OTR Comment - May, 2004

[The following enumerative notes, in none-too-meaningful order, will have much to do with Mr. Shawn’s play Aunt Dan and Lemon simply because this play is most fresh in this writer’s mind, having recently attended a revival staged by the New Group in New York City this past winter. (Aunt Dan and Lemon received an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting in 1985.) As a none-too-scholarly work, page numbers and the like have been left off the manuscript.]

1. He is a dramatist of decay. One can see, in the past sixty years or so, from Bob Hope soft-shoeing across a U.S.O. stage, to any round-backed, sedentary comic mumbling his “observational” bon mots today, that propriety and craft have unraveled and will continue to do so for who knows how long. That is not to say there is no art to be made of decay; for Shawn’s world, manifest most tangibly in his words—the way his characters speak, the odd, torturous, often humorously repetitive, nebishy banalities of diction, rife with em-dashes and those fully-articulated a-ha-ha’s and er’s and um’s; all of his italicized tics of emphasis—all in a jazzy yet strangely inadequate pursuit of eloquence—this is in itself a music of insufficiency, an art of decayed or broken parts arranged or rearranged to resemble Shawn’s feeling of the world.

Perhaps this decay is most keenly felt and expressed in the theatre, due to the primacy of film. The poetics of the screenplay are almost never verbal, or only verbal on the page as they will be one day transfigure into image. Audiences find words less intelligible than pictures. In film, the eloquent and the poignant, the humorous and the tragic come to the mind’s eye through the camera’s lens; whereas the theatre commands a thousand eyes, all (or most) at great distance from the speaker. We have no close-up; we need our ears to see what’s going on.

The theatre, then, persists as a reliquary of the voice; and Shawn’s characters are often no more than voices—stepchildren of Beckett—searching, sifting memory, like ghosts adrift in the here and now, in search of that all but forgotten communion of conversation.

2. And yet…    And yet, despite all this dismantling of the theatrical status-quo—spurning solid scene-craft, disjointing time and place, which in Shawn’s work comes across not so much as an attempt to destroy but an act of picking up and building with pieces of the broken-down—despite all this so-called “deconstruction,” he tells stories (this is #2):

He is a born storyteller. Some would say his plays exist in that limbo between theatre and prose (though this is a naïve response), in that so many of his characters address the audience baldly, telling of things that happened to them, and how it felt, and what they think about how it felt and what these thoughts might mean. They speak to us, but we never know where they are exactly; we don’t even know where we are. Come to the think of it, where is the frame to this picture? What is our role, in the audience? Who are we meant to be?

Lemon, in Aunt Dan and Lemon, addresses us as the curtain rises or the lights swell in a wry and sinister invocation of hospitality, and of the essentially theatrical: “Hello, dear audience, dear good people who have taken yourselves out for a special treat, a night at the theater. Hello, little children. How sweet you are, how innocent.” Or Jack, the titular character in The Designated Mourner: “The designated mourner. I am the designated mourner. I have to tell you that a very special world has died. And I am the designated mourner.” Or the logorrheic sick traveler in The Fever, a play that Wally Shawn, an actor himself—most well-known for his singular film My Dinner with Andre, and for his roles in Hollywood comedies, the best of which remains Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride; though his dramatic turn in Chekhov-via-Mamet’s Vanya on 42^nd Street is also quite fine—used to perform in friends’ living rooms, at impromptu gatherings and perhaps more formal affairs (one likes to imagine). One has this sense then: that his characters can speak anywhere, if they choose to, if they have to—begin speaking and telling their stories, and the time and place, the “reality” of the situation, won’t matter at all. They come to us from a world that is invisible yet concurrent with our own. They haunt us; they tell the stories they could not tell in life.

