The anti-Wellman jihad continues

Yeah yeah, I know, my complaints about Mac Wellman are getting old. What else is there to say beyond the fact that he hates the theater unless it's his kind of "theater" which eschews the expression of strong human emotions and the coherent plotlines that make that expression possible?

But as the world's only living critic of Mac Wellman, I feel it's my duty - if I don't do it, nobody else will, either because they've never heard of him or they're one of his sycophants.

I find it annoying that the New York Times quoted a glowing piece about Wellman from "Postmodern Culture" without mentioning the fact that it's written by a self-confessed "good friend" of Wellman. I guess allowing friends to publish pieces about friends is a very postmodern thing to do:

I am part of this community. I met Mac in a ‘Pataphysics workshop in 2003, after seeing a production of Hypatia and Soho Rep. I went on to study with him in the Brooklyn College MFA program from 2004-6, and he has remained a mentor and good friend.

I believe that I was also in the Pataphysics workshop that year, although I bailed out after the first disheartening session so I don't remember Karinne Keithley Syers any more than she remembers me.

Her piece begins like this, and if it doesn't make you tired then you my friend are ready for the theater of Mac Wellman.

Mac Wellman’s theater is filled by a weird array of voices that are neither strictly human, nor even strictly material. These pseudosolid voices map a topological obsession with holes, hollows, and the filling up of space by emptiness. This essay explores Wellman’s theater as a “strange hole,” where hollow spaces become receivers, openings for something unfamiliar to happen in our thinking, an event Wellman calls “apparence.” In The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, the extraordinary prevalence of holes bespeaks an intensification of a philosophical strand in his writing: a ceremonial concern with a weirdness that is wild, a weirdness gone feral in math-fictional space. This essay explores his strategies for writing us into these registers of thinking by examining two kinds of holes. The first is a “hole poetics”: the deployment of holey strategies in the poetic line. This holed line functions as both a preparation for thinking beyond the already-known, and as a scalar, fractal iteration of the topography of this beyond-space which is the second hole, a ceremonial, nasty, terrifying place that Wellman calls “Hoole’s Hole,” where the non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidian event of apparence happens.

Dear god. 

But of course this is exactly the pointless pseudosolid, pseudo-intellectual scheisse you can expect from an article about Mac Wellman in a periodical called "Postmodern Culture." Obfuscation and mystification are what the postmodernist writer ever strives for and Syers does not disappoint. And no true disciple of Mac Wellman can resist writing about the Master without passive-aggressive jabs at those modes of theater they despise - theater that deals with human emotions:

Wellman is a node of connection within the New York theater community. A loose assembly of younger writers has formed around him, through his MFA program at Brooklyn College, the ‘Pataphysics workshop series, and his generous presence in the scene. His influence is already profound and continues to grow, not as a “school of Mac Wellman,” but as a broadly cast license to think of plays in terms of language, and to value wrongness, ceremony, and a bit of demonism in the theatrical project (contra the overwhelming prevalence of psychological and moralistic drama). 

To the best of my knowledge Wellman has never actually cited the names of these plays that he detests, to make it clear exactly which plays are objectionable. Syers feels that psychological and moralistic drama prevails - so I guess it could be almost anything that is not written by Wellman. I certainly don't see why that couldn't include Shakespeare. I mean, sure, he engaged in plenty of word play, but Shakespeare also included psychological and moralistic drama in his work. Which is why people want to see his work 500 years later.

It's important for Wellman's admirers to let you know that in spite of appearances, Wellman isn't an effete poseur whose only interest is cutesy anal-retentive wordplay, they want you to believe that Wellman (and by associative properties, themselves) is a badass- because Wellman writing a play is like a demonic motherfucking Hell's Angel riding that hog down freedom's highway. Wellman was born to be wild. 

That's because Wellman is a rebel, Dottie:

The well-made play conforms to both psychological realism, which unfolds drama as a series of back-story reveals, and the structure of the dramatic arc as the climax and resolution of a central conflict. But beyond the habit of certain kinds of storytelling, what damns these plays for Wellman is their unwillingness to venture beyond already-known conclusions. In his essay “The Theater of Good Intentions,” Wellman attacks this as a form of high-ground moralism. In “Speculations,” his aphoristic landscape essay on theater’s wild spaces, the “Theatre of the Already Known (AK)” (or Geezer Theatre) appears as a kind of arch-dupe-enemy, hanging onto its “re” spelling as a signal of its unwillingness to abandon the boat of high culture. Instead of finding out once again that incest hurts or that racism is bad, Wellman suggests we allow theater to make us venture into spaces where we don’t already know the answer. If the AK, with its moral and emotional conclusions already on hand, requires no actual thinking, an unknown theater would demand it; the experience would be “open in a sense that is hard to even talk about.”

A play that deals with racism???- been there, done that, since A RAISIN IN THE SUN, and Wellman is too much the with-it hipster to care for your "Geezer Theater."

Strangely enough, although postmodernism is reflexively liberal, Wellman sounds a lot like right-winger David Mamet:

The theatre has become vastly political in my lifetime. Where once we had "weepers" (matinee structures featuring women abandoned, impregnated, deserted by their children or spouse, in a survival of the Victorian sensation novel), in the 1960s we began to see this love of melodrama recast as politics, giving the weeping audience not only the pleasure of a good cry, but also a pat on the back for knowing that group X were people, too. All right. The villain always has a waxed mustache, or can be counted on to stand for social positions that have vanished from our country everywhere but on the stage.

Old style:
"You must pay the rent." 

"I can't pay the rent."
New style:
"You weak and unacceptable woman, homosexual, African American, go away, I do not want you."
"But, does no one see that we are people, too . . . ?" 

Same thing. 

It is easy to write this play, as the course of events is known, and one may simply paint in the spaces, according to the predrawn, paint-by-numbers pattern. But the light is not good in the alley. And the alley is the dark, hidden, forbidden human. A trip down into that alley, for the writer or actor, may be disturbing, revolting, frightening – for that is where the monster of our self lives, and there we may find not only the falsity of our constructed personality, but also the truth of our feverishly suppressed perceptions.

Proving that being an asshole knows no partisan bounds.

Syers praises something called "landscape theater" which appears to be, basically, theater where nothing actually happens and says:

(Gertrude) Stein, as the original theoretician of the landscape play, laid a still-relevant and provocative groundwork for this means of composition; indeed, her essay “Plays” might be the most important essay on theater writing since Aristotle’s “Poetics.” 

I find it hard to believe that Syers considers Poetics to be important, other than as something to react against, since Wellman's only interest in the theater is to do the opposite of whatever Aristotle recommends.

Syers' essay is dense with obfuscation, but every now and then she gets out a paragraph that is nearly perfect in its postmodern impenetrability - a miraculous black hole of intraspecies non-communication:

If we accept the axiom that a Wellman hole fundamentally removes us from knowing where we are or where we are going, then the holed line prepares this form of disorientation. Paired with abrupt shifts and slips in the plot’s landscape, Wellman performs a smaller slipping away from the recognizable and stable whole operative at the scale of the sentence. These small slips undermine the stable experience of knowing where we are, and so reduce the friction that might otherwise slow us down when the plot too takes us suddenly to a place we don’t recognize.

One of my favorite aspects of postmodern prose is the way they throw around STEM terminology to gain credibility. That a Wellman hole fundamentally removes... blah blah blah isn't merely an idea - that would be much too peasantish - it's an axiom. You know, like in math. Because Mac Wellman's plays are rocket science.

What all that axiom twaddle means is that Mac Wellman's plots are incoherent. But Syers can't just come out and say that - much better to babble on about holed lines. And if you suspect that what it really means is that Syers has written herself right up into her own postmodern hole, it only proves that you're too stupid to get Wellman.

And that's what Wellman is all about, Charlie Brown.

Mac Wellman: "I don't like plays."

