by Rachel Cole
Plays, by Gertrude Stein, and The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportions, by David Greenspan
Produced by The Foundry Theatre at Atlantic Stage 2
January 6th – February 7th
The Myopia Wednesday – Sunday at 7:30
Plays Saturday and Sunday at 4:30
There are few and special occasions when I am reminded of how sublime it is to experience a truly genius actor in a role that he truly relishes. To roll along on an ever-shifting ride that stimulates the eyes, the ears, the body, the mind, is an experience necessary for even the most casual theater-goer. This experience can be found at The Foundry Theater’s double feature of Plays, by Gertrude Stein, and The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportions, by David Greenspan, both of which are performed by David Greenspan.
Plays is performed before The Myopia only on Saturdays and Sundays, however I can’t recommend the double billing enough as it serves as a reflexive lens for The Myopia in a way that make both pieces more potent. As the Doppelganger in The Myopia explains, Stein wrote this theatrical lecture “to be spoke – so it was writing to be heard.” With circular language structures and a subtle and self-satisfied wit Stein elucidates “just at present all I know about the theatre.” Read by Greenspan, sitting at a small desk, it sets about explaining the kind of “nervousness” that accompanies a theatrical event due to, as she sees it, a dissonance in tempo and feeling between audience and play. Something about story and character remains out of our control during a traditional play, and that loss of control causes us to be always either ahead or behind the feelings of the characters. To counteract this phenomenon that so troubled Stein as a young theatregoer, she focuses on “theatre from the standpoint of sight and sound and its relation to emotion and time, rather than in relation to story and action.” Thus, the birth of her Landscape Plays, in which time and space are more or less fixed – a play that can “express without telling what happened, in short to make a play the essence of what happened.” The concept is best understood through the actual witnessing of these works in action – which is why is it such a delightfully satisfying compendium to The Myopia, a play that riffs off, adds to, and directly converses with Stein’s work.
The Myopia defies a reductionist description. Briefly, it features The Raconteur, who is sometimes the Narratage in the form of Stage Directions, who is sometimes the Orator (accompanied by the Doppleganger who “bears a striking resemblance to the actress Carol Channing”), who seems to be always a thinly veiled version of Greenspan himself, who has written a play about Barclay, “an illuminated globe of singularly ocular appearance” who is enacting vengeance upon his parents, Febus and Koreen, by writing a play about their disastrous marriage, and who is also haunted by a musical on the life of President Warren Harding that his father struggled to write during his life, which is also a play in this play and it unravels both in the world of Febus’ imagination and in the world of the Orator. Yes. The play is a layered spiral of a singularly mountainous quality whose structure in plot seems to echo the verbal structure of Stein’s Plays. Yet, that itself is not the play either. At top, The Raconteur tells us, “I’ve been reflecting on the difference between the image and the imagined, and the relationship of imagining to thinking.” And thus begins The Myopia, a journey through the telling of images and sounds that Greenspan, who sits on a chair off to the side of the stage for two hours, paints. It is a startlingly theatrical world that occurs simultaneously in the storytelling and in our imaginations.
Greenspan is one of those actors whose dexterity seems to know no bounds. Playing what seems to be an endless stream of characters, alternating falsettos and modulations of baritones, his physicality is elegant and malleable, he slips deftly from one persona to the next so cleanly that we can’t even begin to pick apart the artifice; he just carries us along with him. His lithe body, despite being confined to that one chair downstage, holds enough power to fill a twenty piece orchestra if the orchestra were not just music, but sight, color, texture and atmosphere. And his timing is relentlessly impeccable. Greenspan barrels through the play with urgency, pausing very selectively to linger on just a few moments. And those well picked moments truly capture what Stein describes as the “glitter in the light and a great deal of height in the air” that fills a theater. However because Greenspan so unsentimentally shifts from character to character, we rarely have time to sit with anyone long enough to drum up any empathy for them. His cartoonish characterizations, which often live in the high-octane hysterics of melodrama, seem to invoke that genre as a way to satisfy Stein, who viewed these heightened theatrics as a way to allay that pesky “nervousness” by the fact that “everything happened so quietly one did not have to get acquainted, and as what the people felt was of no importance one did not have to realize what was said.” Rather, we are showered by sounds and images, characters that revolve round and round in a concentric world of narration where they are created and immediately dissolved, and then resurrected once again to say the responding line within Greenspan’s body.
