RE: RAT Famous Playwrights, Mostly Dead

[Jeffrey Jones <Diogenes_@compuserve.com>]

Why, I thought you'd never ask....

Funnily enough, as I was riding the D train home last night, I  happened to
receive a swift kick in the butt. Or at least what I mistook for a swift
kick in the butt.  For a moment, I was hoping it might be my old girlfriend
Tina L'Hotsky, in whose hands (?) buttkicking had been elevated to a high
art  but alas, as I turned, I saw it was only the wizened figure of Ernst
"Putzi" Hanfstaengl, Harvard-educated grammarian for the National Socialist
party (it was Putzi, by the way, who had the brilliant idea of adding an
umlaut to "Führer"). 

"Soooo, Mr. Smarty-Pants," said he, "Who gets your vote for the best
playwright of the millennium"
"The best Aryan playwrigh?" I smirked.
"Aus du lief," demurred Putzi.
"Well, that's a no-brainer, you centenarian racist doucheball," I replied
smartly. "Wm. Shakespeare gets my vote as well as that of a sizeable
portion of the Deutches Volk ever since the Romantic era, if I'm not
mistaken, even in translation. And as queer as Ernst Rohm, I might add"
"Shakespeare hath a will, but Anne hath a way," purred the reformed
anti-Semite. "I just want to know what you propose doing with the other 564
years of the milennium, before he was born."
"I fail to see the relevance of that remark," sez I.
"No relevance at all. But it seems a little inconvenient to let all that
time go to waste. If I had asked you that question in 1563, presumably you
would have had no answer at all?" 
"No, presumably I would have been precognitive and said 'John Dryden,'" I
replied somewhat testily.  Putzi, being well over a hundred years old and a
functional illiterate, despite his reputation for taste, also had a way of
being tendentious.
"And no doubt you would agree that his Henry IV, I & II, are not only a
moving personal meditation on age and death but a trenchant examination of
politics? More, say, than Jonson's Julius Caesar?" 
"I never read, Jonson's Julius Caesar," I lied.
"Neither have I," he replied with a beatific smile. "That doesn't prevent
me from having an opinion on it, does it? Better than Edward II? Better
than..."
"Shut the fuck up," I wittily replied.
"And of the comedies,"  he went on, relentlessly, "and by comedies we shall
say we mean the funny plays, not the strange dark nasty plays like Measure
for Measure, you would prefer Midsummer Night's Dream over, say, 'The Way
of the World?" 
"The Way of the World is not Shakespeare--Congreve's comedies, like those
of Wycherly or Sheridan or Wilde may actually be funnier than
Shakespeare's, but the bodies of work are not comparable!  They are all
writers of the second tier, surely, Putzi."
"Is it the playwright or the play that matters?"  he replied. "And speaking
of Wilde, who is the best playwright of the 20th Century?"
"What's wrong with Chekhov?" I replied.
"I would have said Chekhov was the best playwright of the 19th Century, but
then I would have said that Ubu Roi is arguably the greatest play of the
20th Century. Dates never were my strong point. Do you prefer "Cherry
Orchard" to Vanya, and if so why? Is "Cherry Orchard" really superior to
Gorki's "Enemies," and if it were not, would you be in a position to say
so?"
"Tell it to the Gauleiter," I snarled, untangling my fingers from this
eyes. "School's out for summer, Putzi."
"And of the American, you nominate  this Jewish fellow, what's his name
again, Müller....?" 
"OK, that's it, Hanftstaengl!" I barked.  And knowing that I was about to
undergo a half-hour racist harrangue I turned to go--forgetting for the
moment that the D Train was still crossing the Manhattan Bridge.  But the
Foxy Nazi was too quick for me. In a trice, his cane was between my legs
and I went sprawling to the floor of the car. 
"You are an idiot," he sneered.  "Is that tiresome religious allegory,
Godot, really superior to Endgame or Play? Is Death of a Salesman really
superior to Long Day's Journey or Streetcar Named Desire--to list only
plays that a well educated high school senior might be expected to discuss?
 Which of these plays about kicking a man when he's down is the better: The
Local Stigmatic or Katzelmacher? Do you know anything?" 
"I might know something about the nineties," I said.
"Let us see," he replied.
"Len Jenkin's The Country Doctor was..."
"Written in the Eighties!" He was nearly shouting now. "As was Gogol, as
was American Notes." 
"I still think they're pretty good.  Ditto John Steppling's 'Teenage
Wedding," John Jesurun's "Riderless Horse" ditto Irene Fornes'..."
"Stick to the Nineties, stick to what you know, what the hell do they teach
up at Yale nowadays!"
"OK, here are three:
        1)  Mac Wellman's Terminal Hip is the first play that actually
revives the poetic tradition of the English theatre
             which was killed by the closing of the theatres.  Why? Because
Wellman shows not only how to avoid the
             use of "poetical" language, which so rapidly degenerates into
archness (q.v. Robinson Jeffers, Archibald 
             McLeash, Eliot, even Auden), but sidesteps the whole problem
of meter. The language is so allusive, so
            non-referential, that is is clearly poetry--you are forced into
"close listening"--yet there is none of the mustiness
            of all the previous attempts which tried, however indirectly,
to reclaim shakespeare.

        2) David Greenspan's The Myopia is not one play but
three--simultanously the stories of the mid-career Warren
             G. Harding, a talking eyeball, and a giantess pursued by a
hack writer who spends most of the time on the 
            phone in the can--all wrapped up in elaborate stagings, and
interlarded with preludes, forwards, essays 
                          and asides on the nature of theatre (including,
believe it if you can, Carol Channing quoting extensively from
             Gertrude Stein's essay on theatre).  Yet that is but half the
description, for the play, as written, is also a monolog,
             and everything--Carol Channing, the stage directions, a
smoke-filled room containing 20 republican politicos
             cutting a deal for the presidential ticket at the party
convention--all this is rendered by David, WHO NEVER 
            LEAVES THE CHAIR.  This is a play that both explores and
exhausts the richness of the theatrical.

        3) David Hancocks "DEVIANT CRAFT" (the Frontera production) was as
complex an articulation of intertextual
            realities, of layers of performance and illusion, as you could
ever hope to see--a potted Tempest, wrapped inside
            a demented myth of something called the "Phlogiston
Foundation."--and yet... IT WAS ESSENTIALLY IMPROVISED
           ANEW every night.  This takes writing into territory I have
never seen explored before.

By now we were climbing the stairs to Lincoln Road ("another jew, another
fairy" sniffed my cicerone) and Putzi, so far from being silenced, laughed
at me and said, in his quavery voice, "A goodly tale i'faith, Comes there
any more of it?"  I wheeled upon him. I was filled with righteous fury, and
I roared
"I have answered three questions and that is enough. Don't give yourself
airs! Do you think I can listen all night to such stuff? BE OFF, OR I'LL
KICK YOU DOWNSTAIRS..."
But it was too late. In the twinking of an eye, the aged reprobate had
disappeared and there was only a page from the day's New York Times,
gusting down the street.  I went home and went to bed, and awoke the next
morning from uneasy dreams.


e. s.