Contemporary American Playwrights - Emily Mann

  Emily Mann Emily Mann is the author of plays which engage history through offering testimonies to the nature and crushing power of that history. Largely through the words of those who observed and suffered, she seeks to stage the reality of our century, alive to the ambiguity of the exercise and yet necessarily submitting to it. Hers is an uneasy art. She stares into the heart of darkness, aware that the light she seeks to shine there may falsify the profundity of that darkness and that the mere act of presen- tation may diminish the enormity of what she seeks to encompass. The result is an art whose own methodology is as fraught with moral com- plexities as the world which that methodology is designed to capture. In Granada Television’s documentary account of the Second World War, The World at War, a woman recounts the death of her family in a concentration camp. She sits on a chair and speaks directly into the camera. Her words are uninflected, her face expressionless. The film’s director has done nothing but asked her to sit and testify. She could be a bystander recounting events she has happened upon. The effect is dev- astating. Much the same could be said of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, designed to record the details of the Holocaust. In an earlier television series, Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, Bronowski goes to the camp in which his family died. He wears the suit of a television presenter. There comes a moment when he walks into the mud and stands in the water at the edge of the camp, apparently careless of the fact that the water covers his shoes and the lower part of his trousers. He bends down and as he rises remarks that the mud he has gathered in his hands could contain the ashes of those he loved. The film’s director chooses at this moment to present the scene in ultra slow motion, the water and mud appearing to float down like the ashes of the dead those years before. The artifice destroys the emotional impact. Suddenly truth is shielded by art. What was designed to amplify the stark facts of genocide trans- fers them from the realm of fact to that of aesthetics and the audience’s  response becomes ambiguous. Facts and art coexist uneasily, while truth may be something quite apart. Emily Mann, writer and director, is aware of this and yet, working in the theatre, has to exist on this very borderline between fact and art. She is drawn to allow those she interviews to speak their own truth and yet necessarily shapes their words. She creates a new context for the testi- monies she stages, thereby changing the nature of those testimonies. Private conversation becomes public event, confidences are breached, and even though they are so with the sanction of those who offered them there is a subtle shift in pressure, moral no less than social. By presenting, as she does, edited, shaped, transformed transcripts in a theatrical environment not merely is she removing them from the context in which her subjects lived, moved and had their being, a context, in other words, in which meaning sank roots deep into a familiar soil, she is relocating them in a theatre which has its own dynamics, its own social milieu, its own history. It is not merely that a conversation between two or three people differs from the same conversation overheard by those with whom the subjects might not have chosen to share their intimate and most troubling memories, but that the theatre is a social event, a paid entertainment with its own customary accoutrements, which include the whole business of ticket sales, pre-theatre dinner menus, reviews. Nobody ever reviewed the Holocaust. Suddenly the sensibility of the witness is discussed over the fruit juice and cornflakes as though it were the product of a playwright, anxious to please, as in part it obviously is. And behind this lie acknowledged debts to Brecht, an awareness of theat- rical technique and audience–performer relationships learned from other ‘productions’, and other writers. For Mann’s works are plays offered in production. We are not in a human rights court or at a war trial. And if the subjectivity of the speaker is crucial to understanding, to an emotional empathy, the writer has her own subjectivity, as does the director, the designer and the lighting engineer. All this is to say no more than that a category such as ‘documentary theatre’, popular for a while in the s, is misleading. It is to say no more than that the shaping of eye-witness accounts, personal memories and public history into art is no simple matter, theatrically or morally. Emily Mann’s theatre lays no claim to objective truth, in the sense of offering a verifiable account of the Holocaust, of Vietnam or a murder trial. But even in offering the subjective truth of the lives of those whose experiences she draws upon, she deals in a complex world. The testimo- nies that she derives from personal interviews concentrate on those Emily Mann  aspects of her subjects’ lives that she is anxious to address. The plays are thus metonymic. Indeed the lives are rendered metonymic. In some degree, of course, that is indeed true to their experiences, as single events cut so deeply that they do indeed