For what is Aunt Dan and Lemon, ultimately, but a chillingly told, modern ghost story? A sad and lonely girl is infected with the ambivalent morality of a sad and lonely woman; and that lonely little girl grows into a lonely young woman who, when presented with the opportunity of love, of sensuality, of a meaningful—if somewhat nontraditional—relationship with Aunt Dan, chooses nothing, chooses instead the living death from whence she tells her story: “…there were crazy moments, sitting at those restaurant tables, when both of us were thinking, Well, why not? We adore each other. We always have. There you are sitting right next to me, and isn’t this silly? Why don’t I just lean over and give you a kiss?” But this kiss never happens.

She’s prepared us for this climax, or anti-climax, of course, at the play’s onset: “I haven’t lived much of a life, and I would never say I had. Most of my ‘sex,’ if you can call it that, has been with myself…. I’m sitting here living in the past.” And characters, like people, who live in the past, are most often our storytellers.

Take Lemon’s mother, for further example, in a monologue appended to the Royal Court production in 1985 because Max Stafford-Clark, the production’s director, felt that the audience should “know more about her”; Shawn has himself questioned its dramatic necessity, and I question its necessity here in this essay, but I quote it at length out of my love for the dawn at Oxford:

I loved the dawn at Oxford. I loved the way my room looked when I would draw the curtain, and that little bit of gray light would come in and spill over my books. I loved the way books looked in that dim light—dusty, cold, delicious. I remember there was a whole winter when every morning I got up at dawn, brushed my teeth, made myself a big pot of coffee, and then sat down at my desk, which was right by the window, and I wouldn’t get up until it was almost noon. And I remember that sometimes when I would stand up after so many hours of reading poetry—it was the English poetry of the seventeenth century—I would be giddy and unsteady on my feet until I had rushed to my cupboard and eaten a hard-boiled egg and a bun and a big square of chocolate, all in about a minute and a half.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Shawn is not the storyteller— his characters are.

3. Shawn likes food, he likes sex. His characters are only mildly guilty sensualists—they can’t help being that way, because their author probably is (he’s portly, it’s true, but his frame is small, impish). Note Lemon’s mother’s “delicious” books, her “big square of chocolate.” Note further Lemon’s name (her real name is Leonora, but she has been re-christened by Aunt Dan); even the sour or the unappetizing in Shawn’s plays comes across with culinary gusto: “I watched the big brown roach squirming and crawling, and yet it was totally squashed, and I could see its insides slowly come oozing out.” (That’s Lemon, preparing to compare acts of genocide to the extermination of cockroaches near play’s end.) He dares to seduce us with what we might find morbidly delectable in the squashing of a roach, say, and then has the impudence to put into words the suspicion that some too-large part of us as human beings—or human animals (see #5)—enjoys the grotesque, enjoys the revolting, even revels in the act of violence for its own sake, its power.

But let’s not forget the little things—Shawn doesn’t; he makes a fetish of them: food that is bought or eaten; the boxes and wrappings on gifts; how beautiful a woman looks, seen with an invariably carnivorous eye (he can be equal parts voyeur as painterly romantic). While Aunt Dan imparts to Lemon her theories of relativist politics, intertwined with tales of violence and inappropriate sexuality, Lemon says, “I would watch the wind gently playing with her hair.” Both sensually and ideologically—ideologically via the sensual—Lemon has been perverted, and there’s no denying this.

4. Because Wally Shawn himself is perverse; like Joyce, and others, he’s not afraid to let his characters masturbate, or to speak about it anyway (see Designated Mourner, Aunt Dan and Lemon, et al.). Why should they be ashamed? We’re all in this together, his characters’ intimations seem to say; they simply have no shame, or no shame about discussing that which causes them shame, or regret, or doubt. There are ruthlessly forward in their self-disgust. So forward it may seem like pride, at times, and masochism, of a kind. (“I guess the search for more refined forms of punishment never comes to an end,” says Judy, the poet’s daughter—her rousing first line in The Designated Mourner.) In Aunt Dan, in a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, a morally bankrupt prostitute (and soon-to-be killer) performs oral sex on her soon-to-be victim. There are audience members who will never be able to stomach this: they find it offensive, vulgar; others are simply bored by what they take to be an outmoded bid for counterculture shock value. This is forgivable; there is something of the adolescent urge to shock in all of Wallace Shawn’s plays. One should note that Shawn’s father was William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. One can’t help but wonder a little at what he thought of his son’s plays, in particular the more shocking, youthful plays such as A Thought in Three Parts, which contains in one of these aforesaid three parts a one-act entitled Youth Hostel, a play that requires all youthful cast members to have sex with each other multiple times and in multiple permutations. (This play, if you are not too put off, is ultimately a quite serious satire of the concept of “free love”; but tell that to the vice squad that raided the 1977 London production.)

