Nik Sheehan | No Sad Songs / 1985

just saying

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nik Sheehan (director) No Sad Songs / 1985

 

1985 was the essential year for the cinematic expression surrounding the growing crisis in the LGBTQ community of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the final stage or “syndrome” of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) transmitted primarily through blood and semen. That year saw the first full-length film on the subject, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s October 31st release, Buddies, the first television drama about the disease and its effects, An Early Frost, televised on November 11th of that year, and four months earlier, the first documentary about AIDS and the gay community, Canadian filmmaker Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs, which might have served as the model of so very many documentaries that followed.

    I say “might” because, alas, very few of the others demonstrated the diversity of narrative approaches and the soul and heart of Sheehan’s amazing production, produced on a shoestring budget. That it was even made is almost a miracle. The movie came into existence only after the AIDS Committee of Toronto realized that they still had $20,000 of grant money they had received for an educational audiovisual project which, if they didn’t use soon, would have to be returned. Kevin Orr, from the Committee, made a call to Sheehan asking was it even possible to make a documentary for that amount of money, and the filmmaker immediately responded that he thought it could be done.

      I should just make it clear for the record, there was one earlier documentary of the same year: the US Public Broadcasting Systems’ production of NOVA: AIDS Chapter One, directed by Thea Chalow. This film, quite informative and even brilliant at moments, however, is mostly focused on the scientists’ work to discover what was killing so many young gay men. Although there are a couple of characters representing AIDS victims, whose momentary appearances are quite moving, this film is basically an objective discussion of the scientific issues—a truly much-needed perspective. But it hasn’t an even a bit of the heart of Sheehan’s work, and doesn’t really detail in any substantial way, the involvement of the gay community in the concerns that were quickly killing queers off. Even the doctors can only admit their own inability to actually deal with the tragedy their patients are suffering, and the physical isolation they were forced to endure.

      The result of Sheehan’s work, on first look, is such a highly eclectic mix of genres, personages, and narrative strategies that it almost seems to be an enthusiastically crazed get-together of Toronto LGBTQ figures asked to ponder, suffer over, and, yes celebrate those in their community suffering from  AIDS—except as you gradually watch the various “acts” appear one by one through the work’s frames you realize that such a first-time effort could hardly resist such inclusiveness, and in hindsight, provides us with a record of how the issues surrounding what was in those days described as “the gay plague” that involved nearly everyone from the hellish bigots to the heavenly saints. Moreover, as reviewer Matthew Hays points out, it captured how people both concerned and confused about the unknown epidemic worked in various ways to confront the issues of the day: “The film stands as a crucial document and an ode to those who were fighting on the front lines, just as the gravity of what was to come was sinking in.”

      Including a gay man from the medical profession (Evan Collins), a psychiatrist (Stephen Atkinson), a sociologist (John Allen Lee), bar owners and an S&M patron (Dale McCarthy), an performing fireman talking about death (David Roche), satiric performers (Henry Van Rijk and David Sereda), a playwright (Sky Gilbert) and his actor (Joe Norman Shaw), British actor and writer Neil Bartlett, two gay drag artists dressed as nuns (Sister Atrociata von Tasteless and Sister Celestial Gates), board members of Canada’s major LGBTQ publication Body Politic (Gerald Hannon, Rick Rébout, and Chris Bearchell), and administrators and a volunteer of AIDS Committee of Toronto (Kevin Orr, John Bodis, Karsten Kossman, and Linda Boyd)—all judiciously woven together with a talking head who informs us of missing facts—before focusing on his central figures of people actually suffering from AIDS, their lovers, close friends, and family members (Jim Black and his lover Kevin, Jim Bozyk, Greg Lawrence, and Martha Cronen).

