Il n' y a
pas de hors-texts
Jacques
Derrida, De la Grammatologie
Life [... ] is an experience we share with
others
Charles
Mee, Big Love
I: Despite (or because of)
the political, technological and other radical changes in our postmodern times,
theatre artists from all over the world still turn
to the Greek classics, perhaps more frequently than any of their predecessors,
with a variety of motives.[1]
Some are attracted by the material or
the character of the original which in many cases has led to a new version, a
self standing work.Others are tempted by the possibilities of restoring the
original vision and effect of a play which they deem to have become obscured or
distorted (Innes 248, 249). Their
claim is that no matter how timely some of the classical themes appear to be,
the passage of time and social change inevitably leave their mark. As Peter Sellars
claims, prefacing the run of his Gulf War adaptation of Aeschylus' The
Persians
(1993), "a classic is a house we' re still living in. And as with any old
house, you're going to fix it up and add a new wing. It's not an exhibit. It's
meant to be lived in, and not admired" (in Lahr 103). Which means that to
make this old house a home to reflect the social, political and aesthetic
parameters of the contemporary, it takes redecorating, repainting,
refashioning, new mirrors, new sofas, new sound and lighting systems, new
words, high tech gadgets and spectacular iconography, popular and high culture
(Green 173).
Charles Mee is one of those
tenants who has no problems redecorating and refashioning an old house in order
to give it a new relevance. His whole oeuvre is based on the belief that
"There is no such a thing as an original play [....] culture writes us
first, and then we write our stories" (2004: 2). I know of no other
playwright who, in this day of controversy over copyright law violation,
invites his readers to visit his website (www.panix.com/-meejr), take his texts
and "cut them up, rearrange them, rewrite them, throw things out, put
things in, do whatever you like with them; and then please, put your own name
to the work that results."
II: Charles Mee (born in 1938
in Evanston, IL) began flirting with writing after contracting polio as a
teenager, an event that turned him from a 160-pound football player to a
90-pound invalid. While in the hospital, one of his teachers brought him a copy
of Plato's Symposium which, as he confesses in his memoir A Nearly Normal Life, resulted in a change to his plans for the future. He
writes: "As I lay in bed, I had come to understand that whatever vague
plans I may once have had to make my way in the world with my body were now
useless. Henceforth, I would have to use my head. And my head was empty. And so
I filled it with Plato [....] Before I could hold a book with all my fingers, I
had read all of Plato" (1999: 32).
His first plays were
performed at the Writers' Stage Company (Constantinople Smith. Anyone!
Anyone!,
1962), at the old La MaMa in its earliest days at Saint Mark's Church in the
Bowery (The Gate, 1963), at Café Cino, among other non commercial places. In the mid-Sixties
he had become increasingly caught up in anti-Vietnam activities which, as he
says, "led to political act, which led to political writing, which led to
historical writing" (2002: 102). He spent the next twenty years writing
political history books that "were essentially about the behavior of
America in the world and how that came home to damage life and politics in
America" (Mee 2002: 102) ―The Ohio Gang 1980, The End of Order 1980, Meeting at Potsdam 1974, Erasmus 1971, to mention a select
few. In 1982 he decided to go back to writing theatre, which for him meant to
write what he felt was true and what felt good to him, hoping that it might
feel good to someone else (Mee 2002: 102).
His first play came out two
years later ―The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador (in Wordplays, PAJ Publications). In
1986 he had his first major production at the Public Theatre with the play Vienna:
Lusthaus
(Obie Award for Best Play). In the years to follow Mee wrote sixteen more
plays,[2]
some based on Greek myths,[3]
others on European and American literary and political history,[4]
others on love (chiefly Big Love, First Love
and
True Love.), which, as one of his directors, Matthew Wilder, admits, fly so low
beneath the accepted radar that no conventional means seem adequate to decipher
them (41).
The idea of Elaine Scarry
that a body in pain tends to resist linear logic and neat structures (4, 9),
applies here. Mee makes the connection between the body of his writing (the
semantics of his dramatic performance) and the materiality of his (suffering)
body this way. "When I had polio my life changed in an instant and
forever. My life was not shaped by Freudian psychology; it was shaped by a
virus. And it was no longer well made. It seemed far more complex a project
than any of the plays I was seeing. And so, in my own work, I've stepped
somewhat outside the traditions of American theatre in which I grew up to find
a kind of dramaturgy that [would make me feel at home], welcome and happy and
sane and not judged wanting" (in Erin Mee 93, 97).
