A Eulogy For Certainty: An Evening with Miss America

If you're someone who's reflexively suspicious of a man who reviews his friends' art, you may wish to have the proverbial grain of salt--or a whole shaker of the stuff--handy; since art criticism is already about the attempt to quantify and codify subjective reactions, I feel relatively little urge to affect journalistic objectivity in apology for the fact that that the author of the play I intend to discuss spends an hour or two nearly every Saturday morning helping me pick the world apart and analyze it over coffee.

And if the dialogue his play seeks to establish with its audience is much like the dialogue between us, well, that's probably because ours is the dialogue we've always intended to carry on, with each other, with the audience, with humanity; it's the dialogue we've felt our culture needed to have, however differently each of us may have processed it.

So there it is: the disclaimer.

Moving on . . .

Miss America: A Fugue Born in 1969
A Review

David Mamet? It seems like half the reviews I've seen for this work compare Josh Beerman's eliptical phrasing to Mamet's celebrated sentence-cleaving. Now, while I'm certain that Mr. Beerman would claim Mamet as an influence, reading his style as "merely" Mamet-esque mistakes form for intent. Yes, both employ sentences that die--or perhaps dissipate, or keel over exhaustion--before their time; both are filled with ellipses and interruptions; both offer these slices of semantic confection through the lips of potently flawed organisms.

But a past review, for Beerman's A Eulogy for Citizen, suggested a more apt peer: Hal Hartley. As in Hal Hartley's films, the characters in a Josh Beerman play seem to be fumbling around for the compassion and vulnerability they KNOW is in there somewhere, under the layers of half-cooked dialectical epiphanies, pop-culture saturation, reptilian desires and failed attempts at developing inner peace. While both Mamet and Hartley clearly write from male standpoints, only Mamet's shortened sentences seem to be a function of a precisely masculine stance. Where his abbreviations seem to emerge from either impatience or constant interruption, Hartley--and, by extension, Beerman--seem to emerge from, more than anything, a failure (or highly mitigated progress) in the attempt of the modern, liberal, intellectual male to adopt the free-flowing communication and ongoing emotional narrative traditionally associated with women. It's a form of impatience, perhaps, but an earnest and empathetic one: the focused-yet-incomprehensible rambling of someone who's gathered all the ingredients of a cognitive or spiritual breakthrough, but can't seem to elucidate the excitement, the dread, the ardour to another human being.

Whether it was the influence of our friendship or the force of my narcissism (perhaps a little of both), I was all too quick to see myself in the author's clearest surrogate, struggling writer Charlie (played with impeccably wiry aplomb by Jason Marr). Charlie isn't the smartest, most level-headed, hardest-working or even most neurotic character in the play. What he is is the perfect stand-in for the show, for he's as lost between all the stories as we are (which is to say, less than we believe we are); he's smart enough, level-headed enough, compassionate enough and neurotic enough to contain some piece of each story within him. He's less the protagonist than the observer; less the observer than a hapless participant a la Candide; and, as Captain Ahab said, "Another lower level": he embodies the convergence of all tensions.

The tension Charlie embodies is the collective burden of communication. To count the miscommunications in the play would be a futile gesture; when communication succeeds, it's almost a fluke, and often leads to yet more fertile ground for communication failure.

To lay out the varying conflicts would be to reduce the crowded-yet-perfectly-integrated story (read: stories) to a series of situation dramedies. Since nothing could be further from what you'll see onstage, it'll have to suffice for me to say that we'll witness multiple crises of faith, only one of which is the usual one (as relates to belief in God); a recently blind woman and a lifelong deaf woman struggle within their separate relationships, as well in in their relationship to one another, though it seems by the end that they see and hear no less than any of the other myopic residents of this (barely) fictional Seattle; a man who sells IP addresses is approaching implosion under the weight of both his workaholism and emerging concerns about some of the clients using his wares. Voices of reason emerge (or try to) and recede (or are forced into the background). Dialectical strains erupt and fizzle. People justify themselves with varying degrees of success. Everyone knows each other, but no two people know each other enough, not even those in the most intimate of relationships.