"I don't like plays" is not something you expect the Donald I. Fine Distinguished Professor of Play Writing to say. Now granted, Mac Wellman hasn't said that recently, but there's nothing in his body of work that indicates to me that he ever changed his mind.

Once again he reminds me of the Darren Nichols character in "Slings and Arrows." Here is an exchange from S&A

   Geoffrey Tennant 

You know, Darren, your problem is you hate the theater. 

   Darren Nichols 

I don't hate it, I pity it. Sad little medium struggling to be heard. More people listen to the radio than go to the theater and nobody listens to the radio.

NYTimes' latest article about Wellman is one more example of the fact that among theater gatekeepers, Mac Wellman is an untouchable - there is an unspoken rule that he may not be criticized, and the Times complies. Although the headline writer reveals what Wellman is all about:

Mac Wellman, a Playwriting Mentor Whose Only Mantra Is Oddity

Wellman expressed his dislike of plays before some idiot talked him into becoming a playwright. From the Times article:

Mr. Wellman, 69, came to playwriting accidentally. As he explained over a glass of rosé at a cafe near his Park Slope apartment, he was hitchhiking in the Netherlands during a junior year abroad when the Dutch director Annemarie Prins happened to give him a ride. He gave her a few of his poems, and she asked him if he had ever considered writing plays. “No,” he told her. “I don’t like plays.” But she persisted, and he obliged her, writing plays for Dutch radio.

Damn you to hell, Annemarie Prins. Mac Wellman is the ne plus ultra of the dread postmodernism that infected all the American arts beginning in the 1950s. And yes, it is explicitly postmodernism:

He loathes what he calls “the theater of the already known” — the predictable, the formulaic, the tasteful, the complacent. As a consequence, his work is strange. He favors, as an article in the journal Postmodern Culture suggested, “wrongness, ceremony and a bit of demonism.”

By "the theater of the already known" Wellman means human emotions, which have not changed since the days of ancient Greek theater. Human emotions - and so naturally, actual human drama portrayed on a stage - are anathema to Mac Wellman. So instead his work is devoted to inane prissy wordplay:

There’s an exacting attention to language — every sentence, every word, every syllable — that would seem exhausting if the works weren’t so mischievous, so exultant, so fun. (He signed a scheduling email, “See you tamale!” This was not a case of autocorrect.) And he’s fond of impossible stage directions like “something strange happens” or “a furry pause.”

It turns out that there is very little commercial - or any other kind of - demand for Wellman's tweeness, outside of Academia and the more pretentious circle of critics, but that doesn't matter. Wellman is well-connected. And then of course there are his sycophants:

To Mr. Wellman’s annoyance and delight, his students tend to treat him as a cross between a favorite uncle and a minor deity. He teases them, mispronouncing their names or kidding them when they turn serious, but when he offers one of his playwriting koans — “The theater is a very strange and elusive thing to do,” he told his seminar participants — they reach for their notebooks.

I got a snootful of this bullshit myself when I attended one of his seminars and didn't return after the first session.

He seems to be getting credit in this Times puff piece for the success of some of his former students, although there doesn't seem to be any real reason given - and in fact...

...Mr. Wellman’s program has the distinction of turning out audacious writers with very little in common with him or with one another. Try to find the overlap of Ms. Baker’s empathetic neorealism and Mr. Bradshaw’s scabrous provocations. Look for the intersection between Ms. Lee’s canny deconstructions of identity politics and Sibyl Kempson’s rapturous nonsense. Keep looking.

Even Alexis Soloski, an obvious fan of Wellman, can't find his artistic influence on his successful students. So has Wellman had any influence on their careers at all? I suspect he has, but almost exclusively through his contacts -  he's very well connected and ferociously revered and so I'm sure he was able to help his students make the connections they needed to get ahead in their theater careers. This is not spelled out in the article - but then that bit of realpolitik would not fit in well in the standard airy-fairy Wellman hagiography.

Wellman himself is still writing plays, although apparently enough producers are clued in by now that...

Mr. Wellman’s own work no longer receives the attention it once did, although he’s still writing plays, as well as poetry, novels and opera librettos. He’d like to see these new works staged, though he worries about taking opportunities away from young writers like his students.

I think Wellman would do well to avoid having his work produced. He's already been declared a legendary theatrical deity, and he can only go downhill from there. To the best of my knowledge I am his only living critic, although possibly because I'm one of the rare theater people who has heard of him, outside of Academia and theater critics. Whenever I ask actors or other playwrights what they think of Mac Wellman, I get a blank look.

Wellman and his admirers don't like human emotions, and thus they don't like theater - they pity it. And they are attempting to rehabilitate it, to free it from its sad little formal conventions, the ones that allow meaningful stories to be comprehensible to ordinary mortals. Playing with form and with words is all they care about, and fuck your "already known" feelings. Mac Wellman and his followers would like to drive theater into complete irrelevance. Only then can it be pure enough for them not to despise its grubby little earth-borne commonality.

Another Wellman sycophant, Alec Duffy, expresses the pity and desire for rehabilitation of the theater in this way:

Alec Duffy, the artistic director of JACK, enthusiastically described the work that emerges from the program as “plays that don’t really behave like plays, plays that feature an adventure in form.”

poor Mac Wellman

That's what Akiva Fox, writing in an academic organ The Thread calls him. "Poor Mac Wellman."

It seems to me that Mac Wellman is doing pretty damn well for himself. Not alot of people get paid to masturbate.

You think that's harsh? Check this out and try to tell me that isn't the most egregious example of wankerage you've ever read.

Wellman doesn't just get paid to wank it, he gets awards, he gets accolades for it, as his web site bio will tell you. So why does Akiva Fox feel bad for Mac Wellman? Apparently because he isn't as well-loved as Shakespeare. Here's the context:

Shakespeare... like every great writer, a person who used language in unexpected ways to show other human beings themselves in all their inexplicable fullness. He was not a god; he was not perfect; he was not a genre; he was a writer who strung words together around the time Modern English was coalescing. He was in the right place at the right time. Had he been born in our time, like poor Mac Wellman, he might have fallen on deaf ears. Shakespeare was lucky and good, which is what all geniuses seem to be. The danger of undue reverence is that it leads to vagueness, generality, and every other fatal enemy of art. We tend to think it’s enough to say the words in the right order. Any other playwright, directed and acted the way we approach Shakespeare’s work, would have his work savaged by every critic within scribbling distance.

Apparently only reverence of Shakespeare is dangerous. Reverence for Mac Wellman seems to be an acceptable risk.

The fact that both Akiva Fox's essay and the essay he is responding to, Adam Sobsey's Shakespeare Problem both look to Mac Wellman for some kind of guidance on the subject of Shakespeare is bizarre in the extreme.  I can't think of a playwright further from William Shakespeare, in approach, in affect, in audience-orientation, than Mac Wellman.  But I'll let Wikipedia tell it:

Wellman is best known for his experimental work in the theater which rebels against theatrical conventions, often abandoning such traditional elements as plot and character altogether.

While Shakespeare's language was often innovative (and also, often long-winded and tiresome) he certainly didn't abandon plot and character. He was enough of a traditionalist that plot and character were critical - in fact one of the reasons for his standing as a genius is the way he improved on the character and plotting of his original source material.

I took a workshop at the Flea Theatre with Mac Wellman over ten years ago. It was a two-part workshop and he gave us homework in the week between part one and part two, and I thought the homework was so ridiculous, so far from the nuts and bolts of crafting a play, that I just dropped the hell out. I don't remember now what the homework entailed -  I just remember being filled with the pointless futility of it all.

It wasn't a good portent during part one when Wellman explained that while he was interested in the pagan philosopher/mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, it wasn't because she was an atheist heroine martyred by a Christian mob. He wasn't interested in the dramatic aspects of her life and achievements, the fact that she was a sort of atheist Joan of Arc. In other words, he wasn't interested in the bits that Shakespeare would have been interested in.