Inventive, joyous,
downright entertaining, subversive, exceedingly clever, thrillingly
unpredictable, insanely discursive, provocative, poetic, highly theatrical,
political, these are only a few of the terms used by critics to describe the
work of this historian-turned-playwright for whom the causal constructions and
positivist explanations of standard historical discourse leave much to be
desired. The invented or constructed and the "found" or evidential
are always a matter of dispute or interpretation, an idea that seems to be in
accord with what Hayden White writes in his Tropics of Discourse (1978), that historical
narratives are verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as
found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in
literature than they have with those in the sciences; hence, the deliberate
"messiness" and undisguised arbitrariness of his plays, where the
most unexpected people (and their stories) compete for our attention and
assent. Legendary figures, poets, politicians (The War to End War, Berlin
Circle),
embittered homosexuals, Mexican pistoleros, negroes castrated in their cradle
by rat bites, Choruses by Third World women making computer components or
leaping, shouting and clapping to Zulu Jive music, classical heroes in standard
State Department pin-striped suits (TheTrojan Women), Butof performers, animal
trainers, operatic singers from South America, Japan, Indonesia or China, a
transvestite Dionysus in a white pleated linen skirt, combat boots and a gold
cigarette holder, old liberals (who speak well and truly, with understanding
and tolerance) like Tiresias and Kadmos in gray Brooks Brothers suits and
flamboyant saffron ties (The Bacchae), a quadriplegic Herodotus, a dwarf or double
amputee Thucydides, an epileptic Hesiod (Agamemnon), Electra in an Armani
outfit and Helen of Troy in a canary yellow Chanel suit, who loves to exfoliate
her face once a week with a product that contains oatmeal, honey, and nuts, and
who later on appears in the form of a giant blow-up fuck-me doll, Pylades in a
Jean Paul Gautier suit with silver threads, with earrings and Gitanes
cigarettes, and Apollo with the voice of the current American president (Orestes). This is a representative
sample of the people who inhabit Mee's recontextualized schizoid stage worlds
which, as he himself admits, are not "too neat, too finished, too
presentable. They are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with
things that take sudden turns," filled with people who have been excluded
from the mainstream and now have a platform from which to speak. And that feels
good, he admits, it feels like life in postmodern America ―with all its
"shocking and pleasing and disturbing juxtapositions" (in Wren 58).[5]
In his Poetics Aristotle observes that
drama arises from "the instinct of imitation" (55). In their own
way(s), Mee's collage plays are also involved in a mimetic enterprise. Only
this time, and within the postmodern cultural field with its simultaneous and
contradictory stimuli, with its oppositions and destabilizing flux, the real
and the original are differently defined. The arbitrariness of language
together with the division that it
creates between the real and our interpretation of it, forms a sea of
intercultural and intertextual surfaces, a dazzling pastiche of original and
recycled material, sublime and vulgar at the same time, historical and
mythological, that coexist and interpenetrate, providing a multiplicity of
vision ―as opposed to the unity of vision and coherence of action in classical
plays― that capitalizes on our practised ability to absorb simultaneous stimuli
that call attention to themselves as text and rhetoric. In other words, the
particles that cram together to make up Mee's cultural and dramatic
recombinations, retain their own form while participating in the active process
that constitutes the work in its totality. This is the new
"coherence" that Mee puts forward to replace the old one.
As in much recent American
literature, Mee makes it obvious that transcedental guarantees of truth and
oneness are dead. Truth appears to be the product of the struggle of local
narratives vying with one another for legitimation. People are not formed just
by the domestic forces Freud attempted to explain, Mee argues, but also, and
more importantly, by history and culture (2003: 2). As he writes in his Orestes, "The nation
inscribes itself in the body [...] the human body opens itself and allows the
nation to be registered in the wound [....] the nation is embodied in the
gestures and the postures, the customs and behavior of its citizens" (57). What
he likes about the work of the Athenian tragedians is that they "Take no
small problem [....] unlike so much drama on television, where there 's a small
misunderstanding at the top of the hour that you know is going to be resolved
[....] The Greeks start with matricide, fratricide; here's the raw material,
now make a civilization out of THIS!" (2003: 2).
