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Words And Shards

I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Bronx Gothic

Name a word that begins in “F” and ends in “uck.” The answer: “firetruck.” If you imagined a different word, well, that’s just the coinage of your brain.

It’s now a commonplace that in the 21^st century, the coinage of our brains – when it comes to receiving and processing words directly related to what we know and how we know it — has shifted from intercourse to isolation, from discourse to belligerence.

This theory, coming from sources such as the Public Affairs Council, the Pew Research Internet Project and The Washington Post helps explain our global culture’s growing divisiveness, which ranges from medieval horrors in the Middle-East to squabbling within our own arts communities — the inability to accept, or even hear, views contrary to our own. The trend largely derives from the way social media feeds and then tries to sell us news, opinions and outlets we already agree with.

Avuncular CBS news-anchor Walter Cronkite – “the most trusted voice in America” — used to parse out the various perspectives of our world, whether we liked them or not. We had little choice but to listen, if we watched TV news at all on any one of only three network outlets (CBS, NBC or ABC) that were not, then, so far ideologically removed from each other as, today, FOX News is from MSNBC.

The coinage of our brains has more than shifted, it has transformed. It once resembled a kind of collective swamp where we couldn’t avoid opposing viewpoints. Our information landscape was a kind of epistemological republic that contained, somewhat, the instruments of dissection. Those parsing instruments have been largely replaced with bludgeons and shards. The landscape now contains city-state fortresses built from the brick and mortar of rectitude, pimples on the skin of a rash without horizons.

Let’s just call it a decline in curiosity, in conversation. What is the point of words if nobody is listening?

And yet the cotton we’ve placed in our ears, with the help of Facebook and Twitter, is nothing new. It’s simply trending.

In the 1950s, Eugene Ionesco was so discomfited by the broken cords between words and actual comprehension, he made that theme the centerpiece of his plays The Lesson and The Bald Soprano, wherein words became reduced to tropes and labels and clichés offering comfort through familiarity rather than being tools of inquiry, learning or the understanding of those on the other side of a philosophical or political equation.

Through the latter half of the 20^th century, in the evolving plays and poems of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, language itself grows ever more lean, and whatever wisdom there is to be gleaned comes largely from silence.

Federico Fellini’s last film The Voice of the Moon (1990) closes with the image of a self-appointed truth-seeker in a village. He’s among a carnival of various circus-types. This “prophet” stares exasperated into a wishing-well, while townsfolk are shouting all around him. “If you’d all be quiet for a moment,” he implores them, “We might just understand something.”

Erik Patterson’s play I Wanna Hold Your Hand (closing August 30 at Theatre of NOTE) contains one image, and performance, that lingers relentlessly. Phil Ward portrays a man named Frank recovering from the effects of a brain aneurism. Patterson’s moving play, set mostly in a hospital waiting room, concerns two stroke victims and their families dealing with the capriciousness of personal tragedy, much like Emilie Beck’s Sovereign Body, presented earlier this year at Road Theatre Company. In that play, Taylor Gilbert portrayed a woman named Anna suddenly struck down by an unspecified brain disorder that left her, like Frank, fighting for words.

The two actors, Gilbert and Ward, handled their characters’ rage in very different styles. The fury in Gilbert’s Anna floated more on the surface, explosive; that in Ward’s lean, wise and tender Frank simmers beneath, subdued but no less intense.

Taylor Gilbert (front and center), in Emilie Beck’s “Sovereign Body” at Road Theatre Company. (Photo by John Lorenz.)

Philip Ward and Kirsten Vangsness in Erik Patterson’s “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” closing August 30 at Theatre of NOTE. (Photo by Ido Berstein)

But the power of both these performances, and of the plays themselves, lies in these characters who have a torrent of words at their disposal, lodged in brain tissue that’s now crinkled slightly, so that those words can’t come out, or when a phrase does eventually leak, the words aren’t quite in the right order, or the gender is wrong.

It’s often said that the English appear to be smarter than the rest of us because they’re so articulate, and these plays give a lie to that myth. Like in the latter plays of Beckett and Churchill and Pinter, the truths and the breadth of understanding come not from Shakespearean, Wildean or Stoppardian wordplay; rather, they derive from the silent breaths of knowing characters like Anna and Frank who listen, and listen, and listen, and can’t get a word in edgewise.

