the aesthetics of violence (2001)

8/18/2019 The Aesthetics of Violence (2001)

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of the affair some years earlier. But thiscomparison doesn't do Nolan m uch good:the similarity is only structural. Pinterwas concerned with the devolution ofemotion , the interplay of knowledges, themetamorphosis of character—all of themapproached in reverse chronological orderfor the purpose of further insight. Nolanuses the structure simply as a gimmick to

refresh a stale story of revenge, crime,sex, a film noir tha t never gets any darkerihangris. The characters are so common-place, the action so familiar, th at we verysoon wish that Memento itself could beshown backward—therefore chronologi-cally forward. At least this would reducethe preten sions of a stock item whose onlynovelty is its medical discovery. •

Robert Brustein Theater

The Aesthetics

of ViolenceT

•^ H E THEATRE FOR a NeW Audience, which doesn't have

a home of its OWTI, has beenhousing a new revival ofEdward Bond's aved at the

American Place Theatre in New York. Awarning sign in the theater lobby reads: Saved contains scenes of explicit vio-lence and cigarette smoking. What next?Printed cautions about the non-organic

candy at the refreshment counter? Whenpeople are so sensitive to the environmentthat smoking gets equal billing with mur-der, one almost wonders which of theseliberal middle-class interdictions is goingto upset the audience more.

Well, not really. Some spectators mayleave the theater grumbling about second-hand smoke, but it is unquestionably theinfamous ston ing of a baby in its carriagethat shocks some members of this audi-ence out of their seats after the first-actcurtain, propelling them, coats in hand,towards the nearest available exit. Euro-peans like to accuse Am ericans of having aviolent culture. They are right, of course;but w hen it comes to violence onstage, noone can beat the English. Just considerthe way Lavinia loses her arms, tongue,and virginity in Titus Andronicus, or howGloucester's eyes are gouged out in KingLear. But the onstage murder of thebaby in Saved may very well be the singlemost disturbing moment in all of worlddrama— that is, until Sarah Kane, a disci-ple of Bond's, wrote Blasted which in-cludes an episode about the eating of a

baby.If these scenes of violence were purely

gratuitous, people would be right to walk

out. But both scenes are crucial to theplays in which they occur, and they arewritten with a kind of remorseless, fero-cious honesty that sanctions the horrorof their content. W hat I mean is that theplaywrights pay a price for their GrandGuignol (indeed, Kane committed suicidea few years afler writing her first play).Those who abandoned Saved at inter-mission missed the powerful conclusion

of an extraordinary work that is possiblyBond's masterpiece, and that is certainlyamong the most potent English dramasof the century—though a culture that en -shrines the intellectual exercises of TomStoppard may not be quite ready to recog-nize this fact.

Saved caused a scandal in 1965, whenit was first produced; it was the last playto be banned by the Lord Chamberlain.Since it has now been rescued from pur-blind criticism by the judgm ent of history,reviewers have been casting around forsome other explanation for their feelingsof discomfort. A few have chosen to blamethe current production, saying it lacksemotional warmth and humanity. I amnot sure that it would be possible to findmuch warmth or humanity in the play. Isaw the original Saved in London, andI supervised the American premiere atYale in 1968. This version, as directed byRobert Woodruff is distinguished by astubborn and obviously thankless integ-rity. It is by far the version most faithful tothe intentions of the author (who, I under-stand, was in attendance during m uch of

the rehearsal period).This production makes no concessions

to the pleasure principle. Woodruff has

created a dry, monochromatic shell oevening that envelops the play likecoating on a strychnine pill. We witthe cruelty and the suffering of tcharacters without ever being alloweidentify with them. In this Bond is adisciple of Brecht, who wanted us to wto change the conditions of oppresrather than ju st w eep over the fate ooppressed. And Bond also shares Brebelief that it is the social organism rathan the individual heart tha t is to bfor human cruelty. ( The cause and stion of the problem of hum an violencewrote in 1977, lie not in our instinctsin our social relationships. )

Luckily, Bond does not try to pthis debatable Rousseauian principlhis play. Saved does not have a didabone in its body. Instead we are permitto watch, as if under a bell jar, selemembers of the underclass in the pemance of their workaday rituals. Constive speech being prett>' rare am ong tpeople, most of the rituals are physThe very first action is a laconic seact between Len, a good-natured ybloke, and Pam, a loose and rather fyoung woman, in the kitchen of her h oHer father, Harry, walks in on the twthey are about to have intercourse,tha t does not seem to matter much to DThere isn't a lot of erotic charge inencounter anyway.