III: If in Science Fiction the
present is read through the future and the two, in effect, become one and the
same, in the case of Big Love , or, The Wedding of the Millennium ―that premiered at the
Actors' Theatre of Louisville in the 24th Humana Festival of New American
Plays, in 2000, directed by Les Waters, and later on toured to the Berkeley
Repertory Theatre, Long Wharf in New Haven, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, ACT
in Seattle, the Woolly Mammoth in DC, and the Next Wave Festival at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music― the present of a "Deleuze-like schiz-out"
late- Capitalist America (Wilder 1994: 42) is read through the unified
extremeness, richness and complexity of the past. The result is another
"scizzy meltdown of all boundaries" (Wilder 43).
Mee's starting point is
Aeschylus' play, The Suppliants, the oldest extant text in drama history (possibly
463 B.C), the first part of an incomplete trilogy (the other two parts being Aegyptii and Danaides)[6]
that tells the story of the fifty virginal Danaids who, to avoid marrying
against their wishes, flee Egypt and seek refuge in Argos, the homeland of
their ancestress Io, where they ask for king Pelasgus' protection. Confronted
by the unexpected geographical (re)location of the daughters of Danaus―who will
later on succeed him as king of Argos― the king hesitates for he knows that if
Argos gives them sanctuary, the sons of Aegyptus and all their followers will
attack the city and then his fellow citizens will tell him that he
"destroyed Argos for the sake of foreigners" (l. 402). "What can
I do?," he wonders, "I fear either to act, or not to act"(l.
379). He does not know whether to honor the right of sanctuary even at the cost
of war, or to reject his suppliants and see the altars of his gods polluted
with their blood. In the end he
turns for help to the people, the collective power of the demos. It is the first time ever
that there is any reference to a "popular government," to people as
the rulers of the polis. The principle behind it is that those affected by the
decision should also decide on what is to be done.[7]
Aeschylus is obviously
concerned about the exercise of power: Where does it reside? In law, in the
people, in mutual accord, in sweet persuasion [petho], in domination, brutal
violence, in marriage (Vernant 1981: 15)? To what extent are the people's
comments true when they tell their King (their anax), that he is "the
State," the "unquestioned ruler" that fears "no vote"
(l. 72-4)? What is the role of reason in decision-taking and in ruling?
Issues of nationality,
religion, body politics, love and sexuality, society and individual decision,
are all inextricably interwoven. For example, the women's decision to run away
may be an affair of the family, but, as it turns out, the state also becomes
involved. By offering them sanctuary, Pelasgus brings them inside the polis,
just as marriage brings them
inside their husband's house. As the husbands take on the role of guardians,
the King and his citizens guarantee the Danaids' protection (Zeitlin 136-42).
Mee picks up the body of
the old play and its basic issues and disembodies them, wrecks them, reduces
them to rubble, and then goes on to fabricate "a new play in that bed of
ruins, so that the new play somehow is informed by that history and by that
ruined structure, and that it really is a new play" (Mee 2003: 2). The
Derridean différance is at work here; the gap that comes to exist in this activity of mediation
between the old text and the new. It is this différance that serves to create the
impression of the full presence of the old text and also, paradoxically and
ironically, to maintain its absence.
IV: Instead of fifty brides and
grooms, we now have three men and three women, whom we are invited to see as
rhetorical surfaces rather than real figures in whose suffering we are invited
to take interest (Fuchs 105). What they say does not give the impression that
it comes from within; how they say it does not tempt us to start peeling off
the layers to discover the
underlying psychological motivating force that explains everything they do (in Erin Mee 89).
It is obvious that Mee wants to remove our focus of attention from the
character as an irreducible essence, to the inadequacy of the concept of
character, to a recognition of subjectivity as the product of a relational
system which is finally that of discourse itself.
It is midsummer evening, at
"the long golden twilight" (Big Love 224). The sweet and earnest
Lydia unceremoniously enters in a crumpled white wedding dress, looking
somewhat disoriented (223); she strips and plunges into a bathtub.[8]
Then, accompanied by wedding processional music
(Mozart), her two sisters follow wearing bridal dresses as well and dragging an
impressive eight-piece matching set of luggage. The perky and materialistic
Olympia, who carries along with her the broken heel of her shoe, her Oil of
Olay Moisturizing Wash, her John Frieda Sheer Blonde Shampoo, her Estée Lauder
and Uplift Eyecream, and hopes for a wedding dress from Monique Lhuillier but all she can find
is an Alvina Valenta not even a Vera Wang (276), and last but not least the
feminist Thyona, who always strikes back whenever she is threatened.
