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"I was in the theatre because it was a low, sleazy, discredited art form that had to do with sex and things of the devil." Mac Wellman in TheatreZone
Mac Wellman, Self-Described Damnable Scribbler
Mac Wellman In the 1950s and '60s, Cleveland, Ohio was called "The Best Location in the Nation." However by the 1970s, it had been dubbed "The Mistake by the Lake." One imagines that the latter sentiment made the stronger impression on Mac Wellman when he was growing up there. Wellman isn't the first storyteller to find inspiration in the sordid secrets of Middle America, but he has revealed them using a language unlike any other in American theater. (He even wrote a play titled Cleveland that we're dying to read.) The Poetry Project Newsletter said, "Mac Wellman continues his exploration. . .of a low-rent rural America, festering in the backwater pollution from the urban environment. Wellman's astonishing Ohio-like world has been tagged by some theatregoers and critics as 'Macland,' a world peopled by cantankerous, wistful, confused and frightened people who have lost parts of their body, their minds and their souls to the perpetual machine of the American dream."
Those who consider such things compare Wellman to Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein (perhaps not considering that the latter two were literary opposites and outspoken in their dislike of each other's work.) Take Wellman's play Harms Way, for example, which begins with a gun-toting mother trying to get her child to eat a sandwich:
Mother: Ugly kid. Eat!
Child: Witch. Go stuff it.
Mother: Watch your mouth.
Child: Don't want that crap. It's crap.
Mother: Good American cheese. Real baloney on Wonderbread. Eat it. Or else.
Child: Crap.
Mother: You don't eat it and I'll whip you good.
Child: Crap sandwich.
Mother: I'll show you your ass.
Child: Stuff it up your ass, witch.
Mother: You don't eat that sandwich and I'll kill you good.
Child: Suck my dingus.
Mother: Lemme at you. I'll bust your chops.
Child: Nyah! Nyah!
Mother: Kid don't talk to his mother like that. I'll teach you, little son of a bitch. (She shoots and kills him.) No respect …
The Poet
Wellman began writing poetry at an early age and eventually studied international politics with the intention of becoming a diplomat, but he took a junior year abroad in Holland and got sidetracked into theater. "One of the people I met was the first person to do Bertolt Brecht in Holland. In the States, I hadn't paid much attention to theater because I thought it was very conservative. When I got over there I saw a good amount of experimental theater and that interested me a lot, but it was quite a while before I got involved full-time as a writer."
Wellman returned to the U.S. in the late '70s and took up writing, but within a couple of years had hit a creative wall. He told Kirk Wood Bromley of TheaterMania.com, "I was very frustrated just with writing, so I got a legal pad and I decided to write one page of bad writing every day, and I did for two and a half years...ungrammatical, vague, disordered, everything...I thought I'd explore the downside...and what I found in doing this is that there were all these interesting rhythms...very expressive, very speakable...full of ideas, and I found actually that this mysterious kind of narrative would emerge from it. It was not disordered at all. In fact, it was quite the opposite."
From those pages emerged a succession of plays that announced Wellman's voice to the theater world: Cellophane, Terminal Hip, Cat's-Paw, Fnu Lnu, The Sandalwood Box, Second-Hand Smoke, The Lesser Magoo, Bad Penny, Infrared, 7 Blowjobs, A Murder of Crows, Albanian Softshoe, Mister Original Bugg, Cleveland, Three Americanisms, Girl Gone, to name just a few. "One advantage of not having a full-time job and being poor is that I have a lot of time to write. I've written a lot plays because that is what you have to do to get any good at it, although I tend not to write plays of great length."
Wellman was playwright-in-residence at American Conservatory Theater from 1994 to 1996 and it was during that period that The Difficulty of Crossing a Field was born. A.C.T. Artistic Director Carey Perloff asked Wellman to write something that would be unique to his stay in San Francisco and suggested a collaboration with composer David Lang. Wellman chose a two-page story by Ambrose Bierce. "Like a lot of people, I had read him as a kid and then didn't for a long time. I have actually adapted a couple of his stories for the theater, A Damned Thing for the Ridge Theater which is basically a visual theater - their plays are like paintings; and The Eyes of the Panther for a puppet theater. I'm also working on a one-person show with an actor in New York based on the life and work of Ambrose Bierce, kind of like the Hal Holbrook/Mark Twain show. Bierce is far darker and scarier than Twain and in some ways more interesting and more contemporary.
"The best American work has always been sardonic and sarcastic and complex. The Difficulty of Crossing a Field is fabulous because it's so clear and simple on one level and not so on another. Bierce's way of storytelling is very modern. Many times he'll take four or five different positions on the same event. The Difficulty of Crossing a Field is similar in that there are several different versions of an event that is profoundly mysterious."
In fact, Wellman subtitled the piece "an opera in seven tellings." "It implies that everyone saw something different. I tried as much as possible to write with the same vocabulary that Bierce used in the story. There is a lot of ambiguity in this. I think the language will be quite striking to people and they will be puzzling about what it means - hopefully in a curious way."
