The Primate Press

Cadillac is a tight and lovely little play by Network Playwright Bill Jepsen, set in a car dealership and populated by salespeople combating various moral dilemmas. Is it absolutely necessary to compare it to Glengarry Glen Ross?

Well, yes. One, because the first act has some obvious similarities, or homages. It has a set of salespeople with varying styles and degrees of success, the older generation vs. the younger generation, and a competition for the best leads, in the form of a stack of pending credit approvals on the desk of Finance Manager Howard, the play’s hero. Two, like Mamet’s great play, Cadillac finds beauty in a scene that is not only thoroughly mundane, but also typically seedy and cutthroat.

And no. In every other way, Cadillac is not like Glengarry Glen Ross. In the real estate drama, the characters struggle with a world stripped of any meaning outside of making the sale. Even though it’s a world they bought into, when things go wrong it is painful to face the sword they have lived by. The successful specimen whom they all look up to, Roma, is successful by virtue of being cutthroat but also by being smart and diligent. They live in an inhuman land where their survival skills are in direct contradiction to what they sense is good for human beings, but they persevere anyway.

In Cadillac, meaninglessness is concentrated in the villain, the young Gary. He is on the verge of breaking the record for monthly sales, but unlike Roma, his success is based on cheating and self-interest, not a mastery of sales skills, which he entirely lacks himself and doubts exists in others. Outside of being cutthroat in interest of his commission, he is lazy, naive and hopelessly arrogant.

The rest of the salespeople, two men of the older generation and a younger woman, have a code. It may only be the code of a car salesman, but it is a code nonetheless. It is built on techniques of selling that are demonstrated and philosophized about in fascinating tidbits; the techniques are not necessarily in conflict with being good to other people and to yourself. These characters may not have the wildly inflated expectations of the younger, Internet generation, but at least they see meaning in human life.

This meaning is wonderfully articulated and symbolized by the customer who appears in the first and last scene only, like a middle class chorus. He wants to buy a Cadillac, because all of his life he has worked hard while driving lesser cars and finally, yesterday, has paid off the 30 year mortgage on his house. In his own words, he deserves it.

The rest of the drama revolves around what that sale will mean to the various players on the last night of the sales month. Gary stands to break the record, the woman stands to lose her job, Howard stands to either be ruined by Gary’s manipulation or thwart his unfair ascent. The noose is knotted and looped around the neck of the hero Howard so subtly that you have no idea where it’s going till the last scene, and it is a superb last scene.

The characters look and act as realistic and familiar as the highly detailed and wonderful set, which is complete with wood veneer paneling, plastic plants and bowling trophies. But are these the actions of real car salesmen? Is this whole exchange plausible? No. But Jepsen didn’t make them car salesmen because he wanted to say something journalistic about that line of work. The play’s poetry resides in the symbol of the middle-aged car salesman as noble human. It is so central to the expression that it does not matter if the storyline is plausible for real salesmen; the nobility Howard exhibits by doing the right thing is about what regular people are capable of, no matter how mundane and insignificant they may seem in a seedy Lindy Motors universe. I can’t say enough about the wonderful irony in Howard’s line, “You’d be happier in the Cadillac” in the final scene. He’s a car salesman upselling for all the right reasons, and effectively sacrificing himself in place of the usual unsuspecting customer.

Issue plays are not my cup of tea, but reports of the inventive staging and choreography of Columbinus at the Raven Theatre got me interested. It also struck me as being in this new vein of high school epic play, along with The Sparrow and High School Musical, but with the one, serious, real-life subject high school epics were obligated to visit — Columbine. That combination intrigued me.

The play vividly accomplishes everything it set out to do. I spent the first act, which recreates a traumatic high school world of identity dilemmas, elder incompetence and peer-on-peer injustice, asking whether they would make me see how it could be that Dylan and Eric got to the point of the inevitable disaster. That’s what you expect of the first act, to show how the characters arrive at the second act. Since we all knew what the second act would be, it was disconcerting to feel at intermission that I just didn’t get it. I just didn’t see why they and not someone else actually carried out their fantasy. I was also dimly aware that no one’s name had been used in the first act; I was assuming the archetypal other characters were perhaps their victims, but no one was identified specifically.

