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.