They have escaped Greece
and are now in Italy where they seek refuge at a luxurious villa facing the
Mediterranean Sea owned by Piero. Upon their arrival they run into "an
agreeable, weak and useless" (223) transvestite, Giuliano,[9]
who has a collection of Barbies and Kens and to whom Lydia confesses that they
are looking for asylum so that they won't have to marry their cousins.
Giuliano: You want to be taken in
as immigrants?
Lydia: As refugees.
Giuliano: Refugees.
Lydia: Yes.
Giuliano: From...
Lydia: From Greece.
Giuliano: I mean, from, you know:
political oppression, or
war...
Lydia: Or kidnapping. Or rape.
Giuliano: From rape.
Lydia: By our cousins.
Giuliano: Well, marriage really.
Lydia: Not if we can help it.
(226-27)
Mee does not explain on
what basis their claim is based ―nor indeed all the circumstances which led up
to the flight and the pursuit. We are simply told that their father signed a
wedding contract with their Greek cousins who
went from Greece to
America,
and now they're rich
and they think they can
come back
and take whatever they
want. (234)
By maintaining the rather
deliberate obscurity of Aeschylus on the matter, Mee helps us concentrate on
the violence of the pursuit itself and the loathing which it engenders. The
violence of the pursuers puts them in the wrong; they are guilty of hubris, and their victims deserve
the pity of the locals. Yet Piero, like his prototype Pelasgus, hesitates to
help. He claims that he is not the
"Red Cross" and that he can't take in every refugee who comes into
his garden and turn his home into a "camp [...] full of Kosovars and Ibo
and Tootsies/ boat people from China and godknows whatall" (2000: 235).
And what will happen, he wonders, if the grooms come back and accuse him of
abducting their women and threaten to shoot him if he does not give them back?
(236)
Lydia may consider all
these a matter of right and wrong, of justice, but not rational Piero, who
looks at the world as a very complicated powerhouse that crushes the weak
(236). He does not have the slightest doubt that, no matter what they really
want to do, in the end they will marry their cousins. Their course of action is
already carved out, mediated within the present power structure that leaves
them with no choice since no one would dare protect them, for no one is willing
to put his home and family at risk
(272).
Mee deliberately turns his
heroines' bodies into a site of conflicting languages of power. He adopts the
victim's position and shows that the will to exercise power jeopardizes
humanitarian egalitarianism. Constantine, one of the grooms, is a case in point
when he warns that he will have his bride if he has to have her arms tied
behind her back and dragged to him.
After all
[...] People are taken
against their will every day.
[....]Tomorrow will take
today by force
whether you like it or not.
Time itself is an act of
rape.
Life is rape. (243)
And when Olympia reminds
him that they have an uncle in Italy that will take care of him, or that what
he is claiming is no different than it would be if they were lying in their
beds and soldiers came through the door and took whoever it was they wanted
(273),[10]
he is quick to answer back that he is an American citizen now, that he is not
afraid of her uncle and advises her to watch television to see "what
happens when Americans want something" (243).
Constantine never questions
the moral dimensions of his views. He feels excused by the discourse that has
been made around his actions, demonstrating the Foucauldean episteme of our
age. He is another typical Mee character "through whom the culture speaks,
often without knowing it" (2004: 2). By interconnecting discourse and
power Constantine makes, rather than persuades (petho),[11]
Olympia see that refusal to submit (like refusal to court in the proper manner)
implies an active desire for conflict ―an idea we first encounter in the
original text where, as Zeitlin
observes, "whether verbal, political, or sexual, warfare is always the
medium" (1996: 139). Force is the only guise under which marriage presents
itself to the modern Danaids, as an act comparable to the preying of bird on bird,
an occasion for fear and resistance.
Constantine's abusive
discourse of violence provokes the angry response of Thyona, who, speaking from
the victim's position, analyses power from bottom up and not simply as an
imposition of the interests of the class above. Addressing her sisters, she
asks:
What choice do you have
if your father won't
protect you
the law will not protect
you
you flee to another country
and some man will not
protect you
what is left?
Thyona feels that the men's
discourse helps create the subordinate identities of those who are excluded
from participating in it. And so, to the question "what is left?",
she answers,
Nothing except to protect
yourself
We have no country.
We have become our own
country now
where we make the laws
ourselves
[...] these men who left us
no choice
these men who force
themselves on us
we will kill them
one by one
[...] Not one groom will
live through his wedding night,
not one.
