The Academic Abject
By Una Chaudhuri
Suitcase, or Those That Resemble
Flies From a Distance
By Melissa James Gibson
Soho Rep
46 Walker St.
Box office: (212) 868-4444
David Mamet once explained the title of
his play Oleanna as follows: “Oleanna was the
name of one of the great failed utopias of the nineteenth century.
My play is about the great failed utopia of the twentieth century—academia.”
Mamet’s challenging characterization (which has generally gone
unnoticed, overshadowed by the play’s incendiary gender politics),
goes a long way towards explaining the current status of academia
in the American cultural imaginary. Few institutions are readier
targets for scorn and suspicion than the modern English Department.
Witness, for example, those almost-annual New York Times
articles that lampoon the MLA convention as a festival of ludicrous
posturing, and literature scholars as theory-addled scoundrels.
A few seasons ago, Margaret Edson’s play Wit transmuted
that habitual condescension into a kind of grudging respect, if
only because literary training seemed to offer its protagonist,
an English professor, some philosophical ammunition against the
terminal cancer she was battling. In Suitcase, academia
is the disease itself rather than a balm for it; the play’s two
protagonists are terminal dissertation-writers, and their academic
endeavors are unquestionably to blame for the alienation and anguish
that plague them.
Like Wit’s Dr. Vivian Bearing,
the main characters of Suitcase, Sallie and Jen, are
hyper-literate and super-self-conscious. Unlike her, however,
the terror they have to face down is neither ultimate nor defining;
they are not dying, merely not writing. Lacking a challenging
target, their command of language turns pathological. Speaking
to each other on improbably bright blue telephones which bring
their voices to us over speakers, Sal and Jen become interchangeable,
disembodied voices in an Ionescoesque universe where the language
they possessed now possesses them. Compulsive word-wielders and
phrase-makers, they exchange rapid-fire, epigrammatic accounts
of their respective situations. The more they talk, however, the
less we know them: their abjection at the hands of their “ungoing”
dissertations makes them increasingly formless, increasingly marginal
in their own lives.
“Life,” proclaims one of them, “disdains
subtitles.” Perhaps it is a measure of the play’s distance from
reality that it doesn’t merely have a subtitle, but one that requires
annotation in the program, where it turns out to be a chip off
that most dazzling of postmodern gems, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Chinese
encyclopedia,” whose bizarre taxonomy of animals includes the
category of “those that resemble flies from a distance.” Applied
to the play, this category could refer either to Sally and Jen
or to their hapless boyfriends, Karl and Lyle, who lurk far beneath
the decidedly non-ivory towers in which the women are holed up.
When you’re in dissertation hell, distance doesn’t make the heart
grow fonder; it makes the world grow smaller. Academic endeavor,
it would seem, is a chronic condition whose chief symptom is a
tendency to be masochistic, sadistic, and—most of all—reductive.
The ambitious task that the playwright,
Melissa James Gibson, has set herself in Suitcase is
the dramatization of a kind of self-inflicted suffering that is
no less agonizing for being apparently pointless and unnecessary
(the topics of both dissertations are classics of uselessness;
one of them is, in fact, about garbage). In this quixotic endeavor
she is ably assisted by a director, a cast, and designers who
are quite brilliant at making something out of nothing. For example,
Louisa Thompson’s ingenious set provides some clever commentary
on the effects of so much cleverness. The entirety of the two
women’s apartments are their desks, floating high above the stage.
Their whole world is reduced to these cluttered work surfaces,
behind which they are trapped. A tiny flip-up door on the downstage
edge leads directly "onto" each desk, just as tiny windows
there and behind them give views of a miniature cityscape. (Sallie
uses binoculars to watch the home movies being shown in an apartment
across the street: those that resemble flies from a distance become
intriguing and individualized if you watch them carefully.) At
ground level, two curved iron bars are banisters which the boyfriends
all but impale themselves on as they seek desperately to make
contact with their estranged partners.
While
one waits in vain for the play to discover some redeeming quality
of intellectual endeavor--something to explain why these women
are sacrificing youth, beauty, health, and pleasure for this pointless
exercise—the spatial arrangement begins to explore a different
question: not “Why are these women doing this?” but rather “What
do these men want?” The two boyfriends, doubly abjected though
they are by academia—victims of its victims—gradually become much
more compelling than the objects of their attention. As played
by Jeremy Shamos and Thomas Jay Ryan, Karl and Lyle are determined
to contest the fly-weight status their girlfriends have assigned
them. Unlike Jen and Sallie, played with remarkable reticence
and dry humor by Colleen Werthman and Christina Kirk, Karl and
Lyle are free to experience and express their anguish in their
bodies and in the world: they come and go, make phone-calls, press
buzzers, speak though intercoms, climb the stairs, lean on banisters,
lie on the ground, stand up, sit down, and climb the stairs again.
They try to figure things out, explain their girlfriends to each
other, and survive such verdicts as “you’re such a causal guy.”
The vitality of the boyfriends, theatrically
satisfying though it is, also reads as hostility towards the women
characters. Had this play been written by, say, David Mamet, it
would surely have seemed like a sequel to the misogynistic portrayal
of female academics that made Oleanna so controversial.
The female authorship of Suitcase, like that of Wit,
complicates the sexist implication, in both plays, that women
can only do intellectual work by de-sexing themselves and forsaking
their femininity. As worked through by women writers, perhaps
this is not a case of gender-betrayal or female self-hatred but
an instance of some courageous cultural stock-taking. Perhaps
only a woman can look squarely at the misery caused by the long-established
cultural opposition which divides thinking from feeling along
gender lines, to the enduring detriment of both sexes.
Courageous though it may be, Suitcase
is also crammed with so many dramatic styles and stage effects
as to be almost impossible to heave into theatrical life. The
speaker phones and intercoms form part of a Wooster-Groupish media-saturation
that seems quite at odds with the play’s fundamental interest
in the role of words and ideas in shaping human experience. Listening
in on family tapes with Jen, or watching strangers’ home-movies
with Sallie, brings us no closer to either character. The flickering
images we see projected on the back wall and the forlorn family
interactions we hear when Jen turns on her tape-machine only supply
another, more familiar, order of abjection from the one Jen and
Sallie have fallen victim to. That personal ill-treatments and
disappointments might lurk behind the women’s intellectual delirium
is hardly enlightening. Instead it might be the lowest blow the
cultural imaginary has yet dealt its favorite whipping boy: the
academic abject as a downtown version of good-old family dysfunction.
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