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| notes from underground - societal whispers all the news that print will fit. |
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Wednesday, June 06, 2012 np: Toad the Wet Sprocket - "Fly From Heaven" I've read two plays in the last two days: Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow. Albee's play was pretty amazing. I guess I should be a bit ashamed for having gotten this far in life without having read this play, but it really amazed me, even as it's over 50 years old at this point. I'm not sure what my thoughts about the play are, as a whole, but I was really thrilled by the characters who were all so much deeper than any of their initial outer trappings would suggest. There's something about being married, I suppose, that would allow you a different insight into that play, and that helped a bit. I hope, knock on wood, that my marriage isn't as dysfunctional as George and Martha's, but at this point I don't know that anyone's isn't. Nick and Honey's marriage is just as fractured, it's just that they take more time to hide the elements of the fissures. Which I guess brings us to one of the points of the whole play: for various reasons we're asked (in an implied way - and sometimes more directly) by society to play the part of a functioning human being in all our relationships, whether it's with ourselves or others. All of us go out of our way to hide things about ourselves - whether it's out of self-loathing, concern for how others will see us, concerns for how truths about us will affect other people who care about us, etc. - but is that actually helpful? Or is it more destructive? Does putting our deepest fears, flaws and failures down somewhere and not openly owning them in any way benefit us? I guess there is no way to live a truly honest life. If you did, you probably couldn't hold a job - you'd be fired before long, no question. We are paid to fit a certain form when out in public. So then, how do you choose when and where to be honest? And with whom? There's probably no way for me to be truly honest even here since I can't count on who will read this. Hardly anyone does anymore, I would imagine. So I don't really care. But someone could - and that automatically makes me question how and what I should write. The unexamined life is not worth living, so they say, but can the honest examined life be lived at all? I bought a copy of a pair of plays by Brendan Behan because of Shane McGowan. The song "Thousands Are Sailing" by the Pogues is on their album If I Should Fall From Grace With God and it's one of the band's finest hours. I didn't have any idea who Behan was when McGowan sang that "in Brendan Behan's footsteps I danced up and down the street." So I had to look him up, found out he was an Irish playwright and it hovered in the back of my head for awhile. I was in a used book store a month or so ago and picked up a copy of The Quare Fellow and The Hostage together in one book. These plays were written in the same decade as Albee's, but they are worlds apart. The Quare Fellow is about the inhumanity in many ways of the death penalty (an opinion near and dear to me), but it has such a rollicking humor to it that it's easy to forget the dark undertones. Or rather, not. Knowing the impending death, the humor seems almost out of place. Now, maybe that's the point. Think like Breuger's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" and you get the point in many ways. Life goes on. The world doesn't stop for the death of one individual. Even those immediately around it don't pause. It's just the way life is. The closing scene - with an inmate calling the condemned's march to the gallows like it was a horse race - felt particularly raw. I didn't know whether to laugh at the wit or to frown at it. When put in juxtaposition with the prison guard's obsession with punishing the inmate for his cheek rather than being more respectful of the death that has just occurred, it makes a bit more sense, but it was an odd ending to an odd play. The passages of people speaking Irish didn't help as I most certainly was lost in those conversations. So be it. posted by J. Neas | 6/06/2012 01:40:00 PM
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