Mother's Return - Photo by Jonathan Slaff.
Jean-Claude van Itallie’s play America Hurrah (actually three short plays) was first presented at La MaMa in 1965. It was one of the productions constituting the rush of talent that led to the “avant garde” theatre of off-off Broadway. It’s a measure of how pressurized theatre – and society – had become that the movement broke with nearly all with convention, and burst upon New York.
The piece is iconic. America Hurrah lacked consistent characters, motivation, place, et al. Audiences may have been puzzled, but they welcomed it. They could see that the point of this dramatic confusion was political. In Motel, the best known of the three playlets, overgrown dolls/actors trashed a motel room for no reason. That was in 1965, when the U.S. was trashing – also for no reason – a certain Asian country.
Van Itallie is as iconoclastic as Hugo or Strindberg. But while those two produced identifiable dramatic genres (romanticism and expressionism, respectively), van Itallie has not. In his theatre, there are no genres: every play creates its own form. Such is Modernism.
Two plays of America Hurrah, Interview and Motel, are being produced once again at La MaMa, giving New York a golden opportunity. Audiences need to see these as much as they do A Dream Play.
I asked the playwright himself how an audience can accept a play that it’s not prepared for, with conventions that it’s never known.
JV: “As the creator of a play, you have to be very clear as to what your rules of the game are. You have to be quite sure of what you’re doing. If you’re presenting something which doesn’t have a clear form to you, there’s no hope that the audience is going to understand it, particularly if it’s an unconventional form.
“So, although plays always pose questions, they shouldn’t pose a question about the form that they are. You’ve got to set up a game – which every play is – which at least is clear to you.”
I asked him to tell me about the first productions of Interview and Motel, in the first production of America Hurrah!
JV: “I was 30. I had been in the avant-garde. I wanted to see if I could have a successful play and be a playwright in the world, which went much against the grain of the culture that I was in – the culture of the artists in Greenwich Village. You were not supposed to want a commercial success. More than that, I wanted it on my own terms. I thought “Well, I’ll do the best I can, and they’ll like it or they won’t.” But secretly, a part of me thought they wouldn’t.
“As we rehearsed the plays, there was constantly a refining of form. Joe Chaikin was directing the first play, Interview. He kept insisting that I rewrite this part and that part, monologues and so forth. And he kept refining his staging, so that a few days before we opened, the staging was still not fixed. That was his way.
“Joe had a clear vision of how he wanted that staging to be. And the rhythm of the piece only became clearer. It was always, to my mind, a fugue – with the questions and answers in the employment agency to begin with, accumulating in number, and then the monologues.
“Motel was conceived in 1962. The dolls were constructed by Robert Wilson - it was his first job in the theatre. There, the problem was that the dolls kept falling apart and we had to constantly retape them!
“I had tuned into some collective dream at the right time. You can’t calculate that intellectually. I had managed to tap into my unconscious in some way which is a state of grace for a playwright.
“A playwright is as successful as he or she is able to lower the bucket into the unconscious and come up with a dream which is not only personally significant, but which signifies for the general. That metaphor, Motel, talked about the destructiveness of America in Vietnam. It talked about our materialism. It talked about how the left hand wouldn’t acknowledge what the right hand was doing. And I didn’t plan to write a play about that.
“You don’t lead with your intellect. If you can be in that state of grace, you lower the bucket into the unconscious and, as carefully as you can, you use your craft to make clear the result. If you’re sure of your form, there’s a good chance that the audience will get it.”
The current La MaMa production adds to the two Hurrah playlets a third, new, play by van Itallie, The Mother’s Return, a dream play. While it owes much to Strindberg dream in terms of dramatic freedom, the Swede’s vision turned inward. Van Itallie’s looks outward to society. The politics in Return is sometimes explicit: “High up seated at the desk, he gives the order. Children are killed.” More often, it’s metaphorical: “I become the secretary, but the notebook is already scribbled in.”
I asked Jean-Claude how this production, with its odd mix of old and new material, came about.
JV: “I have the greatest respect for dreams. I've been writing down my own, on and off, since I was nineteen. In the last ten years, I've been analyzing dreams (a painful process) in order to make friends with my unconscious. Recently I've writing down dreams as poems.
This summer when the director Josh Adler [who directs the current production] came up to Shantigar Foundation, the old farm where I live in Western Massachusetts, to take the Acting and Being workshop, he told me: "Something needs to be handed on. I'd like to direct America Hurrah with my theater company, rehearsing at Shantigar. Will you help us?" I said I'd prefer to work with him on a new piece based on my political dreams. Josh replied, "We'll do both." Thus the current production at LaMaMa of part of America Hurrah and The Mother's Return, a dream play.”
America Hurrah revisited and The Mother’s Return, a dream play runs through October 24th on East Fourth Street, a run too short.
