Educated Guesswork

Ah, crafty, wily, quick-tongued Odysseus! Was there ever such a hero before, relying upon his wits rather than his brute strength? A fighter, too, and brave beyond all reckoning, willing to test himself against the siren’s song, though only after espying the loophole in their magic and challenging their beckoning music with prior restraint. Tennyson’s poem exactly captures the man, a hero for whom the eternal “now” of existence is the purpose of existence itself, and for whom the point of being is to always be on the move, pushing back the horizon by ever seeking it. Odysseus is a king among kings, a man among men, truly worthy of striving against gods.

Yet he is everyman, as well. James Joyce famously remarked that each man reenacts the Odyssey each and every day, and then the Irish writer proceeded to craft Ulysses and place the unheroic Mr. Bloom smack dab in the bowels of Greek heroic poetry. Whatever faults may accrue to Joyce from his idiosyncratic deconstruction of the English language in his magnum opus minus one, he understood all too well the power of this most primal of our culture’s tales.

Which brings us to Anon(ymous), a play by Naomi Iizuka purporting to be “a modern retelling of The Odyssey”, which I saw tonight at a high school production at Canyon Creek Academy. It was a very interesting production, and the title role was – as they say – very “ably performed” by one Izzy Pollack. The staging had its moments of brilliance and many of the cast teased out the best meal from the meat they were given. But ultimately the play – by which I mean the play itself, its dialogue, characters, scenes – left me quite unsatisfied.

I would blame Ms. Iizuka for this, if it were not for the fact that I really have no standing to blame anyone but myself for my own dissatisfaction. First, I have so little knowledge or comprehension of drama – of any stripe – that any pretensions I might have to critique even a Punch & Judy show would be quite laughable. After all, Naomi Iizuka is “one of the freshest voices in modern theater” (it says so in the program), and I am truly a nobody among nobodies, particularly in this realm unknown to me. Second, I fear I am a poor critic, unable to channel the true “suspension of disbelief” required for the theater, and too easily distracted by petty inconveniences such as the last-minute rush of people interrupting our place in line; watching twenty or more people push ahead of us to grab the few well-positioned seats in the very small Black Box Theater, I fear, tempered my enthusiasm for the forthcoming presentation of the dramatic arts. Third, I confess to an inability to temper my judgments based on the specifics of the situation; that is, I cannot tell a brilliant performance by a fifteen year-old from a passable one by a veteran, cannot distinguish faulty acoustics from my own wax-clogged ears plagued by tinnitus. And fourth and finally, I came to the play with an odd mixture of highest expectations and low interest; the former from the high regard I have for Homer’s masterwork and the love I have for its descendants from Tennyson to Joyce to the Coen brothers, the latter from the resigned way in which I backed into going to this play. But of that, more anon. For in spite of all these quite cogent reasons why I should not dare or deign to critique Anon(ymous), I have made up my mind to do so.

In this retelling, the Odysseus character – here called Anon – is a stranger to American shores, an immigrant, a refugee from some war-torn land. The play opens with the basic question of “Who Are You?”, to which Anon has no good answer. He cannot remember where he came from, how he got here, and doesn’t really know anything about where he is now. Anon declaims “Where I came from is far away from here” and a song and dance breaks out among the ensemble, evincing the far-away land of green tea and enormous butterflies that Anon cannot seem to recall clearly. During the drama Anon gives several names for himself – often by reappropriating a nearby sign – but most frequently calls himself “Nobody”. While of course this is a clear homage to the source (I would have loved to have seen the Cyclops, sorry, the one-eyed serial killer butcher Mr. Zyclo in the play, scream out “Nobody blinded me!”, but … well, we don’t always get what we want), the constant reinforcement of Anon as a “nobody” underscores both his impotence before the vast forces about him in this new land as well as the “everyman” nature of the lead character. His journey – or rather the series of vignettes, flashbacks, and a few unnecessary set pieces dictated by the original epic – is the story of a person coming to terms with who he is, trying to discover his self when that self has been uprooted from its past and has not the solace of home, for home is an unremembered nightmare and the place where he finds himself is a strange, inhospitable foreign land. Blah, blah, blah.

