The Present State of the Avant-Garde II

The Discourse of Trying to Disturb Discourse

There was a moment during the second act of the play when my whole body tightened, hands gripping the armrests, legs twisting back and forth, every part of my being seemingly feeling the same pain as it shot through my existence sucking all the air out of the theater. The uncomfortable and uptight male character, the guy who had finally realized he was gay, had just bitten off the tongue of the controlling woman. He bit it off, and then he spit it (or some prop that was far too large for the amount of tongue he would have actually bitten off) on the stage.
I was not shocked. If the author--if Adjmi was trying to shock me, it did not work. My body contorted, not because I was uncomfortable, but because I was pissed. I was f***ing pissed! It did not make any sense. The gay guy: he was weak, not because he was gay, but because he was repressed and feeble, and tried to understand his life, but could not, so he decided to mess with the lives of other people. The woman: she was a strong New York character (stereotype). The scene: the gay guy tells the woman that he poisoned her (with apricots) to make her lose her baby--she had gotten pregnant earlier in the second act. His motivation was to see her suffer, and then help her get over it. She did not show any sadness over the loss of her baby, so he told her what he did.
What should have happened, in the exaggerated realistic world that Adjmi had given us to this point, was the woman should have flipped out, jumped across the stage and stabbed the weakling in his neck with one of her five-inch heels. What did happened, what sickened me, not because it was gross or surprising, but because it did not make sense and was clearly written for self-conscious purposes, was the woman flailed. The man went to hug her. They embraced and started kissing. WTF! (I cannot help writing it. It is the only way to express the sentiment I felt, and not in a good or funny way, but a pain shooting through my body excruciating way.) Then the man, the biting, the tongue, and contemporary theater seemed to take away its own voice.
From there, the second act continued to get worse, weirder and weirder for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and not even worth summarizing. I sat in my seat, whispering, “Make it stop,” twisting my legs back and forth, grabbing the armrests harder, and the whole time knowing (thinking I knew) exactly why Adjmi was turning his perfectly viable, pretty good production into an annoying piece of trash: a play without any true characters. It is the same thing that happens to me every time I write. It felt like I was watching something that I had written. I guess it is part of writing in these post-postmodern times.
We know that there is a set discourse and rules that conduct the words we write. Michel Foucault and postmodern thought exposed the core (lie) that perpetuates academia and other enclosed circles. In Foucault’s words, “not all the regions of discourse are equally open and penetrable; some of them are largely forbidden (they are differentiated and differentiating).” This knowledge seems almost intrinsic in anybody born during these post-postmodern times, but the postmodern artists were original and purposeful in using experimentation to blur the lines of their discourse. The post-postmodern artist believes that he is disturbing his discourse, but is actually falling into the new discourse: the discourse of experimentation already established by postmodern thinkers like Foucault.
Adjmi completely destroyed his play and turned it into the longest hour of falseness I have ever sat through because he was afraid of exaggerated realism and struggled to be original. He altered his characters to be original, threw a prosthetic tongue on the stage to show how creative he was, but ended up just falling into the farcical discourse of contemporary writing. It is as if the writer has become afraid of realism, afraid of being uncreative, and so has made himself surreal and hyper-creative.
We are stuck in the postmodern discourse of experimentalism, but what we lack that they had is a purpose; we write because we want to write, because we feel like we are supposed to write, and when we write we feel the need to experiment; but we experiment for no reason other than our own insecurity; we think we are changing or ‘shocking’ the discourse, but really, in our fear of the realistic voice inside of us, in our fear of speaking from ourselves, we are falling into a discourse that we think we understand, but are merely comfortable with; it amuses us; we think it is ‘deep’ and ‘original’, but we are not sure why; we enjoy it, we are comfortable with it, and so we copy it; it is the discourse of the generation before us and we, we are the yet undefined post-postmoderns.

The Present State of the Avant-Garde I

A New Discourse?

For the next month The Evildoers will be playing at the Yale Repertory Theater. It is a new play written by David Adjmi. Last Saturday I went to see a preview of it. Before the play even started I was dumbfounded. For a while I didn't understand why. The inside of the Yale Rep is unassuming: no marble sculptures in the ceiling, no private boxes hanging out in front of the stage, not even a balcony. I liked it. I liked the energy that seemed to flow through the empty space of it; I liked the red color scheme, a bright new red not yet dampened by years of hanging in front of stage lights, but understated and out of view when covered by the butts of all the patrons; I even liked the first part of the play.
It was a play about two married couples in and around New York City. The scenes were funny and intelligent, if not completely together, but this was a preview. The first scene had the two couples at dinner. People were talking over each other, dominating the conversation, but not really knowing what they were talking about, so quieting down as other people took over the conversation, not really sure what they were talking about either. It had a hint of realism, but in the present sense of the word: an exaggerated realism, that's what seems to be happening in a lot of contemporary writings I encounter. It felt like this was a scene in a restaurant that could be real, but it also felt like a scene in a restaurant written by some guy named David Adjmi.
This is where discourse enters the picture. Adjmi, beyond his own power, is writing in the discourse of dramatic fiction. He is attempting to portray something that he knows to be real, but this attempt is curtailed by the stage, lighting shooting down at the four people standing on it, and the hundred people staring through that lighting at it. There is the written script, itself of a certain format, and the trained actors who are delivering the lines in the way they have learned. A certain person is funny and drunk, another person is uncomfortable and uptight, another person is controlling and refuses to relinquish the conversation, and the fourth person sits there feeling she has nothing to add: four people that could exist in a table in a restaurant in New York City, but without lines written for them, and without an audience. Conscious of all this, of the discourse of his field, Adjmi can't help writing a so called 'exaggerated realism'.
In the second scene Adjmi seems to revel in this knowledge and allows it to bring forth a moment that, if not great theater, was at least enjoyable to watch, I perhaps liking it because I associated with the scene and had lived it once or twice myself. The two husbands were sitting around one of their apartments talking about old times. The one, the drunken clown, is blabbering about Christ, but then his mind suddenly drunkenly skips tracks to quarks, and molecules, and entering the molecules of another person and feeling their suffering. The other, he of the uptight qualities, now not so secretly gay, having left his wife at this point, and, excited by his new discovery, catches the idea of suffering molecules and believes his friend is suffering. It is a scene taken from the college dorm room to the midlife crisis apartment in New York City. It was funny to me. The jokes were very modern, as in slightly twisted and definitely snide, but searching for a sincerity in their sarcasm. I pictured a friend of mine and I having a similar conversation in his apartment in New York City, a random conversation hoping to do something, but mostly just talking and drinking.
Intermission came, me floating in the open space of the Yale Rep, ideas waiting to be plucked from the air, and now knowing what it was that made this place so great and exciting. This was a contemporary play. It was not a ten year run on Broadway making a tour of some of the smaller venues only to return to Broadway; it was not Shakespeare; it was not O' Neill, or Williams, or Miller; it was not Brecht; it was not even Stoppard. This was Adjmi, some guy, some dude, that was still alive, basically my age, and here was this stage showing this contemporary play, not that it was the greatest thing ever written and performed, but that there was the possibility that there was contemporary theater. Plays that had never been seen before, had never been written, floated through the empty space above the bright red felt seats, and season tickets were a few mouse clicks away from being mine. A whole new world of writing was scribbling--typing itself out for me. I felt like I have felt for the last six years I have spent working on my own writing: that we were on the verge of something. I was still not sure of the details, but we, young writers, the artistic world in general, was on the verge of a giant step forward into who knows what.
And then the house lights went off.