Len Jenkin's Theatre: Wonder and Heart

Len Jenkin’s Theatre Wonder and Heart

Robert J. Andreach

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA, ® INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Copyright © 2011 by University Press of America,® Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 UPA Acquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2010933491 ISBN: 978-0-7618-5323-7 (paperback : alk. paper) eISBN: 978-0-7618-5324-4

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requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,

ANSI Z39.48-1992

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For Kevin, Jason, and Thelma; George and Elaine; and Jim (in memoriam) and Mary

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Gogol and Kid Twist 1 2 3

1

Limbo Tales, Dark Ride, My Uncle Sam, and Poor Folk’s Pleasure

19

American Notes, New Jerusalem, Five of Us, and Careless Love

52

A Country Doctor, Like I Say, and Pilgrims of the Night

89

Conclusion: Kraken and Margo Veil

123

Index

137

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Akadémiai Kiadó for permission to reprint, in rewritten form, Robert J. Andreach, “The Grail Quest: Providing Entrance to Len Jenkin’s Theatre,” Neohelicon 36.1 (2009) 167-77, © Akadémiai Kiadó, and William S. Doxey for permission to reprint, in rewritten form, Robert J. Andreach, “Reimagining Hermes in Len Jenkin’s Five of Us,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 39.2 (2009) 4-6, © William S. Doxey. I also wish to thank two former colleagues, Professors John Greene and John Stibravy, for sharing resources. Finally, I wish to thank Ms. Patty Shannon of The Wordstation, Avon, New Jersey, for preparing the manuscript; Ms. Joanne P. Foeller of Timely Publication Services, Hamburg, New York, for preparing the index; and Mr. Brian DeRocco of University Press of America for guiding the manuscript through the production process.

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Introduction

Gogol and Kid Twist

In a 1990 article in the New York Times, theatre critic Mel Gussow called attention to a new emphasis on the American stage. The title of the article is “Playwrights Who Put Words at Center Stage,” and its opening words are “Language is reaffirming itself in the American theater.”1 Among the playwrights cited is Len Jenkin, productions of whose plays Gussow was reviewing in the 1980s. About the same time, Paul C. Castagno was attending a conference on new directions in playwriting with Jenkin one of four featured playwrights whose works constituted a new approach to the craft. The approach so engaged Castagno’s imagination that it became the subject of his 2001 book, New Playwriting Strategies, the “basic premise” of which is “that playwriting is language based.”2 A few years later in an article entitled “Experimental Drama at the End of the Century,” Ehren Fordyce cited four playwrights who deserve mention as a group—Mac Wellman, Jenkin, Jeffrey M. Jones, and Eric Overmyer—because of their “interest in exploring the depth and range of the American vernacular.”3 Yet there is no book-length study of Jenkin’s theatre or those of the other group members for that matter, despite their garnering awards; their plays being produced in the United States and other countries, though in non-mainstream venues; and their approach’s spawning a second generation of language-based playwrights. Primarily a classroom text with exercises in the strategies, Castagno’s book is not a study of Jenkin’s theatre. My book is, the result of writing about his plays (and Overmyer’s and Wellman’s) for some time. It takes its inspiration from three sources, in addition to being a spectator at productions and hearing the poetically textured scripts performed. My first encounter with Jenkin’s theatre in published form is the first source. In 1988 Broadway Play Publishing came out with a collection of seven different plays with the seven playwrights asked to contribute statements gathered together as afterwords to 1

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Introduction

the volume. Jenkin’s play is Kid Twist; his afterword is “Some Notes on Theatre,” which is important for two qualities of his theatre that the playwright identifies. After commenting on the sense of anticipation that the opening of a play engenders—houselights fading, for instance—he writes, “Once that’s over, for something to hold me, as author or audience, there needs to be a continuing sense of wonder, as powerful as that in fairy tales, moonlight, or dreams.” The paragraph has two more sentences that clarify the first quality. The wonder “can be present in any sort of work for the stage—realistic to sublimely outrageous—and it’s a quality that can’t be fused into or onto something with clever staging or sideways performance.” The play does not require a particular mode of production to guarantee the wonder; neither can the director, the production designers, or the performers add it to the play. “It’s gotta be there, in the text and through and through.”4 The implication of the paragraph’s third line is that if language is not solely responsible for the wonder, it surely contributes to it. What constitutes the second quality, heart, is discussed in the course of this introduction. The second source is Jenkin’s introduction to a volume of his plays published by Sun & Moon Press in which he relates that he wrote poems and narrative prose before writing plays.5 The third source is the presses that publish his plays. Broadway Play Publishing is sensitive to language’s potential in the theatre, and Sun & Moon Press’ stated mission is helping to promote theatre as a literary form. Having made a case for Jenkin’s language-based theatre, I do not mean to create the impression that his plays are reading experiences. They can be read, but they have to be seen, for they are theatre experiences with the stage images as arresting as the written images. Two plays of the 1970s demonstrate the fusion of verbal and visual images, but they are examined here in the introduction because in them a critic can isolate for study two salient features of Jenkin’s theatre. The first feature, distinguishing the first play, is the quest, in this play for a new fusion of images to revive a dying theatre. The second feature, distinguishing the second play, is the new type of play that the new fusion of images creates. I have written about these two plays elsewhere but have no intention of repeating in toto the analyses here, although some repetition is unavoidable.6 Jenkin prefaces the text of his play Gogol with the closing line of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man and his thanks to John Webster for misquoting him. There are two possible connections between the novel and the play The White Devil. The novel’s subtitle is His Masquerade; it is a series of confrontations on a ship of fools between the Confidence Man in his various incarnations and those he would swindle, most of whom he does. In the play’s fifth act, the Duke of Florence and others are disguised so that they can take revenge on the Duke of Brachiano for killing his wife, Florence’s

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sister. For the second possibility, Hennig Cohen points out in his introduction to the novel that “snake imagery associates the Confidence Man with Satan, especially in his role of the dissembler and tempter of Eden.”7 Various characters in Webster’s play are called devils; in his dying delirium, Brachiano even sees a devil. Yet these are tenuous connections. It is better to interpret the closing line that Jenkin quotes, “ ‘Something further may follow of this masquerade,’ ”8 as a setting up of his play as a sequel of sorts to Melville’s novel. In other words, The Confidence-Man shapes the structure of the contemporary play whereas the passage from The White Devil, misquoted in the penultimate scene, shapes only the ultimate scene. Gogol opens with a prologue in which a character with that name addresses the audience. He is meant to recall the 19th-century novelist, short story writer, and playwright, not because of any allusions to specific works but because his ravings—for example, “I am Gogol, cloud and mud. I am extinct. I run the roller-coaster at night. I am a go-go dancer and a fool” (5)—recall the 19th-century author’s fantastic flights of imagination and the decline in his mental and physical health. Suffering from depression and the effects of fanatical fasting, he died shortly after destroying the projected second volume of Dead Souls. The character Gogol distinguishes between two states of his health. He gives a cause for one of the states: an accident in which he was speared in the side by a prop from a production of Hamlet. The wound recalls the wound suffered by Anfortas, the Fisher King in the Parzival story, especially since a later scene translates a crucial passage in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s 13th-century version of the story. On the issue of sources and allusions in his theatre, Jenkin does not identify every source he uses, even though the Parzival story is reimagined in Gogol. Neither do they carry equal weight, even when he identifies them as in the case of the two prefacing the play’s published text. Finally, I cannot pretend that I have identified all the sources and allusions. I can only hope that I have recognized the major ones. Although Wolfram’s Parzival is a major source, the examination of which must be delayed, the Anfortas wound is not the reason Gogol is hosting a party for the doctor he hopes will “cure” him (26). As he relates, the prop fell on him as he was preparing to rehearse his lines for the party, and he has two concurrent sets of terms for what he is suffering. “Accident” and “injury” refer to the spear’s penetration of his side, causing a “wound” that is still bleeding. “Illness” and “weakness” (5–6) refer to the state of his health that prompted an invitation to the doctor. He gives no cause for this other state, but its effect is declining health that has brought him to the brink of “extinct[tion].” With “final business to conduct, to wind up” his “affairs,” he has arranged the party, even though he has “never met” the guest (5).

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Introduction

The first scene of the play proper also has concurrent tracks of language. One, spoken by a character named Franz Anton Mesmer, who recalls the 18th-century physician, is the language of animal magnetism, the premise of the physician’s practice that a fluid permeated all of life. Believing that obstacles blocking the fluid caused diseases in humans, he devised a treatment to stimulate its flowing. To calm a female patient who feels cured after a session in his healing bath, the character Mesmer explains that the “magnetic bath has drained away a lifetime of poisons.” To her experience of a “miracle,” he demurs, attributing the salutary effect to the “guided operation of natural forces” (7). The other track is spoken by her husband. Forcing himself into the salon, he accuses the doctor of being a “mountebank” (9) preying on vulnerable patients such as his beautiful young wife. Though the scene is imaginary, its basis is historical. Leaving Vienna for Paris because of objections to his methods, the 18th-century healer achieved considerable success before having his practice discredited. The patient’s departure with her husband, vowing that the matter is not over, leaves Mesmer alone for the second scene, a companion to the prologue in that he, like Gogol, addresses the audience identifying himself and, like his counterpart, speaking both tracks. He is a doctor who “heal[s]” the sick and a “quack” (9). The difference between the two monologues is that whereas Gogol explains the first track, the accident, but not the second, the illness, Mesmer explains both tracks. At least he tries to explain, devoting most of the monologue to the second track: being a quack. He is one because he cannot “invent a believable explanation” for his success. That is, he neither fully understands nor controls what happens in a session, although he knows the session heals. Whatever it is that happens—“magnetism, psychic forces, energy channels”—he ends the monologue and the scene with this assertion: “You name it, I suck it up and deliver free, except for a small service charge” (10–11). The patient’s husband has an explanation for Mesmer’s success. He gains the “confidence” (8) of women like his wife. The explanation invokes Melville’s novel whose Confidence Man in one of his incarnations is a herb-doctor who peddles the nostrums Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator and Samaritan Pain Dissuader. Three differences between the novel and the play are immediately apparent, however. Mesmer does not peddle his cure; his patients come to him. His sessions are not fraudulent; they are beneficial for many patients. Gogol is not a victim of a confidence game; he invites Mesmer to his house because he needs the doctor. Thus the connection between The Confidence-Man and Gogol has to be delayed until the end of the examination, for the two characters’ interaction creates the play. We can begin examining their interaction as established so far: that Gogol needs Mesmer because medical science cannot cure him. Since the play is not

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about a condition responsive to conventional medical treatment and since Gogol does not clarify his illness, we have to discover it. Part 1 of the play consists of a prologue and eight scenes with the second scene, “Mesmer Alone,” the companion to the prologue, “Gogol Alone.” In scene 3 Gogol’s mistress delivers the party invitation to the doctor, whose nurse relates that trouble is brewing for him. The Resurrection Man, warning Mesmer in scene 4 that his enemies have gone to hire Inspector Bucket (from Dickens’ Bleak House), advises him to take refuge in a theater. In the next scene, Bucket accepts the assignment and dispatches his two assistants to the theater, where in scene 6 they replace the two actors and two actresses onstage and make pointed remarks to spectator Mesmer, who leaves for Gogol’s house, the site of scene 7, where the playwright’s mistress, a chained woman, and a bear occupy a red-curtained stage within the stage. Scene 8 is the host’s instructions about the party to his mistress and the two actors and two actresses performing at the theater before Bucket’s assistants replaced them. The above scene-by-scene synopsis reveals the centrality of theatre in the play’s setting and action. Yet tonight’s performance, which is the party’s function, will be the last time Gogol and the others will be together as a troupe because as he said to his mistress in scene 7, Mesmer will “cure” him or he will “cure” Mesmer (26). His illness therefore must be connected to his particular kind of theatre, which he identifies when in the instructions he recapitulates the training he received under his teacher, master of fantastic flights of the imagination: “ ‘Vishnu and his mother Kali,’ ” “ ‘The Destruction of Nineveh,’ ” and “ ‘Aeolus Whispering to Venus the Secret of the Winds.’ ” Yet the methods his own troupe used were the extreme opposite of fantastic flights. They are the tools of vaudeville or circus performers: “the grimace, the take, the shout, the eyes rolling distraught, the joy buzzer, the whoopee cushion, the squirting flower and the X-ray specs” (29–30). His theatre’s illness, which is his illness, is that it has no anchor in realistic or naturalistic theatre, and without an anchor, it is uprooted from a nourishing ground. He does not explain the illness because he does not have to. It is obvious in the madness, which is the disconnection or incoherence in the opening monologue’s images, in the history of his theatre, and in the activity in scene 7. After popping a globe containing explorer Magellan’s head, the mistress advances toward the chained woman before a bear warns her to stop—a scene that could be a parody of Elizabethan-Shakespearean bear-baiting. Even scene 7’s title implies theatre. Gogol’s residence is not his home but his “House” (22), a technical term as in the stage directions for houselights going down or coming up. But how can Mesmer cure an illness in the theatre? One approach to Gogol is to see the two principals as the artist tapping the irrational and the scientist

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Introduction

for whom animal magnetism was a “way to understand illnesses and a way to cure them rationally.”9 The opposition is not absolute because although Mesmer admits to being ill in scene 2, he cannot cure himself. Since he and Gogol need each other, their opposition that constitutes an antinomy is one of emphasis. Inhabiting a house with “iron gates made with strange pictures” (34), Gogol inhabits the fluid unconscious that releases strange pictures or disconnected images such as Magellan’s head, a chained woman, and a bear. Inhabiting a “salon” (7), one definition of which is a place for the exhibition of works of art, Mesmer inhabits formed consciousness that arranges the released images in meaningful relationships. As he says about whatever it is that his treatment releases, “I suck it up and deliver free” (11). Thus the play’s action is the quest for the interaction leading to the reconciliation of the two forces or energies the two principals embody. The approach that this study proposes is to see the two principals as two artists, albeit of different kinds of theatre. The image that best captures Gogol’s condition, that of the chained woman, is set within the red-curtained space. The space also doubles as the site of Mesmer’s healing bath. The 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes a session in the doctor’s salon complete with lighting, music, and patients’ seating arrangement, going on to describe how the 18th-century Mesmer, “clothed in the dress of a magician, glided amongst them.”10 The effect was very theatrical. But one does not have to visit the library for the description because part 2 enacts a healing session. The caveat in the preceding paragraph obtains in this paragraph too. The opposition is not absolute but one of emphasis. Although Mesmer’s theatre would seem to be the theatre of wonder, the first essential quality of Jenkin’s theatre, because of the results achieved by animal magnetism, it is a naturalistic theatre in that his treatment is the “guided operation of natural forces” (7) he can neither fully understand nor control while seeking a rational explanation for the operation. His theatre resembles Émile Zola’s naturalistic theatre. In his preface to the novel Thérèse Raquin from which he adapted his play of the same name, Zola states his aim as trying “to explain the mysterious attraction that can spring up between two different temperaments,” and a page later, he characterizes the writing of the novel as a “giving” of himself “up entirely to precise analysis of the mechanism of the human being.”11 Although Gogol’s theatre would seem to be that of conscious crafting because he created works for his troupe and in part 2 stages theatricals for them to perform, by simply releasing images it is more of a theatre of wonder than is Mesmer’s, which in its healing capacity is more of a theatre of heart, the second essential quality of Jenkin’s theatre. The play’s action, however, remains the same as that in the preceding paragraph except that it is a quest for the interaction leading to the reconciliation of the two kinds of theatre.

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The vehicle for the quest is a reimagining of one of Western literature’s great quest narratives: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. In search of adventure in chapter 5, the young knight comes upon a group of sportsmen at a lake. In response to his inquiry about shelter for the night, the lord of the group, the Fisher King, directs him to a nearby castle where he is received as if he were the lord and where he witnesses a marvelous ceremony. Conducted in a hall where the Fisher King, a man so stricken he can only recline on a sling-bed, is surrounded by an assembly in mourning yet gathered to celebrate, it begins with the entrance of a page carrying a bleeding lance. In succession maidens enter with the appointments for a banquet that they set before the lord of the castle, described as “more dead than alive.”12 The last of the maidens is Repanse de Schoye, who enters, her face so refulgent “that all imagined it was sunrise,” with “ ‘The Gral’ ” (125), a precious stone with the power to serve a wondrous meal. The banquet over, the Fisher King presents Parzival with a sword, but since as part of his training for knighthood, the young knight was tutored not to ask questions unless invited to, he does not ask a “Question” (127) about his host’s wound, the ceremony, or the sword. Awakening the next morning, he discovers that the castle is deserted. Leaving, he is taunted by a page at the drawbridge and by his cousin Sigune in the forest for not asking “ ‘the Question.’ ” Had he asked about the sword, for example, Sigune tells him that he would have learned of its magical power to be “ ‘made whole’ ” after shattering (134). She identifies the stricken man as Anfortas. Part 2 of Gogol takes place in Gogol’s house. Since it has “iron gates made with strange pictures” (34), and since one of part-2’s theatricals is entitled “‘Here in the Castle’ ” (40), it is the Grail castle. The opening scene can be thought of as a prologue to the second part or act. Talking animatedly about the host, the members of the acting troupe offer different interpretations for his wealth and illness, pausing to ask Mesmer what he thinks, but before he can answer, the mistress draws him away from the others with the expectation that his curiosity has been whetted. The act proper then opens with theatricals: scenes or episodes staged by the wounded host for the lone guest. A girl with the vaudevillian Porker Pundit that answers audience questions asks Mesmer to ask it a question, but he asks about his own welfare, revealing his failure to recognize his role in the contemporary ceremony. He also asks a question in the next theatrical in which the explorer Stanley insists he is searching for him, Doctor Mesmer. “Aren’t you searching for Doctor Livingstone?” (39), the guest asks, revealing his failure to recognize the allusion to the Grail, the precious stone with the mysterious power to sustain life. Mesmer is not insensitive. The actor playing Stanley pushes him toward the red curtain, which parts for the episode or scene “‘Here in the Castle’”

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Introduction

that is the image not only symbolic of Gogol’s condition but of the human condition: the chained woman struggling to live while dying in the body. A man with heart, Mesmer grabs the Resurrection Man when he attempts to carry her off. Gogol has to intervene and restore order because the cure is not in pulling the woman free from her chains, just as the medieval cure is not in pulling Anfortas, also caught in the state of living death, away from his sling-bed. Neither is the cure in the contemporary reimagining of the Parzival story pulling Gogol free from his castle. Something more radical than that maneuver is needed for the theatre artist and his art to be made whole. An additional theatrical and an epilogue are not the something, pregnant though they are. In the former an actor playing Pontius Pilate urges Mesmer to kill him for ordering the execution of Jesus. The doctor refuses despite the mistress’ criticism that by not participating, he is “spoiling the play” (46) until he consents. In the latter a man praying to “Lord Jesus” while waiting on a road for someone to pick him up until his head “slumps” (47) is an image of humanity abandoned by the execution. The Savior is not dead in Parzival. Even so, the knight can become a figure of the Savior by sacrificing himself for the wounded man’s suffering. In chapter 9 the hermit Trevrizent, who with Anfortas is Parzival’s uncle, tells him that if the one summoned to the castle asks the Question, “ ‘Anfortas will be healed’ ” (246). Years after the first visit, in chapter 16, the poem’s concluding chapter, the questing hero is given a second chance. “ ‘Dear Uncle, what ails you?’ ” he asks the stricken man, who is “whole and well again,” and Parzival, now “King and Sovereign” (395), is lord of the Grail castle and reunited with his wife and sons from whom his adventures separated him. The subtitle of Gogol: A Mystery Play invokes medieval religious drama that, like Parzival, is centered in Christianity’s principal mystery: Christ’s death and resurrection. Mystery plays are cycles of plays performing biblical stories from creation to doomsday in which the Savior’s self-sacrifice redeems humankind. Pilate is a character in some of the plays because he orders the execution. With its red-curtained space to the rear of the performing space, Gogol’s stage also resembles a medieval stage. Death and resurrection will be enacted in Gogol, but since it is a contemporary play, the subtitle underscores the two contemporary mysteries: the artist’s illness and the curative power for the illness. As early as act-1’s closing scene, Gogol gives an insight into his illness when in his instructions to the members of his troupe, he reminds them of the time he “was a playwright” (28). The tense is crucial in that he stopped being a playwright and not because of his madness, for releasing disconnected images is his role as artist of the unconscious in creating theatre art. In act-2’s

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scene that precedes the first theatrical, he introduces himself to his guest as an “author who has produced, for the past twenty years, silence” (35). All that he can produce for the party are theatricals: a series of scenes or episodes that from the guest’s perception are unrelated images. He tries once more in the scene following the epilogue when he tells Mesmer that inside him “grows an empty room, dusty, quiet, no one has disturbed its peace for years” (50). He cannot mean that he has exhausted the storehouse of images because when Mesmer touches his temples in the healing session, the charge emanating from him hurls the doctor to the floor. His condition is worsening, however, as imaged in the empty room. The decline has to be the interpretation for his repeated insistence that he is dying. The explanation for Gogol’s illness—the creative inactivity imaged as an empty room—is that his disconnected images have no ground in which to take root so that they can be connected and transformed into art. Mesmer is the ground, but he too is ill, despite his disease’s refusal “to develop symptoms” (10), for he too is a theatre artist included in the first of the play’s two mysteries, the curative power for the illness being the second. As early as act1’s opening scenes, he gives an insight into his illness when he calls himself both a doctor for having the power to heal and a quack for not understanding what to make of the power to suck up the patient’s illness in the healing session. He also recognizes that given his situation with the medical authorities and irate husbands, his opportunities to continue staging the theatrical sessions are “running out” (11). In his illness therefore, Mesmer lacks the images to suck up as doctor and does not know where to get the images to seize and form as artist of consciousness. In other words, he lacks imagination. His condition is worsening too in that he makes no effort to grasp the significance of the theatricals staged for his benefit or, until the performances are ended and the host addresses him, the reason for the invitation. Like Gogol, he with his theatre art is incomplete. Not knowing what his illness is—what to make of the power he possesses—Gogol images him as a “double dream in a dead dinosaur” (52). In chapter 9 of the 13th-century poem, Trevrizent tells Parzival that only those “ ‘summoned’ ” (241) to the Grail castle can participate in the medieval ceremony. By assuming his host’s wound on his second visit, the summoned knight becomes a figure of the Savior. Gogol summons Mesmer to his castle because of his notoriety in unblocking life’s fluid. By assuming his host’s wound in the contemporary ceremony, the guest would become a savior, acknowledging not only the emptiness of his host’s theatre art but also his own, thereby freeing the images to flow again. Since Mesmer cannot cure him, however, Gogol cures both of them because in the contemporary version of the Parzival story, the contemporary Anfortas is the quester. “You have

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Introduction

been a fool,” he says to the contemporary Parzival. “This will cease. You are to become my cup” (55). “My cup” returns to the Grail symbolism with the host becoming a figure of Christ, the blood from whose lance-pierced side, according to one legend, was collected in the Grail-as-cup by Joseph of Arimathea. Giving a dagger to his guest and ordering him to drive it through his skull, he makes him the vessel in which the two of them will live. “You will save us both,” Gogol says as he sacrifices himself to Mesmer. “One stroke, and clean. I don’t wish to flop about like a fish” (57), he bids farewell to the wounded Fisher King incarnation. Together the two become a whole person, Mesmer-Gogol, lord of the Grail castle in the contemporary death and resurrection. Connecting the artist of consciousness with the artist of the unconscious, Mesmer-Gogol connects the two types of theatre disconnected when the action began but does not yet create the new theatre. The misquoting of Webster’s The White Devil, which precedes the sacrifice and stresses the resurrection rather than the burial, augurs a new creativity but one that requires the infusion of the second mystery, that of the curative power. Perhaps the most crucial passage in Parzival is definitely the most crucial passage in Gogol. When Repanse de Schoye enters the hall in the medieval ceremony, the passage reads, “Upon a green achmardi she bore the consummation of heart’s desire, its root and its blossoming—a thing called ‘The Gral’, paradisal, transcending all earthly perfection!” (125) When Gogol enters the stage toward act-1’s end, he reproves his mistress for interfering with the rehearsals for the evening’s performances: “Roots, then branches, then almost anything you can imagine” (25). In the medieval ceremony, the Grail is the inexhaustible supernatural power to sustain life and make it whole. In the contemporary theatre, imagination is the inexhaustible power to sustain art and make it whole. Natural to humankind, it must, however, have roots in which to operate because without roots as in Gogol’s illness, it generates incoherent images. Yet without imagination as in Mesmer’s illness, the roots do not blossom; the doctor does not know what to make of the operation of the natural forces that he guides. United, Mesmer-Gogol can infuse imagination’s power into the operation, guiding the forces into whole art. The play’s final scene is a prelude to the new creativity. Gogol’s images that had nowhere to go empower Mesmer with imagination. Seizing it, he knows how to interpret Gogol’s death. When Inspector Bucket arrives to arrest Mesmer, with the others Mesmer-Gogol identifies the body as that of the doctor and quack so that when Bucket leaves with the body, the whole artist is lord of the castle and its mystery from which the detective is excluded. In his element with a mystery such as Tulkinghorn’s murder in Bleak House, Bucket is out of his element with a theatre of mystery.

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The theatricals ended, the host expresses his hope for their effect on his guest and the play’s audience: “I hope they have opened a wound that won’t close, a dark space in the center of the chest, in which darkness, if they [guest and audience] look carefully, they can see the stars” (48). By including the play’s audience, Jenkin makes the wound symbolic of the dying state of the American theatre revived by the explosion of innovative and exciting theatre in the 20th-century’s closing quarter, the time in which he began his career as playwright. Gogol’s wound and illness bring Mesmer with his illness to the castle, there to be joined in a mysterious healing ceremony in which the host’s images flow into the guest’s ground, uniting natural power with natural forces. Once they are flowing, the images can come from sources in addition to the unconscious: from history and fiction, for example, or from popular songs and biblical allusions or from Greek mythology and Hollywood movies. The ground can be just about anything so long as it is rooted because the flowing images will grow branches and then imagination will transform the branches into a new art, a new theatre. The play’s closing image, Mesmer-Gogol dancing with his mistress, celebrates this creation as the theatre of wonder and heart. In the afterword “Some Notes on Theatre” in which he defines wonder, Jenkin also defines his theatre’s second quality. Heart reveals that the author “is not primarily an entertainer; that he/she is a preacher, and a singer, and a human being” (435). One way for a play to reveal the quality is in the author investing his characters with heart expressed in love. In Gogol the wonder is in Gogol’s death and resurrection that violates the natural order, and the heart is in sacrificing himself to cure Mesmer and in the closing dance in which the reconstituted artist dances with his mistress. Since Gogol reimagines the Parzival quest, one has to ask why Jenkin prefaced the text with a passage from Melville’s novel rather than one from Wolfram’s poem. I think the explanation is that The Confidence-Man contains a fuller, more easily understood discussion of essentially the same aesthetic as that contained in the translated passage on the relationship between a fertile ground and a soaring imagination. Chapter 33 is an authorial intrusion in which Melville distinguishes between different classes of people in terms of their expectations in fiction. He does not side with those who expect absolute fidelity to real life as they experience it: what today we would call naturalism. He sides with the class that “look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, even for more reality, than real life itself can show. Thus, though they want novelty, they want nature, too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed. … It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie” (199). In chapter 44 in distinguishing between original and different characters—“singular, striking,

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odd” and so forth—he argues for the latter because characters “cannot be born in the author’s imagination—it being as true in literature as in zoology, that all of life is from the egg” (261). Like the fiction in which they play their parts, characters must be grounded or anchored in reality; only then can their creator’s imagination unfetter them. The Confidence Man’s first incarnation is that of a steamer traveler who “by stealing into retirement, and there going asleep … seemed to have courted oblivion” (6). In his eighth incarnation, the Confidence Man identifies himself as a “ ‘cosmopolitan.’ ” Initiating conversation, he wears an outfit described as “grotesque” and puffs on a redolent “Nuremberg pipe” (142–43). Think of Bartleby and Ahab, transformed into a recluse and a madman. Gogol ends with the quest for the interaction reconciling the two types of theatre achieved. Kid Twist is the new theatre in which imagination transforms the ground by interacting and integrating parallel universes, multiple frames, and concurrent tracks. With the audience seated for the performance, offstage voices are amplified for the prologue entitled “Testimony.” The voices are those of a prosecutor and a killer turned witness, Abe Reles, nicknamed Kid Twist, who testifies to murders he and associates such as Harry Strauss, nicknamed Pittsburgh Phil, committed as organized-crime gang members in the 1930s. Reles was a real person who in a deal with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office testified against other gang members in return for freedom from prosecution for the murders. He died under mysterious circumstances on November 12, 1941, while being held in protective custody in the supposedly impregnable Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island’s waterfront. The prologue establishes the structural device of contrast in language, established in Gogol by the juxtaposition of Gogol’s and Mesmer’s monologues. Reles’ jargon contrasts with the prosecutor’s standard, literal English. To the latter’s opening question about his role as a gang member for Murder, Incorporated: “Mr. Reles, did you kill a labor delegate named Seligman?” the former replies: “It was an easy pop. I follow the guy into the movies. …”13 The dialogue then establishes additional contrasts. One is in the juxtaposition of extraordinary violence committed in ordinary places. For example, Reles tells the jury how he took the fire-ax from the movie-house wall and while the audience was watching the screen sank it into the delegate’s head. Another contrast isolates Reles’ amoral universe within the prosecutor’s moral universe. To the latter’s question about how a human being could commit such crimes without pangs of conscience, the former’s reply is that he “wanted to eat steak and drink champagne and go to Florida” (47). The prologue also creates wonder. Gogol’s mad monologue, imitation of a train as he chugs about the stage, and revelation of a wound still bleeding from an accident that occurred weeks earlier create wonder in the prologue

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of Gogol. Yet even with its more naturalistic language, the prologue of Kid Twist is more unsettling, more wondrous. Seeing the actor in the role of Gogol reduces the character’s strangeness. The courtroom testimony reveals the presence of a universe heard but unseen, and it is an amoral universe, for Reles’ testimony to crimes committed not only without remorse but with pleasure conjures a savage universe that remains invisible when darkness signals the prologue’s end and a brightly lit white curtain signals the play proper’s beginning. Only when a character, a police officer named Sarge, appears after first speaking offstage does the savage world begin to materialize, preceded here too by offstage voices. Referring to the holding pens in which the men waiting to be put in a police lineup are kept as “cages,” Sarge stamps on the floor. From below the floor rises a sound like the “growling of hundreds of apes” (48). The amoral world is society’s underworld where savagery’s frenzy is unrestrained by civilization’s law and order. The wonder in Gogol increases as the action moves to the Grail castle for the reimagining of a medieval ceremony that was itself wondrous. The wonder in Kid Twist increases too but not immediately. To the audience’s surprise, when the hoodlums enter one by one from the holding pens to stand before the white curtain to be identified by Sarge, they are the most ordinary looking of men. Reles, for instance, in nondescript clothes and ignoring Sarge’s orders to assume a series of positions in the lineup, is expressionless. The scene presents another contrast in ordinary men who commit extraordinary violence, but the dramaturgy moves beyond contrast as the play progresses. Jenkin deflates while he inflates; he simultaneously establishes and subverts. Given the inflated deeds in this parallel universe, the audience expects the perpetrators to be, if not larger than life, at least different; the lineup’s visual image deflates them. Given the wonder of a universe with alternate codes of conduct, the audience expects its materializing to intensify the wonder; the visual image renders it banal. The verbal images when the scene shifts to the Half Moon Hotel also render the materialized universe banal with the dialogue revolving around the deal the Kid struck with the District Attorney’s office, his expectation to walk out of the hotel after the final three days of his testimony that is the play’s time span, his placing a bet with the hotel waiter who doubles as a bookie, and the boredom felt by Sarge and a fellow officer, Babyface, who are charged with protecting him while he is in custody. The one unusual note is the two officers’ occasional ominous warning that Reles may not find walking away so easy after testifying against fellow mobsters. Only when the hotel scenes dissolve into dream sequences does the wonder increase, but when it does, the current is on full force, for having little to do confined to his room, Reles sleeps and sleeping dreams, the contents of which are the murders about

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Introduction

which he is testifying when awake. By giving Abraham Reles an inner life that materializes in dreams, Jenkin not only restores wonder, he transforms the hoodlum into Kid Twist, the lead actor in unrestrained violence. Furthermore, as the hotel room dissolves into the dream sequences, for the first time the verbal images not only spoken by Kid but also by his fellow killers, the victims, and the spectators of the murders fuse with the visual images that the dreams enact. The fusion creates a contrast between the nondescript visual image Kid embodies in his person and the lurid images the mayhem actualizes in the dreams, but enough has been written about the structural device of contrast. Any more citing would detract from Jenkin’s other dramaturgical techniques. When Kid Twist opens, the prologue creates a unitary self in that Abe, Kid Twist, Reles speaks for himself and other mobsters in testimony about the murders. When he sleeps, however, other characters surface in the dreams and with him speak for the murders so that he is no longer a unitary self. He is fractured into a Rabbi from his Jewish upbringing, Captain Pruss of the ill-fated Hindenburg airship from his reading and baseball’s Babe Ruth and the comic-book Joker from his heroworshiping. Yet when he is awake in the hotel room, he returns to his unitary self. He is a married man with children whose wife visits him. The same technique obtains for the narrative. The action moves linearly from the prologue to the hotel, there to reverse to the past when the murders were committed and the Hindenburg’s arrival over New York in 1937, and then returns to the present in 1941 and moves linearly until the next dream takes over the stage. A variation on simultaneously inflating and deflating, the technique simultaneously creates the twin foundations of naturalistic drama, character and narrative, while subverting them. The technique therefore simultaneously creates and subverts the naturalistic play and the non-naturalistic play. And the technique that fuses the hotel room and the dreams into a single, hybrid, play fuses arresting verbal and visual images such as Babe Ruth handing the Kid a baseball bat with which to split the skull of one victim, Puggy Feinstein, following which murder the Kid and Pittsburgh Phil discuss having a meal or the Joker watching the Kid stab another victim, Jake the Painter, and then tell his blind mistress to feel for Jake’s body in the tub in which he was relaxing. Two grounds or anchors that are historical sources enable Jenkin’s imagination to transform nature by fusing types of plays and images such as those above, thereby giving Kid Twist its power. The first ground is the 1951 record of organized crime and its enforcement arm in the 1930s. From it Jenkin takes courtroom testimony but changes some of it by having Reles take credit for murders other gang members committed, and to it he adds dialogue he wrote for the play. The dreams enact the murders but not necessarily as they were

