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Theater
Creative Urge:
LLTC show explores art and aging.
Books
Nihilism & Redemption: What happens when your addictions no longer hide the truth?
Creative Urge
LLTC show explores art
and aging.
By Quail
Dawning
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Susan (Carol Manzi)
and Dennis (Stephen Speidel) discuss their shattered relationship in LLTC's The
Monogamist.
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In The Monogamist, now playing at the Lord Leebrick Theatre,
writer Christopher Kyle has created an exquisite array of characters and interactions.
All the script needs is a cast and crew capable of fleshing out his framework. And,
bless them, the Lord Leebrick folks get the job done, and they get it done beautifully.
The show opens (after a wickedly funny video cameo from artistic
director Corey Pearlstein) with a tense, hyperactive cable access TV interview between
neurotic poet Dennis (Stephen Speidel) and abrasive feminist theorist Jasmine (Marina
Morrow). Dennis has just published a new book of poetry, the subject of which is
monogamy, and Jasmine is busy trashing not only the book, but Dennis's personality
as well.
These two talented actors set the pace for the rest of the show,
causing the next two hours to fly by. The five actors obtain a high level of energy
and enthusiasm and the audience is immediately drawn into the intimate lives of the
characters and their interwoven stories. Yet the intended cinematic approach to the
play makes us realize that the people we are observing are not quite real, as though
they are separated from us by a movie or television screen.
The story moves on: Dennis goes home to his wife, Susan (Carol
Manzi), a literature professor, and they strategically ignore one another, each hard
at work on their separate projects and too enthralled in their own artistry and career
to take notice of their partner's feelings or achievements. Nonetheless, it is obvious
the two love each other. They cuddle and joke playfully, though their tension is
clear.
Shortly thereafter, Dennis comes home one day to discover Susan
in the arms of one of her young students, Tim (Daniel Durrant). Dennis is outraged,
and, between bouts of nervous asthma, manages to tell Susan that he is leaving. She
protests, eager to discuss things, but he refuses and departs.
Dennis, who expects to be torn up by his wife's affair, instead
finds his own neurotic version of liberation. He takes up with a young college girl
named Sky (Jessica King) whom he met at a poetry bar, where she was drunkenly making
fun of the readers. He takes her back to his city studio and as she attempts to seduce
him, he finds himself enchanted by the similarities between Sky and the young Susan
he originally fell in love with. In taking up with Sky, Dennis reawakens his youthful
sensibilities -- he starts wearing tie-dye shirts and picks up on Sky's college vocabulary.
Dennis also takes to audio and then video recording as much of
his life as he possibly can, and then replaying it to see if he can glean some clues
as to why he and Susan did not succeed. He becomes obsessed, and as he has occasional
meetings with Susan and spends more and more time with Sky, both women become increasingly
bewildered and annoyed with his preoccupation. Dennis insists there is logic behind
it, but is obviously making a bizarre attempt to reclaim some element of his life
that no one else understands.
The show is hilarious. The actors have great comic timing and they
enliven the script with over-the-top movement and exaggerated emotional response.
The production is at once deep and rich with human truth while also containing laugh-out-loud
funny antics.
Each performer dedicates his or her entire person to the character,
most notably Speidel, Durrant and King. These three form a trinity of energetic characters
who don't quite know what they want, a quality that is both endearing and tragic.
Morrow and Manzi play feminists who are engrossed with finding new ways to be female
in our modern society.
AnnMarie Maurer's costumes match the play's 1991 setting perfectly,
while Mark Huisinga and crew's innovative scenic design add to the overall quality
of the show. Add to these accomplishments the wonderful (and essential) video work
by Larry Dobberstein and Tim Guetterman and Lynda Czajkowska's smooth and adept direction,
and the Lord Leebrick Theatre Company has come up with an ideal show: funny, bright
and carefree, but still intellectually challenging and thought-provoking.
The Monogamist plays through June 22. It is highly recommended.
Nihilism &
Redemption
What happens when your
addictions no longer hide the truth?
by Orna
Izakson
CHOKE by Chuck Palahniuk. Doubleday,
2001. Hardcover, $24.94.
 For a person who writes hitting-bottom, in-your-face bleak books, Chuck
Palahniuk seems like a fairly upbeat and engaged guy.
If you don't immediately recognize his name, think Fight Club.
See also: Survivor.
See also: Invisible Monsters.
He's a Northwest native, a Portland resident and a 1986 graduate
of the UO journalism school. He's a veteran of the Oregon Daily Emerald,
even if the paper's current staff didn't know that when they recently called his
publicist. "That tiny sound you hear is my heart cracking," Palahniuk says.
See also: Choke. That's his latest, the one he's coming
down to Eugene to talk about at 7:30 pm June 14 in 175 Law.
"I thought if people were offended by a dark romantic comedy
about violence," he says of Fight Club, "how about a dark romantic
comedy about sex?" Obsessive sex. Sexaholics attending 12-step programs, where
they learn new ways to get laid and find new partners. That's Choke.
The main character is Victor Mancini, a sex addict and medical-school
dropout with two dead-end jobs. His day job is at Colonial Dunsboro, a run-down tourist
destination for folks looking for an authentic depiction of life, mud and deformed
chickens before the Revolutionary War. The other is literally under the table: He
goes to fancy restaurants and pretends to choke on his food. The people who save
him are so thrilled about being heroes that they send him checks every year on his
(re)birthday.
Victor does all of this to support the ex-con mother who kidnapped
him from foster homes each time she got out of prison, took him on short, wild rides
and encouraged him to reinvent the world. She's now wasting away in an expensive
home for the crazy and the dying.
Choke is bleak and nihilistic, and you're warned from the
start to put the book down. But you won't. Instead you'll rip through the mire following
characters bent on figuring out "what would Jesus NOT do" and then doing
it, because, as in Fight Club, upbeat Palahniuk is going to give you a reason
for it in the end.
In an on-line essay at the book's web site (www.choke-book.com), Palahniuk explains: "I
wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from
you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow
choose what your life is going to be about -- With Choke I wanted to show
someone actively choosing their future, instead of perpetuating their past."
You might call the payoff hope, but Palahniuk doesn't. "I
don't really see hope, I see action," he says. "I see there's redemption
through action. Hope is such a passive thing -- I'm really just in awe of people
who take action in their lives and create the world that they want."
The payoff is not sex steaming off the pages, it's the questioning
and rethinking of everything from general announcements in airports to fundamental
questions of identity. It's about reclaiming the right to define ourselves, about
looking for the last new landscapes to explore -- the interior ones.
Somewhere in the mass of press clippings about him, Palahniuk is
described as a new voice for his generation. In the postmodern sense, it's because
of statements like one by the first woman Mancini has sex with in an airplane bathroom:
"'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy.
Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream -- The truth is I don't
really want to know why I do casual sex. I just keep doing -- because the
minute you give yourself a good reason, you'll start chipping away at it.'"
Palahniuk doesn't exactly give you a happy ending, but it's enough
to keep you going. And if he is a voice for his generation in that, he also offers
hope that the current pervasive nihilism covers -- but does not smother -- the possibility
of redemption.
Book Notes:
California poet Nan Hunt reads from The Wrong Bride at 7 pm on June
14 at Mother Kali's Books. ...Monica Szurmark talks about Women in Argentina,
which contains travel writings of women from the 1850s to the 1930s, at 7 pm June
17 at Mother Kali's Books. ...Arleen Stein reads from The Stranger Next
Door (see review in Summer Reading 2001, this issue) at 7 pm on June 20 at Mother
Kali's Books.
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