become definitional. There is, none- theless, a degree to which the shaping hand of the playwright is present even in the questions asked and hence in the answers elicited. She views the world through a frame of her own devising even as those to whom she speaks, and whose responses help to shape the play she would create, are invited to see their lives from a single perspective. It is not simply that the play is shaped out of a conversation. The conversation itself has a template. The theatrical challenge, however, is in a sense no different from that confronting any other playwright. It is to give shape and form to the material, to develop character through language and action, to find a way to bridge the gap between the subjectivity of the character and the subjectivities of the audience. Emily Mann is no mere transcriber. Why else does she express admiration for David Mamet? She is as concerned for the rhythms of language, for the vividness of character and for the theatrical effectiveness of what she writes as she is for the personal truths which may move her but for which she must discover a dramatic correl- ative, a means of communicating to the audience. But she has a respon- sibility, in that sense, which goes beyond that which David Mamet would willingly accept. Such theatre, moreover, derives part of its power precisely from what is not said but known. Behind the personal anecdote is a public history. Therein lies the metonymy. This is, after all, our route into the larger history, our means of decoding the cipher of the past. Personal testi- mony is an attempt to break through the implacable fact of an enormity whose sheer scale, as in the case of the Holocaust, seems to resist ratio- nal analysis, since the irrational can, by definition, never be explained. For the writer, however, history may offer a free ride. No matter how authentically the subject’s memories are conveyed, no matter how moti- vated the writer may be by a desire to retrieve what is lost, to memorial- ise those who have slipped anonymously into death, our knowledge of the fact of the Holocaust, its enormity, its countless private pains and collective despairs, is imported by the audience into their response to the play. What is external to the play (though access to that externality is opened up by what is contained within it) in part determines our reac- tion to it. Our awareness that we are dealing with fact rather than fiction freights our responses with pity, guilt, horror, despair which may or may  Contemporary American playwrights not be generated by the play in isolation. Audiences are confronted with a double truth: this really happened and this is being simulated. People died; an actress is pretending to be what she is not. This is fact; this is fiction. Suddenly Diderot’s paradox is something more than an intellectual debate; it has moral implications as the actress decides either to be moved by what she portrays, and thus approximate the feelings of the person she portrays the better to convey them, or to remain detached and find methods of appearing to be moved, not least because this per- formance has to be replicated. For what is theatre but repetition, through rehearsal and on to performance. In this context, however, the detach- ments of craft may come at the price of guilt at an inauthenticity which potentially threatens the quest for an authentic history. A work which sanctifies truth, and testimony as a route to that truth (‘I was there. I saw it. Believe me’), may falter in the face of artifice required to communi- cate that truth (‘I am pretending to be the person who was there’). It is not hard to move audiences. Yeats warned against sentimentality, by which he meant unearned emotion. For Poe, the ideal subject was the death of a beautiful young woman, a subject sure to stir pity and regret, a romantic affectation that stresses the evanescence of beauty and life alike, caught by an art which alone will not corrupt. How much more powerful, though, death which has the status of history, death which can indeed be represented as a slaughter of the innocents, death which can be thought to have contaminated the century and confirmed a deep flaw in human nature which leaves no one untouched. This electrical, emo- tional charge is available for anyone who fictively enters the death camps, and many a writer has attempted to surf on this wave (including myself in a novel called Still Lives, which raises many of the issues that I am apparently discussing with such detachment). Consider William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. The terrible dilemma at its centre gains a great deal of its emotional force from the fact that such things did happen. Yet it is difficult not to feel uneasy about this, as about an American televi- sion series which sought to communicate the experience of the Holocaust by turning it into soap opera, which has its own paintbox of sentimentalities. It is true that such reservations are liable to dissolve when the author was there. Primo Levi spoke out of experiences so real that they eventu- ally led him to suicide. Anne Frank recorded her daily life. We read that life as we do because we see it ironised by the fate that awaited her, a fate which we know and