I haven't seen Wellman's play, HYPATIA, but I strongly suspect that the NYTimes review is honest and accurate, and it does not surprise me a bit:

Hypatia, played by Sophia Fox-Long with the self-involvement of someone hearing inner voices, is mostly at center stage, engaging with various folks as she passes ethereally through the ages. Meanwhile a variety of narrators, who are never identified but whose costuming and locutions place them anachronistically outside the basic time frame, are spotlighted and blacked out as they take turns speaking.

One has the manner and dress of a television newswoman, another a businessman speaking in Brooklynese, a third a nightclub torch singer. A fourth emanates from an electronic device. Their echolalic repetitions as they puzzle over the legend of the main character are perhaps a suggestion that the mysteries that so appealed to Hypatia -- the nature of zero, for instance -- have remained symbolically in force through the ages. But perhaps not.

Why have an atheist Joan of Arc when you can have Hypatia the flower child in lah-lah land?

No, the plays of Mac Wellman are pretty much the opposite of the plays of William Shakespeare, and I don't think Wellman has any insights into Shakepeare's works that are at all useful. The poor man will just have to get by with getting paid to wank-off for his usual audience of academics. I'm sure the people working at Foxconn pity the hell out of him.

Fortunately someone was interested in telling Hypatia's real story:

more thoughts on Mac Wellman

Someone commented on my recent post "poor Mac Wellman" asking "who are you, again?"

I suspect it's Wellman himself. After I wrote the post, someone doing a search for "Mac Wellman" visited my web site several times. And nine times out of ten the person Googling a name is the person themselves.

But no worries - as the commenter, with the use of "again", is pointedly saying, I am nobody. My opinions are not a threat to the hermetically sealed perfection that is the career of Mac Wellman. For unlike other playwrights, like say, Tennessee Williams, William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Wellman does not get bad reviews. I am not kidding. Here is an interview with Wellman from  BOMB magazine from 1995:

LY You always get good reviews.

MW I know.

LY Always.

MW I know. At least, most of the time.

LY Your plays make up-to-the-moment points that you don’t get from a newspaper. Why isn’t there a Mac Wellman play going on in every neighborhood every night?

MW That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing—two, three plays a year for the past five, six years. I’m worn out.

LY I don’t know how you can turn it out like that.

MW I don’t either. I am slowing down, I know that.

It doesn't strike the interviewer or Wellman as odd that he always gets good reviews. Rather they find it inexplicable that those good reviews don't translate into vast public acclaim.

Just who do these nobodies in these neighborhoods think they are, anyway? How could they not be begging him to give them more of this?

The overall thrust of the piece seems to be about the impossibility of meaningful communication among people. Assuming that’s the case, the play totally makes its point.

And that was written by one of his admirers.

Almost all his reviews mention the communication issue, mainly the impossibility of meaningful communication. If there is any drearier topic for a theatre production, I can't think of it.

Lately Wellman has been working on  an  idea to fund CUNY MFA students.  The concern over the cost of education and the crushing debt that entails is an important issue and by no means one just for students in arts programs. It would be nice if we could just give all American students a bunch of money to continue their educations, even into post-graduate studies. And so...

...Wellman and his colleagues on the CUNY Affiliation Committee have a plan. They’ve recently launched a campaign entitled “CUNY Creative Writing MFA: The New Bohemia” that would fund a full tuition abatement for all creative-writing MFAs. If it succeeds, this initiative will render tuition entirely free for the programs at Brooklyn, City, Hunter, and Queens colleges.

But how important is it, really for a playwright to have an MFA? Instead of money to complete an MFA, why not give them money to do productions - or offer to produce their work?

That wouldn't do Wellman much good though - other playwrights receiving productions would be competition for Wellman, but more importantly, without MFA students, Wellman, the Program Coordinator of the Brooklyn College English Department Master of Fine Arts Program, Playwriting would be out of a job. So for Wellman to come up with a plan to raise five million dollars to fund this program, with the Newspeak-inspired subtitle of "New Bohemia", is a smart career move. Wellman has no trouble whatsoever with meaningful communication when it counts, whatever his plays might say about the impossibility.

Of all the reviews of Wellman's work, I think this is the most clarifying. It's a rare, bad review. However, the reviewer is certain of Wellman's titanic genius:

Wellman is a playwright of considerable merit, an icon of American experimental theater, if not its guru. He has written more than 40 plays; has received three OBIE awards (including a lifetime-achievement nod); and is, by all accounts, a brilliant, thoughtful, amazingly talented writer. But you wouldn't know from this miserably failed piece of experimental theater.

But based on the ensuing description of the work, it sounds exactly like every other play Wellman has written:

A press release... quotes Wellman as saying Hyacinth Macaw is one of "four plays that . . . taken together, [tell] a story about a young woman adrift and alienated in a world essentially gone mad. . . . Populated by corporate thieves and religious maniacs and desperate losers of all kinds." He goes on to disclose that he doesn't "write psychological plays. . . . I'm interested more in plays about the 'big picture' rather than little intimate studies of a presumably sacrosanct inner life."

That sounds reasonable and important and compelling; unfortunately, it doesn't manifest in Hyacinth Macaw. It's as if the play were afflicted with Tourette's syndrome, continually convulsing in a stream of gibberish.

The basic storyline: a mysterious stranger shows up in a family's back yard. He calls the teenage daughter an orphan and tells the mother he has a letter for her husband. She gives the letter to her husband, Ray. It informs him he is a fake and the mysterious stranger is a duplicate of him. Dad has to leave his family forever. No one really seems to mind, least of all Dad. In Act 2, the mysterious stranger gives Dad a snake because that's apparently a gift where he comes from. Dad leaves, as the other characters sing the chorus of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The stranger is now the new dad; he says the contract calls for him to stay 99 years. The daughter feeds him bugs. Mom runs off with Mad Wu, a vagabond from China. The daughter goes with dad to bury the moon; she caw-caws like a macaw. New dad says we are all orphans. Play over.

The critics all agree, Wellman is a genius. But how, I wonder, do they distinguish a "good" Wellman play from a "bad" Wellman play? I think this paragraph in the same review gives the game away:

To not "get" a play like this opens one up to feeling as if one's a Philistine, someone who lacks the intellect to wrestle with highly stylized "art." But it's also possible there really is nothing to get in Wellman's play. And that's fine. Plays that stubbornly refuse to give answers and are instead devoted to making the audience ask questions are absolutely worthwhile.

That's what Wellman's perfect career is all about. The worry of theatre reviewers and academics that to dislike the work of Wellman is to risk being thought a stupid Philistine. And so they err on the side of caution, and heap on the praise for yet another inscrutable piece of anti-emotional, anti-narrative incoherence.

Postmodernism was a disaster for anthropology, for example. Marvin Harris discusses the postmodern hostility towards science in his last book "Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times":

...postmodernists associate science and reason with the domination and oppression of totalitarian regimes. Since science searches for a "best answer" it it precludes diversity and leads to intolerance. In postmodern eyes "reasonable" ways are always brutally unfair to somebody... Pauline Rosenau explains that abandoning reason "means for post-modernists, liberation from modernity's preoccupation with authority, efficiency, hierarchy, power, technology, commerce (the business ethic), administration, social engineering... It means release from modern science's concern for order, consistency, predictability."

Mac Wellman, in this interview from BOMB Magazine reveals himself to be a complete postmodernist when it comes to theatre:

The failure of a lot of theater is that it’s Aristotelian, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end: Now we’re in the conflict part, now you know the conflict is going to be resolved, and then we can all get together and celebrate some perfectly obvious and banal emotional or theatrical truism in some meaningless way. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but that’s not the only kind of work. I think of theater not just as propositions but propositions put in a specific context. Take Bad Penny — that was the best thing I ever did. You couldn’t tell where it started or stopped, and it picked up its special lunacy from the setting. I’m interested in the whole problem of text against context and the interplay between them. That’s what makes something theatrical or dramatic—a complex relationship between the dialogue and the setting. Basically, I’m trying to argue for a theater that’s a little more interested in ideas and texture.