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committed, and to them he adds both historical and fictional characters: Captain Pruss, Babe Ruth, and the Joker. The second ground is the 1937 transatlantic flight of the Hindenburg, the airship that symbolized National Socialist aspirations in world affairs.14 For an alternative perspective on the two grounds, Jenkin creates a Reporter, the counterpart to Kid. Whereas the Kid is subconscious urge, the Reporter is conscious mind; whereas the Kid’s jargon is that of the underworld, the Reporter’s is that of the newspaper world. The killing of Jake the Painter illustrates the contrast. In the 1951 record, Reles shot Jake on the street in September 1932. Seeking the watching Joker’s approbation in the dream, he stabs the victim in the bathtub and then directs Jake’s blind mistress to feel for the body. As the scene dissolves, the Reporter phones in the latest gangland slaying, that of Jake, shot to death by “masked negroes in Good Humor man uniforms” (89). He then shifts the report to the latest information on the Hindenburg’s arrival. The slaying, which occurs in act 2, is the last of the enacted murders that began in act 1 and the most lurid in deed and report with Reles and his counterpart by now a generic killer and a generic reporter.15 What each is doing is exaggerating his role in the events. Displaced from front-page coverage by news of the war being waged in Europe, the Kid wants the public to recognize his role in the making of gangland history. Conscious of the public’s growing interest in the trials that threatens to displace the war news, the Reporter wants the public to recognize his role in making them aware of national and international history. In the Kid’s dreams and the Reporter’s reports, Jenkin mixes the rational and the irrational, research and invention, fact and fantasy, historical and fictional characters, grounded nature and transforming imagination. Mixing genres and styles, modes and tones, he creates parallel universes, multiple frames, and concurrent tracks that interact, interpenetrate, and fuse. Having each hoodlum one by one position himself against the white curtain in the lineup creates frames. When Reles vacates the lineup for the hotel room, the still frames become scenes with the Kid interacting with the two police bodyguards or with other gang members, victims, and spectators in the dreams. Following each dream the Reporter appears to create a frame that becomes an active scene as he phones in his version of the murder. As the action develops, the two sets of frames that become scenes become two parallel universes that intersect toward act-1’s end when the Hindenburg appears in the Kid’s dream in which Captain Pruss rhapsodizes on the image the airship creates as the swastikas on its “underbelly wiggle waggle over America” (69). When act 2 opens, the Reporter has exited his universe to enter a frame in the Kid’s universe. Although they do not speak to each other, both are present for Pittsburgh Phil’s electrocution. Back in his own universe to report on Jake the Painter’s murder, he remains there until the two

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Introduction

universes, racing on concurrent tracks, converge, collide, and diverge in the violent conclusion in which the Reporter covers the blazing explosion of the Hindenburg in 1937 while the two bodyguards, who have been paid to silence their charge because his testimony threatens to expose people in high places, prepare to kill the Kid in 1941. Distorting history while dramatizing it, destabilizing character and narrative while stabilizing them, Kid Twist subverts the naturalistic play while creating it. The killer cannot escape his fate in Kid Twist as a naturalistic play in which he is driven by unconscious urges he cannot control, yet in Kid Twist as a non-naturalistic play, he gains consciousness. Drugged and pushed out the hotel window, he has a moment of blazing illumination in which he pleads with his mother to keep him “up into the light” (100), just after the Reporter bewails the catastrophe’s terrible loss of life. The Kid and the Reporter do not constitute the play’s sole set of parallel universes. The Kid is one universe in another set connected with the second universe in an image both naturalistic and non-naturalistic. There is no physical window in the hotel room in the play’s scenic design. When the Kid looks toward the audience, as if looking toward the water, he does so at a space that creates the illusion of a window in the invisible fourth wall separating him from the audience. Yet when the bodyguards push him through this space, his foot gets caught in the line of bedsheets they tossed through the space so that he hangs dangling in front of the audience at which time Sarge speaks directly to the audience, dispelling the fourth-wall illusion. This is Sarge’s second attempt to connect the two universes established in the opening scene: those of the underworld members and the spectators. As the former are framed against the white curtain in that scene, he appeals to the latter, also framed in a motionless audience body, as victims of crimes to “Look ’em over” (49): to come forward and make positive identification so that the authorities can prosecute the criminals. But the spectators remain in their universe. So does Kid remain in his universe except that periodically he goes to the window, there to frame himself in a mirror image in which he can see the society in which he originated and the society can see itself in him, can see him as one of them. Since the audience does not publicly acknowledge the bond, the two universes become concurrent tracks racing to the inevitable conclusion. The play’s fusion of visual and verbal images in the fusion of genres and styles, modes and tones creates the wonder. Sarge addresses the heart. Gogol and Mesmer speak directly to their play’s audience as spectators. Sarge speaks directly to his play’s audience as participants in the drama. In the closing scene, his appeal becomes an exhortation to “Look him over” (101): to have the audience see what they will become—what their society will become. The play wants the audience to see in the dead Kid what the Reporter

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wants the public to see. Only by becoming emotionally engaged—only by developing heart—can people recognize that violence begets violence and if unchecked by good people becomes epidemic, killing indiscriminately the innocent with the guilty. Hence the exhortation to the audience to be stimulated by the wondrous images so as to become engaged in a communal, moral response of the heart to violence on a national and an international scale. To discover the wonder and heart in Jenkin’s theatre, the following chapters examine the new type of play that the dramaturgy established in the introduction creates. Not all of his plays have been published and where he does not indicate when a play was written, the only information about it is the date of the premiere. Yet except where this study violates chronology for a specific reason, the plays are examined in a general chronological order, for the study pays attention to the information supplied. For example, Gogol and Kid Twist are plays of the 1970s, and a sketch of the playwright’s career in a play published separately, Careless Love, states that with a fifth play that the study withholds until chapter 2, the four plays examined in chapter 1 were written in the 1980s.

NOTES 1. Mel Gussow, “Playwrights Who Put Words at Center Stage,” New York Times 11 Feb. 1990: A5. 2. Paul C. Castagno, New Playwriting Strategies: A Language-Based Approach to Playwriting (New York: Routledge, 2001) 1. 3. Ehren Fordyce, “Experimental Drama at the End of the Century,” in A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama, ed. David Krasner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 539. 4. Len Jenkin, “Some Notes on Theatre,” afterword, 7 Different Plays, ed. Mac Wellman (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1988) 435. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 5. Len Jenkin, introduction, Dark Ride and Other Plays (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1993) 8. 6. For Gogol, see Andreach, Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998) 113–24. For Kid Twist, see Andreach, “Kid Twist: Dramatizing American History Surrealistically,” The McNeese Review 39 (2001): 76–91, rewritten for Andreach, The War Against Naturalism: In the Contemporary American Theatre (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008) 141–50. 7. Hennig Cohen, introduction, The Confidence-Man, by Herman Melville (New York: Holt, 1964) xx. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 8. Len Jenkin, Gogol: A Mystery Play, in Theatre of Wonder: Six Contemporary American Plays, ed. Mac Wellman (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1985) 3. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically.

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9. André M. Weitzenhoffer, “Mesmer, Franz Anton,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 10. “Mesmer, Friedrich Anton,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. 11. Émile Zola, preface to the 2nd ed., Thérèse Raquin, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1962) 22–23. 12. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. A.T. Hatto (London: Penguin, 1980) 123. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 13. Len Jenkin, Kid Twist, in 7 Different Plays 45. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 14. Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder, Murder, Inc.: The Story of the “Syndicate” (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952) and Michael Macdonald Mooney, The Hindenburg (New York: Dodd, 1972). Photos of the airship show swastikas painted on the tailfins and not on the underbelly. The airship was a symbol, though. For its role in National Socialist electioneering, see 82–85. 15. Castagno examines characters in Jenkin’s plays as stage figures and archetypes 72–79. Since Jenkin’s practice of identifying speakers with generic or archetypal designations becomes widespread in the 1980s, this study withholds capitalizing the designations until the first chapter.

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Chapter One

Limbo Tales, Dark Ride, My Uncle Sam, and Poor Folk’s Pleasure

First produced in 1980, Limbo Tales consists of three parts. In the opening part, “Highway,” a disconnected phone conversation with his girlfriend prompts an anthropology assistant professor to set out on a two-hour drive at night to her house but with misgivings. He needs a good night’s sleep to be at his best for an important lecture he has to give in the morning; what there was of the phone conversation before the disconnection disquiets him because it was ambiguous; and the longer he drives, the more he suspects that the disconnection may have prompted Margaret to drive the two hours to his house. To pass the time on a landscape on which the darkness has shrouded all but a few features and to prepare for the next day’s lecture, he plays a tape of the lecture notes while aware that as the “external signals disappear there’s more and more room for internal signs to float up in the dark space the night makes in your mind.”1 “Highway” is Driver’s monologue interspersed with a variety of sounds some of which are music from the car radio, the offstage or taped voice of the gas station attendant, railroad crossing signals, and the lecture notes on Mayan culture. The last named, however, are the signs that float up in the dark space. Surveying the Mayan organization of life from gods through priests to humans, the notes concentrate on their roles in maintaining time’s divisions, particularly the role of the man stationed on top of the great pyramid at Uxmal who was responsible for guarding time’s orderly sequence. If for any reason the Time Watcher relaxed his watch, the sequence became disorderly mixing the divisions with the result that the priests had to sacrifice the man to the gods and replace him. The signs float to the surface because the Mayan narrative parallels the Driver’s narrative. Torn between his desire to arrive at Margaret’s house to learn why she phoned and to arrive home to be ready for the lecture and between the conviction that he made the right decision by 19

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driving to her house and the doubt caused by the nagging suspicion that she is in her car heading toward his house, he experiences a blurring of the time as the highway features disappear, he stops for gas, phones her but receives no answer, turns back toward his house only to make a U-turn and resume the journey. The narratives create visual images too. Once the tape starts, a light illuminates the base level of a Mayan pyramid situated at the journey’s halfway mark, a railroad crossing. As the parallel universes develop, so does the pyramid until it is completed with the Driver’s approach to the crossing where for a terrible moment he thinks he hit a boy on a bike, although a search reveals no body. With blood flowing down the pyramid’s sides, the ancient and contemporary experiences become one. “Thou gods,” the Driver intones, “lords of the mountains and valleys, I have given thee to drink” (31). The lifting of the railroad barriers breaking the spell, he sees on the other side of the crossing Margaret’s car, and his call to her ends the first of the play’s three segments. Someone seeing Limbo Tales as a first encounter with Jenkin’s theatre would recognize his work as experimental, for the set is non-naturalistic: a table on which the actor playing the Driver rolls out the surface representing the highway. As he moves about the table moving the models by hand, electric switches illuminate miniatures such as a service station where he stops for gas. In the 1990–91 Soho Rep production, the audience sat on rising rows looking down on the action so that they were both Mayan gods or time watchers and highway travelers. The play’s second segment, however, would confuse the first-time spectator. The Master of Ceremonies who introduced the “Highway” segment returns in “Intermezzo” to deliver a monologue detailing the “fabulous attractions” the producers were hoping to entertain the audience with in the program but for various reasons could not secure their services. One is an Italian midget no taller than a cigar who jumps “down his own throat.” Another is an Oriental dentist who extracts the teeth of an audience volunteer and then using a cannon “fires” them back into place in the volunteer’s mouth (34–35). The incongruity with “Highway” so undercuts the earlier segment’s seriousness that the first-time spectator has to ask whether Jenkin is poking fun at his own play. Is the third segment also a spoof? The answer is No. “Hotel” is the most profound of the three parts. The interaction of two narratives on a night journey creates the wonder in “Highway.” The interaction of two narratives with a third or central narrative creates the wonder in “Hotel.” The central narrative is a monologue delivered by a character called Man in a room in a seedy hotel in a state of spiritual paralysis, a condition he describes as “starved, stalled, and stranded” (41) and not

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merely because the week for which he paid has expired and he cannot pay for an additional week yet has nowhere to go. He was a salesman of the collected Western tradition as packaged in “Feldman’s Original Books of Knowledge, a set in twenty-two volumes.” That the work kept him on the road did not bother him, not even when his wife with their son left him for another man. That the packaged heritage is fraudulent did not bother him either, for the set is actually a “blurry photo-offset job on cheap paper, of the 1892 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with every other article missing.” Not only do the missing articles make holes, the set is incomplete in that it contains no volumes “beyond S” (48–49). Yet he continued to sell until the day of the experience that brought him to the hotel. A woman at whose door he knocked invited him in but not to buy books. She took him to bed. He stayed on after the children came home from school and the husband from work because he was happy playing with the children until he heard the wife and husband arguing about his presence in their home, and he realized that he did not belong. Abruptly leaving the house, he decided to quit his job. Although he could not contact Feldman because the phone in the company’s office is disconnected, he sits in his limbo paralyzed by the realization that by selling the tradition as canonized, he “bought death” (54). Man is not the hotel’s sole occupant, however. The set specifies that on each of the room’s far walls is a speaker enabling him to hear the sounds coming from the two adjacent rooms, for he, like the Driver, listens to the other narratives that periodically interrupt his. The one that affects him is spoken by Shelley, a young woman starved, stalled, and stranded like him except that she is in more desperate straits because she is sick. But he does not verbalize a response until a young woman professing to be her friend and the second woman’s boyfriend fleece her of what little money she has on the pretext of buying drugs for her. Hearing them leave, Man says, “Oh Lord. If they come back to her, I’m Elmer Fudd” (47). At this point the phone in his room rings. The caller is his father, phoning from the universe of death, to warn him against “wasting” his “life” (47). The call, which draws a parallel between his situation and Shelley’s, allows for the interpretation that the two voices in the adjacent rooms are voices within the Man comparable to the signals in “Highway” that as “external signals disappear … float up in the dark space the night makes in” the “mind” (20). Roused by Shelley’s plight, he is moved to action as she drifts into childhood crying for her mother. His response reveals his heart, the seat of the human being’s affective nature and the second essential quality of Jenkin’s theatre. To himself, the Man asks Shelley to “please stop crying” before declaring his hope that someday he will see her running to catch up to him “and I’ll wait there in the road for you” (55). His response emotional and moral,

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he makes his decision to depart before the landlady orders him to vacate the room. He has overcome the spiritual paralysis. Since the narrative in the third room also influences his decision, we should listen to it before he departs. The voice is that of a Writer who upon awakening from sleep recalls a poem he dreamed and feeling inspired writes down the images until an importune lightning rod salesman so distracts him that he loses all but the consecutive lines he was able to record. The circumstance is that which Coleridge relates in the prefatory note to “Kubla Khan.” The Writer’s images are in Coleridge’s fragmentary poem as are the consecutive lines that end the Writer’s poem. Even the name of the salesman’s company comes from the Romantic poem’s prefatory note. According to Coleridge at the time of the vision, not only was he living in a farmhouse between “Porlock and Linton,” the person who interrupted him after he awoke and was recording the lines was someone “on business from Porlock.”2 The salesman represents the “Porlock Lightning Rod Company” (50). Since Jenkin makes no effort to disguise his source, we have to understand what he is doing with the extended allusion. “Kubla Khan” is a constituent of the Western tradition that Man sold before realizing that as packaged by Feldman, incomplete with gaping holes, it is moribund. As wondrous as “Kubla Khan” is, appropriating the poem as one’s own does not revitalize the tradition. For the tradition with its constituents to be alive and vital, it must be made new. In the interpretation that the voices in the adjacent rooms are voices within the Man, the Writer is the artistic voice that has to be joined with the affective voice to revive the tradition. It stirs when the Writer awakens in possession of the dream’s images, for the Man’s narrative suddenly becomes image laden. Describing life in the metaphor of a journey in the passage beginning, “It’s a wide highway, and you’re following it and somehow it turns into a narrow alley” (44), he alludes to Dickens’ Bleak House and Eliot’s The Waste Land, but the images do not connect to create anew the moribund tradition until he declares his hope of meeting Shelley again. Resolving to “disappear now” in the transforming spiritual death that yields spiritual rebirth, the Man intones an incantation beginning, “Cow shit becomes tomatoes, piss becomes rain,” reimagining in a contemporary idiom the poetic tradition of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. He has shed the defunct tradition, visually imaged in his rising and putting on the floor the suitcase containing a sample volume of Feldman’s set. Discounting the difference in age, he is at play’s opening a Gerontion, an “old man in a dry month, / … waiting for rain.”3 Play’s end reimagines Eliot’s poetry to break the curse of the wasteland as he spits into the pot containing a desiccated plant, “watering it with his saliva” (56). No longer starved, stalled, and stranded, he reconnects

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with a basic text of his heritage. He opens the Gideon Bible, reads a passage praising deliverance (Isa. 55.12), and exits limbo. Were it not for the inclusion of Limbo Tales in a 1993 volume that links it to two other plays, I would have examined the play in the introduction. That the packaged or canonized tradition is moribund is fundamental to Jenkin’s theatre. In the 1993 volume, he recounts how he got his first play produced, an event that confirmed him in a playwriting career. “This first play, Kitty Hawk, is a story of two madmen who believe they are the ‘Wright’ brothers and construct a huge plane on a deserted beach, using as material all the debris of Western civilization” (8). Since Kitty Hawk has not been published, it is not examined anywhere in this study, and nothing has been lost by having Gogol take its place in the introduction because the theme is clear in Gogol. If we just think of the theme in terms of theatre, that play unites two artists to revive a dying theatre whereas Limbo Tales unites three modes of theatre art. But even though Gogol appears to be easier to understand in this respect, Limbo Tales still would have been a good introduction to the theme. By elaborating on the acts the producers were unable to secure, the Master of Ceremonies in “Intermezzo” adds a tone not present in the other two modes. It is the restoration of such a mixture that Limbo Tales implies will revitalize theatre. That is, just as a tradition became moribund by replicating selected forms, so did a theatre become moribund by replicating selected forms: the naturalistic play, for example. Furthermore, Limbo Tales is an excellent introduction to Jenkin’s dramaturgical principles and techniques, strategies and devices. To name but a few: the parallel ancient and contemporary universes that develop as the Driver and Margaret travel concurrent tracks toward each other. The contrast between the non-naturalistic, experimental set of “Highway” and the naturalistic, symbolic set of “Hotel” is more sharply drawn than is the contrast between the sets of Kid Twist’s hotel room and his dreams. “Hotel” illustrates the difference between an allusion that establishes a context or mood—“Kubla Khan”—and one that is a ground for a transforming experience—Eliot’s poetry. Finally, the third segment simultaneously subverts and creates character. Kid Twist simultaneously subverts and creates by having multiple voices speak within the unitary self that is Abe, Kid Twist, Reles. By naming the cast member Man, “Hotel” creates an archetype: a universal, generic image; and he is an archetype rather than a specific, individual character because he is bereft of a sustaining tradition in which he could develop individualizing traits. He is an image of abandoned humanity until he responds to Shelley and becomes an individual man: the Man as a character who overcomes the paralysis or image in which he was immobilized and becomes mobile.

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Chapter One

Its introductory nuggets notwithstanding, Limbo Tales is in this first chapter because of its connection with two other plays. In the introduction to the 1993 volume, Jenkin explains his choice of the five plays in the collection, since it could not be a complete edition. For three of them, he writes, “I’ve always thought of Limbo Tales, Dark Ride, and My Uncle Sam as a trilogy of a kind, in that order. In each succeeding play the search leads to more light, and more darkness falls away” (9). There is a progression in light imagery within Limbo Tales. The Driver’s night journey ends in darkness yet with the recognition that “tomorrow is again day, again light of the sun” (31). “Hotel” takes place during the day but in subdued lighting because a shade is drawn down over the window, yet as the Man exits the room, “strong light” comes through the shade (56). Limbo Tales is not the actual quest, however. In Joseph Campbell’s scheme, it corresponds to the awakening stage or the call to adventure because the Man leaves at play’s end vowing to “disappear.” As he says, “You can spend the time you’re given playing around in the shallows, or you can dive deep and swim with the fishes” (56). Diving deep suggests the death in water that precedes rebirth: Jonah’s night sea journey, and one of the characters in Dark Ride, the trilogy’s second play, refers to the story of Jonah “in the belly of the whale”4 while in the scene that follows, another character refers to a “great whale coming up from the bottom of the sea” (97). With the absence of a central character, the second play might be interpreted as the dissolution of the Man’s unitary self as he descends into the deep. There is dissolution, but the Man from Limbo Tales does not figure in either the second or third plays. The connection between the two plays is not in the characters but in the quest. Dark Ride is the beginning of the quest: in Campbell’s scheme, the passage into a zone that no matter how it is represented is “always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings.”5 The play’s fluidity is in suddenly appearing and disappearing images and scenes. Dark Ride opens with a voice announcing the start of a funhouse ride in an amusement park. The next scene, number 2, is both verbal and visual in which a Translator relates the difficulty he is having translating for a publisher of occult books what purports to be a collection of fragments of ancient Chinese wisdom, although the longer he wrestles with the text the more he suspects that it is not what the publisher, a man named Zendavesta, claims it to be; it might be a “modern forgery” (65). Nevertheless he continues translating, ending the scene with a fragment in which a woman, Margo, is reading a novel. Scene 3 opens with Margo reading a book in which a bandaged Jeweller named Ravensburg explains to another character that he is in the clinic because he was beaten and robbed. In scene 4 the Thief, who is Margo’s boyfriend on the run with the stolen diamond of Indian origin, goes into a

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neighborhood restaurant and while eating listens to a General on television talk about intelligence gathering, the subject of scene 5. Scene 6 interrupts the flowing. Since the Translator is the author of the text that the fragments or scenes perform, the scene is an authorial intrusion. When he says that his difficulty is finding “modern equivalents” (73) for the ancient wisdom that might be a modern forgery, he opens the possibility that the translation is a reimagining of a text as Gogol is a reimagining of Wolfram’s Parzival. Yet Dark Ride is not a reimagining of The Moonstone, which has to do with the theft of a diamond of Indian origin. He suggests that the text’s ten characters are a “frame device” (73), but neither is the play a reimagining of The Decameron. It is a collection of fragments, although they are connected and not only as the summaries of the first five scenes indicate. For example, scene 4 opens with the Thief speaking the exact words that Margo speaks, responding to his postcard, to close scene 3. A more unsettling example for the audience is the interaction between the Translator and Zendavesta and the characters in the translation, an interaction that includes the two in the Chinese text’s ten-character frame device. Since they are both outside and inside the text being translated, the boundary between the translation and the play keeps shifting and dissolving. Yet except for the authorial intrusion, beginning with scene 3, Margo reading, through scene 7, the fragments are chronological. Scene 8 changes the pattern. Scene 7 ends with the Thief, resuming his narrative of being on the run, telling how he stole the gem from Ravensburg in his diamond-cutting office. Scene 8 dramatizes the narrative. The change in chronology to a flashback is minor, but it signals major changes to come and as early as scene 10. Scene 10 introduces a character named Mrs. Carl Lammle, whose name recalls that of Universal Pictures’ guiding force in the 1920s and 1930s. Under Carl Laemmle’s aegis, the Hollywood studio produced fantasy-horror movies that are considered classics of the genre: Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Black Cat (1934), among others. The significance in the similarity of names is not in alerting the audience to the play’s connection to movies because the opening scenes do that. The set is the entrance to an amusement-park funhouse from the interior of which images and scenes appear and disappear to maintain the illusion of a ride tracking through a tunnel, recesses of which become illuminated as the ride approaches and darkened again once the ride passes. Cutting from scene to scene or fading scenes into one another is cinematic staging. The significance is in the cinematic style. In the play’s first publication, the note on staging endorses the style of “B movies rather than art films.”6 In the 1993 collection, the production note shortens the endorsement to “B movies” (61).

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Though not a found text like the ones in Kid Twist and Limbo Tales, the recalling of movies produced by the Hollywood mogul’s studio works just as well as a ground for soaring and transforming imagination. Dark Ride has the fantasy without the horror. Scene 11 ends with the Translator opening one of Zendavesta’s occult books and admiring the frontispiece, a picture that becomes scene 12’s site: the Jeweller’s office. Recovered from his wounds, Ravensburg enlists the General’s aid in abducting Margo as bait to lure the Thief into a trap in which they can recover the stolen diamond. By looking in his imagination into the stolen gem’s tenth facet, he can see into Margo’s apartment, where she can see his eye, for he says to the General, “She’s dreaming, and she thinks my eye is something in her dream” (91). The fantastic images, created by images flowing through scenes dissolving the borders separating the scenes or frames, create the play’s wonder. They do not, however, explain how the Jeweller knows that Margo is the Thief’s girlfriend, but that is not the sole bit of knowledge unexplained. Instead, two theories are advanced within Dark Ride that may explain the world of the play. In scene 9 the Thief expresses an interest in a magazine article he has been reading, “The World of Coincidence,” by Mrs. Carl Lammle, who in scene 10 argues that events seem to be more connected in the world of coincidence than in our everyday world. One of her examples is two brothers being killed ten years apart while crossing a canal in Amsterdam by a green taxi carrying a passenger named Ravensburg. She closes her argument with the example of an oculist’s shop that turns out to be an outlet for Zendavesta’s Sublime Publications, specializing in occult books. The shop is the site of scene 11 in which the publisher argues that since we live inside a hollow shell, we can only know what is inside. The Thief’s arrival to buy a pair of glasses interrupts the exposition. When the publisher mentions Margo, the Thief questions how he knows about her, but Zendavesta ignores the query to resume the exposition. One reason he does not respond is that his theory does not allow him to. That is, while Mrs. Lammle’s theory accounts for the connections between the scenes or fragments, his theory negates her theory. Since we are inside whatever happens in the world, we cannot distance ourselves from the events or connections to derive significance from them. His argument notwithstanding, the connections continue, created not only by the fluidity dissolving borders but by the polymorphism of this beginning stage of the quest. The polymorphism is in the forms of the suddenly appearing and disappearing images and scenes. Although the class of forms about to be examined does not make its first appearance in Dark Ride, it is more prevalent in this play than in any one of the previous three plays examined, and it becomes increasingly prevalent in Jenkin’s oeuvre. Scenes 9 and 10, the two theories,

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are a good introduction to the form. They are not digressions, and neither do they stop the action. They are incipient examples of what become tales moving the action in a play that Jenkin describes as a “weave of tales” (62). They can be introduced or not. Mrs. Lammle prefaces one with the words, “I want to tell you a story” (115); the General, on the other hand, begins his with the admission, “I was married once” (104). They can be long or short. Edna’s tale of her life with Ed runs for a few pages, unlike the General’s tale, which is two paragraphs. They can be related to the adventure with the diamond or not. The Jeweller explains the circumstances leading up to his cutting of the stone while another of Mrs. Lammle’s tales has to do with coincidences involving the Charlotte Russe dessert. The mixture of the polymorphous forms with Jenkin’s signature mixture of genres and styles, modes and tones also creates wonder by creating the disorder of dreams. Since the disorder is non-linear, the mixing subverts the naturalistic play’s ordering of the action in a single linear narrative. At the same time, however, just as the fluidity connects scenes by dissolving the boundaries separating them, so does the polymorphism connect characters by connecting their individual narratives in a weave of tales. The fluid and polymorphous connections therefore create a linear narrative in act 2, the act in which the tales occur. The linear narrative fuses two motifs. In scene 11 Zendavesta tries unsuccessfully to hire the Thief as his assistant on an expedition to find the tiny hole in the shell through which they can emerge outside the structure. Since he is leaving for the World Oculists’ convention on the outskirts of Mexico City, presumably the expedition will depart from that location if the publisher has the necessary funding. It does not depart because after various characters declare Mexico City as their destination, the play ends there with the characters in the convention hotel. To the hotel ballroom where the others are dancing, the Thief brings the diamond and places it on a pedestal, which leads to the ten characters repeating two sentences, the first of which Mrs. Lammle speaks in scene 11. When she enters the oculist’s shop after Zendavesta has expounded his theory and he asks her what she wants, she replies, “I’m not interested in your philosophy. I want to pick up a pair of glasses” (89). Various characters repeat the first sentence until the final scene has each of the ten in turn saying, “I’m not interested in philosophy. Just tell me how it ends” (120). Although he does not state what “it” refers to, Jon Erickson writes that the frustration in being inside the structure and therefore being unable to see “significance in the structure of events” leads the search inevitably to the repeated position, “which appears contradictory, since it would seem only a philosophical sort of answer could tell you how it ends, if philosophy weren’t

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embedded in the structure as well.”7 The final scene so frustrates that the “it” could refer to the play. The characters could be asking how the play ends so that they can terminate the frustrating search. As if answering, the stage directions read, “Ride out. Sound out. End ride” (120). Were it not for Gogol, the final scene’s frustration might be permanent. Features of the scene provide a starting point for alleviating it, however. All ten characters converge on a destination where a precious stone is placed in their midst causing them to cease their activity—whether they are transfixed or not depends on the director—and to question the meaning of the experience. The knowledge that Gogol reimagines the Parzival story provides a possible interpretation. Richard Barber’s comprehensive study of the Grail material contains color plates. Though a cup carried by angels and not a precious stone, one plate, from a 15th-century manuscript, depicts the Grail’s appearance at Pentecost in the midst of Arthur’s court seated at the Round Table.8 The scene in the play is ceremonial, marking the culmination of the unitary action of searching or questing whether for the stolen gem, a translation of a manuscript whose Chinese origin has long since been forgotten, or an understanding of life. With the precious stone in place, the dancing ceases and the ten form a circle around the gem as they intone the two sentences. In this interpretation the diamond is an image of the Grail, and the Grail implies a quest worth pursuing, for “all that the Grails of medieval romance have in common is the function of indicating a goal worth striving for or preserving, and in content at least a modicum of sanctity.”9 The interpretation may alleviate the critic’s frustration, but the characters’ frustration persists. The ambiguous “it” in the repeated “Just tell me how it ends” could mean the ceremony now that the Grail image is present or the ceremony’s sterility is apparent. Or “it” could mean the quest now that its goal, whether fulfilling or empty, has been reached. The “it” also could mean life. If the diamond is an image of the Grail, the journey is to another world: that of the absolute, the supernatural beyond death. The journey is therefore completed satisfactorily, for having had an illumination of life’s goal, the characters know how natural life ends. If the diamond is not an image of the Grail, the journey is completed unsatisfactorily—without discovering an absolute—and the characters want to know how life ends. They do not necessarily want life to end, but they want to know what its end, its significance, is. The funhouse ride’s operator announces that those who wish to go around again should stay seated, but repeated questing serves no purpose if it does not achieve a goal other than death. One explanation for the characters being stalled in their frustration is that although the first quality of Jenkin’s theatre, wonder, is present, the second quality, heart, is not. Seeing in the snow an image of his wife Condwiramurs,

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from whom his adventures have separated him, Wolfram’s Parzival is held enthralled by love “so sharply did longing for his wife assail him” (148). Confronting Anfortas’ suffering on his second visit to the Grail castle, the knight weeps before praying that the man’s affliction “be taken from him” (395). Love, compassion, and just the joy of the ceremony in Parzival and Gogol are absent from Dark Ride, where the characters cease dancing, unlike MesmerGogol and the mistress, who commence dancing as their play ends. Except for Ed and Edna, characters do not have affection for one another. The Jeweller relates a story in which the woman he loved left him for another man, and the General relates a story in which his wife’s lover wired a bomb to his car in an attempt to kill him. Carl Lammle, who is not in the play, visits their brain-damaged son every weekend, but Mrs. Lammle “stopped going years ago” (114), and Margo is not thrilled at the prospect of being reunited with her thieving boyfriend. “I’ve got a few things to tell him myself” (116), she says to the Jeweller as he proposes casual conversation for springing the trap. The explanation for the lack of heart is simple. Expending all their energy on the quest, the characters have none left for life itself. Another play in the 1993 collection can clarify the explanation, but since it is not the third play in the trilogy, completing the study of the trilogy takes precedence over the examination of this other play. The third play is My Uncle Sam, the most intricate of the three—in disorienting strategies, for example. The play is the dramatized tale told by a character named Author in an attempt to understand his Uncle Sam, but the Author is both outside the tale creating it and inside the tale: acting, witnessing, or narrating. An actor plays the Old Sam he was when the Author, then a boy, last saw him. Another actor plays the Young Sam the Author imagines he was when a young man. Yet the two interact in one scene. Three narrators are within the tale setting scenes or giving information to move the action. Sometimes one narrates within a scene, sometimes more than one narrate within a scene, and sometimes the Author doubles as a Narrator within a scene. Their ordering of the scenes—a disordering—underscores the tale’s non-naturalistic wonder. Scene 3 in the published text is scene 12 with the next scene, 4 in the published text, 27; scene 7 in the published text is scene 14; scene 9 in the published text is scene 57 with the next scene, 10 in the published text, 10. The play’s questing is also the most intricate of the three. Of the multiple quests, two are obvious. The Author’s tale is a quest for an understanding of his uncle, who quests within the tale for the missing brother of the woman who has led him to believe they are engaged. The examination will draw out the less obvious ones. Such intricacy, however, does not automatically spell a successful play to a reviewer. The following is excerpted from a New York Times withering review of the 1983 premiere:

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The evening seems like a collection of false starts for a whole series of plays that Mr. Jenkin had the good sense to abandon—at least until now. Perhaps one of those plays—the one introduced at the outset—might be worth further pursuit. It’s about the title character, an old traveling salesman who dies with $410 to his name in a shabby Pittsburgh hotel room. . . . But Mr. Jenkin soon forgets about his title character. He digresses instead into a mannered wild goose chase, told in mock Raymond Chandler style, in which Young Sam attempts to find the missing brother of a saloon tart. There are many dead-end clues, as well as periodic cameo appearances by a Bogart stand-in who instructs Young Sam in sleuthing. Not that it matters—suspense is beside the point.10

Yet there are critics who think Jenkin’s theatre rewards study. In an article in a collection of articles that appeared in 2007, Steve Feffer analyzes My Uncle Sam as driven by the interaction of two nostalgias. In the course of his analysis, Feffer compares the quester of the play’s title, a traveling novelties salesman, to the iconic American traveling salesman, Willy Loman of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. This book’s approach takes its inspiration from something in the play not central to Feffer’s approach: the significance of a series of garden interludes, although the first interlude does not appear until scene 5, a little more than halfway through act 1. The first speaker, following a nightclub couple’s lip-synching to a record, is the Author, who delivers a monologue about My Uncle Sam—his “greatUncle Sam actually”11—now dead but who rises to stand for the monologue. After reviewing exotic facts about the uncle such as being based in Pittsburgh and a bachelor, the Author admits to a “certain mystery” about the man who “stepped aside, in some extraordinary way, from everything around him, and made that stepping aside his life” (126). As the monologue presents him, My Uncle Sam’s choice of salesmanship and bachelorhood would seem to be the stepping aside from mainstream American life. But for Willy Loman, salesmanship is pursuing the American Dream. Of course, both men fail in the pursuit. Dying alone, My Uncle Sam left all he had to his nephew: four hundred and ten dollars. An alternative possibility for the stepping aside is the story the Author tells about him. Since the older man never told the boy a story and since the latter had not seen the former “for thirty years” (126) before his death, he will tell a story about him. The Author becomes a surrogate playwright, and the audience has to wait to determine whether the choice of salesmanship and bachelorhood or something the story will reveal constitutes the stepping aside and explains the mystery of the man. The audience does not have to wait long to eliminate the choice as the explanation. With the monologue concluded, an animated Uncle Sam is joined by Young Sam, who is the older man in his youth, and other cast members to begin dramatizing the Author’s story about his uncle. All “in the postures

