BURIED
LETTER
May 2012
PRESS
Buried Letter Press May 2012 Š Buried Letter Press 2011-2012 Cover design by Matthew C. Mackey
Buried Letter Press Akron, Ohio
Buried Letter Press Proper noun: 1. the particular magazine dedicated to innovative and quality criticism of art in all of its various forms, such as literature, music, film and theater, visual art, etc. 2. a provision of encouragement to artists and patrons worldwide.
MAY 2012 ISSUE Hell’s Library: How Gordon Ramsay Saved My Novel by Allyson Armistead
Argumentation as the Rhetoric of Agency: Bridging the Historical Gap by Robert Balla Freedom and Responsibility: Arts and the Spirit of Protest by Matthew C. Mackey The Poetry Bug by Brian R. Young Hysterically Funny Theater Review of Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) by Robert Miltner
7.
Hell’s Library: How Gordon Ramsay Saved My Novel by Allyson Armistead
They say reality television is terrible for a writer, but truth be told Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen resurrected my sad little novel. I know, I know. Cooking is cooking, and writing is writing, and television is, well, it’s not writing. However, in the midst of a serious bout of writer’s block, Gordon and his brow-beating Scottish rage were my blessed salvation. I had been stuck for months on a novel revision. I had a 300-page draft. I had distance. I had drive. The trouble was, I was fuzzy on just what kind of book I was writing even after six months of steady drafting. There were endless directions, approaches, methods, voices—and all of them were waging war in my draft. Going from a first to second draft of the book seemed akin to one of those pick-your-own adventure books: follow A for third person; follow B for first person; follow C for more reality TV and just forget the whole damn thing. At the forefront of mind was always the question: what is the best way to tell this story? What is my story? And, like any diligent writer would do, I flipped to the solace of television. There was Toddler and Tiaras. Dancing with the Stars. That Fear Factor show I thought was cancelled eons ago. And then among these bright, burning stars was the chef competition show, Hell’s Kitchen. Gordon Ramsay, Michelin-star extraordinaire, was his usual badgering self: beet red, slandering his contestants in a series of censored beeps. In this particular episode, Gordon was screaming at his creatively-stunted chefs that their cordon bleu chicken would never amount to anything. “How can you create bloody cordon bleu chicken if you’ve no idea what bloody cordon bleu chicken is, you bloody monkeys?” and after swinging a few pots and pans around in his typical rugby-gruff manner, Gordon sent his cast to New York City and Chicago, demanding that they either sample every reputable restaurant with cordon bleu on their menu or not bother coming back. It was an intense experience for these chefs; for one thing, a person can only handle so much chicken, but it was also a period of complete immersion. After 100 restaurants, the chefs returned to Hell’s Kitchen with a newfound center, a quiet confidence, and created—almost magically—some of the most creatively rendered plates of cordon bleu this side of Michelin stardom. There were miniature cordon blue “meatballs.” A cordon bleu salad. A cordon bleu entrée gone. Thai cuisine. In every direction, the chefs had embraced the signature dish, but made it their own—sometimes recognizable, sometimes wholly unique, but always fresh and authentic to their various backgrounds. Yes, these chefs already knew thousands of recipes, and yes, they had already invested Malcolm Gladwell’s repudiated 10,000 hours required for artistic mastery, but Gordon’s 100-restaurant challenge unleashed a unique creativity—a kind of reinvention that can only come from this level of intensity. When the episode went to commercial, I sat with my miserable little novel draft and thought to myself: why not read 100 books? As a writer, I had been—like all writers—a constant reader, devouring somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-40 novels a year. However, I had never before
immersed myself in a reading load this intense: 100 books, 1 year, written reviews for each completed work, no mercy. Another form of procrastination? Maybe, but with the block I was facing, I’d try anything. And so I stormed the library, the used books section on Amazon, free books at yard sales. My goal was to select novels, short story collections, and nonfiction books that in some way pertained to an aspect of my novel. I had already conducted a year’s worth of research for my novel, but this reading project would be focused on better defining my story itself—zooming in on its pulse, so to speak—by reading a constellation of related (however tangentially) literary work. I heeded the advice of acclaimed novelist Tayari Jones, who, in the midst of writing a novel, picks books “to read and try to figure out what [she’s] supposed to learn from them.” In this vein, sometimes my own selections had a direct application to my project—books about 1930s China, genocide, grief, photography, image ethics, heroism. At other times, though, my selections were more obscure and tangential—books with confessional first-person voices, characters following an archetypal Jonah and the whale arc, families struggling with loss, and young female protagonists finding their ground. Such a journey took me to Elise