A collage reality (re)made: the postmodern dramaturgy of Charles L. Mee.

Reilly, Kara

Charles L. Mee's theater of history embodies a postmodern dramaturgy that asserts that "culture speaks through us, grabs us, throws us to the ground, cries out, silences us," and enacts a collage reality. Like a "pottery fragment" unearthed by archaeology, Mee takes the shattered wreckage of culture and reassembles historical moments into a new vessel: the (re)making project. His (re)making project explores the notion that there is no "original play;" his work stretches the limits of postmodern pastiche through radical appropriation, asking readers and theater practitioners to explore if every poet really is a thief. In this way, Mee's plays are at the cutting edge of American postmodernism.

Postmodernism has been theorized as a "condition" that led to various cultural, social, and artistic movements. In the sense that it is a "condition," postmodernism refers to the period of late capitalism directly following modernism. Hence, it might be thought of as a total rejection of the values of modernism. It has sometimes been called "anti-modernism." However, "antimodernism" implies a logical progress to history, and it was Jean-Francois Lyotard who signaled the beginning of postmodernism in his rejection of "grand narratives"--sometimes called master narratives--or the teleological progression of history. Lyotard viewed the postmodern not as a rejection of modernism, but as a deepening of modernism's unanswered questions. His critique of history also exposed the dramaturgical structure involved in the writing of history, a teleological structure implying that history is headed toward some unseen progress that is part and parcel of the Enlightenment project. It is the ideas of both teleology and historical progress that Mee's work interrogates. Mee worked as an historian for more than a generation, "and after two decades as a historian, he did not in fact abandon history, but began to write it in the medium of theater" (Bryant-Bertail 40). As Mee claims:

 Historians pick up documents from the time they
 live in, they quote sources, they quote documents,
 they insert into their texts unedited pieces of evidence
 of the real world, and I'm still thinking in
 that mode ... as a writer, I struggle with how you
 take stuff that you've stolen from the world and
 make it work as a play. (Shattered 88)

Mee accumulates his documents for theater creation from the cultural debris that surrounded him in his work as a historian. The detritus of history and the mindless repetition of cycles of violence are central to Mee's plays.

Repetition is considered a condition of postmodernism. As Herbert Blau writes, "if we can believe the history of modernism, we are living in the double bind, the history that always repeats itself" (54). In his (re)making project, Mee uses repetition as a starting point, and he begins with ancient Greek plays and rewrites them to include the language of popular culture. He also does not claim ownership of his plays, but invites others to re-write and produce them by making them available on the Internet (www.charlesmee.org). Royalties need only be paid if the resulting play closely resembles the original text. As Mee has said, "eventually we all die and we lose control over our own work ... I've always thought that the best playwrights who get the best productions are the dead playwrights, so I thought it might be best to behave like one" (Shattered 93). Citing Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" in his typical tongue-in-cheek manner, Mee plays dead rather well, or has for the last decade or so.

Orestes 2.0, created in collaboration with director Robert Woodruff and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1992, became the first of Mee's unique history plays in his (re)making project. "Plays that function as a blueprint for, a fraction of the total experience. He sets up a situation that requires the director, in turn, to elaborate what he has written" (Shattered 85). Using Euripides' Orestes as a blueprint for the text, Mee adds on layers and borrows from Guillaume Apollinare, French surrealist poet and playwright; William Burroughs, beat novelist and counterculture guru; and Elaine Scarry, theorist, known especially for The Body in Pain. He also includes pop culture references like Bret Easton Ellis, best known for his novel American Psycho; John Wayne Gacy, serial killer; Mai Lin, porn star; Vogue magazine; Soap Opera Digest and an astrologer named Farley.

 I realized that the Euripides had become a scaffolding
 on which I'd stuck the new fragments of
 text, and I decided to throw the scaffolding away
 and call whatever remained the script.

The play is entirely based in Euripides' Orestes, but the contemporary texts intervene in the main characters' texts and predominate in that of the chorus. The story of Orestes involves matricide of Orestes' mother, Clytemnestra. It is a revenge killing for Clytemnestra's murder of Orestes' father, Agamemnon. Orestes' sister, Electra, was an accomplice.. In Mee's play, two choruses are present, the nurses and the war veterans. The Greek text of Euripides becomes a scaffolding for the play text, whereas the contemporary texts function as "a tangent--not to be confused with 'subplots' in a conventional play--{and} eventually return to the mythic storyline" (Hopkins and Orr 15).