The preciousness of this play, signaled well in advance by its oh-so-clever title, reveals itself in earnest caring for the infinitude. The poor, the downtrodden, the forgotten, yes they deserve our respect and attention, but the pale character of Anon, who can’t clearly remember where he came from and is not quite sure where he might be going, is too shadowy a nonentity upon whom to suspend the weight of “all the lonely people”. Anon recalls the war, the crowded boat which foundered, separating him from his mother, but these plastic recollections do not give him character; they are merely hollow back stories for a work that would like to be heartfelt and caring for the uncared for, but which fails to stoop to pick up Elenor Rigby’s rice. The easy set pieces continue, hung like a shabby coat on the frame of The Odyssey: the spoiled rich girl who saved Anon’s life when he washed ashore on her father’s private beach (Circe), the one-eyed serial killer butcher (Mr. Zyclo), the sweatshop where the oppressive Mr. Yuri Mackus importunes into marriage Nemasani (also known as “Penny”, in case you couldn’t figure out that Eurymachus and Penelope are intended). But these scenes cloy with the accumulated nullities of fervent significance; yes, sweatshops are bad, serial killers are bad, rich people who own beaches, I suppose, are bad. But what then? The primacy of the little people before these fearsome evils is assumed, but little case is made for these people as true individuals. Or, as Dash says in The Incredibles, “If everyone is special, then no one is.”

Not that these scenes weren’t interesting, at times. Lisa Berger ably directed the production, giving ample credit to her high school case in the playbill for their contributions to a production full of sparkling visual effect, fascinating staging, and the almost dance-like physicality the actors brought to the performance. The presentation of the sweatshop was staged quite impressively, with the ensemble creating a factory with their mechanical movements as actors threaded a long wave of fabric through the all-too-human (and thus inhuman) machine. Mr. Zyclo processes his “meat” in another human machine fashioned by actors passing a red skein of yarn through a device implied and constructed from iron jetsam – a garbage can lid, a series of ducts – to produce Zyclo’s sausage for cannibals. In a later scene, as Anon and a girl he has rescued receive a ride from a lecherous truck driver, the truck is connoted onstage by sheets of corrugated tin held behind the seated actors, with other ensemble members rotating black umbrellas to show the spinning tires of the eighteen-wheeler, while the driver circles his hands on a garbage can lid cum steering wheel. The long sheets of cloth, used with great success in the sweatshop scene, are also used unsparingly to connote water, both as the lapping waves on the rich girl’s private beach, and – in one of my favorite scenes – stretched and billowing towards the audience and Anon and his protective goddess (Naja? I confess a difficulty mapping the characters in the play to those listed in the program) “swim” between the undulating sheets of blue. The effect was most pleasing.

Perhaps my favorite among many quite interesting scenes was the terrific fight between Anon and Pascal. Pascal has rescued Anon from the unseen menace of approaching men of ill intent (“The cops? INS? Rent-a-cops?” Pascal answers with a shrug when Anon asks who their would-be pursuers were), and has led Anon into tunnels for safety. In typical Hollywood fashion, the two must fight to become fast friends, and they proceed to do so over implied or express insults that one or the other may have made towards his partner. The subsequent fight itself was the showstopper of the evening – literally, gaining a spontaneous applause at its conclusion. This brilliant sequence was beautifully choreographed by Christopher Watkins, who mixed the fearsome action with live “slo-mo” sequences at each powerful blow, thus greatly heightening the dramatic impact while ensuring the actors’ safety. Well done! The character of Pascal was performed by Josh Guicherit, who gave a natural credibility to this turn as a streetwise hustler who takes the clueless Anon under his wing.

Alas, Pascal is doomed to die, turned into sausage for Mr. Zyclo’s beastly hunger. But then again, one of the hard aspects of the Odysseus trope is that everybody around him must die.

Yet notes of dissonance creep in whenever the parallels between this play and its epic source are underlined, as during our introduction to the sweatshop where Senator Laius and his wife Helen tour the sewing shop, assured by the oily Mr. Mackus that this is no sweatshop, in spite of the angry dance of the oppressed seamstresses which assure us that it is. This useful irony is not the dissonance I mean, but rather the haphazard sprinkling of Menelaus and Helen into the place which must represent Odysseus’ palace at Ithaca, where Penelope waits oh so patiently for her king to return. (As Kenneth Rexroth pointed out, The Odyssey can be read as a sailor’s ultimate fantasy, wherein the sailor goes out and fights and whores around for years, all while his wife sits chaste at home, waiting for her man to return from the sea.) In the source, of course, Menelaus and Helen welcome Telemachus into their home and encourage him to resist the suitors eating him out of his birthright. In Iizuka’s play, however, they are mere nonentities, especially the again cleverly named Senator Laius (played by Jordan Cavanaugh, who also plays the murderous Mr. Zyclo with perhaps a bit more relish). Helen, at least, moves the plot along by attempting to purchase the shroud Penny works endlessly on for her lost son. Tracy McDowell does a nice job of parroting the imperious tone of the entitled rich, as well as Helen’s simpering sympathy for Penny’s loss, though her amazing turn as Mr. Zyclos’ pet bird, emitting shrieks and cries that quite pleasantly reminded me of the best Dada poetry, was one of the high points of the performance for this ignorant audience member.