Mind you, he's not saying celebrating some perfectly obvious and banal emotional or theatrical truism in some meaningless way is wrong. Like all postmodernists, Wellman will let you draw your own conclusions.

Now postmodernism isn't quite as pernicious in the arts as it is in anthropology or other scientific endeavors - amusing the upper-classes with cachet-ridden nonsense is pretty harmless, and diverts them from insider trading or any of the many other ways they maintain their economic dominance. But still, what this passage indicates is that Wellman actually hates theatre. He doesn't say that though. Instead he posits that there are two different kinds of theatre: the old-tyme, Aristotelian kind, with a beginning, middle and end and conflicts to be resolved; and his kind, where you can't tell where it stopped or started and the interplay is between text against context. 

In actuality Mac Wellman's theatre is anti-theatre. Because theatre is about human emotion and Wellman and his fans are much too intelligent for human emotion. And really, where is the glory in representing emotional content on stage that just anybody can understand? We can establish a hierarchy based on intelligence - some people are smarter than others. And there is the economic hierarchy - people low on that hierarchy can't really afford to see experimental "theatre" can they?

But what kind of hierarchy can you establish based on emotions? Both dull people and smart people, both those who can afford the time and money to attend experimental theatre and those who can't feel love, sadness, fear, joy. And they've been feeling these things since the beginning of time. What's the point of doing theatre if you can't innovate it far beyond human identification and commonality,  beyond those "banal" done-to-death emotion-laden conflicts-to-be-resolved scenarios, into the heroic realm of word salad?

In 1996, Alan Sokal demonstrated the absurdity of postmodernism by submitting nonsense to Social Text, a journal of post-modern studies. After it was accepted, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as

a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics

The opening of Wellman's "Speculations" demonstrates how it's done:

The STRUCTURE of a play ought not be viewed as a fixed thing, but as a mutable one.

I mean, the structure of a play conceived of as a moving point:
ππππππππ . ππππππ

passing over– or through– time, from inception to end point; so that what it is relation    of    part    to    who(o)le    [Oh Mereology!]    changes    continuously    and continually;

changes because space is filled with invisible lines– as theatron. (Da Vinci) This is why vertical narrative is possible.

This is why monologue is inherently demonic.

This is why only the wicked walk in circles. (Augustine)

~

Drama takes place in phase space. The continuum of phase-space is to time as time is to space.

Theatricality    takes    place,    as    it    were, perpendicular to time, along the phase-space continuum. We do not know what we are doing.

Thus neither theatricality nor drama takes place in time, although of course they do.

Time (clock time, I mean) is of the essence only in appearance, not in APPARENCE. Time is only apparently an expression of space; the reverse is also true. (Einstein)
Real thinking as well, lies outside time, occupies an    outside-time,    “that    eternal    moment    that medieval philosophy approached in the nunc stans of the mystic”. (Arendt)

Since postmodernism does not recognize traditional values like structure and coherence, the editors at Social Text had nothing against which to evaluate Sokal's submission, except on the basis of impressive turns of phrase. This is the very essence of the "theatre" of Mac Wellman.

I'm not saying that's wrong.

If you find value in Speculations you will certainly find much value in this Postmodernism Generator. Enjoy.

--------

Update: once again, someone Googling "Mac Wellman" has visited this site - from the same URL as last time - and once again, they've posted a response. As you can see in the comments section they seem to be channeling an insulting Snagglepuss suffering from aphasia. If this isn't Wellman himself, it's someone doing a spot-on impression of what I think Wellman would sound like in a pissing contest. But since the commenter is too cowardly (different lion - Snagglepuss may have been an effeminate thespian but he was no coward) to sign their name, I can't say it's Wellman for certain. The commenter thinks I'm wrong, but about exactly what they don't say, so I can't address the  disagreements.

But then we all know about the impossibility of meaningful communication, don't we?

Mac Wellman wanna-be

The most recent NYCPlaywrghts Play of the Month is the wackiest play we've done yet. I don't know if the author meant to emulate the work of Mac Wellman but if you put this play up under Wellman's name I'd wager that nobody would ever suspect it wasn't him. It has all the hallmarks of Wellman's work: referencing socio-political issues without ever saying anything coherent or incisive about society or politics; lots of repetition - the "hearts beating" phrase comes up a lot in this play; little or no emotional connection between characters, and excessive verbiage.

I originally was going to say that this play indicates that the author has the same problem that so many other writers of 10-minute plays have - he couldn't be bothered to go back and re-work the draft. This is probably the first draft of the play - maybe with a few tweaks here and there. One of my edits in the video recording helped tighten things up - and all I did was leave out the first two sentences.

Why was the edit so helpful? Because the "Dirty Beauty" character starts off talking about how she saw "one of them little buggers." And yet Joseph's first line is: "looks like a bad case of moles to me." Well if she already saw one of them, what's the point of saying that line? Other than it's always better to leave nothing unsaid, and the order in which things are said doesn't really matter.

Cause and effect mean nothing in the universe of postmodernism, which is why it leads to such extremely unsatisfying drama.

An excerpt from the first page of the script:

Thanks. Life's full of surprises. Isn't it. The front lawn's a big surprise. Oh Geez. The neighbors are going to talk about this one, aren't they? I'm sure. My front lawn looks like it has a bad case of acne. It just makes me so sick. It looks like somebody's face. Full of pus. Pus filled chicken poxes. I'm trapped. I don't know what to do, it's like I feel like I'm paralyzed.

Now I happen to like the "bad case of acne metaphor." And the goofy "chicken poxes." And I think it would be better if the passage pretty much stuck to that metaphor instead of throwing in the neighbors and feeling "like I'm paralyzed."

I was originally going to say that the author has a "problem" with not going back and tightening the script, but is it really a problem? Mac Wellman has made a very nice career out of flabby and incoherent and non-dramatic work. Why couldn't this guy?

Although I did discover one reason why Wellman has been able to devote his life to work that most people outside of Academe are not interested in - the New York Public Library inventory of Mac Wellman papers 1959-1999 includes a biographic note that says: The Wellman family already included several inventors, and Mac grew into an inventor and innovator of language.

I'm guessing that, like so many people in theater, Wellman can do whatever he wants because he has a trust fund. And what he wants to do is not actually theater, although he is allowed to call it that:

Here's the second scene from his play CLEVELAND.