Wiesel’s Night, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, John Steinbeck’sThe Moon is Down, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Ha Jin’s Waiting, and even Charles Portis’ True Grit (a full log of my reading adventures can be found here). With each selection, a creative revolution began to happen with my own novel, in much the same way Gordon Ramsay’s humbled chefs found inspiration in their intense exposure to 100 restaurants. I found myself absorbing arcs, storylines, plots, and voices at an electric rate, cataloguing them as though they were blueprints in an architect’s database. I found my own story refining itself—twisting and turning and forging its own path between the established “canon” of my subject material. I felt like the crazed novelist version of Goldilocks: this story’s too cold, this story’s too warm, this story is closer to what I’m trying to accomplish, and yet I began to see how my own story was wholly authentic to me. The experience of reading 100 books in such a short span of time also had the unforeseen, yet positive effect of lessening the mystique of the novel. Reading at such an intense rate made the art form more tangible and less intimidating, the way I imagine a medical student loses her fear of cadavers one body after another. Meh, there’s a liver. Hey, there’s kidney. So what. Big deal. Moving on. Similarly, I became disenchanted with the tricks and trade of fiction; I was a like a child at a magic show who knew all the sleights of hand—“is that it? is that all? what else you got?”—but that removal of that “mystery” allowed me to forge ahead with my own project unafraid, fierce, and wholly believing in my ability to actually pull this book off. On December 31, 2011—at the stroke of midnight—I completed my 100th book. In the weeks that followed, I opened my novel draft again and plunged in with direction, focus, and renewed vigor, gaining traction for the first time in months. There is something to be said for thinking of a project in your periphery—letting its elements fall into place without putting too much pressure on them (or yourself). But there’s also something to be said for widening your inspiration base, refining your palette, and allowing your creativity to emerge from complete immersion in your chosen craft. The intensity worked for Gordon Ramsay’s chefs, and I’m pleased to say that it’s worked for me, as I prepare (finally) to hand over a partial, polished manuscript to a prospective agent who’s been waiting for its completion. Reality television, 100 book marathons—methods of procrastination? Maybe. But the age old advice holds true: sometimes your best work comes from doing anything and everything but the work right in front of you.
Photo: Tom Miller at Kent State Shootings, from asfband
Argumentation as the Rhetoric of Agency: Bridging the Historical Gap by Robert Balla
Photo: National Guard at Kent State University 1970, from The Boston Globe & Associated Press
This May marks the 42nd anniversary of the 1970 May 4th tragedy at Kent State University. It was on that Spring day that Ohio National Guard troops under orders from Governor James A. Rhodes opened fire on Vietnam War protesters and onlookers on the campus of Kent State University. The results were: four college students murdered, nine others suffered permanent injuries ranging from a bullet through the wrist to life-long paralysis, and zero arrests or courts martial. As a teacher of first-year composition at the University of Akron (whose James A. Rhodes Arena, The JAR, is named after the former governor) which is only 13 miles away from Kent State, and as an alumnus of Kent State University, and as proud American who believes that our greatest freedom is our freedom to peaceably assemble to question and challenge our government, I am often stunned by my students’ lack of knowledge of recent, local, historical events like the massacre at Kent State. Some of them have heard of the shootings in a vague sense. Many have not. Even though the events at Kent State took place barely forty years ago, probably 20 years before most of my students were born, we find ourselves in a similar time in political and social history, and, unfortunately, the tragedy and alarm of May 4th has slipped from our cultural memory. Recent worldwide events like the Arab Spring, revolutions in Libya, and an ongoing war in Afghanistan may seem a world away to college students, but here, at home, in downtowns and on college campuses, we see the Occupy Movement as an all too clear reminder that we do not live in a perfect world or a perfect nation. However, many of my students fail to see the connections between social forces like Occupy, the Arab Spring, and themselves. They lack a sense of agency, the ability and power to affect their world, to enact real and meaningful change. As citizens in a democracy, possibly the greatest democracy ever conceived, it is our duty to exercise our agency. However, citizens cannot exercise their agency if they are not aware that they have it or if they don’t know how. It is here that American universities and colleges fail in their primary mission to create and educate CITIZENS, not future employees, who are equipped with the knowledge and means to be socially and civically active members of our democracy. It is to this end that in my classes I, in effort to portray the rhetoric of argumentation as the rhetoric of agency and change, seek to link current social, economic, and political forces and movements to their historical analogues. If current students see their current situations as analogous to historical ones, and then understand that written and spoken rhetoric has the power to alter the world, they will then adopt a more value leaden and meaningful relationship with democracy, citizenship, argumentation, and writing in general. I endeavor to empower students as individuals with clear, strong voices. They need to know that they are more than just products of the education