As it turns out, all of this was evidence that the play was working. At the beginning of Act Two, Dylan and Eric are identified by name for the first time, and in the run up to the actual execution of the plan, you realize it is simply incomprehensible. Why them? All sorts of influences have been shown to be at work, but it’s a high school world with high school characters that could exist anywhere. The outcome is plausible, but not inevitable — and so why them? Why did THEY choose? That is the unanswerable and terrible reality the play brings home.

I call the play epic because it uses all sorts of wonderful devices — voice overs (mostly for ridiculous teachers and guidance counselors), antiphonal narration, choreographed scene changing that included lots of unison table and chair banging, a lighting change that signaled the inner world of the various characters (I especially liked when the voice over, as a teacher, went into this inner world with a flurry of curses), and a combination chalkboard/projection screen — all interspersed with natural dialogue. The first act culminated with each of the kids alone in their rooms, singing along — badly — to Bittersweet Symphony, exactly the way kids do when they’re alone and upset. It was a brilliant premise to bring in the song, whose words and music perfectly summarized the angst and alienation the act was about. There was something slightly wrong with it, because it seemed to go on too long; halfway through the treatment needed to change somehow. But this was the only time something like that called attention to itself. In every other case, the devices were never used the same way twice, and they worked their double duty of expression and plausibility just right.

As a friend had reported, the opening and the ending were indeed entirely unexpected. The closing, especially, I felt, was magnificently successful. Without giving too much away, though I was CRINGING at once again seeing a tragedy memorialized with a list of names of the dead (please stop it, that is hackneyed now), the effect of leaving the screen lit even after the actors had straggled away worked wonderfully. It couldn’t have been otherwise. It wasn’t time to stop watching, there was still something up there to look at. Everyone clapped for a long time, but there was to be no curtain call. “Is it over?” the audience wondered. “It’s over but doesn’t seem over.” Everyone just sat in their seats for a long time, and that’s an accomplishment in Chicago theatre. It was the end, but closure was impossible.

The thing that made me leary of any show about Columbine was the fear that it was, especially if done on stage, an act of giving the killer Eric Harris exactly what he wanted. I was afraid it would glamorize their act, and it did. I was afraid it would make them sexy, and it did, especially Dylan, in part because of the actor. This was Eric Harris’ stated objective: to be remembered as the instigator of the worst school shooting in history. It was a bit of wish-fulfillment theatre he was after, in which he was the only star, and this show gives him exactly that. There is something hard to stomach in that fact.

It would have been superior if Karam and Paparelli could have found a way to avoid this. But perhaps this validation is an inherent side-effect of telling the story at all. The only way to deprive Eric of what he wanted would have been to never talk about it, in the press or elsewhere. It’s not better never to talk about it. I guess the telling is important enough for society to warrant this unintended consequence. And Columbinus did the best job it could at telling the story.

January 22 – March 15, 2008
COLUMBINUS
by the United States Theatre Project
Written by Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli
Conceived by PJ Paparelli
Directed by Greg Kolack
The Raven Theatre
6157 North Clark Street, on the corner of Clark and Granville in Edgewater
(It’s so nice, they have a big parking lot and a huge lounge-lobby. Come up to my neighborhood!)

Last week the NY Times’ political blog the Caucus was struggling with commentors who had become just a tad overzealous. They were arguing for one side or the other in the controversy drummed up by the Clinton campaign that Obama’s speeches were partly plagiarized, and were forgetting the ground rules of respectfulness. The Caucus, like many readers, just wanted to put the issue to bed, and in their entry describing the melee and calling for closure, they finished with the words, “So it goes.”

I couldn’t resist.

I quickly typed in, “What! ‘So it goes?’ Don’t those words belong to Kurt Vonnegut?! I can’t believe the Caucus writers could be so brazen as to use words once used by someone else! It’s a breach of professional ethics!

“As a matter of fact, I propose we all invent our own personal, unique languages. No one will be able to communicate with anyone else, but at least we’ll owe nothing to anyone. I’m thinking of trying something along the lines of Tralfamadorian, but with all of the letters in reverse order.”

