Old Questions to New Beginnings:
FunHome, Good Person of Szechwan,
Julius Caesar forever
Of all the plays I have seen in 2013,
three of them seem to have left lasting impact on me. While everyone
prefers to talk about new beginnings, of all the inspiring
productions I had the opportunity to witness, I want to retain what I
experienced as I watched FunHome at Public Theater, Julius Caesar at
St Ann’s Warehouse and Good Person of Szechwan, again at Public
Theater for as long as possible. These plays do not have much in
common except maybe the universal quality of the questions they pose
regarding human existence and experience.
FunHome (based on the graphic novel by talented and wise Allison Bechdel, rewritten as play by Lisa Kron) is the everlasting battle every individual seems to have to go through as we try to achieve adulthood and maturity; who am I in relation to my parents? Good Person of Szechwan (one of the master pieces of great Bertolt Brecht, the ajit-prop genius) explores the chances of becoming a good, moral and just person as we survive amidst corruption, discrimination and inequality; can I indeed survive and flourish if I insist to keep my moral compass intact? Julius Caesar (of who else but the Bard) is obviously the perennial question of what becomes of us as we engage in power struggles; is there a way out from the corrupting nature of power?
FunHome (based on the graphic novel by talented and wise Allison Bechdel, rewritten as play by Lisa Kron) is the everlasting battle every individual seems to have to go through as we try to achieve adulthood and maturity; who am I in relation to my parents? Good Person of Szechwan (one of the master pieces of great Bertolt Brecht, the ajit-prop genius) explores the chances of becoming a good, moral and just person as we survive amidst corruption, discrimination and inequality; can I indeed survive and flourish if I insist to keep my moral compass intact? Julius Caesar (of who else but the Bard) is obviously the perennial question of what becomes of us as we engage in power struggles; is there a way out from the corrupting nature of power?
Of course the ways in which these
masters (yes I do not mind naming Bechdel alongside Brecht and
Shakespeare) tackled with the particularities of these universal
questions is the inspirational craftsmanship that help us through
with our own lives. Therefore what Lisa Kron, Lear deBessonet
–director of Good Person- and Phyllida Lloyd, -director of Julius
Caesar- managed to create are almost equally instrumental in engaging
the viewer into these questions. And hey, I have already read FunHome
as a book, and seen Good Person and Julius Caesar stagings in three
continents almost a dozen times, but it may be the contributions of
these re-interpreters that have moved me so much so that I want to
retain the memories of these plays forever.
Funhome, is not about fun, it is a
FUNeral home run by a closeted gay father, distressed and voiceless
mother as told by a now proudly gay daughter. The big question of who
am I with respect to my father has often been presented as a father
son battle, but this time we are witnessing it as the daughter is
coming to terms with adulthood tries to connect with her father’s
secrets and shame. She is the healthy one (aren’t we all), it is
the parent who was supposed to be all mighty and all loving that is
deeply damaged (aren’t they all?) He is angry, he is a brute, he is
bossy but in the end Bechdel (and Kron) invites us to empathize with
him. After all that is the only chance for the daughter to achieve an
effective and meaningful adulthood. Understanding the father is not
only a morally meaningful affection; it is also instrumental, i.e.
useful. By witnessing her father going through an oppressively irate
life not knowing any better, the daughter discovers herself, gains
her integrity and grows. See, we are not talking about a particular
sexual identity here. We are talking about every Body.
Yes, for many political reasons we like
to hear about particular troubles of gay individuals. But at the same
time such narrative has the danger of ghettoizing, compartmentalizing
these life experiences, let alone the voyeurisms that may be involved
in gawking into the lives of the marginal, the weird, the
oh-so-different. With the help of Bechdel and Kron, we notice the
lack of such difference; no one is weird, no one is queer, we all
share such wounds of humanness. How similar we all are; we all have
to come to terms with our parents, the damages they bring upon
themselves and thus open us, and most importantly we can all only
grow if we manage to transcend these wounds by acknowledging them as
who they are and realize how they actually helped us. It is painful
but it is so much fun. See, FunHome is not a gay-coming to age story.
It is the story of all humanity and becoming an effective human
being, particulars notwithstanding.
Once we manage to grow-up, can we
become a good and moral individual? Is it really possible, or is such
a quest all together meaningless given the harsh inequalities and
injustices we have to struggle through in life. Bertolt Brecht
invites us (literally, his plays demands active audience
participation) to think together with his main character and three
gods (who were goddesses in their most recent Public Theater
re-incarnations) if goodness is maintainable. Given the fact that he
wrote most of his play while he was living in exile in NYC during the
years of Nazi regime in Germany, it still is a relevant question, for
us here and now, under the shadows of the lower Manhattan
skyscrapers. How far we can continue being moral and just individuals
as we try to survive, find shelter and feed ourselves.
