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Barthelme the Scrivener
The Twisted Grin-Assorted Tales to Amuse and Alarm
Mindless Mirth Productions
Augsburg Studio
2211 Riverside Ave., Minneapolis, MN
Thu., Jul. 30 @ 10:00 p.m., Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., Thu., Aug. 6 @ 8:30 p.m. , Fri., Aug. 7 @ 8:30 p.m. , [S] Sat., Aug. 8 @ 4:00 p.m.
http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/
Kenneth – what is the frequency? In 1986, Dan Rather was attacked by two men who repeatedly pummeled him for no obvious reason, and between beatings, asked this apparently absurd question. The crime was never resolved, though one of the assailants was eventually apprehended. But "Kenneth - what's the frequency?" made a neat song, one Rather got over his trauma long enough to enjoy singing it with REM.
Fifteen years later, iin Harper's Magazine, Paul Limbert Allman claimed he has solved the mystery of this curious assault, pasting together two apparently unrelated lines in Barthelme’s short story “The Indian Uprising” to come up with an equally absurd theory involving the Houston author. Allman has since conceded that he finds his own theory "difficult to accept," and that the assailants could also have been "loose cannons armed with quotes."
Which, interestingly enough, describes Barthleme to a tee. I suppose when you write surrealist fantasy and play with violent themes in fragmentary bursts of flash fiction, echoing the structure and logic of the schizophrenic mind, you should not be surprised when you end up being the source of inspiration for a pair of them - the Jodi Foster of Post-Modernism.
Alternatively, Paul Allman’s piece may in fact be a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Barthelme, who died in 1989. It was written in December 2001. If Barthelme had been alive to see the former Governor of Texas shift the blame for 9/11 from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, he might have written just such a story himself.
I appear to be attending, courtesy of my talented and interesting friends, the Thinking Woman’s Fringe. (Although the Woman's Thinking Fringe makes a better acronym.) This has been making it hard for me to review performances in a timely fashion. I just get too caught up in exploring what I sampled afterwards. I have not read Barthelme in a long, loooong time – one short story in a graduate course on contemporary American short fiction at the University of Minnesota in 1979 really doesn't cut it. After having seen Larry Ripp’s Twisted Grin, I found myself wanting to go home and reacquaint myself with Barthelme’s work. This is relatively easy to do online. So I did. I wish I could take credit for the title of this review, BTW, but at least four others got there before me.
I am amazed that there appear to have been so few adaptations of Barthelme’s short stories to the theater. Beckett was a major influence, as were Sartre and Ionesco, and it shows. Many of Barhelme's stories are monologues, often with narrators of questionable reliability. The folks at Mindless Mirth Productions really have something here – though they might want to change their name. Because Donald Barthelme – while playful - is anything but a mindless experience.
Barthelme’s stories appeared mostly in the New Yorker, where for many I suspect they served the same purpose as the cartoons – short, sophisticated comic relief. Not to say that the stories are not challenging. They are, in fact, linguistic koans, semiotic puzzles. As one critic puts it, for Barthelme the highest success is not if the story strikes us as true, but rather if it shows us how it works. I had to learn a new word - heteroglossia - just to understand some of the criticism. Sometimes I am glad I am no longer an academic.
Turns out I enjoy Barthelme more as interpreted theatre than I do just reading him – though it was interesting in several of the pieces to see what Ripp omitted. There isn’t much, and it seldom does damage to the author’s intention. Of course if it did, Barthelme, an academic himself, could hardly complain. He has read his Husserl, his Heidegger, his Barthes and Derrida. No doubt he has told bar stories at MLA conventions with Frederic Jameson and Stanley Fish. Even now the tenure of entire English faculties depended on an ideology which permits, even encourages, the subversion of authorial intent. The editorial changes of one little Fringe Festival playwright don’t mount to a hill of beans in that town.
Jon Eichenlaub does an excellent job with Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, which is taken almost verbatim from the text, but my favorite stories are those in which the author backs away from fragmented absurdity and meaningless violence as abruptly as he engages it, and imagines instead a different world. We know that this world is as fragile, and as possible, as the other, and yet ending there in some way gives hope. Life is absurd, and we make stupid, even cruel mistakes, but people are essentially good. Sure, the narrator in I Bought a Little City shoots six thousand dogs, proving that power – and capitalism - corrupt. But on deciding he doesn’t like the experience, he just gives it up. At least that’s how it appears in the abridged version. “Took a bath on that deal,” he says cheerfully. And learned not to play God. “A lot of other people already knew that, but I have never doubted for a minute that a lot of other people are smarter than me, and figure out things quicker.” His commentary on the nature of God’s own apparently sadistic imagination - “He does a lot worse things every day” – loses some depth and resonance with the elimination of Sam Hong’s wife. But the essential meaning comes across.
