Tag Archives: Catcher in the Rye

Whose play is it, anyway? On authors and interpreters

Sartre's "No Exit" on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Sartre’s “No Exit” on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Who wrote that play?

I don’t mean, did the modestly talented actor Will Shakespeare really write all those great stageworks, or was he just a convenient front man for Edward de Vere or some other dandy of the ruling class?

I mean, is the production you just saw actually of the play the playwright intended, or did it get reinvented so much in production that it actually became something else?

Charles Deemer has been gnawing on that bone as it relates to Jerry Mouawad’s critically praised production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit at Imago Theatre — a production that places the actors on an intricately balanced platform that shifts with every movement, echoing the tensions and balances among the characters.

Portland playwright Deemer first raised his objections in an Oct. 18 post on his blog, The Writing Life II. “Imago usually does original work, and brilliantly so,” he wrote. “It does original work here — it’s just misnamed. This production needs a little truth in advertising. It’s not Sartre. It’s variations on themes developed by Sartre. It’s interesting. It’s engaging. It just isn’t what the playwright intended and, as a playwright, I think this needs to be said.”

Deemer then followed up with comments on Martha Ullman West’s recent Art Scatter post about No Exit and a clutch of dance performances. “Composers do variations on a theme all the time and own up to it,” he wrote. “… What if someone went to the theater wanting to see the wonderfully grim original? What’s wrong with grim and cynical anyway?”

Then he added:

Let’s say a director resurrects Christmas at the Juniper Tavern and puts all the actors on roller skates because s/he believes it depicts the fluidity of their life journeys. Would I be amused? Guess.

“Edward Albee once closed down a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf because George and Martha were presented as a gay couple.

“I once had the opportunity to ask Arthur Miller what he thought of an all-black version of Death of a Salesman that was done here with Tony Armstrong in the lead. ‘This is not the play I wrote,’ he told me.

“An advantage of the business of playwriting, as opposed to the business of screenwriting, is that playwrights retain ownership of their work. You legally can’t make changes without permission. Consequently I’ve long suspected that many, perhaps most, directors prefer their playwrights dead.”

Theater fans aren’t as volatile as opera fans, and it’s the rage these days in opera circles to boo directors and designers for undermining the music with conceptual approaches. Theater directors have been doing that for years (often, as Charles points out, with the work of dead playwrights who can’t fight back) and are lauded for it.

Interpretation is huge in the theater. But where does interpretation stop and something related but fundamentally different begin? Sometimes it seems like directors and designers use pre-existing works like especially fertile junkyards, discarding what they don’t want and mining them for treasure they can turn into something of their own. Novelists do that sort of thing all the time. But John Gardner didn’t call his book Beowulf. He called it Grendel.

What’s the essence of a play? Is it words? Is it tone? Is it the look of the thing? Or does it shift with every play, according to the play’s own core and elasticity? Putting the actors on roller skates for Christmas at the Juniper Tavern would absolutely change the play into something else. It MIGHT not irrevocably alter The Comedy of Errors.

Continue reading Whose play is it, anyway? On authors and interpreters

Wednesday hot links: Get yer fresh dogs on Rye!

All right, so Mr. Scatter’s been doing this no-meat thing long enough now that veggie franks have actually started to taste good.

At least, if they’re slathered with enough mustard/relish/barbecue sauce/onions/sauerkraut/melted cheese.

And, no, no-meat doesn’t mean no fish or shellfish, or even the very occasional chicken thigh, or (once in a couple of blue moons) a blessed slice of crisp bacon.

Yes, I embrace the vegetable kingdom. No, I’m not fanatic.

Still, most of my links these days are of the virtual variety, a few of which I freely share with you:

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To Move, To Breathe, To Speak. Michele Russo, 1960PNCA at 100: Two good pieces on the new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum celebrating a century of the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which began life as the Museum Art School. A few quibbles, a lot of insights and an impressive parade of names from Oregonian arts writers D.K. Row, here, and Barry Johnson, here. Read ’em both and you’ll want to rush right down to see the show yourself. I haven’t yet. I will soon. And if your reflexes are slow, don’t worry: The exhibit stays up until Sept. 13.

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LOUISE NEVELSON, OUT OF THE BOX: One of the liveliest, best-written arts blogs in town is Fifty Two Pieces, a site that takes as its starting point artists and artworks in the collection of the Portland Art Museum and follows them wherever its muse travels. Right now the site is concentrating on the great and formidable Louise Nevelson, she of the black boxes. Dig back a few posts and you’ll find a series on Portland sculptor Lee Kelly. You should know this site!

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CULTURE JOCK DRIVES TO SEATTLE: … and sees the sights along the way. For anyone who makes that dreary I-5 drive semi-regularly (and don’t a lot of us?) CJ’s tongue-in-cheek record of his recent trip is priceless. Which means you can’t buy it with your Master Card. But you can read it free, here.

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HOLDEN CAULFIELD, WON’T YOU PLEASE STAY HOME: For a 90-year-old recluse, J.D. Salinger is a pretty darned public cantankerous cuss. He’s made such a fetish of his desire for privacy and his insistence that his artistic creations are inviolable that by now he’s better known for his churlishness than for the 58-year-old novel, The Catcher in the Rye, that made us aware of his existence in the first place.

rye_catcherMr. Salinger does know the legal profession, and in pursuit of his vaunted rights has made liberal use of it over the years. The New York Times reports here that now he’s suing over copyright infringement — “a ripoff pure and simple,” as his lawyers put it — by the 33-year-old Swedish author of a book titled 60 years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

Now, I’m all for copyright laws and the right of artists to protect their creations. But Salinger has a pretty weird idea of what’s his and what’s out there in the ether to be grabbed and reinterpreted. In Salinger’s mind, John Donne got it wrong: One man is an island entire of itself. Donne, at least, seemed to intuit that life, and art, are about borrowing and sharing and rethinking and creating something new from something old. Salinger thinks they’re immovable ice statues, frozen in time.

According to the Times, Fredrik Colting, the author of 60 Years Later (which revisits Holden Caulfield as an old man of 76), says his novel is a “comment on the uneasy relationship between his imagined version of Mr. Salinger and the Holden Caulfield character: ‘In order to regain control over his own life, which is drawing to a close, “Mr. Salinger” tries repeatedly to kill off Mr. C by various means: a runaway truck; falling construction debris; a lunatic woman with a knife; suicide by drowning and suicide by pills.’

Sounds like Mr. Colting’s caught the contemporary point: Salinger himself is at the center of the Caulfield universe, and putting him there explicitly is a sufficient reinterpretation of and commentary on the original to qualify it as a discrete work.

I do wish, however, that Colting’s defense weren’t sprinkled with this sort of academic obfuscation: “In additional written declarations, Martha Woodmansee, a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, writes that Mr. Colting’s novel is a work of ‘meta-commentary’ and ‘is thus a complex work, more complex than’ Mr. Salinger’s novel.”

Really?

I have a toothache. Leave me alone.

Or I’ll sue.