Odysseys
in America
By Martin Harries
What Ever
By Heather Woodbury
P.S. 122
150 1st Ave.
Box Office: (212) 477-5288
"Long ago, in the early 1990s" — to quote
the play at hand -- I was teaching A Midsummer Night's Dream
and joked offhandedly that we should make a concerted effort to
reintroduce one of Bottom's words, "gleek," into American speech.
Several students surprised me by telling me that there was no
need for this quixotic venture: they already used the word to
mean to spit in a particularly impressive way. For a few days
I pursued etymologies, fascinated by what seemed an Elizabethan
survival in the language of my students.
One of the many pleasures of Heather Woodbury's
What Ever is that it imagines a hidden Midsummer
inheritance behind teen lingo, and makes it one of the central
structures of her long solo piece. Language is destiny here, and
the cadences from Midsummer that mark the speech of the
play's young ravers metamorphose into a plot that self-consciously
recalls that of Shakespeare's comedy. Clove, for instance, a character
who begins by appealing to the waves in mock-Shakespearean rhymes
— "And clean from me these drops o' mortal jism/ and pull them
far into earth's liquid schism" — finds herself lost and far from
her friends, riding a sculpture floating through the air that
looks like a Brussels sprout and is meant to resemble female orgasm,
and pairing off with Job, the dead ringer for the boy she loves,
Skeeter. Skeeter, of course, turns out to be her half-brother;
he pairs off with Clove's "best friend and fairest cohort," Sable.
The model for all this pairing off is Midsummer. What
Ever's preposterous plot might go somewhat beyond even Shakespeare's
comedies and romances, but it might also be that it reminds us
of just how preposterous those plots are.
A testament to many of the pleasures and
some of the perils of a certain grand American preposterousness,
What Ever is a curious, hybrid thing. It began, in 1994-95,
as a series of Lower East Side performances — skits, really, though
that word seems taboo — and developed into what is now an intimate
marathon: a solo performance piece in eight sections spread over
four evenings. What Ever is now on a return engagement
at P.S. 122, where its run continues over the next two weekends.
So, a series of performances is now an epic, An American Odyssey
in 8 Acts, the play's subtitle, or a Living Novel,
the curious subtitle of the published text. A note in the program
tells us that Woodbury "actively seeks producers for a film version."
Series of skits, epic, novel, possibly a movie: what ever is What
Ever?
The briefest account of the plot must mention
these interlocking characters: Skeeter, Clove, and Sable, teen
ravers caught in a long-distance erotic triangle; Violet Smith,
aged hipster doyenne who tells tales of New York, Paris, and trans-Atlantic
bohemias; Paul Folsom, disenchanted corporate CEO, who loves Skeeter's
New Ager aunt, Jeanette Gladjnois; Polly Folsom, the bewildered
Southern belle whose marriage to Paul is falling apart and who
has fallen in love with a black repairman, Reuben Scott Clay;
and Bushie, a.k.a.. Mollie Bright, a deliriously profane hooker
who loudly haunts the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood where she grew
up. What Ever brings together the stories of each of
these characters, Bushie's plot being the most tangential to the
others. The play's end is comedy in an old-fashioned style. (Maybe
this is, after all, theater?) Each central character ends with
his or her beloved, while Violet, the single raconteur, blows
her trumpet. She plays, if I heard right, a few bars from Miles
Davis and Gil Evans's "Sketches of Spain," here made
the boho emblem of the love that will overcome. "Must you speak
in verse all the time, deah?" Violet reprimands Clove. "Other
than that you're a perfectly pleasant girl." As if to say: enough
Shakespeare, bring on the jazz.
What Ever's aspiration is to
have both Shakespeare and jazz — or Shakespeare as jazz. Jazz
has the heavy duty, not for the first time, of standing for the
union of all sorts of disparate sources, characters, and strands:
corporate insider and Wiccan priestess; Shakespearean rhythm and
raver argot; improvisational performance and the institutions
of theater, performance, and genre. In one passage, Violet remembers
her desire to create "a room that is like jazz, like jazz itself."
When Cora May, her housekeeper, hears her plan, she replies that
to make such a room would be impossible. "But so is jazz!" replies
Violet.
The acknowledgment of the simultaneous
impossibility and manifest existence of jazz sets up the concluding
moment where Violet plays, impossibly, Miles Davis's trumpet.
