Juliet's Economy

In the balcony scene of Shakespeare’s most famous love story, Juliet confesses to the dark night her love for the man she’s just met. Little does she know, Romeo is there in the bushes, gazing up at her with heart also blazing. In the scene that follows, the surprised Juliet elaborates a theory of love that has been interpreted for centuries as naïve and idealistic. What happens if we take seriously the model of love articulated by this young girl from Verona? What if love is an economy that operates not on scarcity but on abundance?

Blame teenage insecurity, blame the patriarchy, blame his aching heart still reeling from Rosaline’s refusal, in any case, Romeo’s model of love is grounded in a traditional economy of exchange. He wants to receive and give in equal measure, at an agreed-upon time. Love is trade, and the trade must be fair.

When Juliet tries to leave, saying that this is all happening too fast, Romeo stops her, saying like so many men before and after him: “O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”

“What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” asks Juliet

“The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine,” he says.

She laughs at his pedantry: “I gave thee mine before thou didst request it!”

Juliet needed no guarantees before she confessed her love. She required no certainty of exchange. She gave because there was nothing else to do with her overflowing love but give it – to the night sky, to the vision of Romeo she held in her heart, to whoever was listening in the garden.

“And yet I would it were to give again.” She continues.

This worries Romeo: “Wouldst thou withdraw it? for what purpose, love?”

“But to be frank, and give it thee again.” Juliet knows that it isn’t the having or the getting of love that is the most pleasurable, but the giving of it. She wants to give, and give again; reaping repeatedly the pleasure of the gift.

She laughs again (at least in the production in my head): “And yet I wish but for the thing I have.”

There is nothing stopping her from giving her love endlessly. She need not await exchange. She need not play coy with her devotion until she’s received certainty that he will give his back.

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.”

In Juliet’s economy, there is no scarcity. Giving love only generates more.

Only A God

In On the Marionette Theatre, by German Romantic author and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist, the first dancer of the Opera insists to the narrator that the grace of the marionette is superior to the grace of human beings...

"My reply was that, no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe a mechanical puppet can be more graceful than a living human body. He countered this by saying that, where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet." (Kleist, On the Marionnette Theatre)

In this video, an inanimate object (the fans) animate another inanimate object (the fabric). The result is so full of vital grace that it calls my own liveness into question. In the interaction of these two non-sentient phenomena I see and feel emotional depth, symbolic meaning, a dramatic arc, and a clear aesthetic vision. I'm not sure if this is an argument for a god-less universe or one where god-full-ness is everywhere. Perhaps that's the place "where the two ends of the circular world meet."

P.S. Everything in this post is borrowed from the brilliance of my friends: performer Grace Booth, who found the video, video artist Joe Moore, who showed it to me, and playwright Elizabeth Hersh, who connected the beauty of this dancing scarf to Herr Kleist and his automatons. And Daniel Wurtzel (not yet a friend) is the installation artist who made it in the first place.

"Directing Shadows:" Artaud's Dreams

I re-read Artaud last week. I'm always inspired by his vision for what theatre could be. Here are a few snippets, along with images of his own artwork:


"For the theatre as for culture, it remains a question of naming and directing shadows: and the theater, not confined to a fixed language and form, not only destroys false shadows but prepares the way for a new generation of shadows around which assembles the true spectacle of life." (The Theatre and its Double, p 12)






"We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being."(The Theatre and its Double, p 13)








"We can now say that all true freedom is dark, and infallibly associated with sexual freedom which is also dark, although we do not precisely know why...The theatre releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the theater, but of life." (The Theatre and its Double, p 31)






"The true purpose of the theatre is to create Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspect, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in discovering ourselves... May it free us, in a Myth in which we have sacrificed our little human individuality...with powers rediscovered in the Past" (The Theatre and its Double, p 116)

"Closer than a brother": The Brothers Size

The epigraph for Tarell Alvin McCraney's powerful play The Brothers Size is a quote from proverbs: "A man that hath friends must show himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother" (18:12). Closer even than blood is the relationship between a man and God, the proverb seems to say. Yet a queer reading looms right below the surface, and in fact, some translate the subject of the second clause as "lover" or "beloved," rather than friend: "there is a lover who keeps nearer than a brother." Is the beloved closer than the blood brother? When situations get sticky, when your neck is on the line, who knows you better? Who will be there when you cry out in the dark? And ultimately, who will be willing to sacrifice their happiness for your own?

These questions roil just beneath the surface of McCraney's play like the queerness inside the proverb. The Brothers Size tells the story of three men, two bound by blood brothership and two bound by an intimate fraternity borne in prison. The hinge of both of these relationships is Oshoosi Size, named after the Yoruba deity associated with justice, the hunt, and imprisonment. Oshoosi has recently been released from prison and has moved in with his big brother Ogun, who runs a garage. His best friend Elegba, who he met in prison, is happy to see him released from jail and the two re-connect on the outside, only to run into trouble with the law again.