Most wonderfully about The Myopia is this real sense that Greenspan delights in his performance. In a wonderful moment that can only occur during live performance, a large man in the front row lumbered slowly across the row of chairs and out of the small theatre midway during the first scene. Greenspan, as Narratage, gives stage directions for the scene in Warren Harding’s hotel room, saying “Warren stays –” at which point the man got up and Greenspan, with a twinkle in his eye, froze in action until the man left, only to finish with his coincidentally most apropos sentence “ – unmoved.” His ability to catch upon this rare moment, to play with environment, to play with the audience, he seems to close the syncopation gap between spectator and spectacle that Stein feared could not be resolved.
As I’ve said before, The Myopia seems in many ways to be a response to, or a celebration of, Stein’s Plays – an exploration of what is seen and what is heard, what is intrinsically theatrical about the theatre. While this is in no way a landscape play in the Steinian sense, Greenspan has a way of playing with time so that we get stuck in time, stuck in the image (the sights and sounds) and lose track, for an instant, of the story. Greenspan creates moments when a character seems to hit a snag, repeating a line maybe four or five times as if the record is broken. His voice is jagged, the line being ripped apart over and over again. These are moments where we get stuck as well. In the imagistic simplicity of one body on stage, it is easy to get lost in the moment – where nothing exits before or after.
One of the most powerful examples of this ripping open of time occurs early in the play, when the monstrously swollen Koreen, who lives in a tower in a nightmarish version of Rapunzel, is taking a shower and singing “Funny Girl.” She sings in such a heartbreakingly beautiful falsetto, that while at first I laughed at the campiness, the song continued, and continued, and continued, until finally I found myself lost within the song, losing sight of story, forgetting where I was, and once again plunged into this magical moment of timelessness.
In Plays, Stein takes issue with the physical components of the theatre, that “there is the curtain and the curtain already makes one feel that one is not going to have the same tempo as the thing that is there behind the curtain. The emotion on you on one side of the curtain and what is on the other side of the curtain are not going to be going on together.” In The Myopia, The Narratage (who is the Narrator who is the stage directions) announces with great patience during each ’scene change’ (and there are many) “curtain light is extinguished. Noise of the change behind the curtain.” Perhaps, in recognition of Stein, Greenspan desires to allay the nervousness of the visible theatrics that seem to create dissonance between us and the stage. The beauty and magic of the theatre is made personal, and this distance is obliterated by it taking place in our imaginations – our mind being inextricably linked to our emotions and our “knowing”; thus the space between us and stagecraft no longer has meaning. It ignites within us that fantasy of stage pageantry. Those tawdry details, like curtains, heard rather than seen, breathe new life into the magic of the theatrical event. Greenspan’s performance holds so much wonder and delight, in the way The Narratage illuminates details that may normally be glossed over by the tired eye, that ultimately, I have to view The Myopia as a kind of love letter to the theatre.
In the final scene, Koreen, who has just killed her philandering husband, returns to the Rapunzel tower of her childhood. She calls to her father, Shav, a somewhat God-like creature of the sea, and at once we are in the land of myth. Transporting us through history, Greenspan invokes the stage of the Greeks, the parents of modern western theatre. There is something awe-inspiring in this twist of scope and genre. In a play of wild characterizations and high neurotics, we are finally given the gift of empathy. Greenspan now bestows a tenderness upon the detailing of Koreen, who mourns the loss of her life as she knew it. As she walks into the sea, her “magnificent bulk begins to harden, petrify…In time, the vast persisting ocean will make silt this tower of grief.” The poetry and tenderness in these last moments gives the play a rare moment of quiet, where tragedy and beauty – two staples of traditional theatre – can really sit with us. With one last loving breath, The Narratage speaks: “A final blessed curtain as light is extinguished.”
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New York Neo-Futurists (Discussed here in “Play by Play” in Issue No. 12 of InDigest)
Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind
every Friday and Saturday night at 10:30
Kraine Theater on 85 East Fourth Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.