Frankly, coming from the 20th
century struggles of the old world, I was (and still am) pretty
doubtful about contemporary American interpretations of Brecht. He
wrote for working-class whereas in general “Americans” do not
like to think of themselves as working class, they are, as Steinbeck
says, millionaires in temporary distress! ("I guess the trouble
was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was
a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Esquire, June, 1960) He wanted
powerless people to express themselves in and through his plays,
whereas this is not the age of suppressed-self anymore, for better
and worse “americans” express themselves plenty via all kinds of
modern outlets. And finally, he believed the educational quality of
art whereas many “americans” go to theater for entertainment. As
an evidence of this maybe-biased impression of mine, I can talk about
the last Brecht play I saw many years ago in Broadway; the disastrous
Three Penny Opera where even the glorious Alan Cumming could not save
the day. So I had sworn not to see one more contemporary US
production of Brecht and I am glad that I changed my mind for Good
Person of Szechwan at Public Theater.
But I could not. There and then I
turned into a bad Brecht audience. I don’t know if it was the
stiffness of the crowd that night, or maybe the actors did not make
the audience comfortable enough to participate (I doubt that) but I
could not bring myself to yell out, as Brecht would have wanted me
to, “mike check.” So, I contributed turning Brecht into an
entertainment, spectacle, rather than an experience of active
engagement. It was not so much the embarrassment of possible
awkwardness that might have followed, but mostly, I was not sure
about the possible connections we had as audience and actors. We are
now people of virtual connections, such as facebook and twitter. Do
we really know how to act in concert in real time and space? We are
now so used to act upon illusionary connections, is it really
possible to elicit substantive reactions from an actual crowd of
human beings? Brecht expects us to think together and act in unison;
are we still capable of doing that? We did it at Zuccotti Park and we
cannot even symbolically re-enact it at a Brecht play? As 21st
century denizens of internet and global connections, we were just
sitting there with that bourgeois stiffness of 19th
century Brecht so much despised and tried to overcome. I was not
proud of myself, as powerlessness crept up on me. Are we doomed to be
silenced, now that we live under the illusion that we continuously
express our free will online?
Speaking of
power, freedom and fate, many speeches in Julius Caesar have always
been in the forefront of my mind, as a student of political
sociology. “Men at sometimes were masters of their fates. / The
fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we
are underlings.” As many folks go back to their sacred books, I
often go back to Shakespeare to help me understand workings of power.
I have seen very talented, world famous actors playing these men of
power, uttering words of freedom, but none of them, now, compares to
the soulful production of an all-female casting of this play by
Donmar company at the St.Ann’s warehouse. (sidenote: I myself had a
tiny role in another all-female staging of the same play when I was
in middle-school; it was a private british colonial girls’ school
in Istanbul, we were pretending to be men, we hated Shakespeare, I
hated Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism, it was a disaster!)
No other Shakespeare, no other play had
ever had such a forceful impact on me. At the end of the play when
Harriet Walter, who played Brutus and who should have died a few
minutes ago declaring that what Caesar represented was still alive,
turned around and looked at the audience with her mournful eyes, I
was paralyzed, in tears, unable to clap and soon discovered not even
able to stand-up and walk.
They were, as the play was
re-interpreted by Phyllida Lloyd, a bunch of unruly, unsophisticated
inmates of a female jail house (the director made sure that we, as
audience had a firsthand experience of the walls of a prison) who
happened to be staging Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. As they were
acting, they grew as individuals; as individuals, they questioned
absolute power, demanded freedom, expressed their free-will, tried to
change destiny, displayed certainty, compromised wilfully and failed
disastrously, even when the most innocent of them all, Octavius,
played by a pregnant inmate,- started showing signs of absolute grasp
of power, denying all forms of limitations to her/his reign, as much
as, her precedent did and died for. After all that bloodshed (war
scenes were carried out by a trash metal band, music composed by the
musicians themselves), guardians marched in and ordered the inmates
to go back to their cells. And guess what, Caesar, who was supposed
to be dead very early in the play and who was obviously hanging
around throughout the performance, was not even an inmate. She was
one of the guardians reminding us the difficulty to answer the
time-honored question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodies, who is
going to guard us from our guardians?
What becomes of us when we try to take
our destiny into our own hands and fight against power? Can we really
get rid of power from our lives? Isn’t she omnipresent? Isn’t she
all mighty? Those of us who band together to fight power, how long
can we maintain our acting in concert before we turn our swords to
each other in the name of freedom? Is it possible to keep up just and
ethical fight against power without falling into the cracks of power
struggles? And after all, at the end of the day, aren’t we all
supposed to go back to our own cells, with the mournful eyes of great
warrior sealed in our minds?
Yet, growing is still possible…quest
for moral self is still valid and yes, power can be limited and
controlled by mature ethical individuals… That is why I want to
keep these three plays with me in 2014 and in many years to come.
Whatever new beginnings new years may bring these questions and
quests will stay with us.
Kumru Toktamis
Kumru Toktamis
December 31, 2013
Brooklyn, NY
Pratt Institute Admissions
Pratt Institute
Main Brooklyn Campus
200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
For more information, please visit our official page
Pratt Institute Admissions