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of forties salesmen” (127), they with him name the novelties he sold from hairy gorilla feet to chinky Chinaman kit and goozelum goggles to poo-poo cushion until a character named Man repeats the central fact about him—that he “sever[ed] himself from the world”—at which time the cast “back away” (128) from him and exit the stage to leave him visually imaging the separation from the group. In the Man’s words, he is neither living nor dead, which is an apt description because although he died, he remains a lonely presence occasionally speaking. The severing also clarifies some of the strangeness about him. Neither selling nor the products sold caused the strangeness because the separation from the group began after he became a salesman. The rest of the scene visually and verbally images the aloneness. In his Pittsburgh hotel room, Old Sam relates how he enjoys watching the dusk overtake the skyline; how now that he is old and perceived as not being a challenge, women stop him on the street to ask directions; and how sometimes forgetting that times and places change, he gives directions to locations that no longer exist. He was not always alone, though. He once had a girlfriend, Lila, who appears as the hotel room fades into scene 2 and the nightclub where she was a hostess. Thus the story will reveal the explanation and solve the mystery. Joining a customer, Jake, Lila reviews her instructions on his assignment to find her brother, who took the money their father stashed before being murdered by his partner when she was a kid and who subsequently disappeared with his wife Darlene. Lila wants Jake to recover the “family inheritance” (138) that the brother robbed. Jake is not a private investigator despite looking and acting tough. Probably an ex-convict because he cannot be caught carrying a weapon, he is nevertheless Lila’s fiancé whom she reminds that she will marry if he is successful in the assignment. Since she has the same arrangement with Uncle Sam, here played by Young Sam, love has nothing to do with the matter from her point of view; she is simply using men to get what she wants. Love does not explain Jake’s involvement in the quest either; sex does. When he leaves the club, he tells Lila to “keep it warm for” him (136), “it” needing no stated referent. Love is Sam’s motivation, though the emotion is not shared. When he says, “Lila, I love you,” she does not reciprocate but says, “I know,” and when he says, “When I come back, we’ll…” (138), she does not supply the missing words about marriage but changes the subject to talk about Darlene. Jenkin’s plays usually have songs. One song is the pining of a brokenhearted lover for his/her beloved. A second song warns that boats built on lies will not be able to cross the water; to reach the “promised land of love” (133), lovers must cross the bridge. In these metaphors while Lila is building a boat of lies, Young Sam is trying—hoping—to cross the bridge. To please the woman he wants to be-

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lieve is his fiancée, he therefore steps aside to pursue a quest for her inheritance, for he does not think of it as his. When he asks Lila how he is to get the money if her brother will not give it to him, she says, “Take it” (138). By scene-2’s end the Author’s quest to discover his Uncle Sam—the key to understanding him—and the uncle’s quest to discover the missing brother and money are underway. They are not, however, the play’s sole quests. A third quest is discovering the best way to tell the story. In a traditional world, the obvious choice would be a linear narrative with whole or unitary characters naturalistically determined. The problem is that Limbo Tales exposes the traditional world that is so packaged or canonized as to conceal gaps or fragments. Once exposed, they are glaring in My Uncle Sam. The Author, the primary narrator, has not seen the narrative’s subject in thirty years, and Lila, one of the principal players in the narrative, has not seen the quest’s object in ten years. All that the Author has to go on are his recollections. His uncle, a bachelor who lived in a Pittsburgh hotel, had a waxed moustache, wore cashmere coats, and smoked cigars. Lila’s recollections, in lieu of a photo that would not be any good anyway, since it would be at least ten years old, are more dramatic in that she retrieves them in a dialogue in the nightclub scene: her brother’s favorite cigarettes and chewing gum, for example. Characterization on the detective-agency instruction cassette that Sam buys to assist him on his quest is also fragmented. The missing person that the lesson instructs on how to trace is not only missing from the client seeking him but is missing a whole conception. Identified by visible details, he may be missing invisible details such as a “chunk of his mind” (141). These fragmentary impressions constitute the conception of postmodern character that is no longer unitary. Sam Shepard describes this new conception for his play Angel City: “The term ‘character’ could be thought of in a different way when working on this play. Instead of the idea of a ‘whole character’ with logical motives behind his behavior which the actor submerges himself into, he should consider instead a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme.”12 Postmodern narrative has a new conception too, as in Will Eno’s description for his play The Flu Season: “The play revels in ambivalence, lives in fits and starts, and derives a flailing energy from its doubts about itself.”13 Identified by Lila’s sensory impressions, such as a man with eight flags, the persons Sam should contact are bits and pieces that pursued will move the narrative by fits and starts through gaps. A Travel Agent initially cannot locate Sam’s destination, arguing that he cannot send him if he cannot “find the place” (143). And the gaps occur in scenes that as the narrators present them are not in sequence. The above gap in the published text’s scene 3 is in the Narrator’s scene 12, which is followed by his scene 27.

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Since a detective traditionally pursues by fits and starts with bits and pieces of information, detective fiction is a way to tell the story. The instruction cassette recognizes the assignment: Although the missing person knows where he is, the sleuth does not, and it gives sound advice: Do not draw your weapon unless you intend to use it. But detective fiction is a vehicle for narrating only partway because the sleuth is pursuing clues in a welter of traditional and nontraditional fragments. When the cast gather as salesmen in scene 1, Old Sam and Young Sam deliver two sentences that invoke two worlds. The sentences are “You say you want more for your money?” and “Tell you what I’m gonna do” (127). One world is that of the confidence game in Melville’s The Confidence-Man, which is a source for Gogol, and in the “Hotel” segment of Limbo Tales, where the product sold is fraudulent. The second world invoked is also that of the confidence game but in the enormously popular television show of the 1950s. On his weekly show, Milton Berle had a regular performer who appeared in an entr’acte as a salesman in a loud sports jacket the sleeves of which he rolled up as he positioned the cart he pushed on which was snake oil or its equivalent. His signature huckstering spiel was the equivalent of the two quoted sentences. As scene 2 ends, Lila cautions Young Sam to “watch out for the Bottler!” (140) I do not know whether Bottler, the partner who murdered her father, is a pun on butler, the murderer in comic whodunits, or a creation of William Gaines, the publisher of Mad magazine. In a prefatory note to My Uncle Sam, Jenkin names two persons whom he intentionally misquotes. One is an author whose satirical novel is discussed below. The other person is Gaines, but I could not check what was misquoted given the volume of Mad magazines and Gaines’ publications I am unaware of. The relevant point, though, is that in mixing Mad magazine allusions with implied comparisons to Willy Loman, for example, Jenkin mixes popular culture and serious literature with his theatre’s merger of styles and genres, tones and modes. Since the theatre’s grounds are constantly shifting and its imaginative world is constantly changing, the effect is phantasmagoric: the optical effect produced by a magic lantern, and a character in scene 5 has a “device for showing magic lantern slides” (148). A more serviceable narrative structure than detective fiction begins to emerge, though it cannot exclude other narrative structures. Loving Lila “like crazy” (142), Young Sam takes the assignment so seriously that he becomes interested in the brother. When he discovers at the first stop that the Lighthouse Keeper likes the brother’s chewing gum, he suspects that he may be the brother. Not the missing man, the Keeper presents a trial by inviting the sleuth to stay and he will teach him mastery over the gulls “caught between heaven and earth” (147). Resisting the temptation to stay as an orgy

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overspreads the lighthouse, Sam easily survives the trial without any aid so that, like Klingsor’s castle crumbling into ruins in Wagner’s Parsifal, the lighthouse “begins to topple, party and all, into the sea” (148). The myth of the hero is the emerging structure. That myth implies a succession of trials, the most challenging of which the next scene introduces not as a trial, which will come later, but as a concept. In scene 5 the Narrator introduces the first of a series of garden interludes spoken by a character, Capability Brown, dressed in 18th-century costume. Lancelot Brown was an 18th-century English landscape gardener who earned the nickname Capability by enthusiastically seeing capabilities for improvement in the estates of the rich and powerful, who became his patrons. He had been dead for decades when Thomas Love Peacock published the first of his satirical novels, Headlong Hall (1816), and he had not left a written record of his ideas, but they lived on in a controversy at the end of the 18th century into the early 19th century. Landscape gardener Humphry Repton espoused Brown’s ideas. Opposing the ideas were Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price.14 Since the controversy is one of the controversies in Headlong Hall and since Peacock is one of the two persons, Gaines of Mad magazine being the other, whom Jenkin cites in a prefatory note to My Uncle Sam as misquoting, the controversy warrants examination. Brown and Repton championed improving the landscape. Knight and Price defended keeping it in its wild, uncultured state. In Peacock’s satire Marmaduke Milestone represents the ideas of Brown and Repton. He is the first to arrive of the guests invited to Squire Headlong’s ancestral home at Headlong Hall, the estate in Llanberris that is the locus of activities that constitute the novel’s chapters. Described as a “picturesque landscape gardener of the first celebrity,” he hopes to persuade his host to allow him to improve the grounds by “polishing and trimming the rocks of Llanberris.”15 Chapter 4 opens with a conversation between the two men as they walk with other guests about the estate. “ ‘I perceive,’ said Mr. Milestone, after they had walked a few paces, ‘these grounds have never been touched by the finger of taste.’ ” After the squire comments on his father allowing the place to become a wilderness, Milestone resumes: “My dear sir,” said Mr. Milestone, “accord me your permission to wave the wand of enchantment over your grounds. The rocks shall be blown up, the trees shall be cut down, the wilderness and all its goats shall vanish like mist. Pagodas and Chinese bridges, gravel walks and shrubberies, bowling-greens, canals, and clumps of larch, shall rise upon its ruins” (29–30).

The passage is misquoted in Capability Brown’s first speech in My Uncle Sam:

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I perceive that these grounds have never been touched by the finger of taste. Allow me to wave over them the wand of enchantment. These rocks shall be blown up, these trees cut down, and the wilderness with all its goats and monkeys will vanish like mist. A garden shall rise upon its ruins (150).

Since this is the lone Peacock misquotation in the play, its significance is in entering the garden into the quests, though Young Sam has more testing to undergo in the quests and Jenkin has more exploring to do with the quests before the play arrives at the garden. Sam continues to track the clues that he expects will take him to the person who will integrate the bits and pieces. His motivation is unchanging. When Lila phones him to check on his progress, he again declares his “love” (155), a declaration Lila does not reciprocate as she hangs up. Narrators continue to narrate while the play continues to experiment with ways in which to narrate the story. Detective fiction surfaces again in scene 6. The Bottler and his companions, Mr. Fleagle and Miss Simmons, enter the action killing Jake in a motel’s room 33 while trying to extract from him the brother’s whereabouts. The biography of Miss Simmons, who “had gone out to the far east in her youth, as a governess, but once in Hong Kong … soon found other occupations” (153), could be that of any femme fatale. Brigid O’Shaughnessy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon met the violent Floyd Thursby in the Orient and came to San Francisco from Hong Kong with him. The multivolume novel is another vehicle. Standing over Jake’s dead body, the Bottler surveys stimuli for stirring memory. A “flavor on the tongue” (154) invokes the madeleine dipped in tea in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The horror film is scene 7’s vehicle. Despite being warned by her university roommate because three coeds have disappeared, a coed needing to pass her botany course keeps her date with the creepy professor in his menacing home. Drugging her just enough to prevent her from resisting, he takes her to a room with “twisted green things” where she will be sacrificed to “flesh eating plants” (158). Young Sam’s arrival allows her to slip away. The most consistent structure through act 1 is the myth of the hero, which has already proven its dependability in the trilogy’s first two plays. Once the hero accepts the call to take the journey, he receives aid on the adventure from a protective figure. Normally feminine, “not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine in form. In fairy lore it may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require.”16 The play’s Little Person first appears to Jake, who not only tells the figure, “Get out of my way, pops,” but “shoves the Little Person aside” (150). When Young Sam encounters the figure, he gives a cigarette to the Little Person, even though it is his last one, and receives the advice to go dancing at the university and to watch out for

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room 33 and the Bottler. He does not comprehend the advice, but he does follow it because the myth dictates a succession of trials. In room 33 he discovers Jake’s body, and in the dancing class he learns that he must go to Chinatown. There he is attacked by the Bottler, Fleagle, and Miss Simmons and rescued by the Little Person. The interaction and interpenetration of the parallel universes, multiple frames, and concurrent tracks of the various vehicles for storytelling impact the vehicles and consequently the storytelling. The collision of the myth of the hero and detective fiction in the pivotal scene 8 impacts Sam as hero and the quests. The opium den is a place where one can go “to disappear … where the world could never reach you.” But as the Denizen goes on, “that place is only in your mind” (164). A place of escape from reality into fantasy, the dreamer deludes himself that he is progressing in his quest. Given the irony of the Writer in the “Hotel” segment of Limbo Tales creating “Kubla Khan” as his own poem, the scene may also be a criticism of drug-induced imagination as opposed to imagination’s power without inducement to transform the visible world to reveal the invisible world. The scene has its own irony. When the Denizen starts to characterize the den as a “place of passage between the worlds …” (164) before being interrupted, he probably means the worlds of reality and fantasy, yet for Young Sam, it is a place of passage between the worlds of surface reality and subsurface reality. Slapped back into reality by Fleagle and then rescued by the Little Person, Young Sam leaves the opium den to “cross the border” (173) in scene 9. On Old Sam’s advice, he crosses the border into Mexico to have a doctor attend to the wounds sustained in the den beating, but he is really crossing into a changing quest. He crosses because of what happens in the den. The audience never learns what Sam dreams, but beyond the implied criticism of the drug-induced state, what he does or does not dream is not the scene’s focus. What happens is that he is slapped back into reality and has to listen to the Bottler’s story. The father’s business partner is pursuing the missing brother to get the missing money so that he can fulfill his dream “to create paradise on earth” (167). His paradise is a resort hotel and casino that as he describes it is a gaudy technological wonder. Lacking natural-supernatural wonder, it also lacks heart, for each room’s “king size bed equipped with magic fingers,” “library of erotic classics,” and “electronic brain stimulation devices” (167) will activate the pleasure impulse. The Bottler’s motivation is neither love, which he dismisses, nor exercising the power of imagination; it is realizing personal power, for he sees himself in the hotel’s penthouse as ruler of a world that he, who “came from nothing” (168), made. The impact of the Bottler’s story is apparent in scene 9, which opens act 2. The scene is similar to scene 1, which opens act 1, in that each begins with

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the Author relating his impressions of his Uncle Sam followed by his uncle relating a story about residing in Pittsburgh. A mini-scene with the salesmen intervenes in scene 1, but the absence of an intervening mini-scene in scene 9 is insignificant. The significance is in the Author’s storytelling. Since Uncle Sam is alive only in his grandnephew’s memory of a time when he was a boy, the older man’s story of life in Pittsburgh is a creation of the Author’s imagination. Scene 1 is fragmented impressions followed by the uncle’s limited perception of Pittsburgh. Scene 9 is the Author’s memory of the uncle teaching him how to candle eggs followed by the uncle’s perception of Pittsburgh that expands to a panoramic vision looking down on planet Earth. The Author’s imagination is expanding for two reasons. He rejects the Bottler’s imagination or lack of it that conceives of paradise as a technological wonder, and his quests are changing. The den scene, which closes act 1, is pivotal because throughout the act the three quests—to discover the uncle, the brother, and the best way to tell the story—have been converging. They merge in scenes 9 and 10 in a fourth quest that subsumes the other three: the quest for identity. As withering as is the New York Times review quoted at the opening of this examination of My Uncle Sam, it recognized the quest for identity as the play’s primary quest because that quest is implicit throughout act 1. For example, the instruction cassette advises the sleuth that he will have a better chance of finding the missing person if he identifies with him. “After all, we’re all missing” (163) is the cassette’s insight. The quest becomes explicit when in an imaginative leap following the uncle’s panoramic vision, the Author has Old Sam and Young Sam simultaneously say, “ ‘My Uncle Sam’ ” (172). Old Sam’s quest and Young Sam’s quest to discover themselves fuse in one quest. Hence when the Golf Course Manager in scene 10 professes to be the missing brother, the Author has a disbelieving Young Sam say, “You try to find someone, you get to know him” (183). “Him” can also refer to himself, for with the two uncles identifying themselves as the same person, Sam is moving ever closer to his goal of finding the brother. In scenes 9 and 10, he does not have to inquire about the missing man. The Doctor tells Sam that he reminds him of the brother, and one of the first questions the Manager asks is whether he is looking for Lila’s brother. The quests to discover the uncle, the brother, and the best way to tell the story are also taking the Author ever closer to his goal: to discover his own identity. The one merged quest connected to the imagination is connected to the garden image as well. The Bottler thinks so little of a garden in his paradise that he does not even include one; Miss Simmons does—on the hotel grounds. Her mention of one is the fourth time since the first garden interlude introduced the concept. The intervening times are in the scene with the coed at the

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professor’s house, the hero’s dream in the biggest seller of the novelty books Sam carries with him, and the instruction cassette’s places where persons disappear. The next time the image comes up is not in a mentioning; it is in the second garden interlude. The first interlude ended with the Narrator cutting off Capability Brown as he stated his intention to “create this Elysium in this very countryside” (151). The second interlude opens with Brown giving his rules for the creation: selecting the trees, flowers, and fruits germane to each season. Once again the Narrator cuts him off, but not before he manages to say the following: “This garden should be so linked to nature that a man could stumble in without realizing he is in a garden at all” (181). The naturalness suggests a “paradise for all seasons” (180), but the naturalness is confined to that sentence. Other sentences list mounds, grottos, crypts, groves, labyrinths, fountains, aviaries, and statuary depicting various gods in addition to the trees, flowers, and fruits. The crowding is not representative of the 18th-century landscape gardener’s style, for the means he “used were natural: he employed neither carved stone nor architectural shapes but limited himself to turf; mirrors of still water; a few species of trees used singly, in clumps, or in loose belts; and the undulations of the ground.”17 The mirrors of still water could be thought of as artificial lakes. They were to Peacock. In chapter 5 of Headlong Hall, the men, circulating burgundy, engage in a postprandial conversation. When to illustrate his argument, one of the guests posits two men purchasing land and one developing his half, Milestone, who is the target of the landscape-gardening satire, interrupts to commend the “artificial lake in the centre” (45). What renders the play’s second-interlude garden more mundane than paradisiacal, though, is an inclusion that contradicts the statement Brown manages to say before being cut off: “A slew of automata among the rocks. Include my patented mechanism for the production of artificial echoes” (181). The landscape-gardening controversy is one of a few controversies in Headlong Hall. Another is perfectibilianism, whose spokesman is a character named Foster, versus deteriorationism, whose spokesman is a character named Escot. In the chapter in which Milestone, accompanied by Headlong, sets out to improve the squire’s estate by detonating rock to smooth the landscape, Foster, Escot, and a third guest walk about the countryside, the trip taking them to a town in which the inhabitants traditionally practiced their crafts in their cottages but have since been industrialized in the developing manufacturing system. Whereas Foster sees almost limitless benefits such as “complicated mechanism” to the local community and the nation, Escot, the character with whom Peacock most closely identifies, sees the workers reduced to “mere automata, component parts of the enormous machines which administer to the pampered appetites of the few” (76–79). Jenkin’s “automata” and “mechanism”

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may not allude to Peacock’s novel. Yet even if they are incidental, the inclusion is unequivocal. The two paradises in the play so far are ostentatious. This one is less gaudy than the Bottler’s but only because it is a garden, unlike his, which is a hotel and casino with a garden on the grounds. More paradisiacal than the play’s first paradise, Sam nonetheless rejects the mechanical wonder that replaces the technological wonder. Sam rejects the play’s second paradise as he rejected the first because the Author, the surrogate playwright, rejects it. The play is his story. Just in case the audience and critic forget, the play has the 20th-century Old Sam calling to the departing 18th-century Brown on scene-10’s miniature golf course, “Dollar a hole?” (181) If that reminder does not work, the play has another reminder. The scene closes with Young Sam listening to the cassette, which warns the cub detective to stop if these danger signs occur: “If you find yourself beginning to search for its own sake, or thinking of your search as a quest of some sacred kind, or feeling that the search itself is the goal and whether you find the missing man or not is simply a question of plot” (186). These danger signs are occurring, which is why Sam and therefore the Author must not stop. As he is questing to discover his identity, the Author is discovering the best way to tell the story. Detective fiction is fine for the plot, but the story is more than plot, which is why detective fiction is only one of the play’s many storytelling vehicles. The myth of the hero is also fine but also only one of many vehicles. Scenes 12 and 13 present the hero’s most challenging trial because the quest takes Sam and the Author to a subsurface reality deep within themselves: to their invisible, spiritual natures. The quest takes them to the play’s third paradise. After a scene 11 in the Church of St. Christopher that ends with the appearance of the Little Person, who tells Sam, “Follow me” (192), the scene is a garish American sideshow where Sam confronts Lila about not loving him but instead using him and all the other fiancés to get the money, and Darlene, removing her disguise as the Little Person, reveals that her husband, the missing brother, spent all the money making a garden. The revelation summons Capability Brown for the final garden interlude, which is different from the two preceding ones on two counts. They are descriptions of a garden’s contents: its surface or visible reality. This interlude is an analysis of its meaning: its subsurface or invisible reality. They claim to be paradise. Gardens in this interlude are symbols or “maps of paradise” where we can discover ourselves, for “our true life, the spirit in everything—is invisible.” This point is one of the crucial points Brown makes not only for My Uncle Sam but for Jenkin’s theatre. Though invisible, our true life so infuses visible life that “we can learn to see it, even in a single leaf, in the blink of an eye.” Furthermore, since “outside, the entire garden awaits us still” (195),

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all of visible life from nature to the garish sideshow is a garden in which we can learn to see our true, invisible life, although obviously it is easier to see in some forms of life than in others: flowering gardens, for instance. These crucial points are religious in the most basic sense of the word: a belief in a reality other than the visible reality of nature, science, and so on. And they support other statements in the play such as the cassette that instructs the cub detective not to think of the search “as a quest of some sacred kind” (186) when it is that and Young Sam’s recognition that the brother’s map that the Mexican Doctor gave him is a “tool to figure out where I am in relation to something a helluva lot bigger than me. Kind of religious, don’t you think?” (178) Why, then, does Sam, having reached the goal of a map of paradise, not stay in the garden? There are different ways of answering the question, all of them helpful in understanding Jenkin’s theatre. We can begin by thinking of the issue negatively. “On these nearby grounds,” continues Brown, lives a lone inhabitant, but the grounds cannot be the garden that the brother made and the single inhabitant, a hermit, cannot be the brother. The hermit “built all this”: the universe where Lila works and where she gave Sam clues for tracking her brother. After building the universe, he made a cottage with a “herb garden” that cannot be the garden on which the brother spent all of the money. The inhabitant has to be the God of creation Who disappeared in the modern age and Who has been absent ever since: the indifferent God of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the absconding God of Kushner’s Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika, and the annoyed God of Guare’s “The General of Hot Desire” Who wants humans’ importunity to cease so that He can sleep. Thus staying in the nearby grounds would be tantamount to living in isolation because the hermit keeps withdrawing into simpler modes of existence: cottage to hut to stick in the ground, and Brown thinks “he may soon move again” (195). Staying would be Sam’s withdrawal from life. The brother’s garden, the site of the penultimate scene 13, is “paradise” (199) for Darlene, the play’s third paradise after the Bottler’s hotel and casino and Brown’s second-interlude garden. There Young Sam saw the “river flowing through the garden and on either side of the river, trees bearing all manner of fruit,” and the Author adds that “everything spoke to him” and “flowers nodded in greeting” (199–200). The description invokes the garden on the top of Mount Purgatory in Dante’s tripartite poem. Entering it in canto 28, the pilgrim finds his way blocked by a stream flowing through the garden that separates him from the “great variety of fresh-flowing boughs.”18 Yet everything in the earthly paradise speaks to him including the lady, Matilda, who

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on the other side of the water goes “singing and culling flower from flower with which all her way was painted” (Purg. 28.41–42). Though similar in geography, Dante’s garden and the brother’s garden are very different. Matilda speaks to the pilgrim; he witnesses the divine pageant, and he is reunited with his beloved Beatrice in the gateway to a new life with the redeemed in Heaven. Like the hermit’s grounds, the brother’s garden is devoid of human life. Darlene explains to Sam that she helped him on the journey because she and her husband “wanted company.” Disappearing from the world “to lose himself” (199), the husband has outdone the hermit in that he has so lost himself that he has lost his identity; he does not remember his name. She leaves to get him, but since Sam leaves before she returns, unlike his sister Lila or his wife Darlene, he never acquires a name or a personality. Crossing over to another form of life, he convinced the Manager of the golf course designed as a solar system to exclude Earth. “ ‘Too dull’ ” (179) was his reason. Earth is not too dull for Sam. Now we can think of his not staying in the brother’s garden and returning to Pittsburgh positively. The ending of My Uncle Sam is different from the beginning. The play opens with a couple “lipsynching badly” (124) a recording in which a brokenhearted lover pines for his/her beloved’s return. Scene 13 closes with the couple “actually sing[ing]” (200) the same song. The singing functions on two levels. It underscores Sam’s motivation for taking the journey, and it returns him to the everyday natural world. Feffer sees the difference in the uncle’s attitude toward life and death. “Instead of quietly disappearing,” he writes, “My Uncle Sam now hopes that his death will not be a quiet one, but inconvenience all those around him, and maybe even cause ‘the maid to scream’ when she discovers his corpse.”19 Another way of stating the difference is that on the quest for the missing brother, Sam discovers his inner reality: the invisible power to see visible life transformed. He does not discover the power of love; he discovered that before the quest. When he was a young man, the uncle stepped aside to pursue a quest for love of Lila. As she is giving him the clues with which to track the missing man, an Older Woman at a nearby table in the nightclub rises and slaps her companion, punctuating the slap with “Love is for fools” (137). Whether Sam hears her or not, he pays no attention because he is too engrossed in Lila. That she makes a fool of him by telling every man she sends on the search that she will marry him does not defeat Sam, whose love for her brings him home from the brother’s garden, but he comes home having discovered the power of imagination. Having crossed into the discovered reality, he sees himself freed from “being stuck in time” (199) and free to be “everywhere” (200). Although he never finds Lila despite years of searching,

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Pittsburgh becomes his map of paradise in which his empowering imagination sees her “laughing” among the ghosts of flowers while his empowering love draws him to the “grave” (201) to be reunited with her in death. The combination of questing in love and discovering the power of imagination gives Sam his identity. We saw Young Sam and Old Sam interacting in act-2’s opening scene when the former asks the latter for help in locating a doctor to attend to his wounds suffered in the opium den. In the penultimate scene in the garden, Old Sam, observing himself as a young man, comments, “He’s not doing so badly. I even like him” (199). In the ultimate scene in Pittsburgh, as the old man dies, the young man declares himself, “I am My Uncle Sam” (202). The uncle, however, is not the sole character to gain an identity through the combined powers of love and imagination, for the Author is not only another quester, he is the play’s principal quester. The best way to understand the Author is to discover My Uncle Sam as the third play in a trilogy. The first segment, “Highway,” of the first play, Limbo Tales, introduces the action that unites all three plays: seeking or searching or questing, and the faculty that the questing stimulates: imagination. The second segment, “Intermezzo,” introduces spectating experiences that stimulate the imagination, but mainstream theatre excludes them. The Master of Ceremonies’ explanation that he and his associates searched “fashionable boulevards and back alleys” (34) implies that producers of traditional or conventional theatre do not secure their projects from the mixture of these sources, yet the mixture creates wonder. Scenes 12 and 13 of My Uncle Sam are a summational set of mixed—wondrous—images. The only way into the garden is through the garish sideshow, the Blowhole Theatre. The third segment, “Hotel,” introduces a primary reason for questing: to recover or revitalize a lost something, whatever the something is. In this segment’s case, it is the Western tradition, defunct because it replicates itself and is incomplete; it has gaps that the circus and vaudeville acts excluded from “Intermezzo” fill in later plays. “Hotel” also introduces a reason secondary in the segment that will share primary status with the recovery motivation in later plays. The Man’s compassion for the stricken Shelley stimulates the emotion that expresses heart. Dark Ride pursues possibilities in narrative implicit in “Intermezzo” and “Hotel” in that it develops not one traditional way to tell a story as in naturalistic theatre but many ways into a weave. The play also pursues possibilities in character implicit in “Highway” and “Hotel” in that it brings together types such as the Thief and the General. Its main contribution to the trilogy, however, is creating wondrous images that so stimulate the imagination they engage the audience in the quest. Its defect or shortcoming is that the characters do not express heart, but as noted earlier, a fourth play in the 1993 collection

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can clarify the reason for the lack of heart. The examination of that play, Poor Folk’s Pleasure, follows the examination of the trilogy. My Uncle Sam expands the grounds for soaring, adding 18th-century landscape gardening and 19th-century satire to 20th-century poetry in “Hotel.” It expands types of characters in Dark Ride to a conception of character as bits and pieces to narrative expanded from dissolving scenes in Dark Ride to a conception that moves by fits and starts. And it combines the imagination in “Highway,” the incipient love in “Hotel,” and the wonder in Dark Ride to create wonder and express heart in both Uncle Sam’s and the Author’s quests. Questing in his love for Lila, Uncle Sam discovers his inner reality in the power of imagination so that he does not have to stay in the brother’s garden. He can see her image laughing in a garden in Pittsburgh. In the myth of the hero as the most consistent structure of the many the Author employs to tell the story, the uncle is a hero in that he departs or steps aside from the everyday world to be initiated into a subsurface world and to return with the power to see Pittsburgh and all of visible life transformed. But although that power redeems his stepping aside, it is not a boon he can share. “He was sure beyond any doubt that an urgent meaning was there [in the brother’s garden]—but he couldn’t read it—not so he could tell it back to you” (200). The Author speaks that passage about his uncle. That is, the uncle needs his grandnephew to tell his story. The Author is the real hero. Stepping aside to quest in love for his Uncle Sam to understand the older man, the Author understands himself. Discovering his uncle’s identity, he discovers his own. Rescuing the dead man from oblivion in a variation on the theme of recovering something lost, he rescues himself. Returning from the mythic journey with the boon of creativity, he becomes an artist. Discovering the power of imagination, he learns how to tell a story. In the story in which the brother’s garden invokes the garden at the top of Mount Purgatory in the second cantica of the tripartite Commedia, the passage in the preceding paragraph recalls Dante’s prayer in the third cantica’s closing canto to God for the power to relate his experience to a medieval audience. Dante is granted the power; the Commedia is the experience with the ineffable. My Uncle Sam is the imagination’s power actualized for a contemporary audience. The play is the Author’s garden, the map of paradise that by transforming verbal and visual images into theatre redeems his stepping aside and revitalizes a dead theatre. The Author does not gain a name, but his closing speech bears comparison with a speech in act-2’s opening scene in which he recreates a Saturday afternoon experience when he was a boy and the granduncle took him to his brother’s, the boy’s grandfather’s, store and taught him how to candle eggs. In the closing scene, he relates how from time to time he takes his nephew to the

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video arcade, and he gives his nephew a name: Jesse. Dressed in a cashmere coat with a cigar and sitting in a leather chair in his uncle’s Pittsburgh hotel, the Author can say, “I am My Uncle Sam” (203). That would be a fitting last line, but the play closes with wondrous imagery that expresses the Author’s heart. Capability Brown’s second interlude lists statuary a garden should contain such as that of Sylvanus, Roman god of the woods. By describing the statue of My Uncle Sam “across America,” the Author memorializes his uncle in garden imagery, for the “brow of the statue” is wreathed “with flowers” (203), a visual image of the invisible power of imagination while the line “I am My Uncle Sam” is an audible image of the invisible power of love. The examination of the trilogy completed, this study turns to a fourth play in the 1993 collection that sheds light on the absence of heart in Dark Ride. Premiering at the end of the decade in which Dark Ride (1981) premiered, Poor Folk’s Pleasure (1989) can be considered a companion play to the earlier play in that it answers the question about going around through life again raised at the close of Dark Ride, although ‘answers’ is misleading in that it implies that the two plays share identical or similar casts. They are both plays without a central protagonist and with the mixture discussed above. Scene 10, for example, mixes naturalism and non-naturalism dissolving and creating theatre. A Newsman speaking directly to the audience introduces Leroy Smiles, known as Crab Boy because he was born without legs and with only two digits on each hand. Accused of murdering his teenage daughter and the older man with whom she was running away, Smiles is about to reenact the murders when the Newsman signals the three to return to their original positions to begin the action anew as the scene ends. The plays’ casts are different, however. Dark Ride has actors who maintain their roles throughout; the actor playing the Translator maintains that role. Poor Folk’s Pleasure has performers who “take on a variety of roles.”20 Nevertheless, the two can be seen as companion plays with the new one a series of performances that actualize the pleasure that makes life worth living. The play consists of 28 scenes, three of which, the first two and the last one, form a framework enclosing the 25 scenes. They will be examined later. Two of the enclosed scenes become wondrous. Comparable to scenes in Dark Ride in which one scene is a portal to another scene that unfolds as the spectator enters the portal, numbers 6 and 7 are scenes in which a Man purchases a look in a shoebox that becomes the next scene on a street corner with a Man and a Girl. Another two of the enclosed scenes open on visually wondrous images. Scene 3 has a dreaming Angel on the back of a Demon dancing to rock music, and scene-10’s Leroy Smiles is the Crab Boy. Symbolic of life’s texture in that they are neither one extreme nor the other but combine the angelic and the demonic, the bestial and the human, the images