Scene 2
(The kitchen. MOTHER is trying to unclog the sink with a  plunger. The sink makes strange noises. JOAN is trying to do her homework at the kitchen table. More nice music.)
JOAN. Mother, how can I concentrate on my homework with you making that noise?
MOTHER. I'm sorry dear. It doesn't drain. Mr. Barfly the plumber was supposed to come fix it, but he never did.
JOAN. But I'm trying to do my homework.
MOTHER. Joanie, there's nothing I can do.
(Pause.)
JOAN. Mother, what's the largest moon in the solar system?
NARRATOR. Why, Triton, dear. A moon of Neptune. Not a very hospitable place. My this sink is hopeless. Miranda's much prettier.
JOAN. Thanks. Mr. Delaplane's science class is really hard.
(Loud crash outside.)
What's that noise?
MOTHER. (Going to look:) Just some commotion in the street.
JOAN. Who is Pope Joan? Bet you don't know.
MOTHER. Haven't the faintest, dear.
(Phone rings.)
JOAN. Oh, God, what if it's Panda Hands asking me to the prom.
(Rings.)
MOTHER. I thought we weren't fashionable enough to be invited.
(Rings.)
JOAN. Well, I still want to go. It depends. You get it.
MOTHER. Silly girl.
(She gets the phone:)
Hello? No, he's dead. That's right. Dead. No, we don't need any. Thank you. Good bye.
(Hangs up. Pause.)
Well, it wasn't Panda Hands.
(Knock at the door.)
Who could that be?
JOAN. If it's Panda Hands I'm not here.
MOTHER. (At door:) Yes? Can I help you?
(A MAN enters.)
MAN. Lady. Your front porch. It ah. Fell into the street. Somebody's underneath. In a car. One of those imports. Squashed flat.
MOTHER. Oh, how terrible. Well, come in.
MAN. Thanks. All you can see is the hubcap.
MOTHER. The phone's right there.
JOAN. Mother?
MOTHER. It's all right, Joanie. The front porch fell into the street and it seems there's a car underneath.
MAN. What's the police number?
MOTHER. Haven't the faintest.
(He reads it off the phone and dials.)
JOAN. Mother, what if Jimmy asks me and not Panda Hands?
MOTHER. Then I expect you should go. Even if we're not fashionable.
MAN. No one answers at the police. Strange. (Hangs up.)
MOTHER. That is strange.
JOAN. Very strange. Hey, can I go look?
MOTHER. If you're careful.
(JOAN skips out.)
MAN. I'll call the wrecking company. You got a Yellow Pages?
MOTHER. Sure, right here.
(Shows him. She goes to the sink and plunger.)
You know, I think I want to go back to school. Learn a skill. I'm tired of being a drudge. And since my husband died. It's rough being alone.
MAN. You're young to be a widow.
MOTHER. He was a Trotskyist.
MAN. (On phone:) Acme Wrecking? Yeah, part of a house's fallen across River Road near Willougby. Traffic's already backed up pretty far. And I think there's someone trapped underneath. Yeah, in a car.
(Hangs up.)
MOTHER. He was a Trostkyist.
MAN. So am I. Thanks, lady.
(He goes out. She goes back to the sink. JOAN enters.)
JOAN. Oh, you should see it. Everything's all smashed. It's real neat. Say, do you suppose someone's dead under all that pile of rubble?
MOTHER. Could be, darling. Could be. Wash up, it's dinner time.
JOAN. If Jimmy calls I'm here. If Johnny calls I'm not. If Panda Hands calls I'm dead.
MOTHER. Yes, dear.
(Pause.)
MOTHER. You know, Joanie. I think I want to go back to school.
JOAN. You'd be a great student. And I'll do the grocery shopping. We'll trade.
(They giggle.)
MOTHER. So. What's the biggest moon in the solar system?
JOAN. Miranda.
MOTHER. Miranda's the prettiest. Triton's the biggest.
JOAN. Darn. Well you tell me who is Pope Joan.
MOTHER. Never heard of her.
(They giggle.)
JOAN. I want to be like Pope Joan. Only I want to be a Trotskyist.
MOTHER. This sink is disgusting.
(The MAN enters again.)
MAN. Lady, can I use the phone again.
MOTHER. Sure.
(He dials. Pause.)
JOAN. If he's on the phone all the time how's Jimmy going to call me?
MOTHER. Ever think it might be Panda Hands?
(They giggle.)
(Blackout.)

Absolutely typical Wellman. It's like a dream - bizarre things happen like a front porch suddenly flies off and lands on top of a person in a car. Except that unlike most people's dreams, there is no emotional resonance from an act of violence. The characters can barely summon up enough interest in an injured or dying person to stop talking about Panda Hands for two minutes. So it's a dream dreamt by a sociopath.

You know how you love to hear some random stranger tell you about his dream, in which implausible violent things happened and nobody cared and they just kept making inane small talk?

Exactly.

Now you may say: "but Nancy, you moron, of course Wellman did this on purpose. He's making A Statement About the Way Things Are in These United States Today. Don't be such a sucker for "Sentimental Melodrama*!"

But the problem is that just presenting humans - in virtually every play he writes - as if a bunch of unfeeling robots isn't enough - there has to be something more. And there never is. What a great job Wellman has though - just throw random sociopathic bullshit on the stage and people - smart people from the university - will invent meaning for it.

And of course being a "Trotskyist" means absolutely nothing in socio-political terms in CLEVELAND. Wellman just name-drops Trotsky, probably because the people who come to see his work will congratulate themselves that they have a vague idea of who Trotsky was - he was the guy who had an ice pick buried in his head by a Bolshevik. They saw that in a short play by David Ives.

And when Wellman attempts actual political satire, well this is what happens:

...A satire about the hypocrisy inherent in right wing American politics, "7 Blowjobs" was written in the early 1990s as a response to senator Jesse Helms’s attack against the National Endowment for the Arts, when he accused the NEA of funding artists whose work he deemed obscene. With so many homophobic and anti-sex politicians scandalized in recent months, it’s no surprise that Theatre on Fire’s artistic director Darren Evans decided to revive the show. What’s surprising is that he imagined Boston audiences would find Wellman’s facile portrait of social conservatives entertaining. 

There are no actual blowjobs in this play, but when a package containing a series of ambiguous x-rated photographs is delivered to Red State senator Bob’s office, his staff of conservative aides is thrown into a sex panic. Their collective sex jitters as they spend most of the play trying to decode the political and sexual meaning of the salacious photos might have been funnier, if the verbal jabs of Wellman’s insipid stereotypes were able to rise above the level of playground polemics. Unfortunately, his dialogue merely sounds like a string of childish partisan text comments posted on You Tube. 

The premise that there’s a pack of horny Chihuahuas humping underneath the rhetoric of anti-sex campaigns is tempting if hackneyed, but the jokes are so bad you’ll end up feeling cheated and embarrassed for the cast, as I did. In the words of two insightful Edge readers I had the pleasure of sitting next to during the show: "This show is an utter waste of time... we were not amused."

Clearly the critic and the reader quoted above don't understand the Wellman play drill - you are not to expect the author to provide insight into the political scenario - just the fact that he used the word "blowjobs" in his title is supposed to be enough to impress you by what a daring maverick Wellman is. You are supposed to provide the political meaning yourself.

I'll let theater impresario Martin Denton demonstrate how it's done:

This is, in effect, all that happens in 7 Blowjobs. Senator Bob seeks advice from a television evangelist named Reverend Tom, whose reaction is pretty similar to Bruce's but whose broader experience in such matters enables him to provide the senator with some valuable strategic/tactical assistance—namely, to pin this and other conspiracies against decency on "fags." Bob, Jr., who one suspects may indeed be a bona fide member of that last-named group, is also interrogated, but to no avail.

The point of all of this non-sequitur lunacy is obvious: playwright Mac Wellman wrote 7 Blowjobs in 1991 in response to the flap on government funding supposedly obscene art by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, and he dedicated it to Senator Jesse Helms. Hypocrisy in government not having gone away in the past decade, the play resonates resoundingly; the spectacle of seeing self-appointed guardians of the moral order salivate and drool over dirty pictures feels great and registers as hilarious, scoring points off its lascivious targets all the while.

The play's brilliance is mostly attributable to Wellman's astonishing language, which simply soars with glee as it dances around actually naming whatever it is that might be depicted in those seven pictures. Wellman delights in imprecision here: Reverend Tom declares them "photos of unnatural acts, capable of rendering a full-grown man happy," and that's really as much as we actually know about their content: how much apt commentary on the current state of morality and censorship in America is packed into that?

It should be mentioned that Denton's ecstatic response to Wellman is far more typical of critics than the negative response of the Boston critic I quoted.

So why, exactly, did NYCPlaywrights choose to do a video recording of a reading of a Wellman-esque play? Well first off, you should have seen the competition. And I would have picked the play that had the blow-up doll in it over this one, but I took a vote on the semi-finalists among the people who participated in the script-reading and majority ruled.

But most of all, because it is only ten minutes long. Postmodern plays are bearable in small doses, especially if there are some humorous bits. But as far as I know, Mac Wellman doesn't write ten-minute plays: all his plays are long enough to be considered an entire evening of theater. An entire, mind-bogglingly pointless, undramatic, postmodern evening of theater.