       Each of these figures, woven in-and-out by Sheehan, of the narrative of his designated “hero,” Jim, presents with a shimmering facet of the kaleidoscopic vision of the entire work. If some of the “performances,” in particular, seem a little amateurish and exaggerated with their satirical educational intent, I agree with the observations from another piece by the reviewer Hays I mentioned above:

 

“When I’ve shown this doc to my queer-cinema class at Concordia, some of the students suggest that some of the agitprop performance art is perhaps a bit hokey. I always argue that Sheehan’s very recording of it—even if it’s occasionally a bit clumsy—is crucial. He shows us the raw, emotional response of queer artists of the time to the brutal onslaught at the dawn of AIDS and HIV.”

     Sheehan’s film begins by establishing some territorial boundaries that later documentaries of latter years refused to declare. Although most people already recognized that AIDS was not just a  “gay” disease—without imagining, however, that years later it would be more common as a heterosexual disease in Africa—the focus of this work was the male homosexual community. And secondly, given that focus, the director and his interviewees argued it was crucial to approach the discussion of AIDS with a complete openness to what being gay represents in its sense of history, its current community, and the various individual definitions of sexuality that often defines it

     As a gay physician Collins argues early in this work that if AIDS often leads to a paralysis, of not knowing how to explain it, cure it, or even help people to live with it, it must be approached as an issue far bigger than a medical one. “The gay community needs to talk and deal with, argue, and have general discourse on how it acts on a social and political level.”

     Atkinson, the psychiatrist, warns us on relying instinctually on notions of “queerness” that come with the territory, particularly as they might be applied to AIDS:       

     

 “Gay people grow up in an environment that teaches us to be afraid of ourselves before we know that we’re gay. We’re afraid of dirty old men, child molesters, some murderers, perverts, all those sorts of things society tells everybody gay people represent. Things we learn about homosexuals before we realize we are homosexual. AIDS feeds into that very much. The whole idea of it being a scourge of God, a gay plague, or some kind of proof that we are bad, dirty, infectious, anti-social type people...can have a personal effect on men who are dealing with AIDS.”

 

     Sociologist John Allen Lee is wary even of the word “homosexual,” particularly in how it relates to the medical profession and dealing with AIDS. He reminds that the word “homosexual”  was created, in part, to rid us of the former depictions of gay men being Sodomites or buggers, and so on. By describing same-sex behavior as “homosexual,” it allowed it to become a medical condition which could be observed and possibly treated. He reminds us that as recently as the founding of the Mattachine Society by Harry Hay in 1950, an early gay rights group, the goal was not to demand universal acceptance but was asking for gays to be pitied and treated respectably. It took years to get the American Medical Association and psychiatrists to stop defining “homosexuality” a disease, and he justifiably fears that if AIDS is seen primarily as a gay disease in need of treatment by the medical profession, there is a strong opportunity to pull the word “homosexual” back into the description of a medical condition.

       The editors of Body Politic realize that the media, in describing how AIDS is a thing that “happens” to gays and that the various effects are seen to “happen” in relationship to having been infected with HIV, that it will create a strong sense of passivity, which may destroy all the positive actions of the LGBTQ community in general and certainly discourage what precisely this film is arguing for, open talk about the need for change.

      Lesbian editor Chris Bearchell feels that, in fact, the gay media has been too passive even in relationship to the general media, making the mistake of reporting each new theory and explanation of AIDS that arises with equal emphasis. “One week it was poppers and another week it was getting it in the ass, and the next week it was something else,” she regretfully recalls. That misled people, she argues, and led to utter confusion. She implores them to move forward with calm, responsible reporting, attempting to let people understand the distinctions between what is known, what is thought, and what is suspected to be the truth about AIDS.

      With regard to the role women might play with regard to AIDS, support volunteer Linda Boyd later in the film expresses her fears that for some time “women in the community did not consider it to be their issue.” But gradually as gay brothers, friends, and acquaintances began to become infected, they realized that as women they might play important roles. “Some men afflicted with AIDS still have difficulty in expressing their fears and emotions to other men but felt more comfortable with women,” probably connected with the mother image she quips.

