Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) had one great dramatic theme: the birth pangs of liberal, enlightened, Protestant, nationalistic, modern Europe out of the womb of repressive, Catholic, absolutist tyranny. With differing inflections and emphases and granted a certain largeness of statement, this theme may be said to animate The Robbers, Don Carlos, Mary Stuart, Maid of Orleans, Wallenstein, and William Tell. This interest of Schiller’s can be misread as narrow advocacy of German nationalism, but his concern, for all the fervid patriotism, was larger; he wanted an Enlightened Europe.

Schiller has had the misfortune of being a school classic in Germany and elsewhere. His unrelenting nobility of purpose, his prolixity and pomposity of diction (Goethe had a coarser vein of popular humor), have made many a pupil groan. In a way, Americans, whose schools are saddled nowadays with far worse horrors than boring nobleness, are ripe consumers for Schiller, whose Mary Stuart (1800) was just done at the Jean Cocteau Repertory. And Schiller was a cleverer dramatist than I may have made him sound. He knew not merely to side with the victors. He learned from Shakespeare to humanize the heavies. His first triumph in this line was King Philip in Don Carlos, and in Mary Stuart he created an Elizabeth and a Mary in sympathetic equipoise, yielding, if anything, too much to Mary, especially in her extended final monotonous pathos. But he was not a sentimentalist, like lesser dramatists of this material; he sees that Mary has to go, but keeps putting off her going. His Elizabeth is a woman of reason undermined by fear, anger, and jealousy. In Schiller’s ahistorical innovation, Elizabeth consents to meet Mary (it is the play’s climactic scene), who is warned to be on her best behavior but cannot, under provocation, resist calling Elizabeth a bastard and a usurper. Thenceforward, her fate is fixed, only its mechanics uncertain.

But if Schiller studied Shakespeare for complexity of characterization, he brought from Racine the convention that virtually everyone had to be involved in a round robin of amorous intrigue. Whatever else was going on politically or militarily, A had to love B, who loved C, who in turn loved A. Most scandalously, Schiller has his Joan of Arc fall for an English officer in mid-battle in Maid of Orleans. In Mary Stuart, all the devious erotic obsessions liven things up agreeably, mitigating the drearier stretches of religiosity. Young Mortimer, nephew of Mary’s Protestant jailer, seems to hate but in fact loves Mary. He was converted to Catholicism on a visit to Saint Peter’s by all the music and art and costumes, realizing the folly of “reason.” (Schiller trying to be fair to baroque Counter-Reformation Catholicism is touching; less so is some later nonsense about priests preforgiving murder.) Mad for Mary, Mortimer pretends to accept Elizabeth’s commission to assassinate her: “False deceitful queen, / As you delude the world, even so I cozen you.” Also secretly smitten with Mary is Leicester, Elizabeth’s favorite. The play’s women are in fact considerably less love-besotted than the men: Mary uses her admirers but seems to have spent her passion in her scandalous salad days; Elizabeth does envy Mary’s winning ways with males but is far more concerned with how to get rid of her without actually having to sign a public death warrant.

The best scene in the play, along with the collision of the queens, is the debate at Elizabeth’s court about what to do about Mary.

The best scene in the play, along with the collision of the queens, is the debate at Elizabeth’s court about what to do about Mary. One adviser, Cecil, urges death. Another, Shrewsbury, urges mercy, adducing Mary’s troubled childhood as excuse for her criminality. A third, the beloved Leicester, waffles, first opting for death but then desiring life, but only on the pragmatic grounds of Mary’s impotence for further evil. The English queen hesitates. It is superb—like a debate in Thucydides. In the same vein, Leicester later counsels Elizabeth to meet Mary, saying, “She asks it as a favor; grant it as a punishment.” At the play’s end, by the way, Cecil is banished for doing exactly what the queen wanted; Shrewsbury resigns in disgust; false Leicester flees to France—all made up, but who cares?

