The Writer

What a Shambles 

The Writer, by British playwright Ella Hickson, now in its U.S. premiere in a production by Steep Theatre, is easily the most self-conscious-seeming play I have ever experienced.  At every moment, one gets the impression that the playwright, seemingly uncertain of her own aesthetic and her chosen methodology, is forestalling potential criticism by having her characters savage the very scenes she has written. 

She accomplishes this — if “accomplish” is the right word — by alternating scenes from a fictional playwright’s work in progress with scenes featuring an older, male director character who critiques those very scenes and argues with the young female playwright (the Writer of the play’s title), telling her that her play is incomplete, shambolic, didactic, poorly structured, and so forth.  

Which, in fact it is.  

By which I mean the play itself, the one called The Writer, as well as, from what little we can see of it, the play-within-a-play. 

The Writer, directed by Georgette Verdin, opens with the aftermath of an unseen production of the play within the play that is the subject of a scathing feminist excoriation by a young female audience member who happens to run into the director when she dashes back into the theatre to retrieve her forgotten purse.  She mentions, for example, a gratuitous rape scene.

The encounter is deeply unrealistic — instead of just handing back the lost bag and going about his business, the director, with no evident motivation to do so, keeps on calling the audience member back to goad her into criticizing the play he’s directed — criticisms he proceeds to argue with and dismiss — while at the same time, and quite absurdly, urging her to write a play for his theatre company, even though he doesn’t know her and has never read her writing.  

Actually, as it turns out, he does know her, and he does know her writing, because he once taught her at a young person’s playwriting workshop, buttered her up with praise, tried to invite her to his room and was rejected.  We learn this when the young audience member says to the married director, “you don’t remember me, do you?” — one of the most cliched of all dramaturgical questions in the “Me, Too” era, and a signal for the grievance-based debates we assume are yet to come.  The grievances are quite real, and no doubt the product of hard-won experience on the part of Hickson and other women in the theatre world; as it turns out, however, the arguments only glancingly touch on the salient issues, focusing mostly on the worthiness, or lack thereof, of the play within the play.

The next scene is a post-play panel discussion, in which we discover that the “director” and the “audience member and young playwright” we have just seen are only actors, and rather passive ones at that.  The other two panelists are the real director and the real playwright, who proceed to take questions from the audience and bicker with each other about the play’s implications.  The director is so negative about the play and the playwright that one wonders why he ever agreed to direct it, and why the fictitious theatre ever accepted the script to begin with.

These two scenes get The Writer off to an awful, and slow, and slightly confusing start.  

Four major scenes follow this.  The first is a putatively realistic scene involving the Writer and her manipulative live-in boyfriend, in which he attempts to wheedle, beg, and demand that she sign a contract worth £40,000 to write a screen adaptation of her play (presumably the play referenced in the first scene of The Writer.)  There is absolutely nothing about this play-within-a-play that says “damn, this would make a fabulous and highly cinematic movie,” although the Writer objects not at all on this basis, but on the basis of artistic integrity, expressed by her in somewhat sophomoric and banal terms; unless one is a truly great artist, which this fictional playwright would seem not to be (her boyfriend says, “you’re no Picasso”) there is absolutely no reason why one’s work should be “compromised” merely because you have been paid a generous sum of money to adapt it to a different medium.

The scene itself is filled with endless bickering and leaping conflict (the boyfriend switches from naked greed and pleading to philosophical musings to petulantly dumping leftover cassoulet over the playwright’s laptop to proposing marriage to yet more insults) with little emotional evolution between these hairpin turns.  There’s also a loudly crying baby that doesn’t exist — an “infans ex machina” — that, as a dramatic effect or symbolic apparition works not in the least.  (Edward Albee would have had something to say, no doubt, about how to write imaginary babies had he witnessed this production.)

The next interlude is a slightly embarrassing Forest Primeval fantasia in which the Writer discovers that she is sexually attracted to women, performs a rhapsodically poetic monologue, and dances with the other female cast members.  The scene, which has some lovely moments, would have worked well in another play consisting of similar lyrical interludes; but in a mostly naturalistic play, like the apparitional baby, it just seems jimmied into place. 