    Body Politic editor Rick Rébout brings up one of the most important secondary concerns of Sheehan’s film. In the recognition that anal sex is perhaps the greatest method for the transmission of AIDS, the problem arises how to talk about sexuality with regard to gay sex. He rightfully argues that the solution often posited—“You just shouldn’t do that” (reminding me of the campaign to prevent teen pregnancies, “Just don’t”)—is not only naïve but represents a total lack of awareness of what sexuality means to gays in general, and what a particular sexual act means to many.

       Earlier Kevin Orr of the Aids Committee of Toronto argued quite insightfully about what gay liberation and being gay means at heart to many people. Coming out at the age of 17, he got immediately involved in gay liberation, he reports. And since then:

 

“I’ve been fighting to do various things. But it all comes back to being allowed to sleep with other men. So AIDS threatens that very directly. When you fight for that so hard for several years and you end up in bed with somebody, are you going to say to yourself ‘Is this going to kill me? Is this wrong?’ Of course the answer is No. All sorts of people have had to change their sexual practice. Sex in the age of AIDS is probably not as good as it was in the 70s. To have to have anal sex with a condom or not have anal sex at all is a problem. As a gay man one of the first things you learn is you have an anus. And straight men don’t know that.”

 

      Even though playwright Sky Gilbert has written plays that seem to argue against senseless promiscuity, he still insists “The joy of touching for the sake of touching is part of gay culture.”

 

      Finally, what these specialists and commentators realize is that AIDS has also had a very positive effect in further organizing the community and in bringing the entire LGBTQ world into a battle that concerns life and death, while also forcing them that they need the help of the heterosexual community as well. Although many Christian fundamentalists and bigots saw AIDS as God’s punishment, a greater number of heterosexual and even highly religious individuals came forward to help in the battle. As ACT administrator John Bodis summarzies:

 

“One of the amazing things that happened is AIDS further brought the community together to successfully challenge not only the disease but bigotry and much else. But gay organizations, no matter how well organized could not fight the AIDS crisis alone. Coalitions of health care professionals and concerned individuals, straight and gay are necessary.”

 

     Although the film does not go this far, I might add that in hindsight AIDS, despite the early heterosexual fears and refusals to even keep company with gay men—when Sheehan was making this film a critic from the Toronto Star asked him what his work was about: “When I told him I’d made the film on AIDS, he literally turned and ran away. There was so much panic and misunderstanding about it in those days.”—eventually it helped the heterosexual world recognize that gays were not only people of “flesh and blood,” but deserved the same rights as all others, at least with regard to marriage. If nothing else, it brought the community fighting for their lives into the social glare instead of relegating it to gay bars and back streets. Homes and families were suddenly missing gay sons, brothers, and neighbors. You could no longer pretend that they’d simply left home never to return.

      And it is these gay men of flesh and blood about to die simply talking that this film, at its most profound, is concerned.

     Sheehan’s long conversations with Jim Black and his lover/caretaker Kevin becomes the focal point of all the other intelligent and moving observations. And in Jim, Sheehan found a spokesman who reminds me a great deal, in fact, of Bressan’s dying hero in that year’s fictional film Buddies.

      Like Bressan’s character Robert Willow, Sheehan’s Jim has been cut off from friends and family because of his illness. As he describes it:

 

“The family is divided. My father’s caught in the middle. He realizes I’m sick. He knows I have something serious. But also, he will not admit that I have AIDS. It could not happen to his son. He’s taking it as well as can be expected. But father’s 73 years old, he’s in ill health and he’s handicapped. All this is an awful lot to dump on a man in that condition.”

 

      It's amazing that a dying man can still empathize for an aging father who will not quite admit to his own son’s condition, but his brother’s decision that “from here on I no longer exist in the family,” is a bit harder to sympathize with. “They want me to stay away from their children. I will never get to see my nieces or my nephew or my god-child again. It’s hard.”

 

     Like Bressan’s figure, moreover, Jim has become a fighter, who after 36 years of seeing the unfairness of the world while waiting for others to help make it right, he now stands out on street corners to remind others of his and his kind’s existence: “if my name pops up somewhere, they’re going to associate me with AIDS, but I knew that before I started all this.”

