Courtside Drama
By Rebecca Fried Weisberg
Three Seconds in the Key
By Deb Margolin
Baruch Performing Arts Center
(closed)
Three Seconds in the Key, a new play by Deb Margolin,
opens a window into the inner life of a housewife dying of Hodgkins
Disease. But the play is no syrupy Terms of Endearment clone.
Rather, in Margolin’s moving one-act, the main character
-– known only as the Mother -– shares her raging emotions
and racing thoughts in an intimate shared hallucination. The play
is a series of vignettes that rise out of the confused caverns
of the Mother’s mind with a paradoxical crispness, like
scenes from a sharply real dream where the oddest things just
happen to occur. At the heart of the play is her imaginary interaction
with a fictional black basketball player from the New York Knicks,
which escalates into a series of verbal tournaments where she
confronts her deepest crises of faith, identity, and strength.
The New Georges theater company recently presented the first
full production of this evolving work -– which began as
a solo piece in Deb Margolin’s well-known downtown idiom.
Its latest incarnation incorporated an unusual setting that vividly
merged the Mother’s real life and fantasy life. The theater
was structured to resemble a small basketball stadium, with arena-style
seating arranged in three-quarter round. The center of the floor
was an orange and blue rubber court, encircled by glossy wood,
with a basketball net mounted on the front of a monitor that later
served as both a scoreboard and a television. In the center was
an orange print couch and coffee table, making up the living room
where most of the drama happened. This design meshed the two worlds
of the play very well: the Mother’s house and the television
world of basketball, with the basketball action increasingly melded
with the Mother’s everyday experiences.
All of the acting was strong, with a powerful and nuanced performance
by Catherine Curtin as the Mother. Evoking hilarity and grief
in equal measure, Curtain led the audience on a sometimes random
and bizarre journey, and she was so captivating that one agreed
to go along for the ride, following wherever the Mother’s
mind went. Alexandra Aron’s directing also clearly shaped
the character development and helped unify a somewhat mismatched
ensemble. Aron skillfully molded the dramatic architecture (as
designer Lauren Halpern did the physical environment), enabling
the sweat of the basketball game to infiltrate the Mother’s
living room without ridiculousness. It was Margolin’s writing,
however, that left the strongest impression.
Three Seconds in the Key begins with a twenty-minute
monologue, in which the Mother pads into the spotlight in bathrobe
and fuzzy slippers and ruminates on her depressing inability to
smoke marijuana, despite its curative effects on the nausea that
comes with her chemotherapy. “I can’t smoke pot,”
she half giggles, half drones in a kind of hammy deadpan -–
making us wonder if her disordered yet acute mental state is supposed
to illustrate the veracity of her statement. Her barbed, darkly
comic monologue is rooted in the absurd and often sad physical
and psychological situations that arise when the body fails. The
comedy is marbled with a startling poetry woven into the very
conversational speech. The Mother describes how in the night shadows
of her balcony, the joint she recently smoked resembled “a
star that had dared to come close to my face; a little minnow
in the darkness.” As her words paint the pictures in her
mind for us, the Mother draws us in, and we begin to feel a certain
communion with her—enhanced by the knowledge (which most
of the audience has gleaned from the program or from reviews)
that the piece is semi-autobiographical, based on the playwright’s
own experiences battling cancer.
The Mother tells of an evening when she formed a striking spiritual
connection with a black Preacher who seemed to speak to her directly
via public access television. Her narrative bursts into theatrical
life as a tall, dark-suited black man (played by Avery Glymph)
appears in the flesh in front of her, back to the audience, not
quite in the spotlight nor quite out of it as he hovers at the
entrance to the stage near the center aisle. Together, they fervently
recite a litany of beliefs about the Lord. “The Lord does
not care for your fancy clothes… your jewels… your
car.” Essentially, he sees right through you, to your very
essence. Although she has no firm religious beliefs, the Mother
is mesmerized by this man: both by the image he creates of God
stripping a person down to his most basic self, and by the Preacher’s
own passion and honesty in revealing his deepest, rawest beliefs
for all the world to see. However, at the very moment of the Mother’s
rapture, the spiritual, almost mystical nature of the experience
is quickly punctured by a too-human absurdity. The Preacher has
been counting his central beliefs on his fingers, raising each
finger one at a time, and the Mother is shaken from her reverie
as she realizes that in his unworldly innocence he will enumerate
a sacred spiritual belief with the ultimate vulgarity: the middle
finger, raised with force. That, says the Mother, is the last
thing she remembers, having then floated off into intoxicated
laughter at the ludicrous contrast between the Preacher’s
beautiful faith and his unknowing “Fuck you” to the
faithful.
