Is Other People: May 2010

One of my favs I wrote this year for my Dramatic Lit class. Involves Sarah Kane (more to come for sure), Eugene O'Neill, and Samuel Beckett.

The updating of a classic play poses many problems. Particularly, how does one modernize a play without sacrificing the original essence? With Phaedra’s Love, Sarah Kane manages to do just so, bringing Euripides’ Hippolytus into a contemporary context. Although the excessive violence, provocative sexuality, and religious blasphemy portray the original through the lens of the cruel and the absurd, the general storyline remains in tact. Via references to Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett, Kane illuminates the destructive capability love possesses by juxtaposing excessive detachment with obsessive desire.
First and foremost, we cannot avoid acknowledgment that Kane is shocking. This is presented from the very first scene that not only lacks dialogue, but introduces us to Hippolytus, who rejects any real human emotion. He is in a darkened room, watching television, continually eating hamburgers. He is surrounded by socks he either blows his snot into or disinterestedly masturbates into. The most perceptive he seems to be is in his ability to avoid the remnants of the latter action to allow him to do the former. Kane divulges his royal background and elaborates on his character in the following scene involving a dialogue between his stepmother, Phaedra, and a doctor. This is followed by a conversation between Phaedra and her daughter, Strophe, and it is revealed how obsessed Phaedra actually is with Hippolytus. Strophe warns her of the danger of acting on her emotions, and that she should get over him, go sleep with someone else. The scene ends with Phaedra declaring to get over him. But we are immediately taken back into Hippolytus’ darkened room where he is joylessly playing with a remote control car and eating sweets. Phaedra soon enters and a sharp, tense dialogue ensues.
It is here that many of the connections can be made to Eugene O'Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, another play bringing the original to a different context. Both plays use walls as a physical barrier that can’t hold back the burning of desire. As Phaedra declares she can “feel him through the walls. Sense him. Feel his heartbeat from a mile,” so too do Abbie and Eben seem to stare at each other through the walls when they are in rooms next to each other. Both of the stepmothers hold the more adamant desire, whereas the stepson is resistant. However, the difference is that Eben in Desire still wants his stepmother, he just denies it as long as he can. Hippolytus is looking for nothing more than another partner to get him off. Abbie and Phaedra also portray opposite personalities in that Abbie is confident she can convince Eben to be with her, while Phaedra’s desperation of desire only allows her to give him oral sex without anything in return. Here we see another connection, which is of power struggles. Both Abbie and Eben originally argue over who will get the land when Cabot, her husband and his father, passes away. For Eben, it is the one thing that connects him to his real mom and he feels solely entitled to the land. Hippolytus expresses his power through oral sex. He gets other people to allow him pleasure and he is able to be in control, forcing his subject’s head however he chooses. Phaedra made the initial move in this situation, only further showing the obsession she has of him. When he finishes, there is a long silence, and the detached Hippolytus can only comment “mystery over.” Even after crying and being insulted by him, Phaedra still insists that she is in love with him. The endings of both plays conclude tragic for the couples. Although he was originally going to desert her, Eben decides he loves Abbie and will go to jail with her for the crime of infanticide. Kane doesn’t paint so romantic of a portrait. Phaedra ends up hanging herself, leaving a note that Hippolytus raped her. Although he didn’t do it, he still admits to it without confessing the crime. As foreshadowed by Strophe he is gruesomely mutilated by a mob, sealing the fate he recognized he must adhere to.
Over and over, the use of ‘burn’ in some form or another enters into the dialogue. This is part of what makes Kane’s play so compelling. It is first mentioned in scene two when Phaedra is trying to convince Strophe of how strong her desire for Hippolytus is. No matter how much Strophe tries to convince her to overcome her feelings, Phaedra cries how impossible it is: “Can’t switch this off. Can’t crush it. Can’t. Wake up with it, burning me.” Here burn is used to describe how her desire for him is burned into her, it scars her soul how much she wants him. Later, when Hippolytus asserts that “everyone looks the same when they come”, Phaedra counters that it’s different “when they burn you.” Hippolytus retorts that no one burns him, but Phaedra suggests a woman