she only feared. We honour her because she told her Emily Mann  small truths which spoke a larger truth, thereby reminding us of what a lost life amounts to. Surely the transference of that account to the theatre does no violence to that principle. Well, a little. She wrote words on a page which we then read (though her father did intervene as editor). In the theatre we deal with a box of tricks. Writer, director, actress have at their disposal lights, sound, décor. They may choose to employ an actor whose own theatrical history carries with it certain assumptions which potentially bleed into the parts he or she plays. The audience, mean- while, is not a single reader, alone, free of social inhibitions or coercive influences, but a collection of people subject to group dynamics and responsive to those moral and behavioural pressures which, for example, force an individual to his feet when the rest of the audience is intent on offering a standing ovation. And what is it we applaud when we reward Emily Mann’s Annulla, An Autobiography if not a performance detached from the role reproduced and thus in some senses detached from the horrors and triumphs dramatised? What do we praise if not what Emily Mann has made of someone else’s story? Why preface a consideration of the work of Emily Mann in this way? Because these are all concerns which bear on what she has chosen to do, which is to create a drama of testimony in which she takes us on a journey into personal histories that in turn become the key if not to history itself then to events which otherwise exist somewhere between the neutrality of facts and the engagement of myth. Emily Mann grew up at a time of social ferment. In  she attended the University of Chicago Laboratory School and lived in the Hyde Park area. As she has recalled, the Black Panthers were ten blocks away and Elijah Muhammad lived three doors from her own house. The area was integrated but within two years, following riots across the country and the assassination of Martin Luther King, the move towards black sepa- ratism had begun to have its effect. Meanwhile, the Tet offensive in Vietnam intensified opposition to that war. She herself did participate in protest marches but has expressed her own suspicion of the emotion- alism generated by mass action. The group to which she was drawn was less defined by political action or street demonstration than that consti- tuted by the communalism of theatre. Working first on props, make-up and design, she then moved to acting and then directing, which remains a principal activity. She directed her first play at the age of sixteen and wrote her first play at Harvard, in a playwriting seminar with William Alfred, though she abandoned writing  Contemporary American playwrights in favour of directing, which she began in her sophomore year. Following a temporary disillusionment with theatre, she moved to Minnesota, working at the Guthrie Theatre and studying at the University of Minnesota. The key moment in her career, however, had come with her reading of documentary material assembled by her father for an oral history project, and then with a visit to Europe to study family history. In her senior year at college she read transcripts gathered by her father for the American Jewish Committee’s oral history project on the survi- vors of the camps. One interview, in particular, seized her imagination and stirred her feelings. A Czech woman, interviewed by her daughter, talked of a recurring dream that had haunted her in the camps, a dream of a ballerina dressed in white. This was a vision that had no correlative in her actual life but which served in some unaccountable way to sustain that life. At that point, Mann has explained, ‘I thought, “I have to talk to people. I have to get it down, to have it in their own words”, because you could hear, from the page, the cadences and rhythms of the Czech woman, as opposed to those of her daughter who was American born. And both of them reaching out across a language barrier, as well as an experiential barrier. It was extraordinary.’ 1 What is fascinating about this account is that though she was moved by the simple account, with its striking image and its human resilience, what she found equally com- pelling was the attempt of someone to understand an alien experience, to bridge not only a gap between the generations but a gap of experi- ence that could be filled only with words. Beyond that, she heard in the rhythms of speech something more than evidence of national origin. This broken dialogue was itself a sign both of dislocation and of a need to mend. For someone who as a writer and director would later express a distaste for the artifice of theatre, it also had the authority of truth. It was, anyway, an experience which inspired in her an interest in family documentary whose first fruit was Annulla. In the summer of  she interviewed Annulla Allen in London. Annulla was the aunt of her college room-mate. Mann herself had, as the play indicates (through the voice of a young woman who seems to repre- sent the author), been intending to look for her grandmother’s house in Poland but was persuaded instead to spend time with the woman who became the basis for the play. She was so impressed by the