Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✩✩✩
written and directed by Adam Seelig
One Little Goat, Walmer Centre Theatre, Toronto
November 13-28, 2009
"The Riddle of the Sphincter"
Adam Seelig’s “Talking Masks” is a riddle of a play, but not so compelling that you actually want to spend time solving it. I have admired Seelig’s work as a director for such difficult plays as Thomas Bernhard’s “Ritter, Dene, Voss” in November 2006 and Jon Fosse’s “Someone is Going to Come” in March 2009. There he shed light on what at first glance seem repetitious, impenetrable texts. With “Talking Masks” he has created a repetitious and impenetrable but rather than shedding light on its meaning, Seelig as director appears intent on keeping it hidden or, in fact, denying that there is one.
The 70-minute work is less a poetic drama than a performance poem for four voices. The reason for the work’s intractability is that it simultaneously constructs and deconstructs itself at every moment. The press release describes “Talking Masks” as “a new play that combines the Oedipus of Ancient Greece with the Biblical and Koranic tales of Isaac and Ishmael to deliver a powerful meditation on the nature of blessings and curses”. From this, one would think Seelig were taking a structuralist approach to mythology in his attempt to unite the story of Oedipus with that of Isaac and Ishmael. In fact, the characters of Greek or biblical mythology are only tangential to Seelig’s theme.
All that really links the three character is that they were bound either by their father or at their father’s behest to face death--Oedipus by exposure to the elements, Isaac (or in the Koran his half-brother Ishmael) in order to be sacrificed. Laius had Oedipus bound to try to escape a prophesy the Delphic oracle that Oedipus would kill him. Abraham bound Isaac (or Ishmael) to fulfill God’s commandment that he should slay what was dearest to him. All Seelig is interested in is that the boy who takes on the name of “Ben” (meaning “son” in Hebrew) is born into a role at birth.
There is no action and no character development except that “Ben”, moves from knowing but not caring that he is bound by a rope to a tree to freeing himself from the rope. Theoretically, such interior action, such as one finds in the plays of Maeterlinck, Yeats or Fosse, could be interesting, but Seelig has buried whatever narrative there is beneath layers of wordplay and far too many metatheatrical signifiers. The play begins with a prelude of almost pure sound poetry from two maternal figures Cathy and Jane, played by Cathy Murphy and Jane Miller. Cathy seems to represent Sarah, Isaac’s mother, and Jane, Ishmael’s mother Hagar, but that is never clear, nor is their relation to “Ben” as Oedipus. All that emerges is that Cathy represents “yes” and Jane “no”.
Next we find Richard Harte as “Ben” in a diaper tied to a two-dimensional tree. He is confronted by Andrew Moodie sitting backwards on a play horse. Given that the word projected on the back of the stage was “asshole” above the picture of the back end of a donkey, those with a smattering of Greek will realize what Seelig is doing. Oedipus was the one who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, a human-animal monster that had been terrorizing Thebes. Because of this he was acclaimed King of Thebes and thus became the husband of Jocasta, who (unknown to both) was his own mother. The word “Sphinx” comes from the Greek verb “σϕίγγω” (“I bind”) because she would strangle her victims. The word “sphincter” comes from the same verb representing a band of muscles that constrict. Thus, Moodie on the horse with the talking anus is Seelig’s bawdy version of the Sphinx who confronts a boy who is also “bound”. The wordplay emerging from their dialogue of the two involves Moodie’s insistence that “Ben” is bound both physically and by both fate and death, while “Ben” claims that despite the rope, he is free until death.
Following this “Ben”’s two mothers clothe him in adult garb as if his encounter with the Sphinx had moved him to another stage in life. This would be fitting since the riddle of the Sphinx refers to the three ages of man--four legs, two legs, three legs. In moving from infancy to adulthood, “Ben” language with the two women repeatedly takes on sexual overtones even when they try to teach him his alphabet. In the Oedipus story we have to assume this represents Oedipus’ marriage with his mother. Through dialogue repeated to the point of nonsense, “Ben” somehow grows beyond his mothers’ control, stands up and walks down the long leg of Jackie Chau’s cruciform stage saying that he is free--Oedipus/Isaac/Ishamael free of his fate and actor Harte free of his role.
I fully expected that this was merely the end of the first act. In fact, it was the end of the play. Had Seelig somehow meant the encounter with the Sphinx also to represent Oedipus’ slaying of Laius and Abraham’s intended slaying of Isaac (or Ishmael)? In myth, Oedipus blinds himself and Isaac grows blind. Did Seelig symbolize this somehow or not? Besides this, if we have “Ben” move from four to two legs, why not continue until he reaches three legs, as Oedipus does in “Oedipus at Colonus” and as Isaac does in the story of his twin boys Esau and Jacob?
Seelig does indeed present us with “Talking Masks” but the lack of specificity in what they represent renders the “action” purely symbolic and extraordinarily confusing at that. Although the Walmer Centre Theatre is a very small space, all four actors use microphones to speak in character and do without to speak out of character. As the highly literate Seelig knows, our word “person” comes from the Latin for mask “persona” from “per sonare” because ancient masks had built-in megaphones to amplify an actor’s voice. The microphones are likely an allusion to this and would be sufficient as an alienation technique but Seelig also has the actors directly address the audience as themselves and to give us a bit of biography, likes and dislikes, to underscore yet again that actors are really people playing roles. Fortunately, all four actors give fully committed performances that give the impression that at least they know what the play means. Harte, in particular, impressively speaks his seemingly unmemorizable part of fragments and repetitions as if it were completely natural.
Ultimately, “Talking Masks” presents us with the spectacle of an extremely intelligent writer outsmarting himself. In a thicket of multiple word games and allusions and theatrical deconstruction, whatever had been the underlying story becomes lost and his poem for the theatre fails to become involving as “drama” (from “δρᾶμα” meaning “action” in Greek), whether internal or external.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cathy Murphy, Richard Harte and Jane Miller. ©Sai Sivanesan.
2009-11-17
Talking Masks