Was this Wellman's first libretto? "Strictly speaking, yes. I've done a lot of what the Europeans call music theater, which are plays with a lot of songs in them, but this is the first time I've written what you could call a real libretto, although in some ways it doesn't look like a libretto. I didn't particularly want to write the sort of opera libretto that had a lot of plot and big numbers in it - arias and recitative and that sort of thing. I wanted to do something that kind of circled around itself and was full of odd little ditties. David and I talked about what sort of things we wanted to do and I did my best to make something that would be fun for him to work with. To my great surprise he set much more of it than I thought he would. There is one main aria but there are all sorts of other music episodes that are sort of half-songs. David has written some music without words and to some extent the music has become almost another actor in the piece."
Shepard Meets Stein?
We wanted to return to the Gertrude Stein link. "Yes, people compare me to Stein. I've seen Four Saints in Three Acts. She's great, of course, although I wasn't terribly interested in her work as something I wanted to draw upon until recently. I did play called Hypatia with the Ridge Theater that was pretty much pure Stein. Stein's plays are totally suited to musical adaptation and I'm surprised more haven't been done that way. Of course when you sing something you can get away with a lot.
"I think there is a lot more room for innovation in opera and musical theater. I find that this generation of composers is fairly conventional in their notions of theater, whatever musical idiom they practice. There are so many possibilities besides narrative, psychological melodrama set to music, but that notion seems too outré for the mainstream theater. The opera world is very conservative also. They seem to want only Mozart and Wagner and Puccini. I have nothing against those composers; it's just that one of the reasons opera attracts me is the possibility of creating a new idiom. It seems totally pointless to take a Tennessee Williams play and make it into an opera. I know people have done that but I just don't see why you'd do it.
"I don't really know what kind of response this piece will get and in a sense I don't care. It is a major achievement and I think I did rather good work on it and David Lang has done very fine work. Everyone involved is terrific so I am very optimistic. But I'm sure there are a lot of people who won't know what it's about, meaning it doesn't announce a higher moral purpose in the first three minutes."
How has your work been received by critics? "I've gone through periods when I have gotten wonderful reviews and others where I've gotten terrible reviews. It's not that these critics are idiots or unsympathetic, it's that they are a little bit at sea. What tends to happen with my work (and work like it) is that a critic begins to get more interested in it and then he or she gets fired and replaced by someone who is more the arts-and-leisure type. This has happened at The New York Times and in publications in other cities.
"I was on a panel recently with a bunch of American theater critics and this kind of question came up in slightly different form. One critic asked, 'how can we deal with something that is difficult when we only see the thing once?' I answered that I thought there were ways to take that into account. It's really ahistorical to demand that theater be absolutely transparent and immediately consumable. That attitude has essentially driven the intelligent audience out of theater. I don't mind being puzzled. I don't mind being stimulated and I don't mind listening to something that takes me beyond what I already know. I get bored with things I already know and I don't think I'm exceptional in that regard. But it is typical of a certain type of journalism that is pervasive in this culture that everything has to be already known. It's also pervasive in how we talk about politics. The idea that we would put anything in an historical context in the Middle East is utterly foreign to us right now. So we are flailing around instead.
"I hear over and over that audiences need to be reassured right now. The problem is that they are told they should want reassurance. But people often want to see something that takes them out of themselves and challenges them in ways that have spiritual dimensions and forces them to question. I think there is an audience that isn't only interested in being reassured and that can appreciate something that is new and complex and deep. If the purpose of art is to reassure people, we may as well just give audiences sedatives. There is nothing particularly reassuring about Beethoven or Wagner or Bach. One reason I wanted to deal with The Difficult of Crossing a Field is that it was by a classic American writer. On the surface it looks fairly simple but it really is quite profound and very dark.
"A few years ago there was a symposium of Times' critics, including the opera critic, and they talked about how sick they were of irony. I wondered what they thought about Sophocles and Shakespeare and Melville? What they were saying was that they wanted work that announced what it was about in clear terms and told you on page one that it was a frivolous, silly thing or a serious thing and that anything else was a waste of time. They wanted theater to be like journalism. So now we have a huge wave of British plays of the moral-superiority type. It's a problem."
Is there a major playwright whom you dislike? "Arthur Miller. I think he's incredibly overrated. He's a ghastly writer. The morality in Death of a Salesman is hideous. [Willy Loman] is a failure because he's a loser. It's the American ideology in pure form."
More about Mac Wellman
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/English/Writing/NuMuse/Intro4th.html
http://www.location1.org/locution/wellman.html
http://www.williams.edu/acad-depts/theatre/productions/terminalhip/terminalhip.html
http://www.bottomsdream.com/terminalhip/terminalhipinfo.htm
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/wellman.html
http://www.salvagevanguard.org/terminal.html
http://www.curtainup.com/catspaw.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9917/mcnulty.php
http://www.bottomsdream.com/7blowjobs/7bjs_la_weekly_july22-28_1994.html
http://theatreschool.depaul.edu/PERFORM/0002/s2guide01.htm
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/authors/bierce.html
http://richardgingras.com/devilsdictionary/
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Bierce/
http://www.biercephile.com/
http://donswa.home.pipeline.com/
http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/18661913/lit/bierce.htm
http://home.wlu.edu/~blackburnj/shepard/toc.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/sshepard.htm
http://www.tenderbuttons.com/
http://www.sci.fi/~solaris/stein/
http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/Beck_Links.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/beckett.htm
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hpinter.htm
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jjoyce.htm
http://www.cohums.ohio-state.edu/english/organizations/ijjf/
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~caveman/Joyce/
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