     He continues, “The AIDS thing will eventually be like tuberculosis and no one will make a big thing about it. But right now it’s a hot issue and it’s important. And I want to make my life important by helping to get people to know everything they can about this. Because if it can happen to me, it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody, straight or gay. And you can go into a hospital and a blood transfusion and you could get AIDS. You don’t have to be sexual. And it’s up to me to go out there and make a fool of myself, and crack all these crazy jokes and say, ‘look unless I give you a blood transfusion, as long as I sit here and talk about it, you won’t get AIDS from me.’ We have to remove the fear. And the only way to remove the fear is knowledge. And you go and kick the public in the teeth and say ‘Look at me, I am a flesh and blood person. I have a disease you don’t want to talk about. But you’d better.’”

      It’s strange but all the others in this film don’t really think much about death, even the performative fireman who reminds that most of us of think of death coming “after you have lived your life.” But all the gay men dying of AIDS talk about the fact that they are dying now as younger men. As Greg Lawrence reports, he visited his dying friend’s family with him and they had a fierce fight that ended with his friend trying to tell his family that he was going to soon die. Lawrence reports that when his friend actually said it that even he realized that it was really true.

      Jim speaks of it often and mostly quite humorously. He insists that epitaph read: NO SAD SONGS FOR ME FOR I HAVE FOUND MYSELF.

      Appropriately, however, it is the soon-to-be survivors who get the last word in Sheehan’s film, and what they have learned is not only that life without their loved ones will represent an impossible tear and loss in their lives but while their lover and brother still live that it is most important, just as the doctor ordered in the opening speech of this film, to talk and to keep talking, to find out how the dying feel and hope to live out their remaining lives.

     As Martha, whose brother Gary is dying of AIDS, expresses it: “The most important thing is to talk. I have to start talking more about the details. Because you can pretend too much and not talk about what really is happening. What do people who don’t have family, who can’t talk, who can’t share their fears, their joys do?  You have to be together. To laugh and giggle and watch a movie and maybe go for a walk. And have a moment when you’re sad, you’re sad together.”

     Jim’s lover Kevin finally opens up: “I’m preparing myself with the problem of who to hold on to, who to talk to.”

    Obviously, this director loves to hear people talk, to hear about their fears, their expressions of accomplishment, their life stories, the joys they about to lose forever. In his hands these men become far more than hapless men on their deathbeds. There is almost something joyful in their encounters with death. Yet, as he admits, “But of course, it was terribly, horribly sad.” And I assure you that each of the three times I watched this film, I cried. But that won’t ever stand in the way of watching these brave figures talk to me for an hour again.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).

 

Alex Myung | Arrival / 2016 [animated film]

life meeting art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carey Perloff  Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View (London: Bloomsbury / Methuen Drama, 2022)

 

Theater director Carey Perloff’s 2022 publication Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View is many things at one time: a memoir of her own encounters as both director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco from 1992-2018 and before that of New York’s Classic Stage Company from 1986-1992 with the two most significant British playwrights of the 20th century Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard; a handbook of how to direct their plays, particularly given the fact that on several occasions she worked in close collaboration with the playwrights during the rehearsals and early productions; and, perhaps most importantly, a sophisticated analysis of their works based on her own readings, their personal comments, and the history of critical dialogue that proceeded her involvement with their works.

      I can’t recall when I so enjoyed a book of theater history and artistry. But then Perloff has long been an acquaintance and over the years those of us who have known her are no longer surprised by her intellect and immense knowledge of theater, her instinctual insights into each work she and her companies have produced, and her utter enthusiasm for all things concerning language, particularly that of the theater.