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become less wondrous and more human. In scene 24 the angel is feminine while her carrier is a man “who writhes and twists like a demon” (29). When Smiles reappears in scene 21, it is to propel himself along the floor between lines of dancers until he stops to stare at the audience and be perceived with compassion. That scenes dissolve into overlapping scenes without being portals to them—that is, they are simply being succeeded by them—is not in itself wondrous, for the cinematic style is typical of much contemporary theatre. Two of the scenes are part of a filming. In scene 15 a Blind Man and a Lead Girl are walking along an abandoned railroad track when they encounter a Forest Ranger checking permits. As the Blind Man draws his gun, a Film Extra enters the scene. At this point the film shooting stops, to resume in scene 16 with the Extra performing her role. That scenes are repeated is not wondrous, and the repetition is not pointless because each time they repeat, they vary. In two scenes girls are playing a storefront game called Fascination, orchestrated by a Teenage Girl, who phones her boyfriend in scene 9, interrupts her phone conversation with a girlfriend in scene 18 to order a man occupying a seat but not playing to surrender it to someone who wants to play, and who returns without the players in scene 24 to phone her boyfriend. A Performer in a Clown Show appears in three scenes. Midway through scene 11, he/she “abandons the attempt” (14) to perform a routine, completes the attempt in scene 19, and returns for more routines in scene 24. Verbal images also make the scenes of life’s pleasure less wondrous. All folk are “just meat” (3) to scene-4’s hissing Woman, traveling “through this dreary orchard of bones” (20) to scene-15’s Blind Man, on “this bitch of an earth” (16) to scene-12’s Watcher. The Announcer’s summary statement in scene 11 of a performer’s laws of existence applies to all folk. They are “permitted to suffer, and commanded to amuse” (14). As denying of life’s pleasure as these images are, they are outnumbered by images affirming the pleasure in scenes of dancing, singing, and dancing and singing, and the images become more affirmative as the scenes progress. Granted that in early dancing scenes the dancers slap one another provoking tears, the slapping is expressive of emotion absent in Dark Ride. By scene 21 couples continue “sweeping up and back” (25) as they dance, and in scene 24 the angelic girl still dreams on the back of her demon-like partner as he “moves forward and back” (29). Almost from the beginning, the singing scenes have been joyful with the Man in the Straw Hat singing about the “ants” in his “pants” for his baby (9) in scene 7 and reprising the lyrics in scene 14. A Man sings the opening lines of “Life Is But a Dream” (3) in scene 4; the entire company sings the song in the closing scene. For the combined activities, an Old Man and a Young

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Woman sing while a couple dances in scene 23. When he leaves, she continues singing while the couple continues dancing. Finally, although scene 25 ends with a Man pausing “uncertainly” (31) before exiting, and only because he is unsure of the audience response, the scene is his spirited dancing to illustrate the song he is singing. Two other sets of images change as the scenes progress. If joyful is too strong a characterization of the changes, affectionate and communal and celebratory are not. In the first-set’s early scenes involving a man and a girl, conversation is short-circuited. In scene 4 the Girl in the tavern with whom the Salesman attempts a conversation has to have the tavern’s MC lift her head from the table on which it is lying, to little avail, though, because she slumps back into the position. The Girl in scene 7 leaves the Man in limbo by refusing to say whether she will come to his place that night. “I gotta go” (9), she terminates the encounter. In scene-26’s motel room, however, a Woman does all the talking to a Man in the Chair, “his expression unchanged,” until, singing of love, she moves to his chair and holds him, at which time he “leans his head on her breast” (32). For three of the four scenes in the second set of images, a Man with Shaking Hands sits apart from the company, his sole emotion a chuckling or laughing to himself. In the second scene, number 20, a Woman taps him on the shoulder, and partnering with her, he joins the couples in the hitting or slapping dance, but he performs perfunctorily. He is still emotionally detached in his third scene, number 24, where he views the surrounding activities “with sang-froid ” (30) until the scene ends with him receiving a phone call that makes him explode. In his fourth appearance, he sings with the company in scene 28, the closing scene that is the counterpart to the closing scene of Dark Ride in that an image from the Grail story can cohere otherwise incoherent images. Since the Man with Shaking Hands appears in four scenes, particularly the second and final scenes, he is part of the play’s framework but only a part of it. The core of the framework is scenes 1, 24, and 28. In scene 1 a Boatman with a “beatific smile on his face” approaches a “crowd on shore” (1). Presented in contemporary images—he sings about his dog—he is an emissary from the world of the absolute on a vessel associated with the Grail story. The episode that Jenkin can be reimagining here is not that of Parzival’s experience in the Grail castle in Wolfram’s version that he reimagines in Gogol and that can be the basis for the ballroom ceremony in Dark Ride but that of the anonymous 13th-century Queste del Saint Graal. In this version a miraculous ship propelled by divine wind is sent to speed Galahad, accompanied by Perceval and Bors, to the Holy Grail.21

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The miraculous ship is a variation on an image found throughout mythology: the vessel that comes from the other world to transport the quester on his/her adventure. Images of boatman, ship, and crowd appear in Dante’s Commedia. In canto 3 of Inferno, Charon arrives to ferry the damned across Acheron; in canto 2 of Purgatorio, a winged angel arrives to pilot the penitent to Mount Purgatory’s shore; and in canto 2 of Paradiso, Dante likens himself to a singing ship as he ascends with Beatrice from Mount Purgatory to the beatific vision. In Poor Folk’s Pleasure, no one boards the arriving boat so that after pausing “uncertainly” (1), the Boatman exits. He returns twice more. In scene 24, a scene in which a variety of activities— among them, one of the performers essaying a routine in a Clown Show— repeat earlier scenes, the Boatman arrives and sings, but since the activities continue with no one boarding once again, after pausing “uncertainly” (30) a second time, he exits a second time. He returns for the third and last time in the final scene, but before examining this scene, I want to bring the Man with Shaking Hands back into the examination because he is part of the framework and clearly connected to the Boatman. He first appears in scene 2 after the Boatman’s exit ends scene 1. Seated apart from others, with a lantern and a bell, he collects a fee from people who gather to look “intently at something we cannot see” (1). It is tempting to think that they are looking at the departing Boatman or toward the world that lies outside their ken, but the scene remains ambiguous. In any event, when he rings the bell, except for one woman the people exit. His palsied hands qualify him as a herald of the adventure for which the ship is dispatched because such figures are “often dark, loathly, or terrifying.”22 Yet he cannot come from the other world. He is a watchman and not an emissary, for try as hard as possible, he cannot explain what the people are looking at or his relationship to the scene. He has a sense of an “urgent meaning” in the experience that the Author says Uncle Sam has in the brother’s garden, and, like the uncle, he cannot “tell it back to” an audience (200), but in the final scene, he gives up trying to communicate it. He is no quester or pilgrim. Unlike Dante, he does not ask for the power that would enable him to communicate it. One reason has to be because the experience of the permanent, perfect world is ineffable in the impermanent, imperfect world. That is, it must be communicated in images or symbols suggestive of another reality as in the Grail ceremony. As already discussed, the Man with Shaking Hands reappears in later scenes. Noteworthy is his third appearance that follows the Boatman’s second appearance, in scene 24, to observe “with sang-froid ” (30) the activities that so engage the others that they ignore the Boatman, who leaves without anyone accompanying him. Now we can examine the final scene. It opens with

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the Boatman rowing “away from shore” (33), the reverse of the direction in scene 1, presumably to return to the other world. He has a Girl with him who sings the opening lines of “Life Is But a Dream,” a song accorded five stanzas in the scene because beginning with the third stanza, the entire company forms a group around the two and joins in the singing. With the fifth stanza sung, the Man with Shaking Hands comes forward to explain the experience but once again cannot, only this time he “shrug[s],” implying that his inability to explain no longer makes a difference, “smile[s]” (34) for the first time, and returns to the group that made overtures to him in the course of the play. The Boatman resumes rowing as the lights come down on the performance. The closing scene is as ambiguous as the closing scene of Dark Ride. The text does not mention the Girl after the company joins her and the Boatman in the singing, and neither does the text state whether or not the company remains with the Boatman as he resumes rowing. The second stanza’s closing line, “Life is but a dream,” implies that since life is impermanent, the company chooses to depart with him for the permanence of the other world. Yet the fifth and final stanza that the company sings contains these lines: Life is but a dream, and we can live it We can make a love, none to compare with Will you take part in, my life, my love—(34).

I am not a director. If I were, however, I would take these lines as the cue for the company to remain on shore as the Boatman departs, for they imply that despite life’s impermanence, it is worth living. Rather than forgo the known for the unknown, the group chooses the poor folk’s pleasure of the transitory world, even if the choice means the hitting or slapping dance or short-circuited conversations, the wandering attention span playing the Fascination game or the violence of scene 14 in which a Woman recounts hitting the hospital nurse who insisted that she had to fill out a “long goddamn form” (17) before any assistance was forthcoming. The reason for the choice is that the joy of dancing and singing—of interactions with other persons—in our world outweighs the pursuit of whatever is in the other world. In other words, our world offers the possibility of love: the expression of the heart. Interestingly the cover art’s centerpiece on the Broadway Play Publishing edition of Poor Folk’s Pleasure is a naked couple atop a bed. There is wonder but no heart in Dark Ride because the characters pursue the quest for another reality at the expense of the interaction that leads to human love whereas there is heart but no wonder in Poor Folk’s Pleasure because the characters pursue the interaction at the expense of the quest for another reality. Perhaps the other reality is divine love, suggested by the pre-

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cious stone in Dark Ride, which is the Grail’s image in Parzival, the Boatman’s beatific smile, and an ineffable experience. Yet the characters in Poor Folk’s Pleasure cannot discover the other reality so long as they, unlike their counterparts in Dark Ride, the questers in the anonymous The Quest of the Holy Grail, or Dante’s pilgrim, do not take the journey by either ignoring or rejecting the Boatman and his wondrous boat. Lacking heart, the characters close Dark Ride questioning life’s significance: the value in going around again. Concerned solely with life’s end, they do not experience the pleasure that by discovering heart gives life significance regardless of the quest’s outcome. Lacking wonder, the characters close Poor Folk’s Pleasure rejecting any reality other than life’s significance. Concerned solely with enjoying life, they do not experience the quest that by discovering wonder gives life significance beyond the pleasure in going around again. Although the characters in the second of the two plays ignore or reject the Boatman, the critic should not because his beatific smile is one more image in a pattern of imagery that begins with the reimagining of the Grail story in Gogol, is maintained with references to “paradise” and “hell” (31) in Limbo Tales and Christ’s death and “resurrection” (93) in Dark Ride, and leaves no doubt about its significance with biblical allusions and references to paradise in My Uncle Sam. Young Sam names the significance when he talks about his quest: “Kind of religious, don’t you think?” (178) That he is looking at the map the Doctor gave him renders the imagery doubly significant. Sam—actually the Author creating the story—rejects the three paradises of the Bottler, Capability Brown’s second interlude, and the brother for gardens that are “maps of paradise” (195). The implication of the play’s closing scenes is that a quester cannot experience the other reality as it is because that is possible, assuming the other reality exists, only after death. The quest consequently changes to one in which the quester discovers the other, non-naturalistic, reality in the naturalistic reality. The successful quester experiences an approximation or map of the absolute, supernatural order in the natural order, although this study uses the terms non-naturalistic and naturalistic because the other reality or order is vague, undefined, ambiguous. For example, the goal of life after death can be either Heaven or Big Rock Candy Mountain. The section on My Uncle Sam opened with an excerpt from a withering review. The section on Poor Folk’s Pleasure and the chapter close with an excerpt from a withering review: “The whole production is stylish, the choreography and music are amusingly suggestive and each scene is so sharply focused it might be a panel in a comic strip. But together they do not add up to a vision, a dream, not even a nightmare—no more, in fact, than just a bunch of weird stuff.”23 Yet just as the earlier review recognized the quest for identity as the primary quest in its play, this later review recognized that

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divorced from Jenkin’s oeuvre, its play is nothing more than a collection of arresting images. A first-time spectator of Jenkin’s theatre would not know what to make of either Dark Ride or Poor Folk’s Pleasure, for they are the playwright’s most surrealistic plays. The one seems to be telling a story but with its images and scenes so blurred that the story keeps receding. The other focuses its images and scenes but so isolates them from one another that they seem not to be telling a story. Of the four plays in this chapter, My Uncle Sam is the breakthrough uniting story and image, wonder and heart. The next chapter examines experiments with the breakthrough in four works that with these four constitute the middle period in Jenkin’s theatre.

NOTES 1. Len Jenkin, Limbo Tales, in Dark Ride and Other Plays 20. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2. The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford UP, 1951) 296. 3. T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1963) 29. 4. Len Jenkin, Dark Ride, in Dark Ride and Other Plays 93. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 5. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: MeridianWorld, 1956) 58. 6. Len Jenkin, Dark Ride (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982) 47. 7. Jon Erickson, “The Mise en Scène of the Non-Euclidian Character: Wellman, Jenkin, and Strindberg,” Modern Drama 41 (1998): 362. 8. Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005) plate iv. 9. A.T. Hatto, foreword, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival 8. 10. Frank Rich, “Len Jenkin Directs ‘My Uncle Sam,’ ” New York Times 12 Oct. 1983: C19. 11. Len Jenkin, My Uncle Sam, in Dark Ride and Other Plays 124. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 12. Sam Shepard, “Note to the Actors,” Angel City, in Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Bantam, 1984) 61–62. 13. Will Eno, The Flu Season (London: Oberon, 2003) back cover. 14. For the controversy with its sources and ramifications, see Marilyn Butler, Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in His Context (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) 30–37. 15. Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall, vol. 1 of the Halliford ed. of The Works of Thomas Love Peacock (New York: AMS, 1967) 23. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically.

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16. Campbell 72. 17. “Brown, Lancelot,” The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. 18. Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: GalaxyOxford UP, 1961) 28.36. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 19. Steve Feffer, “My Uncle Sam in Consumer Society: Len Jenkin and the Death of Death of a Salesman,” in Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance, ed. William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 230–31. 20. Len Jenkin, Poor Folk’s Pleasure (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2005). This study quotes from an edition later than the one in the 1993 collection. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 21. The Quest of the Holy Grail, trans. P.M. Matarasso (London: Penguin, 2005) 207–21. 22. Campbell 53. 23. D.J.R. Bruckner, “Night Is Where the Nuts and No-Goods Come Out,” New York Times 18 Sept. 1996: C18.

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Chapter Two

American Notes, New Jerusalem, Five of Us, and Careless Love

Of the four works to be examined, the chapter begins with American Notes, the fifth play in the 1993 volume. It has a connection with a play in that volume examined in chapter 1 in that two of the characters refer to the HiHat Tavern, scene-4’s setting in Poor Folk’s Pleasure, but the connection is slender and not unusual in Jenkin’s theatre. The Bottler’s conception of paradise in My Uncle Sam has each room in the resort hotel stocked with erotic video classics such as “Dr. Kremser, Vivisectionist” (167). When a character in Pilgrims of the Night tells the tale of “Dr Kremser, Vivisectionist,” it is a mad-scientist tale. Edna’s narrative in Dark Ride of her life with husband Ed has him inventing a carnival ride, the “Ezekial” (99), geared to imagery from chapter 1 of the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. A character in Pilgrims of the Night acknowledges having taken a ride on a carnival attraction, the “Ezekiel.” A better reason for including American Notes in a volume in which he had to be selective is Jenkin’s justification for the inclusion, which offers three approaches to the play: “American Notes is the beginning for me of something new that I am still exploring. It’s still multilayered, and tricky, and hiding behind itself. But I hope there is a directness, and an honesty that’s not as present in the earlier plays. A little more heart, and less head. I believe this play is purer somehow, straight talk from America” (9–10). The three approaches are through “heart,” “talk,” and “America.” Since America is the easiest to examine, the study takes it up first. Of the six plays examined so far, except for Captain Pruss of the Hindenburg, only Kid Twist has characters, locales, and a ground for soaring that are exclusively American. Limbo Tales has characters and locales that are American, but the grounds for soaring are Mayan culture, an Englishman’s Romantic poem, and an expatriate American’s modern poem. Although the characters and locales for the opening and closing scenes of My Uncle Sam 52

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are American, the interim scenes, except for Mexico, could take place anywhere, and the grounds are English landscape gardening and satirical fiction. The amusement-park ride in Dark Ride can be American, but the Translator is struggling with what purports to be a collection of ancient Chinese wisdom, and the questers converge on a convention center in Mexico. There is little that is specifically American about either Gogol or Poor Folk’s Pleasure. Not only is the title of American Notes specific, in print the first specific reference is the epigraph from a canceled plate to William Blake’s America, the subject of which is visionary, prophetic, mythic America releasing promethean energy in revolution against tyrannical England.1 In performance the first reference is the play’s opening speech, a monologue delivered by the Mayor of an unnamed town somewhere in America who addresses a traveler who enters “unsure which way to go.”2 Though he carries a suitcase, he is no traveling salesman like Uncle Sam, and though he is peregrinating, neither is he searching for a precise goal as Uncle Sam is. He is a directionless traveler and an anonymous one, for the Mayor names him Chuckles. The Mayor recognizes the type the silent listener is because he once was such a traveler himself. “Now I been on that road myself,” he tells the newcomer. “Got tired one day, and settled down. Right here. Got a wife and three kids.” Guessing where the arriving traveler is headed before Chuckles decides to settle, he names eight rivers “between here and there” (209–11). Were Chuckles to follow them in the order in which the Mayor names them, he would wander with no direction. The first four are an Ohio river, the Muskinggum (correctly pronounced, it is Muskingum), a Georgia river, the Chatahoochie (Chattahoochee), a New Jersey river, the Raritanic (Raritan), and a Pennsylvania river, the Monongahoola (Monongahela). The next two are fictitious, followed by two that are real: an Idaho river, the Snake, and an Iowa river, the Skunk. The Mayor knows of a ninth river but chooses not to name it. Whether one encounters the reference in performance or in print, the America in the play is a combination of historic and mythic, real and imaginary, naturalistic and non-naturalistic. Although this study examines other grounds for soaring, one more reference to America leads into a specific combination. Conversing with a motel’s desk clerk, Pauline, a motel guest, Faber, relates that as he travels through American towns, they merge into one town because all have a main street with a grocery store, a restaurant, and a tavern. As he continues, he imagines the townspeople going about their routines in a passage beginning, “There’s the mailman scampering along Main Street, and the delivery boy, and the girl who works the checkout counter, and old Mr. Mason, slipping outta that ranch house” (253). The passage does not resemble Uncle Sam’s descriptions of Pittsburgh, which have no townspeople in them, but is very similar to the section of the Stage Manager’s opening

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monologue in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town beginning, “ ‘There’s Doc Gibbs comin’ down Main Street now, comin’ back from that baby case.’ ”3 Another similarity between the two works is that just as Our Town, in Wilder’s words in the preface to the edition, “is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village” (xi), so American Notes is not a picture of small-town life. Rather, it combines, in Jenkin’s words in the production note, “full and movie-like—realistic places” and the feeling that the “distances surrounding our places … are vast” (207). The combination of full and movie-like places surrounded by vast distances is a mixture of limited, naturalistic places and unlimited, non-naturalistic distances. Examining the mixture, the study pursues the breakthrough in My Uncle Sam that closes the preceding chapter and that takes the characters, the audience, and the critic on the quest that changes as that play closes. The set’s places are six: the Mayor’s area, a motel reception area, a motel room, a carnival attraction, a bar, and a Professor’s house. As the opening scene nears its end, the Mayor calls Chuckles’ attention to the next scene’s place or site and character, Pauline, the motel’s night clerk on duty in the reception area. The lights come down on the Mayor and Chuckles and come up on the motel office where Pauline asks Faber, a motel guest who comes into the office because he forgot his key, to make sure a drunk who has been bothering her is not loitering outside the office. Faber checks, returns to assure her that he chased the drunk away, and stays in the office to chat with her. Since Pauline staffs the office between midnight and eight, since she and Faber do not change costumes and engage in a continuous conversation though interrupted by other scenes, and since she indicates the passing of time during the night, the play’s action takes place during one midnight-to-eight shift. While Faber is checking on the drunk’s whereabouts, the lights come down on the office and come up on the Pitchman of a touring carnival that has set up on the local high school’s football field a “few miles down the road” (236), according to Pauline. He is not alone. The opening scene ends with the Mayor, in his attempt to get the slow-witted traveler to settle in the town, offering to help him secure employment. Since Chuckles appears with the Pitchman as his assistant supplying the simulated sound effects for the carnival attraction, the Mayor must have done what he said he would do. And not only did he connect Chuckles with the Pitchman, he did so with the characters in the other sites, for the erstwhile traveler enters scene after scene to perform tasks such as vacuuming the motel office and serving drinks in the bar where a couple perform. That he is able to cover the vast distances surrounding the sites in the same night while assisting the Pitchman stretches credulity, yet not for the Mayor, who reminds Chuckles in a later scene that although he enjoys their social-

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izing, the latter has to “get back to work” (243), at which point the handyman rushes from the scene with the Mayor to one where he stocks toilet paper in the motel rooms. Confusing are the Pitchman’s statements early in the play that he gave Chuckles a job when he found the derelict wandering about when the carnival arrived in town, although the spectator settling in for a naturalistic drama might conclude that the Pitchman is taking credit he does not deserve. More confusing, though, for the spectator expecting a naturalistic drama are the Professor’s statements that Chuckles has been assisting him for some time, for the play dramatizes the assistance. The Pitchman and Chuckles figure in another action that subverts a naturalistic drama. The lights come up on the barker while Faber is checking on the drunk. It seems unrealistic that he would be giving his spiel to attract customers to see his exhibit, a colossal crocodile named Bonecrusher, after midnight, the time Pauline comes on duty, yet the couple who perform in the bar, Tim and Linda, corroborate the time by going into the exhibit. She cannot go in the late afternoon or evening because she works the four-to-midnight shift at a fast-food restaurant. Emerging from the exhibit, they tell the Pitchman that Bonecrusher is dead. He disagrees, but they insist and laughing as they exit tell him to “bury” the creature (227). Rejecting their advice and speaking with affection for Bonecrusher, with whom he has been associated for thirty years, the barker resumes his spiel. Yet the next time that the Mayor and Chuckles are together, the Mayor asks the handyman whether he has a shovel because he wants to “go down to the dump, dig up that crocodile” (242). In his final scene, the Pitchman, carrying a suitcase, “walks away from the carnival slowly, crosses the stage, and is gone” (263), presumably because he no longer has an exhibit. And all of this action occurs during the one midnight-to-eight shift. Although the action violates the naturalistic play’s temporal order, individual scenes within the collapsed time are naturalistic. American Notes is a mixture of naturalism and non-naturalism but not a converging to merge before diverging as in Kid Twist. The quest that follows from the breakthrough in My Uncle Sam is a quest for the discovery of the unlimited in the limited: a non-naturalistic order in the naturalistic order. The Author has Uncle Sam reject the brother’s garden because Pittsburgh or any visible reality can be a map of the invisible reality: paradise. American Notes has all of the characters involved positively or negatively in the quest and throughout all of the scenes. The result is so convincing that Mel Gussow watched the 1988 premiere “in fascination.” His review sparkles with insights that, given the nature of theatre reviewing, he could not analyze in great detail. One insight is that the play is “less disorienting than Mr. Jenkin’s previous nocturnal journeys.”4 It is less disorienting because the play divides the characters into six pairs forming three sets of two

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pairs each and develops the quest through the gradated sets beginning with the most naturalistic set. The Mayor and Chuckles are the first pair because theirs is the first scene. When the peregrinating traveler arrives in the unnamed town, he lacks the characteristics that determine naturalistic identity: name, residence, occupation, and ability to express himself. By naming him Chuckles, the Mayor makes the initial connection from which the other determinants proceed, whether he, the Mayor, is himself responsible for the other connections or in his self-promotion is taking credit due others, such as the Pitchman, who claims to have found Chuckles wandering about the lot where the carnival set up, and the Professor, who claims to have been utilizing Chuckles’ assistance from before the time of the play’s action. The Mayor, however, is the play’s spokesman for naturalism’s values. By settling in the town, he established a home and family and found an occupation. By being elected town official, he enjoys the “honor” (209) of his fellow citizens and the license to spin out tall tales about his mayoral duties. He also makes the play’s most naturalistic speech. Checking in their second meeting to make sure that Chuckles is not thinking of leaving, the Mayor tells him what would lie ahead. The traveler would have to pass the apostle Thomas’ tomb and the tower of Babel, landmarks that would place him in biblical times. In a passage that is a counterpart to the instructional cassette warning Uncle Sam not to think of his search “as a quest of some sacred kind” (186), the Mayor warns Chuckles of being on a “dangerous journey to who knows where. You might be shipwrecked, more than once” (243). Dangerous though the journey is, it is the night sea journey that must be taken. It is Jonah’s journey to rebirth “symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale.”5 Yet the warning works. Reminded that he has to get to work, Chuckles runs to the motel to stock the rooms with toilet paper. The other pair in this first set are Tim and Linda, who tell the Pitchman that his carnival attraction is dead. When he denies Bonecrusher’s death, they try to deflate his spiel by telling him that not only is the creature not an Egyptian crocodile but is an American alligator. Laughing tauntingly, Linda would rob the exhibit of any mystery by recommending that the creature be buried or put in the town dump so that “children can play with his bones” (227) after birds strip him clean, the implication being that Bonecrusher is nothing more than his physical nature. This study could have taken the couple first for their insistence on death’s ultimate reality. Spokespersons for naturalism’s supremacy, they invert the theme of discovering a non-naturalistic order in the naturalistic order in that they sell a naturalistic experience in the nonnaturalistic experience. They reduce to sordidness the sexual experience that expresses the spiritual engagement in the physical engagement. Pimping for

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prostitute Linda, Tim urges Faber to look her over while he “take[s] a dump” (231). Demanding that he touch her, Linda then asks Faber to wipe the lipstick from her teeth. When he does, she bites his finger, at which point Tim reappears to resume his spiel, going from “What’s your offer?” to “Gimme something” (233–34). When he declines, they leave. The Pitchman and Bonecrusher are one of the two pairs in the second set, a set that needs to believe that a non-naturalistic order can be experienced in the naturalistic order. For the barker, the colossal crocodile embodies the non-naturalistic world that history records in biblical times—“from the land of the pharaohs”—and is described in chapter 41 of the Book of Job, a condensed version of which he quotes. The “summum bonum of nature’s awesome power,” it is not only “alive” for him (214), it will “outlive you or me” (227), he counters Tim’s claim that the creature is dead. The Pitchman is so confident of Bonecrusher’s power to outlive forms of life in the naturalistic world that when it is time to die, he will do so in the creature, guaranteeing him eternal life. “I’m a religious man, in my way,” he informs the audience. “If Bonecrusher eats me, I’ll go on living, looking out of his eyes” (226). Unlike the Mayor, who advises Chuckles against taking the journey, the Pitchman will take the night sea journey to rebirth in the creature’s belly. He is therefore so devastated by the crocodile’s death that in his final scene he exits the carnival and the stage, speechless, suitcase in hand. Denied the non-naturalistic experience of discovering life in death, he has to accept the naturalistic world’s death as life’s overpowering reality. Another of Gussow’s insights into why American Notes, unlike some earlier plays, succeeds is that it is “on one level … an exercise in interaction.”6 The interaction is gradated. That the Mayor spins out in tall tales his role vis-à-vis the townspeople that elected him suggests that he has no real interaction with the community, and Chuckles reacts to him more so than interacts with him. Tim and Linda interact with potential clients but as pimp and prostitute, roles devoid of emotional engagement, and when each relates to Faber their relationship to each other, the versions differ, suggesting that they have no real interaction with each other. From the affectionate way in which the Pitchman talks about his thirty-year association with Bonecrusher, it is a partnership in which they interact in a double sense. They collaborate to create a carnival attraction that enables them to interact with the public, some of whom are “repeat customers” who having seen their exhibit, the opposite of wax dummies, “bring their kids” to see it (227). Hence when Bonecrusher dies, the Pitchman loses his partner and their public. The Professor, who is one member of this set’s other pairing, claims to have lost his partner from the non-naturalistic world, but he is not devastated by the loss. Rather, he is frightened because his extraterrestrial wife, whom he

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had to imprison as punishment when she turned out to be “unruly” by being “sexually demanding,” escaped and returned to her “shadow people.” Spiritual beings, they nevertheless look like people in the naturalistic world, if one could see them, and they behave like people in the naturalistic world. Where they differ from humans is “they won’t die” (257). Since they are vindictive and have his house surrounded, they will try to kill him to prevent him from publishing the secrets he learned about them from his interaction with them in friendlier times, an argument that fails to make a believer of the Reporter sent to investigate his story. The Professor’s “proof positive” (258) of the shadow people’s existence, a plaster cast, only proves his derangement to the Reporter, who ends the interview. The Professor cannot convince the Reporter that the invisible non-naturalistic world exists. It does but in wonder and not in extraterrestrials. The first set’s pairings are a speaker and a silent listener and two individuals whose interaction is a transaction. The second set’s pairings are couples, and although they are not human ones, they progress from man and reptile to man and woman albeit of another species. The gradation is in the presence of heart, the second of the three approaches to the play in Jenkin’s justification for including it in the 1993 volume. Gogol and his mistress are a couple, but they have little interaction. Ed and Edna are a couple in Dark Ride, but they separate early in the play and do not reunite until all the questers are in Mexico. Uncle Sam loves Lila, but they never become a couple, and although Darlene loves the brother, he never appears. That characters interact as couples in American Notes is one reason the play has the feel of a naturalistic play despite its violation of naturalistic order. The interaction expresses the heart, even in the strange relationships in the second set. In preparation for the third set, the second set develops the second approach, through the heart, by connecting it with the other quality of Jenkin’s theatre, wonder. The pairings’ incongruity—man with reptile and man with extraterrestrial—creates wonder while one character in each pair expresses his heart. The third set takes the gradation to the next more realistic yet heightened level. Couples’ quests create wonder while their interactions express their hearts. Alone in her motel room in the first of five scenes with the third as brief as a phone call to the office to check on any messages, Karen interacts in a live voice with herself in a voice-over as the scene dissolves into her parting from the Reporter, who left her at the motel to pursue his assignment interviewing the Professor. The scene establishes the players in the first of the third set’s pairings and the naturalistic situation while introducing the non-naturalistic treatment of the situation. Disconnected from the Reporter, Karen is disconnecting from herself; her sense of self is beginning to disintegrate. In the second scene, the alter ego voice-over narrates the scene that led into her

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present situation with the Reporter appearing to repeat the parting that she fears leaves her stranded after three days of not hearing from him. Only by insisting that he will not abandon her but will return for her is Karen able to retain control of herself. In the fourth scene, the voice-over forces her to selfexamination: who she is and how she got into her situation and not merely the facts of her meeting the Reporter but the facts of her life as they bear on her relationship with men. The Reporter appears for only an instant, though he is very much on her mind, for she sees herself “staring out the window for him” (246).7 His appearances in the recreated parting scene, to repeat his assurance that he will return for her, and at their initial meeting are the non-naturalistic treatment of her situation in which she reveals her feelings for him and her fear that he has abandoned her. After writing and destroying various notes she plans to leave for the Reporter, Karen has to address an immediate concern in the fifth scene: how to leave the motel unable to pay the bill without jeopardizing Pauline’s employment as clerk responsible for collecting a bill. The necessity of connecting with a sister in a male-oriented world changes the monologue as dialogue. The live voice, which expresses Karen’s present reality, strengthens with the result that the voice-over, which expresses her past reality, has little to say. The voice-over does not disappear because her relationship with men does not disappear. Instead, for the first time, both live voice and voice-over speak simultaneously in the scene’s last line: “Karen darling, soon as it’s light, we go,” with going referring to “some other town” as a “new girl” (261). The progressive brevity of the Reporter’s appearances in her scenes also indicates that she has become less dependent on him for her sense of self. What her reaction to him finally getting through to her in a phone call is, is left open. Even if she yields to him, an integrated Karen is ready to return to life with a newfound, reconnected sense of self. Thus in the third set, the characters undertake spiritual journeys: quests to understand how they got into their situations that become quests for self-identity with the first couple’s first quester interacting with herself and her absent partner. The first couple’s second quester interacts with himself, his absent partner, and the Professor. The additional interaction in the gradation allows Jenkin to have some fun with the quest. So long as Karen is the focus of her scenes, the audience can sympathize with her situation. Since he has not contacted her, the fear that her man has forgotten her depicts him as cavalier about their separation. A reporter for Flying Saucer News, he left to interview the Professor, an assignment that he explains dictates that she wait in the motel until he returns for her. When the scenes shift to the Reporter, however, the perspective on the situation changes. He is anxious to return to Karen because she is the second chance given to him in life and he does not want to

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lose her, but he cannot contact her because he cannot remember the name of the motel. His desire to reconnect with her enables him to survive the threat that the journey into the Professor’s non-naturalistic world poses, though the threat is presented mock-heroically. Approaching the Professor’s house in the “middle of god-forsaken nowhere” (222), he feels “sort of gloomy and nervous at once, like I’m coming down off something … Hell, maybe it’s the air, seems kinda damp or…” (254). Of the three great journeys to the land of the dead in pre-modern Western literature—by Odysseus in book 11 of the Odyssey, Aeneas in book 6 of the Aeneid, and Dante in the Inferno—Aeneas’ journey is the closest model for the Reporter’s journey. With the Cumaean Sibyl, the Trojan hero descends into the underworld through the “gloom” to the “very jaws of Hell.”8 As they journey through the infernal regions, they are never far from waters with their rising vapors. For example, when Aeneas and the Sibyl board Charon’s craft, it groans under their weight, taking in a “marshy flood” yet manages to convey them across Styx to the “ugly mire and grey sedge” (414–16). In the letter that the Professor wrote to the newspaper that prompted the Reporter’s assignment, he told of living in the midst of “shadow people” (223). When Charon sees Aeneas and his guide approaching the river bank, he questions their right as living beings to be in the “ ‘land of Shadows’ ” (390). Finally, at the house the Reporter is unnerved by the howling of a dog; moments later Chuckles, who assists the Professor, enters carrying the dead animal. Alighting from Charon’s craft, the two passengers encounter the dreaded Cerberus, but the Sibyl drugs the beast with a medicated cake so that they can proceed. To Aeneas’ request to enter the nether world, the Sibyl insists he understand that though the descent is easy, “ ‘to recall one’s steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this the toil!’ ” (128–29) In Jenkin’s mockheroic treatment, recalling is easier than descending because as soon as the Reporter enters the Professor’s house, he remembers the name of the motel where Karen is waiting for him. And since his host’s phone is disconnected, he is anxious to finish the assignment and reconnect with her: “There’s a visible woman waiting for me in a motel room, and I got to get back to her before she disappears” (258). Ignoring the Professor’s warning that the shadow people, who surround the house, will harm him, he leaves, and despite the scream must return to the outside world because Karen receives a phone call at the motel. The Reporter is the lone character in American Notes to take a physical journey in the course of the play’s action, unlike Chuckles, who ends his physical journey by settling in the town. He reaches a boundary separating the naturalistic and non-naturalistic worlds, but unlike the Professor, he forgoes the invisible world’s wonder with extraterrestrials for the invisible world’s wonder in commitment to a terrestrial partner with whom he can ex-