system; that in fact education serves to empower them to become autonomous and responsible. To this end I have used the play May 4th Voices, scripted by David Hassler, as the historical touchstone for my students to which I link the current wars in the Middle East and domestic social justice campaigns such as the Occupy Movement. David Hassler, director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, has created an engaging theatrical retelling of the stories and personal narratives collected by Kent State’s Oral History Project which provides access to oral history accounts pertaining to the May 4th shootings and their aftermath. The sources that Hassler uses from the Oral History Project are actual firstperson narratives collected from people who were on campus or otherwise directly affected by the events: faculty, staff, students, Kent citizens, National Guardsmen, police, and others. While the play’s narrative is admittedly edited and rearranged, it retains the feeling and authenticity of real firsthand accounts needed to make the play powerful. It is this authenticity that has prompted me to adopt the DVD recording of the debut performance accompanied by the script for my argumentation classes an attempt to get my students to finally experience the power, emotion, and agency that can only come from finely crafted personal narrative. It is in these first-hand source accounts that the self and the text become one, and it is from this union that the power of the narrative stems. It is in the written self, the self of experience, of pain, and of joy that we find a personal connection, we find ourselves, and we begin to understand who we are and how we live in the world. The play is organized into nine scenes which follow the events and aftermath of the shooting. The first scene establishes the main voices in the play. The central narrator is Maj Ragain who was a Professor of Chemistry at KSU and who witnessed the shootings in person. Ragain’s lines are taken verbatim from his own poetry, journals, and audio recordings of interviews conducted in the 1970s. The other main voices in the play belong to various KSU students, several guardsmen, townspeople (adult, a high school student, and a nine year-old girl), a Vietnam Veteran, and other faculty members. While these characters are never identified by name in the play (the names used below are simply the names of the actors reading the parts), their narratives clearly establish their roles. The subsequent scenes follow the actual events as told by the various voices. The narratives begin on Friday, May 1st with the increasing outrage over the expansion of the war into Cambodia and the growing unrest in Kent. We hear from average students, protesters, and the unprepared and incredibly young guardsmen. The tensions build to the night of May 3rd when the scene of the riot in Kent is narrated by several guardsmen who abuse the protesters. One recounts an encounter where “A fella down from me put a bayonet to a man’s nose and said, ‘I know your face, but you don’t know mine. If I ever see you again, this is gonna go in your head.’ I think the man urinated himself right there on the spot.” The brutality of a guardsman and the victim’s helplessness are shown when a soldier closes Scene 3 with, “He had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. He was up against the wall with his hands up, and one of our guys ran his bayonet through his hand, pinned his hand right against the building.” When my class gets to this point in the text/video my class is often stunned by the brutality of it. They may gasp, or they may sit in silence, but they may not internalize the experience. This is where I pause the historical and begin the current. I bring up on the overhead multi-media projector recent videos of Occupy demonstrations on Wall Street where unarmed students at Berkley are assaulted by riot gear clad police and the now infamous footage of UC Davis students being pepper sprayed for sitting on a sidewalk. While none of the student protesters have been killed, the similarities are striking, and my students do see this. The actual shooting took only 13 seconds, and the scenes four and five of May 4th Voices, which chronicle the actual shooting, are appropriately short. They depict the terror and