This mythic storyline begins in a white Newport or Palm Beach style house with a lawn ruined and bombed out like ground zero. When the green fog that covers the stage gradually clears we see damaged war victims and veterans onstage in camouflaged hospital gowns with nurses who attend them. The nurses are the Furies, or the Eumenides (Greek for "Kindly Ones"). The clothing of the nurses and war victims is altered to expose the uniform of hospital inmates, signifying the hospital as cultural apparatus. Sometimes these characters are in the veterans' hospital and sometimes the space shifts into a mental ward. Overall, the setting reads "Hospital" as a cultural superstructure.

Orestes wears a red satin hospital gown, and his hands, covered in blood are the same color as his gown. A man is tied to a wheelchair with duct tape covering his mouth; he struggles to free his mouth so that he can speak. The Tape Mouthed Man is a victim of oppression; he has been silenced, and is reminiscent of Black Panther Bobby Seale, whose mouth was taped by judge's order during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Nod is a soldier/war victim who also acts as an emcee of sorts, and John is also part of the war victim chorus, although throughout the play he indulges in fantasies of extreme violence and sexual mutilation. The third soldier/war victim is William, who appears to be recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Electra is onstage with her hands bathed in blood. She wears a pink Armani suit, an updated version of the pink Chanel suit Jackie Onaissis Kennedy wore on the day JFK was shot. Imagine if Jackie had stayed in that very same suit for six days after the murder and done nothing but chain smoke cigarettes and drink coffee. Electra has done just this, awake for six days since the brutal death of her mother, Clytemnestra, and her reality has begun to fall apart at the seams. A forensics expert presents the "reality" of the body: the cut-up corpse of Clytemnestra on a silver autopsy slab. The expert tells us in gruesome detail how the murder was accomplished, "a fatal blow to the back of the neck, the knife blade carving her from the vocal cords down into the cervical vertebrae where the blade remained lodged and embedded" (Shattered 90). The forensics expert claims the cause of death was heart failure, as if Clytemnestra died of shock or a broken or frozen heart. Like callers at some surreal wake for Clytemnestra, it is her corpse that begins the play. The matricide is background information to Euripides' play, but here begins the journey into what Sarah Bryant-Bertail has called an "Americanized collage" (Bryant-Bertail 45). For while the pathologist speaks, all the other characters are onstage too, and there is no 'right' place to look, only the proliferation of images and meanings.

At the crossroads of theater and history, the postmodern Mee is like high modernist Walter Benjamin because he possesses the understanding that "without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin, which he cannot contemplate without horror. There is no document of civilization that is not the same time a document of barbarism" (Benjamin 256). If, as Lyotard has suggested, the postmodern condition is a deepening of the questions of modernism, then Mee deepens Benjamin's ideas that even though civilization contains the record of barbarism, the task of the historian is to re(make) history by "brush(ing) history against the grain" (Benjamin 257). Like Benjamin's Angel of History, Mee sees not a chain of events, "but one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage sky high."

In his "Thesis on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin says, "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that 'the state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule" (257). While looking at Paul Klee's painting "Angelus Novus," or New Angel, Benjamin perceives the task of the historical materialist:

 This is how one pictures the angel of history. His
 face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive
 a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe,
 which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and
 hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like
 to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what
 has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
 Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
 violence that the angel can no longer close them.
 This storm irresistibly propels him into the future
 to which his back is turned, while the pile of
 debris before him grows skyward. This storm is
 what we call progress. (257)

While Benjamin's reading of the New Angel makes the angel a witness who sees the chains of history in perspective before her, Mee's is a postmodern black angel who considers history to be both a virus and a barbaric montage. Mee chose an Ernst collage called "Les Cormorants" (1920) for the cover image of his book History Plays. In the Preface of his History Plays, Mee states:

 These plays were composed in the way that Max
 Ernst made his Fatagaga pieces toward the end of
 World War I: texts have been taken from, or
 inspired by, other texts. Among the sources for
 these are the classical plays of Euripides and texts
 from the contemporary world. (4)