After the setting moves to a boat(all set changes are made in full vby four hurly stagehands), we learn

Pam is pregnant—not by Len. The chfather, Fred (also knovra as Skip), sullen hoodlum in a leather coat hangs aroun d with even more threatehoods. Other than fighting and muing, they don't seem to know what twith their time. Like the loungers inlini's / Vitelloni, they make an art of ness and anomie.

After Pam gives birth, Len movesthe house. But no one, not even the pathetic Len, seems interested in comfing the crying baby. Pam copulates Fred in full view of her parents, anfull view of Len, with the door openthe lights on. Like Fred, she is drivenby her appetites—by what Iago calllust of the blood and a permission owill. And when Pam has left the s(and the baby carriage) in order to puFred, his mates systematically toand kill the infant—hitting it with fists, rubbing its face in its own vand finally hurling stones at it. (joins in the murder, muttering, Thain't mine. ) The shock of the audienpalpable—cries and whimpers altern

with angry protests.Fred serves a few months in the s

mer on manslaughter charges, and


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worst perpetrators get off scot-free. Pam'sfamily seems to take the infanticide instride, though her mother, Mary, blamesher daughter for not looking after herkid. In a highly flirtatious scene, Maryasks Len to repair a run in her stocking,accompanying his efforts with suggestivedouble entendres ( You'll make it bigger,not smaller ; Bite it ; and so on). In themiddle of this encounter, her husbandHarry walks in and, as in the first inter-rupted sex scene between Len and hisdaughter, walks right out again.

When Fred returns from jail, he is un-able to describe what it was like inside, orhow it felt to kill a baby ( I forget ). Hisblank inarticulacy and his frozen feelingsare shared by most of the characters inthe play. Eventually Fred leaves, and thedistraught Pam tries to get rid of Len,too, despite his ineffective protests ( I'mthe only one who stays, and you want m eto leave? ). While he is packing his case,Harry comes in. Len assures him that I

never put a finger on your old woman,and, aher a few moments of mumbledsemi-communication, Harr>' asks him tostay. It is the only mom ent in which some-thing resembling human feeling can hediscerned—indeed, it is the closest Bondcomes in this play to creating a genuinelove scene.

At the end, Pam is reading her RadioTimes, Mary is cleaning up, Harry isworking, and Len is fixing a chair. Nohuman voices are heard, only the soundsand scratches of everyday life masking

the evidence of human misery. (We arereminded of the final moments of UncleVanya. Bond's title is largely ironic. Butit is in these final inchoate momen ts, if itis anywhere in this bleak, relentless b ruteof a play, that some sort of speechlesssalvation may be happening.

The acting, under WoodrufF's firm ifunderstated direction, is splendid—especially Amy Ryan's stertorous, hard-nosed Pam, Randy Dansons worn-outyet vaguely nurturing Mary, NorbertButz's mercurial Fred, Pete Starrett's long-suffering Len, and the somnolent Harryof Terence Rigby (a fine English actorwho has been faulted for not having aconvincing English accent). Douglas Steinhas contributed a simple set that, withthe aid of a curtain, manages to changeshape and dimension scene by scene, asdoes this brave, unflinching study of dailytransactions among the lowest humanlife-forms.

Two new plays of some quality openedrecently—the Roundabout Theatre Com-pany's production of Martin McDonagh's Skull in Connemara at the GramercyTheatre, and the Lincoln Center Thea-ter production of Jon Robin Baitz's Ten

Unknowns at the Mitzi E. NewhouOf these, the Baitz play is the more sopisticated, and the McDonagh is the mamusing. Each, unfortunately, neesomething more than intelligence laughs.

