The Age of Soliloquy.

Before we actually discuss some aspects of “in yer face” drama, I would like to consider another, more recent form of contemporary theatre with Adam Rapp’s Nocturne, an American play in four parts (not acts) followed by an “epilogue” which was first produced in New York on May 4th 2001 by the New York Theatre Workshop and directed by Marcus Stern. Decor, costume, lighting and sound were especially designed for this production which included five characters on the stage: the son, the sister, the mother, the father and the red-headed girl with the gray-green eyes. Let me remind you again (and again) that we are now dealing with drama so the text is only one of the many ingredients of which the theatrical experience is made. You should at every stage of your examination of the text imagine what impact and effects you would like to create if you were the stage director. It is far from obvious that you should want 5 actors on the stage, and scenery or sound can be conceived in many possible ways. Drama is probably the most impure of all artistic forms and playing with alternative possibilities through illusion, deception, verisimilitude or shocks is what actually matters.

The text of the play was published by Faber and Faber in New York in 2002 but you should also know from the start that Adam Rapp is also the author of a few novels: Missing the Piano (a copy is available at the English Department Library),The Copper Elephant and The Buffalo Tree 1997 (New York: Harper-Tempest, 2002). If you want to read a recent article on Adam Rapp and see what he looks like, go back to the homepage of “Hétérologies” and click on Dossier then Portfolio in the main menu. We will consider four extracts from the play in this study (extract numbers 1, 2, 4 and 6).

The play starts thus: Fifteen years ago I killed my sister. There. I can change the order of the words. My sister I

killed fifteen years ago. I, fifteen years ago, killed my sister. Sister my killed I years ago fifteen. I can cite various definitions. To deprive of life: The farmer killed the rabid dog. To put an end to: The umpire killed the tennis match. To mark for omission: He killed the paragraph. To destroy the vital essential quality of: The dentist killed the nerve with Novocain. To cause to stop: The bus driver killed the engine.

To cause extreme pain to: His monologue killed the audience.

To slay. To murder. To assassinate. To dispatch. To execute.

You can play with tenses. Will kill. Did kill. Have killed. Will have killed. Would like to have killed. […]

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister. 1[1]

At first reading, the play sounds like an anamnesis that the main character (a thirty-something year old man) is conjuring up in order to re-enact the ‘accidental’ murder of his sister (then aged eight) in a car crash accident. The play could hence be called a tragedy (“a half-human tragedy” according to the playwright. Why half-human? ) but the point in the play is the editing that the son (the semi-tragic ‘hero’) exerts on his own recollections of the incident. It does not completely sound like a public apology or defence (even in a Mock Nabokov/Lolita-like manner) but rather like a verbal (see the meta-linguistic elements in the lines quoted above) downpour to wash the murderous stains left behind. The general tone of the play could make us feel the influence of a Eugene O’Neill with its macabre, symbolist, almost naturalist overtones and yet it is very much inscribed in today’s or yesterday’s suburban America and the formal structure of the text is closer to a soliloquy rather than anything else. It could be tempting to imagine the whole production as a one-actor performance with no other human presence but video-art screens or enlarged photographs around and behind him to recapture the mood of such a “dialogue” with the inexistent recipients of his interior monologue (see the definition of a soliloquy). The unrelenting question that any performance of Nocturne raises is the identity of the potential addressee(s) of such verbal diarrhoea (see further down what the son says at the end of extract number four). Is the main actor speaking to himself or simply and solely to the audience (plays in which actors speak to no one else but to the audience all along are quite rare in the history of drama)? It is of course also conceivable to imagine a more naturalist stage direction as it was the case in New York with flash back effects which make the audience participate with the re-enacting of the various scenes which achronically build up towards the main trauma.

The first passage under scrutiny is first characterized by the overwhelming presence of audio and musical data and an almost surrealistic treatment of mental images adapted to the mass consumerist age. Those sensory experiences are all the more striking since they appear as more real and raw as the spiritual or psychological voyage of the “murderer” is left unsaid or un-expressed.

1[1] RAPP 7-9.

Classical music is heard throughout the play but also pop songs and other sounds from everyday life. The title refers, as we are led to understand towards the end of the play, to Grieg’s Nocturne and we can indeed imagine piano-pieces being played louder and louder at various moments of the performance, the repetitive languor of Grieg’s composition counterbalancing the cathartic climax never fully reached and overlapping the speech delivery which is not automatically to be made clear and audible throughout. The first lines of the passages refer to “the final movement of a sonata”, “weaving voices interloping a fugue” the buzz effect of the strange internal music he hears while the fatal moment of the car crash draws nearer (“like the invisible drone of bees at work”) ; and there is then the ever present music on the radio (some cover by Steely Dan soon replaced by the Alan Parson Project’s hit “I am the eye in the sky” reaching a climax when mixed with the sirens shrieking while Radio Trees is still on). This accumulation of sounds (with their white noise effects) is only to be interrupted by the obscene “thud” which corresponds to the sister’s body being projected head on through the windshield against some wall or tree where she then is left dead. Nothing much articulated is said about what he “felt” but much is heard.