It's almost criminal to mention stand-out performances in a cast as uniformly strong as this one (see bottom for a full cast list, and let it be clear that every last one of those people is spectacular in his or her capacity), but Jane May's performance as Molly, the aforementioned blind woman, haunted me well into the night; Philip Clarke balanced gravity and levity as Alvin, a pastor struggling with faith; Ray Tagavilla is admirably contorted by the twin demons of conscience and ambition as Thomas; and Brandon Whitehead conveys, effectively, both calm reason and ineffectuality.

Jennessa Richert, as America, "born in the '60s", is a welcome presence, but her character is an enigma, one all the more frustrating in that one wonders whether the solution to her mystery lies in realizing she's just as mundane as the rest of us. She arrives too late and gives us too little. This has nothing to do with Richert, who invests her few scenes with a lot of dimension. And to be perfectly fair, it may not even be the fault of the writer or director; indeed, given her loaded name, that my primary reaction to "America" was one of confused apathy--when apathy is the last thing the rest of the play could be said to inspire (though it does explore the inaction that results of having too much insight--or attempted insight--for one's own good)--might well be entirely fitting. In a play of ellipses and uncertainty, she speaks in whole sentences (except when interrupted), and seems eerily certain of things. This sense of clarity is, not unexpectedly, something of an aphrodisiac for Charlie, but after this festival of reason, folly, nuance and neurosis--and compassion, our tenderest and most useful neurosis--certainty and simplicity seemed, for Charlie (if not for Beerman), like a little bit of a copout.

That said, I wanted to believe that there was a free spirit who could help poor Charlie anchor himself, and Miss America might well have been the best woman for the job. Given that it's a minor quibble (and that I can always ask the playwright what he was getting at with her), I'm willing to concede that I might be experiencing a reflex (reflux?) based on my own less-than-spectacular experiences with so-called "free spirits".

Production elements were strong. The synth-heavy sound design confirms any Hartley comparisons I'm inclined to make (I was particularly reminded of the maudlin-yet-icy tones of his score for No Such Thing), the lighting conveyed both a heady delirium and a sense that events were unfolding in something close to the real world, the set was gloriously minimalistic and functional. Rob West's direction was solid throughout, with bursts of inspiration in the yoga class scenes (you're just gonna have to see, 'cause I couldn't possibly do justice to explain them) and several group scenes in a coffee shop. He also handles the many scene changes with flair (I've seen MANY a solid production nearly sunk by the dead air that occurs when furniture's being moved).

I've suffered more than my share of disillusionment with "plays" of late. People talking to each other about prosaic affairs is well-served by film, with its closeups, its negative space, its specificity of locale and arsenal of formal tricks inherited from the French New Wave. That Beerman's play seems to reinvigorate the form is a testament to his wordplay and knack for construction, but there's something more potent at work here; his writing is an ongoing, unfinished (unfinishable?) dialogue with the actors and the audience, one that genuinely engages the audience without offering resolution. It revives the too-long dismissed idea of art as discourse, a meeting place where we pick ourselves apart, mock foibles we wouldn't ordinarily think to notice and make a collective commitment to get just a little better at being. Here's hoping that, on his road to finding some peace, the jittery Charlie remains a bit jittery, that he continues to indulge gloriously confused (and intermittently profound) reasoning, and that he doesn't go finishing those sentences 'til he's damn sure where they end.

Miss America: A Fugue Born in 1969 runs one more weekend at Theatre Schmeater, to close on May 20. For those readers in Seattle, I really can't recommend it enough.

Cast:

Patrick Allcorn
Paul Bergman
Philip Clarke
Chad Evans
Erica Evans
Lindsay Evans
Rob Jones III
Erin Knight
Matthew Lyman
Jason Marr
Jane May
Jennessa Richert
Ray Tagavilla
Brandon Whitehead

Artistic Company:

Josh Beerman - Writer
Rob West - Director
Anne Hitt - Stage Manager
Michael Perrone - Set Designer
Tim Wratten - Lighting Designer
Wrick Wolf - Sound Designer
Carla Moar - Costume Designer