Come forth from the womb

The cast of Crave. Clockwise from upper left: Liz Rimar (C), Alex Mickiewicz (B), Duke Doyle (A), and Heather Anderson (M).
STIPIMM: “Wish You Were Here,” by Incubus

Perhaps I’m not the most objective observer to be commenting on Bridget’s plays, but dag nab it, I’m extremely proud of what Bridget’s done, and what she has in store for her in the fourth quarter. Quite a swing in topic from Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show, which was fun, but ultimately fluff; there’s nothing fluffy about either Crave or 4.48 Psychosis, both by Sarah Kane.

The production was obviously a milestone for Bridget: her first production at BU; the first one that students and faculty would see; etc. But, as I told her on a day when rehearsals were going poorly, this production is even more important as a turning point in Bridget’s understanding of theatre. She has been in love with 4.48 Psychosis since she read it several years ago. Throughout all her theatre work, it has been lingering in the back of her mind, out of reach in terms of production, but always there. Now that she’s done it, it’s as though she had completed writing a novel; she didn’t have to or want to think about the subject or the play anymore. Her mind is free of the lingering pull of 4.48 Psychosis and Sarah Kane, “Happy and free.” It is truly a turning point; pre-4.48 Bridget will be distinctly different from post-4.48, and in a good way.

I got to see both Crave and 4.48 Psychosis a total of five times. Two of those times, I was busy behind a camera, but the other times (especially the last time I saw in on Saturday) I got to enjoy it fully. The productions inspired a lot of feelings and a lot of thoughts. It makes me very proud that my Bridget has created something that has really made me think about what I’m seeing. These are two productions that are worthy of serious analysis, and so I’d like to share some of my thoughts on them.

When I first read Crave, I was worried for my girl. Not because the material was too difficult, but because of the form of the play: scattered dialogue that can at times appear random mixed with no stage directions. In all honesty, I dreaded Crave because it seemed like one of those plays that people who don’t like modern theatre make fun of: people dressed in black, Dadaistically talking and moving around stage. The play has four characters, labeled as A, B, C, and M, sometimes interacting in the dialogue, other times seemingly speaking to themselves or having their own one-person conversation.

Here’s a telling sample:

C If she’d left—
M I don’t want to grow old and cold and be too poor to dye my hair.
C You get mixed messages because I have mixed feelings.
M I don’t want to be living in a bedsit at sixty, too scared to turn the heater on because I can’t pay the bill.
C What ties me to you is guilt.
M I don’t want to die alone and not be found till my bones are clean and the rent overdue.
C I don’t want to stay.
B I don’t want to stay.
C I want you to leave.
M If love would come.
A Let it happen.
C No.
M It’s leaving me behind.
B No.
C No.
M Yes.
B No.
A Yes.
C No.
M Yes.
B Let me go.
C I don’t want to have to buy you Christmas presents anymore.

It’s not too hard to imagine this done overly expressionistically, with C and M doing a movement piece as they belted out their first lines. In short, I had a bad feeling that I was going to have to pretend to like whatever came out of Bridget’s work.

I didn’t feel too much better about it when Bridget first told me how Crave was originally performed in Britain. Avoiding any semblance of over-expressionism, the staging was non-existent; the four actors sat in chairs, facing the audience, never directly interacting with each other. Very Vagina Monologues. Very artificial. Very easy. Very boring. Almost as worthy of making fun of as the Dadaland described above.

Bridget, mercifully, chose something in between these two ridiculous extremes, choosing instead to have the actors embody the characters fully and interact with each other as realistically as possible. Bridget’s emphasis as a director has always been on character and the actors’ creation of them; just because Crave was a seemingly disparate mess wasn’t going to stop her from trying to fully realize these four characters.

Let’s be honest, though: Sarah Kane would have hated it. It’s the kind of realistic (if that’s the right word for it… there’s nothing “real” about it, per se) production that she sought to avoid. Well, in the words of Death in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life: “Well, you’re dead now, so shut up.” If her plays were really that important to her, she shouldn’t have killed herself. Too bad, so sad. Rest in pieces and roast in hell, for all I care. Because guess what, Sarah dear, Bridget’s production works.