The comedy in the play brings laughter that is excruciating:
even while finding humor in the Mother’s escapades (and
admiring her ability to do so), we feel her anguish. Also, as
she tells us, laughing is like bleeding -– "cleansing,
painless, fatal." While this idea may seem perplexing at
first, our language is replete with analogies between laughter
and death: “I died laughing” or “That kills
me.” Like bleeding, laughter destroys our physical control,
seemingly draining our life force. As the words spill out of the
Mother, it is not just the laughter that provides relief; she
exults in words, spilling them liberally, and the hemorrhage of
poetry purges her demons while renewing her strength. This dichotomy
is the play’s fundamental irony: sometimes salvation lies
in isolating and embracing the regenerative qualities of our most
destructive moments. Indeed, the play’s meditation on the
nature and purpose of faith is its focal point, and it is drawn
out more deeply as the Mother develops her relationship with yet
another unnamed character, the Player.
The Player is introduced along with his equally anonymous teammates
immediately after the Mother’s first monologue. In an abrupt
segue, the audience is transported to a live basketball game.
Fluorescent light glares, hip-hop music blares, and five tall,
muscular basketball players come running onto the court, dribbling
and passing the ball while pictures of their faces bob across
two monitors on stage.
At the same time, the Mother’s little boy enters, and mother
and son gaze at an imaginary television, experiencing this basketball
game as the TV audience. The blissfully technical sport provides
a short respite from illness and pain. For a moment, all that
matters are the speedily accumulating points, the sheer athletic
power of the players’ bodies, the emotional but ultimately
unimportant hairsplitting interpretation of the rules. The Mother’s
obsession with her inner life and the words that swirl around
there contrasts starkly with her participation in this display
of mainstream sports culture. Her unlikely affinity for the sport
makes the team chant resonate even more loudly; it comes to serve
as a metaphor for her battle for her life.
I refuse! I refuse to lose! I refuse to fail! I refuse to die!
I refuse to be afraid! I refuse to be taken! I refuse!
Frequently, sports metaphors seem trite: in applying the lessons
of everyday activities like baseball and football to life’s
deeper struggles, they can detract from the weight -– and
the tragedy -– of individual stories of hardship. In this
case, the unusualness and physicality of the situation refreshes
the metaphor and transforms it into a powerful artistic tool.
As the team breaks off the chant and the other athletes recede
into darkness, the Player (played by Samuel R. Gates) walks straight
into the living room, breaking through the imaginary boundaries
between the Mother’s home and the surrounding realms of
fantasy. When the Mother catches sight of the Player, she is arrested,
breathless, and slaps him to prove to herself that he cannot be
real. The sound of skin on skin reverberates, its sharp echo symbolizing
a turning point for the Mother. Suddenly, her mental extravagances
have created a channel for salvation to help her to escape from
the dark chambers of her mind.
The
Mother’s dialogues with the Player are interspersed with
her solo musings and conversations with her son, as well as the
team’s conflicts as they stumble through a losing season.
These dialogues are central and, interestingly, they mirror her
spiritual experience with the Preacher. In their first spoken
exchange, the Player tells her, “I got your call, Mother,”
and we are reminded of the way the Preacher came to her in a moment
of need, alone in a scary, smoked-out stupor. As the Mother said
earlier, God comes to you when you’re alone, and while God
does not have a tangible existence in the play, we have a sense
that He has sent two representatives to help the Mother through
her pain. Also, the way the Player relates to the Mother recalls
how the Preacher urges his followers to strip their souls down
to their most essential being. It is the Player who calls her
“Mother,” and when she objects that she is more than
just a mother, he violently disagrees: “That’s all
you are –- Mother,” in a tone of voice that
brooks no argument. His statement is not meant to be derogatory;
while harsh, it is intended to remind her of her most important
function, and hopefully remind her that it is not just an identity,
but also a calling. Also, in refusing to recognize her by name,
the Player maintains a certain distance, like a surgeon or an
undertaker, as if it were unseemly for him to get involved in
the specifics of her life. She, in return, calls him only “Sir.”
