The First Law of Emotional Thermodynamics: Longing is Directly Proportional to Self-Hatred

first edition of Chekov’s Three Sisters (1901)

Before you plunge down the black hole of longing, consider that desire, particularly for an unattainable object, is directly proportional to self-hatred. You want only what you can’t have because you hate what you have. You have to want what you have is the other side of the coin. However, there's something delicious about this search for phantoms. If self-improvement had been all the rage during the 18th and l9th centuries, the romantic movement might never have gotten off the ground and The Sorrows of Young Werther might have been rejected by Goethe’s publishers. On the other hand there wouldn’t have been any copycat suicides by jilted young lovers—since people would have fallen for love objects within their ken and in the absence of self-loathing suicide itself wouldn’t have been an antidote to anything. Self-esteem might be a nice thing, but it’s a killer of a whole literary oeuvres. Flaubert famously said “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” but if Flaubert hadn’t experienced a hatred for himself and everything around him, if he hadn’t entertained the notion that there was some kind of new found land that was worth hurting himself and others to attain—as is Emma’s plight—would he have been able to write the book? There are no Emma Bovarys in utopia. Yes it’s nice to live in the present and develop the Zen way of thinking in which you treasure every moment, neither regretting the past nor living for some unattainable future, the Moscow Chekhov’s Three Sisters dream of as they slog through their dreary provincial existence. But let’s face it, that kind of level-headedness can be boring too.

Meltdown at Home

Three Mile Harbor Reactor (United States Department of Energy)

Two self haters seeking validation of each other is a little like the critical mass that occurs in an atomic reaction, using say Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239. Put Hedda Gabler together with Hamlet and you would have the potential for mass destruction. Someone should actually create a play about a  therapeutic community inhabited by a host of self-hating and self destructive characters, adding of course Iago, Lady Macbeth, Medea, Mary Tyrone from Long Day’s Journey, Solyony from the Three Sisters and say Bazarov from Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. That’s essentially the palette the director Neil LaBute is using in brilliantly misanthropic films like In The Company of Men. If you look at the history of the humankind the self-destruct impulse has often won out over the forces of creation. When Tito died and Yugoslavia caved into its irredentist impulses former neighbors, Bosnians and Serbs, who had lived peacefully for generations, became enemies and the massacres of Srebrenica and Sarajevo were the result. On a microcosmic or ontogenetic level we see the same pattern occurring in proliferation of relationships where freedom often includes the choice to fail. You see it must frequently in aging couples who blame the failure of their aspirations on each other. The aspiration for greatness, for success in either art or life is often the culprit, but once the chain reaction starts, it’s a little like the meltdowns at Three Mile Harbor and Chernobyl. When the “reactor” becomes overheated,  it’s almost impossible to stop.

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.