57. THE
DESIGNATED MOURNER
There
is some very interesting chatter going on in the Shiva Theatre, on the first
floor of the Public Theatre. The chatter is embedded in, or should I say
embodies most of, THE DESIGNATED MOURNER, Wallace Shawn’s play, which
originally was staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1996, had its New York
premiere in a South William Street venue seating only 20, and, with the same
three actors from that production, is now being revived in front of 99. The play
is in two acts, and, the night I saw it, enough people to fill all the seats at
the 2000 performance had departed after the first act, which lasts about an
hour and 45 minutes. Even before that, after only half an hour or so, two men
clomped out noisily, making me wonder if Mr. Shawn, watching them go from his
seat on stage in the role of Jack, might offer some comment, much as he had
when a couple of latecomers arrived about 10 minutes into the show. He told
those people not to be too concerned, that nothing much had happened, and that
he’d merely been talking about this and that to the audience before they
arrived. No one else came late, but had they, even toward the end of the
three-hour performance, Mr. Shawn could almost as easily have said the same
thing, i.e., that nothing much had happened and he’d merely been talking to the
audience about this and that. But therein lies the rub, since you must pay
attention in order to appreciate that more than this and that is being said. The
problem is that the style of the writing and performance can easily deter the
kind of strict attention the material requires.
THE DESIGNATED MOURNER does have a
plot, more or less, and concerns three people living in an unnamed country,
possibly Latin American, under a dictatorial rule. The political activities in
the background are never made precisely clear. When the conservative government
begins to fear an uprising by guerrilla forces, it purges thousands of citizens,
imprisoning and executing many intellectuals, regardless of how tenuous their relationship
to the rebels. Jack is a disaffected English professor, his father-in-law is a
noted poet named Howard (Larry Pine), who wrote on politics in his youth, and then
there is Jack’s ghostlike wife, Judy (Deborah Eisenberg), her sharply angled face wearing
eerie whitish makeup with her lips brightly reddened; Jack has cut himself off from Judy and Howard, even
taking up with Peg, a lemonade stand girl. Jack considers Howard a “highbrow”
and fears the elimination of “lowbrow” culture if the revolution succeeds. He
recounts how he expressed his growing disdain for highbrow culture by
defecating on a book of John Donne’s poetry. Howard and Judy meet their demise,
leaving only Jack, who is not unhappy to see their loss and
who remains as the designated mourner, the one who remembers those no
longer with us, in this case the effete artist-intellectuals who did nothing to
assert their responsibility in their oppressive society.
Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg in THE DESIGNATED MOURNER.
Described thusly, the play would seem to demand some
sort of dramatic action, but Shawn deliberately avoids providing it. What we
learn of the political background comes out in long, discursive monologues,
only occasionally broken by flashback conversation, with the characters
speaking, for the most part, directly to the audience. The actors sit in chairs
or on a double bed upstage. Movement is minimal. No one raises their voice, the
tone remains civilized and conversational, and a fundamental sincerity is
conveyed, but never in a confrontational or overtly emotional way. When the
evening ends, if you’ve stuck it out, you may be hard put to isolate clearly
what on earth you’d been listening to for so long. You might take away some
thoughts on complacency in a totalitarian society where the elite are allowed
to survive until they come to be seen as a potential threat; you may wish to
meditate on the difference between highbrow and lowbrow culture, and what this
means for society; you may contemplate the idea of intellectuals struggling unsuccessfully
to stay above the fray in a fascist dictatorship; but no real effort is made to
make this or any other point the play’s driving force. You come to the theatre,
you listen to the chatter, and you go home, either to go over in your mind what
you’ve just experienced or to simply move on to something else. To emphasize
the casual nature of the experience, Mr. Shawn simply walks off through a door
at the end, waving goodbye. He then reappears on the auditorium floor to again
wave the audience home. There is no curtain call.
With three superb actors speaking the words (and Mr.
Pine, Mr. Shawn, and Ms. Eisenberg are definitely that), the majority of them
delivered by the always affably entertaining and incisively acidic Mr. Shawn, there
is definitely enough here for some audiences. Those who saw the earlier New
York performance (with the same cast and director, André Gregory) were reportedly
absorbed in the venue’s living room-like ambience, where they were like guests
invited to share in their hosts’ rambling ruminations. In the larger space of the Shiva, intimate as
it is for most purposes, that sense of communal interplay—at least to someone
who missed the 2000 version—seems lost. The seating is on bleachers, with the all
the chairs covered in white cotton slipcovers, their numbers stenciled on in
black. They face a wide stage on which John Lee Beatty’s set presents walls
painted to resemble concrete slabs, much as in a prison (a motif continued into
the auditorium), and there are doors at both sides of the stage, as well as a window
at stage right suggesting an odd jumble of windowpanes. There are a few pieces
of furniture, dominated by a double bed at center. In one of the few modest
pieces of staging, all three characters sit or lie on the bed, which is where
Howard, presumably ill, remains most of the time. In act two, with Howard gone,
the bed and most other furnishings are piled together under a gray cloth against
the rear wall.
Apparently, to make sure we don’t miss anything, each
actor wears a mic that is placed on him or her by a stage assistant in full
view of the audience. In act two, standing mics are used. The effect may be
intended to heighten the self-dramatization of the speeches, although I did
appreciate the enhanced audibility of the speaking.
To a certain extent, logorrhea can be engrossing when,
as is the case here, what is being said is clever enough, but when the pacing
and performance style resist traditional theatrics over an extended time
period, boredom and restlessness are sooner or later bound to arrive. If your
appetite runs in this direction, you will find enough here to satisfy you. I
was only half-satisfied.