The surrealistic treatment of images is first to be found in the mental associations conjured by the son in his recollection of the events (“an aluminium bat”, “locusts in the fruit trees”, “the bass line’s all liquid velvet” p. 12, “clouds like frayed gauze” and the ominous solid presence of the black piano which is not without reminding us of some of Dali’s paintings or his film L’âge d’or (1929), co-directed with Luis Bunuel, in which a black piano is covered with the putrefying carcass of a dead donkey as a votary gift abandoned there and NOT sacrificed on a pagan altar. The surrealistic treatment is also to be grasped through the metonymic aggregation of all the connected or disconnected visions of the tragic hero during the few seconds that preceded the crash, as if this might help him to grasp the “essence” of what happened through non-reasoning logic. Extract number two makes use of such a cinematographic technique as the scene is divided into several frames which might as well have been simultaneous but that the author of the soliloquy presents pell-mell although the order of the sequence is far from being innocent. This is what the son calls “breaking down into celluloid” as if he were trying to break down the visual perceptions of the moment into discrete split seconds of pure vision (the “intangibles) which each belong to parallel but discontinuous worlds or realities. This epicurian method of reconstructing the actual image of the accident is not devoid of the blackest kind of humour as frame four is for instance associated with “possible projectile” and frame number five with “the perfect sister”. Such representations are of course distortions of reality or rather distorting perceptions of what cannot be represented on stage, that is to say death or rather murder (the nearest equivalent in the

cinema would be the illegal “snuff movies”). It would be interesting at this stage to imagine for yourself what you would make of such “frame” sequences if you had to stage such a scene. The last cue of the main actor in this scene is “Sure I play with the drama. I tweak it”.

Another major characteristic of extract number one is on the one hand the insistence on medical terms (brutal heart failure, coronary thrombosis, the hipbone’s connected to the leg bone (the progression seems also to establish some contiguous association – almost a synecdoche! – between the cage in which they are (the car) and the rib cage which has been associated since pre-classical times with the bone-prison in other words the organic human body. On the other hand, the world which is perceived in this passage seems to be reified at any given moment: objects, cars, the formica of the kitchen (“Infinite formica”) are the tangibles with which the son struggles with, not with his emotions. It is also a reified world within the age of mass culture as iconic or emblematic representations matter much more than their signified referents (the whole description of the car is not that of a “car” but one that seems to come out of a comic book. The house, the speedometer, and the many other items described throughout the play all refer to a miserable and perfectly predictable suburban life best encapsulated in the name given in this first extract : Sub-Diggity. The reification process is such that the art of soliloquy finds its full justification: what matters is not to express one’s grief but to display the indescribable actuality of the sheer horror. Such a cue as “The accident happens like this” sounds almost like some stage direction but is actually what the actor is trying to pass over to the audience in historical present tense. The rhetorical device is both the “message” and the means to reach out to the audience. Making it happen, make them see and feel what the crash looked and sounded like. The performance thus becomes a kind of excavation process (not unlike Daniel Emile Fork’s play Archéologies given et the Théâtre de la Villette in Paris in the late eighties) in sensual perceptions and the effect is one of collusion between private and collective experiences, maybe the best definition of myth-making. The first extract is replete with references to myths (ancient as well as mass cultural ones).

Anything goes then for such kind of drama (both verbal simplifications and sophistications, syntactic rearrangements, discontinuity of time, place and action, mixing the trivial with the quintessential, the organic with the mechanic, the imaginary with the multiple layers of reality…) whose main function is to take the audience to a mental space which is no longer purely artistic, as some critics have tentatively suggested. The space involved would embrace that of the medically unconscious, and the function of contemporary drama would be more therapeutically performing than politically or poetically challenging. It is noticeable that if you read the two or three very cheap and rather boring novels by Rapp (they are very commonplace novels for teenagers with a kind of suburban Midwestern Mark Twain combination about them as they describe the anxieties and various

forms of humiliations of teenagers coming to terms with their relation to the world which is offered or forbidden to them) that the play Nocturne seems to feed on the subject-matter of his fiction. It is in fact in the dramatized spectacle of the lures and meanders of “autofiction” that the magic of Rapp’s theatre lies (it might be interesting for you to know that Rapp has been a semi-professional basket ball player until he started to write compulsively overnight) not in auto-fiction as such.

I included the last two extracts reproduced below for you to realize to what extremes Rapp comes to in this play. In the third part of the play, the son takes the audience to his present existence and under the disguise of an autobiographical account, makes you believe through

a kind of reverse ‘dramatic irony’ effect, that what you know about some circumstances of his past life (Oscar Wilde said that “experience is the name men give to their past mistakes”) can enlighten your understanding of the character that is in front of you on stage. This passage is quite heterological as it is addressed to an audience who is most likely to consider artistic expression and transmission as something valuable and meaningful. Yet the passage is interspersed with heaps of reference to books’ titles which inevitably will tempt the viewer or the reader to play the little game of identifying and associating the works mentioned. But what we hear at the end of this scene is that literature and more precisely the reading of classics is only a copout for confronting life and creation (“the titles are a kind of horizontal comfort”) and that art is more an unhealthy addiction than anything else. The son knows better and uses those books now for practical purposes, especially building furniture (a credenza, a writing desk etc.) but he is hooked and occasionally has to have his fix (the authors’ names raise countless associations as poisonous as their works’ titles). Bracing himself, he realizes that reading is an escapist strategy and listing or appropriating those lives and thoughts through lists of authors’ names even more so. The implied metaphor between all those artistic pages and the hygienic toilet paper on the floor is THE anticlimax of the whole play. It seems to establish that today’s drama and art in general could as well be not only of a medical sort but some basic body-art experience like piercing or being tattooed in public (“So voiding his bowels turns into an act of gastrointestinal performance art”). The arte povera experiment of the sixties turns into a passive bodily functional experience at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

These are the concluding lines of the play. The art of soliloquy reaches a climax as the negation of emotions (and that of the humanistic myth of emotional transmission) is now complete (“the heart is described as a colder artery). The actor’s voice is now almost lost in the notes of Grieg’s Nocturne as the “auto-fictional” speaking actor fades behind the sleepwalker hanging around in some concrete environment. And still, nobody or nothing out there to even wish to communicate with, nothing but the shattering “5 a.m. silence of New York streets”. Final as a fact.