The penultimate scene is yet another big reveal in which we discover that the preceding scene had, again, been taken from the play-within-a-play, and we witness yet another argument between the Writer and the Director about whether the scene works. It doesn’t.  It also isn’t clear why the actor in this scene, which the director crudely calls “this tribal shit,” is played by the Writer, rather than by the actual actor we were introduced to in the first scene.

The final scene is a homebound mini-drama between the Writer and her new girlfriend that seems to repeat some of the domestic power dynamics between the Writer and her pushy boyfriend, and features an awkwardly staged sex scene featuring a two-headed dildo.

Speaking of sex, the other sex scenes in The Writer — an earlier one between the Writer and her boyfriend, and a later one between the Writer and her girlfriend — are conducted fully clothed, and take approximately 40 seconds from foreplay to orgasm.  (Children should be barred from this production, not because the sex scenes are “dirty,” but for the opposite reason, that they’ll develop unrealistic notions about how clean and convenient sex is!) 

While there’s an understandable concision in the sex scenes required in light of the play’s running time, less understandable is the characters’ endless fiddling with blankets to conceal their nether parts from the audience.  Intimacy coordinators, a relatively recent and welcome addition to our theatre, can perform a valuable role in eliminating awkwardness in terms of both the treatment of actors in vulnerable positions as well as in the way the scenes are blocked and communicated to the audience.  I felt as if more thought could have been given to the latter consideration in these scenes.  

The play’s feminist sexual politics are a worthy and very timely topic, and there are hints that The Writer’s nested and non-linear structure is a means of establishing differentiation between the patriarchal power structure of the professional theatre world and the presumably looser and more intuitive methodologies of female artists.  (Though plenty of male playwrights write non-linearly, and a whole host of female playwrights write in traditional forms, and even as I write it, the term “looser and more intuitive” seems deeply patronizing.)

Once again, in her characters’ pronouncements on sexual politics, the playwright seems to want to have it both ways.  For every line like “dismantle capitalism and overthrow the patriarchy” we get another line like “the parts where it gets ‘ranty’ can become unbearable.”  Importantly, these lines don’t represent some sort of Hegelian dialectic that, through the unfolding of a powerful story, progresses inevitably to a devastating conclusion; they are just — or so it appears — a means for the playwright to hedge her bets.

Some will find this questing and questioning assemblage-like structure more appealing than I did.  For my part, I confess that I like theatre to have a more well-integrated structure, where (despite all of the inevitable human complications and ambiguities) the play’s parts cohere to make, at the end, a powerful impression.  In the exploitative and inequitable treatment of women in the theatre world, that point was there to be made, but I found myself disappointed that Hickson muddled that message with narrative trickery and a structure that seemed to undercut itself at every turn. 

It is entirely possible that this insistently recursive structure may have been precisely Hickson’s intention.  But for me, at least, the constant critiques and counter-critiques of the characters ended up canceling each other out, and left me, at the end, wondering if there had been a point at all.  

The acting is very fine — particularly Lucy Carapetyan as the Writer — and the stage design is beautifully realized.  (Though I was puzzled by one elaborate set that was revealed to the audience but never employed.)  The production itself is quite solid, but fatally compromised by a script that either doesn’t know what it wants to say, or is afraid to say it without equivocation. 

Nonetheless, I look forward to the next production of one of Hickson’s other works.  On a line-by-line basis, Hickson (who was named by the Guardian in 2011 as one one the young playwrights to watch), has the rare ability to create memorable characters and to command the audience’s attention.  Structural challenges aside, she is a playwright to watch and to follow. 

One of the final moments in this confused and confusing play is a fleeting image of Picasso’s Guernica.  It is, possibly, a reference to the Boyfriend’s earlier observation that the Writer is no Picasso, and/or perhaps another one of Hickson’s self-conscious self-criticisms, but all I could think of was, if you need to borrow artistic credibility from the greatest work of the greatest visual artist of the 20th Century, that’s a sure sign that your own artistic project is badly ill-conceived. 

Somewhat Recommended 

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented by Steep Theatre at the Edge Theatre, 5451 N Broadway

Chicago, IL 60640

Tickets are available at access@steeptheatre.com or 773-649-3186.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.