resulting tran- script that she wished toturn it intoa play. This desire, in turn, led toher Emily Mann  1 David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York, ) p. . decision to go to Minnesota and the Guthrie. By her own account it was seeing the actress Barbara Bryne perform there that made her feel that the project was possible and it was Bryne’s enthusiasm on seeing the tran- script which led tothe play. An early version, Annulla Allen: Autobiography of a Survivor (A Monologue), directed by the author and starring Barbara Bryne, duly opened at the Guthrie Theatre’s Guthrie ,in.Ina revised form, Annulla, An Autobiography was staged at the Repertory Theatre of St Louis in , directed by Timothy Near, and in New York, at the New Theatre of Brooklyn in , with Linda Hunt as Annulla. In a note Emily Mann indicates that ‘for the most part’ the words of the text are those spoken to her in that summer of , ‘and my own words told to Timothy Near over a decade later’. 2 The equivocation is necessary, understandable, but interesting. Anyone transcribing a tape knows full well that changes are required to make spontaneous speech fully coherent. The process of editing, meanwhile, represents something more than a shuffling of the deck. Annulla is thus a testimony whose shape is determined partly by the events recalled, partly by the manner in which its subject chose to recall them, and partly by the writer who needs to shape them to the requirements of theatrical presentation. This is, in short, a play and not a dramatised tape recording. By the same token the Voice in the play is that of Emily Mann; it is also, however, a character with a dramatic function. Emily Mann’s own motivation, at least as later rationalised and given to the character in the play, is personal. The truth which she seeks is to serve a private as well as a public purpose. It is not testimony that she seeks but information. What she is looking for is a past that has been dis- assembled and a language in which, and with which, to address that past and unlock its secrets: I needed to go to someone else’s relatives in order to understand my own history because by this time my only living relative of that generation was my grand- mother – my mother’s mother – and she had almost no way to communicate complex ideas. She’d lost her language. Her first languages were Polish and Yiddish, but when she went to America she never spoke Polish again. My grand- father spoke English at work, but at home they spoke a kind of Kitchen Yiddish together – certainly not ‘the language of ideas’. Her children first spoke Yiddish, but they wanted to become American, so as soon as they went to kin- dergarten, they only spoke English. So in the end, she read a Yiddish newspaper but spoke in broken Yiddish – half Yiddish. She had no fluent language. This isn’t uncommon among immigrants of her generation. So I went to Annulla, who had the language. (Testimonies,p.)  Contemporary American playwrights 2 Emily Mann, Testimonies: Four Plays (New York, ), p. . And so a European story becomes an American story: not the revelation ofsuffering but the discovery of roots. The primary purpose of one woman’s life is suddenly to throw light on the life and pre-history of another. An act of appropriation is undertaken and justified. The dis- continuities of one woman’s life (Mann’s grandmother), and hence of those to whom she bequeaths those discontinuities, are to be resolved by a woman (Annulla) who is presumed to have the key to one experience only to reveal that she is the holder of the key to another. The disrup- tions, discontinuities and vacancies which she suffers, however, are, argu- ably, more profound than those afforded by expatriation while fluency may not give access to a truth that lies outside words or outside the capacity of words to recuperate. And that, of course, is the problem of testimony for language can never be adequate to experiences which defy comprehension and communication alike. The young woman of the play goes in search of one thing, hoping to complete the gaps in her own story, only to find herself confronted with other stories whose caesuras are more profound and terrifying. Ironically, on her arrival in Annulla’s Hampstead Heath flat, she finds herself confronted by a woman who tells her that her own life ‘is in ter- rible disorder’ (Testimonies,p.), and who has herself tried to bring shape to her life by writing a play, called The Matriarchs, still six hours long and in need of precisely that condensation which will confront Emily Mann. Indeed she confesses that the pages are unnumbered and that she has just dropped the manuscript so that it is in total disorder. Her putative play, however, is not in itself an account of her camp experiences but is designed to demonstrate that a global matriarchy will conquer evil, though on this evidence it seems unlikely to bring much order to the world. She seems less interested in the past, indeed, than in the future, which is ironic given Emily Mann’s commitment to countering an American disregard for history. Gore Vidal’s references to the United States of Amnesia imply a con- tempt for history that he finds disturbing, but perhaps this disregard says no more than that America is an