Gollywillikers. I used to think Stephen Sondheim was outrageous with his musicals about presidential assassins and butchered fairy tale characters. I’ve just now come across some really shocking avant garde theater.
One such shocking play I encountered opens with the line–um, well, er — “merde.” It’s about a gang tough who kills the local boss and all but one of the boss’ children, then takes the boss’ place. Having done so, he then proceeds to slaughter a succession of judges and other worthies who get in his way. When a poor person refuses to pay him tribute, the tough burns down the man’s house. Throughout the play, the tough and his wife banter back and forth in dialogue made up almost entirely of profanities.
Another avant garde work that took me completely by surprise is about a brother and sister so mad for each other she becomes pregnant by him. Their father tries to marry her off to an unsuspecting swain, but the fellow finds out about her pregnancy and how she got that way, and threatens to kill both sister and brother. Before he can, the brother dispatches the sister, cuts out her heart and runs around with it on a knife at a birthday party to show that he will possess her love forever. He then kills the would-be husband, whose friends then kill him.
Yet another theatrical stunner I’ve come upon is about a clergyman who falls in love with his children’s nanny and makes her his mistress. When his wife commits suicide over this, the clergyman discovers the nanny talked her into it. Besotted with love, he asks the nanny/mistress to marry him anyway and become the motherless children’s stepmother. But she changes her mind about him and refuses, feeling guilty over having been her own father’s mistress a few years before. So despondent are both of them that each commits suicide, leaving the children complete orphans.
I won’t elaborate on yet another, the “erotic evangelical verse play” about Mary Magdalene’s “love for Jesus.” Suffice it to say, it goes the limit as well.
The most remarkable thing about all these plays is not simply that they were actually produced and performed, but that they were produced and performed a century ago.
Their titles are “Ubu Roi (Ubu the King),” “Annabella,” “Rosmersholm” and “L’Amant du Christ (“Christ’s Lover”). The playwrights are the long dead Alfred Jarry, John Ford, Henrik Ibsen and Rodolphe Darzens.
The plays are, in fact, part of a large body of such works of the period, including a hot number called “Salome,” by one Oscar Wilde. A scandalous, Biblically derived work involving a seductive princess, John the Baptist and sexually obsessive love, it received its first private staging in Paris in the apartments of none other than Bertha Honore Palmer, who had advanced through liberating passages from stuffy Chicago society matron to Edwardian royal bundle to Parisian saloniste.
Or as they say in Schaumburg, “Woo woo!”
So ancient are these plays that my initial encounter with most of them took place last week in a lofty Washington museum–the not-so cutting-edge National Gallery of Art. It has just opened an exhibition of program covers, playbills, posters and other illustrative artwork from these fin de siecle productions. Called “Artists and the Avant-Garde Theater in Paris, 1887-1900,” it’s on view through Sept. 7.
The art, on loan from the prestigious Atlas Collection, is just as brilliant and just as scandalous as the plays. One illustrative broadside shows a naked couple rising frontally from a bed. Another depicts a lecher groping the elsewheres of a lady while her husband stoically looks on. Another presents a man bathing hands and face in the blood of his maid, whom he has just dispatched.
The artists are not exactly off-the-wall weirdos, either. They’re such perfectly respectable weirdos as Pierre Bonnard (who was fond of painting his wife sitting nude in the bathroom), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (who was fond of painting anyone’s wife sitting nude in the bathroom), Edouard Vuillard and Edvard Munch (whose famous “The Scream” may have been inspired by an outraged avant-garde theatergoer).
I bring this up not only because the artworks are as marvelously engaging as the plays they represent, but because they and the discovery of the plays gave me sudden pause as I pondered the current controversy in New York over Terrance McNally’s scandalous new play “Corpus Christi,” which is about a gay, Christ-like prophet who makes love to his disciples.
The Manhattan Theater Club, which didn’t even blink at staging Joe Orton’s phallus-frolic “What the Butler Saw,” scheduled “Corpus Christi” for the fall season, then hastily dropped it, then hastily rescheduled it again.
There’s been so much outrage over it that MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow issued a statement saying the theater was outraged over the liberal outrage over the theater’s bending to conservative outrage.
I even caught myself in lamentation, wondering if the American theater is caught up in some slow but inexorable slide into degeneracy.
But this is foolish. None of this is new; or if you will, before the avant-garde, there was the avant-garde, all the way back to the beginning. The slide is rather like an endless roller coaster ride, with scandal and outrage a constancy throughout the history of human artistic expression.
Ford’s “Annabella,” in fact, was first produced in 1633 as “‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore,” playing in London regularly and popularly thereafter–until shut down by Cromwell’s Puritans in 1642.
Maybe Sondheim will make a musical out of it.
