Contemporary American Playwrights - Richard Nelson

  Richard Nelson One of the mysteries of academic studies of modern American theatre, my own included, is their almost complete disregard for the work of Richard Nelson. In part, perhaps, this is because his more recent work has tended to be performed first in England. In part, though, it may reflect the difficulty of placing him. Not only has much of his energy gone into adaptations of European plays but his own work seems hetero- geneous, including brief and apparently enigmatic fables (Bal, The Return of Pinocchio), epic drama (Rip Van Winkle or ‘The Works’) and what appears to be Broadway comedy (An American Comedy). But beneath this variety is a playwright who, for all his eclecticism (and the influence of Bertolt Brecht, Edward Bond, Sam Shepard, Dario Fo and Caryl Churchill, along with Shakespeare and Molière, among others, seems evident), has a clear social and theatrical stance. Richard Nelson is a moralist, a political writer, a satirist, a teacher but not a polemicist. Once tempted by the ministry, he is inclined to see a certain Calvinism in his approach to work, certainly in his early plays, a belief that the sheer strenuousness of effort is its own reward (a view expressed by the principal character in Rip Van Winkle or ‘The Works’), that art is its own justification. But, at the same time, he believes that to speak in the world is to become involved in the world and he has acknowledged pinning a quotation from Plutarch over his desk: ‘Politics is not like an ocean voyage, something to be gotten over with. It is a way of life.’ 1 He is also, however, centrally concerned with the relationship between theatre and experience, in a number of his plays exploring the theatri- cal metaphor, or making theatre itself, its methods and assumptions, a primary subject, in an early play called Jungle Coup () transforming a jungle setting into a theatre and having the central character address the audience directly.  1 David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York, ), p. . Had his career started a decade earlier, he might have adopted a more programmatic stance, but liberal and radical presumptions about social change had collapsed by the mid s so that his career corresponded with a deeply conservative period in American history. As he has remarked, ‘The liberal movement fell apart because it said that if we do this, then we’ll get that result. And when it didn’t happen, everything crumbled. What needs to be infused is the sense that it matters daily what we do – politically, morally, socially. We matter’ (Savran, In Their Own Words,p.). It is not difficult to hear the would-be minister in those observations. Acting out, as he has said, ‘is a commitment’ (Savran, In Their Own Words,p.). It follows that theatre does not have to be about political issues; politics are immanent in theatre and, indeed, in lan- guage, politics in the sense of a moral view. The point is not to transform society along particular lines, to have a goal which is served by art, which thus becomes subservient, a means, serving an ultimate cause, but to acknowledge the fact that writing not only exists within a moral context, not only expresses and engages a moral point of view, but is itself an action with moral consequences. Meanwhile the structure of his plays reflects a conviction about the fluidity, the openness, the unresolved nature of experience. There is an enemy. It is not imperialism or capitalism as such but a reductive view of human experience which sees it, no less than art, as simply a means. That may lead to protesting against wars or challeng- ing materialism but not in the name of Marxism, anarchism, or any other formulaic mechanism for organising society or responding to human needs. It is simply a logical, though contested, consequence of acknowledging the dedication of language and art to communication, to engaging values, and Nelson has been as fascinated with language and the processes of art as he has been with exploring the nature of American society. Politically, his enemy is cynicism, more especially with respect to the power of art to engage its own times, not least because cynicism consti- tutes an essentially conservative position. It denies the possibility of change. And since theatre itself is heavily invested in transformations, it follows that a number of his plays have concerned themselves with writing and the manner in which it bears on the reality it offers to audi- ences and readers. As he has said, ‘A hidden agenda in all of my work is that it is about art – its value, purpose and function .The plays are efforts at being involved in society and at questioning values. What am I doing? How am I making things matter or not matter?’ (Savran, In Their  Contemporary American playwrights Own Words,p.). Indeed the I which creates is itself explored, the impulse to write itself potentially involving an arrogant expropriation of experience. Far from writing out of the kind of confidence that typified much s drama, therefore, he chooses to explore the ambiguous impulses which drive the writer no less than the culture within which he operates. Thus Conjuring an Event, ostensibly a play about the arrogance of the press, examines the manner in which the writer constitutes the world with which he or she chooses to engage. Scarcely less important is the fact that Nelson is a comic writer, with a talent equally for quick-fire humour, farcical interplay and caustic irony. That humour is a value. It implies a viewpoint, an attitude. At the same time it underlines the fact that, serious though he can be, he is not solemn or portentous, even about his own craft. Thus, Some Americans Abroad, for example, is both a satirical account of his fellow Americans and an acknowledgement that theatre can be simultaneously elevated to cultural icon and relegated to marginal activity. Theatricality, however, is central to his work, not least because he was shaped by a decade, the s, in which society, and particularly American society, was self-consciously theatricalised. Politics were quite literally acted out on the street, with mass demonstrations and marches, often carefully choreographed. The mock-heroic drama of gathering together to elevate the Pentagon was a comic gesture making a serious point. Frequently these events were joined by theatre companies. On the East Coast the Living Theatre deliberately breached the boundary between the theatre and the street. On the West Coast the San Francisco Mime Troupe performed its political dramas in a public park. The solemnities of justice were meanwhile transformed into a theatrical event when Abbie Hoffman decided to turn courtroom procedures into low farce. Nelson’s plays are full of actors, directors, writers as he debates with himself questions not merely of political utility and social effect but of authenticity. Writers are, of course, liars, producing texts as suspect as those generated by Christopher Columbus in Columbus and the Discovery of Japan. Actors simulate feelings, persuading us of the truth of their sim- ulations. How far, then, is a moral or political stance possible in a hall of mirrors? And, by displaying projected signs, Brecht-like, as he does in virtually all of his plays, he reminds us that we are, indeed, participating in a constructed event, as those plays, in turn, remind us of the theatri- cal dimensions of what we choose to regard as everyday life. For his char- acters are often caught self-consciously constructing the selves which Richard Nelson  they choose to project as authentic signs. The two central characters in Two Shakespearean Actors, his play about the nineteenth-century actors William Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest, never cease to be actors even when they step off the stage. How far, he asks, here and elsewhere in his work, are we, then, any more than actors primarily concerned to adapt our performances to the shifting audiences we encounter? Such a concern is certainly at the centre of The Vienna Notes, in which a politi- cian carefully shapes not only his account of events but the events them- selves to serve the personality he wishes to construct. Richard Nelson’s interest in theatre began early. His mother had been a dancer and, living outside New York, from an early age he was exposed to the stage, mostly gravitating to musicals. When the family moved to Detroit he attended the Fisher Theatre, a Broadway try-out venue. At university he began writing plays, fourteen in four years, producing them in a variety of places. Several won prizes. A travel grant on graduation took him to England. On his return, in , he moved to Philadelphia where, together with others, he formed a theatre company, working with Philadelphia’s public radio station. Early in his career he had a particular interest in exploring the rela- tionship between public events and their reporting, the way in which a supposed reality is constructed, and since such a concern necessarily involves an acknowledgement of the constructed nature of theatre, there was, from the start, a metatheatrical aspect to his work. His start in professional theatre came partly as a result of the contem- porary popularity of documentary theatre, and in particular of Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. It was this that led those at the Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum to select one of Nelson’s plays for laboratory performance. The Killing of Yablonski is based on the murder, just outside of Pittsburgh, of Jock Yablonski, his wife and daughter. Nelson covered the trial, for murder, of Tony Boyle, head of the United Mine Workers Union. The Trial of Yablonski is, however, not documentary theatre. Indeed it, and his later work, casts doubt on the very notion that theatre can recu- perate fact or that fact and meaning are synonymous. The writer himself becomes a problematic figure whose motives colour the reality he pre- sumes to present. This is particularly clear in the second work produced by the Mark Taper Forum, Conjuring an Event. Staged in , it is a satire on the hubris of the reporter, no longer content to report the news or make claims for journalism as a new literary form but working, as the title implies, to generate events. It is not even a case of the journalist  Contemporary American playwrights turning mere events into news but summoning events into being, creat- ing them out of nothing. The central character, Charlie, wants to breach boundaries, tran- scend frontiers, extend limits. Appropriately, he is himself a borderline schizophrenic with a tenuous grasp on reality, occupying a strange world in which characters transform, explosions rend the air and invisible crowds cheer and applaud. He wants to be the rock star of journalism, a shaman revealing hidden truths, a necromancer, an alchemist turning lead into gold. His aim is ‘absolute depth-reporting’. 