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*Mac Wellman in a 2012 edition of the Dramatist Guild's magazine. He's talking to Annie Baker:

Theatre criticism is a remarkable one note only interested in what I call Sentimental Melodrama. They miss any intellectual sharpness, visual or physical acuity. They are only interested in what I call Face Value theatre. What you see is what you get, no time for reflection (incidentally they miss the sharp edges of your work.)

Mac Wellman wants to slap the audience in the face

Almost five years ago I noted that Mac Wellman likes to talk about how much most American theater sucks, but he refrained from naming names - although the interviewer of this American Theatre piece claims otherwise, but this is the first time I have ever seen it:

(Wellman) ...I never wanted to write the American kind of “play.” Some of my plays are disguised—they have five legs instead of four legs. Some of them have tusks. 

(Interviewer) Oh, I know your plays are multi-limbed! 

Careful! 

When you say you’re not interested in writing the American play—what does that mean to you? 

Ooh, I wouldn’t want to list all the plays that I hate! I mean, I’m not a big fan of Arthur Miller or even Eugene O’Neill, though I think he knew a lot about theatre. O’Neill is a great person but you put him next to Strindberg and he disappears. I don’t particularly care for Tennessee Williams. I think, really, American playwriting began to get interesting in the ’60s with Shepard and Fornes. Before that, it’s screenplays that are great. 

I actually think the great period of playwriting is now. The problem is there just aren’t enough theatres willing to do plays. As well you know. 

Aye. 

In New York everything has to make money and be corporate. So it’s hard. But it continually evolves, so I don’t know where it will be in 10 years. 

Looking back at your texts and essays, you never seemed afraid to name names, as in your disinterest in Edward Albee, O’Neill. 

I mean, I like Albee. He likes to think he’s like Beckett, but he’s not like Beckett at all. You can’t imitate Beckett but you can imitate Albee and a million people have, and they aren’t as smart or interesting as he is—it’s hard. I mean, that’s why I always try to get my students to read foreign plays. This country is very cut off, I think.

So Wellman doesn't like the work of O'Neill or Miller or Albee or Williams. And yet audiences persist in wanting to see their work, those plays which invoke unsightly human emotions.

The interview continues...

You often encouraged us to let the play reveal itself, or let the structure reveal itself. Will you talk a little bit about that in comparison to the idea of conflict and resolution? 

In American theatre, structure is just a set of clichés. Plays are not about plots. They are about moments. And moments are about epiphanies when something happens that wakes you up. But mainstream plays are about reaffirming what the audience thinks it already knows. And I think that’s a waste of time. Why do that? Why not give them a slap in the face? Actually the most interesting playwrights I know are practicing a slap-in-the-face kind of theatre, whether they know it or not. I used to have students write a play with no structure.

As Theresa Rebeck said:

I seem to be constantly confronted by theater professionals who are more or less annoyed by the prospect of structure. One time I was at a wedding reception, for crying out loud, and I got seated at a table with a really famous genius of the contemporary American theater who had directed a play I admired. He had deconstructed a well-known play but the essence of the original story was still there, and the artistry and strangeness of his interpretation was beautifully balanced within the original tale. When I told him so, he went into a drunken rage. "All that structure, all that story," he growled, pouring himself more wine. "What a nightmare." 

"I love structure," I confessed. "I think it's beautiful." 

"Yeah, the audience loved it too," he sneered.

I don't know if she was speaking to Wellman in this story, but I wouldn't be surprised if she was.

Wellman doesn't like "cliches" and "plots" because he doesn't see the point of coherent structure that invokes the human sympathetic response. Human emotions aren't progressive - humans respond to various stimuli as they always have since before the theater of ancient Greece.

Mac Wellman should have had a career in technology or mathematics or anything that doesn't involve working with people and their stupid feelings. His current profession must be incredibly frustrating for him. He uses a metaphor of physical assault because he has no empathy for the audience. Or as Donald Trump fans would say: fuck your feelings.

But he is adored in American theater anyway, because many theater writers (critics, interviewers for American Theatre, etc.) are postmodernist pseudo-intellectuals who also feel similar contempt for theater audiences and have a constant yearning for plays that "break the boundaries" as I documented five years ago here - and as this recent review of Wellman's THE OFFENDING GESTURE demonstrates:

One of the many wonderful things about Mac Wellman’s work is that there are no boundaries to where he takes us. Sure, we can be on earth sometimes, but he’d rather not stay anywhere too recognizable for very long, and he would much prefer to be in space or on a different planet (often one of his own creation). Who can blame him? Earth is pretty awful. You know what/who else is awful? Hitler.

But every now and then there will be a critic who isn't as reverential as the rest and refuses to be baffled by Wellman's bullshit, as with these two:

David Barbour in  Light and Sound America: 

Yet these elements somehow fail to add up to a satisfying evening. Wellman's dog's-eye view of the semiotics of power seems awfully thin on ideas; it dawdles, it meanders, it pauses for passages of vocalizing, and scenes seem to repeat endlessly. Even the ravishing musical scenes (composed by Alaina Ferris and beautifully sung by the Mooncats) come to seem like so many interruptions. A last-minute reference to the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq comes out of nowhere in a strange attempt at capping off the show. It is merely mystifying; the circumstances of Hitler's brief and unconsummated flirtation with that country (which was encouraged by anti-British Iraqis) was nothing like the long-running calamity of Bush's Middle East misadventure. If this is the punch line to the joke, it's little better than Noble Wolf's snapper about Goering.

Christopher Kompanek in the Village Voice:

A third pooch, a bulldog named Wuffles who belongs to Winston Churchill, remains offstage (and is solely an invention of the playwright). He's used as a way to introduce Churchill's creation of Iraq (combining the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds — or, in doggyspeak, "Sunfish, Shits, and Turds"). This sort of wordplay appears frequently and amounts more to a source of annoyance than humor. Likewise, Layla Khoshnoudi plays Hitler (named Noble Wolf, the English translation of Adolf) with a farcical abandon, but the material is too opaque for any real levity to land...

...Wellman writes with a unique blend of poetry, puns, and non sequiturs that confound more than they illuminate and never fail to feel written. "I do the gesture as it gives me a please, a pleasure in the right front foot department," is one of Jackie's most straightforward lines, and it could easily have been lopped in half. While the title gesture is repeated throughout and mentioned ad nauseam, the actual offense is that it never rises to more than a background din. The final moments attempt to spell out a theme that should have been gradually building throughout, and only in the last line does Wellman finally pose a question worth asking.

Wellman and other postmodernists have their own cliches - the obsessive need to play with form and word salad at the expense of content, and macho bad-boy posturing, imagining violence upon the audience. Basically the angry young men of the theater, except the men haven't been young since the 20th century.

But you'll never get them to believe they are rehashing the same old shit - they will go to their graves believing they are the last word in daring, novel rebellion.

More and more Mac Wellman sounds like the Darren Nichols character from Slings and Arrows.

hopefully the last post about Mac Wellman

I mean really, if some people enjoy the plays of Mac Wellman, who am I to tell them they are wrong? Maybe they like those precious names or the endless monologues. Maybe they hate coherence and plot. Whatever, just because endless monologues irritate me, and just because I prefer coherence and a well-wrought plot, who am I to dictate my tastes?

But what really annoys me is when Wellman starts expounding on The Problem with Naturalism in Theater as he does in his introduction to a collection of his plays "The Bad Infinity" which I recently took out of the library.

Wellman loves to reach out to the Great Men of History for affirmation. He starts with Kierkegaard:

 ...Kierkegaard said that a direct relation to the deity was the definition of paganism, and he meant by this that the attempt to grasp and seize divinity by the appropriation of a human definition was to create an idol, an unreal apparition that possessed no truth. If we take the world we know as an act of collective imagining, an idol of the modern mind, it becomes apparent that reality as such becomes subject to the same - or a similar - danger: decay of the perceptual process, enactment of an unreal idol reality. The banishment of the real world. In other terms, the thing itself is replaced by successive (repetitive) images of the thing...