Then I said something about the depths to which the Clinton campaign has sunk, and the fact that she is oblivious to what human communication is really all about.

Huh. The moderators never published it. I’m sure it’s because they felt I was stating the obvious with that crack about Kurt Vonnegut, and they didn’t feel it added anything.

I thought it was a really good Instant Theater. Too bad it was so cold out.

First, I really liked the little play about the two young people who met on the Internet (written by Trina). I loved how they went down the list of computer communication and imbued all of it with this double meaning — “I love your attachments!” — and how they finally discovered certain things that were really nice about face to face contact as well. And then, it was a magic moment of theatre, or maybe even an accident, when the cell phone music played while they hugged.

I also loved how Keely was able to pack plot twists into her short play about the unfaithful/blackmailing/non-hetero husband. It was very complete for five minutes, I’m trying to figure out how she did that.

Great dialogue in the twin sisters scene by Tyla, two people having a completely opposite experience of the exact same thing is my cup of tea. A five minute play that might be allegorical.

One other thing, I just loved the performances of Will and Linda as reptiles in my play, I was totally entertained. I’m still feeling the end doesn’t work, unfortunately, but they did a good job carrying it through. I’m rewriting the end today.

Thanks to Chris and Aaron for running this thing.

Ah, the Hypocrites.

For a play distinguished by its naturalism, and set on an estate in the 19th century, it might seem a betrayal of August Strindberg’s intentions to stage Miss Julie in a series of kitschy fold-out sets furnished like the 1950’s. Or to allow the audience to roam freely through them. Or to compel them to follow Miss Julie and poor Jean on foot as they move from kitchen to bar to – chaos.

But that is a distinguishing feature of Sean Graney and the Hypocrites. When they treat a classic of Modernism like Miss Julie, they might skip the faithful reproduction, but they succeed in capturing the spirit of the play for a contemporary audience.

Miss Julie was shocking, animal, violent and certainly invasive of the audience’ comfort zone in 1889. Graney has recreated this feeling through the unconventional set that erases any zone between the audience and the actors. Social divisions between landed gentry and farm help may not be in the fabric of common experience today, but he was able to express the inherent conflict through other means. Graney rewrote some of the dialogue to bring it up to date, generally to good effect. It helped to put the servants in mechanic jumpsuits and name tags. And of course, the acting is always exceptional. Stacey Stoltz’ Julie was domineering, teasing, slightly crazed – and tragically messed up.

I loved the device of the piles of trash pouring out of the walls, and then Julie and Jean piling out after them in their underwear, in the immediate aftermath of the fateful act. It was a great visual metaphor for the utter chaos they’d landed in. It also worked that that was the only scene that was not representational at all. The device of incorporating items in the trash into the action went on just a little too long, though. This was one of just a couple moments when the staging became distracting. The conversation here is crucial for revealing what drove these characters to what they are – the actors reached just the right pitch of emotion as well – and I wish the compelling thing of the scene could have been just that.

The staging of the final scene, conversely, was perfect. It was just the right kind of shock to the audience, who was forced to step up to an even more intimate level. I also thought Graney used violence and the intimation of violence to great effect throughout the whole thing. He seems aware that the reason this play is still good is because, while surface forms change, sadly, these class conflicts and limitations still dog us. And a new kind of theatre is necessary to express that today.

Miss Julie • The Hypocrites
The Chopin Theatre Studio
1543 W Division St, Chicago
Thurs– Sun., through March 9th.

I used to have a pet theory that the decline of the Left over the last thirty years was due to a misunderstanding about the relationship of form and content. When I was in school in the nineties, English students, under Liberal professors minted in the sixties, learned to deconstruct the work of Melville to reveal his sexism; entire papers could be written critical of a writer’s content without one breath about its form. While this thinking has value, students usually lacked any context in which to understand it. I believe those students came away with a misconception that it doesn’t matter how something is done, so long as it’s for the right politically-progressive reasons.

Maybe I should resurrect my theory. Hillary Clinton’s main charge against Barack Obama is that he is all polish and no substance. This charge plays well to many of her diehard supporters, at the core of the party establishment. To them, good form is not only suspect; it is seen as mutually exclusive of content. Being wonkish themselves, content is defined narrowly as quantitative and policy-oriented – not the stuff of poetry.  Someone who speaks well about a variety of things by definition has nothing to say.

