Do What You’re Told!

Serbian playwright Iva Brdar’s And If I Don’t Behave Then What

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Brdar has done what poets must do to process the iron grip that some parents wield over their children, a grip that reaches deep into the subconscious and holds on into dotage.

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“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    “They may not mean to, but they do.   

“They fill you with the faults they had

    “And add some extra, just for you.”

These lines from Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be The Verse” resonate through Serbian playwright Iva Brdar play, And If I Don’t Behave Then What, now playing at Open Fist Theatre Company at the Atwater Theatre. Larkin’s poem isn’t literally in Brdar’s play, but some omniscient mother certainly is, fucking up her daughter with the best intentions. Though offstage, mum is front and center. And Brdar has done what poets must do to process the iron grip that some parents wield over their children, a grip that reaches deep into the subconscious and holds on into dotage. That’s all there.

Brdar’s play isn’t a play in any traditional sense. It’s a poem. A one-woman confessional in 13 verses, starting with “Age 0” and culminating in “Age 78.” It’s almost a one-woman show performed by Cynthia Ettinger, except for the supporting characters (Carmella Jenkins, Howard Leder and Debba Rofheart) who step in nimbly to supplement the verse, sometimes speaking it as in a baton passed, or suggesting the characters to whom the central speaker, Woman, refers.

Each verse begins with what becomes a refrain: “My mother always said . . .” and weaves from there into all kinds of sometimes salient, sometimes idiotic counsel — sometimes getting Woman into ludicrous physical contortions (“do not sit on other people’s toilet seats never sit on other people’s toilet seats it’s where bacteria accumulates where it lives on other people’s toilet seats and then you’ll spend the rest of your life treating some kind of urinary infection some kind of venereal disease some kind of disease do not sit on other people’s toilet seats instead bend your knees squat levitate but do not under any circumstances sit on it and so I never did and I invented various physically demanding poses in order to never sit on other people’s toilet seats. . .”)

Perhaps the most difficult realization is that each piece of advice contains some shard of sense —don’t get near radiation, don’t swim in pools where other people piss, etc.) — but Woman’s lifelong attempts to live by her mother’s credos keep landing her in absurd difficulties and a kind of isolation and, finally, a culminating realization that she can’t see her own reflection in a mirror, hence — following all this well-intended advice has led to the disappearance of her own identify, her own soul.

It could be argued that this is a play about authoritarianism — i.e. guidance on how to best live life by people who, armed with either a religious or political credo, claim to know better. Too often, and we see it on all shores, counsel becomes an interference and an imposition on the right to discern one’s own ways of untangling the knots of confusion that confound all of us.  Brdar gets at this through a microscopic lens. One mother. One daughter. Forever bound. Why can’t Woman simply disengage? Yes, that’s the question. That’s the point. The everlasting grip.

Being a guy, I kept hearing the male equivalent of this play in Polonius’s advice to his son Laertes in Hamlet (“Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar” “Never a borrower nor a lender be” etc. etc., all coming from a self-appointed sage referred to by Hamlet (and likely imagined by Shakespeare) as a “foolish prating knave.” How ironic that Polonius’s dictums are among the most remembered and revered in English literature, while Shakespeare was making fun of them. Why do we so need others to tell us how to be behave, and, more to the point, who we are? Not in, don’t kill other people, but as in, don’t swim in other people’s pools, which are really toilets. Is such advice actually helpful? In the larger scheme of things?

Cynthia Ettinger (Photo by Frank Ishman)

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Yet Ettinger reading the entire poem, enhanced by her intellectual and emotional intelligence, actually added a theatrical context that this is a poem, this is text, without apologies, without artifice.

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At the performance I attended, Ettinger was holding a script through the entirety of the 65- minute poem. (The other actors weren’t.) This was explained to me as a consequence of last-minute rewrites from the author. Yet Ettinger reading the entire poem, enhanced by her intellectual and emotional intelligence, actually added a theatrical context that this is a poem, this is text, without apologies, without artifice.

Years ago, UCLA hosted the British company Forced Entertainment’s production of Exquisite Pain — diaries of French conceptual artist Sophie Calle. The entire company simply read from the diaries around a table. The remedial simplicity of it was brilliant, as though to say, these are words, and here is what words can accomplish. The diaries contained example after example of abuse and death and tragedy, in a stream so relentless that people started laughing as a form of escape. It was not derisive laughter. It was the laughter of discomfort, so powerful were the words, and so perfect was their recitation. All of which makes me wonder if Ettinger should stay on script and not yield to the biases of what performance actually means. In one verse, Woman says that her mother told her to stay away from theater people. This is one sliver away from her mother telling her that plays are meant to be memorized.

Beth F. Milles stages the play with striking sensitivity, which presumes that sensitivity can strike. And it can. And it does here. Jenkins and Rofheart support Ettinger with the most delicate of gestures, and Leder (the production’s one male) lends subtle comedy through small gestures revealing multiple variations on perplexity. (Sensitive men live in a state of unceasing perplexity.)  

Richard Hoover’s elemental production design proffers up set pieces as needed — boom microphones being a prominent feature, and Gabrieal Griego’s projection designs gently fill in what would otherwise be some missing pieces.

Open Fist Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater; Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 3 pm (added perf Fri., March 3, 8 pm); thru March 4. https://openfist.org Run time, 70 minutes without intermission.