Letter From Los Angeles
by Linda Sandoval
In his book, THE SAVAGE MIND, Claude Lévi-Strauss writes about game versus ritual. A game starts out with equality and through the process of the game creates inequality. Winner and losers. It’s only a fair fight if the sides are even.
A ritual, on the other hand, starts out welcoming all kinds of disparate elements. It starts out with inequality. The purpose of a ritual is unification and communion. A ritual supplies a form that allows questions of meaning and existence to be considered. There are no winners or losers.
Religious rituals are all about unification and communion, of course. The pythia in ancient Greece gathered supplicants into divination and the divine. She channeled the voice of the god and her iambs were fearsome and maddeningly vague. Those who sought to see the future in those rhymes were left with many more questions than answers.
There are social rituals too. All of the children get a stocking at Christmas. The bride and groom are always carried above the dancing celebrants in wobbly chairs. Dinner parties with friends? If it’s a good party, then it succeeds as a communal ritual of food and drink where expectations are met and friends leave feeling even closer than before. If the guests are unhappy then perhaps the party is functioning as some kind of competitive game with unstated rules and hierarchies.
For me, the theatre is the purest of our rituals because it strives toward unity and communion without the dogma and exclusivity of religion or the repetitiveness of social tradition. Any world can and does exist on the stage be it profane, irritating, confrontational or transcendent. A stage ritual bows to humanity and invites the scrutiny of the participants. If the audience doesn’t like it there will be boos and walkouts and very nasty things written in the press. The theatre lives by spinning public discussion in a shared time that, like life, passes constantly into memory. Everyone is welcome at this discussion. Welcome and necessary.
And we don’t have to get fancy to experience it either. Some of the most healing moments in the theatre are delivered by children in those haphazard elementary school plays. Children forget lines and stumble and knock down flats and miss entrances but they still reach towards the audience with everything they have and the audience reaches back not only to the children on the stage but back to their own childhood. The child’s struggle to perform is a basic condition within all of us at any age.
Occasionally, there are those performances that supply a paradise of revelation and meaning, where we can relax with the seemingly effortless mastery of the artists. Where we sit in the darkness and breathe together a woolgathering of recognition.
Lee Breuer and the MABOU MINES theatre company have been rendering the luminous transience of the stage since the 1970s with just those kinds of skills. Last fall in Los Angeles I witnessed his visionary adaptation of Ibsen’s, A DOLL’S HOUSE. From the very first moments of the play I knew I would never again think in quite the same way about freedom and equality.
A red velvet curtain drops, revealing the walls of the doll’s house. A house constructed in dimensions just right for the male characters played by brilliant but very small actors all under four feet tall. The interior of the house is then assembled through the labor of brilliant actresses all around six feet tall who eat at the tiny tables and sit in the tiny chairs and drink from tiny cups and crawl on their knees when the men are present so as to make them, the men, feel tall. Gestures are exaggerated and silly. Live, silly melodrama style piano music accompanies the large gestures. The piano is actually built into and becomes the stage. The females speak in little girl squeaks, around the men that is. They coax and flatter and flutter about. Live doll-puppets dancing to the manic music. They hide their size but they hide their hearts and souls and fears as well in order to be kept, in order to survive in the world of these tiny men. These men with their manipulations and oversized opinions of themselves. Even the children mirror this dollhouse reality. The little boy is a tiny dwarf child and the little girl, tall, but crawling on her knees around that tiniest of little boys. When the men leave the stage the women telescope like Alice between childhood and adulthood. They gossip and compete with one another in full size and voice. The servant is a towering, pregnant goddess of a woman who skirts the outer reaches of the doll’s house, witnessing everything through the miniature windows. At one point she carries the dead body of family friend, Doctor Rank, in her arms, like an angel cradling a wizened infant. At the end of the play Nora, the wife, rebels against her false life and leaves Torvald, her dollhouse husband. The blood red velvet parts and reveals puppet stages stacked to the flies, like boxes in an opera, full of wooden Nora and Torvald puppets dressed for the show. High up in the center of these puppets is the live Nora who is no longer a doll but looking down on us like a tortured saint at the stake. The live Nora is nude and bald. Her little girl blonde ringlets have been cast aside forever. She is beyond ever speaking to her husband again, so she must sing the last speeches of the play. Her freedom from the doll’s house is at the risk of this naked martyrdom that soars from soap opera melodrama into tragic opera. The accompanist at her stage/piano is no longer joking with us, but supporting this transformation with serious, profound music.