And Lemon is perverted by Aunt Dan. Here’s another character, Andy, speaking in a story being told by Aunt Dan to the eleven-year-old Lemon: “Mindy was another story [another story!]… For one thing, frankly, she was very, very funny when we were having sex, and that’s not nothing. I mean, you know, she thought the whole thing was basically a joke. She just thought bodies were funny.” And within seconds we’ve switched topics from sex to politics, via the unlikely bridge of Aunt Dan’s near-sexual infatuation with the figure of Henry Kissinger, whom she sees as both life-loving (sexy) and righteously wise (paternal)—two attributes she aspires to, whether she realizes it or not. And soon Lemon is learning not just of sex, but of “the power of evil in the world.” Indeed, the power of sex and the power of politics are one and the same in this play; which is why Aunt Dan, were she alive today, would most likely have a crush on Dick Cheney.

5. He’s funny. Take The Designated Mourner—not overall a laugh-out-loud riot (its title should tip you off), but in the particular, in the moment-to-moment, Shawn relates his stories with such delectably compounding ironies, such a shuffle of quirks and quizzical observations of human nature, that his stories often reach a kind of anxious comic pitch (this is when we are most reminded of the Wallace Shawn we know from films). When Jack tells us about meeting his future wife Judy, he says, “I kept having this really vivid fantasy that she and I were both trying on pajamas, and I was taking off my clothes and sort of wandering by mistake into her little booth.” And Judy’s father, the “great” poet Howard, is gently (at first) lampooned for his artistic pretension, for “all the choices he made: to dress in blues and greens, and not reds or grays; to know about the Sumerians, but not about the Assyrians”—and one can’t help but feel that some part of Shawn is laughing at himself, and at his father perhaps; the “elite” artists and intellectuals he’s spent his life surrounded by. But Howard has his revenge: “Jack wasn’t actually a bad fellow, you know. I just found him a little bit vague at times. A little bit vague, a little bit lazy. You know, he was lazy. In fact, actually, he was so lazy that his favorite foods—I’m not making this up, because I observed it quite carefully—were soup, risotto, mashed potatoes, and ice cream. I’m not exaggerating!” Only as the play unfolds, or disintegrates rather, do we begin to see the darker tones of this humor, this tension between hi- and lo-brow, as TV and ice cream (and cockroaches) survive—if not destroy—the Sumerians, the blues and greens, the poetry.

6. His language lives. On the page and in the mouths of actors. Despite all those colons and semicolons, the occasional constructiveness of speech: his dialogue gives birth to itself. The character, up there onstage, has no idea what she’s about to say. She has the impetus, the urge to speak, to tell, but language is an adventurous affair she enters into with trepidation, with much self-consciousness. She is struggling always to translate something:

[Lemon’s] MOTHER. Love—please—you mustn’t—don’t—darling—you’re becoming—

FATHER. No. You leave me alone. You leave me alone right now. Don’t you start telling me what I’m becoming. Don’t you dare. I’m not nothing. Don’t you say that I’m nothing. Don’t you dare say to that I’m nothing.

One feels that these words on the page surprised the author in the moment of creation, as much as they surprise the characters in the action of utterance—and as they surprise the audience in the act of witness. The language happens, and doesn't sound written at all.