named Lena. Due to the denial and violent reaction of Hippolytus, it is assumed that this was an ex-lover of his and he orders her never to mention that name again. This could be assumed to be the root of Hippolytus’ depression and nihilism. When the scene is about to end and Phaedra is about to leave, Hippolytus reveals that he has gonorrhea, which can involve a burning feeling during urination. The detachment with which he says this, offering first that she see a doctor, lends a dark, dark humor, emphasized in his attempts to get her to hate him. Eventually, we get more physical senses of burning. In the next scene, when the town hears that Hippolytus raped Phaedra, they start to riot, burning down their palace. Phaedra’s body is burned at her funeral. And during Hippolytus’ absurd torture scene in the end, his genitals are cut off and thrown onto a barbecue to the sounds of cheers and laughter.
The existential nihilism expressed by Hippolytus throughout most of the play is a clear descendent of an exaggerated Samuel Beckett. Kane throws in a few direct references to Waiting for Godot in particular. When Phaedra first speaks to Strophe in scene three, she salutes “go away fuck off don’t touch me don’t talk to me stay with me,” a direct echo of Estragon’s plea of “Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!” Both of these characters attempt to put up a strong veneer, but they truly just wish to have someone to talk with. The second connection, and here is where Hippolytus truly despairs, is when he asserts that “life’s too long.” He denies that he has a life at all; rather he is just “filling up time. Waiting.” Here is where we can draw a foundation for the meaning of Hippolytus’ final lines, which end the play. He asserts that he is “waiting for something to happen” and is convinced life is just wasting time, equating even Christ Almighty with “bric-a-brac, bits and bobs, getting by.” He denies the priests proposed reprieve, exerting his power and debasing the priest’s convictions to the point where he performs oral sex on Hippolytus. Clearly, he is not waiting for the afterlife for something happen. So it must be that his death is the only thing he can consider a happening. The only reason he is in this position to begin with is that he finds out that Phaedra killed herself because she really did love him. He is caught in disbelief; he feels it is almost a duty to accept the penalty, for he recognizes that he really did kill her. He realizes how she meant that love isn’t logical. He very easily could have denied the rape, but he saw a chance for something to happen, something not of the ordinary. It is a severely twisted view of love, one that relies on the destruction of both parties rather than the embracement of each other. But it is real. The burning is real. Hippolytus feels the burning, physically and figuratively. “If there could have been more moments like this” because there is beauty in the world, but it is a dark and brutal beauty, illogical and fierce. Everything else just happens while we wait and we pretend that that’s what we enjoy and makes us feel happiness. The cruel candor of this play is further underlined by Kane’s sharp, vulgar language and visually alarming interactions between characters. The effect of this is a stronger argument for love, a questioning of our near and dear values, and theater that is truly startling, convincing, and above all, honest.

So it’s come to this. With only one working drumstick, the head of my acoustic mysteriously snapped (again) and the consistent breaking of Jon’s strings, I have taken the sign to give up on music and to try my hand at writing. Most subjects (of which it is most difficult to come up with) will most surely revolve around literature, music and vague philosophical meanderings. If anybody has any topics they would think would be interesting for me to pursue or perhaps would like to provide an article or essay for me to comment on, feel free. Since I've rejected the conventional notion of the capitalist college graduate of finding a ‘real job’ and am continuing on with the same job I've held since high school which most likely won’t consistently supply forty hours of work each week, I, needless to say, have a lot of free time. Expect some intermittent non-sense thrown up here, every couple of days at first, followed by an upload once a week, once a month, until I’ve completely lost all motivation to follow through with this idea, as seems to be the current trend in my life. Until then, hope you enjoy the writings, perhaps want to challenge the writings, maybe make you think in a different way, or at the very least recognize the intellectual capability of my being (which I guess must be the desired goal of the incoherent ramblings of any blogger, that egoistic creature that has taken too much advantage of the technology of our era).

Is Other People

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Might As Well

Girls

Intro