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press his heart. Hence his journey is more spiritual than physical, though by taking the physical journey, he enables Jenkin to undermine the Professor’s otherworldly experience. The final pairing is the culminating gradation in the second approach, through the heart, to American Notes because the couple discover themselves, wonder, and heart by interacting with themselves and each other. Pauline is a college freshman whom Faber, sitting in the motel office, engages in conversation during the course of the midnight-to-eight shift, conversation in which she reveals concerns about such worldly matters as her future and her mother’s health. Some of her questions of him he might construe as flirtatious because she asked him to check on the drunk and offers him coffee and because he is being flirtatious. For example, when she asks him whether he “would ever think about living here,” he, pretending to misunderstand, teases her with a question: “In the motel? Sure. Forever” (236). One question neither has to pretend to misunderstand surfaces as the night wears on, and since they do not know the answer, they engage the audience in the issue. Studying a poem for an English literature class, Pauline asks Faber for the meaning of “doges.” Since he does not know and since she repeats the word and the line in which it appears in the poem’s second stanza, together the two draw the audience into a careful listening to her reading of an Emily Dickinson poem, “Safe in their alabaster chambers.” When she finishes reading, he admits he still does not know the meaning of the word in the poem’s penultimate line. “It’s a mystery” (240), he says. The poem is not a mystery. Usually included in representative selections of her poetry, it is essential Dickinson because of the two versions of the second stanza. In the first stanza, the dead, “safe in their alabaster chambers,” await the “resurrection” and passage to immortality. The 1859 version of the second stanza is positive, but Dickinson wrote an 1861 version that reflects her doubt about immortality. In it while “Diadems drop, and doges surrender,” the dead lie under a “disc of snow” (240). About the final image, one critic writes that it is drawn from Dickinson’s “recurrent word for death and whatever lies beyond it, in combination with the newest astronomical term to describe the Milky Way (a ‘cloven disk’), the furthest reaches of the universe visible to the naked eye. This concluding symbol suggests the cold immensity of infinite space and unending time.”9 There is no immortality in the second, 1861, version, the one Pauline reads, only the passage of time in eternal death. Since Pauline and Faber do not pursue the meaning of doges or the poem, the audience has to wait until Pauline, gradually responding to Faber’s introduction of issues larger than employment after college, responds to the notion that death is the ultimate reality. To Faber’s question about humans being

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happy, she says, “I think … we are happy here. That happiness is another word for our life. That we were made for joy in everything, even our death.” She then gives as justification for her belief an image from Dickinson’s poem without any recognition that the image is in the poem. The night her father died, she felt a light—Dickinson’s image of immortality—enveloping her father, mother, and herself. Not only did she feel “very happy,” although he died later that night, a “little of that happiness” is still in her, and it is “truer” than other feelings she has (264–65). Death is not life’s ultimate reality for her. It is something one thinks about but not all the time because there is much more to life. Pauline’s partner in the pairing, Faber suffers from a sense of alienation. He has been in the motel a week, leaving only to walk in a world he perceives as dead in which even raccoons and squirrels are asleep. Yet his proposal to Pauline that they swap stories is the glimmer of hope for him, for it reveals his need to interact and share with others. Responding to her youthful honesty, he questions her about her goals in life, thereby opening up about the situation that brought him to the motel. His situation parallels that of Man, the traveling salesman in the “Hotel” segment of Limbo Tales who relates to the audience that he came home from two months on the road to discover that his wife had left him taking their child with her. From neighbors he, Man, learned that his wife was seeing someone to whom she presumably went when she left, although she continued cashing the checks he sent her until one came back as undeliverable and he lost all trace of her and their child. Sad as Man’s narrative is, it is understandable given an occupation that kept him on the road. Faber’s narrative of waking up one morning to discover his wife leaving with their child offers no explanation for her leaving. The alienation is stressed in this terrible sentence: “I saw her a few times after that, but it was like seeing someone else” (238). Like Man, Faber has lost his will and does not know what to do. He too feels stranded. Yet half kiddingly, half seriously he connects with the night clerk. When she says that she is not responsible for his happiness, he disagrees, “Yes you are, Pauline, and I’m responsible for yours” (248), so that as a result of the interaction, he gradually sees life awakening, as in the passage that recalls the opening scene of Our Town in which Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, awakens. With the nocturnal interaction changing their relationship, she advises him to “do something” (262): to act. It is her connecting with life in her father’s death, however, that enables him to act. Connecting with life in his father’s death, for he relates how having a vision of the dead man happy to see his son, he, Faber, was “almost laughing, and the tears were running down my face,” he acts. He proposes marriage to Pauline, who declines, but that is okay with him because as he says, “Unrequited love” is

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“better than no love” (266). Awakened to love’s power in the vision of his father and the nocturnal interaction, Faber resolves to leave the motel in the morning and return to life. Both Limbo Tales and American Notes end with a man who feels stranded as a result of a woman abandoning him acting or resolving to act as a result of an experience with another woman. The ending of the later play shows the greater progress in the journey. The action of “Hotel” takes place during the day, the Man vows to “disappear,” and one transformation in a list of transformations is “ink into dust” (56). Despite light intensifying and a biblical passage praising deliverance, the implication is that he leaves to undergo the night sea journey; it lies ahead of him. Despite his call to Momma to keep the porch light on till sunrise, Faber likens himself to a “little plume of dust rising … with the sun behind me in splendour” (268). Since dust is a symbol of death as in Dickens’ Bleak House, a favorite novel of Jenkin, the implication is that the transformation has been completed. For Faber, the nocturnal interaction with Pauline is the night sea journey through death to rebirth, just as her interaction with him is her night sea journey, for she confesses to him, “I’ve been thinking about what you said, about me sort of … doing more” than working in a motel (250). She begins wondering about possibilities in life other than being a night clerk, he recovers a feeling for life’s wonder, and together they have a brush with love. In a departure from earlier plays, American Notes brings together the quest and the love, the wonder and the heart in the same experience for a couple, uniting the wonder of Dark Ride and the heart of Poor Folk’ s Pleasure. My Uncle Sam unites the qualities in the uncle’s experience, but he journeys alone. The culminating pair, Faber and Pauline together discover the nonnaturalistic order in the naturalistic order. They discover the triumph of life in their parents’ deaths and in their nocturnal quests for meaning in their own situations. From here on couples assume greater prominence in Jenkin’s theatre. The third approach, through talk, in the justification for including American Notes in the 1993 volume follows from the experimenting with ways to tell the story in My Uncle Sam. Stories told in a Jenkin play are not digressions. The playwright is perfectly capable of writing digressions because he does in his novel N Judah, which interrupts the action of a couple searching for the truth about the woman’s son to tell, among others, “The Story of the Wandering Jew” in two parts and “The Story of the Mutiny and the Mbili.” Stories in a play are strands in a weave that is the play. Even though Jenkin does not call American Notes a weave of tales, the description he gives to Dark Ride, Gussow recognized the play as “short stories stitched into a tapestry.”10 The weave is a composite image of the America in which the action takes place,

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and the tapestry is a better weave than any in the other plays in the 1993 collection. Following an abrupt phone call from his dead father that makes him aware of his situation, Man in “Hotel” overcomes his feeling of being abandoned by responding to Shelley’s situation. Karen overcomes her feeling of being abandoned in a series of scenes in which she takes stock of herself in her relationship not only with the Reporter but with men generally. When Ed in Dark Ride realizes that he cannot afford a ticket for his sideshow attraction, a mummified body of John Wilkes Booth, and cannot sell it, he leaves it at the railway station, and that is the end of his “prize possession” (75). The Pitchman has genuine affection for Bonecrusher, intensified by Tim’s and Linda’s taunting remarks, and is devastated by the creature’s death. The best contrasting example is the scene in My Uncle Sam in which Young Sam visits the botany professor, who sends him to Chinatown. The destination is another clue that Sam must track on his quest to find the brother; the giving of it, however, is preceded by a visit that has no bearing on the action but is in the play because it illustrates the horror movie as a vehicle for telling the story. The coed’s visit to the professor’s house could be a scene in Little Shop of Horrors. The Professor in American Notes is introduced early in the action so that the audience knows of his claim to consorting with extraterrestrials long before the Reporter arrives at his house. And all of the scenes in American Notes are interwoven so that Karen’s interaction with herself and the absent Reporter, for instance, takes place while the interacting Faber and Pauline are learning about themselves, the Pitchman is expressing his association with Bonecrusher, and the Reporter is descending on the Professor’s house. American Notes also develops a theme that emerges from the Author’s role in experimenting with ways to tell the story in My Uncle Sam. A few examples can track the growth-of-the-artist theme. At the end of the opening scene, the Mayor, attempting to persuade Chuckles to stay by offering to help him get employment, tells him to look toward the motel office where Pauline works. As it did in the 1988 premiere, the stage design can place the two onlookers within sight of the office with the night clerk visible in the lighted room surrounded by darkness. The scene shift is realistic. The second example is less realistic: the Reporter appearing in Karen’s scenes. Her conflicting feelings for him, given his interest in her, and her fear that it was short-lived and he has forgotten her render his image visible but only his image and only briefly. The third and best example is not realistic, yet it is the most imaginative of the three. To pass the time on her graveyard shift, Faber proposes that Pauline tell him a story. When she declines because she cannot, he tells his story of his encounter in the bar with Tim and Linda. He does not just narrate it; he summons the entire scene dramatized with him as a player in it.

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My Uncle Sam is the culmination of the growth-of-the-artist theme in the trilogy in that the Author creates a story about his uncle. But since the Author is both within and without the story, the audience is always aware of the artifice. The audience may be aware of artifice, even trickery, in an earlier scene involving Faber. Assuring Pauline that he did the favor she asked, the motel guest tells her that the drunk howled before leaving the area at which time an offstage voice howls. Faber’s story, however, is no trickery. A self-contained reality, it makes the artist as storyteller a magician who can summon scenes and whole plays that have a life of their own. The Professor cannot convince the Reporter that the invisible world exists because he cannot summon it into the visible world. Faber can and does by retrieving images for an audience to experience and thereby overcoming the images’ death by disappearance. In this sense the artist as storyteller discovers the non-naturalistic order in the naturalistic order—the everlasting in the transitory, the infinite in the finite— by infusing life into dead images and thereby approximating the absolute world of eternal life. This study examines New Jerusalem next because to pass the time while she waits for the Reporter to return, Karen sings a couple of lines from a song about New Jerusalem and the central character is a man named Faber, although he is not the Faber of American Notes. Apparently Jenkin likes the name, just as he apparently likes the name Margo, the woman with whom Faber becomes involved, which is also the name of the Thief’s girlfriend in Dark Ride and the name of an aspiring actress in a later play, Margo Veil. Its premiere in 1979 puts the play New Jerusalem between Gogol and Kid Twist in the 1970s and Limbo Tales and Dark Ride in the 1980s. Since the work has not been published as a play, however, the study examines it in the form in which it is available: adapted as a novel published in 1986 with an epigraph for each of the unnumbered 16 chapters. Although the epigraph for chapter 9 comes from Revelation, the passage from 21.8 is not the one that gives the work its title. The passage that does is from 21.2: “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven.” What descended from the sky in Jenkin’s New Jerusalem did not come from God, and the destination was not a biblical holy city. The city was named by its founder, Arnheim, whose name comes from Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim, or The Landscape Garden,” the source of chapter 3’s epigraph. The narrator of Poe’s tale tells how his friend Ellison spent a fortune he inherited. Possessed of the poetic sentiment but neither a poet nor a musician, he chose to create a landscape garden called Arnheim because, he argued, landscape gardening affords the greatest opportunities for displaying the imagination. After a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the two styles of gardening, the natural and the artificial, the narrator relates that Ellison chose a style that

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exceeds the purely natural or purely artificial. There follows a narration of the voyage by vessel and then canoe over dreamland’s waters to a resplendent landscape garden: the “Paradise of Arnheim.”11 Jenkin’s New Jerusalem is an island penal colony whose first criminals, parachuted onto the island by sentencing governments some forty years ago, were like the sinners in Rev. 21.8 being punished in the burning lake after the descent of the holy city to claim the redeemed: “the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars.” This passage is the source of chapter 9’s epigraph. Other criminals also were parachuted there, embezzlers like Arnheim, who by using his money and influence to import needed materials became the city’s presiding officer who had the native population slaughtered. He connects with Ellison in Poe’s tale, for his vision of a New Jerusalem shaped the city’s destiny until he died twenty years ago. Between the time of the UN’s designation of the island as a penal colony and Arnheim’s death, prisoners’ families were allowed to settle there and tour groups allowed to visit so that the colony became a city. Yet with the production on the landmasses of Stelbesil B, a wonder drug inducing nirvana and consequently eliminating the need for penal institutions, the island was forgotten, sealed in isolation for twenty years until the opening of the novel set in a futuristic world. Written in the 20th century but taking place in the 21st century, New Jerusalem begins as a journey navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of government control and individual license. The story is a first-person narration told by Faber, a reporter rendered superfluous by the worldwide use of Stelbesil B, which eliminates events, mandating that in order to survive newspapers invent the news. Since he cannot, he will inevitably lose his job. He therefore volunteers to cover a real event: the UN’s opening of New Jerusalem. The world body is sending a ship to the island to recover any persons still alive and return them to a mainland to be reconditioned through the application of the worldwide drug. He connects with the narrator of Poe’s tale, for he narrates his journey to Arnheim’s domain. An appellation and an image connect the works too. Ellison’s domain of Arnheim is a “Paradise”; springing up from its midst is a “mass of semiGothic, semi-Saracenic architecture … glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets …” (615). Springing up from the island is a city built by the convicts that Arnheim envisioned as a “ ‘paradise’ ” with buildings in every style including “minarets.”12 Though they share an appellation and an image, Jenkin’s novel and Poe’s tale are different works unfolding in different modes. The tale begins realistically but ends in fantasy in the descent on dreamland’s waters to the resplendent garden. The novel begins in fantasy in a futuristic world in which Stelbesil

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B fills the minds of the residents of Faber’s housing project with “but a single thought” (12): enjoying their adaptations to the 21st century; watching television would have to be a popular adaptation. Hence the government removed all doorlocks and disbanded all police forces because they are unnecessary. The fantasy continues as the plane carrying Faber and other passengers approaches the island. In an image reminiscent of Jeweller Ravensburg’s eye appearing in Margo’s dream in Dark Ride, as Faber, looking out the plane window, sees a Chinese sampan, he sees the family onboard skinning a rat with big eyes. “A bright silver toy airplane appears in the center of each dead pupil” (35). Yet as the reporter explores the city, New Jerusalem becomes progressively realistic, even naturalistic. For example, the description of the death houses in New Jerusalem’s slums compares with the description of the houses in London’s Tom-all-Alone’s in Dickens’ Bleak House. Another scene names the novelist. A temple, the lone building antedating the penal colony, has in its library “‘files of the Reader’s Digest, ancient stone tablets, complete Dickens’ ” (191). Eliot, another favorite author, is not named, but lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are echoed in Faber’s description of a nocturnal adventure “when a ragged peasant scuttles past me into a sidestreet like a crab” (139). Along with these literary allusions is the mock-heroic treatment of classical literature’s crossing of an infernal river encountered in American Notes. Faber and two others leave the pier on a night “blacker than hell” (123) on a trip enlivened by the ferryman’s attempt at a funny creation myth. Names in the novel are amusing. The island’s opposition to the ruling government is the Kamoro cult, a play on Camorra or secret society. Its leader is the oxymoronic Big Tiny. The substance everyone wants to possess is a dolphin-brain extract that is the island’s equivalent to Stelbesil B. It is called keph, which is Greek for head, a slang term in drug culture. The in-flight magazine on New Jerusalem Airlines is Loving Couples with a cover that features two naked women and one naked man in an obvious threesome relationship. Also in the mixture are elements of pulp fiction. Petersen is the fat man on the plane who keeps trying to get information from Faber by offering to form an alliance. In bermuda shorts and undersized t-shirt, he joins a Kamoro procession wearing the cult’s black box on a string around his neck. The plot is a scramble for a shoebox containing the keph with everyone betraying everyone else to get it. The plot spawns graphic scenes: Faber discovering the body, throat slit, of the doctor in whose care the shoebox was entrusted and collapsing to the floor, drugged by Margo, the woman sent with him to retrieve the shoebox, as she stands over him clutching it. Chapter epigraphs from the Bible and Chuang-tze, Blake and Lévy-Bruhl, Shakespeare and Sax Rohmer, Poe and Earl Derr Biggers as articulated by Charlie Chan spread the mixture throughout the work.

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Jenkin forefronts the realism by grounding the novel in the fantastic. He grounds the novel in Poe’s tale that becomes fantastic, and he grounds the adventure in New Jerusalem in the futuristic new world. That is, when Faber journeys from the future in which the novel opens into the past, an island sealed in a time warp, the reporter is in the present: the old world that is our world here and now. Thus New Jerusalem is a blistering satire of a materialistic, addicted culture. The city’s corrupt, greedy power holders kill off one another in their quest to possess the remaining keph while Big Tiny, the opposition power holder, heads a Kamoro cult whose members worship such gods as Magnavox and Motorola. Deprived of technology ever since the island was isolated, they believe that the UN ship is bringing appliances and electronic devices and that once they are delivered, the thousands of tourists hiding in the volcanic mountain will emerge to purchase them. Since they wear the kamoro, a black box with a camera aperture, on a string around their necks that they secure on their faces for ceremonies, the novel lampoons the religious cult’s myopic view of reality. Big Tiny’s view is not so restricted, however, for with the fortune he expects to realize by selling the remaining keph, he plans to open a luxury hotel on the island, duplicating the Bottler’s conception of paradise in My Uncle Sam. Not only corrupt and greedy, he is vicious, having fed his son, a boy about five years old, a daily regimen of keph so as to seduce the cult members into accepting him as their messiah: the one who knows the secret of processing keph from a dolphin’s brain from which it is extracted. Emaciated, the Kephi-boy cannot hold his head up, weighted as it is by the kamoro box. That Stelbesil B and keph are nirvana-inducing drugs is a detail shared by the novel’s two worlds. Combined, the two worlds share details with other Jenkin works. Checking into the island hotel, Faber learns that three dollars is added to the bill should he masturbate in the room, the same amount charged in the “Hotel” segment of Limbo Tales. The different possibilities for interpreting the map of the island recall the different possibilities for the manuscript the Translator is translating in Dark Ride, just as Arnheim’s protective shell around the island recalls Zendavesta’s shell in that play. Though the words that the pirate Wu Fang is reading are upside down, Faber, sitting across from him on his junk, can read that “ ‘things have roots and branches’” (125), a passage echoing Gogol’s instructions to his mistress for stimulating the imagination in the theatricals, itself a passage echoing the description of the Grail when Repanse de Schoye brings it into the ceremonial hall in Parzival. The quest for the keph as a Grail is a variation on the quest for the Grail in Gogol and Dark Ride, if the stolen diamond in the latter play is so interpreted. The Grail is a symbol of the absolute world in that every Good

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Friday, in Wolfram’s poem, a dove descends from Heaven to place a wafer on the precious stone, renewing its power to sustain life. Since the drug is also inexhaustible, it confers on the person or persons who possess it absolute power over life and death in that addicts will go to any length to get it because denied it, they die. Though the object of the quest is all that is left of the drug in New Jerusalem, as Petersen says about its inexhaustibility, “Enough in that box to addict North America quite conclusively. It can be cut a thousand to one and still be potent” (94). Wu Fang dumps the box’s contents over the junk’s side to prevent the drug from reaching the mainland and conferring power. Once in the hands of unscrupulous persons, with modern scientific instruments they will learn its chemical composition and, as he says, “Then they will rape the oceans for the [dolphins’] flesh they need” (201). Even Faber becomes complicit when he decides that his role in the scramble warrants a share in the profits realized from the drug’s sale. He has a change of heart, though, and therefore a change in his quest: from the keph to a meaning in life. Apparently the Thief in Dark Ride undergoes a change of heart too, although the play offers no explanation why he becomes a thief or why he places the stolen diamond on a pedestal at the convention. The novel prepares for Faber’s change. He sets out for New Jerusalem on a quest for meaning in life by so writing a story that he can start his own newspaper dedicated to reporting as opposed to inventing reality. Becoming embroiled in the scramble changes the original objective to sharing in the drug’s sale, but his humanity prevails. He intervenes to protect a dog being mistreated, he judges the island’s film crew “criminally insane” (105) for killing the extras to make the scene more realistic, and he responds to the Kephi-boy as the “most pitiful sight” he has “ever seen” (164). The boy is the catalyst for his action that continues the quest that changes from accepting someone else’s paradise to discovering and creating one’s own map of paradise. After the UN ship’s crew annihilate the inhabitants and scorch the earth, Faber and Margo, believing themselves alone on the island, are drawn to the sound of Kephi-boy’s voice. Rescuing him, they turn their backs on the new, futuristic, world to stay on New Jerusalem nursing the child to health and plowing the ash under to transform the land into a “garden” (214) to feed themselves. Forced to change the quest’s goal from the absolute power the inexhaustible drug confers to a meaning in life, they reverse the novel’s mode once more. It begins in fantasy and becomes realistic and then horrifically naturalistic in the holocaust that destroys the island. But the novel does not end in death. It ends with the couple discovering life in the island’s death. Faber and Margo discover the inexhaustible power of love and imagination that can create paradise in a natural garden: a new, edenic, world that approximates the absolute, supernatural paradise. It is a paradise

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to be shared, for Faber invites the audience to discover and create by coming to New Jerusalem, where he, Margo, and their child will “wait for you, a long time” (214). The longevity itself suggests an approximation of eternity. Five of Us reverses New Jerusalem in that it begins in what appears to be a naturalistic mode. The play’s opening monologue—“I am a messenger. I deliver. I work for the Pony Express Messenger Service. I have a bad back and my feet smell all the time”13—puts the speaker in the company of Gogol, whose opening monologue in his play has the same conversational staccato. Where their speech patterns differ is that the disjointedness continues with this speaker. After trying to communicate the notion of saving the best for last by explaining how he eats dinner, he yokes the notion with trying to dry his wet socks in the apartment where he lives alone and not opening the package he stole from his route until the morning: “Best to begin is weakness, and for babies, which we are not or we would be in our cribs and praying inside our tiny brains that mother is there in the dark, and to stay dry. So. Not until morning. First, sun up. Then, open” (26). With a cast of five characters; a set of two adjoining apartments and a space for ancillary scenes in the street, hallway, and bar; and a botched burglary, the spectator might think the play naturalistic and the speaker the “idiot person” (15) that he says he is. But though Five of Us looks naturalistic, it is not, and though the speaker knows himself well enough to know that he cannot hold any job other than the one he has, he is much more than an idiot. Not naturalistic, neither is the mode fantastic, the opening mode of New Jerusalem. It is mythological. Introducing himself as Herman, the speaker is Jenkin’s reimagined Hermes, the Greek messenger god. Act-1 scenes, in which Herman is separate from the other four characters, develop the preliminary parallels between the two messengers. Taking the stage for the opening monologue, he is described as “neither old nor young” (7). Hermes is a baby in the story in which he steals Apollo’s cattle and bearded on the stone pillars or herms that are his shrines. Explaining in a subsequent monologue how he expects to trick his supervisor into believing that the package he has stolen was taken from him on his delivery route by thieves who hit him, Herman hits himself with a rock. Hermes is an anthropomorphic god personified in the heaps of stones marking boundaries that became the bearded stone pillars. On the day he is born, in the story personifying him, he tries to trick Apollo into believing the latter’s cattle wandered away by disguising his footprints and their hoofprints to conceal his theft of them. He is therefore a trickster god of thieves. Before leaving the herm, I want to jump ahead to act 2 and reverse the order paralleling the two messengers. As a fertility god, Hermes is embodied in a shrine in front of a classical Athens home: a “stone pillar with male head, genitals, and erect penis.”14 With the two women out of the adjoining apart-

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ment for girl talk in a nearby bar, the two men break into Herman’s apartment, not realizing he is home, to burglarize it. Not knowing what to do with him, the two intruders tie his hands behind his back and bring him to their apartment to which the women have returned. As the four debate options for dealing with the situation, he admits to having an “erection now from fear and love” (52). He also calls his captors “beasts of the field” (41), paralleling him with the son of Zeus and brother of Apollo in his role as god of herdsmen. One of Herman’s pastimes is making reservations by phone in hotels in far-flung places and then marking on maps the places phoned. He cancels the reservations, but an avid reader of National Geographic magazines, he likes to imagine himself a world traveler. He also travels on his delivery route though to more local stops. Not only the god whose herms mark boundaries on roads but also the divine messenger, Hermes travels everywhere, most notably to demand that the bound Prometheus reveal the secret, to bring Persephone from Hades to her mother, to lead the three goddesses to Paris for his judgment, to give Odysseus the moly as protection against Circe’s magic, and to inform Calypso that she must release Odysseus. Another of Herman’s pastimes, in addition to imagining travel itineraries and reading pornography, is learning languages. Using tapes, he practices Chinese, not that China is a special place but that the learning and the pornography equip him for imaginary relationships that he conducts on his route without interfering with his deliveries. Real relationships are impossible because the look he sees in the eyes of women he encounters fills him with “disgust and hatred” for his “own shape and being” (34). “Successful communication with enemies and strangers is the work of Hermes, and the interpreter, hermeneus, owes his name to the god.”15 A final preliminary parallel is in act-2’s opening. Thinking the two intruders have killed him, Herman cries, “I am going to tell policemen that you killed me. I am dead and you killed me” (40). As the messenger of death, Hermes escorts dead souls to Hades. Act 2 develops the principal parallel. Prior to this night, Herman has not been in his neighbors’ apartment because they do not reciprocate his greeting uttered in the hall and on the street and because he respects the boundary in the “wall between” them (50). Hermes is a god of boundaries that the herms establish. Herman, however, has been “in bed with you by hearing and mental seeing,” he tells his captors (49). In his imagination and his dreams, he transgresses the boundary. “A bringer of dreams,”16 Hermes is both a god of boundaries and a transgressor of boundaries: in his theft of Apollo’s cattle and his role as escort of the dead, for example. Thus Herman is not simply retarded. He is other: someone who lives in another world, but I do not mean the divine, although it may be. He is a character unlike the four who is able to participate in life imaginatively. Cultivating his imagination by “both hearing study and sex reading” makes him

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able to “think different things” (33) while performing everyday activities. Different from the four, he transgresses imaginatively, and they do not as evidenced by the one’s misunderstanding of the man next door. That the two men transgress physically creates the play’s action. In addition to reimagining Hermes by paralleling Herman with his mythological counterpart, act 1 parallels the two universes of the two adjoining apartments. Here Five of Us duplicates New Jerusalem in its shift from one mode to another with the shift to the apartment occupied by an unmarried couple, Mark and Lee, introducing the play’s naturalistic mode. The second scene opens with Mark reading a National Geographic magazine featuring Sri Lanka, not to imagine a travel itinerary, although Lee reminds him of his position that “thinking was the only way to travel” (18). He is reading to learn about the island republic to which Lee, an anthropology graduate student, is going for a year of field work. Her going leaves him in the lurch, for unlike Herman, he seems unable to fend for himself. Not only is she filling the refrigerator with food, she is also instructing him on how to cook the food. Yet his problem is not shopping or cooking. He can survive he assures her. He cannot, however, because her going leaves him without the income she brought into the relationship by waitressing when not being a student. While struggling for three years to write a novel, he has been grinding out pornography under a pseudonym, pornography that unknown to him Herman reads unaware that his neighbor is the author. But the product has become so hackneyed that he lost his job, a fact he does not share with Lee. In this parallel that is really a contrast, Mark is insecure whereas Herman is confident, and it is Lee’s departure for Sri Lanka that manifests the insecurity. Mark’s insecurity is that he wants to be a writer but fears that he lacks the talent. So long as Lee is with him, he can work on the novel by playing games with her to stimulate the imagination and by revising based on her constructive criticism. But alone he will have to confront the terror of the blank page. He fears the change not only in his present situation but also in their future relationship after the yearlong separation. He is not alone in fearing the change. Lee fears losing his love in the separation. Her best friend Crystal, who comes to the apartment to say good-bye, sums up the fear when she expresses her wish for “us to look exactly the same when she gets off the plane” one year later (19). The three of them sum it up when Mark and Lee sing, with Crystal dancing, the song “Stay.” The fourth character, Mark’s friend Eddie, masks his insecurity in finding a better job than driving a van and in cultivating relationships, since he has a police record and a history of failed relationships, by studying at home to be a mercenary and by coming on as a macho man when meeting a woman, a tactic that has the reverse effect on Crystal, alienating her.

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The most telling parallel that is really a contrast is that Herman uses his imagination whereas Mark misuses his. Not having a normal relationship with a woman, Herman has a sexual life that he describes to the audience as “lonely” and consequently “not good I think for you to learn” (9). He compensates by reading the pornographic novels that Mark writes, but by so doing he cultivates his imagination. Crystal is right when she says to Mark that writing the pornography “is no good for your head” (20). She does not explain; she does not have to. Grinding it out impacts on his imagination: his ability to generate images for his novel. By cultivating his imagination, Herman conceives of the plan to steal the package, sell the contents, and with the money quit the messenger service to travel to the countries he has learned about from reading National Geographic magazines whose languages he has been learning. The best track that Mark can follow with his imagination is to convince Eddie that with the women out of the apartment to break into their neighbor’s apartment. By not getting to know Herman, who has tried to be friendly, he believes the messenger hoards money and is not home. His plan is to steal the money so that he can pay his rent until Lee returns from Sri Lanka. The burglary is a disaster. Yet in the play’s irony, Mark and Eddie’s quest—their transgression—initiates the action that changes their and the women’s fortunes. One does not have to be a seasoned theatregoer to know that the two universes will intersect and the characters interact. Act 2 opens with the break-in. Awakened by the transgression and taken captive by the men to their apartment to which the women have returned, the messenger from another world awakens in his four captors responses to three of his roles. The first and most important role is cultivator of the imagination. Once he recognizes Mark, Herman elicits Lee’s question about what they are going to do with him. The response takes imagination. As the faculty awakens in the four as they debate the options, they confront their insecurities: for example, that Mark lost his job and that if he sells the necklace in the package Herman stole and with the money goes to Sri Lanka with Lee, Eddie and Crystal will be left behind to deal with the prisoner and Eddie’s police record. With his role as thief emerging, Herman’s parallel with the god reemerges. Accused by Apollo, in the Homeric Hymn, of stealing his cattle, Hermes denies the theft, even when the two brothers appeal to their father for a judgment in their dispute. Zeus orders the younger brother to take his older brother to the hideaway where he drove the cattle. Hermes obeys and with the cattle released plays the lyre he invented the morning of his birth. The sound so delights Apollo that Hermes gives it to him, in return for which gift Apollo gives the messenger a shining whip ordaining him “keeper of herds” (399). Herman also has been denying his theft of the package until, sitting in his

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captors’ midst listening to their arguments with one another and confessions to one another, threats to harm him and apologies to him for the imbroglio their transgression created, he admits his guilt and gives them the necklace as a “gift,” making the day their “birthday.” He will lie to the supervisor; they “can go, and become strong with money, and fly” (52). Their disagreement over whether to believe him yields his third role. The Homeric Hymn, the primary source of information about Hermes’ roles, ends with Zeus appointing his son “messenger to Hades” (405). Convulsed by an epileptic fit, Herman falls to the floor and appears to settle into sleep but is actually dead. The messenger’s death brings Eddie and Crystal together. Seeing how Eddie handled the situation softens Crystal so that she extends an invitation to him after he puts Herman to bed in his own apartment: “I’m going home. … You wanna walk me?” (57) He does not have to reply. The play ends with the song “Come Go with Me” playing over the house speakers. Not realizing Herman is dead, Mark and Lee take the advice of Eddie and Crystal, who do know, and leave for the flight to Sri Lanka on Eddie’s promise to sell the necklace and send Mark the money. The messenger’s death keeps the couple together to create an edenic workplace in the Indian Ocean republic in which she will do field work and he will finish the novel. Addressing Mark’s concern about not having packed for the trip, Lee says, “They might have clothes in Sri Lanka. If not, you can go naked for a few weeks till we make some out of leaves” (56). Were the departing sequence reversed, the ending could be more dramatic. Since Mark and Lee leave for the flight, the lights come down on Eddie and Crystal and therefore not on the new eden as in the ending of New Jerusalem. Regardless of which couple the lights come down on, however, the four are the beneficiaries of the messenger’s death. With imagination stunted and fearful of change, the four have lost the excitement of the quest. It is Herman who is imagination’s emissary, and it is imagination that enables one to accept change by envisioning new possibilities to pursue, exploring and growing into them. It is Herman who has the excitement of the quest. As he says, “Those who do not improve mind do so at their peril of having no new tracks to follow and thus wearing the old till they are ruts and you are stuck” (34). A bringer of dreams, he infuses imagination’s power into his captors enabling them to escape their ruts. He frees Mark and Lee to pursue their old dream by making it new: by giving Mark financial security and a muse in Lee to inspire him and by giving Lee emotional security in having Mark love her “all night” (56) so that she can work during the day. And he frees Eddie, who is “alone” in life (52), and Crystal, who is divorced with a seven-year-old, to pursue a new dream of security together. In Five of Us, the four characters presented naturalistically discover life in the death of the one character presented nonnaturalistically.