At the foreground of Ernst's "Le Cormorants" collage, eight black flamingoes wade gracefully through water. These are cormorants: marine birds with dark plumage, webbed feet, and a slender hooked bill, but the word can also mean a selfish, greedy person. Cormorants have a distensible pouch, and the birds got their reputation for devouring fish with voracious appetites. Above these flamingoes, three giant battleships are shown in an aerial view. The center ship carries a cathedral rose window as its cargo; the left ship contains a portion of a biological cell; the ship on the right contains a gigantic hollow cement circle that looks like it a might be a portion of a neolithic stonework. This third ship also carries an orange pod of some kind shaped like a viking ship with the inner workings of an organ. Attached to this circle is a long black cord that has dropped a bomb in the foreground of the painting, right in the path of the flamingoes, as they march forward into the future. At the very top of the painting flies a black angel, visually familiar because she is torn from a Brueghel painting. This angel guards the planet Saturn, which was believed to be the planet that ruled madness and genius in the Medieval period, and attached to the center of this planet is another black string that leads to the center of the rose window. Like Mee's plays, the proliferation of images in the collage resists the confines of a single reading. The battleships might well represent the flow of time with the cell being the contemporary era and our fascination with science; the rose window, the Middle Ages, when the church reigned supreme; and the stone wheel representing pre-historic times. The string attached from the stone wheel to the bomb, and from Saturn to the center of the rose window, might well represent the way church, state, and biology are all bound up in power relations. From any perspective, the radical images provoke the viewer into thought and approach enigma. The puzzle is invoked through a series of dark winged figures, and in reference to Benjamin's "New Angel," the black winged angel Ernst places under the sign of Saturn becomes Mee's cormorant-like angel of history.

Like Ernst in his collage making and Benjamin's vision of Klee's angel, Mee takes the detritus of cultural images generated from a chain of events that piles sky high and reassembles them into a three-dimensional collage on the stage. Through his plays, he moves collage reality into three-dimensional space as montage and parades civilization across the stage. Mee's interrogation of mimesis seeks to stage history as a virus and barbaric montage, unfolding itself on the armature of a Greek tragedy, (re)making culture at the same time it is made by it. Where Benjamin's angel sees a chain of events, Mee's angel breaks the chains into separate links. This breaking is a rupture that exposes the lie of cause and effect history. It is this enigma of collage that Mee creates in his history plays. In his collaged reality, the past and present brew into the storm called progress. All the black-winged figures of "Les Cormorants" see the wreckage of culture, but, unlike New Angel, these figures are not an objective presence looking at the debris piling sky high. They are part of that wreckage.

Taking this idea that Mee's plays are formulated through the lens of Max Ernst's collages we can look at the collage called "Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale" and juxtapose it with the opening sequence of Orestes 2.0. The field of vision shows a faceless girl in a billowing white gown running as though in terror. She holds a knife and gazes at the blade, perhaps looking for her reflection or contemplating violence. Before her is a wooden gate that extends off the frame of the painting into a real wooden gate, creating a doorway, a gesture from the two-dimensional world of painting leading into the three-dimensional world of theater. Above her flies a tiny gray nightingale, but its flight pattern, like the airplanes of our world, is somehow menacing, as if the nightingale's wings trace an augury of "the state of emergency." After five years of making collage, Ernst called "Two Children" "the formal logical conclusion for the time being of the collage technique" (Ernst video). One might say the writing of Orestes 2.0 is also the formal logical conclusion of Mee's work as an historian studying the wreckage of culture. The play begins with a specific historical moment, American soldiers returning from the first Gulf War, and collides with Euripides' Orestes, into an interrogation of the very notion of logical, consecutive space and time.

Electra is onstage with her hands bathed in blood. She holds a cigarette like the knife of the girl in Ernst, looking at her reflection in the silver cigarette case periodically, just as the girl gazed at the knife blade. Orestes wears a white hospital gown, and his silk bathrobe is draped about him, his hands covered in blood. He is the slumped child in the foreground. Electra is dealing with the history of atrocity in her family, the House of Atreus, a bad name for a family restaurant. She and her brother have committed matricide, killing Clytemnestra as punishment for her murder of Agamemnon, their father.

Electra begins to speak "as though speaking to the jury, and/or homicide detectives in a room at the stationhouse, way beyond exhaustion and control. She attempts to tell her story as confession. She is on trial: Electra repeats the phrase, "you could say" six times in her opening monologue, desperate to tell her story and to articulate the events that have culminated in this moment. Even though Orestes lies on a guerney in the corner with the Furies (dressed as nurses) tormenting him, if Electra tells her story right, she believes she will reveal the cause of the barbarism in her world. She cries out, "It's a nightmare really." This phrase becomes an echo throughout the play. It is the keening which Greek choruses cry out in the lament, "Ai, Ai!" Mee gives the girl threatened by the nightingale the face of Electra. She lives in a nightmare montage reality that confirms Benjamin's idea of a perpetual state of emergency.