The nature of their intimacy while behind bars is an open question - it was a love that lived in the darkness, and we see it reflected in Oshoosi's dreamscapes and hear it in between the lines of their sparse conversations: "We was like brothers" says Elegba, "Brothers in need." Indeed, the love between Oshoosi and Elegba is palpable (as is Oshoosi's fear of what that love could mean) but the words "gay" "homosexual" or "queer" never cross the lips of any character in this play.

In interviews, McCraney quotes Essex Hemphill, the African-American poet and activist, who said “Two black men loving one another is a revolutionary act." McCraney points out that "He didn’t say ‘two black gay men’, he just said ‘two black men’. It’s something we don’t see. I wanted to put it on stage – these men, in all forms of colour, trying to figure out how to love themselves and each other.”

Both Elegba and Ogun love the childlike, open-hearted Oshoosi. Both try to give him the freedom he craves - literally, both give him cars, that 20th century symbol of "ultimate freedom." But sometimes our ability to give generously to the person we love is limited by the experience of love itself. Sometimes our desire to keep him close overpowers our desire to set him free. Though Elegba's tortured devotion to Oshoosi is strong, it almost lands them both back in the prison they just left.

Near the end of the play, the sometimes-hard big brother Ogun stands on the porch of his house. Speaking his stage directions (as they frequently do in this play) he says "Ogun Size / stands alone in the night / staring." In the fantastic production I saw at the Magic Theatre, this was followed by an intense, attenuated moment of stillness and silence. One of those silences that releases into the audience waves of shifting experience: confusion, then worry that something has gone wrong, then curious attention, then tentative acceptance. Ogun's presence in this long moment was penetrating but impenetrable. It was as though he was simultaneously looking back into the dense, shared past of brotherhood and forward into the delicate tendrils of possible futures that could lie ahead. After this long pause Ogun decides to push his brother forward into the unknown.

The gift he gives Oshoosi at the play's end is the gift of flight. Leaving the elder brother Size alone again on the porch facing the stillness and solitude of his own life. Elegba was at Oshoosi's side when he cried out in the darkened prison; he was the "friend that sticketh closer than a brother." But Ogun makes the choice to unstick in order to set his brother free.

Akin to Death: Mary Stuart

I recently saw a fantastic production of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart at Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Adapted and directed by Mark Jackson, the language was clear and direct without losing the dense, poetic force of the 19th century original. It was blessed with a slick contemporary design and actors to die for, and so expertly paced that the two hours traffic never lost its urgency.

This play chronicles the last few days in the life of Mary Queen of Scots before she's put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. The confrontation between two immensely powerful queens in a deeply patriarchal world is fascinating, and the one scene in which they share the stage is the keystone of any production of this play. Lucky to even get an audience with Elizabeth in the first place, the imprisoned Mary's passionate nature gets the better of her. Instead of begging for mercy, she calls her cousin the Queen a bastard and reiterates her claim for the English throne saying, in Jackson's powerful translation: "I am your king!"

Ooops. Not the way to avoid a beheading.

From that moment on, while our sympathies lie with Mary and we hope for her rescue, we know she's doomed. Death, like the presence of the actress who never leaves stage, looms.

Playwright Jean Genet, in his letters to his director Robert Blin, says, "If we maintain that life and the stage are opposites, it is because we strongly suspect that the stage is a site closely akin to death, a place where all liberties are possible."

Schiller's play is about bondage and freedom. The chains that bind us sometimes take the form of politics, sometimes of patriarchal systems, sometimes of the will of the public, and sometimes they're just the outcome of the tangled mess we've made of our life. Death is sometimes a gateway to freedom, to a place where "all liberties are possible."

In Schiller's version, Mary is given her last rites in secret from her Lord Chamberlain, who has been ordained as a priest, before she mounts the scaffold. In Jackson's production however, all of Mary's attendants have been cut, leaving her desperately alone in Elizabeth's world. The last rites scene is done solo: this passionate, beautiful force that is about to be extinguished plays her own father confessor.

The hope for absolution - the dream of utter grace - lies somewhere at the border of death. At this boundary between the freedom offered by the void and the meaning that only exists in the land of life's living interpreters, forgiveness is possible.

I'm not a Catholic, so no personal mystic associations arise for me as I watch the actress playing Mary take the imaginary host into her mouth. But I feel the dream of transubstantiation as I'm held spellbound by her performance. In the mouth of the stage, the host of the actress's body becomes Mary Stuart, becomes Christ, resonates with every person facing the imminent truth of their own death, overcome with longing to return to communion with the dark quiet everything that grows closer and closer with each breath.

Genet called for a theatre that was "so strong and dense that it will, by its implications and ramifications, illuminate the world of the dead." He called on his artistic collaborators to "break down whatever separates us from the dead." I believe he'd be proud of how this beautiful production reaches a quivering hand out across that boundary.