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Like American Notes, which opened this chapter, Careless Love, which closes it, returns at the end to its beginning, though unlike that play, the return is a scene-by-scene reversal of the first half: a reversal and pattern among other reversals and patterns. The play opens with a brief framework in which the image of a train’s arrival and departure invokes naturalistic terminals between which the action unfolds. A brief scene with an Actress follows. Visually she is connected to a character named Lorenzo, who tries unsuccessfully to envelop her in his arms while declaring his love for her. Their second-half counterpart scene clarifies the connection and the disconnection. Verbally she introduces the play by naming it and tells the audience what not to expect: “No tear-jerking vanilla marshmallow drivel, no drooling obscurantist mumbo-jumbo.”17 Proving immediately that Careless Love is neither sentimental nor cerebral, two tumbleweeds, identifying themselves as “spiritual beings” (13), enter to expand the introduction by setting the boundaries between which the action unfolds. Buffeted by desire “between Erebus and the Big Rock Candy Mountain … between Bicklebarney and the ever-greeny land of God” (14), they wander bodiless “seeking form and love” (16) as the wind increases, propelling them and the play between the boundaries. Heaven, mind, and spirit are images of the upper boundary; Hell, body, and form are images of the lower boundary. Since they “enter from above”—from the direction of the upper boundary—to “lower into view” (13) and in their quest are attracted to, while fearful of, “the nether regions, the world below the waist, the bottomless pit” (16), the expectation is that they will exit downwards. They do not; they exit “upwards” (17): a contradiction or inconsistency that is not unusual for Jenkin’s theatre, which is neither programmatic nor predictable. The movement has to be downward because the boundaries are absolutes: permanent states rather than settings for action. If all the action takes place in the Heaven of absolute spirituality or the Hell of absolute carnality, there would be no drama or play because there would be no tension between enjoying the pleasure of the impermanent carnal world and questing for the permanent spiritual world. Jenkin’s characters do not want to experience the absolute; to do so means they would be in another realm. The questers hope to experience a non-naturalistic approximation of the absolute to sustain their faith in the absolute’s existence. Hence Careless Love takes a fresh approach to the new direction this chapter has been examining: the discovery of the non-naturalistic order in the naturalistic order. The action begins as the title states as a quest for the satisfaction of naturalistic lust or love without caring. Once humans become involved in the quest, which changes, non-naturalistic dream sequences violate naturalism’s rational order in settings where human life is lived between the absolute boundaries.

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With the wind increasing and the tumbleweeds, spurred by remembrances of past exploits, departing in a “flurry of desire” (17) for more “amorous” (16) adventures, the action descends to a level farther below the upper boundary. A young man, Jacky, enters a young woman’s apartment where she lies sleeping on a bed and sits on its edge to talk to her without wakening her, thereby visually creating the image of spirit over form. Apologizing for staying away, summarizing his life apart from her, and confessing to the hurt he felt two years earlier when she asked him to leave, the monologue verbally creates the image of mind over body. Explicit about where he is trying to put his life together—“in between” (19)—the monologue reveals that he still cares for her, tempering the quest for sexual gratification. The upper boundary continues to recede when motel lounge singers replace Jacky and the Sleeping Girl. A divorced couple performing together, they image more body and form than did the preceding couple, particularly when they perform Olivia Newton-John’s “Let’s Get Physical,” but it is the ex-husband’s, Spin’s, remarks that image a descent from the preceding scene. Talking about how outlines blur at night, he says, “That hand resting on the thin rayon fabric of her skirt, touching the warm thigh beneath, that hand just dissolves into her flesh, flesh to flesh.” Ex-wife Marlene confirms the descent: “We’re all one body anyway. THE body” (22–23). Spin closes the scene with the assurance that “love will find a way” (25), though there is mockery in his assurance: “Hey, the truth is you can say it all in three little words. God—Love—Acid. Hey, just kidding” (22). The kidding, counterbalancing Jacky’s seriousness, prevents Careless Love from becoming sentimental and maintains the mixture fundamental to Jenkin’s theatre.18 Tempered by Jacky’s caring, the way is nevertheless sexual as the scene shifts to a loft where a woman, Marie, enters expecting to find her partner, Bobby, home. She wants to share her excitement at getting an acting job although knowing he will disapprove because he wants her to concentrate on her poetry that she performs in clubs, but he is not there. Expressing her disappointment gives her the opportunity to emphasize the body, both in her person as she changes clothes for the acting role and in her poetry as she performs a poem presumably inspired by her love for Bobby. In the poem the beloved has “ ‘two broken teeth’ ” and a “ ‘black star’ ” on his “ ‘ass,’ ” none of which interferes with his prowess on their “ ‘stained’ ” mattress (27), incarnating Jacky’s spirituality on the edge of the Sleeping Girl’s mattress. The eroticism is not confined to Marie’s poem. In a flashback Bobby incarnates their relationship in what might be called a one-paragraph prose poem. In her poem he, “ ‘hunchback,’ ” is on top of her as they “ ‘sail’ ” their “ ‘love … to the stars’ ” (27). In his prose poem, she is on “top” of him, a single drop of her

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sweat providing the liquid for her “message that flies out by night,” a “love message” that empowers her to write “immortal, feminine, earth verse” (28). Since these lovers are two of the principal players in the drama that follows, one would expect a narrative to convey the love unless the dream sequences dissolve rational structure, which is a possibility in contemporary theatre. In his study of the American avant-garde theatre, Arnold Aronson writes the following: At a basic level, almost any play one can select from the repertoire—from Oedipus Tyrannus to Miss Saigon—are all stories. They may be told in varying degrees of complexity with a variety of performative components and strategies, but they are stories nonetheless. The old axiom that all drama is reducible to “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl,” is not only a fairly reasonable synopsis of much of the world’s drama, it also emphasizes the privileging of narrative in the dramatic form. In most performances that can be classified as avant-garde, however, narrative structure is eliminated.19

The core drama of Careless Love is a narrative but with a difference, and I do not mean the transposing of the two principals to girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy. The narrative is not the play’s only structure, but the second structure does not become apparent until the action reverses the descent that dominates the first-half scenes. Two allusions chart the descent from the upper boundary toward the lower boundary, although three other allusions could be deleted without loss to the play’s texture. As the tumbleweeds reminisce about incarnations they have been and the dangerous adventures those incarnations entailed, the more moderate exclaims, “Oh, the humanity!” (16) These are words spoken by Herbert Morrison for station WLS in Chicago reporting the explosion of the Hindenburg as it came in for a landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, and used in Kid Twist but appropriately so in that play because they are spoken by the Reporter covering the historic event as it occurs in Kid Twist. Realizing she is late for the acting assignment, Marie sings, “ ‘I’m late I’m late, for a very important date’ ” (32), alluding to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The allusion is appropriate, but that is about all that one can say about it. The most appropriate of the three that could be deleted is the allusion to O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” a short story in which a couple discover what they did for love. She discovers that he sold his watch in order to buy her combs for a Christmas present while he discovers that she sold her hair in order to buy him a fob chain for a Christmas present. The allusion is Marie’s remark to Bobby, “Next thing you know, I’ll sell my hair and you’ll buy me a comb” (46). She is incensed to discover that to make money for them so

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that she does not have to take acting jobs and can concentrate on her poetry, he has taken another modeling job, which she detests because they usually mandate that he pose nude for “middle-aged perverts drool[ing] behind their canvases” (30). She wants him to concentrate on his painting. The acting role Marie is essaying yields two allusions that cannot be deleted. With the Christian Video Players, she is scheduled to portray various women in a series dramatizing biblical stories produced by a Christian broadcasting network. Her role being filmed in this scene is that of Jezebel in a condensation of three episodes of 1 Kings. In 1 Kings 16.31, Ahab, king of Israel, marries Jezebel and supplants the Lord with her god, Ba’al. 1 Kings 21.23 is the prophet Elijah’s judgment on her for her duplicity in the death of a vineyardist named Naboth so that Ahab could take possession of his vineyard. The least condensed episode is the contest of miracles in 1 Kings 18 between the Lord acting through Elijah and Ba’al acting through the pagan god’s prophets. Victorious, Elijah has the false prophets slain. The script, however, so distorts the contest that Elijah is the villain whom Jezebel accuses of ordering the deaths of harmless devotees of love dancing and praying to their god. When the director, Arnie, who admits that although the script corrupts the biblical account, he intends to continue filming because the Christian network is paying him, tells Marie, protesting the corruption, to take a break and get her act together, the scene changes. The scene distorting the contest charts the descent from the upper boundary toward the lower boundary verbally in Jezebel accusing Elijah of criminal behavior and visually. As the scene unfolds in the studio, “actors cavort around a statue of a golden calf, in a scene of degenerate Biblical idolatry” (36). Carnality’s triumph over spirituality plunges the action toward the lower boundary and prepares for the second allusion. On the break Marie composes a poem that contains an allusion to Moses as an infant floating in bullrushes in the Nile in Exod. 2.3. In the poem the “ ‘cradle’ ” is “ ‘in the bullrushes,’” but it “ ‘floats on an oil-slick’ ” (41) in a jarring shift to a contemporary, polluted wasteland image that with its emphasis on the physical records a disillusioning loss of faith in the spiritual. The severed connection with traditional faith is not the only instance of disconnections within Careless Love. Dissolving dream sequences are another as is Marie’s poetry. No matter what is happening, she periodically composes a poem, even when she is taken hostage. Consisting of discrete images in tension with one another, the poems have little or nothing to do with the action or other poems except for an occasional comment on either. The narrative, however, is continuous—as the core drama, that is. Marie’s anger with Bobby for taking the modeling job is so aggravated by the disillusioning experience

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with traditional spirituality that when she catches up to him in his modeling session, she tells him to pack his stuff and get out of their loft. Bobby is posing for a Plastic Surgeon operating on himself, so that his face is covered with blood and bandages, to reshape the features until he has assumed Bobby’s face. Just before Marie arrives, the two quote the first seven lines of Henry Vaughan’s “The World.” For the Surgeon, the poem is an example of “useless learning.” Rejecting the poem, he rejects a universe ruled by an eternity “ ‘like a great ring of pure and endless light’ ” (44). Rejecting the values sanctioned by that eternity, he deals in drugs, steals his model’s identity to flee the country with the contraband, and when arch-criminal Lorenzo and his cohorts surround the place, fires his weapon at but misses Bobby, and takes Marie as hostage for a getaway in his airmobile. If the play is performed with an intermission, the getaway would be a good place to break because the second half’s reversal of the first half’s downward direction begins on their flight with the descent charted by traditional images of descent from the ring of pure and endless light. In the poem Marie composes while the Surgeon drives, their bodies “ ‘hang on the lip of the void,’ ” and they fall “ ‘like evil cherubim’ ” (53). “You’ll end up in Hell,” she warns him, but he is not cowed, for Hell, he says, is “not for me” (57). Neither is Hell the action’s destination; settling in an absolute state would end the tension and therefore the drama and the play. The need for a mixture of spirituality and carnality to create the tension is, however, an aesthetic reason for the change in direction that occurs on the getaway. Another reason must be structured into the drama for the action to reverse from descent to ascent. A description of Careless Love on one of the play’s back pages gives the reason. Interwoven with the medley of songs, poems, croons, recitations, and cries is the “search for love and meaning.” Marie and Bobby have to search because they are losing love and meaning when the play opens. A possible allusion provides illumination, but even if it is not an allusion, it still helps in recognizing the loss in this difficult play. When the Surgeon draws his gun and grabs Marie to take her as hostage, Bobby cries out, “The room spins, in a vortex of…” (49). Whether or not “vortex” alludes to Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” it conjures up Poe’s imaginative world with its theme of the loss of identity in the disintegration of the self. When Careless Love opens, Marie and Bobby are losing their identities because they are misusing their creativity and their love. Marie is a poet and Bobby is a painter, yet both have accepted roles in which they are prostituting themselves in that they are misusing their bodies. Marie is so bad an actress that director Arnie warns her that unless she starts weeping as the script demands, he will take the role himself, and Bobby allows the Plastic Surgeon

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to appropriate his identity. Misusing the spiritual gift of creativity, the two artists have sunk into carnality. They are misusing their love for each other, but since Bobby does not discover Marie’s prostitution until the second half, the recognition confines itself to his prostitution. Mistakenly believing that in his love for her he is ensuring a situation enabling her to write, Bobby allows the Surgeon to appropriate his identity. But in so doing, he forfeits the self that Marie loves. As she asks staring at the doctor’s transformation, “Bobby, if there’s gonna be two of you, not that I care, but how do I tell the difference?” (47) Misusing the spiritual gift of love, the two lovers have sunk into carnality. The reversal of the search for love and meaning from the carnal way to the spiritual way begins when the Surgeon reacts to Marie’s poetry as “unpleasant,” provoking her response, “You don’t know anything about Bobby, or me, or my poems.” When he then asks her whether she likes Polynesian food, she asks, “You mean like stuff with pineapple on it?” (53–54) The play’s second half is connecting the first-half’s disconnections from the criticism of Marie’s artistic gift, to Bobby’s encouragement of it tinged with her love for him for the encouragement, to his artistic gift. When basking in his praise of her poetic gift in the first half, Marie reciprocates by praising his gift in a painting of a dreamscape of a “dusty field of pineapples” (29). For a repast of Polynesian food, the Surgeon stops at Mama Wong’s Tiki Lounge, where the reversal accelerates the uniting of the twin gifts of creativity and love. When Mama Wong tells the doctor that she did not recognize him, Marie protests that it is her “boyfriend’s face.” When the doctor reminds her that the two are breaking up, Marie protests that her love life is none of his “damn business” (55–56). To escape the pursuing Lorenzo and his men, who have closed in on them at the Tiki Lounge, she and her abductor are transported to a pineapple field. Creating a poem, she hears Bobby call her name. “Here!” he reveals himself to explain that he came to the field to wait for her, and though weakened by a beating Lorenzo and his men administered, he repeats, “Love brought me here” (62–63). “Here” returns the examination of Careless Love to avant-garde theatre, since location implies space or landscape rather than time or narrative, and landscape rather than narrative is a characteristic of avant-garde theatre. For Aronson, Gertrude Stein is one of the pillars of the 20th-century avant-garde movement because instead of creating traditional plays with a temporal structure in which the narrative moves linearly at a rate the production determines, she created plays with a spatial structure in which the landscape is simply there for the spectator to determine what to make of it. About the relation between the spectator and the landscape, she writes, “You may have to make acquaintance with it [the landscape], but it does not with you, it is there and

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so the play being written the relation between you at any time is so exactly that that it is of no importance unless you look at it.”20 The landscape that is there for the spectator of Careless Love to make acquaintance with Michael Feingold likens to a Mobius strip that merges with the play’s comic-strip narrative to create a “bookended construction.” He continues: “So the piece folds back in on itself, leaving you with no base in reality except the outside world, as if that were anything to judge by.”21 The Mobius strip is an excellent image for the play’s spatial structure on which the narrative unfolds, although the criticism that the play lacks a base in reality for judging applies not only to Jenkin’s theatre but to most contemporary art. I also think that Careless Love offers a guide to recognizing a base, and it is in the merger of temporal, linear narrative and spatial, stationary landscape. The wondrous mixture of fact and fantasy, dream and reality, kitsch and profundity, and chance and intention draws the temporally engaged spectator from scene to scene on a landscape whose sites are portals for the spatially engaged spectator to enter. At his most imaginatively inventive, Jenkin fuses scene and site in an irresistible engagement. To escape Lorenzo and his men, the Surgeon orders Marie to flush a toilet in the men’s room, an act that transports them to a pineapple field that is “like the one in Bobby’s painting” (60). As proof of Bobby’s talent, early in the narrative Marie directs the audience’s attention to a dream he is painting on the wall of their loft apartment. Projected onstage, it is rows of pineapples leading in the distance to a padlocked shack. She, however, does not recognize the landscape to which they were transported and has to be told to walk toward the shack. As startling as her failure to recognize the dreamscape is, more startling are the Surgeon’s questions as they walk: “You don’t remember any of it, do you? That yellow sky?” (61) Asked by her captor whose conversation during the modeling session revealed that he was never in the apartment, his questions suggest that contrary to Marie’s earlier response about him not knowing Bobby, in assuming Bobby’s features, the Surgeon is becoming Bobby: a shadow part of him and a part that does not like her. During the session he told the model that he liked him; in the airmobile he told the captive that since she has neither the model’s “stillness” nor his “beauty,” the two “are doomed to separate” (53). The next surprises startle in rapid succession. Being mistaken for the Surgeon by Lorenzo and his men, who beat him, implies that the identity transfer is complete, a transfer Bobby revokes by refusing to separate from Marie. Struggling to get up, he opposes his shadow’s dislike of her in a line that resonates: “Love brought me here” (63). For Aronson, the altering of the “way in which an audience views and experiences the very act of theatre” is another characteristic of avant-garde performance. “Traditional ways of seeing are disrupted so that habitual patterns, which inevitably reinforce social norms,

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are broken. A change in an individual’s attitudes, associations, or beliefs is effected not through a straightforward presentation of ideas but through a fundamental restructuring of perception and understanding.”22 Unfortunately Jenkin does not have a body of non-dramatic writings on which the critic can draw. Richard Foreman, whom Aronson includes among avant-garde artists, does, and he has an image for the restructuring of perception that his theatre effects in the spectator. “My plays are an attempt to suggest through example that you can break open the interpretations of life that simplify and suppress the infinite range of inner human energies; that life can be lived according to a different rhythm, seen through changed eyes.”23 The engaged spectator of Careless Love has eyes and ears changed, for the surprises compound. Ordered by the doctor to continue walking toward the shack, Marie tells the stricken Bobby not to risk additional harm by attempting to interfere and then utters a non sequitur: “By the way, Arnie says hello.” She is repeating what the Christian Video Players director said to her when he told her to take a break, but the utterance is Ionesco’s theatre of the absurd or Witkiewicz’s theatre of pure form, and it has a result opposite to the one she desired. Bobby leaps to his feet to rebuke her for “doing that Christian TV shit” (63), a complementary theatre-of-the-absurd or theatre-of-pure-form response in his stricken condition but one that fits the situation. When Marie burst in on the modeling session, he had to endure her berating of him. Since he was being paid to pose, he had to maintain his position as passive model and not hearing her refer to the job she took had no weapon with which to retaliate. Now it is his turn to vent his anger and hostility at her for squandering her talent on a job he disapproves of while berating him for squandering his talent on such a job, but the venting is only momentary because he does love her. Equally important as his reaffirming his love is his reclaiming his identity by asserting himself as she has been asserting herself with the Surgeon. Rushing at Marie and her captor provokes the latter into shooting him, ending the interference or so the latter thinks. Once again on his feet, Bobby directs his anger and hostility at him, exorcising the double, the shadow who afforded him his only opportunity prior to this scene to express his displeasure with Marie. He quotes the opening of Vaughan’s “The World,” for the Surgeon an example of “useless learning” (44). The asserting of himself with the captor of his face provokes another bullet, killing him. The transporting of the action to the pineapple field fuses an event in the narrative and a site in the landscape into a portal for changing perception because the scene reunites what was separated; it connects what the first half disconnects. As soon as Marie appears in the play, talking about her relationship with Bobby and the acting job she has taken, she changes clothes and

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while checking herself in a mirror goes into a mode in which she performs her poetry in clubs. “She’s tough and she’s good ” (27) because she is a union of soul and body, verbal and visual images performing her self. By taking an acting job in which her body is called upon to enact another self, she separates her body and soul. Bobby does the same thing. As soon as he appears in a flashback within this scene, he is painting in pants “splattered with paint” (28), an image uniting his soul and body performing his self as it expresses itself creating art. By taking a modeling job in which he surrenders his body to the Surgeon, he separates his body and soul. Sinking into carnality—emphasizing the body divorced from the soul—they lose their identity, their art, and their love for each other because they are no longer the selves they were when they fell in love. The first-half’s closing scenes dramatize these losses. The second-half’s opening scenes climaxing in the pineapple-field dreamscape dramatize the regaining of the losses. The transporting of the action to the dreamscape fuses an event in the narrative and a site in the landscape into a base for judging the search for love and meaning because the scene does not startle; it jolts. Prior to Bobby’s death, the spectator with changed eyes might see the core drama enacting the pattern of the fortunate fall. Had Bobby and Marie not taken the modeling and acting jobs, they would not have lost their identities, art, and love and consequently would not have to search for love and meaning. But they would have remained innocent of themselves and the world. They would not have plumbed the depths of themselves to know they had repressed emotions about each other, and they would not have plumbed the depths of the world to uncover the degradation that the Christian Video Players, the Surgeon, and Lorenzo mask. They would have remained secure in their faith in the spiritual nature of life, but they would have been unprepared for the termination of its physical nature. And never having had to quest for an absolute reality, they had never discovered meaning; never losing anything, they had no need for meaning. The second half dramatizes the regaining of the losses renewed and strengthened: the benefits of the fall. Yet Bobby’s death seems to disrupt the pattern. That is why the surprise jolts. Not only does he lose innocence and gain suffering, the ultimate naturalistic event claims him before he can regain paradise. Careless Love, however, has not finished with surprises. A second wave of surprises begins as soon as Bobby dies, and they follow the same progression as the first wave. They begin by startling. Shoving Marie into the shack at the end of the field that turns out to be an elevator, the Surgeon orders the top floor, but the elevator descends. The second-half’s direction nevertheless is upward, reversing the first-half’s scenes. Coming to after fainting, Marie looks out the window to see the same scene she saw from the window of the building where the Christian Video Players were performing. Only now she

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is in Geneva, where the Surgeon and his wife make their home and where the wife assists her in escaping. That he approves of the escape indicates that whatever pattern shaped the first half, it is still operating; that the Surgeon’s and his wife’s roles are integral to the pattern; and that the search for love and meaning that the pattern generates is ongoing. Driving the airmobile, Marie hears Bobby’s voice collaborating with her on the creating of a poem, integrating their love and their identities as expressed in her art. Playing the videocassette the wife gave her, she is back on her Jezebel throne with the actor portraying Elijah cursing her, as he did in the first filming, with the allusion to 1 Kings 21.23. But since the scenes on the ascent are not mirror images of scenes on the descent, this time Arnie fires her for failing to put life in the corrupted role of Jezebel. She is not unhappy, however, about losing the assignment. “To hell with their job anyway,” she declares. The loss is of no consequence, for she adds, “Christianity’s dead” (79). Her declaration triggers the series of startling surprises that culminates in the one that jolts. The ascent recovers the descent’s losses with one exception. When she performed in the first-half’s Jezebel filming, Marie suffered a loss of faith in traditional spirituality, a loss she does not recover performing in the second half if by traditional spirituality is meant as revealed or experienced in organized, systematized religion. This study emphasizes this first surprise in the series because it is the backdrop for the drama in Jenkin’s most ambitious work, Pilgrims of the Night, examined in the next chapter. In the second startling surprise, Marie integrates her love for Bobby and their identities as expressed in his art. She does not collaborate with him on a painting, real or imagined, as he just did with her on a poem, but she imagines that he is in the apartment working on the pineapple-field painting. “Truly” (79) loving him, she is chastened by her experience so that she relents and consents to his taking an occasional modeling job. The change in tense from “You shot him” (65), Marie’s accusation hurled at the Surgeon, to the present should alert the audience to the jolting surprise. Bobby appears, and together he and Marie leave. The pattern really is that of the fortunate fall. Had the two not fallen out of love, they would not have searched and discovered love renewed and strengthened. Had they not fallen from innocence, they would not have searched and discovered meaning in the ultimate non-naturalistic event canceling the ultimate naturalistic event. Reunited in caring love as opposed to careless love, they discover the victory that crowns the pattern of the fortunate fall: life defeats death. With Bobby rejoining Marie, the landscape disappears, the narrative concludes, and the core drama ends. The direction continues to reverse with lounge-singer Marlene announcing, “We’re back … from the very lip of the void” (80), although the second-half scenes are not identical to their first-half

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counterparts. The Sleeping Girl wakens, sits up, and talks to Jacky, and given the wind’s intensity, the two tumbleweeds “fly crazily off in the wild winds of heaven” (89) but over the one’s protest, vacating the stage for the Actress. With Lorenzo’s hands unsuccessfully trying to hold her and the train arriving and departing, the performance of Careless Love is over. The issue that has to be raised is determining why the play continues beyond the lovers’ reunion other than the superficial need for symmetry. The issue, then, might be better phrased as determining why the dream is within a framework. Traditional literature supplies an insight. Two of the finest allegories in English in which a character searches for meaning, Piers Plowman and The Pilgrim’s Progress, are dream visions within a framework. By adopting a similar construction, Jenkin reminds the critic of the mixture that constitutes his theatre, and since he has traditional and avant-garde elements in his plays, either designation by itself for his oeuvre ignores the full complement. Experimental does justice to the mixture. A theatrical experiment, Careless Love achieves two goals within the dream. Bobby and Marie discover the approximation of the ultimate non-naturalistic event that cancels the ultimate naturalistic event. The discovery has to be an approximation, for were it the real thing, the couple would pass beyond life’s boundary. In the search for love and meaning, Bobby and Marie connect the quest and the pleasure disconnected in Dark Ride and Poor Folk’s Pleasure, creating the first quality of Jenkin’s theatre, wonder, while expressing the second quality, heart. The goals are enhanced by being achieved within a dream that is contrasted with the framework within which it unfolds. Without the framework, audiences can easily forget they are witnessing a dream. Avant-garde theatre supplies an insight. “Typifying the avant-garde were the dual impulses to eliminate boundaries between genres or forms—blurring distinctions between art, music, literature, and performance—and the related attempt to eliminate boundaries between art and life.”24 The passage goes on, but it is the first impulse that applies to Jenkin’s play. Having the action unfold on a landscape, Careless Love eliminates boundaries. Yet that is not a total description of what happens in the core drama. Having a narrative unfold the action retains boundaries. Merging the two structures therefore eliminates and retains boundaries. The pineapple field to which the toilet flushing transports Marie and the Surgeon and where Bobby, who was last seen dodging a bullet at the modeling session, waits for her is a site in a landscape. Yet Bobby’s death on it is an event in a narrative. Lorenzo also figures in both structures. At the opening and closing scenes, the Actress appears toward the play’s upper boundary because the action descends from her and returns to her. In her opening appearance, she welcomes the audience as “human,” which means that there are “no goats in the house

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tonight, no toads, no monkeys” (12). Lorenzo, however, is a character with a monkey. Whenever anyone refers to the arch-criminal, he/she refers to the monkey on his shoulder, which means that Lorenzo is subhuman or representative of the play’s lower boundary. Since the arch-criminal is heard but never seen, he is both in and out of the play, further evidence that he represents the lower boundary that the action approaches on the descent but never reaches, receding until it is eliminated as a boundary on the landscape. Yet his arrival at the modeling session to have his men surround the building forces the Surgeon to flee with Marie, accelerating the descent in the narrative that reverses when Marie rejects the doctor’s criticism of her poetry and dismissal of her relationship with Bobby. As the Actress addresses the audience in her closing appearance, from behind the curtain emerge Lorenzo’s hands seeking unsuccessfully to grasp her while his voice pleads his love. Since he tells her of his emotion—“I love you”—and since his hands are described as grasping “lustfully” (91), he is thwarted love or lust. And since he is the lone character so frustrated, for even the Surgeon is reunited with his wife, he represents the lower boundary in the narrative that approaches but cannot reach the boundless landscape of love fulfilled in a pure and endless light above the Actress. By bringing together the Actress and Lorenzo, the play eliminates boundaries; at the same time by keeping the two separate, the play retains boundaries. Thus Careless Love keeps disrupting and altering the perspective from which the spectator views the action, preventing him or her, with changing perception, from relaxing in a fixed interpretation. The objective of the disrupting and altering is engaging the spectator in the work. Though the objective is not limited to avant-garde theatre but obtains for contemporary theatre that eschews closure and resolution, an avant-garde artist states the case succinctly. For Marcel Duchamp, “ ‘The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.’ ”25 Since as a spectator and a critic I am imaginatively engaged, I want to raise a second issue: why in her closing appearance the Actress sees the Surgeon grip Marie’s wrist, an act that takes place when he seizes her as hostage in the modeling session. The only explanation I can offer is that there is a lag between an event in the dream and its registering on an eye outside the dream: another surrealistic image in a play composed of multiple elements because the search requires them. As lounge-singer Marlene says, “You know, love is a Mystery” (81). Lounge-singer Spin’s “You know, sharing is caring. Total sharing is total caring” (22), repeated by Marlene in the couple’s second appearance

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(82), is a start for deciphering and interpreting, but since the mystery eludes analysis, love must be rendered in apprehensible images, as in the Grail story. By itself avant-garde theatre with a single, landscape, structure is inadequate to the task of dramatizing the search. As Stein describes the landscape of her play Four Saints in Three Acts, “a landscape does not move nothing really moves in a landscape but things are there, and I put into the play the things that were there.”26 If love is one of the things, it neither lives nor dies but is there to be appreciated as a picture for the spectator to make of it what he/she can. By itself naturalistic theatre with a single, narrative, structure is also inadequate to the task, for although it activates love in a story in which love lives and dies, the play tells the story for the spectator who is an observer of the drama behind the illusion of an invisible fourth wall. Together the two structures in a larger mixture correct the distortion they perpetuate apart. Since love is a motion of the heart expressed in the body—a mixture of spirituality and carnality—the mixture is more faithful to real life in the temporal, spatial world where love can die but also be renewed, and its renewal is suggestive of an absolute realm where love is eternal. Careless Love is a complicated play. During the course of the examination, I argued that it has a base for judging, but the merger of the temporal, linear narrative and the spatial, stationary landscape is itself complicated. The play lacks a single unifying element such as a reimagined medieval ceremony or a reimagined mythological god. The plays in the next chapter are as complicated as Careless Love with the third, Pilgrims of the Night, probably the study’s most complicated play. A single element, however, unifies each one of the three: the art of storytelling, an art that in Jenkin’s most mature period simplifies.

NOTES 1. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, newly rev. ed. (New York: Anchor, 1988) 59. 2. Len Jenkin, American Notes, in Dark Ride and Other Plays 208. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 3. Thornton Wilder, Our Town, in Three Plays (New York: Bard-Avon, 1976) 7. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 4. Mel Gussow, “Len Jenkin’s ‘American Notes,’ at the Public,” New York Times 19 Feb. 1988: C3. For Gussow, the Mayor’s monologue makes him a “kind of reverse image Stage Manager” from Wilder’s Our Town. 5. Campbell 90. 6. Gussow C3.

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7. For an analysis of this scene, see Castagno 156–57. 8. Aeneid, in Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library LCL63 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999) 6.268–73. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 9. Charles R. Anderson, introduction, “Emily Dickinson,” in American Literary Masters, vol. 1 (New York: Holt, 1965) 985. 10. Gussow C3. 11. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Domain of Arnheim or the Landscape Garden,” in The Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Modern Library) 615. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 12. Len Jenkin, New Jerusalem (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986) 32–33. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 13. Len Jenkin, Five of Us (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1986) 7. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 14. Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 3. 15. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985) 158. Burkert is a good source for Hermes’ role in both establishing and transgressing boundaries. 16. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, in Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982) 365. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 17. Len Jenkin, Careless Love (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1993) 12. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 18. Outside the play Spin and Marlene are an ever-changing lounge act appearing over the years in various venues. Steve Mellor as Spin and Deirdre O’Connell as Marlene most recently performed The Dream Express, some of the songs of which they themselves wrote, in the winter of 2009 at New York’s The Chocolate Factory. For a brief history of the work, see Gary Winter, “Len Jenkin’s The Dream Express: The Outlaw Lounge Act Returns,” The Brooklyn Rail December 2009/January 2010: 77. 19. Arnold Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre: A History (New York: Routledge, 2000) 9. 20. Gertrude Stein, Last Operas and Plays, ed. Carl Van Vechten (1949; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) xlvi. 21. Michael Feingold, “Clarity Ward,” Village Voice 16 Nov. 1993: 117. 22. Aronson 7. 23. Richard Foreman, Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater, ed. Ken Jordan (New York: Pantheon, 1992) 4. 24. Aronson 20. 25. Quoted in Aronson 25. 26. Stein l.