(The trumpet was given to her by Sammy Tine, a black jazz musician
who appears at Polly Folsom's concluding "Interracialist" Tupperware
party.) This act of ventriloquism summarizes four evenings of
Woodbury's quite amazing feats of ventriloquism, producing, along
with the voices and gestures of the main characters sketched above,
those of Mexican migrant farm laborers, members of the Lakota
nation, and Puerto Rican teenagers. "Ventriloquism" is perhaps
the wrong word; these are not, in the manner of Anna Deavere Smith's
work, enacted performances of oral testimony. As the Shakespearean
resonances suggest, the play as often features invented and highly
stylized argots as it does carefully observed versions of everyday
speech. Inclusion here is not a matter of responsible reporting
and transcription. If anything, What Ever's dramatis
personae recalls the scattered hipster casts of rock and roll,
where Quinn the Eskimo, Crazy Janey and her mission man, and other
spirits in the night appear on the same stage.
But to repeat a refrain: maybe this is,
after all, theater. The artifact What Ever most closely
resembles is that other sprawling, self-consciously "American"
work with a whole set of titles and subtitles, Angels in America:
A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. The parallels are many.
Both contain rattled, verbally unruly central characters who are
haunted: for Prior Walter's angels, What Ever substitutes
none other than the ghost of Kurt Cobain, who occupies Clove,
rattles Violet in a visitation that recalls Prior's first erotic
encounter with an angel, and frightens the farm laborers, Carlito
and Helacio. Both Angels and What Ever include
older female figures, Violet Smith and Ella Harper, who surprisingly
meld with the only superficially hipper younger folk. Both feature
powerful members of the establishment, Paul Folsom and Roy Cohn,
whose fates, surprisingly, become intertwined with those of the
plays' marginalized protagonists. Beyond these connections of
plot, What Ever shares with Angels a utopian
confidence in the theater's ability to represent — and potentially
help create — some alternative America, a counter-nation.
What Ever's image for this alternative
America, a spectacular cross-generational rave, unquestionably
differs from Prior Walter's more somber blessing, but the comparison
of the two works is most telling as a measure of the theatrical
ambition they share. One body, eighty, ninety, one hundred characters!:
This is one way to sum up the terrific ambitions of What Ever,
and Woodbury's remarkable talents and stamina. What unites these
characters is not simply that body on stage. The eight acts and
four evenings and scads of characters are also part of an epic,
"An American Odyssey." This odyssey at once describes Skeeter's
picaresque crisscrossing of the United States and Clove's foray
up the northwest coast, and also the audience's four nights in
the theater: It should be the audience's odyssey and the audience's
America.
As with Angels, the efforts at
performing inclusion to some extent backfire. With the single
and problematic exception of Bushie, who wakes up to the fact
that she is queer late, late in the story, the central and most
vivid figures in What Ever are straight and white. That
Bushie is the exception also draws attention to the autonomy of
her plot; it is the most loosely tied to the rest of the stories,
and in many ways the least convincing. In general, Woodbury's
treatment of those for whom marginalization is not an elective
affinity but a fact of American life is so gingerly as to lead
to a familiar kind of racial sentimentality. The chaotic glee
with which she occupies her raver characters and the good-natured
battiness she bestows on Violet disappear in the sort of genteel
respect one associates with well-meaning entertainments of the
1950s. Reuben Scott Clay, Polly's lover, a powerful man of few
words, recalls Dennis Haysbert's character in Far from Heaven,
but What Ever does not have that film's uncanny distance
from the conventions within which it works. (When Reuben finally
speaks, it's a shock.) Cora Sue, housekeeper as confidante, exists
mostly to listen to Violet's tales. Carlito, whose letters home
to his wife in Mexico we hear, speaks elegiacally but all too
familiarly: "I wish I could be there at the moment to drink a
coffee in the sun and watch your face and neck while outside all
of our little donkeys are braying." This inclusion of familiar
stereotypes feels, on another level, like exclusion.
What Ever, once more like Angels
in America, asks to be judged in the light of its own ambitions
to contain "America," to embody national themes. Its published
form tempts one to think of What Ever as a finished thing;
in performance, however, it remains a work in progress and the
text is still in flux. The manic pleasure with which Woodbury
invests Skeeter or Violet limns a brave new world, a surprising
and compelling counter-public. But what are the limits governing
which bodies Woodbury can anarchically occupy, and which not?
Must these limits, too, follow the color line? The limits of such
imaginative and performative investment are certainly not those
of Woodbury alone. This is American theater, and the failures
of What Ever are far preferable to the timid successes
of ten thousand "well-drawn" plays set in some zone next door
to Friends. I look forward to other, even more capacious
odysseys.
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