But making Mulligan stew from Homer’s meat and potatoes bothered me greatly. Beyond tossing characters hither and yon in an attempt to claim the sheen of Homer’s poetry for her own, Ms. Iizuka’s decision to make Penny the mother of Anon – rather than Odysseus’ wife – struck a heavy blow against my appreciation of the play as a retelling of Odysseus’ tale, a blow which resonated shrilly through many of the other elements and characters lifted from Homer, both shattering this connection (in my mind) to the masterful source and detracting (I felt) from the work before me. For at this point, when Odysseus becomes Telemachus, I begin to wonder why bother make a connection to The Odyssey at all. Scrub the names to remove all connection from “Yuri Mackus” to “Eurymachus”, give me a reason beyond the Cyclops episode to explain why a stranded immigrant might come face to face with a serial killer, and perhaps I will see a story shorn of its needless decorations. Invoking a masterwork means summoning its ghost, and unfortunately that ghost runs circles around Anon(ymous), though the chains that fetter Ms. Iizuka’s play are not those brought by Homer’s spirit, but are heavy iron forged by the play itself, its would-be weightiness instead becoming a deadweight that sinks the drama in spite of its light and music and action.

For Anon is no Odysseus. The merest hints of craftiness are given his character – his cleverness at making up his aliases mentioned before, distracting Mr. Zyclo by questions about wine or pretending to hear a lost bird – but for most of the play Anon merely stumbles into and through the action around him. Others drive him on his journey – Pascal rescues him, a rich girl rescues him, a kindly family with a curry restaurant lets him know his mother still lives. He has two fights which prove that he isn’t a complete wimp (it is left as an exercise for the reader to guess with whom the second fight takes place), and he insists the truck driver pull over as questions about its cargo arise, but…. Ultimately Anon’s passions are plastic and feeble. The vigorous lust Odysseus has for the eternal “now” is replaced in Anon(ymous) with mediocre maunderings through an eternal “here”. There is no point to Anon’s wanderings; his quest is made complete only through deus ex machina happenstance. (“It’s a smaller world than you think.” Really?) Anon(ymous) claims to be about trying to find a home, when home is gone and unremembered, but no home is presented, only an ill-realized “Golden Age” of a land long gone, and the frenetic, senseless vignettes of Anon’s new circumstances, Anon’s eternal “here” as easily replaced by an eternal “nowhere”.

Ultimately, of course, Anon(ymous) must be judged upon its own merits, and not upon the spirit of Homer with which it seeks to commune. That that spirit hovers above Iizuka’s play in vibrant contradistinction to the pallid characters in Anon(ymous) only heightens the lifeless nature of the easy caricatures presented by this modern drama. Anon, in portraying Everyman, more often than not becomes the Nobody he claims to be, beset by the unfathomable events which occur around him rather than shaping or being shaped by them. And while Odysseus had his own share of being put upon by the gods, never did the wily, crafty-tongued mariner simply submit to his fate. Truly the king of Ithaca insists upon drinking life to the lees, while Anon is left with the merest dregs of life, as the scintillating staging and banal platitudes of interconnectedness cannot distract, in the end, from Anon’s ponderous helplessness before the contrived chaos of his manufactured drama. In the end, Anon(ymous) falls flat, victim of its own hubris as it overreaches its powerful source, grasping instead a vacuity of “messages” that lie lifeless before the still living ghosts of The Odyssey. The dazzling smorgasbord of Ms. Iizuka’s play provides all-too-little meat for men and women hungry for meaning.

The play makes a great show of beginning in media res, with Anon’s muse urging him to “begin in the middle” – more homage to the blind poet of Chios. But the play’s middle is everywhere and nowhere, its circumference everywhere and nowhere, and it has no center with which to hold its chopped bits and pieces together. The play seems to “breathe” most freely when exposing its creaky machinery, as it processes Homer’s yarn to make it an unfortunate and indigestible sausage. The showy staging and innovative machinery of Anon(ymous) cannot hide the lack of nutrient within the play’s core.