     One’s first reaction to the book, obviously, is that she could not have chosen two more different British playwrights, differences with she herself summarizes in her “Introduction”:

 

“…It might appear that the differences between these two writers outweigh the similarities, when viewing them across the landscape of post-war English theater. Pinter is a playwright of intense observation, with an uncanny ability to mine the simplest of situations for the hidden current of menace, violence, and power play underneath. His is a drama mystery, of subtext, of terror. ….His plays usually take place in a single space, in an atmosphere so denuded of superfluous detail that the slightest move is a radical act. He is uniquely able to take seemingly ordinary speech and lift it onto the plane of poetry without ever disconnecting it from the guts and heartbeat of his characters. Stoppard, by contrast, is a writer of ideas. Following his own internal dialectic, he sets off the create characters and situations that can best reveal his own debates in dramatically satisfying ways. ‘I’m a playwright interested in ideas and forced to invent characters to express those ideas,’ Stoppard told the critic Mel Gussow in 1979.”

 

     Yet by the time she is finished, we recognize that, despite the vast differences of how the works mean and are performed on the stage, there are perhaps just as many similarities between the two major figures of the late English theatrical revolution of the second-half of the 20th century.

      The most important similarity, perhaps, is that both playwrights are profoundly Jewish, something which has previously received little attention, but to which Perloff devotes an entire highly revealing first chapter. Her first paragraph indeed summarizes her discoveries about these two writers:

 

“If finding a playwright’s ‘voice’ is a key to realizing their work onstage…a crucial aspect of both Pinter’s and Stoppard’s life histories is that both are Jewish. Not only Jewish, but Central European Jews who came of age in the traumatic period of the Second World War and the Holocaust. ….In the New York, where Judaism is pervasive, the fact that these two major figures happened to be Jewish may seem inconsequential. I would like to argue that Pinter’s and Stoppard’s Jewish heritage ultimately had a profound impact upon their plays and is a useful angle to explore in the rehearsal room.”

      Speaking extensively of his ties to family and the Jewish traditions he inherited from his growing up in Hackney in London’s East End to parents very much bound up their Jewish heritage, Perloff quotes Pinter himself: “I’ve no religious beliefs whatsoever, but I’m still Jewish. I don’t know what that means, really, nobody ever does.” Through her discussions of The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and Mountain Language Perloff shows how the centrality of language, the continual sense of loss and displacement, and the importance of ritual in characters such as Goldberg in the first play, and the entire patriarchal family in The Homecoming echo from his cultural and religious roots. In The Caretaker she observes how characters such as Davies, “a man robbed of his name and identity and desperate to find a way to get to Sidcup to get his papers,” reveals just how permeated is Pinter’s consciousness by the Jewish world which often shared a sense of non-belonging with Kafka, one of Pinter’s favorite writers.

     By the time she was finished, I saw Pinter in an entirely new way, realizing just how radically different he was from the first wave of British playwrights of the 1950s and 1960s such as Alan Bennett, David Storey, Edward Bond, Alan Ayckbourn, Michael Frayn, John Arden, Simon Gray and Caryl Churchill and even from fellow Jewish writers such as Arnold Wesker who dealt specifically with Jewish themes and characters. For Pinter power lies in language and when that is taken away, even momentarily, it evidences a loss that is immediate and devastating.

       Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 with the name Tomas Staussler, was the son of a Jewish surgeon employed by the company hospital of the Bata shoe factory. That company’s owner had arranged for the evacuation of his Jewish employees to various world-wide factories to escape the inevitable invasion by Hitler. Accordingly, the young Stoppard, nicknamed Tomik, with his parents ended up in Singapore for two years before heading to Australia and being diverted to India, where by that time the boy called “Tommy” ended up with his mother and his elder brother Peter in Darjeeling. It was only later that he was told that his father had died.

       Stoppard’s memory of that revelation was: “For my part, I took it well, or not well, depending upon how you look at it. I felt almost nothing. I felt the significance of the occasion but not the loss. How had my father died? At sea? No one seemed to know. As far as I was told, he had simply disappeared.”

      The family remained in India for the duration of the war, an experience that Stoppard fondly recalls, afterwards moving to England (Retford, Derbyshire) where he attended school and quickly grew up to be an “honorary Englishman,” adopting the new language along with a new identity that only occasionally resulted in a slip that made him conscious of his transformation. Perloff quotes him in a Guardian interview: “I fairly often find I’m with people who forget that I don’t quite belong in the world we’re in. I find I put a foot wrong—it could be a pronunciation, an arcane bit of English history, and suddenly I’m there naked, as someone with a pass, a press ticket.” Perloff demonstrates how that sense of alien being, the temporarily loss of identity, haunts a play such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in which the two characters are not quite certain of who they are or what role they are to play in Hamlet’s world in which they find themselves.