One of the most powerful stage directions for action occurs in this opening section, "laboring to explain as though diagramming a sentence or a family tree" (93). This labor is real. If Electra could own language as a speaking subject or at least uncover the mythic "origin" of her identity as a subject-in-process, she might find meaning. There is no originary moment, only the perpetual desire to find it. Each time she begins to tell her back story, the past that led her up to this present moment, Electra resembles She, the female protagonist in Samuel Beckett's Not I. She is desperate to rupture the power of language, the Law of the Father, but in the end she must take up a subject-in-process status. The story of Atreus crystallizes in this opening monologue in Electra's desperation to communicate, to speak herself into being. As Benjamin has said, "thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad" (263). This is what Mee's postmodern dramaturgy of history enacts; he takes the structure of Orestes and configures it with the contemporary world, and generates this monad. This is a mimesis that bears witness to the task of the historical materialism and the contemporary dramatist. For Euripides, Electra's opening monologue is as follows:

 Our single hope is left.
 Our uncle Menelaus has just come back from Troy
 (I: 52-4).

Mee gives Electra's speech in a very different tone:

 Our lives depend at last on these people who
 brought us so much trouble,
 on this--man--
 and on his "wife" Helen. (95)

Electra and Orestes' lives rest in the hands of those who brought the original act of atrocity in their own lifetimes: the Trojan War.

But Orestes has committed a sin beyond the realm of murder, his crime is matricide, and he is fervently pursed by the Furies. As Robert Graves tells it, "the serpent-haired, dog-headed, bat-winged, Errinyes appeared, swinging their scourges, against which Apollo's bow of horn was of little avail, Orestes fell prostrate on a couch where he lay for six days, his head wrapped in a cloak--refusing either to eat or to wash" (I:62). According to traditional myth, the Eumenides came to haunt him while he guarded his mother's grave on the outskirts of the city (Graves I:64). Tyndarus, Clytemnestra's father, arrives from Sparta to bring a charge of matricide against Orestes. When he talks to Orestes, he makes a point of telling him, "Your civilization is madness, it speaks politely," meaning it is politically correct, "but acts barbarously." Menelaus, laden with the cultural treasures (spoils of war) lands at Naulpia, but sends Helen ahead to confirm the news that Agamemnon is dead and Aegisthus and Clytemnestra have been murdered. Helen, unwilling to publicly mourn for her sister because she fears a vengeful mob will attack her (since she was the cause of the Trojan War) sends Hermione, her daughter, to mourn in her place. Tyndarus warns Menelaus not to set foot on Spartan soil until he has punished his criminal nephew and niece. Menelaus agrees to attempt to gain Tyndarus' desired verdict in court, that Electra and Menelaus be stoned to death (Graves I:65).

All of this leads up to the trial of Orestes and Electra, which juxtaposes "two levels of text: one delivered in the foreground, one in the background, sometimes simultaneously. The foreground text, which is mostly what we hear, is all about private--indeed, intimate--life" (127). This foreground text goes back and forth between the three nurses or Furies. As the texts become layered into a pastiche--a technique that is typical of postmodern drama--the worlds of high art and low art collide. The nurses discuss their family structures in the mode of the daytime talkshow, and primarily address other people's dysfunctional families, particularly wives' relationships to their husbands.

 Nurse 2: This friend of mine met her husband
 through a newspaper ad?
 Nurse 1: Right.
 Nurse 2: And so now he's beating her up.
 Nurse 1: What did she expect? (127)

They also comment on their sex lives in great detail, using texts from Mai Lin's porn films, Nurse 2 goes into great detail about her insatiable sex drive.

 Nurse 2: For me, I'm turned down 70% of the
 time I want sex now. It's been five years since I
 had as much sex as I want and I keep trying to
 adjust to less sex. Doing porno films really helps
 satisfy my appetite. (128)

She goes on to discuss her nymphomania and masturbation in great detail, but all within the rubric of the daytime talkshow. The nurses' chorus is an echo of the sound bytes heard in the everyday life of American television culture.

The other overlapping portion of this foreground, private life text, is a kind of absurd standup comedian routine between two of Orestes' fellow hospital inmates, William and Nod, which grows more and more demented. It begins with a promise to punish perpetrators of violent acts of torture, but descends into a tirade that betrays what they really think:

 NOD (Reads) Manny waited until they were finished.
 "Now," he said, "I know you fellows are
 unhappy are unhappy because your girlfriends are
 sleeping with the Arabs and you've had to sell
 your Volkswagens to meet next month's mortgage
 payment, but I'm here to make you laugh in spite
 of yourselves ..." "Go ahead and do it then, you
 kosher cocksucker!" yelled the big drunk. "I wish
 to thank you for telling me like it is," Manny said
 very quietly, "Now if you'll stop finger-fucking
 your lady under the table I'll get on with my act."
 (131)

The anti-semitic audience is violent to the comedian who tries to entertain them in their moment of doubt, and the comedian responds violently with more "comedy." The comedian's act further disintegrates into a spoof on the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill trials though a coke can conversation that repeats under the surface of the trial:

John: Well, somebody put pubic hair on my coke can.