But his language is also a little dead. Jack’s fondness in The Designated Mourner for the “sort of” and “kind of” and “actually” and “I mean” and “anyway” (the list goes on), might seem at first the verbal prevarication of the spineless. And it is that. But it’s also one character’s desperate attempt to make language work again, to make it mean something in an age of verbal deflation where “like” means “is,” and “is” can mean so many things; where there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns (of course, you say); and “abuse” means torture, but sometimes it means just abuse.

7. Wallace Shawn thinks we’re animals. Or he fears it, rather. Comparisons of human beings to animals and insects abound throughout all of Shawn’s work: like Nebuchadnezzar, sort of, the “very amusing and extraordinarily long-lived” president of our nameless country devolves into a cat in The Designated Mourner. In the same play, in a metaphor that has much to do with Shawn’s identity as a Jewish-American author (a subject beyond the scope of this essay, and beyond the ken, perhaps, of this Anglo-Irish critic), an uncle informs Jack, “Look, we are rats. All of our family have always been rats, and you, too, will be a rat, my boy…. Rats aren’t bad, they’re not mean or cruel, they’re simply doing what they can to survive.” Rats, cats, mice: animals who stalk and are stalked. Even the prey is not meant to inspire pathos here, because rats—like cockroaches—can be disgusting. In Shawn’s tragicomically conflicted world, our displeasure with the cruelty of cats is tempered only by our revulsion for vermin.

In Aunt Dan and Lemon when we first meet Aunt Dan she is playing charades with Lemon’s parents and trying her best to impersonate a cat: “No, it’s a sort of sea monster—isn’t that it?” “A sea lion!” “No—a lion! A lion!” (A lion is a kind of cat.) And sometimes the animal is not so much dangerous as pathetic, and the species unclear: Lemon’s father is described—by Lemon—as a “caged animal…. He was never given a thorough washing. So no wonder…his fur was falling out, he was growing thinner and thinner every day. His teeth were rotten, his shit was rotten, and of course he stank. He stank to hell.

The animal motif is perhaps most pungent here in Aunt Dan, where this belief—that humans are just another kind of animal—makes evil possible, even permissible. It’s not a new idea, but one that still rankles the modern mind—more than most modern writers are willing to admit (fearing they may sound too much like Thomas Hardy): How do we reconcile the scientific proofs of the last century and a half, while striving to hold ourselves to higher moral standards than that of your average housecat or cockroach? (School districts in Kansas, and elsewhere, have tried to solve this problem neatly by pretending, simply, that Darwin was wrong.) This anxiety about our special position in the menagerie of life is primary in Shawn’s work, and largely unacknowledged in such terms. Audiences are too often simply shocked, or miffed, or titillated by the hypothesis put forth—by Lemon, for example, that compassion does not exist and murder is natural, enjoyable, certainly unavoidable—failing to recognize what could be motivating such a hypothesis, motivating the writing of the play in general: Shawn’s characters are desperately unhappy about this idea. Because it’s more than an idea: his plays are nightmare scenarios, neurotically tinged, of conflicts that exist in most of us who claim to live in a secular society, who claim to be happy with so-called religion as a social or metaphorical institution, who claim to be contented to know we are “descended” from apes, and to dust we shall return…

Is it any wonder that the youthful Lemon cannot bear to eat her lamb at dinner?

8. He’s a moral writer. And he gets at it in the most moral way: via immorality, via the profane, via the pleasurable illusion, even for a few hours in a darkened theater, that we as responsible citizens—in the most classical sense—have the freedom to at least entertain amorality in ourselves. As in most drama since Aristotle, the actors in their characters’ skins take on the burden (and ecstasy) of extremes, and we are free to experience Lemon’s moral confusion to whatever degree we can; to entertain—though not necessarily to be entertained by—the grisly endpoints of her murky logic. People who are too angered by any presentation of the amoral in art will not grasp this easily about Shawn. He’s trying to look at the moral question as nakedly, as honestly, in some ways as bravely as he can; and he wants the audience to experience the question as he experiences it: in a way that is disturbing—“like a dog whose barking never stops,” he writes in an essay on Aunt Dan (a dog this time, if not a cat); “a dog whose barking persists throughout the day and then continues regularly all night long. It is a perpetual irritation” [emphasis mine]. He doesn’t want to soothe the audience, as lesser writers will, in writing a world where the dog no longer barks. Or a world in which the dog barks, but the action of the protagonist will quiet it. In either case Shawn would be lying, which would not be so much immoral as bad art.