       Yet Stoppard did not actually explore his own roots until later in his life, a lacuna driven primarily by his mother’s refusal to talk about her life in Czechoslovakia and her own family. When he finally met a distant cousin Sarka as a full adult at the National Theatre, when he asked, “How Jewish are we?” she replied that the family was completely Jewish and that most of the family had been lost to the gas chambers. He hadn’t even been quite certain that his own mother was Jewish. And it was only when Stoppard later met the daughter of one of his mother’s best friend, Vera, that she and Sarka took him to the Pinkas Synagogue, next to the famous Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, where he witnessed in the 1990s the names if 80,000 Czechs murdered by the Nazis during the war, names that included both the Becks (his mother’s maiden name) and the Strausslers.

 

      These discoveries eventually made their way into his plays, particularly in the Czech-based 2006 play Rock n’ Roll which Perloff bravely directed in San Francisco and in Leopoldstadt, which as I write this piece is about to have its premiere on Broadway. When Stoppard and his wife made a surprise visit to San Francisco in 2018 in celebration of Perloff’s farewell party from the A.C.T., they drove after down to Los Angeles to visit her mother Marjorie, whose parents had left with her from Vienna the day before the Anschluss. Marjorie had written a memoir The Vienna Paradox about growing up as a child in pre-war Vienna and traveling with her family to resettle in the US. And clearly those very issues were very much on Stoppard’s mind as he was working on that play, which premiered and quickly closed in London in 2020 because of the COVID pandemic. As Perloff reports: “Over a long afternoon, he asked her innumerable questions about pre-war Jewish life in Vienna. She was amused by how surprised he was about certain aspects of that complicated, assimilationist, culture-obsessed Jewish universe, and tried to make nuances clear to him,” just such issues that arise in Leopoldstadt. The guilt Stoppard now clearly felt for his previous ignorance of the truths of his own ancestors was played out, so Perloff reveals, in his Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Hard Problem, and The Invention of Love, discussed in a chapter titled “Anatomizing Guilt.”

      These two very different authors also shared a remarkable interest in observing, commenting on, and in Stoppard’s case actually remaking their plays in pre-production. Despite the many warnings Perloff had received about Pinter’s difficulty, given his media outbursts and his well-known disliking of US politics, the young director found the former actor and director completely caring and accommodating with regard to her actors David Strathairn, Peter Riegert, Richard Riehle, Miguel Perez, Jean Stapleton, Bill Moor, and Wendy Makkena at CSC. Although only occasionally interrupting Perloff’s own directorial comments, he was loathe to tell the actors how to play their roles and respected the characters he had created as individuals who were as unknowable as the humans around him, on several occasions quietly asking questions and posing answers that helped his fellow thespians to come to terms with his works and the figures they portrayed. Indeed, Perloff found his presence necessary and reassuring, and enjoyed the pleasure of working with someone who had had years of acting experience himself and was a brilliant director as well.

     With Stoppard she corresponded for long hours via fax wherein he would completely explain seemingly impenetrable scenes, often rewriting passages to make them clearer. Working with her in New York on his early play Indian Ink, he completely reconceived the ending of the play, restructuring it thoroughly and rewriting various moments.

      In both cases she appears to have become close friends with the playwrights neither of whom threatened her role as director but contributed to the final fuller dimensions of the actual productions.

