Three Plays

Contents

Preface
Ontological Proof of My Existence
Miracle Play
The Triumph of the Spider Monkey

Reviews

• Library Journal, December 1, 1980, p2512
• Booklist, December 15, 1980, p554
• Commonweal, August 28, 1981, p475-476

Excerpt

Preface

Ceremony, ritual: the inexpressible coherence of 'fate': the disharmonious music that is torn from us at certain moments in our lives and in history—these are the elements that underlie drama. Atop them nearly anything can be imagined and played, depending upon the courage of the individual voices.

My fascination with the drama is a fascination with its oldest, and in a way most conservative function: the mimesis of an action 'tragic' in its intensity, involving defeat and triumph, often in inexpressible terms. Language does not always fail—it quite frequently succeeds—but images must never fail. The gesture will outlive its moment in the plot.

The basic 'texts' of the plays are surrealist, and their mode of discourse poetry. Consequently a surface realism and a prose facade may be employed for as long as the director thinks effective. Movement is always from prose to poetry, from 'realism' to 'surrealism,' but the ease with which the metamorphosis is accomplished in each play (and in scenes within each play) must be determined in part by the sophistication of the audience. The more sophisticated the audience, the more readily one can dispose with a 'professional' slickness and reveal, even allude to, the ceremonial underpinnings of the story. Peter V. of Ontological Proof of My Existence has all our names in his book.

The plays are clearly meant to be formal rituals of sacrifice, on their most fundamental (and secret) level. Strong actors might convey the struggle almost physically—as in fact I have seen them convey it, through facial and bodily gestures that are improvised. The tug-of-war is not simply for triumph of a kind but for survival itself in the ongoing drama. To be less than the star is to be—obliterated.

It is helpful for the actors to imagine themselves performing on two planes, as we 'perform' in real life. We sense ourselves more or less contained within a coherent structure, a 'story' that is being told (without a storyteller?)—we are characters experienced in the third person. At the same time we cannot help but transcend the story intermittently, suffering glimpses of its gravity, its momentum (though we can do very little to alter its plot). We are, consequently, characters in an anarchic prose poem that is plotless and timeless and has been experienced throughout human history. Our mode of discourse for the one is prose, for the other, poetry.

Though these are highly self-conscious plays their 'realism' should not be scorned. Imagine simply that the function of the Greek chorus has been absorbed into the participants of the drama—perhaps into the texture of the drama itself. Action and commentary; commentary and action; analysis; illumination; stasis; and then movement once again. The plays' secret passage is from prose to poetry, from a time-locked 'story' to anarchy. My faith that this corresponds to our own secret passages—as speakers of prose, as speakers of poetry—is absolute.

Ritual is always stylized and impersonal; that is why it is ritual, why it is both terrible and necessary. Life may not be a constant struggle for self-definition but its crucial moments are, and drama focuses upon those crucial moments. Drama is greedy, insatiable: it swallows up great expanses of 'ordinary life': not to dismiss them but to transform them. The more abstract the drama, the more rigorously its discourse may correspond to the secrets of 'ordinary life.' Perfect gestures outlive the plots that surround them and make them possible.

Ceremony, ritual, sacrifice. And a final illumination. These are conservative elements. In a drama that takes itself so seriously, with such self-conscious gravity, moments of sheer comedy—comedy that is free, even, of parody—are irresistible. The more comic the struggle for survival is imagined, the more compelling the play: up to a point. But of course that point cannot be passed or the ritual—is destroyed.

Shelley of Ontological Proof of My Existence begins her play strongly and even defiantly; but she loses it, as she loses the audience, to the superior imagination—the strength and bravado—of her enterprising lover Peter V. In Miracle Play everyone contends for victory, simply because victory—however minimal—assures the only possible conditions for survival. Titus, like Peter, is an industrious entrepreneur: he cannot be defeated since he is, in his glory, the Savior of his society's secret religion. The 'miracle' is not that Titus succeeds at murder, and will not be stopped; the 'miracle' is far more basic—that he dares to define himself as if he might be, indeed, self-born, self-generated. Both Peter V. and Titus are mock-saviors and mock-playwrights whose refusal to be mere third-person characters assures them victory.

The Triumph of the Spider Monkey, the most recent of the plays, and for obvious reasons the play closest to my heart, involves a 'tragic' hero who is both criminal and victim: one who acquiesces finally to his fate, which he has tried to misread as destiny. Bobbie Gotteson's story has evolved through so many stages in my writing career that its basic meaning has become inescapable to me, yet no less painful for being self-evident. The thwarted artist, the mocked and ridiculed and doomed artist, the artist who is tirelessly (and madly) convinced of his genius—how has it come about that he is, in the public's rapt eye, merely another mass murderer?—merely the 'most appealing' of recent mass murderers in the great State of California? And how has it come about that his pursuit of his obsession has involved the deaths of others? They are innocent deaths as well—as Bobbie admits freely, "They were all innocent." Yet the Spider Monkey is redeemed—in a manner of speaking. His passion is a triumph: in a manner of speaking.

I have imagined these plays as rites of sacrifice, then: but they are also, and more obviously, arenas in which warring and harmonious voices take on life. The 'voices' are those of strangers—yet, to the playwright, they have a curious mesmerizing resonance. No form of art is perhaps so graphically autobiographical in essence—in emotional essence—as the drama; yet no form of art can appear so distant, so detached from its imaginative source. The 'voices' become those of actors: the sensibility of the playwright becomes that of the director: the original play is seen not to exist, except as a tissue of words, awaiting life. As a writer, as one who believes in the relative permanence of the written word, I find both astonishing and saddening the fact that actors' performances are largely lost. The inspired moments, the half-conscious gestures that are so perfect, and so fleeting—the uncanny ability of the good actor to submerge himself in his role—the extraordinary subtlety of actors as they play together: it seems to me tragic that these precious achievements are fated to be lost, except in memory. (And what is memory? Where does it reside?) Consequently it seems to me that drama's most instinctive curve is toward the tragic, or even more violently toward the ironic and the parodistic. In Bobbie Gotteson's words, the music of the drama, and perhaps of all art, is simply a way of trying to disguise something so humanly sad it can't be expressed in any other terms.

Joyce Carol Oates
Princeton, New Jersey