If you asked them to name a word that begins with “F” and ends in “uck,” they’d probably, eventually, torturously, come up with “firetruck.”

In this vein, it would be remiss not to mention last month’s solo dance performance, Bronx Gothic, by Okwui Okpokwashili, presented by Show Box L.A. at Highland Park’s Ebell Club. A statuesque black woman who has worked extensively with Julie Taymor, Okpokwasili opened the performance in a thin, shimmying cotton dress, with her back to the audience, and her entire body quivering in tiny jerks and undulations so that muscles on her back and buttocks rippled. The stage was draped in white cloth, while the sound track (Philip White, Sound Consultant) tracked a course from ancient tribal drumming to Hip Hop to urban street cacophony. All that noise. Street music. Barely a decipherable word.

Okpokwasili in motion. (Photo by Ian Douglas)

After 20 minutes or so, she faced the audience, stood at a music stand and recited words that she herself had written, in childhood, at the age of 11 to and from a friend of about the same age. The words were initially about sexual curiosity – her friend claimed to have engaged in all kinds of activities with her 15-year-old boyfriend – pornography with an inexorable emotional logic:

“Yes, his dick. It gets hard when he has an orgasm you can tell easily because he comes. He comes come. It’s a verb and a noun. Technically, it’s called semen. And it’s white like milk but a littler thinner. And that’s where the sperm is and that’s what can get you pregnant”

“That is so nasty.”

“No it’s not. Sometimes it tastes good”

“You drink it? What does it taste like? Does it taste like pee?”

“It’s not pee so why should it taste like pee? And I don’t drink pee so I don’t’ know what pee tastes like. Come is salty and bitter sometimes. It depends on what he had for lunch. And he eats me out where I pee so why shouldn’t I swallow his come when I give him a blowjob?”

“What?”

“When I’m sucking his dick.”

“Why are you sucking his dick?”

Because he likes it and I like it. When you suck a man’s dick they’ll never leave you. . .”

Unlikely that these are the lessons taught in middle-school sex-education classes.

The “lessons” later take on the permutations of race, and you can see the shift turn from a blend of inquiry and boasting to the evisceration of labeling.

“Nigga niga nigga nigga nigga black ass tar baby bitch nigga jungle goonie goo goo ape ass nappyheaded nigga bitch dirty ass skinny funk-sweaty smelly hairy jungle bitch monkey nigga swinging from the trees hut living talking white ass nigga African African African nigga nigga nigga ugly ugly ugly ugly . . .”

Later, exposing the duplicitous pathology in vicious – what some might label helpfully “honest” criticism — her friend writes:

“I’m sorry but you ugly. I mean you know you’re ugly. You can’t let that make you sad. Everybody can’t be pretty. It’s hard to be pretty, its like winning the lotto. And you know what the chances of that are? It’s like one in hundred million. That is not much of a chance. I’m being honest cause I’m your friend and if I wasn’t honest you couldn’t say I was your best friend. I’ll meet you at the corner store. I gotta get cigarettes for my mother’s boyfriend.”

Response?

“. . . I’m locked inside myself like it’s a prison cell with a toilet full of shit and I don’t know who got the key. Who got the key? Who got the key? Who got the key? You know? No, you don’t and now you’ll never know. You’ll never know and I’m sorry for you! Because this is the last letter I can write to you, ever. I can’t ever forgive you and that only makes me hurt even more inside. We can never help each other feel love. And that’s sad and that’s how it is you fucking bitch! Have a shitty life, (and just in case that bounces off of you and sticks back on to me I mean have a nice life).

“Signed

“You don’t give a fuck about me anyway so don’t think I’m gonna give you the satisfaction of writing my name.”

Response?

“Dear You Back – My heart is a jagged rock. Don’t make me pull it out and cut you. What does your mother say about me? She’s looking at a shadow. What does that mean? You don’t look at nobody. You don’t talk to nobody. You don’t breathe.”

The insight in Okpokwasili’s gorgeous performance, directed by Peter Born, came from the juxtaposition of these lacerating words with hurly-burly movements and a cacophony of sound. One large point of the correspondence is how words can’t be trusted, even those sincerely expressed, when the motives of speaking are saturated in pathology. Macbeth, King Lear. One need look elsewhere, beyond words, to discern what’s really going on.

The words are just shards.