        When I was younger I had long imagined, given my deep interest in theater, that I might someday be a theater director. With my abilities to rather thoroughly analyze theater works and my managerial affinities, I might have, in fact, been somewhat successful in such a role. But I cannot imagine conceiving the play with regard the wide range of details that Perloff outlines in relationship to the sets, lighting, and props. Particularly in Pinter’s plays in which the space is so particularly defined and free from unnecessary objects one has to think about how to reveal a staircase, as in The Birthday Party that leads to an invisible upstairs which is both a fortress to Meg and her boarder Stanley, and a territory to be breeched by Goldberg and the other intruders, or another, much longer staircase in The Homecoming which represents an entire kingdom to the males of the house and later to Ruth who will reign as their queen after her husband Lenny leaves her to them almost as a “homecoming gift.”

 

       How do you represent a box of Cornflakes to the audience, one of the most important props in The Birthday Party, particularly to viewers who cannot comprehend the importance of that staple in the post-World War II British diet? How do you shred newspapers into even strips as McCann is required to in the same play? Or how do you destroy a toy drum each evening, as the same play requires, without buying endless numbers of such drums for each production?

      How to create lighting that conveys the vast shifts of time and place that occur throughout Stoppard’s plays? These questions are not only brilliantly answered by Perloff, but the significance of their roles in these plays is thoroughly explained by the writer in terms of ambience and overall thematics.

      By the time I had finished Perloff’s book describing the works she had directed by Pinter and Stoppard—in a couple of cases in two different productions—I could not imagine them differently than the way she described them, and I wished to rush out immediately and see productions of them, even if they were conceived by other directors in completely different manners. I discovered, alas, that I had missed a production of The Birthday Party by a small Glendale-based theater by just a few weeks!

      If nothing else, I was convinced at book’s end by the genius of both the playwrights—both of whose work I had long admired—and their director. I have always believed that coincidence has something to do with evidence that one has made the appropriate decisions in life. And I was absolutely delighted, accordingly, when Perloff reported that in the midst of their A.C.T. production of Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, the cast met up by accident with the band that had helped to inspire the play. The Plastic People of the Universe had regrouped long after the events in the play, had somehow managed to stay together, and were suddenly performing in San Francisco.

      Perloff writes:

 

“We could not quite believe that those famous ‘pagans’ had shown up on our doorsteps just as we were trying to tell their story onstage. The night before their gig at the Independent, they came to see our production (in which we had used their music at strategic moments), and afterwards met with the audience, chatted with the cast, and sold merchandise which we all eagerly bought. …The next night, when our curtain came down, we all descended upon the music venue in our “Plastic People of the Universe” t-shirts, exulting at the sight of a group of passionate aging Czechs playing their unique brand of cacophonous, rebellious rock ‘n’ roll. The rest of the San Francisco audience, totally unaware of what this band had done to change the world, bopped along, happy in their ignorance. It was a surreal and moving example of life meeting art.”

 

Los Angeles, August 23, 2022

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2022).

 

 

 

 

Monika Treut | Die Jungfrauenmaschine (Virgin Machine) / 1988

alternatives

by Douglas Messerli

 

Monika Treut (screenwriter and director) Die Jungfrauenmaschine (Virgin Machine) / 1988

 

Caught up in sexual relationships between her half-step-brother, Bruno (Marcelo Uriona) and her heavy-set thuggish boss Heinz (Gad Klein)—trapped as you might put it between incest and heterosexual disgust—you can well comprehend why Dorothee Müller (Ina Blum) is unhappy. Imbued with traditional notions of womanhood (“women are the empty receptacles to the male urge to propagate”), she is working as a journalist on the “secret to romantic love.” As a romantic herself, she interviews a hormone specialist (Peter Kern) who discusses the bodily secretion before and during sex of chemicals such as oxytocin, noradrenaline, and dopamine while appearing to be unwrapping a sausage he is about to eat as if were cutting away the stitching on a recently circumcised penis. Like most of the males in this movie he is quite disgusting.

     Dorothee even attempts to communicate with a female chimpanzee to explore her DNA commitments to raising and caring for her babies until hormones overcome her and she seeks out the male pack.

      Understandably, however, she feels her research is getting nowhere, and finally decides to pack up and travel to the USA, in particular San Francisco to where her mother has escaped years earlier—demanding that Dorothee kill her father after she left. Bruno also delivers a message that her mother would finally like to see her.