If you can find any actual substance in the above excerpt you are a better semiotician than I Gunga Din.

First off, Kierkegaard was a theist who thought Christianity needed reforming. Presumably along the lines of Martin Luther - Kierkegaard was raised Lutheran and is commemorated in the Lutheran Church's "Calendar of Saints."

Kierkegaard's attitude towards Christianity is similar to Luther's - that salvation, or a connection to God is on an individual basis, not to be mediated through the Catholic Church (in Luther's day) or the Protestant establishment (in Kierkegaard's day.) So what does a non-Christian - an atheist even - care about these ecumenical squabbles on the supposed evils of paganism? I mean, really, why would I care if the relationship to "the deity" is direct or indirect? It's a relationship to a fiction either way.

But even if I did care,  what do I make of Wellman's interpretation?

...the attempt to grasp and seize divinity by the appropriation of a human definition was to create an idol, an unreal apparition that possessed no truth

What exists outside of "human definition?" Unless you are a mystic, you must agree that nothing does. Whether your relation to deity is direct or indirect, it is defined by you - or by a group of individuals as in the Catholic Church - as a human. And surely even a mystic, one who believes humans are created by the deity in question, can hardly fault humans for defining the world around them based on human understanding.

Or could you? If you don't worry about logic or coherence, then I guess you could.

So with that in mind, onto the next statement:

If we take the world we know as an act of collective imagining, an idol of the modern mind...

That's a big if, and it depends on how you define "the world" and "collective" and "imagining" - but you fans of Wellman don't need to be told, you're already among the knowing. Clearly from the context, the world we know, "an idol of the modern mind" is bad... we know it's bad because Wellman continues:

...it becomes apparent that reality as such becomes subject to the same - or a similar - danger: decay of the perceptual process, enactment of an unreal idol reality.

Danger. That's bad. So is decay. And the danger is enactment of an "unreal idol reality." From this we can infer that real reality - or "reality" - is good.

So there we go. Idols are bad, because they are not reality, which is good.

I would argue that idols in themselves are neither good nor bad, but just a symbol of something. You know, just like these words you are reading inspire thoughts in your head, but the words themselves are just black marks on a white database field. And Wellman doesn't think words are bad since he generally uses an excess of them whenever he wants a character to speak.

So how does all this evil idolatry connect to theater? Wellman continues:

In American theater this idolatry bears the name of naturalism. Its origin is the same as that of the paganism Kierkegaard wrote of: the desire to subsume all human experience under labels, definitions, and explanations and therefore to substitute rationalizations for experience.

It should be noted that Wellman's distaste for unreal paganism doesn't stop him from providing his own labels, definitions and explanations.  Although perhaps all can be understood with what comes next:

The logic of The Bad Infinity is an attempt to suggest the logic of this decayed act of collective imagining. It is not interesting at this point in human time to portray the real world as it seems to be in its own terms; but it is interesting to unfold, in human terms, the logic of its illogic and so get at the nut of our contemporary human experience.

At least, it's Wellman's opinion that his plays are interesting and that they unfold in human terms the logic of illogic (or I guess the blackness of white, or the fullness of emptiness, etc.); and that this in turn somehow gets at "the nut of our contemporary human experience."

I'd say his plays are as interesting and as penetrating as his anti-naturalism philosophizing.

You do have to at least be grateful that he will allow the unfolding to take place, you know "in human terms" rather than presumably in his more native direct-from-deity terms.

He then goes on to ask us to worship more of his personal idols, the aforementioned Great Men of History in addition to Kierkegaard - he name drops Beckett, Handke, Witkiewicz, Twain, Bierce and Mencken:

We need a dozen Mark Twains, a score of Bierces, a hundred Menckens to do justice to the times. Those of us involved in this critique of apparent reality cannot expect to convince many, much less can we expect our views to prevail (the time may be past for all that); all we can expect is to have some fun, share some laughter, and go out with a modicum of self-respect. We must love the truth not because it favors us but because it is the truth.

What "the truth" is, Wellman doesn't actually say, but maybe if you have to ask it's a sign you're not a member of the mystical anti-pagan truth brotherhood and shouldn't even bother asking for a definition - you know "in human terms."Although maybe he really is saying nothing more nuanced than "naturalism in theater is bad and untruthful" and "postmodern theater like mine is good and truthful."

I have to laugh at his inclusion of Twain, who I seriously doubt would be a fan of Wellman's plays or  theories. Twain's own play, IS HE DEAD? is about as naturalistic as they come (and also a big mess), and so are his novels. Then of course, as lovable as he often is, Twain was a raging bigot against native Americans, and Mencken was an anti-Semite.

In any case, I'm taking "The Bad Infinity" back to the library, and with any luck won't have to think about Mac Wellman much more in the future, apart from bumping into the occasional Internet hagiography.

Wellmanmania

I received a response to my second post about the work of Mac Wellman. The commenter seems to think I'm wrong about something, but they don't say what exactly.

One of the points I made about Wellman's work is that because it elevates word-play over dramatic narrative, it is anti-emotional.

To continue along those lines - human emotions are not progressive. Unlike human intellectual endeavors, human emotions are not about innovation and novelty. People feel the same old shit. Emotions are stereotypes. And because the same old emotions are common to most people - possibly psychopaths and those with extreme cases of autism or brain-damage excepted - we can identify with the characters on stage. We don't have to be ex-kings and fathers of recently deceased daughters to be emotionally impacted by the last scene of KING LEAR. Now if we didn't know anything about King Lear's situation except with signage - a sign tells us he's an ex-king, a sign tells us she's his dead daughter, we would still respond emotionally to the spectacle of his mourning her death. But it's only through the coherent story, the dramatic narrative, do we really feel the full impact of King Lear's regret, remorse, anguish and mourning. That is what makes drama work.

I said in the previous post that I thought that Wellman's preferred text-centric approach to theatre was hostile to emotion. When Wellman says, in disparagement of "Aristotelian" theatre:  "we can all get together and celebrate some perfectly obvious and banal emotional or theatrical truism" he reveals his attitude towards emotion. Because emotion is banal. As the dictionary has it, banal is by definition:

lacking originality, freshness, or novelty

Yep. That's emotions for you. That's why we still watch The Trojan Women. Because we feel the same old banal shit that the ancient Greeks felt.

I'm not the only one who says this about emotion and Wellman's work. Consider this paper, "The Challenge of Neo-dramatic Writing in the Anglo-Saxon Theater" by Avra Sidiropoulou, from, amusingly, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

The paper provides a nice label for Wellman's postmodernist theatre - "Neo-dramatic Writing", the anti-Aristotelian approach to drama.

Neo-dramatic Writing is a true acrobat of all artistic disciplines. Sidiropoulou explains:

Essentially, in neo-dramatic writing textual primacy is restored, but done so after having been percolated through performance considerations, while simultaneously underlining the dangers of over-exposure to visuality and the limitations of empty formalism.

Sidiropoulou appears to be a fan of Wellman, but really, who, besides me, is not? And this is what he says about Wellman's work:

Traces of this tendency can be found in the plays of Mac Wellman. A poet, as well as a playwright, Wellman sometimes oscillates between the structures of poetry and theater in his dramatic work. As a result some of his plays display a portentous verbosity that actually flattens the characters, cerebralizing and ultimately sabotaging all sense of emotional content. For example, in Description Beggared; or the Allegory of WHITENESS (2000) one of the most characteristic speeches reveals the narcissistic trend of writers to over-verbalize, which is in theory similar to some auteurs’ image-saturated and as such, fatuous and heavy-handed performances:

Fraser
Can you believe it? I am surrounded by
maniacs and idiots. It is hard to say
which is worse, the maniacs or the idiots.
It is hard to say which is worse, the
mania of the maniacs, or the idiocy of the
idiots. For if there is one thing I
cannot abide it is the mania of maniacs;
for if there is something I hate even more
than that it is the idiocy of idiots. (Wellman)

This observation, together with the readers’ and the spectators’ (re-vised?) quest for essence and meaning does by no means vindicate a return to the structures of well-made plays.  