2 Facts and figures are for those who ‘play it safe’. He derides those who stand outside the scene they report. The essence is to look out from within. For his part, he is in training, sharpening his instincts. His skills at sniffing out a story are honed by practising on foodstuffs and objects laid before him. He breathes in the air, looking to transform a mere odour into substance as he will create a story out of nothing more substantial than his own desire. At first he fails but there comes a moment when he achieves a break- through, offering a Whitmanesque list of objects, turning the banal into a kind of poetry, a hint at what he hopes to achieve through his writing. But it slips away. Charlie’s brother, meanwhile, also in the significantly named Pen and Pencil Club where the action takes place, tries to sell Charlie’s book to a publisher called Sleeves, himself a one-time journalist from the age of Ring Lardner, Ben Hecht and Dorothy Parker, a time now long gone. When he learns of Charlie’s experiments, however, he runs out ‘scared shitless’ (An American Comedy and Other Plays,p.) at the thought of such a radical revisioning. In the second act a minor figure from the first act, himself some- thing of a phantom, returns, dressed now as a s reporter. He reminds Charlie that others had sought the same grail as himself, turning themselves into the real object of their attention, from Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe through to Gay Talese, whose sexual adventuring was presented as reportage, people who ‘fell into their involvement acts’ (An American Comedy and Other Plays,p.). The reporter’s confessional reveals the self-doubt which leads to the asser- tion of self: ‘I confess I have fed off other folks’ actions. Their wrongs, scandals, joys, hardships, triumphs’. Confession, though, is followed by assertion: ‘The Reporter has more range than a Beverly Sills ever had. More gusto than an H.H.H. ever had . . . More rhythm than Otis ever Richard Nelson  2 Richard Nelson, An American Comedy and Other Plays (New York, ), p. . had, more draw than Jagger ever had, more power than Billy Graham ever had!’ (p. ). But this reporter transcends even this, intoning to himself: ‘You are the leader-man. Way ahead of the field. Avant-garde .You’retheconnection. You determine what’s big by where you play’ (p. ). Under pressure he fragments into two personalities. He comes to feel that events only occur because he is to report them, that the world is kinetic energy that will only be released at his command. ‘I break my neck getting to a fire and the fire it waits for me. I interview the candi- date and the candidate, he questions me . . . I discover the scandal and the world discovers me’ (p. ). It is not difficult to fill in the blanks. On one level Nelson is plainly satirising a wholly recognisable process whereby the reporter not only feels himself superior to the event but feels the event to be justified only because he or she has condescended to report it. Beyond that, however, is a fascination with the notion that reality is only what we agree to describe as such, what we are prepared to concede to be of true significance. At the height of his megalomania Charlie asks to see those who applaud him and the house lights go up to reveal the audience. Beyond the implicit accusation that the power claimed by such as Charlie can only exist if readers are prepared to endorse it, is a self-reflexive acknowledgement that the playwright, too, absorbs experience, particu- larly the author of such a play as The Killing of Yablonski, and derives his reputation from claiming that experience as his own: ‘I consume them all and repackage them under my label’ (p. ). The play ends on a note of apocalypse as all experience is drawn into the reporter, who becomes the god worshipped by an invisible crowd. The final word, heard amidst explosions, is ‘Me’, a word that resonated in the s which, following the communalism apotheosised by the s, narrowed the focus to the self. There are echoes here of the early imagistic plays of Sam Shepard, of the characters from The Tooth of Crime, performed at London’s Open Space Theatre in the year Nelson spent in Manchester. A realistic setting encloses non-realistic characters. Language is shaped into neurotic arias. The following year saw two plays that reflected his concern with the manner in which the real is constituted and the egotism of a decade in which public issues had