There are times when I sense more gravitas in Barthelme than comes across in Twisted Grin. Like I Bought a Little City, The School, perhaps, loses a bit of its complexity, feeling more like a Saturday Night Live sketch (hence the Mindless Mirth) than a piece that genuinely addresses existential questions. Is it death that gives meaning to life? Or life itself which is its own meaning? Either I blinked or an element rather critical to the ending of that particular story was missing - an element similar to the absence of Sam Hong's wife. Missing that context, I was distracted at first by not knowing whether the narrator was herself a sociopath, or a jinx, or whether the students at the school were just us, confronting what we all must confront –that life, in the end, will kill you. There is also a whiff of Cold War to “The School,” as if it was written in response to the actual absurdity of schoolchildren crouching under desks to protect themselves from nuclear attack. (I was there. We did this.) Yet the story that remained fit the character Rose Johnson portrayed, and I especially enjoyed her expressiveness and comic timing.
Gravitas is there, if you wish to find it. And affirmation of what is beautiful and joyous in life, amidst the absurdity. My favorite story (as anyone who knows me could probably guess) was A City of Churches – which for some reason I will probably never know, is available online in English and Chinese. Like another reviewer who claims he “went to that school,” I have done time in that city, which has a peculiarly Southern feel to it. I feel like Barthelme has stared with me down the length of Hillsboro Parkway in Nashville, where the steeples line up like missile silos. A city where you can “live in the church of your choice.” A choice as American as the color palette of a Model T. Vickijoan Keck’s portrayal of the young woman looking for an apartment in Prester, who has already been offered a job as their “car rental girl” despite the fact that everyone has a car in Prester and nobody wants to leave it, is spot on. She has the ability to act whatever age the part demands, which is a rare gift. For the most part, Cecelia (her name in the story; I do not believe it is mentioned in the play) is the rational voice, the reasonable outsider. Of course she will not take a job renting cars in a town where no one rents cars. That makes no sense. Of course she will not live in a belfry apartment. That would be bats. Are we in the Twilight Zone? But when her guide asks, quite pointedly, what denomination she is, the woman responds with an apparent non sequitur that explodes any precoonceptions we might have had about her character:
"I can will my dreams," Cecelia said. "I can dream whatever I want. If I want to dream that I'm having a good time, in Paris or some other city, all I have to do is go to sleep and I will dream that dream. I can dream whatever I want."
In the end, the guide’s insistence that Cecelia must stay “for balance” – that they need a car rental girl to make their town complete and thus perfect, to quell their own restlessness with the illusion of opportunity – has a certain menace to it. And yet Cecelia – who the narrator of “I Bought a Little City” would recognize immediately as “too imaginative” - threatens to break open their perfection, shake things up. Who will win?
I will admit this story has an idiosyncratic, personal meaning for me. In a past life I lived inside many churches. I know, in less than playful terms, what that does to a woman’s dreams. Especially a woman who is “too imaginative.” So I’m rooting for Cecilia. Dream on, baby.
Mindless Mirth Productions
Augsburg Studio
2211 Riverside Ave., Minneapolis, MN
Thu., Jul. 30 @ 10:00 p.m., Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., Thu., Aug. 6 @ 8:30 p.m. , Fri., Aug. 7 @ 8:30 p.m. , [S] Sat., Aug. 8 @ 4:00 p.m.
http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/
Kenneth – what is the frequency? In 1986, Dan Rather was attacked by two men who repeatedly pummeled him for no obvious reason, and between beatings, asked this apparently absurd question. The crime was never resolved, though one of the assailants was eventually apprehended. But "Kenneth - what's the frequency?" made a neat song, one Rather got over his trauma long enough to enjoy singing it with REM.
Fifteen years later, iin Harper's Magazine, Paul Limbert Allman claimed he has solved the mystery of this curious assault, pasting together two apparently unrelated lines in Barthelme’s short story “The Indian Uprising” to come up with an equally absurd theory involving the Houston author. Allman has since conceded that he finds his own theory "difficult to accept," and that the assailants could also have been "loose cannons armed with quotes."
Which, interestingly enough, describes Barthleme to a tee. I suppose when you write surrealist fantasy and play with violent themes in fragmentary bursts of flash fiction, echoing the structure and logic of the schizophrenic mind, you should not be surprised when you end up being the source of inspiration for a pair of them - the Jodi Foster of Post-Modernism.
Alternatively, Paul Allman’s piece may in fact be a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Barthelme, who died in 1989. It was written in December 2001. If Barthelme had been alive to see the former Governor of Texas shift the blame for 9/11 from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, he might have written just such a story himself.
I appear to be attending, courtesy of my talented and interesting friends, the Thinking Woman’s Fringe. (Although the Woman's Thinking Fringe makes a better acronym.) This has been making it hard for me to review performances in a timely fashion. I just get too caught up in exploring what I sampled afterwards. I have not read Barthelme in a long, loooong time – one short story in a graduate course on contemporary American short fiction at the University of Minnesota in 1979 really doesn't cut it. After having seen Larry Ripp’s Twisted Grin, I found myself wanting to go home and reacquaint myself with Barthelme’s work. This is relatively easy to do online. So I did. I wish I could take credit for the title of this review, BTW, but at least four others got there before me.
I am amazed that there appear to have been so few adaptations of Barthelme’s short stories to the theater. Beckett was a major influence, as were Sartre and Ionesco, and it shows. Many of Barhelme's stories are monologues, often with narrators of questionable reliability. The folks at Mindless Mirth Productions really have something here – though they might want to change their name. Because Donald Barthelme – while playful - is anything but a mindless experience.