immigrant country with a vested inter- est in leaning into a future over which it has always asserted presump- tive rights. Denying the past, or banishing it to pre-history, is the price of entry. Henry Ford may have been over-blunt is declaring history to be bunk but he had the sanction of national mythology on his side. America was a new beginning. The slate was wiped clean. When Arthur Miller went to Italy not long after the Second World War his father was bemused that he should wish to visit a continent they had been so glad to leave. It was a land of oppression. The Voice in Annulla recalls her Emily Mann  grandmother asking the same question of her and, indeed, her journey, and the play which it generated, constitute an engagement with the past, and more specifically the European past, which is, indeed, at odds with American notions of history as discarded experience. Of course a different kind of past has always proved attractive, a past composed of a sentimental nationalism, a myth of origins which sends American pres- idents looking for Irish forebears and members of the Daughters of the American Revolution for evidence that they sailed, with impeccable social origins, aboard the Mayflower. But the history explored in Annulla is of a different kind, while the past has more secrets than those offered by a genealogical chart. Emily Mann, in the guise of the Voice, explains her own attachment to the past as in part a factor of being the daughter of an historian but also as a product of her Jewish identity. Indeed identity, for her, is entwined with a tradition that by definition offers a crucial link with the past. In a play which consists of a collage of stories, she thus has her own story to tell, in fact her own account of the Holocaust passed down from her grandmother to her mother, a story no less terrible but in some way now released by the stories of another. This difference between European and American sensibilities is raised by Annulla herself, who in describing her family life relates it to that offered in Strindberg’s theatre, a drama whose concern with tormented souls she believes to be at odds with American values, or at least alien to American actors. This is the reason, she assumes, why Goethe’s Faust finds so few interpreters in America. O’Neill once suggested that his own failure to engage the American public had something to do with a tragic sensibility so at odds with American values, while Arthur Miller has been tempted by the same thought. Annulla, however, is precisely concerned with ‘souls in torment’, as it is with survivors. It is, in that sense, a European play as defined by Annulla herself. For if it goes back, hori- zontally, through time it also slices downwards, vertically, into extremes of human emotion, recalling moments when men and women were in extremis. Annulla goes on a journey into her own past but this is paralleled by the different journey on which the writer or, more properly, the Voice, goes, on being led back into the heart of darkness. Annulla, by its very structure, poses questions about the nature and capacity of theatre to address and dramatise certain experiences and emotions, as its central character discusses the relationship between theatre and national identity. A play about a woman who writes a play which she believes will have an immediate impact on people’s behaviour,  Contemporary American playwrights which is in turn shaped by another woman, Emily Mann, cannot help but raise questions about theatre itself, as about women’s sensibilities. Indeed, Annulla is, by its nature, metatheatrical. Annulla is simultane- ously a character and an historically located person whose existence, independent of the play, is offered as a sign of its authenticity. Yet this ‘real’ Annulla is herself a conscious creation, her identity problematic and deliberately vague. After all, her own survival as a Jew in Nazi-occu- pied Europe, and the survival of her husband, depended on the success with which she performed as an actress, presenting herself as what she was not, concealing her real identity, an identity already problematic. For the truth is that she was also a product of that grand theatre which is European history. Born in L’vov in Galicia, which was first Austria then Poland and finally Russia, she spoke Polish and then German before Ukrainian, French and Ruthenian. The family then moved from Austria proper to Germany to Italy and then England. Along the way she picked up a handful of further languages. Who, then, was she? Those around her assumed she was Czech. She presented herself as being Aryan. She inhabited, and continues to inhabit, a necessary vagueness. Forgetful of her childhood days, raised in a country whose identity and language changed, she drew her vagueness around her as a protection. This woman, who once wanted to be an actress, became pre- cisely that, necessarily concealing the pain she felt, her religion, her motives. She flirted with a German officer to get her way, became a coquette to protect her husband. She became a contradiction, a role player who faced the risk of losing herself in her roles if she was not to become merely a mosaic of them. She even chooses to forget her child- hood because it was unpleasant. As she