Are we agreed? (273-4)
Her language suggests a
horror of male contact in any form. The violent approach of the grooms has
turned her against marriage as such and men in particular. For her
The male is a biological
accident
an incomplete female
the product of a damaged gene
a half-dead lump of flesh
trapped in a twilight zone somewhere between apes and humans
always looking obsessively
for some woman. (239)
Thyona's radical reaction
is very revealing regarding body politics, politics of difference and the power
game they involve. She embraces a deconstructive, separatist attitude which
shows that, however regrettably, violence can only breed violence, that the
victims of violence can become violent agents and that hubris can breed hubris
―an idea first encountered in The Suppliants, where, for all their claims
of sophrosene, the Danaids show a capacity for violence. "MEN," Mee's Thyona
cries,
You think you can do
whatever you want with me, think again.
you think that I'm so
delicate?
you think you have to care
for me?
[....] you think I need a
man to save my life?
[....] These men can fuck
themselves
These men are leeches
these men are parasites
these rapists
these politicians
these Breadwinners.
(244-45)
"Boy babies should be
flushed down the toilet at birth" (2000: 239),[12]
she angrily says, to which Lydia answers back:
There are places in the
world
where refugees are taken in
out of generosity
and often these are men who
do the taking in
because people have the capacity for goodness
and there could be a world where people care for one another
where men are good to women
and there is not a men's history
and a separate women's history but a human history. (239-40)
The dramatic situation that
Mee creates is choreographed like the World Wrestling Federation; it is
"spoken" physically, through gesture and body movement. As Erin Mee
explains, "[her] father writes text for performance in which what he has
written will be a fraction of the total experience. He sets up a situation that
requires the director, in turn, to elaborate on what he has written"
(2002: 85). In Big Love the
brides slam to the wrestling mat, writhing and tumbling in hysterical and
hilarious fashion, as they try to vent their rage and frustration. It is the
kind of choreography that indirectly brings to mind the story of the brides'
ancestress Io who, stung into maddened flight by a gadfly (oistros) and compelled to wander
like a maenad over a vast geographical expanse, captures the strange
contradictions of the critical moment when the maiden, like the young animal,
is yet untamed (Zeitlin 154).
The grooms, on the other
hand, stomp, jump and berate women for their expectations of men until they are
exhausted. Both sides claim their territory and make their physical presence
felt in a way that is as grotesque as it is bloody, sentimental as it is very
physical and cruel, a maddening interplay that invites us to read one text through another,
"however fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship may
be" (Owens 73), to see all the larger forces of history, politics,
economics, all constituents of culture, that condition people's lives and their
behavior. Constantine foregrounds this idea of the construction of the
subject-self as fiction when he
describes gender role playing in these words:
Girls are socialized
so they want a man to be
older
take charge
[...] a boy wants a girl
she plays hard to get
a boy learns to
talk big
[...] not take the answer
no
look for younger women
[....] People think
it's hard to be a woman;
but it's not easy
to be a man,
the expectations people
have
that a man should be a
civilized person [....} (264, 265,
266)
Mee brings to us male and
female selfhoods with their cultural, ethnic and gendered characteristics that
predetermine their subject positions within discourse. Culture always turns out to be much bigger than
them. Lydia is the only one who is ready to try and overcome embodied
differences and thus liberate herself from this rather pessimistic
preconditioning in order to achieve better human relations. Like Emily in
Thornton Wilder's Our Town, she reconsiders the value of life and concludes that
the most important thing is to "get along with each other [....] to know
what it is/to live life on earth" and that "true love has no
conditions" (261). Thus, when her sisters
pull out kitchen knives and murder their husbands, one by one, all of them
splashing their white wedding dress with blood, she and Nikos are off to one
side making love. For the first time sexual desire presents itself not as a
brutal rape, but as a persuasive and enchanting courtship. In her mind love
outweighs all, it is the highest law, but not for Thyona of course, who
continues to disagree, not because she is incapable of loving but because she
feels that:
You can't love a person in
this world
when everyone else might be
hurt, or worse
choose your selfish choice
and let everyone else go to
hell.
