes high art a debt, Shaw says, and it ought to pay that debt.
So, Shaw says, why should theaters, in his example, not be organized so that “high” and “popular” art can exist together? In a review dated 30 January 1897, he writes that, for example:
If Mr. [George] Alexander [an actor and manager], instead of handing over Magda to fail in the evening bill at another theatre, had produced it and [German playwright Hermann Sudermann’s] Sodom’s Ende and so forth at a series of matinees of the Saturday Pop class, financing them from the exchequer of the kingdom of Ruritania [in other words, by using some of the proceeds of more popular plays], and aiming solely at the nourishment of the drama and the prevention of stagnation in public taste, he might have laid the foundations of a genuine classic theatre, in which the cultivated people who never dream of going to the theatre now would take their boxes and stalls by the season, and the hundred thousand people who go to the St James’s twice a year would be represented financially by four thousand going once a week.
The same point may be made today, and to some extent Shaw’s advice has been taken. (The Shubert organization, for example, Broadway’s largest producing entity, invests a certain amount of money each year in less conventional theater through the Shubert Foundation.)
The bigger problem today is an attitude of indifference toward the importance of art in much of society, particularly in the related areas of politics and education, an attitude that has been documented by Rick in this blog. Shaw lived in a similar era. He saw the problem, but he did not give up hope.
It is a tribute to Shaw’s importance that his views on popular art are as interesting as his plays, and that both are vital today. He was able both to diagnose the relation between popular and high art, and to do something about it by creating art that straddled both worlds. We might perhaps try to profit from his example.
[The quotations in this article are taken from the following books: Bernard F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw, Director (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971); Bernard Shaw, Our Theatre in the Nineties (three volumes) (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1954); E. J. West, ed., Shaw on Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958).
[One commercial note, so to speak: Kirk mentions his book, The Art of Writing Reviews, which I suggest is worth a read. But what I really want to point out here is that I spent four posts on ROT commenting on the book back on 4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009. In addition to reading Kirk’s book itself, it might be worth having a look at my side remarks—they’re like marginalia except I typed them up for public consumption. (I think of it as a kind of Talmud to Kirk’s Torah—though I doubt he’d see it quite that way!)
[Now, a personal note on Shaw. I suggested that he’s one of my favorite playwrights, and when I was trying to be an actor, I thought I could make a life just doing his plays—Eugene Marchbanks in Candida when I was still in my 20’s; Napoleon in The Man of Destiny (whom I did get to play!) when I was in my 30’s, Undershaft in Major Barbara or Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion when I was graying. I never got to do enough of his work—I probably couldn’t have gotten to do enough; there’s no such thing—but I loved every chance I got to do one. I liked doing Shakespeare, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, the great Americans Tennessee Williams and George S. Kaufman (among others), Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Molière, and so on, as well as the moderns and the contemporaries. But I could have lived and died doing Shaw. A number of years ago, I got to go up to Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario for a week at the annual Shaw Festival. I think I saw eight shows there—hog heaven for me—and two were Shaws, including one of my absolute favorites, Arms and the Man (Bluntschli’s another part the playwright wrote for me), and one I’d never seen, Too True To Be Good.
[Shaw is also the author of one of the best statements on freedom of expression I may ever have read. It’s from the 1913 revision of The Quintessence of Ibsenism: “The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but it is absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often. But it is not good for people to be garotted occasionally, or at all. That is why it is a mistake to treat an atheist as you treat a garotter, or to put ‘bad taste’ on the footing of theft and murder.” It’s why I’m a First Amendment absolutist.]
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