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.