uncertainty in the minds of those participating and observing. It is here that some of the guardsmen express their confusion. One remarks, “God, someone else is shooting. Did I miss an order? I’m gonna do this… I assumed that when others were firing, they were firing for a reason,” while students walking across the commons are aghast at the “tremendous amounts of blood.” The remaining scenes deal with the immediate and short term effects and repercussions of that bloody day. Hassler gives us snippets of violent FBI interrogations and devastated families. We hear from protestors running for their lives and from frightened students desperately looking for friends and loved ones. The residents of Kent abandon their homes and university students flee to theirs in Cleveland and Akron. The animosity and hatred of the following weeks and month are summed up when the state prosecutor trying the guardsmen says to the Grand Jury, “They should’ve shot all the troublemakers.” I conclude this section of my lesson with a final internet video. This one is three minutes powerfully silent footage of UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi as she walks past hundreds of seated, silent students in a parking lot after the pepper spray incident. Watching this, my students are just as quiet. The personal narrative, when presented in combined oral and visual form, is an incredibly powerful vehicle for social change. This is what Hassler’s script does incredibly well. The narratives are well adapted to the stage, and Hassler interweaves them in a unique and effective way. The play is staged without scenery or props, and there are only limited sound effects from off stage. This allows for the first-hand personal narratives to be the center of the production. The interplay between the voices is most effective in scene 5 when the bullets begin to fly. We hear alternately from guardsmen, students, and protestors who simply step forward to deliver their lines directly to the audience: John: I didn’t have my glasses on. I couldn’t see through my gas mask. Alex: I saw people hitting the dirt, so I hit the dirt thinking, “Okay, okay.” Brandon: The men in front of me were aiming their rifles. Tessa: The bullets whizzed past my ears. John: God, someone else is shooting. Did I miss an order? The immediacy of Hassler’s presentation allows the audience to focus, listen, and understand the complexity of the situation. Combining the DVD of the play with the written script affords my students ample opportunity to internalize the narratives. The unique staging and creative use of narrative casts these almost forgotten events into a new light. Bridging the gap to the present with the viral videos of recent Occupy events establishes the connections between the historical events, my modern students, and relevant social issues that will drive critical inquiry, foster a sense of agency, and empower a new classroom full of citizens. If my students can see this in the writing of others, and if they understand the power of words, and if I can equip them with the requisite tools, then they too can become agents of change.
Freedom and Responsibility: Arts and the Spirit of Protest by Matthew C. Mackey While we typically come to envision protest in the political sense, as an organized or disorganized body of individuals rallying behind a cause, who have come together in a declaration of opinion, to offer a gesture of disapproval, or lodge a complaint against the “powers that be,” protest occurs first on a very personal and experiential level as an ideological conflict. It isn’t always the people versus the government. For example, in his famous work, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce speaks of being born in Ireland, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” For Joyce, it was a matter of oppression. Any time freedom is burdened by the imposition of any oppressive force, protest is inevitable. Artists play vital roles as protesters and dissidents. Protest, as Joyce points out, is a careful examination of oppressive forces that inhibit, police, or worse standardize autonomy. Actually, let me revise my previous statement: artists should play vital roles as protesters and dissidents. All artists should be revolutionaries of some sort or they might not be artists. Whether in their field, with their own notions, socially, politically, etc., artists must maintain the spirit of revolution, otherwise we will keep producing the same shit over and over and over. And, no, I don’t think that all artists need to subject themselves to the political soapbox, but as Salmon Rushdie says of poets, “A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point out frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop going to sleep.” It may be feasible to replace “poet” with “artist.” In a previous article on Buried Letter Press, I discussed the social relevancy of other art forms compared to music. The article takes a look at how music has seemingly been the vanguard of the art world, constantly adapting and evolving, often ahead of the artistic curve. Take jazz for example. The complex composition that often resists standardization in form was a major influence for artists in the twentieth century. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” which came out in 1924, was in direct conflict with the notions of strict musical regulations, inspiring a whole slew of jazz artists to start cultivating a rebellious, artistic inclination. Pushing for freedom from restriction, jazz has come to be the inspiration of many artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Dove, were all influenced by jazz. Elsewhere, we can see how Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg were mutual influences on one another. Ginsberg even appears in Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video. But, I digress, and perhaps Dylan is probably one of the most well-known social activists of his time, but he wasn’t alone. In the `60s and `70s a whole lot of musicians were presenting their views on what they