given way to private concerns: The Vienna Notes and Bal. The Vienna Notes dramatises an attempt on the life of a US Senator, visiting Vienna. But this is not a crime story. The fact is that the Senator spends much of his time dictating his memoirs to a secretary  Contemporary American playwrights and since he does this as events unfold it is possible to see the gap which opens up between what happens and what is reported as happening, as he seeks to shape reality to serve what seem to him to be the purposes of art. Indeed, little by little his account begins to have such authority that those involved adjust their behaviour to serve the memoir. The insecure socialite who accompanies the Senator slowly turns into an actress, per- forming at his behest, even adjusting her response to her husband’s death when this seems insufficiently moving or appropriate. She looks to him for approval of her ‘performance’. He and his secretary applaud when she meets their expectations by affecting a particularly moving, if calculated, moment. The Senator, meanwhile, models his own account on the clichés of popular fiction, becoming, in effect, a product of his own invention. When they face death they debate among themselves the aesthetic quality of their chosen last words. The play, which begins with another memoir, as a hotel porter is paid to recount a past incident, ends in similar style as he offers a dramatic account of the events we have just witnessed and the Senator’s secretary presents a similar memoir of a political campaign. On one level the play is a reminder of the fictive nature of what we take to be actual and substantial, a dramatisation of the suspect nature of history and of the events and personalities we believe ourselves to know. As Nelson has said, The politics of personality are the politics of our time. Political personalities (which are the characters created by the performance of public figures) are more important to us than are political acts . . . The notion of  has become what the notion of  once was. Whereas a public figure may have once sought ‘his place in Heaven’, now he seeks ‘his place in History’. And just as one once struggled for his soul’s immortality by doing good works, one now struggles for the immortality of his characters in History by attempting to create as good, exciting, and empathetic a personality as he can. 3 The Vienna Notes is, appropriately, not a realistic play, since the status and nature of the real are precisely up for debate. Nor is this a play solely about the politics of a time in which personality substitutes for identity. Inevitably, it also raises questions about acting and theatre, as it does about those who choose language over experience. When the Senator asks himself (theatrically) about the virtues of ‘a life down on paper when there is a life here that breathes’ (The Vienna Notes,p.), it is not Richard Nelson  3 Richard Nelson, The Vienna Notes, in Word Plays: An Anthology of New American Drama (New York, ), p. . without relevance to the playwright who creates him, particularly to one who, like Nelson, wishes to engage with the political world. Nelson reminds us that there is nothing inherently false about acting, that ‘drama, or the dramatic, lies in our veins’ (The Vienna Notes,p.). It is endemic to communication. In that sense theatre is continuous with experience, life being invaded with fiction and fiction with life. The Vienna Notes is, he has insisted, ‘a play which in part is about performance and self-expression and audience reaction’ (p. ), all of which apply equally to daily life and to the special circumstances which constitute theatre. In that sense it is a play about authenticity, about the problem of knowing truth. In a theatrical context it engages the paradox debated by Denis Diderot, concerned as to whether truth can best be approached through dissembling. Art, whether it be that of the playwright or the actor, is, by its nature, crafted. It offers a simulacrum. Its truths are compounded of fictions. Its tears are false, and tears are shed in this play. Yet we have Nelson’s remin- der that acting is not inherently false and, perhaps more surprisingly, that, in this play, ‘The Senator .never lies about what he feels or what he is experiencing. The emotions he expresses do in fact exist within him. His concern is never to find a “better emotion”, only to find a better way of expressing his emotions’ (The Vienna Notes,p.). But that, too, is the essence of theatre, whose aim is to find the most effective way of com- municating emotion. In life, no matter what Nelson implies, such an act of calculation is taken for a sign of inauthenticity since it implies a dis- tance between feeling and action, which casts doubt on the depth of the feeling. A mother whose child is run over does not calculate how best to express her feelings. The actor in a play does and must. Yet, Nelson might say, the manner in which the mother responds may itself be shaped by a lifetime of performance which ensures that questions of authenticity no longer have real meaning, as that mother may have become the person she has created, since, at some level, we have all become what we have created. Diderot’s paradox, therefore, whatever Diderot may have thought (since he believed that the actor could remove his or her greasepaint and return home, authentic once again), applies with equal force beyond the stage door. And in so far as this is true then theatre becomes less of a special circumstance and the dilemma of the writer or actor no more than an expression of a dilemma which confronts us all. The Vienna Notes is, thus, a metatheatrical piece. It is in part a play about play-making, a myth about myth-making, a fiction about the construction of fictions.  