Hamletathon I: Mea Culpa

John Barrymore in Hamlet

Here are Hamlet's immortal words: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!” But when you think on them, the simple almost aphoristic statements begin to break down. A more realistic appraisal might be given by the words “What an unfortunate creation is man. How torn between reason and instinct, how limited in intuition. In form and moving how doomed by his loss of innocence. In action how selfish, in apprehension how vulnerable.” If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny then can we say that on an individual basis, in any given year we set out with lofty principles and goals, as if we were superior creatures capable of determining our fates, instead of craven animals forced to follow the bidding of our instincts? We make lists, write constitutions and bills of rights, but ultimately find ourselves like Dante, “In the middle of the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark wood/for the straight way was lost.” Hell is other people, Sartre’s Garcin cries out in No Exit, but hell is really consciousness and an evolving awareness of how irrational supposedly rational creatures can be. As the Hamlet-Actor says in Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine, "I am not Hamlet. I play no role anymore. My words have nothing more to say to me. My thoughts suck the blood of images. My drama is cancelled. Behind me the scenery is being taken down. By people who are not interested in my drama, for people, to whom it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to me either. I’m not playing along anymore." Animals might not experience the thrill of nudity or temptation. Indeed their desire may be less tainted by mediation and ultimately more profound. No one knows what goes on in the minds of animals, but can we presume they're spared our mea culpas? 

Trojan Women (After Euripides) at BAM

Photo: Richard Termine

Just when you thought enough of monitors and digital displays, enough of post-modernist sets and quantum approaches to acting, enough even of nudity, what about an old fashioned proscenium production that does justice to the text, comes Anne Bogart’s direction of the SITI Company’s Trojan Woman (After Euripides) at BAM. And a slam BAM thank you mam production of a classic play it is. If the A.S.P.C.A. gave an award for howling by a human then Ellen Lauren who plays Hecuba would surely be a frontrunner. To do the production justice, there is an attempt to capture the irony and realism that characterize the Euripidean approach to tragedy. Rather than “After Euripides,” the production might better be characterized as after Aeschylus and Sophocles since it’s truly faithful to the playwright, who created a modern seeming universe in which the Gods are absent or totally malevolent. Considering all the recriminating that’s going on—with Helen blaming Paris and Hecuba blaming Helen and everyone commiserating over the glory that was Troy—this Trojan Woman has something in common with both Sartre’s No Exit and its famous line “hell is other people” and Chekhov’s Three Sisters who either live in the past or the future, but never fully inhabit the present. But what’s with Menelaus (J. Ed Araiza) in a tux looking like a lounge singer, Poseidon (Brent Wertzner) in his surgical looking greens and Odysseus (Gian-Murray Gianino) dressed like he's just attended graduation at Annapolis? “I did not destroy you, only you did,” Helen (Katherine Crockett) announces at one point. Actually from what transpires on stage, it might be the histrionics that are to blame. Something’s amiss when a production of Trojan Women starts to look and sound like General Hospital.

Paris Journal V: 38 Temoins

Existentialism is alive and well in France, if Lucas Belvaux's  38 temoins (38 Witnesses) exemplifies the zeitgeist. The movie, which is playing at the Danton, only steps away from Odeon stop of the Metro, might be subtitled Kitty Genovese in Vichy. A woman is brutally murdered on a street in the port city of Le Havre and none of the 38 witnesses (38 people by way also witnessed the Kitty Genovese murder) in the apartment complex overlooking the scene of the crime even calls the police. However horrible the murder, the real crime is silence. And when one of the residents, a harbor pilot named Pierre Morvand (Yvon Attal) racked with guilt by his own complicity in the silence, fesses up, he is treated as criminal by his irate neighbors. For all the seeming ponderousness of its story, the film is narrow and slight, a mordant form of what Graham Greene might have termed an entertainment (it was based on a novel by Didier Decoin). Everything fits together neatly--the movie is a philosophical vignette--and the disquisition takes the form of montage sequences in which scenes of Pierre piloting cargo ships through the harbor are cross cut with the memorial the self-righteous apartment dwellers have built to honor the ill-fated victim. “l’infer, c’est les autres,” is a line from Sartre’s No Exit. In slightly more watered down form, 38 temoins presents a similar notion. It’s not surprising the film hasn’t found a US distributor, but this is France where philosophical dialogues can still be found on television. The French still require a smear of existentialism with their croissant.

The Hellfire Club

Has a very dismissive person, who has never given you the right time of day, died or suffered the loss of their faculties? It’s rather disconcerting, since it throws the whole project of trying to prove oneself to a naysayer into question. Who cares what X, Y or Z thinks if tomorrow they suffer an aneurysm that puts them on life support? Potentially, anyone you want to impress—whether it’s someone of the opposite sex who spurned your advances or someone who looked askance upon your talents, like a high-powered literary agent, editor or casting director—is going to perish, and actually won’t be taking their dismissive attitude with them to the grave. No, you will carry that venom until you pass it on to the next person at the party. There are people we all hate enough to want dead. At the very least, we want those who are unimpressed by our existence to suffer the same torment we have suffered as they descend into Malebolge, the eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno, reserved for the sins of omission. In No Exit, Sartre wrote, “l’enfer, c’est les autres.” Hell is other people. This should be qualified. Hell is a place where those who have sinned against us will be the victims of those same crimes. The murderer will be murdered, the rapist raped, and the person who fails to see the inherent genius in any one who has the bravado to claim such talents will suffer an eternal diminution of their talents and abilities. Those who tested and tracked ADHD students with standardized tests and termed them to be lacking in intelligence will experience the equivalent of a perpetual Ground Hog’s Day, in which they are perpetually mailed notifications from Princeton Educational Testing Services informing them they have not lived up to their potential.