considered to be significant and meaningful concerns. Not every song produced in the `60s and `70s was a song of protest or one that pointed toward social issues, and many of those songs are worth knowing, but there is a reason we think of these decades as eras of protest. From John Lennon to Neil Young to Bob Marley and a host of others, protest in music was considered a vehicle for social change. But, they lived at a time where those issues were prevalent, and that was so long ago. Oh, wait, war, social inequality, corporate greed, civil rights, etc. are still ongoing issues today. There is of course a wide range of art and artists who promote a social consciousness, believing that art has the power to illuminate or suggest a higher awareness. In fact, here are a few works of art that inspire some of us at Buried Letter Press: Robert MiltnerAtrabillarios (The Defiant) by Doris Calcedo (Colombia): “Calcedo’s piece represents a movement in contemporary Central and South American art in which people who have been ‘disappeared’ are evoked by art. In this installation, of women’s shoes housed in cavities in the wall behind thin sheets of stitched cow bladder, evoke the only way bodies can be claimed, that is, by identifying the victim’s shoes. Haunting and ritualistic, this installation protests both the inhumane action and the official silencing of families by making the absent present. For music, I have to say, ‘Masters of War‘ by Bob Dylan, and I woke up this morning with ‘Get Up! Stand Up!’ by Bob Marley in my head. Jamaican Bob Marley’s raggae ”ragged” music became the beat 1970s for anticolonialism, anti-racism, anti-poverty, anti-government oppression, providing a venue for the silenced and dis-empowered to sing their pride, nationalism and ‘rude boy’ (punk, rowdy) declarations. It is why Marley is so important in the Caribbean and in Africa. Before hip hop (name variant on the 1950s jazz “bebop” of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrain, and Thelonius Monk), raggae was the anthem, due to Marley. ” Molly Fuller“You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” by Patty Loveless: “Probably the most haunting and beautiful song EVER. I also love Frida Khalo’s work, but choosing one is difficult, so I’ll also offer Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependencyfor MY favorite piece of protest art, which protests against the dominant repressive and homophobic culture.” Rob Balla“My favorite protest song is ‘Fight the Power’ by Public Enemy. Not only did it serve as a defining song in a new genre of underground rap, but it also served as a touchstone for the young, urban, black community. It deals with institutionalized racism, freedom of speech, the deliberate media censorship of a band, genre, and a community. The subsequent legal battles also set the stage for a generation of politically active musicians. As for art, I was just last night discussing with my daughter Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est.’ Owen, a British World War I enlistee who advanced to the rank of Lieutenant wrote extensively about the horrors of war, its brutality, and the lies people tell in order to justify it. ’Dulce Et Decorum Est’ recounts the retreat of group of soldiers, who while trying desperately to stay ahead of enemy mortars falling steadily behind them, stumble into a vicious gas attack. Owen describes in vivid detail the horrific heath of one soldier who was unable to secure his gasmask in time. The poem is a public condemnation of Jessie Pope, a WWI British pro-war poet and propagandist who encouraged young men to join the army in hope of finding valor and honor in battle. Owen reviles Pope with his final lines: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.(1) (1) It is sweet and right to die for one’s country. Owen died in battle of a fatal gunshot wound to the head – one week before the signing of the Armistice to end the war.” MeI’m partial to Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changing.” The lines, “Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen. And keep your eyes wide the chance won’t come again” has always prodded me to be conscious of how writing can be a watchtower against social injustice. I also think the Klíčová Soucha (The Key Statue) in Prague by Jirí David speaks volumes about protest. The sculpture sits in Franz Kafka square and says “Revoluce” (Revolution) in over 85,000 metal keys. Jangling keys were the symbol of pro-democratic rallies, organized by Vaclav Havel (also an artist), in 1989. It’s an undeniable reminder of how important it is to remain socially conscientious. Havel was the integral figure in overthrowing the communist regime oppressing the Czech Republic. Art has great potential to raise awareness, to get into our heads, to promote solidarity, and to encourage a spirit of protest against any oppressive power, political or otherwise. Maybe music has traditionally been the most popular “voice” of protest, but that does not mean it is the only one. Artists have a rare opportunity and a grave responsibility to understand the social context of their work and the issues that inhibit not only their expressiveness, but issues that infringe upon human dignity as well. Artists should, as Joyce might say, “go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of [their] souls the consciousness of [their] race.”