The Cocteau production, directed by Casey Kizziah, used period costumes and a mode of stiff, solemn rhetorical declamation. Nothing was modernized in the slightest, and one would like to endorse this eschewing of gimmickry and recommend that JoAnne Akalaitis, who superintends the Public Theater nearby, check it out. But truth compels one to admit that the monotonous oratory of the Cocteau production did begin to pall after a while. One began to wish for … not perhaps Charles Ludlam, but some source of pep. But within the chosen hieratic style good work was done. Angela Vitale, beruffed and bepearled à la Bette Davis, made a nervously intelligent Elizabeth, who would not do the thing that she would do. In traditional black dress and wimple, Elise Stone’s Mary was a statuesque one, with the word’s good connotations of beauty and strength as well as the less good ones of unanimatedness and immobility. Mary’s stab at sexiness seemed a wrong note, though; Schiller calls for her to go to her death in white with bound hair, while Mary here suddenly steps forward in a va-va-voom red dress with hair undone (I thought of Maggie Smith’s great comic moment of revelation in Lettice & Lovage). Were they going for a tableau of baroque, Berniniesque sexuality? If so, it was insufficiently clear—and so looked, in the indefiniteness, merely a muddle. Among the men, Craig Smith’s Cecil and Joseph Menino’s Shrewsbury were solid, while Mark Westerman’s Leicester energetically negotiated his complex allegiances. Best was Grant Neele’s passionate, hot-headed Mortimer, full of life.

The new verse translation by Robert David MacDonald seemed, to my ears, a lightly reworked and updated retread of the blank-verse version by Joseph Mellish, a contemporary and friend of Schiller’s. MacDonald depoeticizes without importing any new verse or prose life. Lines like “A grim presentiment runs through my heart” or “Would she dare send a royal head in ignominy to the block?” are neither old fish nor new fowl. The Cocteau would have done better sticking to the Mellish, which still reads quite well.

Joanne Akalaitis has not heeded my advice. Her production of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, an incest melodrama of c. 1630, at the Public Theater is nothing if not replete with facile gimmickry. One of her two governing bright ideas is to set the thing in the Fascist Italy of the early 1930s. Thus, characters from time to time exchange Fascist salutes and mutter something about “Il Duce”; a few sport period military uniform; girl scouts wheel out a neon sign proclaiming “Dio Patria Famiglia.” But the Fascistification is half-hearted and fitful. What really gets Miss Akalaitis’s juices flowing is the other gimmick—Surrealism. Stage right is dominated by a mobile Chirico-esque portico; the backdrop is a Tanguy-like sky alive with blobs. In one scene, a Man Ray photograph, called “Tears,” of a woman’s face with an artificial drop near her eye, reposes atop a pillar; in later scenes, four identical large photographs of a kneeling rearview nude dot the playing area. But these Surrealist props, while perhaps less familiar than the veneer of Fascism (which has become a weary cliché in the theater in the half-century since the Mercury Theatre originated it), are in the end no more successful as a principle of artistic coherence in this ’Tis Pity. For Surrealism was not, after all, décor; it set out to pictorialize the unconscious, to unsettle and unnerve and frighten by violent imagistic yokings-together. It may, to be sure, have fallen prey to the chi-chi and the facile, but it had, to a point, a serious psychic agenda. Miss Akalaitis uses the surface vocabulary of Surrealism to mask her lack of an agenda. The Times critic lauded the “artistry of the feminist statement” in the production, remarking that this is “one of those evenings when you leave the theater convinced that the director must have rewritten the text, for how could a work with language so frank and nasty and sexual politics so sophisticated have been written almost four centuries ago?” (The Ford text, while essentially trashy, is not so absurdly topical as Frank Rich makes it sound here.)

In fact, though, what the contradictory Akalaitis stylizings convey is not a feminist manifesto but a nervous fear of emotion —except for the easy emotion of revulsion. Thus, evil revelers are made to march and gesticulate like spastic marionettes; bad guys banquet in black tie at what looks like a fashionable sushi bar. Neon . . . chrome . . . the cold . . . the void—Akalaitis likes these tones (one remembers the final, kingly apparition of Hal in her Henry IV 2, where these tones worked). The play’s comic figures, weak enough in Ford in the first place, are made to belittle the very idea of humor; they strike poses out of silent comedy not to get laughs but to manifest the ugliness and maladroitness of bad actors trying to get laughs. Laughter is somehow immoral in the Akalaitis universe. The throbbing, one-note music is generic avant-garde minatoriness. Alas for the feminist statement, the play’s women are a grim lot: a luridly vengeful vixen (played with brio by Ellen McElduff); an amoral and stupid confidante (overcooked by Deirdre O’Connell); and a heroine, Annabella, who has been described by one commentator as “virtually a moral defective.” Jeanne Tripplehorn does impart a sweetness and tenderness to this figure. But this is a text that gives slippery purchase to propagandists.

