Different Hats
By Una Chaudhuri
Far Away
By Caryl Churchill
New York Theatre Workshop
Box Office: 212-460-5475
“Without research, which no one will
ever bother to undertake, neither the circumstances nor the
attitude of the maker towards her or his hat is finally knowable.”
--The Homebody, in Homebody/Kabul, by Tony Kushner
Last year, a few short months after words
like Taliban and Kabul had leaped into the forefront of American
consciousness and media-chatter, Tony Kushner’s strangely prescient
Homebody sat on the stage of the New York Theatre Workshop talking
about, of all things, hats.
A year later, on the same stage,
Caryl Churchill’s eerily unconscious characters stood
before strangely accoutered work-benches and made, of all things,
hats. In the next scene, those hats and many others were worn
in, of all things, a parade of prisoners, a death-march.
I seize on this image of hats, serendipitously shared by what
were, arguably, the two most important plays of the past year,
because for me it constellates--in a uniquely theatrical and decidedly
ironic way--many of the main issues, challenges, and possibilities
that face political theatre in this era of globalization, this
age of realigning the “far away” with the “near and dear.” The
hats that the Homebody speaks of evoke difference and distance,
as well as the desire to experience--however superficially and
playfully--the“far away.” She tells of going looking for certain
hats that she remembers having seen in an exotic part of London,
wanting to use them for a party she is planning and for which
some festivity will need to be manufactured. The hats she holds
in memory are fabulous, jeweled, magical. The ones she actually
finds make her think immediately (as “this century has taught
us” to do, she says) of the suffering and exploitation behind
them. Yet, for all the economic and political mystery and misery
they represent, the hats are “beautiful.” And, she adds, “sad.
As dislocations are. And marvelous, as dislocations are.”
The hats of Far Away manage to be, grimly, both dislocational
and marvelous. They are extravagant creations (we watch a few
being constructed before our eyes, then see dozens more in the
parade). Colossal creations of grotesque proportions, bizarre
shapes and riotous colors, they silently scream out the horror
that results when aesthetics loses all concern for the material
reality from which it works. As the two characters work steadily
and diligently, assembling their wild concoctions, the seduction
of pure form is palpable, distracting us from the bleak sweat-shop
they work in, just as their preoccupation with the particulars
of their employment seems to distract them from the brutality
of the system they serve. There could hardly be a more graphic
rendering of a social contract in tatters, a world where art and
labor have been turned into weapons of domination and alienation.
The first two acts of Far Away stage the progressive
rending of the social contract, first through lies, and then through
non-sequiturs so disturbing they make one nostalgic for lies.
In Act One, a woman (played with frightening bitterness by Frances
MacDormand) answers her young niece’s questions about the brutality
the child has witnessed right outside the house, deftly covering
each violent and bloody detail with banal explanations. It is
chilling to see how easily moral and political concerns can be
deflected, how easily the habit of not seeing what one sees can
be cultivated. In Act Two, things have gone much further. The
girl, now a young woman, learns fast how to not even ask questions,
how to keep on doggedly talking about the wrong thing.
While the “hat act” is the most visually stunning of the play,
its final “animal act” is far and away (so to speak) its most
ideologically challenging. Churchill is well-known for her dramatizations
of some of the most challenging modern philosophers and theorists,
from Freud (Schreber's Nervous Illness), to Fanon (Cloud
Nine), to Foucault (Softcops). If Far Away
has such an antecedent (I do not know that it does), it could
well be The Natural Contract, by French philosopher Michel
Serres. The extraordinary final act of Far Away, in which
we learn the consequences of the lies and alienation we have witnessed
in the first two, could well be a dramatization of this most original
and far-sighted of meditations on our present global circumstances.
According to Serres, the breakdown of the social contract in the
course of the past genocidal century leaves us confronting a different
order of violence than ever before, that of the natural world
that we have so long abused. Serres writes, “We so-called developed
nations are no longer fighting against ourselves; together we
are all turning against the world. Literally a world war, and
doubly so, since the whole world, meaning all men, imposes losses
on the whole world, meaning all things.” In Churchill’s play,
the fraying of the social order in the domestic, professional,
artistic, and political spheres leaves her characters, finally,
face to face with an ecocidal free-for-all. All of creation has
joined the fray--animals, plants, rivers, even the weather is
part the new reality of total enmity, universal dissension. News
like “the cats have come in on the side of the French,” hilarious
to hear, turns sour when species after species is added, bizarrely
aligned with nations who are divided not only against each other
but also, apparently, within themselves, along lines of some insane
new professional tribalism: “Portuguese car salesmen. Russian
swimmers. Thai butchers. Latvian dentists.” In response to the
dangerous extreme we have reached, Serres imagines a new “natural
contract:” “We must decide on peace among ourselves to protect
the world and on peace with the world to protect ourselves.”
Churchill,
however, makes no ameliorative proposals. Instead, she shows the
dire threat to life of things in the medium--theatre--best
suited to (though rarely used for) thinking about things, for
reflecting on the human relation to the non-human. Which brings
me back to the hats, Churchill’s and Kushner’s, and a few others
besides. Well, two others--those famous ones exchanged between
and peered into by Didi and Gogo, signifiers of their vaudeville
lineage and of their desperate search for meaning. Those hats--like
Pozzo's watch, Lucky’s rope, the famous carrot--enacted what one
might call our “co-life” with things.
An Andrei Serban production of Godot many
years ago ended with a delicious joke: as the tramps sat gazing
forlornly into nothingness, the boots previously shed by Gogo
slowly began to move around the stage, as if with a life of their
own. Churchill’s hats are in a way the opposite: autonomously
evil, as if with a deathliness of their own. They seem to be man-made
versions of the killing things that the final act speaks of: “there
was one killed by coffee, one killed by pins, they were killed
by heroin, petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves . .
.” Kushner’s Homebody wanted exotic hats to lighten a gathering
of friends and relatives who “tend to afflict each other in baleful
ways.” In Churchill’s dystopia that principle has been taken to
the extreme. The chained and silent figures who shuffle forward
wearing the hats perform the nightmare of history as a festival
of cruelty, where brutality is glamorized and spectacularized.
That such vast themes can be contained within a fifty minute play
is testament to Churchill’s instinct for the encapsulating image,
the telling phrase, and the revelatory leap beyond logic (like
the dinner party of Top Girls, the temporality of Cloud
Nine). It is also a testament to her grasp--as keen as Kushner’s--of
the power of discontinuity and disparity. The two parts of Homebody/Kabul
(that title itself enacts the issue of distance, of the relation
between far and near) convey so much through the gap between them,
a gap spectators must fill by evolving, even as we watch the play,
an ideology of distance. In Far Away, the gaps
are not between acts or between worlds but within them,
and to watch the play is to be forced to confront its constitutive
distance.
The New York production brilliantly literalized this challenge
visually. Entering the theatre, the audience was greeted by a
painted show-drop depicting a sentimental rustic scene: a fairy-tale
cottage nestled beside a lake, a translucent starry sky, trees
and bushes. Bird-song was heard. We were both far away and nearby,
a long way from our modern city lives, yet close to the cozy fantasy
lands of our childhood. The contrast between this image and the
grim world of the play was more than merely ironic; it was an
encapsulation of the distance between the world we treasure and
the horror we have made of it. Far Away depicts the ideology
of distance that must be countered with a new “natural contract.”
(Una Chaudhuri is Professor of
English and Drama at New York University.)
print version