The Poetry Bug by Brian R. Young If poetry is contagious, then what exactly is being transmitted? Certainly some degree of meaning exists in every poem, but communication of meaning isn’t a goal worthy of the intricacy of poetry— there are much simpler ways to inform another person. The concept of opening someone’s skull and pouring stuff inside is a task more appropriate to surgeons and perhaps schoolteachers, but not to poets. There is a difference, however, between the clear transfer of meaning and engaging the reader. The former objectifies the reader as a receptacle; the latter is participatory—requiring the presence of the physical body and mind of the reader. It is important that a writer discover how to bring the reader along for the ride, to draw him or her entirely into the alternate reality or mode of perception of the poem. It is always an option for a reader, even if the argument is ‘perfectly constructed,’ to dodge its mighty persuasive power simply by covering their ears—by refusing to hear, to read, to let the thoughts enter their mind. As a graduate teacher pursuing an MFA, I related this to my composition students, but it holds true for any sort of writing. If a reader resists entirely, the door is closed. The stranger is locked out. I don’t think that I could adequately discuss what I thought about poetics while I was in graduate school without including some of the readings from my seminar classes. Certain texts got into my system, and whenever I find myself attempting to explain what poetry can do, I return to them. This isn’t to say that I’ve completely made sense of their influence—simply that they have incorporated themselves into my aesthetic. There’s a section of Chapter 20 from The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, in which she discusses rapture and her experience of being possessed by ‘God.’ This discussion echoes what I have come to think about the encounter of a poem—what it requires of those involved—writer and reader. She says: “For, happen what may, we must risk everything, and resign ourselves into the hands of God and go willingly wherever we are carried away, for we are in fact being carried away, whether we like it or no.” The first part of this quotation suggests the demands of an encounter—one must be willing to risk everything. By composing, vocalizing, and reading one may find everything that they have constructed and maintained being challenged or questioned. One can never be sure what this encounter (with language, with a poem) will result in. Everything could change—the way you think of the world, or of your self, how you act, how you live. The second part of this quote “go willingly… whether we like it or no,” turns as it progresses away from a free decision to end with pre-determination. This move functions several ways. First, it emphasizes the impossibility of this situation—when one is ‘taken over’ by a poem, it becomes impossible to distinguish one’s will from what is happening. The reader must say ‘yes’ by entering into the exchange, but after that the poem carries its reader away. This process can’t be thought of as a choice, because what happens when we
read precedes conscious choice—our brain connects with the words, reacts to all their textures and potential associations, attempts to create meaning and sense, even before we are aware of its proceedings. A model that I think fits for describing the process of a poem is that of the virus. I first encountered the concept that “Language is a virus” while studying fiction by William S. Burroughs in a seminar class. To say, as SUNY Buffalo’s website, that “poetry is never about something, it is something” is to credit poetry with a vitality of its own. The virus model works, I think, precisely because it is only with great difficulty and debate that we say viruses are ‘alive.’ Certainly if they are alive it is not in a conventional sense. The poem, like a virus, infects us, gets into our body and our blood. Poetry is something that we live through, that we experience, that we survive. Poetry stays with us after we read it. It requires the presence of a host, or reader, to grow and replicate. Viruses replicate by cutting into a cell’s DNA and inserting their own, causing the cell to become the reproducer of the virus. This reminds me of what happens with a reader’s (mis)reading of a poem— not only is the reader changed, but the poem itself often changes in the interpretation, at least in terms of how it gets transmitted. Interpretation leads to variations on a theme as reader becomes creator. Art inspires art, both in terms of what it demands of the body before ‘understanding’ and what lingers after. I don’t mean to imply that the poem on the page is dead. The poem itself represents the dormant stage of a virus—when it passes from host to host. Though the life process occurs when a poem is read, the form of the virus—the poem on the page—has everything to do with the reaction, the ‘sickness’ of the person who opens him or herself to it. To discuss the poem as a virus seems more than a little creepy and disturbing, especially because concepts of an encounter or a friendship often include nostalgic associations. The friendship or relationship or encounter that occurs between a reader and a writer, or a person and the subject matter, can be thought of as a friendship or alliance, but this should not signal that the process is comfortable or unchallenging. That is why I think the strangeness of a virus