Nod: So, somebody put pubic hair on my coke can, too.

John: I'm saying, somebody put pubic hair on my coke can. (132)

The Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas case that made Supreme Court Justice turn into a phrase that resembled oxymoron repeats in the subtext, but it is louder than the final collage layer of the trial. The daytime talk show and the stand up routine are more familiar to our daily lives than real court trials, in which power plays itself out on a grander scale.

This final layer, "the background text, which we mostly don't hear is the text of public life, the trial--which is treated as so irrelevant that even those speaking it sometimes neglect to listen to it. In short, the Judicial System is in ruins. This is the Crazy Trial" (127). It is the least audible and Mee calls it, "a fragment of the archaic Greek world," probably because the actual trial is the fragment of text that more closely resembles Euripides' writing. It is the most important moment in the play, but it is inaudible. The Euripidean text is a Messenger's speech; however, Mee imagines a trial where Orestes takes the stand to argue for his own innocence. Euripides' messenger speaks of the trial:

 Then Orestes rose.
 'Men of Argos,' he said, 'it was for your sake
 as much as for my father that I killed my mother.
 (....)
 As things now stand, my father's unfaithful; wife
 is dead. But if you vote that I must die,
 then the precedent my act establishes
 must fall, and you are all as good as dead,
 since wives will have the courage of their crime.'
 (166)

Orestes continually points out that Agamemnon was made into a cuckold by Clytemnestra in order to justify his matricide. It is a trump card that Orestes plays in desperation. In Mee's text, it reads:

 Orestes: Men of Argos, it was for your sake
 as much as for my father that I killed my mother.
 If you sanction the murder of husband's by wives,
 you might as well go
 kill yourselves now or accept the domination of
 your women.
 If you vote that I must die,
 then you are all as good as dead,
 since wives will have the courage of their crimes
 (133)

The messenger in Euripides and Nod in Mee's play both agree, Orestes' speech is cheap blabber played to appease the mob. The ruling is that Orestes should be stoned to death with Electra, who encouraged his actions, but Orestes convinces them he will commit a double suicide with his sister. D.J. Hopkins and Shelley Orr, who have both dramaturged for Mee suggest "Mee appropriates classic texts, radically overwriting them with the cultural code of the contemporary. In doing so, he creates a moment of genuine connection between two distant cultures. Then he buries it" (Hopkins and Orr 16). In the intermingled quality of the background text of the trial and the foreground text of the men as degenerate comedians, women as talk show hostesses, and the track of the news media playing Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, there is a connection between cultures and time. Rather than merely burying it, Mee attempts to generate a postmodern monad where the idea that our civilization remains full of atrocity steps forward through the context of his collage reality.

This drama crosses centuries, interrogating the history of civilization as barbarism, and the nature of war and empire. In generating a three-dimensional collage reality, Mee creates a monad that crystallizes in this state of emergency. He (re)makes atrocity into a thought-provoking theater in which the angels of Mee, Ernst, Benjamin and Klee act as angels of history who are blown into the future by the storm of progress. Caught up in that wind, Mee (re)makes the debris and wreckage of civilization into postmodern American drama, which continues to ask the most difficult questions about civilization.

WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken, 1968.

Blau, Herbert. To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. New York; London: Routlege, 1992.

Bryant-Bertail, Sarah. "The Trojan Woman a Love Story: A Postmodern Semiotics of the Tragic." Theatre Research International 25 (Spring 2000): 40-52.

Euripides. Orestes. Trans. William Arrowsmith. Euripides IV. Eds. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958. 106-208.

Gimferrer, Pete. Max Ernst. New York: Rizzoli, 1983.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 2 vols. New York: Penguin, 1955.

Hopkins, D.J. and Shelley Orr. "It's a Nightmare Really. The Radical Appropriations of Charles L. Mee." TheatreForum 18 (Winter/Spring 2001):13-19.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Frederic Jameson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Max Ernst. Portrait of An Artist. Dir. Peter Schamoni. Videocassette. Reiner Mortiz Associates, Ltd., 1991.

Mee, Charles L. Orestes 2.0. History Plays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 1998: 87-158.

Mee, Erin, and Charles Mee. "Shattered and Fucked Up and Full of Wreckage." The Drama Review 46 (Fall 2002): 83-104.