A tale told by twelve idiots
29/05/08 01:24
... / Quentin - committed suicide in his freshman year at Harvard just after his sister Caddie got married / ... / Benjy - thirty-three years old, a life-long idiot in the care of a boy half his age / ... / These are the characters / The rest are negroes / ...
William Faulkner wrote the "The Sound and the Fury" in 1928 when he was thirty-one years old. It is the kind of book that your teacher praised to high heaven in literature class, but never succeeded in convincing you to actually go read. In other words, "The Sound and the Fury" is your average modernist masterpiece, artificially kept alive by professors and librarians in haunted basement vaults, exerting strange and subtle influences on authors that you always felt to be its antithesis. Such is the true curse and the blessing of the avantgarde and the avantart. Even though you might hate it, you know you really should love it. And so I do.
Firmly fixed inside the mind and sweater of a soon-to-be castrated idiot child headed for his thirty-third birthday, the strutting and the fretting began. Two of the actors went over to Benjy, and a bluegrass banjo fired up the hearth from hidden speakers. They hiked up their pants, and started dancing around like drag queen cowboys stuck on the horns of a rodeo bull. Nobody seemed to pay them any mind, and when they finally collapsed on the floor, out of synch and out of breath, Benjy responded by tracing the flight of imaginary golf balls with his eyes. His sister Caddie picked up a book, and began reading out random paragraphs from Faulkner's novel.
The dialogue was filled in by different actors who made sure to read the tag lines identifying the speakers: "'You're not going out into the snow, Benjy,' mother said," the actress playing the mother said. Or rather, the actress currently playing the mother said. Suddenly she would get up, and hand her nightgown to one of the other actors, and then let him play the part of the mother. The emphasis on tag lines and the physicality of the character swapping almost made it too easy to follow, but at the same time it lent a certain rhythim quality to the text which combined especially well with the deafening array of hyperrealistic sound effects. It was not really about understanding at all, it was about the ebb and flow of things around you, and the actors sure did a good job of dim-witting me to the point of actually becoming my own personal Benjy.
The Elevator Repair Service acting company came into vogue with their 2006 adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". With a title like "Gats" and a running time of six hours it was set for instant off-broadway success. Unfortunately, I only heard about it last night during the intermission. The elderly lady who told me was the same elderly lady who told me that the present play only concerned itself with the first chapter of Faulkner's novel. Chapters two and three are seen from the perspective of other characters in the story, while chapter four is told by a third-person narrator. What the story is actually about, I am not going to relate in any detail here, except to say that it is a pretty ordinary tale about a pretty ordinary family somewhere down south. Sure, emotions are somewhat melodramatic, and skeletons seem to pile up a bit high in the closets, but apart from that - really nothing out of the ordinary.
The play dragged on for some two and a half hours which definitely was a bit on the long side. Luckily, it was staged like a series of crescendoes - or, perhaps more appropriately, sketches - that usually developed from some trivial matter like a birthday cake or a death in the family. What started out as a deeply immersive reading of a passage in the novel tended to end up like a full-blown circus act of uexpected activity and intensity. But somehow the actors never lost control, and I am almost inclined to agree with the pompous conclusion of Hilton Als' review of the play in The New Yorker:
This show runs on something more substantial than chic, more difficult than irony - namely, the real blood and sweat that go into making stories feal realer than reality.
A chart depicting family relations was handed out before the play, and the couple to the left of me spent most of the first act trying to figure out who was who, and when. During the intermission they left. Tracing the free associations of Benjy's mind must have been like tracing a pinball trapped in a machine with all flippers and no holes. It is a box, a frame - a mind! - and the only exit is through the base of your skull. Alternatively, you can shut down your brain and go to sleep - just like the guy to the right of me did. He woke up all happy and smiling as the lights went out on stage for the last time that evening, and jolted out of his seat to deliver an impressive standing ovation. It was as if he wanted to return the favor of the Faulknerian clowns with his own little parody of theatrical conventions. It was all part of the game last night, and when the sound and the fury finally subsided, everybody hurried back out in the streets as if, suddenly, they had become aware of themselves in an embarrassing moment.
Outside, the storm had calmed, and another begun. "I'm not crying, but I can't stop," all the Benjies of the night seemed to say. They spilled in and out of bars all the way up Third Avenue from 4th Street to 51st Street. I followed the throng, and we all felt happy and warm in our own little idiocies. The question of good or bad did not seem to apply to neither play nor people, and I just smiled my little secretive smile, signifying nothing.
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