There is another important, if subtle, link between the Player
and the Preacher. The Player, whose spirituality is evident in
his exchanges with the Mother, will not join in the brief prayer
that his teammates share before their games. On several occasions,
he declines even to stand with them, despite their pleas and occasional
harassment. Yet he humbly gets down on his knees with the Mother
to pray for her. Similarly, the Preacher has foresworn all organized
religious activity. “I do not trust myself to that Church,”
he intones, speaking of the place where some congregants pay attention
to clothes, jewels, and cars. Both men are deeply spiritual, but
they call out to God only when in the presence of those whose
souls call out to them.
That both the Preacher and the Player are tall, lean black men
helps to bring out the similarities in their functions for the
Mother, while creating interesting questions about why African-American
cultural and religious values speak so strongly to her -–
a secular Jewish woman who believes in God, but only because it
“takes too much energy not to.” This cultural contrast
is highlighted by the Mother’s discussions with the Player
on Jewish attitudes and practices, and by his snide questions
and comments about Jewish racism. He takes note of the way certain
Jewish people mumble “schvartze” (pronounced “Sh’vah-tzah”)
under their breath when a black person walks by -– he knows
that the word must be the equivalent of “nigger.”
As the Mother defends her culture -– noting how everything
sounds derogatory in Yiddish –- the Player insists on the
destructiveness of these attitudes. Yet, just as his reduction
of her character to “Mother” was not sexist, these
comments manage to skim the surface of anti-Semitism. In fact,
they effectively underscore how faith, whether religious or secular,
depends upon a basic respect for the self and others. In addition,
as two of society’s most noticeable “others”
-– and as two peoples acutely aware of having been slaves
in former generations – Jews and blacks have a great deal
of common ground that can unify them in spite of cultural differences.
These associations provide texture for the relationship that develops
between the Mother and the Player, and also provide opportunities
for the Player to share some of his own personal history and identity:
his childhood poverty, his intense focus on “learning [his]
game” as he grew up, his children that he never sees.
This fascinating exploration is conducted through the Player’s
efforts to instill the Mother with the will to seize control of
her life in spite of her illness. In offering her a life perspective
so vastly different from her own, he attempts to help her find
a true appreciation of the time that she has already spent on
earth, which will liberate her to make the most of the remaining
days -– however many or few they may be. This is where the
title of the piece comes into play. Three Seconds in the Key
refers to the amount of time that a basketball player is permitted
to stand near the net waiting for a pass. The Mother at one point
asks the Player, “How do you take a shot when you’re
so worried about where you stand?” He answers, “Three
seconds is a long time, Mother, a long time. You know when you’ve
had your three seconds in the key, and you just dance in and out.”
The Player’s frequent hostility seems designed to provoke
the Mother to fight back, and hence rediscover and rebuild her
forgotten strength. In a climactic moment, as he’s pushing
her to rise above her pain and exhaustion, they engage in a battle
of wills underneath the scoreboard. Both fall back on racial and
ethnic bigotry in expressing their anger, but as they volley insults
back and forth, with ten-second countdowns for each on the scoreboard,
the conflict becomes a confrontational debate about the Mother’s
weakness of spirit. “I’m fighting for your life,”
cries the Player, “and you’re barely raising your
arm! Use your body, Mother! Use your arm! Arms up on ‘D,’
Mother!” (“D” stands for “defense.”)
This emotional shock treatment ultimately penetrates the Mother’s
self-destructive defenses, and in the end she achieves a peaceful
resignation that frees her to dance in and out of the key with
each three-second moment that is allotted to her by the divine
Scorekeeper.
A few minor structural problems disrupt
the flow of the play at times. For example, the son's presence
is not completely integrated, and the Mother's other immediate
family members -- a husband and a daughter -- are casually mentioned
but never appear in the play and serve no dramatic purpose. According
to an interview with the playwright, the addition of the son was
one of the last changes to the piece. Further, the intense chemistry
between the Mother and the Player was sabotaged towards the end
when their relationship awkwardly developed romantic and sexual
overtones. In the New Georges's production, melodramatic staging
and performances in the last scene between the Mother and the
Player contributed to this awkwardness, which somewhat undermined
the momentum that had been building. Thankfully, these were trivial
fouls that did not significantly detract from our experience of
the drama. Perhaps they even heightened it by exposing the raw
humanity of the theatrical player who created the whole game and
provided us with three very worthwhile seconds in the key.
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