Contemporary American playwrights But it is also a play about the theatrical dimension of experience, the degree to which the authentic is already a construction, the ethical formed as well as expressed by the aesthetic, genuine responses shaped by formula, personal biographies and histories sculpted to match famil- iar patterns. Nelson’s next play, Bal, is also an exploration of the so-called ‘me decade’. First presented by the Williamstown Second Company, in , it was produced at the Goodman Theatre, with Gregory Mosher direct- ing, the following year. Bal, a man in his thirties, about whom we learn almost nothing, is little more than an embodiment of egotism, a charac- ter to whom others are drawn for no apparent reason beyond an unac- countable charisma unrelated to genuine human qualities. He is, as Nelson has said, ‘totally grotesque’. He uses and abuses people to serve his own ends, disregarding their feelings, denying them their reality. To Nelson ‘the play is saying, “You take what we’re seeing to the extreme and this is what you get.” It’s not fatalistic because it is engaging an audi- ence with the assumption that one can actually change’ (Savran, In Their Own Words,p.). It is, in other words, an oblique parable, an account of a man who acknowledges no social or moral responsibility. In ten brief scenes, themselves further divided into scene fragments, it presents a man whose life is as discontinuous as the play which stages that life. Nelson followed this study of an imperial self with, if not a study of an imperial culture, then at least an altogether more epic work, one in which he chose to address the nature of his own times by exploring the nature and fate of American utopianism, a utopianism marked by inter- nal contradiction. Using a familiar American story (itself derived from a German original), set at the time of the birth of the American Republic, he staged the collapse of an apparent idyll into violence and a divisive ambition. Rip Van Winkle or ‘The Works’ () is a long way from Washington Irving’s tale of an unyielding human nature and the ironies of history. In Irving’s story Rip falls under the enchanted spell of magical figures in the Catskill Mountains and sleeps for twenty years, only to awake and discover that while George III has been replaced by George Washington, in other respects the world, and those who people it, have remained much what they were, besides suffering the effects of ageing. Nelson retains the magical interlude (shortening it to fifteen years) but otherwise introduces radical changes. What he takes from the story is an interest in the transformations of American society. As he remarked, ‘it was a Richard Nelson  wonderful story from which to express a sense of disorientation, a sense of things changing. It seemed almost a natural myth through which to come to terms with my feelings about the last twenty or so years in the life of this country.’ 4 Fittingly, the action of the first part of the play is observed by a surveyor, set to map the territory (essentially Nelson’s objective), for, as he explains, the problem with maps is that ‘things keep changing’. The play takes place in a valley most of whose land had once been owned by Rip Van Winkle, although everyone, including himself, assumes that he has signed it over to Hans Derrick, who operates what is referred to as ‘the works’, a factory whose object of manufacture is left vague. In fact the document was not a sale but a mortgage and since the value of the land (thanks to the construction of the works) now exceeds the loan, Rip is rich. Knowing nothing of this, however, and being illit- erate he comes close to being tricked into signing away his rights but, before he can do so, wanders into the hills and falls into an enchanted sleep. When he awakes he learns the truth, reclaims the land and turns the valley back into farmland. However, a drought precipitates a crisis, exacerbating an already deteriorating situation. Rip and Derrick are killed. The play ends with the death of Rip’s daughter and her husband. The Revolution, which exists in the background of Irving’s tale, remains central here, too. Indeed, Derrick, whatever he may manufac- ture, sides with the rebel militia, the works themselves having been erected without the permission of the British authorities. Nonetheless, his patriotism is flavoured with commercialism. Even this early in the history of the new Republic, it seems, the business of America is busi- ness. The scale of Rip Van Winkle is considerable. The cast list identifies forty-five characters. It is deliberately epic in scope. Set immediately before and after the Revolutionary War, it appears to comment not only on the values of eighteenth-century American society but on those of a contemporary world in which another kind of revolution had seemed under way, that of the s. What is at stake, though, is less the conflict between an agrarian and an industrial society than the ability of the individual to retain a grasp on experience, on his or her own identity, in a society undergoing change, a society in which individual freedom is challenged by corporate thinking.  