      Strangely, instead of the male gay bastion by which we define the city today, Dorothee imagines it as an amazon-like community of mostly woman who control everything. To her great disappointment, the women she meets at first is just as crude and mean as the males she has left behind. The landlord at her mother’s apartment announces that she’s owned five-months back rent, and the mother has taken off to god-knows-where. Dorothee’s questions lead to a spew of hateful abuse on the landlady’s part. A black woman standing nearby suggests she saw Dorothee’s mother leaving in a cab, but the girl’s eager desire to find out further information leads even that confidant to order her to back off.

       Have no fear, the doe-eyed innocent (at moments a near look-alike for an early Liza Minelli) as we soon discover this traveler to her own Oz to be, is—as even she describes herself to be— “all ears,” eager to listen to any stories that might come her way. Renting a room in a sleazy San Francisco boarding house, Dorothee sees an ad for a woman who promises to solve all sexual difficulties and immediately telephones, leaving her number.

      Soon after on the beach she encounters fellow German emigree Dominque (Dominique Gaspar) who communicating in German takes the newcomer under her wing. And in another walk down the hill-city’s yellow brick roads, Dorothee comes upon a sex-expert, Susie Sexpert (Susie Bright) attempting to lure men and most women into a female strip show. Susie is particularly keen on encouraging her fellow females to visit the strip-tease shows, and gives the eager Dorothee a  long lecture on the various tools of the trade, including overly-large breasts which keep one stripper working long after the usual age of retirement.

       Soon after, Dorothee borrows a bicycle from Dominique and speeds off around town to engage in the new venues, mostly lesbian, suggested by her friends. Her eager races through the city cannot help but remind us of the New Wave films, in particular Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), as Dorothee ventures into lesbian clubs, joins dykes on bikes, and visits various other lesbian establishments.

       Susie also has a large collection of dildoes which she shows off and describes to her new friend. Almost immediately after, Dorothee attends a show of the drag king, Romona, whose male attire attracts an eager lesbian audience as she employs various tools and a bottle of beer that, when placed near her vagina, foams up and over convincingly to suggest male ejaculation.

       Dorothee is particularly interested in Romona, and soon after makes a date with her, excited about their impending meeting at a bar.

       Their encounter might be described as the centerpiece of the film. Ramona takes Dorothee in a stretch-limousine to Fishermen’s Wharf where they snap pictures of themselves together and have them transferred on to t-shirts. After drinks in the back seat of the limo, they enjoy dinner at El Rio, finally ending up back in Dorothee’s room where they have some of the most beautifully filmed lesbian sex since Chantal Ackerman’s somewhat more robust female coupling in Je, Tu, Il,  Elle (1974).

      Totally overwhelmed by the entire experience, Dorothee imagines herself in love and in ecstasy simultaneously, until Romana rudely awakens her to tell her that the price for their get-together—on sale because of how much she likes Dorothee—comes to $500, an extraordinary cost for 1989.

       What is such a guileless romantic to do but to simply lay back and let out a hearty series of guffaws? We love Dorothee even more for her naivete.

       Far from souring her on the lesbian world she has now entered, Dorothee engages in an amateur strip night, closed to all males including the King of Porn himself, and becomes even closer to Dominque and her female friend, the three of them dancing in delight as they prepare a dinner for themselves.

      Soon after, Dorothee gathers together all her German family and previous lovers’ photos and bicycles to Golden Gate Park, where tears them into pieces throwing into the bay. She has found a new home and world that at least promises to meet her romantic expectations.

       Dorothee’s romp through life to discover a new world of delight is both extremely educative to audiences of the day and so much fun that it’s nearly impossible not to love Monika Treut’s slightly punk lesbian and feminist Die Jungfrauenmaschine. As the reviewer for the 2017 Berlinale screening of the film noted, Virgin Machine is "open, cheerful and with a lot of fun; the women in the film go through life and are not only an inspiration for Dorothee Müller, but for all modern women."

       Today the film has become something of a cult favorite.

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2022 

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).