Bad Penny

Post-modern. What’s post-modern? I got dizzy once in a lecture on deconstructionism because it had taken me a lifetime trying to understand how my world was constructed and now they were tearing it apart and putting it together differently. But give me credit for trying. I stood in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and looked at what seemed like a huge mass of vomit in the center of the room, and…come on…I loved and understood Francis Bacon and I was trying to understand exactly how a pool of vomit related to me. I was moving with the times. I spent years teaching Julius Caesar and Browning, and suddenly iambic pentameter was relegated to hip-hop and serious poetry no longer rhymed…that was a hard one.

Yet time is a river, and you’re in it, and you reach out as you flow and grab what you can, right? And if you stop grabbing, you just float and you know where that ends up.

So I ran in, last-minute, to see a play in a theater I had not researched for intent or point of view…and the lights went down and I saw a man sleeping on a tire in the middle of a park, and a woman on a bench observing that the sky was clear, or was it dark, or was it raining, or was the sky the place where lost things end up, stuff like bent wire coat hangers. And a woman slid by in a boat, and a painter (cum easel) observed, and a lady feeding pigeons observed, and a guy living in a cardboard box observed — all of them in a torrent of language which gave no moment for consideration, and then the Boatman came and took away the tire guy who had the bad luck of being given the “bad penny.”

Okay, I thought: theater of the absurd. But did I understand the point? I knew Ionesco and Durenmatt. I loved when the train stayed hours in the dark tunnel and the passengers wouldn’t look up to notice, and then the guy’s glasses flew off and the padding of his clothes flew off, and the broken glass pricked his skin and he felt, and then the train plunged…I got it.

So give me a medal. I had come from the solidly constructed plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams — passion and clarity — and you walked away from those plays with as clear a message as you got from ancient Greek theater. And I had taken a lecture on “chaos theory” before watching Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. I had come a long way, baby, reshuffling the gray matter into new patterns of comprehension. I move with the literary times.

But what happened in the last hour? Lights up and I was drenched in language, drowning in language. I asked a few people around me. Did you understand it? I got this answer and that, and finally I met the director and asked, “Is this play absurd?” and she looked at me as if I were an idiot and I think she said something about post-modern. Okay, I thought, new writer trying to make an absurd play with a guy sleeping on a tire and a guy living in a box.

So I went home and googled the writer. Mac Wellman was an Obie-winning New York playwright, and his language was the core of his style. Well, I had read Finnegan’s Wake. No, that’s a lie. Nobody has read Finnegan’s Wake. Well, I read Ulysses…after I took the course.

I thought: Celebrate…you have had a new experience…no small thing at my age. I also thought: You have made rather an ass of yourself with your snap literary judgments. And I also thought: Post-modern, absurd, existentialist…these are only head trips. Here is simply a new way to say something profound and you’ve missed it first time around. So I girded my literary loins and returned for a second evening of Mac Wellman’s Bad Penny. And I also read something about the unique and quite wonderful experiment at the City Garage in Santa Monica, California.

I should have realized, when I rushed down Santa Monica’s Fourth Street looking for 1340 and a half, that I was about to have a Harry Potterish experience. I realized, second time around, that this was a small troupe of chance-taking actors and a director who chose only those plays that asked you to work with the material, that made you think, that asked you to struggle with the reality of a man in the park who is actually sitting, not on a park bench, but on the skin of a planet that is spinning through space in an incomprehensible universe.

The long speeches, this time around, were quite wonderful with twists and turns and constant repetitions. The sky is dark the sky is light the sky is gray and it sometimes rains, but sometimes the sun comes out. And the man with the tire has a goal…as do we all…he needs to get the tire fixed. And the woman who tries to relate to him has been ill and she’s been well and ill and well. And the world is suddenly filled with platitudes. And I’m asked the question: What is the function of myth? And what in my world is the “bad penny?”If a man is unlucky enough to end up with the bad penny, the Boatman glides in and takes him away.

The lights came up and I I realized that I had just seen the days of my life. These were the patterns and the repetitions and the little games I play to ignore the Boatman. Shall I believe in God and give myself a fantasy to offer a life beyond, and why does anything happen, and if I had turned that corner that day, I would have lived a different life and these would not have been my children and this would not be my house…and is any of it real anyhow?

The language was so unique that I wished that it had been slowed a little to give me thinking space.

The City Garage is a something unique. Perhaps the audiences will not be large, but here is a place to watch and think and after the lights come up, somthing to discuss over a coffee. And in the world of reality TV and sit-coms and endless commercials and e-mail which gives you no think-time and the Tivo and the Blackberry…or is it Blueberry? ( Okay, I can deal with post-modern, but I still haven’t caught up with the tech)…you can treat yourself to a little think-space. City Garage gives you that space and that challenge.

If you haven’t seen it yet, there is still time to catch Bad Penny at the City Garage. Put down the phone, close off the world, and think a little.

City Garage: 1340 1/2 (off the alley) Fourth Street, Santa Monica, California (310) 319-9939