But the party establishment is wrong about form and content. The greatest writers assert form is content — they are one. Philosophers tell us the end never justifies the means, because rotten means will destroy a noble goal in every case. The establishment is also wrong about Barack’s substance. He may not spout policy as fluently as Hillary, but his donor list is free of PAC and corporate donations. When the party agreed to the ground rules for the primary, and the candidates agreed not to campaign in Florida or Michigan, Obama stuck to his word. Only Hillary was on the ballot in Michigan. Only Hillary is operating behind the scenes to get the rules changed mid-game about the uncounted Florida and Michigan delegates.

Which of these stories constitutes substance? On Tuesday, Wisconsin gets to weigh in.

This month’s Instant Theatre theme is here!

Instant Theatre

I’ll be participating once again, apparently — good thing, I was looking forward to improving on a few things.

Join us Wednesday night the 20th at 8pm for fun and art.

Chicago Dramatists

Milwaukee, Chicago & Ogden

(Go to the back door.)

Sick and tired of snowstorms perfectly timed to coincide with rush hour? So am I.

Well cheer up! Cubs pitchers and catchers report for spring training in only 1 hour and 48 minutes!

In Nicholas Kristof’s commentary in the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10kristof.html?hp

he makes very important points about women leaders throughout history. He argues it’s harder for women to succeed in a democracy (as opposed to a monarchy or some family-line government), and he’s certainly on to something. Yet, I cannot stomach this sort of analysis of women’s monumental barriers as a defense of Hillary Clinton. This is exactly what so many of her supporters are trying to do.

For example, in the comments section, poster #19 argues women can’t speak the accepted language of politics because they’re perceived as masculine when they do. “I’d welcome a new political language that isn’t based on military metaphors, but so far, we’re still told to talk tough (but not too tough), or we won’t get taken seriously. No wonder many women feel like they just can’t win.”

Yet it is Barack Obama who is doing this very thing: creating a new language for politics. What is this argument that women being “told” they cannot do something by society’s mores explains their failure? Everyone that argues this forgets — or ignores — that Barack Obama has been told from day one that he cannot talk this way either. He does it anyway. That is the only way to change anything, to have the sand to do anyway what everyone else says you cannot. It is the only first step to changing something that is wrong and unjust. Eventually people will get used to it.

I don’t buy it that Hillary is being stymied by sexism in this. She does not have courage and she does not care to change things for the better, including the double standard that women are held to. She only cares to win, and everyone senses it. Her campaign is only about one woman, Hillary Clinton — not the plight of women years from now.

It takes an extraordinary person to make real change in the fabric of a society, someone with singular wisdom and courage. Someone like Martin Luther King or Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Jane Addams. I’m sorry, Hillary is no Jane Addams. I would argue that Obama is far closer to approaching this group in his wisdom and courage to take a stand. Which kind of person would leave the nation, including women, better off?

To argue that it is her gender that prevents her from changing a rotten gender stereotype makes no sense whatsoever.

Is Hillary a victim? Yes, of course. Just like I am, and any woman who attempts to lead in any field, she is a victim of a male-centric system that erects multiple barriers to her success no men have to face, a system supported by men who are (conveniently) barely conscious of this situation, and certainly won’t admit its depths. But she is being challenged by Obama not because she’s been circumvented by sexism. At a moment when people are hungry for change, it is — ironically — because he is more of an agent of change than she.

If Hillary faces John McCain in the general election, she’ll lose.

Non-Latino voters should consider exactly who they are voting for when they choose Clinton in the primaries.

Latino voters are in a somewhat different boat. Perhaps they feel Hillary versus McCain is a win-win situation for them. But I’d beg them to ask whether a Democratic President is not overall in their best interests. McCain may be a particularly sympathetic Republican on immigration issues, but remember, he will bring an entire Republican administration with him and a mandate to that party’s base. By voting for Hillary in the primary, that is what you are choosing.

Is Barack Obama’s immigration policy so different from Hillary’s — or certainly from John McCain’s — that Latinos would prefer another Republican administration over what Obama has to offer?