[...] in the real world
if there is no justice
there can be no love
because there can be no
love
that is not freely offered
and it cannot be free
unless every person has
equal standing
and so
the first order of business
is to make a just society. (281, 282-83)
Where Thyona cannot live in
a world with no justice, Lydia cannot
imagine herself living in a world "where it is not possible to love
another person" (282). Approaching the end, "the close-knit family
bond displayed at the opening of the play is ultimately torn by strife and
difference" (Hopkins and Orr 18). Lydia distances herself from the
oppositional character of her sisters' thought and opts for a more unifying
framework of belief. In Aeschylus we do not know how Hypermestra was treated
for her disobedience. Was she brought to trial? And if yes, by whom? Danaus?
The polis?[13] In Mee's play we are told that Lydia is
put on trial and Bella, the matriarch (Piero's mother), is assigned to deliver
the verdict. She says:
[...] You did a dreadful
thing, you women, when you killed these men
[...]And yet [...] what
else could you have done?
You came to us [...]
and we failed you.
We share the blame with
you.
[....] And yet,
you can't condemn your
sister
[....]
She chose love
[...]
For we all live together
and come to embrace
the splendid variety of
life on earth
[...]
take it for what it is: the
glory of life
[...]
For the sake of healing
for the sake of life itself
for life to go on
there will be no justice.
(285-86)
In their
analysis of the play, Hopkins and Orr choose to underline the political
overtones of Mee's ending by claiming that Bella's "ruling makes clear the
inadequacy of any mere court decision in the face of destruction and loss of
life, as well as the difficulty of resolving a scenario which, in different
forms, continues to play out in Europe and the Middle East [...] What is, for a
comfortable Western reader or theatregoer, a set of contemporary reference
points applied to the appropriation of a classic text is for others a vivid and
deadly-serious reflection of their own lives. Though it begins as a playfully
postmodern wedding-gone-horribly-wrong, Big Love becomes the
arena for a debate over real-world questions: Is the absence of justice the
same as injustice? Must we choose between a justice that perpetuates division,
hate, and war and an injustice that leads to peace and reconciliation?"
(18). Hopkins and Orr are right in posing all these rhetorical questions. Mee's
colorful, wild spectacle in the end, designed to provide the appropriate
context for the exit of Lydia and Nikos, does not submit to the seductions of
the imagery of the resolution of conflicts, of completed patterns. The dialogue
is kept open and invites the audience to ask whether history is evidence of who and how we are and what
we do in an age that instead of remembering loves lethe, or judge
whether Lydia is guilty, whether eros and understanding are still possible,
what authority is, that of man over woman, of husband over wife, of Chief of
State over citizens, of the city over stranger? Love or death, or love and
death? Whose power is inscribed on whose body? The final text is constructed by
the viewer and the free play of imagination. Meaning or lack of it become the
property of the interpreter, the one to answer the question whether people can
still love each other, live together and prosper.
V: In Big Love Mee comes to repeat what he
says in one of his earlier plays, Orestes: to put a nice face on things does not make
them into good things, to speak nicely does not imply a nice person (Orestes 48). One
has to make use of his/her heart. "Of all human qualities, the greatest is
sympathy," he writes in Big Love
(Big Love 287). To be a human being one
has to relate with others no matter what their faults are. And if, in the end, the wedding has any
meaning at all, it lies in its symbolic connotations: a stage icon of people's
innermost urge to celebrate in an old fashioned ceremony in a church they
probably no longer believe in what they feel deep inside. As Bella says,
"If we cannot embrace another/ what hope do we have of life?/ What hope is
there to survive at all?" (2000: 286). After all, "We've done a lot
of violence to the snivelling tendencies in our natures," Mee writes in
his Orestes; "What we need now are some strong, straightforward actions that
you'd have to be a fool not to learn the wrong lessons from it [...]. Everyman must
shout: there's a great destructive work to be done. We're doing it!" (Orestes 79).
Big
Love is a play written by a
playwright who believes that, although we are made up of heterogeneous codes,
we can still strive for an autonomy of a classically liberal kind that would
help downplay the seemingly irreconcilable differences of identity between individuals (and nations) and
help build a sense of (universal) community. As mentioned earlier, Mee did not
turn to the Greeks by accident. He felt that they "had a larger understanding
of what makes human beings human, and so their plays prepare their people to
live their lives, to be conscious beings, clearheaded, able to understand what
it is to have life on earth." This insight is what really tempted Mee to
use them as a model for his own work (in Volansky 26). The words of Hesiod in
his Agamemnon I think provide an appropriate finale to this paper:
Nothing
human is forever,
everything
perishes;
except the
human heart
that has
the capacity to remember
and the
capacity to say
never
again
or
forever.