9. Another reason to trust Wally Shawn is that he doesn’t make sense. Or his plays don’t, as a whole, as a treatise, as “political” plays often try to; or as “instant” (just add water!) theme-rigged psychological realism. Because he looks at morality, and because he’s not stupid, he knows he has no answers. His plays are exemplars of what the lazily pedagogic might call “question-plays.” He’s not interested in showing us what great truth he’s discovered about life, unless by truth one means a question, a tension, an only partly known unknown that most of us would rather not think about on any given day. He likes to unearth deep veins of anxiety—about so-called political killing, for example, in Aunt Dan and Lemon. He doesn’t say that all killing is unnecessary—how could he?—what he does ask is, How do we tell the difference? Between the war in Vietnam, for example, and some other conflict. Or for that matter, between an invasion of Afghanistan and an invasion of Iraq. How do we know, in the living, present moment, without benefit of hindsight, as we sit in a darkened theater, as we sit before our TV screens, the difference between the “just” war and the unjust?

10. He’s not political. And yes, he is. He’s universal, for lack of a better term. The Designated Mourner lends itself to universal-thinking by laying no claims to any specific context (a tactic most often lethal to potent storytelling). The plot—in which a poor class of “dirt-eaters” rises up and takes control of the government and exterminates the elite, and art and music and literature along with them—could happen most anywhere. At times Mr. Shawn seems to allude to Latin America, now or in the past, an Argentina or Colombia or Cuba; to Tsarist Russia; even to Eastern Europe following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. At other times it seems all too clear, and all too apparent in the diction and language of his characters, that he’s talking about our country, his country, now or very nearly in the future—and he should be: he is an American, or a New Yorker anyway. The play was written and first produced in the late 1990s, but in a relatively recent radio version of the play (Mr. Shawn’s work, reliquary of voices, is especially suited to the voice-haunted medium of radio), broadcast soon after 9/11/01, it was impossible not to feel there was something prescient in Shawn’s nightmare vision of a disenfranchised people rising up against the wealthy:

In other words, you see, if you look at the world, the world as a whole, actually most people in it are the ones we can only refer to, rather nervously and gingerly, by means of those terribly melodramatic and almost hysterical words like ‘wretched,’ ‘miserable,’ ‘unfortunate,’ ‘desperate,’ ‘powerless,’ ‘poor,’—that’s a very sympathetic one—or to put it a bit differently, God bless them, they’re people who simply don’t have any resources of any kind at all. And these particular people—and, you know, God knows why—well, they just don’t like us. They don’t like us. They simply don’t like us. So it’s not hard to see what will happen one day.

Prescience in art does not require the gift of foresight; it requires insight, an engagement with and an investigation of the core conflicts of a society. And these conflicts are never perfectly resolved. Such perspicacity will draw next generations back to the same text.

Aunt Dan, too, has been revived for good reasons of timeliness. In a short apologia for this play, Shawn writes: “Perhaps it was permissible to kill a person in order to prevent a terrible evil. But if I acted impulsively, heedlessly, and blindly—if I killed the wrong person because I relied on an erroneous suspicion or an intuition, or I based my action on some erroneous theory of the world which I’d accepted for years because it happened to be flattering to someone like me—would I still have behaved in a permissible way?”

That question is not just for our current leaders to answer but for all citizens of this country now, whether or not we attend the theatre.

Chris Anstey is a freelance drama critic.