model is particularly effective. What arises in this encounter isn’t a need to agree, or a warm and fuzzy affiliation. More is at stake than arriving at meaning, consensus, or assimilation. A virus makes you sick—your body has to develop antibodies to learn how to live with the presence of the virus. In a similar way, the stranger—the poem—makes your foundation of belief unstable by disrupting or challenging your constructions and beliefs. It is perhaps more appropriate to think of this encounter as a meeting of rivals—of selves, experiences, and modes of perception—which are differently assembled and resist, enflame, or bump up against each other. As I remember from another of my seminars, where we read Deleuze and Guatarri’s What is Philosophy?, “If we really want to say that philosophy originates with the Greeks, it is because the city, unlike the empire or state, invents the agon as the rule of a society of ‘friends’, of the community of free individuals as rivals.” We can’t discuss the encounter without including the struggle that always takes place. What is significant here is that the chaos is allowed in, and what occurs isn’t capable of being summarized or neatly fit together. To think of the friends as opposites or binary doesn’t adequately describe the struggle—what happens is a shattering or a tearing apart. Instead of reinforcing the separation between self and other, this distinction becomes impossible, as ideas and devices start to pass through the boundaries of inside and outside, self and other. The virus attacks, the body counters, each folds into and absorbs the other. The variability of this process may serve as a good model (or an excuse perhaps) for how I encountered many of the texts and poems that I read as an MFA student. I could be quite deliberate in my misreading—often in workshops I’d discuss a peer’s poem in terms of my vision for it – sometimes refusing to give up on a read even after the author had insisted that my view differed from his or her intentions. Often I envisioned what I would attempt with the poem—something
‘other’ than the author. I think this potential isn’t entirely removed from the poem itself. In fact, it is because of the evasiveness or slipperiness of language (as a teacher of mine often said) that such variations are possible. Poetry is like the most dangerous of viruses because it is constantly reinventing itself—as soon as a ‘cure’ (an interpretation or definition) is designed, the virus can become something different than what the cure was designed for. Workshops provide poets not only with a unique opportunity to actually hear how their potential audience might respond to the work, but also to engage, to struggle with, to resist, and to be resisted by this audience in an instance where both are present and actively engaged. I realize there are dangers inherent in a workshop—that some feel it tends towards homogeneity and assimilation—but I think that the dangers of this are at worst no more present than anywhere else where people passively read, passively engage, and absorb (which is everywhere). At best, and this was almost always my experience, aesthetics and individuals were not at all weakened or diluted— but crashed, met with, engaged, affected, and encouraged the growth and development of each other. Poems were written as challenges, and the challenges of poems were disrupted or turned against the challenger. Conversations between friends were uncomfortable, which was quite productive and beneficial.
Hysterically Funny Theater Review of Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room(or the Vibrator Play) by Robert Miltner
Literary periods produce certain writers whose work becomes both symptomatic and emblematic of that era. A Shakespeare orMolière, say, George Bernard Shaw or Noel Coward, Samuel Beckett or Edward Albee. Sarah Ruhl is rapidly becoming the emergent signature playwright for the 21st Century. Nominated for Pulitzers and Tony Awards, and producing plays at a rate (twelve in as many years) that rivals Woody Allen, Ruhl is a dominant presence both on and off Broadway and consistently attracts larger audiences to her work. While her early plays were adaptations of Chekhov (not a bad place to hone one’s craft), culminating in her brilliant adaptation of the difficult Virginia Woolf novel Orlando (2003), or her modernizations of classical Greek tragedies, especially her widely-produced Eurydice (2003), Ruhl’s newer plays, includingDead Man’s Cell Phone (2007) and her recent Stage Kiss (2011), fuse, hybridize and satirize recognizable subgenres of the theatrical cannon. In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) (2009) was recently staged at the Cleveland Play House’s new Second Stage in the Allen Theater, using a thrust configuration that places the audience on three sides of the stage. This was an excellent choice for this play, configured at the floor level as a Victorian parlor at the front of the stage where Catherine Givings, convincingly and charmingly played by Nisi Sturgis, greets her husband’s patients, her wet nurse, and the Romantic painter Leo Irving, whose performance by Zac Hoogendyk practically steals the show with his jaunty cap, Bohemian scarf, sparse whiskers, and inspired delivery of memorable lines—“Love animates everything!” and “I love incomplete paintings”—ultimately representing the artistic sunny side of life. Science, its odd and dark twin, is represented by Dr. Givings whose medical offices are on