The language is a virtual pastiche of Shakespeare. The besotted brother, Giovanni, says to his sister:

                           Thus hung Jove on Leda’s neck
And sucked divine ambrosia from her lips.
I envy not the mightiest man alive,
But hold myselfin being king ofthee
More great than were I king ofall the world.
But I shall lose you, sweetheart.

We seem to be hearing a comic-book version of Romeo and Juliet and Merchant of Venice. When Annabella says,

              there’s but a dining-time
’Twixt us and our confusion: let’s not waste
These precious hours in vain and useless
speech,

a simplified Measure for Measure echoes. And here is Giovanni about to slay, abort, and remove the heart from his sister:

                      Be dark, bright sun,
And make the midday night, that thy gilt rays
May not behold a deed will turn their
splendour
More sooty than the poets feign their Styx.
One more kiss, sister.

Othello is bubbling beneath these lines. Actually, however, Ford’s true note seems closer to the megalomaniacal bravado of Christopher Marlowe than to anything in Shakespeare. ’Tis Pity is a not untypical period piece of Italianate farrago spiced with the sensational “hook” of incest. Eliot made a telling comparison: “We see clearly why Antony and Cleopatra find each other congenial, and we see their relation, during the course of the play, become increasingly serious. But Giovanni is merely selfish and self-willed, of a temperament to want a thing the more because it is forbidden; Annabella is pliant, vacillating and negative.”

Almost paradoxically, the best things in this Akalaitis version are two male performances. Jared Harris, whose mannerisms jarred as Hotspur and as Pistol in Akalaitis’s Henry IV, here found an appropriate outlet for his skewed posturings and accents in the role of Annabella’s cruel and violent husband. Val Kilmer, a film star, takes Giovanni quite seriously, quite at his own valuation, as a kind of hiphop Hamlet. Kilmer clearly relishes Giovanni’s scholastic quibblings about incest with a slow-witted Friar and brings a forcefully self-absorbed mixture of sophistry and craziness to the amorous siege and to the later murder of his sister. As she did with Hal, Akalaitis spares her puppyish hero any of the distorting stylization lavished on the extras. This laissez-faire indulgence of Kilmer may be artistically illogical, but it does at least let sound one note of (to be sure, perverted) humanity in the bowels of the clanking machine that is her ’Tis Pity.

Sight Unseen, a new play by Donald Margulies at the Manhattan Theatre Club, deals with the painter as celebrity.

Sight Unseen, a new play by Donald Margulies at the Manhattan Theatre Club, deals with the painter as celebrity. Jonathan Waxman has hit it big: he’s hired a PR firm; he’s been profiled in Vanity Fair and the Times; he presells unpainted canvases to the Japanese; now he’s having his first big London show. Two of the play’s eight scenes (they occur in jumbled chronological order) take place at the London gallery, where a prim German TV intervieweress needles Waxman about the content of his signature painting. It is called Walpurgisnacht 1986 and depicts a black man atop a white woman, her fists clenched, in a Jewish cemetery whose graves have been spraypainted with swastikas. Pressed about the Jewishness of the work, he explodes in a tirade about philistine museumgoers ignoring Van Gogh to get to the gift shop (the relevance of this easy and trite indignation was not clear) and then, accusing the woman of “Jew-baiting,” stalks off. But the play spends most of its time on a visit made by Waxman to an English farm four days before the London opening. His old lover and muse Patricia lives there now, doing archeology and married to a dour English archeologist who knows all about Waxman and oozes sardonic, Pinteresque menace. Waxman has come both to make amends for his angry dismissal of Patricia fifteen years back and to buy back a key early Waxman painting of Patricia that is hanging in the farmhouse. Patricia plods around in boots washing and slicing veggies and setting tables and making cutting cracks about Waxman’s celebrity. She too has a question about Walpurgisnacht 1986; she wants to know if the woman’s clenched fists indicate that she is being raped. Waxman waffles. But basically Patricia has retreated far from Waxman’s world into vegetables and shards. Waxman pleads for the Patricia painting: “I’ve lost my way; there’s a kind of fury in this painting I must get back.” She treasures it in a sense (“I never felt so alive as when I sat naked for you”) but agrees, with the bizarre husband’s enthusiastic concurrence, to part with it for a nice sum. And then there are two flashback scenes to Patricia and Waxman’s student days in New York: on the day they meet he is reluctant to sleep with her because she is not Jewish; on the day his mother dies he excludes her from the mourning and his life.

