A Pragmatic Analysis

The Pragmatists

I make a practice of not reading about new plays — or plays unfamiliar to me — before seeing them, because I want to come to a performance fresh, without any preconceptions.  In some cases, this means not even reading the brief plot synopsis in the program; it’s the playwright’s job to tell us the story.  And I want to be surprised!  

Nor do I make a practice of reading other reviews or explications of a play before my own review has been written and posted.  Again, I don’t want to be influenced by what others have thought or said, and perhaps be nudged into pretending to like something I actually didn’t at all care for, or — an even more egregious critical sin — ganging up on an otherwise universally unpopular work that I actually enjoyed.

I make an exception for plays that I know in advance are likely to have a difficult-to-follow plot and/or abstruse language — one of Shakespeare’s history plays, for example.  Right about the time that Falstaff is dickering with Mouldy, Shadow and Feeble, I feel grateful that I took a quick glance at the play’s synopsis before entering the theatre.  I don’t want to be like the young lady who I once witnessed when I was in London, storming out in the middle of a production of The Tempest, juggling a load of crinkly shopping bags and exclaiming loudly in Cockney as Ariel entered a scene, “is he supposed to be the Devil or something?”

I realized on opening night, while watching the Trap Door Theatre’s new adaptation of Polish absurdist playwright Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz’s 1919 play The Pragmatists, directed by Zeljko Djukic from a translation by Daniel Gerould and adapted by Adam Randelovic, that I should extend this practice of studying in advance to determinedly avant-garde theatre.  

The Pragmatists is a rather abstract chamber piece that takes place on a crisply designed single set by Natasha Djukic comprising corrugated, translucent plexiglass and thin, vertical white ropes, accented by bells, black walls and gongs.  It reminded me — though perhaps it would remind no one else — of the setting of an Italian giallo movie from the 1970s.  In any event, it served as as kind of playground for the play’s seven characters, who exchange angry, funny and maniacal dialogue that, on a line-by-line basis, is never less than interesting, eerie, indignant or amusing, but in service to a plot or thesis that, to be perfectly frank, I didn’t understand even one bit.  

As it turns out, the story — I’m quoting directly from Trap Door Theatre’s press release here — “takes place in a setting that is at the same time a torture chamber, a chamber of the heart, and a chamber for a virtuoso recital, (where) two former friends struggle for domination in an existential conflict…they are ‘pragmatists’ because instead of facing the ultimate mystery of existence, they attempt to find pain-killing evasions, which doom them to live the past over again while experiencing the future in advance.”

This was of some help in understanding the play in retrospect but is, itself, rather abstract.  Indeed, I did read this particular synopsis before the play began, but found that it didn’t advance the ball all that much. 

When I later turned to the playwright’s biography for help, I learned that Witkiewicz was “an expert on drugs, an early spokesman for a radically non-realistic theatre and an original philosopher and social critic of mass culture, post-industrial society, and the rise of totalitarianism…(who) committed suicide shortly after the outbreak of War in September of 1939.” This, as it happens, is the very same time that W.H. Auden, in his poem “September, 1939,” wrote that “Waves of anger and fear/Circulate over the bright/And darkened lands of the earth,/Obsessing our private lives;/The unmentionable odour of death/ Offends the September night.”

I discovered a brief exegesis of The Pragmatists on a website called TheatreMania that offered me some additional after-the-fact insight: “The play is about an existential conflict between two former friends: the weak, passive recluse Plasfodor Mimecker and the confident, bombastic Minister of Poisons Graf Franz von Telek. They use the women surrounding them as weapons in their struggle: Plasfodor’s mute wife Mammalia, his androgynous maid Masculette, and a mysterious Chinese Mummy in the employ of von Telek. However, these women, no mere objects, control the action just as much as the play’s ostensible protagonists, and life is made difficult for everyone involved.”

It is true that I find that much of avant-garde literature suffers from the imitative fallacy — in order to portray the absurd condition of society, the poem or novel is itself absurd; a fragmented civilization results in fragmentary lines of verse, and so on.  This has always struck me as an artistic surrender to our difficult existence, rather than an attempt, as I believe great art should strive for, to in some fashion transcend it — as, for example, I believe Auden did in “September, 1939.”

In addition, some of the lines in The Pragmatists seemed rather anachronistic — did Witkiewicz really write, back in 1919, of “the widespread dominance of liquid soap in public bathrooms,” or “white people say so many useless things, in life and on stage”?  These seem like contemporary paste-ons, an unfortunate outgrowth of the adaptation process.  More believable are various characters’ references to “the essential strangeness of existence” and “the banality of existence.”  However, as with many other utterances in this play, the lines often seem unconnected to the lines spoken directly before and after them. 

But there is no denying the energy of the seven actors — Venice Averyheart, David Lovejoy, Manuela Rentea, Keith Surney, Kevin Webb, Hannah Silverman, and Caleb Lee Jenkins — and their ability to slide seamlessly from clownishness to dolor to belligerence, and then back again to physical and verbal comedy.  Although I was baffled by this play, I would like to see it again.  Armed with a little foreknowledge, I think its impact would be immeasurably greater on me — and on any other audience members who came to this unusual theatrical experience unprepared for what they were about to witness.

Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented by Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cartland St. 

Tickets are available at www.trapdoortheatre.com or by calling 773-384-0494.

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