As that last sentence indicates, the author doesn't consider the sabotaging of emotional content a bad thing. And as he soon after says:

...fragmentation of character, fracturing and distortion of narrative, and mistrust for conventional representation are key characteristics of the post-1980s dramaturgy, part of the inevitable development of dramatic writing towards the ambiguity and abstraction that express our twenty-first-century sensibilities...

Yes, those traditional aspects of theatre, like emotional resonance, must be jettisoned - inevitably - in order to make way for 21st-century theatre.

Like Sidiropoulou's paper, Neo-dramatic Writing is a creature of the well-heeled confines of Academia. And in order to show that it is worth keeping around, in order to maintain any kind of prestige, theatre can't do the same old tired, trite, emotional-narrative thing that Wellman disparages. It has to show some kind of progress.

After all, science is always coming up with new ideas, creating new paradigms. Surely art must do the same thing.  Audiences can come to Neo-dramatic Writing theatre and they can like it. Or not. It doesn't matter - either way there's funding available.

How We Learned About Ourselves and Each Other Through Acting Games

The title of this post sums up the plot of CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION, but it was smart of Annie Baker not to use it as the title of the play. The actual title makes the play sound far more deep and mysterious than the alternative.

But I was flabbergasted when I read the play the other day. As I blogged about on Tuesday, Mac Wellman opined that the critics don't really get the sharp edges of Baker's work. And Wellman disparaged what he thinks American critics love, which is "Sentimental Melodrama" aka "Face Value Theatre."

I was flabbergasted because Baker's play is basically a one-episode tricked-out soap opera, without a single sharp edge. I am not kidding. Through the structure of the acting-class we learn who is married, who is divorced, who is attracted to whom,  who cheated on whom, who was molested, who can't get over her ex-boyfriend, who has an ill family member, etc. etc. etc. You know - gossip. The kind of stuff that people who are not Mac Wellman just absolutely cannot get enough of.

I think it's a good play, but then I don't think the problem with American theatre is not enough edge and too much respect for boundaries. As I demonstrated Tuesday, American theatre companies are obsessed with surpassing, pushing, breaking and smashing boundaries. And far from not enough intellectual sharpness, there is in fact a denigration of emotions. I found it telling that in her intro to CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION Baker makes sure to tell you that the characters "are not fools." Why would she need to do that? Because it's the natural inclination of the contemporary theatre world to look down on a play that is about average people, interacting in the usual ways. Having more female than male roles doesn't help either.

Baker manages to avoid having her play dismissed thanks to the acting class scenario. It works for four reasons: it gives a dash of high culture to the proceedings; it's very meta - actors pretending to take an acting class and in some cases playing acting games for the first time; it freshens up standard play conventions like monologues - one of the acting games is to have a person pretend to be another person in the class and tell the audience about "themselves" - so there are several monologues throughout the play, but characters deliver each others' monologues. Finally, it works because it's funny to see these people being made to act in odd ways required of acting games.

But the reason it's a good play is because it is well-plotted. Baker ensures that as we gradually learn about the characters outside of class, we see how that impacts their interactions during class, and vice versa

Yes, it's very well done but it is in absolutely no way cutting edge or boundary-breaking. I read hundreds of plays a year through my various theatre activities and I promise you, there's nothing edgy about CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION. A CHORUS LINE, first produced in 1975 is far more edgy.

I don't know if Mac Wellman is talking about another play by Baker that has sharp edges, but I suspect he was just flattering her when he said the stupid critics missed the sharp edges of her work - I guess he didn't want her to think, after all the nice things she said about him in the Dramatists magazine interview, that he was lumping her in with purveyors of Sentimental Melodramas. But really, that's exactly what CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION is, and that's why it will be performed fifty years from now.

Is it possible to praise Mac Wellman too highly?

And the answer of course is no. It is absolutely against the code of contemporary theater to say anything bad about Wellman. Here is another ecstatic paen of worship for Mac Wellman.

Meanwhile it seems that The Flea Theater, of which Wellman was a founder (which explains why he was given the job of teaching the worst theater class ever) is doing well these days, thanks in part, by exploiting actors.

The Flea board of directors is full of millionaires. But you can hardly blame them for exploiting young people - it's so easy to do and almost nobody will criticize them for it.

Instead we are expected to bow down and worship them for their generosity in funding the arts.

Free Fire Zone

As I expected, I'm really enjoying Theresa Rebeck's "Free Fire Zone" - admittedly in part because we think alike. She feels the same as I about post-modernism in the theatre:

...On one side of that line you have people who think post-modernism is a good idea, and on the other people who think that post-modernism is a load of nonsense perpetrated on the story-telling community by protofascists from Italy...

Although she doesn't name Mac Wellman as the leading perpetrator, like I do. She puts the blame on Gertrude Stein:

...Obviously not all writing is character-centric. If you're interested in writing nihilistic postapocalyptic pseudo-Gertrude Stein verse drama, you can toss everything I said out the window. The same perhaps can be said if you want to write action movies, where the most complicated emotional moment will be someone yelling "Get in the truck!"

And I thought this was an especially good explanation of what went wrong in the theater:

"...The propagation and worship of bad theater, particularly in America, has come about through a series of worthy historical events that collided in a way that wasn't as useful as it could have been. The achievement of theatrical titans such as Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett cast a wide shadow at a time when the audience for theater began to dwindle. The heyday of post-modern achievement consequently presents itself as the model of theatrical storytelling in opposition to more realistic models adopted in television and film. Subsequent generations of writers, struggling for an identity concluded that, because their heroes did it, tossing out narrative altogether is automatically art. Unfortunately abandoning forward motion in an art form that exists in time is not such a good idea. Audience expectations that they are on a ride with a beginning, middle and end that will get them to a destination are undermined. Consequently, theater increasingly becomes a kind of elitist event one attends because "it's good for you" - like opera or going to the dentist... 

If she didn't have Mac Wellman in mind when she wrote that passage, she might as well have. Wellman said: 

The failure of a lot of theater is that it’s Aristotelian, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end: 

He thinks that meeting audience expectations is failure. And I think it's truly because he has this elitist idea that he, the artiste, knows what's good for the audience, and they're a bunch of banality-mongering losers for preferring stories that have a forward motion in time. 

Rebeck also has a good theory on the rise of the importance of the director in theater,  which jibes with my belief that part of the problem is that since directors can do whatever the hell they want with Shakespeare's scripts, they certainly don't hesitate to do anything they want to anybody else's scripts:

My theory is that as theater has become increasingly problematic to produce, producers have turned to classics and revivals as a way of protecting themselves. But these plays require vital new interpreters - you can't just stage them, that's been done already - hence the rise of the star director... 

...One director I know directs alot of Shakespeare, and he seemingly convinced himself that by being an expert at interpreting Shakespeare, he can also "become" Shakespeare - he seriously thinks that he is a genius because he's good at staging Shakespeare, and Shakespeare was a genius. Consequently, all living playwrights (who are not Shakespeare) are beneath him...

And she also puts in a plug for playwrights directing their own work:

...writers still have no reason to suspect their own authenticity. We know that we know how to tell stories because we create them out of whole cloth every day. That aspect of our psyche is unusually (in this business) secure. We know how to tell stories, and a lot of directors, some of whom are wildly overhyped, really don't know how to tell a story, at least not from scratch. So... I say go ahead and direct. What are you waiting for?

Nice. I think I will quote that on the NYCPlaywrights web site.

More gems from this indispensable book soon.