“Age,” according to Michel de Montaigne, “imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.” And he knew whereof he spoke by the time he penned that, in the late 16th century, when his “grey hairs gave [him] some authority.”
He’d already spent his entire writing life in mental self-portraiture, trying to capture the subtle byplay of his thought. From the French verb “to try” he derived the name “Essay” for the newfangled literary form he invented. Yet his ideas kept imprinting quirky new channels – wrinkles – faster than he could pin them down.
Of all literary forms – fable, horror, ode, farce, romance – the essay is probably the hardest, and rarest, to bring to the stage. And no wonder, as its subjects tend to be immaterial, like thoughts, and sit static and composed, like portraits.
Yet there’s drama inherent in a well-lined face, if you know how to look for it. And the wrinklier the better.
Two of this year’s PuSh Fest productions bring off the rare feat of spinning essays into riveting theatre. Each show goes about it in its own quirky way.
Essayist, science explicator and broadcast personality David Suzuki is probably Canada’s best known environmental advocate. Together with his wife, Tara Cullis – herself an author, literary scholar and activist – they’re widely hailed as godparents of the worldwide Green movement.
But in What You Won’t Do for Love, we meet them not through their published opus, but rather through the intimate and revealing lens of their decades-long love story. The play is still a work-in-progress, but PuSh audiences got to see it in an advanced stage of development at a one-off workshop presentation in New Westminster’s Anvil Centre.
The show is the handiwork of Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes of Toronto’s Why Not Theatre, a power couple in their own right (co-developers of a new Mahabharata in this year’s upcoming Shaw Festival). But in the Anvil workshop, they appeared as supporting facilitators only, with the starring roles reserved for Suzuki and Cullis in person.
The framework is a convivial dinner, with Jain and Fernandes as admiring hosts who pour the wine and download their distinguished guests. The audience is arrayed, theatre-in-the-round style, on three sides of the circular table. An overhead camera beams a top-down view of the tabletop in real-time onto a cyclorama screen.
Scattered amidst the stemware and hors d’oeuvres is a hodgepodge of Suzuki-Cullis memorabilia – snapshots, clippings, papers, souvenirs – which serve as reminiscent talking points. Photos of Canada’s World War II Japanese internment camps, a seminal memory for 82-year-old Suzuki, tells us a lot about how he acquired his lifelong passion for social – and, eventually, ecological – justice.
A studio portrait of Cullis as an earnest 20-something grad student (“looks like Rita Hayworth,” according to Suzuki) bespeaks her determination to win that man (13 years her senior and already a celebrity) so they could get past this noisome distraction of mating and get on with their joint life of service.
We hear about the charms and trials of an intercultural marriage and the logistic travails of raising children while spearheading a cause. They expound their left-brain/right-brain theory of how they complement one another. Left-brain dominant as he is (logical, scientific, yang), he’s at a loss without her right-brain support (intuitive, poetic, yin).
Along the way they do get to squeeze off some disquisitions on their Green themes, but always in the dramatic context of their life stories. Their adoring on their grandchildren, for instance, lend a poignant urgency and concreteness to their hopes and fears for the planet. Rather than serving up discursive polemics, they offer us their memoirs as an essay in how to live responsibly. At Anvil Centre, they preached to a responsive choir, judging from their standing ovation.
Far more explicitly essayistic is Theatre Replacement’s Footnote Number 12. In fact, as we file into the black box of Granville Island’s Performance Works, we each find on our seat a paperback book of essays by belle lettriste David Foster Wallace. Each book is dog-eared to a 2006 New York Times piece, ostensibly about tennis, with select passages carefully bracketed or underlined by hand.
It’s hardly your run-of-the-mill sports journalism; rather an extended meditation – with footnotes, no less, and footnotes to the footnotes! – upon the hermeneutic resonance of the epochal 2005 match between tennis greats Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon.
But don’t expect any rolling green vistas, grassy courts, gleaming white togs or whippet action here at Performance Woirks. Instead, PuSh audiences get the studiously schlubby figure of Theatre Replacement co-artistic director James Long in a tricot shirt, his hangdog face shadowed by a visor cap, slouching between stools around a flimsy camp table.
He recites from an unbound copy of the Wallace essay, crumpling up each leaf of the script as he’s done with it. Now and then he gathers some of the balled up pages to play a kind of stationery pétanque – about as sporty as we’re going to get.
The only other player onstage is soundboard operator Nancy Tam, black-clad and expressionless, as diminutive as Long is gangly, severe straight-cut bangs fringing her pie-eyed Lucite specs. She mostly sits in the front row, back to the audience, twiddling dials. Each tweak summons up a whole new character in the show.
Except, disorientingly, they all emanate out of Long’s mouth; Tam’s soundboard bends the pitch, tone and timbre of his voice so drastically that he can sound like a lisping, wistful child, a maidenly grammarian or a stentorian professor. He inhabits each of these personae in turn to highlight different registers of Walace’s storytelling.
In the high-pitched child voice, he keeps returning to the image of the “coin-toss boy” who determines the match’s opening serve – a chemo-scarred cancer survivor who’s a peripheral figure in the Wimbledon ceremonies but a potent symbol in the Federer/Nadal teleology. As the reflective schoolmarm, he parses the stark binaries that Wallace so abundantly invokes: “the king-versus-regicide…Apollo and Dionysus. Scalpel and cleaver. Righty and southpaw.”
With typically professorial throat-clearing eructations, Long’s baritone voice tutors us to read the essay from the bottom up, i.e. broaching the main text by starting with the footnotes. So we’re reminded, right in in footnote #1, that “There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body…. pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits,” but that “great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter.”
And from there we’re referred back to Wallace’s core concept in the main text of “kinetic beauty,” which “has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms,” but rather with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”
After nearly an hour of speaking in tongues like this, the preciosity of it all gets too much for Long in all three of his avatars. He smashes up the flimsy stage furniture while raging against Wallace as an overly clever, privileged white boy who wound up so unreconciled to his own privileged bodily existence that he inexplicably tossed it all with his and suicide, just two years after the Times essay, at age 46.
Then, just as abruptly, Long repents his tantrum, reassembles the table and campstools and reverts to the essay, but this time in his own, undistorted voice. After all the soundboard jiggery-pokery, his straightforward tenor seems an act of great vulnerability and sincerity, even when parsing the nit-picky titular Footnote #12 (which ponders a point of “dodgy” Brit grammar).
But it’s his final footnote, #17, that brings the audience to hushed silence and then a standing ovation. That’s where Wallace pull together all the strands of the essay: the religiosity, the poignancy of the chemo “coin boy” and the “kinetic beauty” of Federer.
“It’s like a thought that’s also a feeling... that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer.” Yes, and also produced and Tam and Long and the show’s Norwegian scriptwriter/conceptualizer Andrea Spreafico.
“And just look at [them] down there,” the note concludes. “Look at that.”