Sight Unseen was well performed, with the right mix of guarded intensity, circling wariness, and profound bitterness, by Dennis Boutsikaris as Waxman and Deborah Hedwall as Patricia. Jon de Vries went over the top with the husband’s elephantine idiosyncrasies.

But the play amounts to precious little. The glib and finally unrewarding juggling with the scenes’ chronology could not long distract from the mediocrity of the content. It was like an episode, and not one of the better-written ones, of “Thirtysomething,” in which, say, a Frank Stella or Julian Schnabel kind of guy pops in on the married Hope, whom he loved and sketched at Penn: she goes up to the attic and gets him that cherished sketch; husband Michael somehow knows. The visitor admits that, for all his success, he misses that “fury” in the dormitory. “Thirtysomething,” after all, like Sight Unseen, was not above drawing on “The Aspern Papers” and “The Dead.”

While Mr. Margulies clearly knows the art world, it is not so clear if he has anything interesting to say about art. Walpurgisnacht 1986, a teasing but unlearned allusion to Anselm Kiefer or Eric Fischl, is just a gimmick to introduce titillatingly shocking topics; the Patricia painting evokes, if anything, Andrew Wyeth and not serious art. Waxman seems more a Judith Krantz than a Henry James idea of an artist, more a Stassinopoulos than a Richardson version of a painter. Mr. Margulies appears not to have thought through Waxman’s Judaism at all: the painting confronts anti-Semitism, but why then does Waxman bristle at this fact? If Waxman is going to make an issue of not bedding shiksas, why then does he do it? It is all just left irritatingly dangling. More than irritatingly—irresponsibly, for these are issues too serious to serve as mere ballast for a half-baked script. And finally, whatever his inwardness with art, Mr. Margulies is out of his depth in archeological strata. Patricia speaks of a “late medieval rubbish dump” where “I sift through piles of ancient rubbish every day” (my emphases). I have just enough fondness for Sight Unseen to resist telling Patricia that, if she tossed her script onto that ill-assorted dump, she could add a layer of postmodern rubbish.

Another new play involving archeologists is John Guare’s Four Baboons Adoring the Sun at the Vivian Beaumont. It is a one-act family drama about two archeologists welcoming their nine children (all from earlier marriages) to their cherished summer dig in Sicily. Guare is peerless in writing parent-child confrontations (they were perhaps the best thing in Six Degrees of Separation). Here the parents are pantingly eager to share their magical place; they have set up an “archeological Easter egg hunt”; they carefully explain their Cretan dig as resembling an “incredibly delicate lasagna”—how good Guare can be at twisting the shapes of everyday life into wit and point! The kids, of course, are at first whiny, ornery, resistant, recalcitrant. Until the eldest boy, thirteen, and the eldest girl, thirteen, become infected by the genius loci and try love. Until the eldest boy takes his new monicker of Icarus (all the kids have been given mythological names for the summer) literally. Until, in short, “The Brady Bunch” tries to turn into Hippolytus. Guare’s second-time-lucky married lovers ask, “Is there a moment when our lives are mythic, touched by grace, and we start again?” Guare brings these bright and appealing people into touch with the numinous, whose awesome power can exalt or annihilate with impartial insouciance. At the end, all but a few characters shrink from contact with the divine. These few are left uncomprehendingly, unseeingly adoring the sun, like the eyeless sculpted baboons “in the Louvre” that the parents revere.