And so it
is
that our
own hearts
and
nothing else
are the
final arbiters
of what it
is
to be human.
WORKS CITED
Aeschylus. The
Suppliants. Trans. Philip Vellacott. London: Penguin Books,1961.
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. S. H. Butcher. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1961.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing
and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge, 1978.
Fuchs, Elinor. The Death
of Character. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.
Hopkins, D. J. and Shelley
Orr. "It's a Nightmare Really: The Radical Appropriations of Charles L.
Mee." Theatreforum 18
(2001): 12-9.
Green, Amy S. The
Revisionist Stage: American Directors Reinvent the Classics. New York: Cambridge UP,
1994.
Innes, Christopher.
"Introduction: Remaking Modern Classics." Modern Drama 43. 2 (2000): 248-351.
Kitto, H. D. F. Greek
Tragedy. New York: Doubleday, 1954.
Lahr, John. "Inventing
the Enemy." Review of The Persians. Dir. by Peter Sellars. New Yorker, October 18 (1993): 103-6.
Mee, Charles. Orestes. In: Performing Arts
Journal 45
(1993): 29-79.
--------------. A Nearly
Normal Life: A Memoir. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1999.
--------------. Big Love. In: Humana Festival. Eds. Michael Bigelow Dixon
and Amy Wagener. New Hampshire: A Smith and Kraus Book, 2000. 219-90.
--------------. Interview. Wilmabill
(February
/March 2003): 2-3.
--------------. Interview. Wilmabill
(March/April
2004): 1-3.
Mee, Erin. "Mee on
Mee: Shattered and Fucked Up and Full of Wreckage." The Drama
Review 46 . 3 (2002): 83-104.
Owens, Craig. "The Allegorical
Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism." October 13 (1980): 67-86.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body
in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
Vernant, J. P., and P.
Vidal-Naquet. Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece. Trans. J. Lloyd. Atlantic
Highlands, N.J. 1981.
Volansky, Michele.
"Forces of History." Interview With Charles Mee. Theatreforum 14 (1999): 25-6.
White, Hayden. The
Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1978.
Wilder, Matthew.
"Fantasizing About Chuck Mee." Theatreforum 5 (1994): 41-3.
Winnington-Ingram, R. P. Studies
in Aeschylus. London: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Wren, Celia. "Combines
in Red." American Theatre (September 2001): 58.
Zeitlin, Froma. Playing
the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: The U of Chicago
P, 1996.
[1]* I would like to thank my colleague Ruth Parkin
Gounelsa for reading the paper and making useful suggestions.
See H.
Cixous' and Ola Rotimi's use of the Oedipus story, Kamau Brathwaite's Ghanan,
Mac Wellman's American and Athol Fugard's South African Antigones, Wole
Soyinka's Nigerian Bacchae, Guy
Butler's South African, Christa Wolf's German and Oscar van Woensel's Dutch
Medeas, M. Yurcenar's French Clytemnestra, among others.
[3] Requiem
for the Dead (based on the fragments of Sophocles' lost plays), Orestes (1992, first directed by Tina Landau and staged at
the American Repertory Theatre), The Bacchae (1993, first directed by Brian Kulick and produced
at the Mark Taper Forum's Festival in Los Angeles), Agamemnon , based on Euripides and Berlioz's Les
Troyens (1994, first directed by Brian Kulick and produced
by the Actors' Gang in Los Angeles), TheTrojan Women: A Love Story (1996, directed by Tina Landau and produced by En
Garde Arts in New York), Big Love (2000, Humana Festival).
[4] The War to
End War (1993, directed by Matthew
Wilder, Sledgehammer Theatre, San Diego), The Imperialists at the Club Cave
Canem (1988, directed by Erin Mee
and produced at HOME and at the Public Theatre in New York), The Berlin
Circle (based on Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1998―retitled in 2000 as Full Circle, directed by Tina Landau and produced at
Steppenwolf), bobrauschenbergamerica (2001), among others.
[5] His comments
on the structuring of the text of his Orestes are a telling example of his pastiche method. "This piece was composed the way Max Ernst
made his Fatagaga [an abbreviation for "fabrication de tabéaux garantis
gazométriques"] series of pictures after World War I, so that passages of
the play were inspired by or taken from twentieth-century texts by Apollinaire,
William Burroughs, Cindy, Bret Easton Ellis, John Wayne Gacy, Mai Lin, Elaine
Scarry, Roberto Mangabereira Unger, Vogue, and Soap Opera Digest" (1993:
29).
