STEIN
SOUP
By Jonathan Kalb
House/Lights
By Gertrude Stein
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster Street
According to a famous myth, Picasso found
it impossible to paint a likeness of Gertrude Stein in eighty
sittings, but captured it exquisitely months later from memory.
True or not, this story has served over the years as a testament
to Picasso's genius, to the power of subjective impression, and
to the triumph of modernism in freeing artists from slavish dependency
on direct observation. The myth also reflects on Stein, though,
and suggests a somewhat more current paradigm of the artist who
successfully eludes encapsulation, whose work tends to slip further
away the closer one stares at it, but who (like Samuel Beckett)
seems to invite the very sort of dogged, assiduous scrutiny that
conceals her essence. Long cherished as a world-class figure for
her stories, sketches and essays, Stein, author of over seventy
plays, has remained obscure as a dramatist--partly because of
her deliberate abstruseness of course, but also because most directors
lack the insight, imagination and patience to paint her work,
as it were, from memory. That's what the plays really require,
and that's what Elizabeth LeCompte does best.
A year ago, I wrote that LeCompte's kabuki-inspired production
of The Emperor Jones with The Wooster Group wasn't merely
an interesting adaptation but rather the best production of that
O'Neill play I'd seen. Now, House/Lights--LeCompte's
version of Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,
which has opened for review after two years of development in
rehearsal and on tour--is the most inspired production of Gertrude
Stein I've seen. It's certainly the only one I've fully enjoyed.
LeCompte's instinct for finding classic texts that are indeed
freshened and clarified by her explosive multimedia deconstructions
is, once again, part of what's impressive. Devoid of the arbitrariness
and triviality that plagues so much other multimedia work, her
pieces lay bare what was essential and enduring in the original
texts and then force that core into intensely revealing interaction
with mediated detritus from today's surrounding cultural environment.
Faustus was originally written
as an opera libretto in 1938, and it has the reputation of being
one of Stein's most accessible dramas, not because it's really
any easier to follow in performance than her other work, but because
it's rooted in a familiar legend and makes some compromises with
chronological time (events in one act actually seem to follow
from those in the previous one, and so on). The title character
is the inventor of electric light and seems to be a figure for
an era that has sold its soul for technology. Faustus complicates
this neat picture, however, by arguing with Mephisto over whether
he really has a soul to sell and otherwise speaking as if he doesn't
consider the deal certain or final. The lights sometimes sing
and dance like an inanimate chorus, characters switch sexes and
become plural willy-nilly, stage directions and character designations
are often indistinguishable from dialogue, and a young woman named
"Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel," who seeks help from Faustus
after being bitten by a phallic "viper," becomes a second protagonist.
In the end, Faustus longs for darkness and begs Mephisto to take
him to hell "I have sold my soul to make a light and the light
is bright but not interesting in my sight"), his final despair
in part a reaction to Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel's progress
toward sexual independence.
As one might expect, LeCompte has pumped this old text, with its
complicated semantic humor and dense web of classical references,
full of her particular frenetically savvy and technophilic energy.
The set (by Jim Findlay) is an architectonic thicket of metal
frames and railings, seesaw ramps with sliding tables, video monitors,
wide banks of bright fluorescent striplights, stools, couches
and numerous incandescent lights of different styles, including
several huge bulbs hanging on hinged strips from a mobile pipe
overhead. The eight actors dash madly about these obstacles with
a surefooted awkwardness that strongly recalls Richard Foreman,
with Kate Valk playing Faustus in high heels and a tight grey
dress with an odd bulbous ring around the buttocks similar to
the one she wore as Brutus Jones. Suzzy Roche is similarly encumbered
as Mephisto with badly pencilled eyebrows and little goat-horns
on her head. Voices are miked, distorted and punctuated with quacking,
ringing and other sounds, and the actors sometimes lip-synch to
snippets of music too various to list and assorted video images
ranging from attractive static to Desi Arnez to a water ballet
to a scene from Young Frankenstein. One woman spends
much of the action delicately "playing"; a laptop computer downstage
like a musical instrument.