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Chapter Three

A Country Doctor, Like I Say, and Pilgrims of the Night

The three plays examined in this chapter form a group because they were published as a group. In the author’s note, “On These Three Plays of Mine,” to the volume containing them, Jenkin writes, “These are plays about story, the act of story-telling, and the connections between the tales we tell each other as darkness falls. . . . The stories are, for the most part anyway, love stories— in their fashion.”1 The first ground for soaring is in the first play’s epigraph. Roger of Wendover, a 13th-century St. Albans chronicler, is the first to tell of the man, who goes by different names in the legend, who mocked Christ on his way to Calvary and as a consequence was condemned to tarry until the Second Coming: to be the Wandering Jew. The second ground, identified by the play’s title, A Country Doctor, and its subtitle, Based on the Story by Franz Kafka, is “A Country Doctor.” An article on gender roles in Kafka’s fiction connects the legend and the story: “In the highly condensed and rich symbolic short story ‘A Country Doctor,’ Kafka presents many divergent models of masculinity. The doctor, unable to rescue his maid from a brutal intruder, ends up lost on a never-ending journey. Like Ahasver, the Eternal Jew, he is unable to settle down.”2 Although Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” does not figure in the play’s action until the fifth of its 21 scenes, the first four scenes prepare for the story of the never-ending journey. In scene 1 a Pitchman promotes an optical device imported from Czechoslovakia, Kafka’s birthplace, that enables the viewer to see in all directions including behind him or her, presumably to include the past because the scene ends with the appearance of the Country Doctor, named in scene 2 in the story’s German title, “Ein Landarzt.” Scene 3 introduces the contemporary journeyer, the Wedding Guest. Telling the audience that he has to drive to the country for a wedding because he was invited, he then adds, “I won’t hide.”3 That is an odd comment! Who would think he 89

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would? He keeps a doctor’s appointment in scene 4, which is not odd except that there is nothing wrong with him, and the doctor tells him to leave because he is keeping him from his sick patients who need him. When the doctor, in a slip of the tongue, says, “My time is liniment,” substituting the noun for the adjective ‘limited,’ the Guest pauses to make a joke, “Don’t rub it in!” (8) The suspicion therefore is that not only is he not looking forward to the wedding of a couple he used to work with, he is delaying the journey. The scene has two other instances of extended or delayed journeys. While waiting in the doctor’s outer office, the Guest reads in a magazine a college student’s story of picking up a girl, taking her to a motel, and leaving to buy some champagne that she said she needed to get in the mood, but forgetting the motel where he left her being forced to “drive forever up and down the motel strip, looking for” her (8). Kafka is one of the doctor’s patients. He too delays his journey by not boarding the bus for the sanatorium because he must attend to personal matters before leaving. (Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, the novelist and short-story writer was in and out of sanatoria before death ended his journey in 1924.) The Country Doctor makes his first speaking appearance in scene 5: the opening twelve lines of the story in which he relates how on a snowy night he was in “great perplexity” because he had to start on an “urgent journey” to a village where a seriously ill patient awaited him yet had no horse for his carriage, his horse having died and his servant girl unable to borrow one. Hence he stood covered with snow and “unable to move” (10–11).4 In the play, however, he does not speak the lines uninterruptedly as in the story of which he is the first-person narrator. Jenkin creates theatre by having lights come up in another area of the stage on the Patient, who screams, and his parents, who communicate with the Doctor by telephone. In Kafka’s story the servant girl Rose, seen from the doctor’s perspective and not immediately named, is a peripheral character in these twelve lines. Not so in the play. Rose appears before the parents’ call comes. Given an independent existence, she becomes a player in the drama, even to being ironic with the Doctor for ignoring her attempt to please him with the tea she serves. Finally and significantly for the journey motif, the Doctor narrates the twelve lines to the Guest, connecting him with himself and Kafka. When Kafka does not board the bus in scene 4 because of pressing personal matters, he nevertheless assures the office doctor, “I’ll get there” (8), words the Country Doctor repeats (10) to assure the parents. As scene 5 comes to a close, the Guest tries to break away, using similar language: “I’ve gotta get…” (11). Writing about Jenkin’s plays, the critic encounters a problem that the texts occasionally present, and the critic must rely on the texts unless he/she has the ability to recall in their entirety performances years later. Scene 6 of A

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Country Doctor opens with the Narrator telling the Guest to sit back and watch the scene, followed by stage directions specifying that the Narrator, Doctor, and Guest “are gone” (11) as Rose attempts to borrow a horse in a local convenience store. With her attempt unsuccessful, the Doctor enters to resume enacting his role in Kafka’s story, the Narrator readies himself to speak an occasional line setting the scene for Kafka’s story or one of the Doctor’s insights, and the Guest “still watches” (12). In performance “gone” could mean the actor leaves to return with the Doctor, or he stays onstage to watch but with the lights down on him. I argue that the Wedding Guest has to be onstage throughout the scene and cannot return because the return would be voluntary and contradictory. Where he is during scene 6 may not appear to be serious, but it is, and it begins with his odd comment that he will not hide and even odder comment that the couple being married told him “they love each other” (6). He cannot intuit the love but has to be told! The following are bits and pieces that when connected form a preliminary sense of the man. When the Country Doctor first appears, he “grabs” (9) the Guest to tell him his story. The latter tries to break away at scene-5’s end, but the Narrator tells him to stay and “watch closely” (11), which he must do. The following, then, are preliminary conclusions about the Guest. Even though he has an excuse for not staying, a wedding to attend, he does not resist the Narrator. He would not leave during the story’s enactment and return with the Doctor when he could have broken away. Even though he does eventually break away during scene 6, he does not hurry to the wedding. As the bits and pieces continue to connect, a fuller sense of the Guest emerges. Scene 6 is a transitional scene. The opening lines of Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” are realistic, but as the doctor stands in the courtyard “unable to move” (220), the story becomes phantasmal. From an uninhabited pigsty on the property emerge two horses and a groom who attacks Rose when she helps in harnessing the horses to the carriage and who announces that he is not accompanying the doctor but is staying with the servant girl, who shrieks, “ ‘No’ ” (221), and flees into the house. This section yields the story’s irreconcilable conflict that Jenkin carries over to the play. The Doctor is a self divided between his responsibility as a doctor to his patient and his responsibility as a man to the woman living in his house. When Jenkin’s Doctor yells “STOP!” (14)—a command not in Kafka’s story—two events take place. The scene shifts to Prague, where a Man identifies himself as a Country Doctor to Kafka, the latter “delayed at his doctor’s appointment” (14). There follows another version of the story in which the Country Doctor must have alighted from the carriage and followed Rose into the house. The version is not in Kafka’s “A Country Doctor,” yet it is a version in the play

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because A Country Doctor is not a dramatization of “A Country Doctor” but a play based on the story. Its import, however, is in the illumination it sheds on the irreconcilable conflict by developing the housemaid as a character in her own right with her own perspective on the action. As Rose tells the version, she embraces the Doctor before shoving both Kafka and him out of the house and into the snow, Kafka for writing “boring and incomprehensible” stories (15) and the Doctor presumably for not being aggressive, forcing her to take the initiative in a reversal of gender roles. When the Man identifies himself to Kafka, before Rose takes over, he tells the fiction writer that the housemaid is an “animal” (14) whom he thinks he loves and will marry. The second event signaled by “STOP!” involves the Wedding Guest, who looks at his watch and “rushes off ” (14). Since he was told to watch, he could have recognized the Doctor’s conflict as a division between his public and private selves and rushes off to fulfill his public or social obligation without realizing that he has the same or a similar conflict. And not knowing himself and leaving before the scene shifts to Prague for the story’s alternative version, which links the Doctor and Kafka, he does not know that he is linked to them. Yet he is, for the prefatory note advises that the play’s “feel should become progressively less ordinary and more otherworldly as the COUNTRY DOCTOR, the WEDDING GUEST, and KAFKA progress on their journeys.” Scene 7 resumes the story with Rose’s “ ‘No’ ” shrieked before the shift to scene-6’s alternative version and continues with the Doctor’s awareness of the Groom’s shattering of the house’s door to get at the girl. There are also changes. The Narrator continues to contribute an occasional line or two. In the distance a choir can be heard singing a song. And the prefatory note recommends that the Patient, a boy in the story, be played by an actress. His words, however, do not change as the Doctor conducts his initial examination: “ ‘Doctor, let me die’ ” (222, 16–17). The story resumes in scene 10, a scene that fills in the preliminary sense of the Wedding Guest. Of the eight scenes of A Country Doctor in which “A Country Doctor” is enacted and narrated, scene 10 is the only one that violates the story’s sequence. A scene will repeat a line from the story in an earlier scene but as a signal that the resumption is underway, and the story’s opening five words, “I was in great perplexity” (220), are repeated so often they are a refrain as if Jenkin were creating Gertrude Stein’s continuous present. The violation, however, cannot be accidental, for Jenkin is not writing from memory but is incorporating passages from the story in sequence in his play. Yet scene 10 opens with a passage in which the Doctor, whose cursory examination led him to believe the Patient not ill, decides to let him “lie” (222, 19) where he is in bed. The scene then returns to the cursory examination and resumes in

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sequence to a passage to be repeated about writing prescriptions. The clue to the violation is in the prefatory note that mandates that various characters play the role of the Doctor. Scene 9 closes with the role thrust upon the Guest. That he enters at the wrong place in the sequence indicates that he is detached from it. Despite listening and watching intently, the story is not his story; it is a composition—an object—apart from him. He is not emotionally engaged in it so that he can see himself as a subject in it until being forced to participate in its enactment makes him correct his mistake, and he is forced to participate, for the Mother “drags him toward the Patient” (19). Scene 11 also violates the pattern of narrating and enacting passages from “A Country Doctor” in that it narrates and enacts selected passages from Kafka’s “The Judgment,” a hermeneutical bonanza for critics.5 Georg, a young successful merchant, is musing upon his correspondence with a friend who went to Russia years earlier, finally informing him in the letter he is writing of his engagement. Brought out of his reverie, he enters his father’s room to tell him of the letter. At first denying the friend’s existence, the father acknowledges him as a son he would have preferred over Georg, who has been tucking the old man under the bed’s covers. Springing to his feet, the father accuses the son of disloyalty in the family business; ignoring his, the father’s, needs; and, lifting his shirt in reproachful mimicry, allowing himself to be seduced by his fiancée hiking her skirts. Condemned to death by the old man, Georg executes the sentence. Violating the pattern of incorporating passages from “A Country Doctor,” the play also violates the ending of “The Judgment.” As the father pronounces sentence on Georg, the dead mother’s voice reminds her son that the father has been dead for ten years, “wandering forever in the other world” (22). With the mother’s pronouncement, the ghostly figure on the bed collapses. The violation in the dead man’s “wandering” connects this scene with the wandering-journey theme of Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” and Jenkin’s A Country Doctor. The violation in switching to “The Judgment” also connects but in a less obvious way, though Jenkin reduces the distance separating the audience from the connection by substituting characters. The two characters in Kafka’s story are Georg and his father; the two in the play’s scene 11 are Kafka and his father. Although not authentic biography, the substitution is nevertheless provocative in that any father-son relationship in Kafka’s fiction could reflect the fiction writer’s complicated relationship with his father. Viewed from the son’s perspective, the complication stems from an irreconcilable conflict in which he is torn between his need as an artist to explore his dreamlike inner life and the expectation that as a merchant he will fulfill his filial obligations. He is divided between a private need and a public expectation: releasing his internal self in writing and engaging his external self in business.

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This is the second irreconcilable conflict that the play’s characters take with them on their journeys through life, the first being the division in the Doctor’s self between his need for love and sexual intimacy and the expectation that he will fulfill his professional obligations. Thus scenes 10 and 11 form a unit within the play in that they connect the two conflicts with each other and with the third, that of the Wedding Guest. To the Doctor’s public self of doctor and Kafka’s public self of merchant, he brings the public self of wedding guest. What his private self is takes the rest of the play to discover. It is neither Kafka’s artist, since he does not compose a story, nor the Doctor’s lover despite being forced to play the Doctor, since the journey does not develop his relationship with women. Kafka’s evolving conflict and the Guest’s emerging conflict do not phase out the need for love and sexual intimacy. Having an actress play the Patient reinforces the need in the Doctor because when he looks at the Patient, he is forced to confront his helplessness in rescuing Rose from the Groom back at the house. Furthermore, as we will see, that need replaces half of Kafka’s conflict. The resumption in scene 13 of one of the play’s two grounds for soaring— the resumption of the enactment of “A Country Doctor” with the Doctor as himself—is his recognition of his conflict. Believing the Patient not ill, he expresses his bitterness for having been summoned to the village needlessly. Although accustomed to being summoned, he finds this call particularly galling. “But that I should have to sacrifice Rose, the beautiful girl who lived in my house for years, almost without my noticing her—that sacrifice is too much to ask” (223, 23). Now conducting a more thorough examination, he discovers the Patient’s incurable “rose red” wound (223, 24). The Patient is the Doctor’s double.6 With that interpretation carried over to A Country Doctor, the Patient and the Doctor are Kafka’s doubles. In the scene immediately following scene 13, Kafka admits he is “ill” (24) but rejects a woman’s offer to be with him while he is being treated in the sanatorium. The rejection moves the character Kafka away from his irreconcilable conflict with his father and toward his irreconcilable conflict with women: that is, between the demands of the artist to plumb his solitary self and the husband to perform his social self. Meno Spann links Franz Kafka’s illness; his complicated relationship with Felice Bauer, to whom he was twice engaged and twice disengaged; and “A Country Doctor” when he observes that the doctor’s first word, in describing his patient’s wound, is rosa (“pink”). Kafka seems to indicate that Rose (Rosa) is the incurable wound of the doctor. In August, 1917, not quite a year after he had written “Ein Landarzt,” he called Felice “his wound,” interpreting his first hemorrhage. After tuberculosis had been diagnosed in both of his lungs he called “the wound” in his lungs “a

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symbol of the wound whose inflammation is called Felice and whose depth is called justification.”7

A Country Doctor solidifies the connection between Kafka and his doubles when the character assumes the Doctor’s role in the scene, number 16, that continues the recognition of scenes 13 and 14. Like the Wedding Guest, Kafka has the role put on him, but unlike the Wedding Guest, he enters the sequence in the correct place, indicating that he is emotionally engaged in the story as the Guest is not. Jenkin also combines two passages to indicate that he is not only engaged but identifies with the Doctor. After discovering the incurable wound, the doctor in “A Country Doctor” muses upon the impossible expectations the villagers have of a doctor: “Well, as it pleases them; I have not thrust my services on them; if they misuse me for sacred ends, I let that happen to me too; what better do I want, old country doctor that I am, bereft of my servant girl!” (224) In the scene after repeating the opening of the passage with minor changes—“wish” for “pleases”—Kafka drifts into the Doctor’s earlier recognition that he sacrificed Rose: “What better do I want, country doctor that I am, robbed of my housemaid, Rose, that beautiful girl who lived in my…” (223, 26). The villagers then begin to remove his clothes, but when the Doctor next appears, he is as himself. Having verbally identified with the Patient in recognizing the wound in scene 13, the Doctor visually identifies with him in scene 18. Stripped, he is placed in bed next to the Patient but escapes, hoping to fly back home as fast as he arrived, only to discover the journey interminable, for once a false alarm is answered, “it cannot be made good, not ever” (225, 32). Except for a song, this closing line of “A Country Doctor” closes scene 20 of the play’s 21 scenes. Jenkin’s A Country Doctor dramatizes different ways of journeying through life, all rooted in a self divided by an irreconcilable conflict between the demands of the private and public selves or the needs of the solitary self and the expectations of the social self. Since the Doctor is the first of the three principal players to utter a closing speech in scene 21, his way will be examined first. His story generates the action, yet it is not tragic, despite the presence of the first two divisions of tragedy’s tripartite structure. The reversal occurs within moments of the story’s opening in the loss of control of his household to a Groom who unknown to him has been living on his property and who will have his way with the housemaid Rose. The recognition occurs in the village when seeing himself in the dying Patient, he realizes he has the conflict. The third division, suffering, is, however, not present. The predominant mood of his closing speech in scene 20 is resignation to his fate and not suffering. As he says about the experience, “I do not want to think about it anymore. Naked, exposed to the frost of this unhappy age, [I] wander astray” (225, 31). His closing line in scene 21 while contradicting the statement in

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scene 20 about not thinking about the experience anymore intensifies the resignation. After introducing himself, he speaks the opening line of “A Country Doctor”: “I was in great perplexity” (220, 32). He is resigned to interminably telling the story on his interminable journey. Kafka is the second of the three to utter a closing speech, first spoken by the Doctor as a comment on being summoned needlessly by parents to minister to their offspring, whom he cursorily concludes is not ill: “To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard” (223, 20). Spoken at play’s end, the sentence can be read as the story writer’s criticism of the Doctor, who can write prescriptions but cannot understand people. By implying that he can understand people or he would not be able to write fiction, even though he cannot write prescriptions, Kafka is not suggesting that he does not have a conflict. He does, and it is the Doctor’s conflict. After all, he was the Doctor in the continuation of the recognition scene. But although Kafka has the conflict between the demands of the private and public selves, the demands have been evolving since his scenes with his father and the woman who offers to be with him while he is being treated in the sanatorium. Rejecting her offer, he articulates the first of the new demands. He has not done what was “given” him “to do … and never can hope to do any of it” (24). His conflict is that the talent given him demands that he create with it—write fiction with it—yet his failing health demands that he enter a sanatorium and undergo treatment for a disease that will not only encroach on the solitary self’s needs but ultimately will prevent him—take his life from him—from fully realizing his talent. On a picnic while at the sanatorium, he articulates the second of the new demands. Those of the “social or romantic life” mandate a public self so that if he wants some kind of a social life, he has to produce a public self, which he can do through “invention.” Yet the “effort” expended in the invention is at the expense of the private self trying to create fiction in the time left to him. Kafka does not have to invent this latter self, for “there is someone, down there in the dark” (30) exploring his dreamlike inner life. The Wedding Guest is the last of the three to utter a closing speech: a repetition of the Doctor’s “I do not want to think about it anymore” (32). As he speaks the line, it is ambiguous, for it could mean that he too is resigned because he was the Doctor in his second assumption of the role in scene 20 when the Doctor spoke the line. I do not, however, think so. In scene 21 the Guest speaks the line as himself, he arrives at his destination, and the line reflects everything he has been as himself in the play. That is, with the story over and the marriage ceremony about to be over with the reception to follow, he does not think about it anymore. He has finally disengaged himself from a story he never was emotionally engaged in anyway.

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He does have the conflict, though. He provides an insight into it in his initial appearance when in explaining that he is going to a wedding, he holds up a tie: “I got my tie right here” (6). He is not normally a public self. Were he, he would be wearing the tie as his normal attire. Instead, he carries one to put on when he arrives at the ceremony and performs his public self. That performance cannot be too often because later he realizes that he forgot to buy the couple a wedding present. The insight, however, does not explain his delay in arriving at the ceremony, for despite his continual protest that he is late and must be on his way, he is forever stopping: to pick up a hitchhiker or twice to get something to eat. Having his car stolen by the hitchhiker necessitates that he hitch a ride with a truck, confirming the preliminary sense of him as a man who wants to extend the journey as long as possible. For the explanation, we have to turn to the discovered private self. Unlike the public self, which performs, the private self listens. Hence the journey enables the Guest to indulge his private self. Driving his car, he can listen to the Loveliner stories on the car radio in scene 8; a hitchhiker after his car is stolen, he can listen to the Truck Driver’s story in scene 12. The best example is in scene 17. He has already stopped for a “coffee and some shit to go with it” (17) yet stops again to “grab a bite” (27). When a couple occupy the next booth, he is in position to “hear every word” (28) of the Woman’s story. The last of the three principal players to speak, the Guest is not the play’s last speaker. The Patient is, and by not repeating lines from the story, he provides a way of thinking about the play based on it. The gist of his speech to the audience is that they do not have “to leave” their “room” because the “world will freely offer itself to” them “to be unmasked” (32). If ‘theatre’ is substituted for “world,” the play is unmasked. This chapter opened by citing an article on gender roles in Kafka’s fiction. The dramatization of a version of the story not in “A Country Doctor” in which Rose shoves Kafka and the Doctor out of the house emphasizes gender roles, but they go into abeyance after that scene. When they surface again, Jenkin plays with them, as he does with the descent into the underworld in American Notes. For the cited article, “The sick boy with the mysterious wound in his thigh—a possible allusion to the Gentile view of Jewishness as a disease—exemplifies the Gentile stereotype of the Jew as either effeminate (the suppurating wound is an horrific male vision of the vagina) or as diseased. The expectations of the villagers add to the gendering of two male characters as masculine and feminine respectively. The doctor is expected to lie down in bed with his youthful patient in order to heal him.”8 Having an actress take the Patient’s role supports this interpretation except that once the Doctor lies down, the roles reverse and the Patient “shoves the Doctor roughly out of bed ” (29).

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The cited article connects the gender roles with a possible view of Jewishness. Harold Bloom does not connect any part of the story with a view of Jewishness: “We do not know whether Kafka is or is not allegorizing the Jewish condition in his time and place, or his own situation as a writer.”9 We do know about Jenkin’s play. Jewishness figures in Kid Twist in the Rabbi who appears in Abraham, Kid Twist, Reles’ dreams and in the Mourner’s Kaddish that the chorus chants at his death, but it does not figure in A Country Doctor. Finally, when Jenkin wants a story about the Wandering Jew, he writes one. The two-part “The Story of the Wandering Jew” in his novel N Judah has to do with the wandering and not with any character’s skill in storytelling. A Country Doctor is a play about creating theatre, about “story” and the “act of story-telling,” according to the author’s note to the volume containing the play. The Doctor is forced to tell the same story over and over, but by itself it is not theatre; it is a short story. If it is thought of as theatre, it is a story interminably replicated, making theatre a museum rather than a place of experiment and innovation. Kafka is the author of the story that to be theatre has to be adapted. To actualize it onstage, the text’s prefatory note offers suggestions for lighting and microphones, the size of the performing company, and different styles of music to distinguish between scenes set in Prague and those in America. Kafka becomes a player in the actualization, but he is writing against an ever-encroaching disease and the demands of his social self that in the time left to him take him away from the wellspring of his creativity: the depths of his solitary self. His presence, though, changes the conflict carried over from “A Country Doctor” to that of the writer as artist and the play’s focus to the growth of the artist and the art of storytelling. Granted that the conflict is not as acute in the Wedding Guest because he does not tell a story, it is the writer’s conflict. By listening, he is readying himself for the day when he creates. That explains why he has to be forced to participate. He is not engaged in the story’s plot but in its craftsmanship, its artistry so that when it is over, he is finished with it. The third in this play’s growth-of-the-artist progression, the Guest is the first in the volume’s three plays, which can be thought of as a trilogy on the growth of the artist and the art of storytelling for the theatre. For five characters in Like I Say, the second of the volume’s three plays, the wandering has ended but not solely because of their choice. The setting is the ruined Hotel Splendide on the tip of a peninsula somewhere on the United States’ coastline so that they are surrounded on three sides by rocky cliffs overlooking the sea. About wandering from city to city before coming to the hotel, one of the five says that he had reached a point in his life where he no longer knew where his home was. About another of the five, a third says to him that by coming to the hotel, he got “as far away” as he “could

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get.”10 They could choose to turn back because although the world they knew has ended, Like I Say is not an end-of-the-world play. References are made to the town to which one of them runs errands, and it has townspeople with children, a library, and a poolroom. They do not turn back because the three mentioned above are where they want to be, and the other two are hotel employees. Helena is the manager, and Little Junior is the factotum. Since they are where they want to be, the three can indulge their private selves. Schwarzberg, who no longer knew where his home was, is a visual artist painting a mural on the hotel’s garden wall. Revealed a section at a time as dropcloths are removed throughout the play, it is an “American Dance of Death” (43): a series of images in which Death, a skeleton, leads a parade of humanity. Isaiah is a literary artist who has not written in years. After his wife and children were killed in an accident from which he escaped unscathed, he retreated into himself by getting as far away from the world as he could get. He rescued his companion Rose from an abusive relationship. With him ever since as his caretaker, despite his family cutting off his allowance, she indulges her private self by having Schwarzberg tattoo her back. Yet they cannot indulge their private selves all the time because their presence at the hotel draws out their public selves. That is, there are so few of them that they cannot lose themselves in the crowd. They comment on the surroundings and the activities: Rose’s tattoo and Schwarzberg’s wall painting, for example. Given the cliffs’ slipperiness, they inquire about someone’s absence from the daily gathering for drinks in the garden at twilight. The longer they are together, the more they reveal of themselves in autobiographical bits and pieces, for instance. And the longer they are together, the more they are attracted to one another. Attracted to Helena, Schwarzberg dances with her. Attracted to Isaiah, whose books she had special ordered, Helena removes her bathrobe as she approaches him, only to have the romantic moment interrupted by the arrival of a drunken Schwarzberg and the factotum, who was watching over him on the slippery cliffs. Little Junior is so attracted to Rose that he confesses, “You know I’m crazy in love with you.” The attraction is mutual, though her emotion is scaled down from “love” to “like” (59). The interaction develops as the play develops, but even if the five avoided one another precluding their interaction, they could not avoid two additional guests who arrive early in act 1. Leon and Tanya Vole are larcenists who come to the hotel to swindle Isaiah out of the small fortune they were told he has in his suitcase, but unknown to them the teller, Rose’s abusive exboyfriend, fabricated the tale to get revenge on Isaiah for taking Rose from him. Their declared purpose, however, is that they are traveling puppeteers awaiting payment from their agent for their last booking and the details for their next booking. They therefore offer to perform in the interim a few shows

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at the hotel for the local townspeople to which end Little Junior carries in the puppet theater and Tanya a cardboard box filled with puppets, the cast of the show The Crystal Castle. Their arrival is the event that activates the drama or as David Mamet puts the matter for drama in general, the circumstance that affects the characters’ behavior.11 That evening after Tanya introduces the puppet cast, Isaiah “return[s] the favor” (48) by launching the story of Coconut Joe, an event prepared for earlier. When Rose, objecting to being thought of as his nurse, threatens to quit being his companion, Isaiah says, “You can’t go, Rosie. I’m gonna need my muse. Someday” (39). The implication in this exchange in the play’s opening scene is that the literary artist will begin storytelling again, and he has taken the first step by releasing verbal images in the scene in series as long as Schwarzberg’s visual images but not linked or composed as they are in the mural’s uncovered sections. Activating the drama, the Voles’ arrival activates the play’s weaknesses and strengths. All of the play’s weaknesses follow from one weakness: lack of an apparent ground. One of the characters has a ground. Schwarzberg’s painting is rooted in the tradition of the devil claiming sinners’ souls for his domain; rather than depicting medieval scenes, his scenes, which he calls a “modern update” (44), have the devil claiming the souls of contemporary types. But the painting is revealed in fits and starts. Like I Say has allusions: to Tom Sawyer and the myth of Galatea and Polyphemus, but they do not feed a root to become a modern update. The result is that the play is the least successful of the three plays. Truncated narratives, the individual autobiographies are starts that atrophy or parts that when added together do not make a whole. Songs are repeated, but they are fillers adding length and not depth to the action. One example is “Row row row your boat, / gently down the stream” (61, 86). The lines are sung twice in Poor Folk’s Pleasure. The second time occurs in the play’s final scene and is crucial to the interpretation of the scene and the play. Since the Girl with the Boatman sings the lines before the entire company joins in the singing, a director and an audience have to decide whether the group remains on the shore or leaves with the departing Boatman. The lines are also sung twice in Like I Say. A drunken Schwarzberg sings them the first time. The second time Isaiah sings them while narrating Coconut Joe’s flight in a rowboat to escape Venetian police; the lines are ornamentation. For a second example, Rose and Tanya sing lyrics purporting to be those of strange languages but may be gibberish; islanders in one segment of the Coconut Joe story twice chant gibberish. Another example of repetition, though not of songs, is Schwarzberg’s “Nooze or Mirra” (45). On four other occasions, he incants the words, recalling the days when he hawked two newspapers, the News and the Mirror, in the New York subway system.

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Lacking a ground-producing modern update that would give the repetitions a function, Like I Say is not, however, without strengths, all of which follow from the Voles’ arrival, for although Isaiah’s story of Coconut Joe is a series of unrealistic episodes as in a picaresque novel, the Voles are the rogues. They are also puppeteers whose introduction of the cast of The Crystal Castle that they want to perform for the townspeople prompts Isaiah “to return the favor.” When the play opens, he is verbalizing a congeries of discrete images; he is mining the vein but not seizing the images and connecting them. Tanya Vole’s claim that “every puppet” in the cast “deserves to be called a living being” is therefore the impetus to begin composing again. He inflates her claim of a “living being” to “living beings” (48) to deflate it by countering in effect that a well-crafted narrative has more “living beings” in it than a puppet theatre no matter how well the figures are manipulated. Jenkin is not claiming that auditory images are superior to visual images. The tale is dramatized. As the playwright explains in a prefatory note, the play’s cast can be as small as eight: the five guests, the two hotel employees, and an actor for the role of Coconut Joe. The first seven can double in the other roles in the Coconut Joe sections. That is, dramatized storytelling creates theatre, and while his theatre is literary, Jenkin is also a master of the visual image from naturalistic to surrealistic, suggested to realized, individual to group in a panoply of voice-over, video, and musical experiences. One episode alone in the Coconut Joe saga opens with Joe in the mountains of southern Germany, guarded by a man in an anti-radiation suit, shoveling radioactive waste onto a conveyor belt before escaping by crawling through the snow while resisting the hallucination of a snow spirit coaxing him to stay with her until he arrives in a spa in Italy, each change of locale requiring different music, where he assists in a lab making serum from dead monkeys until he can escape by helicopter, disguised as an Italian starlet, to Venice. Tanya’s claim is the stimulus for the first installment of the Coconut Joe story, and Rose’s lingering in the hotel ballroom instead of going to bed the stimulus for the second installment, which ends with Joe escaping to Venice but does not end Isaiah’s composing. Sitting near Tanya in the ballroom in act-1’s final scene, he stops one set of images describing Venice to try another set: “No. The sulphurous gloom…” (71). Schwarzberg’s repair of the flickering ballroom chandelier so that the light is clear “like afternoon sunshine” is the stimulus for the third installment, which opens on a “bright summer afternoon” (82). The installment itself relates how Joe is used by a Contessa with whom he is infatuated to kill her husband with poisoned wine; his escape to the vessel whose cargo his company sent him to Europe to authenticate, only to discover it is rotten; a pirate ship’s attack on the vessel; and the explosions that leave Joe and the pirate queen adrift on the ocean. Yet

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despite the absence of a pattern to the stimuli, there is a pattern to the tale’s contents. The pattern reflects the change Isaiah undergoes in the course of the play. “Drowning” in his “unhappiness” (71), according to Tanya, he scares Rose that he “won’t come back” from the “waste” (65) he is making of his life because he cannot recover from the accident that killed his wife and children while leaving him unscathed. As he says, “I loved them, but that didn’t seem to help matters” (74). The darkness of his mental state pervades his language when not narrating. “Man is born to sorrow” and “The world is only a Saturday matinee horror movie” (64–65) are two examples. The darkness pervades the narration, for Coconut Joe is Isaiah’s surrogate: a “middle-aged man” (82) whose adventures are a series of betrayals separating him from his beloved Daughter. The developing situations and interactions in the Hotel Splendide contribute to Isaiah’s perception of life as a series of betrayals and the change the perception undergoes. When Tanya meets him, she says that she has read all of his books, provoking his wariness: “Do you want something from me?” Rose is also wary when Tanya tells her that it may have been a friend of hers who recommended the hotel. “Eddie?” the caretaker asks (45–46). Tanya says that she does not remember, but had she named the ex-boyfriend as the friend, his motive would be doing harm to Isaiah and Rose. The two would not know the form of the harm, but they would be on their guard. Isaiah is when at the daily gathering for drinks in the garden, Tanya reminds him that earlier that evening she introduced the cast of The Crystal Castle. Isaiah remembers, for of all the puppets she named, he singles out the “hangman’s beautiful daughter” (54). He then rejects her overture, escorting him to his room. He does not reject Helena’s overture, removing her bathrobe. Dancing with her until they are interrupted by Schwarzberg and Little Junior, he proposes that they “finish” (62) the dance at another time. Neither does he reject Tanya’s second overture, her proposal that they go to his room prefaced by “I love you” (72). This time they leave together. Although the scene ends with morning sunlight streaming in through the window, their exit together does not lighten the storytelling. In the third Coconut Joe installment, a Contessa has Joe deliver to her husband a birthday present of wine that unknown to the two men is poisoned. The Contessa knew that she could use him when he kissed the bruises on her arm and thigh, an act that duplicates the scene preceding the narrating of the third installment. As that earlier scene is constructed, Leon, observing his wife and the writer from behind the closed puppet theater, comments for the audience by likening himself to Polyphemus observing the shepherd Acis about to kiss the nymph Galatea’s thighs. Tanya then tells Isaiah that not only does she no

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longer “love” her husband, she “love[s]” him (72), a situation duplicated in the tale. The Contessa tells Joe that although she “hate[s]” her husband (84), she is honoring a custom in which partners exchange birthday presents, and although she does not confess her love for Joe, she makes herself available to him. The question that has to be asked given the correspondence between the situations in the hotel and the tale is why Joe, Isaiah’s surrogate, is unsuspecting. It is unrealistic to think that Isaiah suddenly falls in love with Tanya and captivated does not suspect her motive for wanting to go to his room. A realistic explanation is that, like the tumbleweeds in Careless Love, he feels a stirring of desire. That he can feel desire for someone of whom he is wary indicates that he is coming out of the withdrawal from life into which he retreated years earlier. That the betrayals continue with Joe discovering that the Contessa tries to kill him and the vessel’s cargo is rotten indicate that his frame of mind is still dark, that the change in perception is gradual. The betrayals end in the fourth and final installment, however, so that something must happen in the intervening scenes to accelerate the change. The something begins with the Voles springing the trap by demanding that Isaiah give them the money Eddie told them he had in a suitcase or Leon, armed with a gun, will kill Rose and ends with Helena rescuing Isaiah, who is shielding Rose, by shooting Leon. The fourth installment opens with Joe and the pirate queen recognizing each other adrift on the ocean—she is the woman who betrayed him in Berlin by luring him into a trap—and ends with Joe reunited with his Daughter. What happens in the story reflects what happened in the hotel. The two castaways wash ashore on an island where they are rescued by the natives with the queen leaving Joe to become their queen. When he subsequently begins the weekly practice of putting flowers on her grave after she dies, he is in effect putting to rest the dark perception that life is a betrayal while his reunion with his Daughter, who arrives on the island after years of “searching the world for him” (96), signifies his reunion with the brightening perception that life can be loving and happy. The fourth installment also reflects Isaiah’s relationship with Helena. On the island Joe encounters the owner of the ruined island hotel, whose name happens to be that of the ruined Hotel Splendide’s owner, who puts him in charge of the hotel when he departs. The scene following the final installment shows that Helena likes the idea that Isaiah plans to stay at the hotel. Excusing Rose to go walking with Little Junior, Helena assures her that she will “keep an eye on Isaiah” (99). When Joe guesses that he and his Daughter will “start over” (97), he reflects the change that Isaiah undergoes after telling Rose early in the play that he is “not gonna start a shiny new life” (64) and that emerges from “trying

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to understand everything that’s happened to” (96) his surrogate and himself. One possibility for the “power within” (96) themselves that the surrogate and his creator discover is the “mercy” (92) that makes a being human: the power to forgive what life has done to a person so that he/she can start over. Another possibility is love: the power to “give comfort, or even heal” or be “responsible for everyone’s happiness” (96). A third possibility is imagination: the power to compose images into stories, to try to understand life’s experiences by storytelling. The Voles, the most allegorical of Jenkin’s characters, use the three powers destructively. Figures of death, they are the death of mercy. In answer to Tanya’s query about Eddie’s fate after telling them about the money Isaiah is supposed to have, Leon relates how he left the body in a dumpster. They are the death of love. When alone they talk about persons they fucked or would like to fuck. Tanya cannot “remember” (57) whether she fucked Eddie, and Leon watches without attempting to stop her when she leaves with Isaiah to go to his room. They are the death of imagination. For the five at the hotel, Leon performs two puppet shows geared for an audience of children. In the first show, the Devil’s Crocodile fights the Devil for a donut. When Leon blurts, “Fuck you” (76), Tanya, who functions as a commentator, has to remind him of the intended audience. In the second show, which begins with a whimsy appealing to children, a Hermit befriends a Bear, who reciprocates by protecting his friend until a fly alights on the latter’s nose. Using a boulder to swat it, the Bear decapitates the Hermit. Everything about the Voles bespeaks death. In an early scene, Tanya warns Leon to keep his hands off her or she will so stab him that he will not know he is “dead”—because in a sense he is. The scene ends with Tanya looking out the hotel window and seeing a vista “black as the grave” (56–57), provoking laughter from Leon until a paroxysm of coughing wracks his disease-ridden body. It remains for Helena in a later scene to officially identify them. With the mural’s final dropcloth removed revealing Death leading a blind man on the road to perdition, Helena makes the connection. Leon would put a blind man “on the wrong road home” (91). Though the Voles are expelled from the hotel’s garden, they cannot be denied. As they leave, Tanya’s parting shot is “We’ll survive” (98). The hotel five, however, fight them by using the three powers creatively. Given discretionary authority, Helena allows Isaiah and Rose to live at the hotel, even though they are unable to pay their bills. Love appears to be blooming for Little Junior and Rose and may bloom for Isaiah and Helena. The third power informs the final scene, which closes with Isaiah starting over by repeating with a rearrangement his monologue of discrete images that opens the play. As revealing as the monologue is of imagination’s power to mine the contents