The Abuser gets abusive with C.

It works for two primary reasons: first off, the characteri­zations are strong and clear. The names of the characters have connotations that we’re supposed to acknowledge (A = “Author/­Abuser”; B=”Boy”; C=”Child”; M=”Mother”). In the production, these roles are clearly laid out by the actors, particularly by Duke Doyle and Heather Anderson, who play A and M, respectively. None of the four roles are characters, per se, but are instead living embodiments of the pure urges (craves, if you will) of each character. A, the desire to control, to manipulate. M, the desire to create, to nurture, to educate. B, the desire to explore, to be loved. Kind of Platonic ideals in the flesh, or perhaps a better comparison would be the Freudian id and superego: distilled versions of pure urges, and all their trappings.

If A, B, and M are the equivalent of the id and superego, then C (played wonderfully by Liz Rimar) is the ego. Her journey is the one we experience in the play, an experience that culminates in the opening of the box that occupies the center of the stage. The other characters seem to exist for her and perhaps by her. She soaks up everything they say, everything they throw at her, until finally she is able to step away from them.

Which brings me to the other reason Bridget’s production works: 2) she succeeds in creating the sense of “another world.” Bridget contends in her process paper (which she has to write for each production detailing how it progressed) that she didn’t think she had succeeded in this, but I disagree. There is a distinct sense, from early on, that we are in a unique world, someplace that is decidedly different from our own. It sounds like such a silly thing (“Of course it’s not our world, it’s a freakin’ play!”), but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Indeed, I think she succeeded in Crave in this area more than she did in 4.48 Psychosis, and so much the better for Crave.

And what exactly is this world? Bridget talks in her process paper how she feels it is the world of a bad dream, i.e., a mental world. If that is the case, then the mind we’re looking into would have to be C’s, and we’re watching her nightmare. But what’s the point of this nightmare? What exactly is happening to C as she’s dreaming this, and what will happen when she wakes up?

"I want a child." And if her contortions are any clue, she means it.

The metaphor of birth runs throughout the play, particularly from the character M, who repeatedly tells C, “I want a child.” Two very significant passages occur early on in which both B and M relate experiences that were passed to them inside the womb (B inheriting his father’s broken nose; M having a memory that only her mother could have had). These passages hint at what is going on in C’s metaphorical birth in this play: she is subsuming the urges, the craves, that are embodied in the other three characters. Indeed, from the metaphorical womb, she is inheriting experiences, urges, ideas, pains and pleasures from the other three, sorting them out until she’s ready to step out from her mind.

The play represents a major life change for C, a fundamental shift in perception and understanding. It’s a life change that can really be going on at any time in the character’s life, but as I watched the play five times, I personally came to understand the play as a literal birth, sensing what is going on through the child’s mind right before the moment of birth. You think, sure Chris, I’m sure what’s going through a baby’s mind at the moment of birth is “A fourteen year old to steal my virginity on the moor and rape me till I come” (one of C’s lines). But remember, much of the play revolves around the idea that C is absorbing the experiences from outside, and the dialogue is not something to be taken fully literally, but experientially. It’s not impossible to imagine that C is expressing experiences or urges felt by her mother or father or whatever. “We pass these messages faster than we think and in ways we don’t think possible.”

"Into the light."

But, of course, like all good plays, it’s not just about one thing, and it is probably more about metaphorical birth than literal birth. But that’s what I came from it with, and how I came to see the play by the fifth time I watched it. And even if my interpretation is miles off, it says something about the quality of the production that I can come away from it with a distinct interpretation that is probably quite different from other people’s. Forget C; this is Bridget’s rebirth as a director. “Come forth from the womb,” indeed.

Next up… 4.48 Psychosis, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Suicide. (Although I may have an Oscar post before then)

Note on the photos: I’m sorry about the quality; I didn’t have an opportunity to take production stills, so I just did screen captures from the video recordings I made.