All of this belongs more or less to the basic Wooster Group vocabulary,
however. The really unique and crucial decision behind House/Lights,
the one that gave it its fascinatingly ambivalent comic texture,
was the incorporation of an inadvertently brilliant sexploitation
film from 1964 called Olga's House of Shame (directed
by Joseph Mawra). Perceiving the Steinian qualities in an obscure
film like this and knowing how to apply them was what I meant
before by painting from memory. The film is narrated by a cheery,
newsreel-style male voice that tells of a rash of retaliatory
violence against female underlings committed at an abandoned mine
by a ruthless international crime boss named Olga. The footage
itself, however, is always explicitly titillating and seems to
mock even this alibi-narrative by concentrating on "torture" scenes
in which pretty, deadpan Olga (in high-fashion clothes) seems
about as dangerous as a stuffed animal, all the violence is ridiculously
phony, and the real action seems to be about consensual bondage
games. Olga takes a while to acknowledge her lesbian inclinations
openly, and this is one link with Stein and the slow coming-of-age
of Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel. Another link, though, is
the film's flat, affectless atmosphere and sense of disjunction
between words and intentions, words and actions, and actions and
reactions. The parallel of this flatness, or deliberate phoniness,
is far more compelling to me than the strained plot parallels
LeCompte suggests by giving all the Faustus characters secondary
names from the film.
Stein thought this sort of disjunction
"syncopation" was her word) was implicit in theater and tried
to make it explicit in her plays, but LeCompte improved on the
idea, using it not only to emphasize the famous "continuous present"
but also to reintroduce danger to this self-mocking play. Every
time a conspicuously unfrightening torture scene from the film
is also acted out live, for instance (as happens several times),
the live actors behave in a noticeably more violent manner than
the filmed ones, reminding the audience of the presence of and
risk to live bodies in this wild play about damnation. Similarly,
whenever one of the live actors poses on a stool to duplicate
a salacious breast- or crotch-shot from the film, the play's somewhat
abstract connection between plural identity and female degradation
becomes suddenly and jarringly concrete.
Fortunately, LeCompte is above easy political positiontaking,
obviously aware that the whole spirit of this show depends on
maintaining the irresolvable rift between sincerity and insincerity.
She consequently has no qualms about letting the entire second
act (which deals with Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel's "curative"
encounters with Faustus and other male figures) become a wonderfully
hammy set-piece for Valk. Valk sits center stage the entire time,
poised between pillows and framed by metal poles, talking by turns
neutrally, snidely and conspiratorially in a dewdrop Betty-Boop
voice to a microphone outfitted with a viper's head, the viper
speaking back to her in the hilarious, ventriloquist-dummy voice
of John Collins.
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,
as it happens, has been something of a rite of passage among American
avant-gardists: Robert Wilson directed it in 1992, Richard Foreman
in 1982, Larry Kornfeld in 1979 (with the Judson Poet's Theater),
and Judith Malina in 1951 (the first production of The Living
Theater). Unfortunately, I saw none of these versions. I have,
however, seen eight or ten other Stein productions (including
Wilson's Four Saints in Three Acts and an expensive German
version of Faustus), most of which were unbearably tedious,
providing me many hours to ponder why this author's particular
playfulness is so hard to get right onstage. Stein's ideas and
insights about language and theater are no more or less difficult
to apprehend, in the end, than those of any other fiercely idiosyncratic
modernist, such as Joyce, Beckett or Artaud.
The problem, I think, is the blandness
and sleepiness in her writing, rooted in her sing-songy nursery-rhyme
cadences and simple reiterative vocabulary, which was always controversial
and hasn't aged at all well in the info age. The deadliest equation,
in my experience, is Stein paired with a director (such as Wilson)
who tries to superimpose a differently faux-naive performance
idiom and ends up with a mixture of two flavorless liquids. The
best, as LeCompte brilliantly demonstrates, is the director whose
street-smarts tell her when to walk away and where to go.
