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.
Friday, February 8, 2008
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