Another Half-Masterpiece
By Jonathan Kalb
Middletown
By Will Eno
Vineyard Theatre
108 E. 15th St.
Box office: 212-353-0303
In a corner of my mental library is an imaginary
shelf containing a group of dramas I call "half-masterpieces." These
are plays whose second acts struck me as baffling disappointments at
their premiere productions compared to the radiant originality and breathtaking
imaginativeness of their first acts--not just minor letdowns, mind you,
but utterly inexplicable failures of nerve, scope and technique compared
with the astonishing resonance of what preceded them. Among the plays
on this shelf (many the object of much unreserved acclaim) are Caryl
Churchill's Top Girls, Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul,
and David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross--and they are now joined
by Middletown, Will Eno's first "full-evening-length" work.
Eno's is an interesting dramatic voice. His Thom
Pain (based on nothing) was a remarkable debut in 2005, a 55-minute,
utterly uningratiating, Beckettian monologue by an irascible yet intellectually
playful and insatiably curious man who resented being a dramatic character
and indignantly repudiated what he saw as his obligation to tell us
a coherent story. The piece was peppered with bright and surprising
articulacy and Lewis Black-style insult humor (prompting the indignant
exit of a planted spectator at one point), but both its depth and its
comic charm lay in its furious impatience and its clever use of self-deprecation
and audience-antagonism as forms of metaphysical investigation.
Eno's characters brood on spiritual emptiness.
They are more worldly than Beckett's indomitable tramps and decrepits,
but they share their persistent psychic restlessness. In Thom Pain,
in the evening of shorts Oh the Humanity and Other Exclamations
(2007), and in Middletown, Eno has identified a peculiar brand
of mental hermeticism among ordinary contemporary people as his special
field of exploration, writing rambling yet philosophically pointed monologues
in which moment-to-moment perceptions are subjected to ruthless freeze-frame
scrutiny. Volubility is his characters' mode of living and thinking--of
being, as the existentialists used to put it--and that affinity with
the likes of Beckett, Joyce and Dostoyevsky is evidence of Eno's extraordinary
ambition.
Middletown--splendidly directed by Ken
Rus Schmoll in this New York premiere--introduces itself as a sort of
anti-Our Town, inviting us into a quintessential American small
town where quiet anxiety and uncynical self-consciousness prevail. The
environment David Zinn has designed, dominated by a pair of dully modular
house-fronts with windows big enough to spy on the occupants, emphasizes
the place's deadly normalcy and regularity. Wilder's Grovers Corners
was also suffused with quiet anxiety, of course, but it wasn't as self-consciously
trite as Eno's Middletown, where "the main street is called Main Street
and the side streets are named after trees," as the local cop tells
us. Middletown is a postmodern cliché of hyper-normalcy, an exaggeration
relentlessly overworked in recent decades by David Lynch, with his gently
mocking, contrived surrealism. Eno isn't interested in surrealism, thankfully.
He focuses on quirkily perceptive characters who chase their thoughts
down idiosyncratic rabbit holes of doubt and logical inference drawn
from their everyday experience.
The first character to appear is a Public Speaker--played
with wry, Rotarian nonchalance by David Garrison--who welcomes us to
the show and suggests he might be a sort of guide, like the Stage Manager
in Our Town. As it happens, he's not up to that role. He can't
even finish his greeting. His single sentence becomes a slippery worm,
a mad, Lucky-like digression that enumerates all the possible listeners
that occur to him, stringing his mind along for five hilarious minutes:
Ladies and Gentlemen, Esteemed Colleagues,
Members of the Board, Middletonians, Local Dignitaries, everyone really,
stockbrokers, dockworkers, celebrities, nobodies, Ladies, Gentlemen,
all comers, newcomers, the newly departed, the poorly depicted, people
who are still teething, who are looking for a helping verb, the quote
beautiful, the unquote unbeautiful, whose bones are just so, whose
veins are just so, the drunk, the high, the blue, the down, los
pueblos, los animales, foreigners, strangers, bookworms, those
whose eyes are tired from trying to read something into everything,
those at a crossroads, in a crisis, a quandary, a velvety chair, the
dirty, the hungry, yes, we the cranky, the thirsty, the furious, the
happy, who are filled with life, bloated with it. . .
Next to appear is the cop, a clean-cut, haplessly
overconfident fellow played with dead-on obtuseness by Michael Park,
who speaks in proud and proprietary generalizations about the town,
suggesting that he might be our Wilderesque guide, except that he has
nothing much to say about Middletown and soon distracts himself by violently
harassing an innocent bystander on a bench. And so it goes for the rest
of the act, with various other characters introduced in situations that
begin in a familiar vein and then veer off toward peculiar or disturbing
sidings. None of these people has enough self-possession, let alone
objectivity, to narrate more than a tiny piece of the overall story.
A romance seems to bud, for example, between
a handyman named John Dodge (Linus Roache) and a woman named Mrs. Swanson
(Heather Burns) who is new to town and whose husband travels a lot,
but their fragmented and desultory conversations only deepen their separateness.
A tourist couple visiting the town is bored by the sole stone monument
there and asks if the tourguide can do better ("we just like some perspective
with our history. Some little, like, gossipy footnote about a local
dish or a bastard child"), whereupon the guide embarks on a woolly and
tentative speech about the continuity of molecules across eons. An astronaut
(a native of Middletown) is moved to wax mystical about the enormity
of the view from his space capsule, but he can't find adequate language
and the clichés he does muster bore his ground-control handlers, who
steer him back to dry radio protocol.
What links all of these vignettes is their shared
theme of psychic centerlessness, a feeling of disempowerment specific
to people who are superficially comfortable in the world. All the characters
desperately long for some perspective from which they might see and
thwart what ails them, and Middletown’s exaggerated normalcy is
a trope for their sense of entrapment within tormentingly smooth walls.
It’s as if they all seek points of traction, or creative friction,
that might vary their outlooks a bit and allow them to climb above their
habitual mental refuges momentarily and see their situations whole.
Their efforts are, as expected, heartbreakingly futile.
Eno paints this dilemma vividly and makes it
theatrically exciting for an hour or so. Unfortunately, he has little
more to say about it than what is packed into the establishing circumstances.
After intermission, Middletown grows tediously redundant and
predictable, becoming an essentially conventional dramatic experience
centered on the dreary story of Dodge and Mrs. Swanson’s non-affair.
A few more of those philosophically meaty, disconnected vignette scenes
crop up, but they come off as afterthoughts, making exactly the same
points about emptiness and separateness heard before. With the adjacent
house-fronts replaced by adjacent hospital beds, the thrust is numbingly
directed toward the approach of a hackneyed resolution in which the
end of one life (Dodge’s) is neatly juxtaposed with the beginning
of another (Mrs. Swanson’s newborn child). The character Thom
Pain—keen critic as well as a merciless repeater of the phrase
“I don’t know”—would have savagely skewered
such a mendacious imposition of balance, harmony and order.
It is puzzling indeed to see a falloff so precipitous
from a writer of Eno’s talent and insight, and though I have no
information on how it occurred, I strongly suspect it had to do with
pressure on him to produce “evening-length” work, since
all his earlier pieces were short. Which only prompts me to ask: what
is wrong with being a master of the gem-like short? Yes, it probably
would reduce one’s opportunities for regional and Off-Broadway
productions (though that never fazed Beckett or Pinter). The dubious
alternative, though, is to become a nominally successful Off-Broadway
dramatist whose second acts are plainly unworthy of his first.