Manic Flight Reaction, by Sarah Schulman

DIARY

Last Monday I posted that Jessica and I had attended Sarah Schulman's Manic Flight Reaction at Playwrights Horizons, and I described the piece as "one of the three or four worst" plays I'd ever seen. Gemma was interested in more explanation, so here it is.

I understand that Sarah Schulman is a very prolific writer, and has written extensively in many mediums with an emphasis on Lesbian art and politics. I was unfamiliar with this information until I looked at the Playbill, and ultimately her artistic vision has nothing to do with why I hated her play.

On the other hand, I can't really make excuses for her on account of the acting, the set, the venue, or anything else, because each of these elements were acting in Ms. Schulman's favor. The set was not only beautifully realized, but effectively conveyed the play's setting. The actors, while they didn't make me shudder, brought a degree of nuance and subtlety to their readings line-by-line, and were convincing in their timing and responsiveness.

In the end, my criticism is mundane and straightforward; the same criticism I had for Alfred Uhry's Last Night of Ballyhoo:

The writing sucked.

* * * * *

A quick recap on my take on good writing. It's simple and reductive: for writing to succeed, it must accomplish what it sets out to do. For it to suck, it must not. The capacity for suckery, then, is mainly contained in the writers appraisal of the work's goals and her ability to attain them. The writing of "Dick and Jane" books does not suck, because they are able to meet their goals: teaching kids to read. Likewise, plays like Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida can be considered to suck somewhat because they set the bar very high for themselves... they fall short where other efforts may succeed.

Proceeding on this definition then, what fundamentally doomed Manic Flight Reaction was a combination of many wrong choices on a close (eg., dialogue) and intermediate (eg., character attitudes that are components of their overall arc) scale. More specifically, Schulman tried write this play as a combination of the standard American psychodrama and a sort of absurdist Political satire, and she ruined both.

It is possible to combine the psychological and the satirical. To cite the most pervasive example today, look at any "successful" sitcom. Anything that falls into the half-hour block of psychologically, character-motivated plots including wacky hyjinks and one-liners does this. Inasmuch as we call them "successful" (they do what they set out to do), they reconcile satire and psychology. Sitcoms are, in fact, an evolution of commedia dell'arte, a Renaissance theatre form that would have stressed the satire above dynamic characters. To bend the direction of psychology, however, writers like Anton Chekhov and Tennessee Williams may not have been overtly satirical in their best known work, but they certainly incorporate a sense of extremity or even grotesqueness in characterization. Likewise, "modern" writers from Pinter to Churchill have managed to write highly stylized work that nevertheless draws upon psychologically consistant and compelling characterization.

So not only can what Schulman's attempted be done, but there's a long and glorious tradition of it having been done, in colorful and different ways.

Now if the difference, between Manic Flight Reaction and Cloud Nine was simply a difference in complexity, I'd be arguing that Schulman's play was mediocre, not awful. It did feel awfully surface to me. But Manic Flight Reaction isn't a mediocre play. It's just awful.

* * * * *

The plot whirls about Marge, who just might be the most significant (and weirdly passive) force in the Universe. Now a professor at U of I Champaign-Urbana, she had a relationship with Cookie, who is currently married to the Republican Presidential candidate. Meanwhile, her mother was a famed socialite who killed herself, a fact which she has kept from her daughter, whose boyfriend is son of an evil corporate exec, who together obtain proof of the relationship with Cookie. Also: Cookie and Marge had a threesome with Bill Clinton. So you see, Marge has the keys to the Universe, but is flustered and doesn't really do much with them throughout the play. She is, instead, manipulated and played by Cookie, a reporter, the two kids, and her graduate non-boyfriend. Oh yes, and she's very moral, and also brilliant, and absent-minded.

With the exception of a few key moments, the play has more of a bunch of ideas than a plot, and again, I could if I chose to, take the script to task for that. But I don't even have go there to tear it down, because even accepted as a "bunch of ideas" the choices here are utterly unconvincing.

Schulman has bound her story with a series of a priori conventions that her characters adhere to some of the time and break some of the time. These conventions, however, are the very core of the play.

In the most recurrent, and significant, example, is that modern culture is portrayed as fundamentally materialistic and cynical, and that this manifests in Grace and Luke, Marge's daughter and her boyfriend. The choice carries out through the two stomping all over Marge's ideals, and lying to and exploiting her. Their cynicism is so overpowering that we never develop sympathy for their characters. Which is the card Schulman plays at the end, when suddenly Grace is not only infused with inexplicable sincerity, but bitter with Marge for her own manipulations.

Marge, for all her courage and idealism, is stomped upon again and again. Cookie lies to and exploits Marge. The reporter lies to and exploits Marge. Grace and Luke lies to and exploits Marge. Even Albert, the graduate non-boyfriend, lies to and exploits Marge. By the end the contradiction between her alleged brilliance and her manifested cluelessness is so transparent that she becomes a symbol, a martyr, not the polemic or problematic or inspiring kind; the annoying kind.

So I didn't find any ground to accept this play as a psychologically informed drama. It's either allegory or peopled with idiots.

That said, I'm not ready to accept this as an allegory either. The primal wants of the characters, their two-dimensional material and sexual and (in the case of Marge and possibly Albert) loving urges continually undercut the force of the symbolism. If Grace and Luke really are so cynical and embittered my the media and materialism, then why do they incessantly demurre to spontaneous moments of kindness? If Marge is a human sacrifice to the betterment of the human race, then why does she let Luke and Grace engineer Cookie's downfall? If she's a human sacrifice with a selfish bone in her body, then why doesn't she ever stand up for herself, or at least sabatoge the Oppressors' plans?

So I wasn't convinced, either, by this play as a satire.

In short, it did the opposite of all the examples I cited above, from Chekov to The Cosby Show. It embodies all of the weaknesses and limitations of both satire and psychodrama without drawing upon their inherent strengths. It wasn't just a bad play. It was an exercise in how not to write.

* * * * *

Moments of isolated personal dissatisfaction and a nod.

ISOLATED PERSONAL DISSATISFACTION:

Not a structural point here, but the play included a series of supposedly funny one-liners. They rarely paid off, and ranged from irritating (the out-of-nowhere remark that McDonald's alum Albert should "consider being a playwright") to the offensive (the repeated implication that the U of I is in the hinterland and peopled by cretins).

NOD:

The last five minutes were lovely. They dropped the satirical end completely, and we saw a middle-aged woman who felt young and in love put on a favorite song from her past, and sat down to call her ex-girlfriend. It could have been genuinely moving.

END OF POST.