A Skull in Connemara is the second pin McDonagh's Leenane trilogy (whincludes Th e Beauty Queen of Leenane The Lonesome West)—not to be confuwith his Aran Islands trilogy TTie Crippof Inishmaan, The Lieutenant o f Inimore, and TheBan.shees oflnisheer . Oously McDonagh likes to do things threes (as does another Irish writer, BRoche, who wTOte the Wexford trilogyWith the completion of these six filength plays, McDonagh has a prodigioutput at a very early age.

Much as I admire this playwrightthink he may be writing too much atoo fast. With A Skull in Connemara, osenses for the first time the presenceformula. I am not referring to the retition here of the joke in The LonesoWest that nobody can be sure whether local priest is called Father Walsh Father Welsh (1 like running gags). Itrather, a question of st>ie. McDonagh halways been brilliant at creating a coedy of mayhem, a t showing how the lisides and the dark sides of human natco-exist with each other. But while characters have previously managed tosavage and engaging at the same timhere their whimsicality tends to mus skeptical of the reality of their violside. In A Skull in Connemara, McDoagh seems to be pulling his punches.

Or maybe his protagonist is, sincethis play a character can be brained wa mallet, blood streaming down his shwithout suffering more than a heache. This is the stylistic privilege of anima ted cartoon, the one genre in whviolence has no lasting physical conquences. And while A Skull in Connmara sometimes asks to be comparwith Hamlet (the play is one long gravdiggers ' scene, with dozens of Yoricks gting their skulls smashed into splinteit is actually closer to Tom and Jerry. This hardly the fault of McDonagh's goactors (Kevin Tighe, Christopher EvWelch, Christopher Carley, and ZoaunLeRoy), or of his skillful d irector (G ordEdelstein). McDonagh is still a masof dramatic surprise and unexpected versals. It's just that these techniques now beginning to look a little tired amechanical.

Jon Robin Baitz's Ten Unknowns about an aging painter who has been liviobscurely in Mexico for the past twen

eight years and is now about to be redcovered. The fashion for Action Painthaving given way to a new hunger for


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authenticity of late-generation WPAartists, the figurative work of MalcolmRaphelson is coming back into vogue. Andwith the help of his South Africa-bornagent, Trevor, Malcolm is poised to be-come the darling of the New York salons.The trouble is that Malcolm is not muchinterested in taking part in fashionabledisplays such as the Whitney Biennial.With growing frustration, Trevor discov-ers that he is representing an artist whodoesn't want to show, and the bulk of theevening is devoted to gradually revealingwhy. The main plot involves Malcolm'sattraction to a young ecologist namedJulia Bryant, who has come to Mexico tostudy trans lucent frogs, as well as his diffi-cult relationship with a young assistant,an acerbic pothead named Fudd Sturgess.

The big revelation is tha t M alcolm, in avariant on what is coming to be knownas Jerzy Kosinski Syndrome, has beenletting Judd do his painting for him.Malcolm excuses this by saying that DiegoRivera had assistants, too (eight in all,and he was one), but that however muchJudd may have contributed to the Raphel-son myth, all the creative impulses be-longed to him. Waking from his narcoticdaze, Judd wants acknowledgment forhis work, to which Malcolm replies: Allyou are is me minus the self. When some-one describes Malcolm as an Americanoriginal, Judd snarls: Well, he could havebeen, bu t he ain't.

Like Baitz's The Substance of Fire,which was about an aging, out-of-fashionpublisher. Ten Unknowns is a literate andinformed study of life among the intel-ligentsia. The play is stuffed with artchat, especially Raphelson's contemptu-ous screeds against the man ia for thenew, and the self-hating art world's sur-render to reverse racism. And except for asomewhat superfluous subplot, it movesalong smoothly enough. The cast, under

Daniel Sullivan's deliberate direction, isengaging and attractive, especially Don-ald Sutherland , his hair and beard a shockof white flax, wry and bitter as Malcolm;Justin Kirk, playing Judd with the tartintensity of a young Gar>' Sinese; andJulianna Margiilies as Julia, looking andsounding a lot like Amy Brenneman withher dark good looks and sexy, hoarse voice.