One wants to like a Guare play. Civilized irony is, after all, a treat. And here one is happy in the company of the charming, intelligent, and touching Stockard Channing and James Naughton as the parents. But Baboons remains a sketch—and a sketch in an archly Edwardian, E. M. Forsterian, ah-the-power-of-the-gods mode. Mr. Guare has found no way to bridge the gap between familial naturalism and melodramatic supernaturalism. So he has to resort to such desperate devices as a superintending sprite clad in satyresque tights and called Eros and given to chanting calypso wisdom, an earthquake, a volcano, metamorphosed statues, a great blinding sun disk. And precisely what is weakest in Guare has served to stimulate director Peter Hall, whose loudly intrusive impressionism cannot blind us to the gaps in the dramaturgy. It is not, in principle, necessarily a bad idea to blend the quotidian Menander with the demonic Euripides, but this script has been taken out of the oven before it has had a chance to cook properly.

Death and the Maiden, by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman, is at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in a production directed by Mike Nichols and starring Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss, and Gene Hackman. Set at the “beach house” of Gerardo (Dreyfuss) and Paulina (Close) in “probably” Chile, the play brings a neighbor, Dr. Roberto (Hackman), to the house to return a spare tire to Gerardo only to be tied up and abused and threatened with death by Paulina, who is convinced she recognizes Roberto as her sadistic, Schubert-playing (hence the title), Nietzsche-quoting torturer/rapist years back in the dungeons of a Pinochet-like regime—and all this on the very day when distinguished lawyer Gerardo has been appointed by the new democratic President of the country to a Commission to investigate the abuses perpetrated by the former dictatorship. Gerardo, flummoxed by his wife’s behavior but hogtied by his own guilt because of adultery, pleads with her to let the law take its course in dealing with the possibly innocent doctor. She scorns the mere law: “The judges? The same judges who never intervened to save one life in seventeen years of dictatorship? Who never accepted a single habeas corpus ever?” The story of Death and the Maiden is thus preposterously silly.

And the English of Ariel Dorfman never rides above this clumsily expository sawdust.

And the English of Ariel Dorfman never rides above this clumsily expository sawdust. Come on, Paulina, wouldn’t your husband already know how many years the dictatorship lasted? But it often sinks below it into profanity, as Paulina compulsively rehearses the coarse obscenities she believes herself to have heard in captivity from the lips of Roberto. There is, too, much talk of Schubert’s being soiled by having been the favorite composer of a monster. This trite trope of twentieth-century torture is in no way refreshed or re-examined in the hands of Mr. Dorfman. And in the event, Paulina does not put Roberto on trial at all, and thus the climax to which the dramaturgy has seemed to be building does not occur. She merely forces him at gunpoint to write a confession, which her husband may or may not have supplied. Then, despite her word, she puts the gun to his head. “They freeze in their positions as the lights begin to go down slowly.” There is an epilogue of sorts in which Gerardo delivers a lengthy, high-minded oration on the Final Report of the Commission to a packed concert hall in which Roberto may or may not be present (he could be a hallucination of Paulina’s).

Unresolved ontological and epistemological questions accumulate until we seem to be in the world of Pirandello. But these uncertainties are mere bluff, for Mr. Dorfman’s play by its emotional weight sides with Paulina as against the petty, flawed, male legalism of Gerardo and the (at best) slimy equivocations of Roberto/Mengele. Mr. Dorfman is Arthur Miller pretending to be Pirandello. But I can only say, after suffering through the tax-form deadness of Mr. Dorfman’s language and the loaded ineptness of his dramaturgy, “Come back, Arthur Miller, all is forgiven.”

Mike Nichols has been taken to task by critics for trivializing a powerful script with a glossy set and three preening movie stars. Yes, it felt like a Malibu hideaway complete with stucco walls, softly billowing, ceiling-to-floor curtains, and the (imagined?) susurration of the surf without. Yes, the three stars played it like a particularly leaden and absurd Joan Crawford psychodrama (with, say, Van Heflin and Raymond Massey). But to my view these Nichols touches were at least rouge on the corpse.

I shall, finally, be eager to learn of any productions of Death and the Maiden, with its implicit but urgent call for vengeance on agents of tyranny, in the former Soviet Empire. Or perhaps in Havana?

A Message from the Editors

Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 10 Number 9, on page 54
Copyright © 2024 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1992/5/schiller-other-exhumations

Popular Right Now