the raised back stage that provides the audience an opportunity to look into what Catherine and the others only hear from behind closed doors: patients being treated with electric vibrators in early medical procedures to reduce hysteria and depression. This seems to be Ruhl’s point, really: that what science discovers and utilizes objectively, art will raise to the level of romance by discovering its subjective possibilities. For what is in the next room, that is, the medical offices, is the treatment by Dr. Givings and his midwife assistant Annie, of cures for “hysteria”—what Freud called a sexual disorder—rooted in feminine depressionand disease during the 19th century, believed to be connected to the uterus (root word for hysteria). The cure: by the good doctor with an electric vibrator or by Annie through manual message. The result: straight-laced, high-collared Victorian women experiencing the unexpected paroxysm of orgasms. Sarah Ruhl’s plotting and scripting lead just as equally to paroxysms of laughter on the part of the audience which is privy to actions both inside and outside the medical offices, including the bizarre contraption, looking somewhat like a pseudo-sadistic apple corer used for anal stimulation, invented by Dr. Givings who treats men for hysteria, Leo Irving in this case, as Givings pronounces that “Hysteria is rare in a man, but [Irving] is an artist!” The play is largely about control as the dominant medical community of men believe themselves to be in control of their wives and their private lives, and in homes in which the (in)ability to have children (Sabrina Daldry) and (in)ability to breastfeed one’s own child (Catherine Givings) are the primary social identities of the wives of socially important men. So when Sabrina and Catherine enter the medical offices, and discover that they too can operate the mechanical vibrator, they leave objective science behind and head happily down the road
Photo: In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl, from The Philly Post
toward sexual discovery and subjective agency. The saddest comic moment occurs when Sabrina and Catherine ask Elizabeth the black wet-nurse if she has ever experienced anything like they have, and as they describe the vibrator-produced orgasms, Elizabeth replies that it sounds like what happens when she and her husband are intimate. Sabrina and Catherine laugh—well, hysterically— with their bodies jerking almost as if being shocked, in a scene that portrays the absurdity of sexual intimacy and satisfaction between bourgeois Victorian couples. But Elizabeth doesn’t laugh, her silent sadness evident. We feel it too in our theater seats. We come to laugh, be entertained, but we come to understand that In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) explores the psychology of emotion. Ruhl has said in an interview that her plays are based on “a more medieval sensibility of the humors, melancholia, black bile, and transformation,” suggesting that ritual— and theater and performance have historically done this—is a form of renewal, regeneration. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him,” Ruhl once said, and this play is about Catherine Givings externalizing the emptiness inside her so that she may be renewed. In the play’s final scene, Catherine convinces her husband that it is not the vibrator, a mechanical substitute for intimacy, she wants—she wants human intimacy, she wants love. Outside, in the snow, the first time the audience sees them in a natural setting, they undress and the nownaked Dr. makes snow angels and, as they embrace, they are transformed into dynamic doppelgangers as they rise on a mechanically lifted stage section as if on a pedestal to love, a romantic variation on the plastic couple on the top tier of the wedding cake, snow falling like iced frosting as the stage fades to black. Really? How did this exposé and satire of the medical community and patriarchy take us here, to a send-up of a snow globe? Rather than “connect the dots psychologically in a linear way,” Ruhl has said, she prefers to create emotional and psychological states through transformation of the performance space. And in performance space anything is possible, and that is as true for the characters as it is for the playwright who is also transformed through her career working in the transformative space of the theater. Ruhl has come a great distance since her apprenticeship of adaptations, arriving in a place where her work is becoming more layered, textured, blurred, blended and hybridized, as evidenced by In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) which is simultaneously a comedy of manners, a drawing room drama, a burlesque, a mystery of sorts, a retro-manifesto for feminism, a work of experimental theater, a romantic comedy replete with eavesdroppers and a happy ending, the type we know from Shakespeare’s great plays where, unless the stage is knee-deep in the dead, everyone’s difficulties, problems, issues, and damaged hearts are repaired as couples join hands, or, as in the case of the Givings, make lady-on-top love in the snow-globe of a garden. No wonder critic John Lahr praises the boldness of her plays: they are “full of mysteries, surprises, and astonishments,” for they give the audience not the known and proven, but the unexpected and the delightful. What better reason could there be to attend a performance of a play by Sarah Ruhl?
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