Contemporary American playwrights 4 Richard Nelson, ‘Rip Van Winkle Our Contemporary: An Interview with Richard Nelson’, Theater , (Spring ), p.. [...]... ethic It is an attempt which seems doomed to fail in that he now lives in a society unsure of its 5 Richard Nelson, Rip Van Winkle or ‘The Works’, Theater , (Spring ), p   Contemporary American playwrights direction or principles And if that is the case in post-revolutionary America, for Nelson it is even more true of his own society for, as he has said, in a society such as ours which... dogmatic politics Indeed, if Nelson offers a critique of American society it is a moral rather than a political one Rip certainly seems to have something of Bond’s austere vision as the play ends with the death of its principal characters and the off-stage death of those who might be thought to contain the promise of the future However, these deaths seem  Contemporary American playwrights strangely unrelated... Our Contemporary , p ) Business values were, once again, to be American values and hard-headed asocial individualism to be reconstituted as a value And, though Nelson was hardly to know it, the s would see a triumph for individualism, an insistence on the reality of the dream and the death of a social ethos This is a play, then, which, despite its eighteenth-century setting, is offered as a self-conscious... Space Theatre in , following a workshop production the previous year at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, addressed genuine aspects of  Contemporary American playwrights American society in the caricatures and distortions offered by its central character, who steps out of fairy tale and popular culture Nelson has said that Pinocchio was influenced by his work on the classics, being a play about... turn contemporary political drama and Shakespearean plays, alike, into little more than supper table chat or academic fodder, the background noise to a life of inconsequence For a writer such as Nelson, whose plays have been con8 9 Richard Nelson, Roots in Water (New York, ), p  Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration – (London, ), p  Richard Nelson. .. from aesthetic codes and the real lose its edge, 10 Richard Nelson, Two Shakespearean Actors (London, ), p  Richard Nelson  its primacy For a writer such as Nelson, committed equally to theatre and to the need to acknowledge the demands of the public world, the paradox is particularly disturbing Macready and Forrest are arrogant and self-centred The deceits they practise are not restricted... iceberg, seven-eighths of which is below the water, and which can only be inferred from what is visible Much the same could be said of the work of Richard Nelson, particularly in this play Despite the brute facts of blood and pain to which we are exposed, he works by understatement, by implication The opening scene is deliberately confusing, though not without its humour In the American production Nelson. .. naiveties Told that his father, a lawyer and jour- Richard Nelson  nalist, has met with Manuel Rosa, the country’s poet turned ambassador to Franco’s Spain, he cannot accept it But the essence of the play does not lie in a radical critique of South American politics The country remains unnamed The clash between right and left is not in itself the subject It is, in Nelson s words, a play about fathers ‘The... Yet, as here, writers are as capable of naivety,  Contemporary American playwrights of betrayal, of wrong-headedness as anyone Like anyone else they change over time while being baffled by change They are as guilty of egotism and manipulation as those they claim the right to castigate, as liable to misjudge motives, misunderstand intentions Thus Nelson tells the story of his own production of Dario... rationalisation until we slowly discover that such public passions are not only rooted in private experiences but defer to them 7 Richard Nelson and David Jones, Making Plays: The Writer–Director Relationship in the Theatre Today (London, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights And so the action switches back and forth in time, different actors playing the young versions of those who meet as . corporate thinking.  Contemporary American playwrights 4 Richard Nelson, ‘Rip Van Winkle Our Contemporary: An Interview with Richard Nelson , Theater ,. working-class audience. Indeed Max’s commitment is paper-thin, no more than a series of postures, slogans and pieties, ridi-  Contemporary American playwrights