Barthelme’s stories appeared mostly in the New Yorker, where for many I suspect they served the same purpose as the cartoons – short, sophisticated comic relief. Not to say that the stories are not challenging. They are, in fact, linguistic koans, semiotic puzzles. As one critic puts it, for Barthelme the highest success is not if the story strikes us as true, but rather if it shows us how it works. I had to learn a new word - heteroglossia - just to understand some of the criticism. Sometimes I am glad I am no longer an academic.
Turns out I enjoy Barthelme more as interpreted theatre than I do just reading him – though it was interesting in several of the pieces to see what Ripp omitted. There isn’t much, and it seldom does damage to the author’s intention. Of course if it did, Barthelme, an academic himself, could hardly complain. He has read his Husserl, his Heidegger, his Barthes and Derrida. No doubt he has told bar stories at MLA conventions with Frederic Jameson and Stanley Fish. Even now the tenure of entire English faculties depended on an ideology which permits, even encourages, the subversion of authorial intent. The editorial changes of one little Fringe Festival playwright don’t mount to a hill of beans in that town.
Jon Eichenlaub does an excellent job with Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, which is taken almost verbatim from the text, but my favorite stories are those in which the author backs away from fragmented absurdity and meaningless violence as abruptly as he engages it, and imagines instead a different world. We know that this world is as fragile, and as possible, as the other, and yet ending there in some way gives hope. Life is absurd, and we make stupid, even cruel mistakes, but people are essentially good. Sure, the narrator in I Bought a Little City shoots six thousand dogs, proving that power – and capitalism - corrupt. But on deciding he doesn’t like the experience, he just gives it up. At least that’s how it appears in the abridged version. “Took a bath on that deal,” he says cheerfully. And learned not to play God. “A lot of other people already knew that, but I have never doubted for a minute that a lot of other people are smarter than me, and figure out things quicker.” His commentary on the nature of God’s own apparently sadistic imagination - “He does a lot worse things every day” – loses some depth and resonance with the elimination of Sam Hong’s wife. But the essential meaning comes across.
There are times when I sense more gravitas in Barthelme than comes across in Twisted Grin. Like I Bought a Little City, The School, perhaps, loses a bit of its complexity, feeling more like a Saturday Night Live sketch (hence the Mindless Mirth) than a piece that genuinely addresses existential questions. Is it death that gives meaning to life? Or life itself which is its own meaning? Either I blinked or an element rather critical to the ending of that particular story was missing - an element similar to the absence of Sam Hong's wife. Missing that context, I was distracted at first by not knowing whether the narrator was herself a sociopath, or a jinx, or whether the students at the school were just us, confronting what we all must confront –that life, in the end, will kill you. There is also a whiff of Cold War to “The School,” as if it was written in response to the actual absurdity of schoolchildren crouching under desks to protect themselves from nuclear attack. (I was there. We did this.) Yet the story that remained fit the character Rose Johnson portrayed, and I especially enjoyed her expressiveness and comic timing.
Gravitas is there, if you wish to find it. And affirmation of what is beautiful and joyous in life, amidst the absurdity. My favorite story (as anyone who knows me could probably guess) was A City of Churches – which for some reason I will probably never know, is available online in English and Chinese. Like another reviewer who claims he “went to that school,” I have done time in that city, which has a peculiarly Southern feel to it. I feel like Barthelme has stared with me down the length of Hillsboro Parkway in Nashville, where the steeples line up like missile silos. A city where you can “live in the church of your choice.” A choice as American as the color palette of a Model T. Vickijoan Keck’s portrayal of the young woman looking for an apartment in Prester, who has already been offered a job as their “car rental girl” despite the fact that everyone has a car in Prester and nobody wants to leave it, is spot on. She has the ability to act whatever age the part demands, which is a rare gift. For the most part, Cecelia (her name in the story; I do not believe it is mentioned in the play) is the rational voice, the reasonable outsider. Of course she will not take a job renting cars in a town where no one rents cars. That makes no sense. Of course she will not live in a belfry apartment. That would be bats. Are we in the Twilight Zone? But when her guide asks, quite pointedly, what denomination she is, the woman responds with an apparent non sequitur that explodes any precoonceptions we might have had about her character:
"I can will my dreams," Cecelia said. "I can dream whatever I want. If I want to dream that I'm having a good time, in Paris or some other city, all I have to do is go to sleep and I will dream that dream. I can dream whatever I want."
In the end, the guide’s insistence that Cecelia must stay “for balance” – that they need a car rental girl to make their town complete and thus perfect, to quell their own restlessness with the illusion of opportunity – has a certain menace to it. And yet Cecelia – who the narrator of “I Bought a Little City” would recognize immediately as “too imaginative” - threatens to break open their perfection, shake things up. Who will win?
I will admit this story has an idiosyncratic, personal meaning for me. In a past life I lived inside many churches. I know, in less than playful terms, what that does to a woman’s dreams. Especially a woman who is “too imaginative.” So I’m rooting for Cecilia. Dream on, baby.