A similar note also accompanies his Agamemnon, where he admits that some of the texts were
inspired or taken from the works of Hesiod, Herodotus, Thucydides, Homer,
Aeschylus, Artemidorus, The Book of Revelations, Philip Vellacott, Slavenka
Drakulic, Zlatko Dizdarevic, Zbigneiw Herbert, Pierre Klossowski, Georges
Bataille, Sei Shonagon, and Hannah Arendt. And for his Bacchae we read that the text "has been based on, or
taken in part from, among others, Euripides, Georges Bataille, Klaus Theweleit,
Wilhelm Stekel, 'insane' texts from the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg,
Valerie Solanas΄s SCUM Manifesto,
Joan Nestle's Femme-Butch texts, Pat Califia, Jeanne Cordova, Barbara Duden,
Mary Maclane, Aimable Jayet, Slei Shonaon."
[6] There are
different versions of the story in circulation, yet it is Aeschylus in The
Suppliants itself who gives us the
primary evidence. It was customary for Aeschylus to introduce his main themes
in the first part of the trilogy and develop them in the other two. We see this
in his Oresteia and it is
reasonable to assume that he used similar methods in the Danaid trilogy and
that themes which are developed in The Supplicants were taken up and developed further in the
succeeeding plays (Winnington-Ingram 56). In the missing two-thirds of the
trilogy, the myth says that the 50 grooms catch up with the Danaids, their
father Danaus secretly provides them with a dagger and instructs them to kill
their husbands on their wedding night, which they do, with the exception of one
who is put on trial for betraying the trust of her sisters.
[7] We
are not to suppose, of course, Kitto argues, "that any and every decision
has to be ratified by the Argive assemply [....] This decision is so serious
and so unusual that the people, traditionally quick to blame (l. 485), would
have every reason to disobey. Pelasgus is the Homeric King who knows how far he
should go. The reference to the people is a means of emphasizing the
seriousness of the dilemma" (10-1).
[8] In Aeschylus
we read that the maidens also enter "Unheralded, unsponsored, without
friend or guide" (l. 240).
[9] In the original
story, the first person they encounter is the King himself, who greets them as
strangers, due to their "barbaric gowns [....] How can/ A race like yours be
Argive? You resemble rather/ Lidyans―certainly not women of our country"
(l. 237, 275-77).
[10] The image of
the woman as property, as a subjected subject, is stressed in all of Mee's
adaptations of classical myths.
[11] Petho-Persuasion,
the mediator between two opposing
groups or points of view that implies an effort made by one to identify with
the other. It admits the dynamic principle of compromise that accepts dialogue
between two sides. An aspect absent from Mee's play, yet very important in
Aeschylus where the city of Athens rests on the dialogue between fixed values
and the dynamic power of persuasion and mediation. At the same time, however,
the suppliant women personify something else: they are mediators between two
cultures. Their role as suppliants, like the herald, is a way to import or
adopt alien others into one's own society. The question in Aeschylus's
play is how will the city
"socialize" its virgin suppliants and persuade them to marry?
Marriage is designed to tame and civilize the female partner. It is the last
stage for an astoxenos
(resident alien), to become a metoikos, and finally a citizen-wife of the Thesmophoreia (Zeitlin 135-36).
[12] One
finds similar thoughts in Requiem for the Dead ("O mortal and miserable race
of men walking about as a superfluous burden upon the earth") and The
Trojan Women ("Men
should be extinguished [...] crushed and stepped on, utterly
extinguished"). Mee's heroines appear as a collective at odds with those
in power.
[13] On the
grounds of the few lines we have from the missing Aeschylean Danaides, where Aphrodite appears and delivers a speech
which proclaims the universal power of sexual love, we could assume that she
spoke in Hypermestra's defence and that Hypermestra was on trial. What is left
in the air is the fate of the other women. We have no exodos of the Chorus―it
prays to Zeus asking him to save them "from cruel subjection to a man
[they] hate" and "grant victory to the woman's cause" (l. 1064-1067) ― yet we can assume that in the end we have
reconciliation, their reconciliation to marriage. It was the function of
Aphrodite to reconcile them, as it was the function of Athena to reconcile the
Furies. And the lines that we have are part of her attempt to persuade them. If
this view is correct, the trilogy ends as it began with the attitude of the
Danaids to marriage, but this time with a conversion.
