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.
