Death of the Author

Reviewed by Bill Raden

 
How enthusiastically one responds to Steven Drukman’s playful and idea-bristled new comedy about the arcane politics of academia may depend as much on what one studied as an undergraduate as anything that transpires on stage.

Art and lit-crit majors, however, are in luck. The play’s title is taken from literary critic Roland Barthes’ seminal 1968 essay “The Death of the Author,” which was an early salvo in the siege then being laid to American university liberal arts departments by the emerging school of French critical theory known as post-structuralism.

By downplaying the primacy of the author, ignoring the author’s intentions and focusing instead on “texts” as parts of larger systems of meaning, the essay helped spearhead a practice of “intertextuality” that forced open the doors of staid cannons and departmental orthodoxies onto other literatures and fields (history, art, philosophy) previously off-limits to lowly, tenure-tracked assistant English literature professors.

Which is not to say that the sly allusions to literary and critical theory woven into Drukman’s comedy of misunderstandings require a PhD to parse. Drukman has set the bar low enough to flatter any audience’s level of erudition.

Rather, as Takeshi Kata’s elegant, mirrored-chamber set in director Bart DeLorenzo’s crackling and expeditious production suggests, one merely needs to appreciate how the combination of power, prejudice and language can make determining meaning as simple as finding the exit to a funhouse hall of mirrors.

At an unnamed university, young adjunct English professor Jeff Egan (David Clayton Rogers) meets in his basement office with student Bradley Walker (Austin Butler) on the eve of graduation to discuss Bradley’s final paper for Jeff’s undergraduate seminar in postmodern genre fiction.

At issue is the paper’s rather free and unattributed use of excerpts from Barthes and other writers that has triggered Jeff’s computer program for sniffing out plagiarism, which in turn has set into motion departmental machinery that threatens Bradley’s diploma.

Complicating matters is that Jeff is being put forward for a prized tenure-track position by his mentor, the university’s legendary in-house deconstructionist, J. Trumbull Sykes (Orson Bean).

Bradley challenges the plagiarism charge by asserting that what should be considered is his intention behind the appropriations is not the act of stealing (“Parody is all that’s possible, when there’s no original text,” he quotes from Sykes). He then ups the ante by submitting a letter to the dean that re-construes Jeff’s innocent office meeting as a sexual come-on. The professor soon finds himself in water even hotter than his student’s.

For Drukman, of course, meaning as well as dramatic conflict is all about intentionality, which he proceeds to flesh out in pathos-charged, if sometimes inchoate backstories dealing with Sykes’s deteriorating health and the emotional trauma surrounding Bradley’s recent breakup with his theory-minded and mischief-making girlfriend Sarah (Lyndon Smith).

To that end, Butler delivers a forceful and star-making turn as the guileless but inarticulate prelaw undergrad, whose propensity towards the literal opens up calamitous misunderstandings with his allegorical-minded professor, while Orson Bean holds up the play’s comic center with a delightfully screwball portrayal of elderly eccentricity that he first perfected in Being John Malkovich.

But for all of Drukman’s cleverness and intellectual brio, the playwright ultimately proves to be his own worst enemy. After a powerful, almost Borgesian opening, Drukman betrays a near-fatal weakness for tying off too many of the play’s purposeful ambiguities with overly tidy, unnecessarily uplifting and tension-deflating resolutions.

Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 3 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; through June 29. (310) 208-5454, https://www.geffenplayhouse.com

Deborah Klugman interviewed playwright Steven Drukman for Stage Raw on what specifically inspired Death of the Author, as well as the playwriting’s creative process.