Theodor Adorno writes in his essay on the Lizard Princess:
“They resemble the image designated for them: the more they are pure appearance, undisturbed by any impulse of their own, the greater their likeness to archetypes…their lives are constructed as illustrations, or a perpetual children’s festival, and such perception does no justice to their needy empirical existence. Dream princess and whipping-girl are the same, and she suspects nothing of it.”
Theodor Adorno, MINIMA MORALIA (Reflections From a Damaged Life)
Nora is the classic Lizard Princess. Nora occupies the pedestal of the Madonna /child at the expense of her humanity. Her husband dotes on her constructed idealized image when it suits him but flies into a punishing, hateful rage when her ignorant child’s behavior might cause him embarrassment.
Torvald
…But no man would sacrifice his honor for the one he loves!
Nora (singing)
It is a thing hundreds and thousands of women have done…As soon as your fear was over-and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you-when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned, it was exactly as if nothing at all had happened. Exactly as before I was your little skylark, your doll…it was then it dawned upon me that for eight years I had been living here with a strange man…
A DOLL’S HOUSE, Act III
Dream princess and whipping girl indeed. But, in A DOLL'S HOUSE, Nora is no longer able to remain ignorant of her situation. Torvald’s intrinsic cowardice and denial of love is unbearable to Nora and it kills her love for him. Ibsen wrote that the destruction of love is the greatest sin of all. It is a sin that can’t be patched up or survived. In Ibsen’s play, JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN, the character of Ella states:
“You have killed the power to love in me. Do you understand what that means? In the bible it speaks of a mysterious sin, that there’s no forgiveness for. I’ve never been able to see till now what it could be…The great, unpardonable sin-it’s the sin of killing love in a human creature.”
JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN, Act II
This death of love is Nora’s bitter meal and Torvald’s as well. She chooses to slam the door on the princess role, but it is at the cost of her entire life and everything she thought was right and solid. No one can say what happens to Nora when those red curtains draw together and she’s left to wander in the frigid Norwegian winter.
Nora, (singing)
…I have heard that when a wife deserts her husband’s house, as I am doing now, he is legally freed from all obligations towards her. In any case I set you free from all you obligations. You are not to feel yourself bound in the slightest way, any more than I shall. There must be perfect freedom on both sides. See, here is your ring back. Give me mine.
A DOLL’S HOUSE, Act III
In college, I studied what I thought then was Ibsen’s outdated warhorse of a play. I often marveled at how revolutionary it was during it’s own time. How could audiences be so outraged that they stormed from the theatre in protest? When Nora left her husband and children at the end of the play and closed the door behind her it was so shocking to Victorian sensibilities as to seem criminal. George Bernard Shaw described it as “the door slam heard round the world.” When I saw the Breuer production, I experienced the play’s relevance anew because Breuer restored the life of the play. His inspired staging revealed its essence and its danger. And yes, some of the audience, reacting to what they viewed as a desecration of a classic text, walked out, as was their right.
At the end of the play questions hang in the air like the riddles of the pythia. Are we just enablers of our loved ones, keeping them children while worshiping them as idealized images? Who is more the child, the husband who is small or the wife who pretends to be smaller? Are we willing to sacrifice our own strength to enjoy a reflected flattery? Are we willing to sacrifice the truth in order to live like dolls in a pleasant deceit? Is there such a thing as a true partnership or friendship that doesn’t depend in some way on exploitation? Torvald cries out for his wife in pain and loneliness from his little bed. His cries are a heartbreaking realization of loss reaching back to the unconscious pool of childhood. But what or who is he calling to? Sadly, that phantom mother/wife probably never existed for any of us. And from Nora there is that bald, naked question left suspended in the blood red velvet. Can we exist without love?
The final image of the play rests on the daughter who enters the nursery to play with the gifts meant for the jolly Christmas morning that will never come again to this family. There in the dying light of the stage she rocks away on a wooden horse. She’s traveling to her future perhaps, on a gift that was probably meant for the little boy. The scene is more than unsettling. What will the future be for this abandoned daughter? This is the last question dipped in the ritual of a Christmas morning and sent out to us in the audience. One thing is certain, the rocking horse may be a toy but the little girl is not playing a game. After all, the sides are not even. Any equality will have to be reached through the collective human desire to will it into being.