confesses, ‘I was really ignorant of the horror that could befall me because I had to be’ (Testimonies,p.). Thus, though she asks ‘how can people change if they don’t know what happened. It is like in psychoanalysis. You must know what hap- pened to you’ (p. ), she herself knows the advantages of oblivion, the necessity of forgetting which must contend in her own life with the necessity to remember. And Annulla, the play, is about the necessity of remembering. There is, thus, an element of cruelty in the naive Voice who urges Annulla to travel where she would rather not go, disperse the ignorance which had once offered her a limited protection, a dubious grace. There is, in other words, an element of cruelty in Emily Mann. Annulla’s husband had been arrested in  on what came to be known as Kristallnacht. He was taken to Dachau from which, remark- ably, she managed to secure his release in good health, the Germans Emily Mann  [...]... demanding as to rule out most committed drama And that, of course, raises a central question about Emily Mann s play Annulla, after all, may speak out of her own knowledge and experience of war; Emily Mann does not Annulla objects to Brecht seeing Emily Mann  humour in a serious subject; but Emily Mann sees humour in Annulla Meanwhile, Annulla’s life, perhaps, sustains its integrity more fully precisely... confronting the past and as a way of giving form to otherwise unfocussed 4 Philip C Kolin, ‘Public Facts/Private Fictions in Emily Mann s Plays’, in Public Issues, Private Tensions: Contemporary American Drama, ed Matthew Charles Roudané (New York, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights anxieties The emotional intensity and linguistic energy are contained and controlled by the form As she has... whatever she says, Emily Mann made it Whatever their roots in another sphere, she constructed its characters They are the products not only of their language but of how that language is used, not only of the experiences and emotions which they recount but the context and manner in which those experiences and emotions are recounted Her formalisation of language  Contemporary American playwrights in verse... ‘You, the Jury: Emily Mann s Execution of Justice’, Theatre  (), p  Emily Mann  of the audience, a pluralism of perspective which, to Mann s mind, provided the subtext of a play which rejected the notion of a homogeneous political and social gay community along with the idea of a society genuinely sharing the values, assumptions and myths so frequently presented as defining American identity... disputed The trial ostensibly turned on the state of mind of the murderer For Mann, however, as for those for whom she became in effect a spokesman, it was not his state of mind but the state of society that was a principal concern And what is true of Execution of Judgement is true, too, of Mann s   Contemporary American playwrights play, Greensboro, which recalls the killing, in , in Greensboro,... Holocaust that appalled If it be argued that Emily Mann s objectives here are deliberately more limited, having to do with recalling what is too easily forgotten, offering the human details behind fading headlines, this is to ignore, for example, her deliberate attempt to identify the parallels between Klan activities in the s and  Contemporary American playwrights events in Nazi Germany (one of... electricity or tension in it And it didn’t have the traumatic effect’.3 Distilled, however, the monologues, ‘found their own 3 Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York, ), p  Emily Mann  rhythm, which was, in fact, iambic pentameter I wanted to retain the actual rhythms of the way each person spoke, in real language, during the interviews.’ She... trial but, of course, the image of the trial had been implicit in the earlier plays, had been implicit, indeed, in the very notion of what Mann herself chose to call a ‘theatre of testimony’ But this literal trial is presented in the context of the wider com- Emily Mann  munity while its realism is stylistically subverted Indeed the play text is at first reminiscent of a film script The opening stage... the political will left by Harvey Milk, as well as from interviews of the kind used in her previous work Whatever her intention, Execution of Justice in fact deploys the very  Contemporary American playwrights mechanisms Mann seems to distrust If the media is accused of shaping responses to the trial and its participants, she does much the same, using similar methods She not only deploys what are... makes it seem a response In the same speech she refers to the finality of divorce – ‘it’s over’ –  Contemporary American playwrights and to the ubiquity of men like Mark – ‘It’s all over’ (meaning ‘everywhere’) – an internal rhyme which ties the two experiences of estrangement together A minute later, Mann repeats the strategy as Cheryl once again remarks ‘I’m telling you – / if I thought about this . (Testimonies,p.)  Contemporary American playwrights 2 Emily Mann, Testimonies: Four Plays (New York, ), p. . And so a European story becomes an American story:. tran- script that she wished toturn it intoa play. This desire, in turn, led toher Emily Mann  1 David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American