So the evening passes pleasantlyenough, as time does when people areengaged in intelligent conversation aboutthe arts . But the play needs anoth er draft,

and for three reiisons. I don't think Baitzhas quite completed his thoughts aboutthe commercialization of art, which I taketo be his theme. I'm not quite sure whatthese characters are doing on a stagetogether. And I don 't know why this giftedplaywright felt compelled to write thisparticular play. The kind of urgency thatcatapulted Bond's Saved into our con-sciousness is not a characteristic of everyplay-writing generation. •

h Murder of MemoryA R O S L AW A N D E R S

Neighbors: The Destruction of theJewish Comm unity in Jedw abne, Polandby Jan T Gross(Princeton University Press, 26 pp., 19.95)

POLES OF MY generatio n, bo rnaround 1950, usually remem-ber the moment when theylearned of the existence ofJews. In my case, the mom ent

occurred in March 1968, two m onthsbefore my high school graduation. Stu-dents in Warsaw were demonstrating at

JAROSLAW ANDERS is a Polish writer

living in Washington , D.C. He writesfrequently on Eastern Europeansubjects.

the universities against censorship andfor something tha t they called pluralism(democracy still did not dare to speak itsname). The official press described thedem onstratio ns as a Zionist conspiracy,and it treated its readers daily to the real —that is, Jewish-sounding—namesof some of the protest leaders, as well asthe names of professors and intellectualswho had the temerity to defend them. Itwas then, during those exhilarating andsurreal days, that I discovered that some

of my best friends were, indeed, Jews.Before this, there were no Jews, andcertainly no Zionists, in Poland. There

were people of Jewish origin, or (raoddly) Poles of Mosaic faith. The wJew {Zyd was usually written in locase, which in Polish suggests a relignot a nationality. But now Jews weverywhere, mostly in prominent influential positions—in politics, acamia, the arts, and of course the meAnd not long afterwards I discoverealong with my friends, including thnewly revealed as Jewish—that aSemitic sentiments were still runnstrong in Polish society. N ot all the slogpainted on the walls, and not all insults chalked on th e doors of our nebors, were the work of the secret polic

People who were usually disdainfuthe diatribes printed in the official pseemed strangely inclined to believe communist Poland really was ruled b Zionist cabal, and they even startedexpress genuine satisfaction that members of this cabal were being posed, and removed from their positi

and loudly encouraged to leave Poland go to Zion —all this despite the pable admiration of Israel's victory othe Soviet-armed Arabs. In the mattethe Jews, the official communist proganda, usually so ineffective, seemedhave struck a responsive chord .

I discovered also the existence of a peliar zone of silence surrounding evthing that touched upon Polish-Jewrelations, especially d uring World WaThere were no books on the subjectserious historical studies, no archopen to researchers. The issue baexisted in postwar Polish literature art. Of course, there were many oblank spots in the official version of Pohistory, but this one seemed differenencompassed not only officially stioned speech, but also private convetions with parents, neighbors, and tniolder friends. Even people known for tintellectual honesty and moral courseemed to speak about these matreluctantly; and their awkwardness gested that they lacked the proper guage to express things that they m

have known from their own experiencAt school the subject was treated wit

peculiar hastiness, without the usual cussion points and extra-curricular ring lists. We knew only that duringwar Poles often helped Jews, despitefact that such acts were punishabledeath—not only for the person direinvolved, but also often for that persentire family, household, or village. were taken on school trips to Auschwwhere we were shown the nightmaheaps of clothes, shoes, eyeglasses,

hair—the tokens of Nazi crimes agahumanity. Yet the list of nationa lities perished in the ovens did not inc


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the aesthetics of violence (2001)

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