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for storytelling, a conversation that precedes the monologue reveals storytelling’s power. To Helena’s question about when Schwarzberg expects to finish his wall painting, the visual artist replies that there is no hurry because there is no death. “We live forever” (99). He cannot mean that people live forever, for earlier he told Helena the painting’s message is “Carpe diem” because all girls and boys “come to dust” (91). He must mean that the act of wallpainting, like the act of storytelling, lives forever. Although people die, one can always start telling stories, and although the stories can die by not being remembered or transmitted, the act of telling them does not die. Despite the weakness in not having a modern update or reimagining of a story from tradition that would give a function to the truncated narratives and repeated song lyrics, the play’s strength is in building outward from a center in the creative act of storytelling. A conversation Helena has with Isaiah in the scene preceding her conversation with Schwarzberg about finishing the mural reveals why the most profound story is the search for love and meaning in life. With the story of Coconut Joe concluded and the Voles expelled, Isaiah, brooding on life’s mystery, asks, “Where’s Coconut Joe?” and answers his own question in language that suggests he is referring to both his surrogate and himself: “When it passes, without a memory, this worthless body becomes a dream. …” If the scene ended at this point, he would be agreeing with the Voles, minus their evil, that death ends life. Helena interrupts him, however: “Shhh, baby. Enough. One world at a time, OK?” (98–99) She does not assert the existence of another, absolute, world, but she keeps open its possibility, and since its existence is a possibility, death is the ultimate naturalistic event, but there are other naturalistic events or acts: the three powers used creatively. Showing mercy, giving love, and telling stories, people can not only discover the heart’s pleasure in the one world in which they live, the events or acts can approximate mercy, love, and imagination in an ultimate non-naturalistic order. Furthermore, discovering the heart’s pleasure of this world enhances discovering the quest’s wonder, for storytelling is a form of questing that renders the ineffable in effable images and symbols. The play’s first and last speaker, Isaiah is the volume’s second artist in the growth-of-the-artist progression. After years of not creating, he resumes with a story of reunion and renewal but not only for Joe and his Daughter. His final words, spoken in the garden, “And we’ll begin. Now” (100), have three implications. The first is that with the hotel five as Adam and Eve were in the original garden or Faber, Margo, and the boy are in the cultivated garden in New Jerusalem, life can begin anew. The second is that with life beginning anew, the search for love and meaning can begin anew. For the third, he reverses his opening monologue of discrete images in his closing monologue of discrete images so that the four words in the act-1 monologue close the

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act-2 monologue. The implication of rearranging the words is that Isaiah is not forced to repeat the same story. Now that he is again composing images in storytelling, he is ready to create new stories for a theatre that can begin anew. Pilgrims of the Night is the only one of the volume’s plays that fits the description in the author’s note, “On These Three Plays of Mine,” as having “connections between the tales.” But before the tales within the third play connect, it connects with the second play. Excluding the actor who takes the role of Coconut Joe, Like I Say has a cast of seven: two hotel employees and five guests. Pilgrims of the Night has the same number: two employees of the ferry terminal that is the play’s setting and five travelers or pilgrims. The Hotel Splendide is on the tip of a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water. The terminal is on the bank of a river with “no bridge for two hundred miles in either direction”12 so that the only way of crossing to the opposite bank is by ferry. Though references are made in the preceding play to a nearby town with its people, library, and poolroom, no townspeople figure in the action. Though references are made in the current play to a railroad platform with a taxi stand about twenty miles from the terminal and the voices of a helicopter pilot and a news announcer come over the terminal radio, the dirt road leading to the terminal is a “road to nowhere” (108). Like the hotel, the terminal is in poor condition but with some of the area “under repair” (105). Without repairs the day will come when the hotel will so disintegrate into the landscape that there will be “raccoon shit in the hallway” (44). “Pine trees, broken glass, and raccoon shit” (107) are all that one of the travelers encountered while walking on the dirt road to the terminal. Two significant differences, however, separate the two plays. Pilgrims of the Night is more an end-of-the-world play than is Like I Say. Three days prior to the opening scene, a fireball lit up the sky before crashing on the land on the river’s far side, an event that prompts the pilot of a helicopter dispatched over the area to report that the cause was probably a meteorite or a camp fire that got out of control and a news announcer to relay the report of the nearest Naval Air Station that its radar recorded no unidentified aircraft in the air space at the time of the fireball. Yet the event’s effects are pronounced. Earth has been “rolling wiggle-waggle” ever since (106), animals are either burned by the blaze or behaving erratically, the “river’s rising, and the weather’s foul” (107). Another effect is the arrival of the five pilgrims to investigate the crash site, for as one of the terminal’s employees says, “When strange and powerful events occur, people are drawn to them” (107). The second difference is in the role of theatre in the plays. The subtitle of A Country Doctor is Based on the Story by Franz Kafka, but the play’s opening has no indication that the story will be dramatized within the play, and the dramatization does not begin until scene 5. Neither is there any indication of

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a story’s dramatization, that of Coconut Joe, at the opening of Like I Say, and it does not begin until scene 4. The stage directions for act 1 of Pilgrims of the Night indicate an intersection in the terminal by “elements” from the “realm of the stories” because the setting “should be a ferry terminal—and a theater for the tales to come” (105). And the dramatizations begin in the first scene because the opening scene is a prologue that invokes a famous prologue in medieval literature. A prefatory note that reads, “With apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer and Herman Melville,” underscores the parallel. The Canterbury Tales opens with a general prologue in which Chaucer relates that while stopping at the Tabard Inn on his pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket, he joined a group of pilgrims whom he describes in detail. To help pass the time, the inn’s Host proposes that each pilgrim tell two tales on the journey to Canterbury and two on the return journey and that he, the Host, in addition to traveling with the group will be the judge of the best tale, its teller to be rewarded with a dinner at the Tabard. Pilgrims of the Night opens at a ferry terminal from which the ferry is just leaving. Addressing the audience, a young man identifies himself as Poor Tom, the terminal caretaker, and the six characters—five travelers and the ferry captain’s wife— who enter to spend the night before boarding the ferry for its first morning run because, he explains to the audience, his “part [is] to let you know who all the travellers are, their names and occupations, and give you some idea of how they think and what about” (107). Once they are all together and identified, Viva, the ferry captain’s wife, proposes a way of passing the time pleasantly. They agree, and Poor Tom ends the opening scene, which functions as a general prologue, by announcing that “all the company agrees to tell each other tales, one tale to each, to make the night fly by” (115). The second of The Canterbury Tales is The Miller’s Tale, a fabliau of an older carpenter, his young wife Alison, and the student Nicholas, a tenant in their home who becomes her lover. So that the lovers can spend more time together, Nicholas convinces the carpenter that to prepare for an imminent flood, he should secure to the roof three tubs in which the three can survive until the water recedes. Duped, the old man follows the instructions, and when he falls asleep in his tub, the lovers enjoy each other until the arrival of a would-be lover, the clerk Absalon, who is tricked into kissing Alison’s posterior and who, to have revenge, sears Nicholas’ posterior with a hot coulter. The student’s cry for relieving water awakens the old man who, believing the flood has come, cuts the ropes securing the tubs and plunges to the ground. The first ferry-terminal tale, told by businessman Ray and enacted by the others in the cast of seven, is an adaptation involving a plumbing contractor, his young wife Darlene, tenant Nick Slick, and would-be lover George, a cook at the restaurant where Darlene is a hostess and where she met her

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husband. An actor, Nick dupes the husband by rigging the television set so that he appears on the screen as patron-saint Anthony to warn of an imminent flood. The ferry-terminal tale has contemporary twists typical of a postmodern update. With Alison and Nicholas aligned against him, the Miller’s carpenter finds no sympathetic audience in his neighbors; they judge him mad. Released after a psychiatric evaluation, Ray’s contractor returns to plumbing, an “older, but not a wiser man” (119). He wants his wife back, but she parlays the notoriety into a developing career as a dancer. Nursing their wounds—George is arrested for his hot-plate assault on Nick’s posterior—the three men can only watch her perform in a local club. The different natures of the two genres, poem and play, determine the formal differences. Character conception and theme are differences in content. The Miller’s language befits a man who is so “dronken” that with difficulty “upon his hors he sat.”13 When Nicholas first approaches Alison, he catches her “by the queynte” and then holds her “harde by the haunchebones” (MT 3276–79). Yet even though Absalon “kiste hir naked ers” (MT 3734) and has his senses scrambled when Nicholas lets “fle a fart” (MT 3806) and Nicholas has his “ers” (MT 3810) seared, it is the carpenter who is ridiculed, for despite his broken arm, the townspeople make him the butt of their jokes. Ray’s language is not so coarse. It is, however, uglier because Darlene’s motivation is different from Alison’s. The carpenter’s wife initially resists Nicholas. Not for long, but she does, and when she capitulates, she offers no reason other than to alert the student that her husband is a very jealous man. The reader may conclude that the frisky eighteen-year-old married the much older man because he is “riche” (MT 3188), but his wealth is not an issue. Eluding his watchful eye is, as is the lovers’ desire for “myrthe and … solas” (MT 3654). When Darlene enters Ray’s Tale and sits next to her husband on the couch, he “tries to get sexy with her,” but she not only “pushes him away,” blaming “girl stuff” for not reciprocating, she “winces” (115) when he refers to intimacy when she feels better. She does not resist Nick Slick. Their first meeting fades into a motel scene where in answer to his question as to why she married the older man, she admits the reason is his money, and getting the money is Nick’s reason for duping the contractor. Ignoring the Reeve’s warning not to defame carpenters, the Miller tells his tale, provoking retaliation from the Reeve, who learned carpentry in his youth and who tells a tale of a dishonest miller and the revenge two of his victims exact on his household. Ray’s Tale does not provoke retaliation from any of the other pilgrims. The contractor is not ridiculed; he is presented sympathetically. Since Ray is a self-made businessman whose scruples keep a rein on his huckstering impulses, he would respect the hard-working contractor and be harsh on the gold-digging wife and para-

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sitic lover. Yet he does not ridicule them either, their treacherous language and motivation notwithstanding. Both tales expose the folly of marrying the wrong partner, but whereas The Miller’s Tale ends with the penalty exacted for such folly, Ray’s Tale continues, thereby changing the contemporary tale’s theme. Although the men in both tales are wounded in their pride and dignity, the three men in Ray’s Tale suffer an additional loss, a loss they feel more deeply. They have lost Darlene. Removed from her, they suffer a loss of love, whether or not she reciprocated; they can only watch her move away from them as she essays a new career, no matter how dubious its promise. In the author’s note, Jenkin writes that the plays’ stories “are, for the most part anyway, love stories—in their fashion.” The differences between the original and the adaptation continue with Ray ending his tale with a contemporary variation on a medieval convention for which there is no counterpart in The Miller’s Tale, although as Chaucer’s editor, F.N. Robinson, notes about the ending of The Reeve’s Tale, “It was a common rhetorical convention to end a tale with a proverb or general idea, and in particular with a moral application.”14 Ray’s quatrain, which calls attention to itself by being the only lines of verse in his tale, makes the point that one should not be “too nosy” about “God’s mysteries” or one’s “wife,” providing a condition is met: that one is “getting all the love” desired. Given the tale the quatrain ends, the emphasis is on marital love. That is, if one is “getting all the love” he desires, he should not “inquire” about his wife’s possible extramarital life because there is a “remainder” of love (119); marital love does not exhaust love, even if it exhausts an older husband. Where one encounters the “remainder” of “God’s mysteries” is a question that must be withheld until the examination can establish where it is encountered in the two poems by the two authors to whom Jenkin apologizes. Pilgrims of the Night contains no postmodern update of Melville’s poem, but like Chaucer’s poem, it is a ground whose impact on the play has to be examined because each of the three works dramatizes a pilgrimage summational for the age in which it was written, and since the play refers back to the two preceding works, Pilgrims of the Night can be interpreted as summational for all three pilgrimages. Moreover, that Ray’s quatrain includes God’s mysteries is a further indication that the contemporary-postmodern play warrants comparison with the medieval and modern poems, for the encounter with a mystery is the reason for the pilgrimage in each of the three works. The 14th-century pilgrimage to St. Thomas à Becket’s shrine that provides the framework for the series of tales within an enclosing tale should have been undertaken with reverence, for every April in the Middle Ages folk longed to go on pilgrimages, in the case of the one to Canterbury, “the hooly blisful martir for to seke, / That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke”

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(GP 17–18). That some of the tales are not told with reverence is one reason for the poem’s enduring popularity. Yet from a religious perspective, a tale reminds the pilgrims and the reader that the pilgrimage to Canterbury is but a stage on life’s ultimate pilgrimage. The last to be told, with reverence tinged with sternness, The Parson’s Tale is a medieval sermon on penitence: the “righte wey of Jerusalem celestial” (PT 80), for the “fruyt of penaunce” is the “endelees blisse of hevene” (PT 1076). A corrective to the irreverent tales, the tale is a summing-up of the entire work and the entire medieval age. The mystery that is experienced on a lesser scale at the shrine of the martyr who “hath holpen” pilgrims when they were “seeke” is, in the Parson’s peroration, supreme in Heaven, where the “body, that whilom was syk, freele, and fieble, and mortal, is inmortal” (PT 1078). Melville’s four-part poem sums up another age. The Narrator of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land makes the connection between the poem he is narrating and the medieval poem when he describes the pilgrims leaving Jerusalem for the Dead Sea: Not from brave Chaucer’s Tabard Inn They pictured wend; scarce shall they win Fair Kent, and Canterbury ken; Nor franklin, squire, nor morris-dance Of wit and story good as then: Another age, and other men, And life an unfulfilled romance.15

The poem’s first part, Jerusalem, explains why the modern age is an “unfulfilled romance.” Clarel opens on an American theological student in his room at an inn in Jerusalem, “his luggage … unpacked” (1.1.12), brooding on the gulf separating his dream “in the glow / Of fancy’s spiritual grace” (1.1.114–15) and the reality encountered. Clarel has come to the Holy Land, a place more sacred than Canterbury and the one to which Americans traveled centuries later, hoping to find answers to his doubt: the crisis of faith from which he suffers. But approaching the city instead of a goal “ ‘aloft,’ ” he saw the “ ‘blank, blank towers, Jerusalem!’ ” (1.1.59–61), and in the room instead of “ ‘Siloh’s oracle,’ ” he hears a “ ‘naturalistic knell’ ” (1.1.23–24). The holy sites do not inspire visions of the celestial city; they are the ruins of a city so fallen that when viewed from a tower on nearby Olivet, one pilgrim questions whether it is the “ ‘city Dis’ ” (1.36.29), the bottom of Dante’s Inferno. The fact that Dis will be encountered later in the poem does not elevate the city. Melville’s Jerusalem, the modern Jerusalem of the 19th-century poem, is a dead city.

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As the pilgrims depart on the pilgrimage in the second part, The Wilderness, the Narrator continues invoking the medieval poem, but the similarities are few. For example, one of Melville’s pilgrims, of the total of nine in addition to the guide and guard, is a “priest” who combines the “secular and cleric tone” (2.1.29–33) reminiscent of Chaucer’s worldly clerics. The differences, on the other hand, are many. The inn where Clarel stays has a host, but he does not accompany the group, although the Narrator can be thought of in that role. No one, however, suggests that the pilgrims tell tales to pass the time, one reason being that the 19th-century journey is more dangerous than the 14th-century journey. Hence the armed guard. So too is the destination dangerous, though not from marauding Bedouins. The descent to the Siddim Plain and the Dead Sea, charted from canto to canto in allusions to Homer’s, Virgil’s, and Dante’s epics, is a descent into the underworld: Southward they file. ’Tis Pluto’s park Beslimed as after baleful flood: A nitrous, filmed and pallid mud, With shrubs to match (2.28.1–4).

Suddenly caught in a “bitter mist” from the “Bad Sea,” the men are “half seen or lost” (2.28.39–42). They do regroup, yet when they dismount to “restore / Ease to the limb,” they are still haunted by a mood of “dumb dejection” (2.29.171–73). The Dead Sea, which for Melville’s editor, Walter E. Bezanson, “embodies variously the risk of annihilation, absolute evil, and the unbearable limits of introspection,”16 is the scene of the most telling difference. As discussed above, The Parson’s Tale, the final tale of The Canterbury Tales, reminds its audience that every pilgrim on life’s pilgrimage should have his/her eyes directed toward the celestial Jerusalem. Melville’s Nehemiah is an American who has come to the terrestrial Jerusalem to prepare for the Second Coming anyone who will listen to him or accept his handouts. A kindly man, he befriends Clarel early in his visit; a fervent believer in God who rallies the men by chanting from Psalm 23 when the bitter mist separates them one from another, he is not the least bit plagued by Clarel’s doubt. Yet when the group beds down for the night, in a somnambulant state he follows a vision of the “New Jerusalem” (2.38.42) that appears to him in a dream. The next morning the others find his body on the shore of the water so dead that there is not even “one ripple ’gainst the cheek” (2.39.24), and when they wait for some sign, some acknowledgment of his death, the “elements yield no replies” (2.39.89). Two phenomena, a thunderous avalanche and a frail fog-bow, occur in part2’s closing canto, but whether they are susceptible of more than a scientific

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explanation is one of the poem’s crucial issues. A disagreement in a prior canto (2.33) illuminates the issue. With the encampment completed, pilgrim Rolfe gives the biblical explanation for the Dead Sea as recorded in Genesis. God destroyed the sinful cities of the plain, the most infamous being Sodom and Gomorrah, the ruins of which lie buried beneath the nitrous water. Disagreeing, pilgrim Margoth gives the geological explanation. The flow of the Jordan River and streams formed the basin. The repeated braying of the ass Nehemiah rides undercuts Margoth’s position but neither vanquishes the geologist nor resolves Clarel’s crisis. If the biblical account of life’s origin and early history is in doubt, faith in the supernatural is in doubt and nature becomes the sole reality—geology in the case of the Dead Sea. That is the crisis that brings Clarel to the Holy Land and that remains at the end of the second part. The pilgrims visit shrines such as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on the return to Jerusalem, but the crisis of faith not only persists, it brings forth other issues with which the pilgrims wrestle in part 3, Mar Saba, and part 4, Bethlehem. If nature is the sole reality, how does one live one’s life? If there is no timeless realm to enter the world of time, transforming and redeeming it, how does one combat loss, suffering, despair, and evil? The penultimate canto of the narrative portion of Clarel is entitled “Easter.” The pilgrims have returned to Jerusalem and dispersed on their homeward journeys. Clarel remains because on the outskirts of the city he discovered that the woman with whom he had fallen in love before the group departed for the Dead Sea died while he was gone. The time is Easter Sunday. As the former theological student broods on Evangelist Matthew’s words (28.6), “Christ is arisen,” he asks, “But Ruth, may Ruth so burst the prison?” (4.33.65–66) The narrative portion ends weeks later with a disconsolate Clarel following a train of pilgrims on the Via Crucis, or Via Dolorosa, before vanishing down a narrow passageway. For Robert Penn Warren, Clarel is a pivotal “document in literary history and in the history of ideas; and it is, too, the document of a conscience and a consciousness. It reaches back to Byron, to Childe Harold, and is more immediately related, though not by imitation, to poems like In Memoriam, ‘Dover Beach,’ and ‘The Scholar Gipsy.’ It casts forward to Thomas Hardy (even to The Dynasts), to Ezra Pound and The Cantos, and significantly to Eliot and The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets.”17 Clarel is also pivotal in understanding Jenkin’s 20th-century play, the only one of the volume’s three plays to consist of multiple tales—Ray’s and the five that follow it—and thereby fit the description in the author’s note of having “connections between the tales.” Reporter and adventuress Lily recounts a time when just out of college she shared an apartment with a roommate who under the pretext of managing an estate is lured to a Caribbean island.

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Once there she is drugged by the estate’s owner to enter the lifeless state of a zombie and marriage to the owner’s Son, who was hideously disfigured in an accident. She is returned to life only because the Son releases her. A man who has spent a lifetime reinventing himself, from porno film star to Trappist monk, Samuel tells a tale of Doctor Kremser, a transcendental vivisectionist who performs experimental operations on the brain, enraptured as he is by a “vision of a heavenly city on an island” (128). Since his Wife “loves him with a deep devotion” (127), he operates on her, but when the operation leaves her “hopelessly mad ” (129), he is committed to an asylum for the criminally insane, where the Nurse who assisted him in the experiments is now employed. Together she and Kremser overpower the asylum’s head psychiatrist and the woman who arrives for a dinner date to operate on her. In Viva’s, the ferry captain’s wife’s, Tale, Doctor Landu and his assistant tour with Olga, a headless woman decapitated in a train wreck whose body Landu animates by connecting tubes from a panel into the cylinder where the head should be. “Maybe I was guided by love” (136) is his explanation for keeping her alive. “A very special kind of love” (137) is his offer to anyone in the ferry-terminal audience who will bid on the key to her trailer. When no one does, he leaves, at which point the assistant exposes the illusion. With the hood removed, Olga is revealed to be a retarded girl no longer permitted to pass notes to the audience because all that she ever wrote was “ ‘OLGA WANTS TO DIE’ ” (138). Zoe, a magician’s assistant, relates the story of Elmo March, visited at age five by Silvergirl, an extraterrestrial. Years pass, and although Elmo is happily married with children, he has never forgotten the visitation. One night Silvergirl appears as a mysterious shopper in the shop he owns to tell him that he has been chosen to spread the aliens’ wisdom in order to save the world from destruction. He does in a book but with little impact. Nevertheless she returns again, a prostitute in this incarnation, to commend his effort. “Don’t cry, little Elmo. I love you” (144), she consoles him. Bunny and Dick are a married couple in Professor Hubert’s, the magician’s, Tale. Since Dick lost his job, with money saved the two pursue their dream of founding an “Eden for Everyone” (147). Surviving a train derailment in which their car sinks to the bottom of the sea, they surface to pull themselves into a boat that comes drifting by. The settlement they found on a barren island realizes their dream, for though they die, it does not. Accommodating all of life, the settlement flourishes. Images repeated with minute variations are the links connecting the tales. The estate owner’s Son in Lily’s Tale is so hideously disfigured he is veiled. Dr. Kremser’s operation on his Wife’s brain is so botched that she is “hideously bandaged ” (129). A hood covers Olga’s head in Viva’s Tale, and each

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time Elmo March’s visitor removes her covering, as a shopper or a prostitute, she reveals herself as Silvergirl. Characters from one tale reappear in other tales. For example, the Calypso Singer from the zombie tale and the head psychiatrist at the asylum to which Kremser is committed reappear in the Silvergirl tale. The estate owner’s disfigured Son and Darlene from Ray’s Tale are on the train derailed in Professor Hubert’s Tale, the conductor is reading Elmo March’s book, and the boat into which Bunny and Dick pull themselves is the plumbing contractor’s boat from Ray’s Tale. Themes are the strands connecting the tales. One identifies the play’s most painful experience. Ending Ray’s Tale, it is the sense of loss and life’s consequent meaninglessness. It is a strand found throughout Jenkin’s oeuvre. From the many statements attesting to humanity’s plight, a few suffice to make the point. As the night wears on in American Notes, Faber, sitting in the motel office with the clerk, becomes increasingly introspective. “We’re a bunch of poor bastards here, Pauline. Roam the planet like starving dogs, and never get it right. Find any little scrap of something in this world and it’s thank God and step careful, cause you’re likely to lose that too” (251). To Kafka’s plea in A Country Doctor for sympathy and love that people should have “as if we stood before the gates of hell,” the Pitchman implies that we are already in Hell: “My friend, people do suffer—endlessly—except for certain lively moments of relief” (25). For the terminal’s Poor Tom, the world is “beautiful,” and “yet we live with cruelty, and madness, and death” (134). Another strand in Pilgrims of the Night identifies what has been lost. Even though Lily’s roommate, Sherry, was reduced to a zombie state for marriage before the Son released her, back home she repeats her initial impression of the Caribbean island by describing it as a “paradise. Eden with a capital E” (124). Samuel’s Tale has Dr. Kremser seeking “direct communication with the upper spheres” (127). His vision of a “heavenly city on an island” (128) connects the New Jerusalem with Sherry’s “paradise” in Lily’s Tale. Dr. Landu in Viva’s Tale calls the restoring of Olga to life a “miracle” (136). The significance is in the language and not the alleged restoration, which turns out to be an illusion. The language invokes the existence of a non-natural or supernatural world to which an event in the natural world surpassing the natural world’s laws can be attributed: one of the “upper spheres” in Samuel’s Tale. With the passing years distancing him from his childhood vision of a higher form of life from an upper sphere, Elmo’s life in Zoe’s Tale “seems empty, and stupid, and slow” (140). With a description similar to that of Elmo’s life, Martin Esslin applies the loss to all of contemporary life: What, in centuries to come, will be the central theme of the history of our own epoch, the twentieth century? There can be little doubt that, on such a secular

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scale, our age will be regarded as faced with the immense problem of filling the vacuum left in Western civilization by the decline and collapse of the firm framework of religious faith—and the social and ethical structure based on it— in the aftermath of the scientific and industrial revolution that was the outcome of the nineteenth century. … With the loss of a belief in a supernaturally ordained structure and purpose in the world, life seems empty, meaningless and absurd. Material satisfactions become all-important; but, once they are satisfied, nothing remains. Everything there is appears explicable, but on a very banal, superficial level. The world loses its grandeur, its mystery.18

The decline and collapse into the loss of mystery from the medieval age through the modern age into the contemporary or postmodern age can be traced through the three pilgrimages in the pilgrims’ shrines, their motives for questing, and the experience that recovers that which was lost. Though some of Chaucer’s clerics are too worldly and though others on the pilgrimage are divided on issues that reflect medieval values such as sovereignty in marriage, none question the Canterbury shrine’s sanctity. Since Clarel is not a series of tales within an enclosing tale, the characters do not reveal themselves in tales; they do so in their attitudes toward values, traditional and modern. Clarel is not alone in suffering a crisis of faith; other characters are more tormented than he. Still others have no reverence for sites steeped in religious faith. While one character finds Gethsemane the perfect place for buying souvenirs, another sees it as the perfect place for a railroad station in the Holy Land’s development. Yet whether revered or desanctified in attitude, ruined or attended by votaries, the shrines exist; they are part of the landscape. As the Narrator says, the “numbers” of “mourners” have so “worn the stones” of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem that “such ties, so deep / Endear the spot, or false or true / As an historic site” (1.3.99–102, 112–14). There are no shrines, sanctified or historic, on the desolate landscape of Pilgrims of the Night. The crashing of the fireball that brings the pilgrims to the ferry terminal may have created a shrine, although in Tom’s words it is an “uncertain shrine” (114). Moreover, as he does throughout the play, Jenkin undercuts positions that might establish certainty with opposing positions, thereby creating uncertainty. He begins with an epigraph purporting to be a prophecy of Mother Shipton about men seen in the air. Although people believed in her prophecies for centuries, everything about the woman reputed to be an early 16th-century witch and prophetess and the prophecies’ authenticity is uncertain. Samuel’s certainty that the crashing fireball is a “sign in the heavens” (109) undercuts the epigraph but is itself undercut by being the sole perception among the pilgrims of the phenomenon as religious and by Zoe’s joke that the “flying things” accompanying the fireball “are actually God’s angels” (144).

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As for the motives for questing, Chaucer’s Pardoner may be going to Canterbury to sell relics along the way, for he tries to sell one to the Host as soon as he finishes his tale, but Chaucer does not examine his pilgrims’ motives probably because pilgrimages had been commonplace for centuries when he wrote The Canterbury Tales with the result that his group is “united by a common religious purpose” (R 2). Five hundred years later, Melville felt the need to examine his modern pilgrims’ motives because pilgrimages were still commonplace, even though the medieval age with its authoritative frame of reference and traditional values had been long gone. It comes as no surprise therefore that they are not united by a common religious purpose. A banker and his future son-in-law, for example, are in Jerusalem to further a financial scheme, and since the affair lingers, “dull time to kill, / They wandered, anywhere, at will” (2.1.171–72); they turn back the first day out. Margoth has come to the Holy Land to collect geological specimens; he continues collecting on the plain after the group departs on the return journey. The secularization notwithstanding, the majority of Melville’s pilgrims are on a spiritual quest with some expecting the shrines will be certain in their traditional meaning and others hoping they will be. The secularization increases in Pilgrims of the Night with three of the five pilgrims seeing in the fireball utilitarian opportunities. For writer Lily, it has the potential of a story that sells, a flying “saucer exclusive” (108); for entrepreneur Ray, a business potential with contracts to be negotiated with the space creatures and supplies to be sold to them; for magician Hubert, the potential of a tourist attraction, “our own Hanging Gardens of Babylon” (114). At the same time, however, their pilgrimage to the river’s far side offers the opportunity to counter the uncertainty in the contemporary age. As the five arrive at the terminal, Tom introduces each to the audience with a short biography and also gives one for himself and one for Viva. Drifting from place to place, occupation to occupation, and relationship to relationship, all suffer a lack of focus and direction—a lack of meaning—in their lives. Ray’s biography is typical. On his own “since he was twelve years old, shining shoes and stealing cars” (109), he became a producer of slasher films but is now an agent, promoter, and representative of a mining company. Their spirits energized and their imaginations stimulated by the fireball, they seize the opportunity the pilgrimage presents to search for meaning that resolves the uncertainty and recovers a purpose to life lost with the loss of an order or reality other than the natural one. With the coming of dawn, the ferry resumes its schedule, but only four board for the crossing: Lily, Ray, Viva, and Hubert. Samuel died during the night, and Tom and Zoe remain in the terminal. As Hubert looks back at the audience, he speaks for the departing pilgrims: “If we don’t find what we’re

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looking for, there are other places to try, and other ways to get there than a ferryboat. We can explore them together, one after the other, on and on, forever to the end of the world” (152). To appreciate Hubert’s speech, we should compare it to a speech in a play by an author with whom Jenkin is linked by Gussow, Castagno, and Fordyce at the opening of this study. Eric Overmyer’s On the Verge dramatizes the adventures of three time travelers as they trek from a 19th-century embarcadero to the postmodern era. At play’s end the three women go their separate ways. While Fanny accepts a marriage proposal and Alex pursues a songwriting career, Mary continues trekking. Her speech closes the play: Billions of new worlds, waiting to be discovered. Explored and illuminated. Within and without. The nautilus shell mimics the shape of the Milky Way. Quarks and quasars. My face is bathed in light from a vanished star. (Beat) I stand on the precipice. The air is rare. Bracing. Before me stretch dark distances. Clusters of light. What next? I have no idea. Many mysteries to come. I am on the verge. (She surveys the horizon and her prospects.) I have such a yearning for the future! It is boundless! (She takes a deep breath.) Not annoying. Not annoying at all!19

Even though she is poised for flight, she does not mean that she wants to be an astronaut exploring outer space. On the Verge is metaphoric. As Overmyer writes in the production notes, it is a play “about language … about the imagination, and about theatricality.”20 The exploration is “within and without,” connecting the two realms. As the women trek from the past into the present, they discover their ability to create within themselves images for the objects and concepts they encounter outside themselves. Moments before the closing speech, Alex asks Mary to give her and Fanny a “lowdown on the future” she will be exploring. “Coining place names for a map of the New World,” she obliges with a long list of terms not in existence at the embarcadero (108). In a play about creating new linguistic worlds—new imaginative worlds—new theatrical worlds, Mary intends to continue creating. As she says, the future is “boundless!” Jenkin’s plays are also about language, the imagination, and theatricality, but the departing pilgrims’ quest in Pilgrims of the Night, as Hubert speaks for them, is not for images to connect with the objects and concepts they encounter. Neither are they searching for extraterrestrials or for evidence of a crashing fireball that may be a meteorite—not if they intend to search in “other places” and “forever.” Hubert must be referring to evidence of another world, a parallel universe impinging on the natural world. That is, he must be referring to the recovery of an order that nature’s rise to supremacy vanquished. They can continue questing in other places and forever for a

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phenomenon for which there is no explanation and is therefore the experience of mystery in the natural order. Of course, other places can be other imaginative worlds: other plays. Unlike Mary, however, Jenkin’s departing pilgrims are not creating the imaginative worlds. They are but not, as we will see, by taking the ferry. The third way of tracing the decline and collapse into the loss of mystery is through the experience that recovers what was lost. If we go beyond the loss of a framework of religious faith that follows the breakup of the medieval age in Esslin’s sketch to the loss of paradise, Chaucer’s Parson does not mince words. He warns his audience against waiting until the last minute to repent because although Christ’s mercy is infinite, the sinner is playing a dangerous game. Abandoning sin as early as one can is the certain way—“the siker wey” (PT 94)—to salvation. That is, the certain way to regaining paradise is imitating Christ, Who is presented as humankind’s model throughout the tale. Clarel does not find the resolution to the crisis of faith that brought him to the Holy Land. What he finds is the reality of the Cross. The implication of the poem’s closing canto in which he trails pilgrims along the Via Dolorosa before disappearing in Jerusalem is that whether or not Christ is risen, the quester for meaning in life must become Christ-like, must imitate “Him our pure exemplar” (4.34.21). As editor Bezanson observes, “The recognition at last of the tragic view is Clarel’s major insight. He too must endure the Passion” (B 565). Yet the epilogue’s closing octet offers Clarel hope for triumphing over the naturalistic death that renders suffering meaningless by urging him to be true to his heart, for then, like a swimmer rising from the deep, “Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea, / And prove that death but routs life into victory” (4.35.33–34). The decline and collapse hit bottom in Pilgrims of the Night in that the contemporary pilgrims deny any meaning to their tales. Asked to comment on his tale, Ray replies, “Think what you like, my story’s done” (120). The other pilgrims have similar replies. Annoyed by the questions, Lily insists that she just “made that story up” (124) about her roommate Sherry, not only denying a higher intention to the storytelling but also the roommate’s existence. Samuel defends the abruptness of his story: “It ends when I stop telling it.” His purpose in telling a story is simply “to amuse” (131). When asked why Bunny and Dick were saved from the train derailment, Hubert professes not to “know why things happen” or why he should be expected to know. All that he can say is “I just spoke, and they were saved” (151). By denying any meaning to their tales, the pilgrims are not denying their quest for meaning. What the denial does is engage the audience in the quest. The spectator who desires meaning must discover it for himself/herself. He/ She can in recognizing a design to the tales that is a way of identifying the

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experience of recovering what was lost and the third strand connecting the tales, the first two strands identifying life’s most painful experience and what was lost. The third strand connecting the tales is also the third strand connecting the three pilgrimages, the first two strands the shrines and the motives for questing. Recognizing the design begins the rebound from the bottom. Ray’s Tale, the first of the six, is the oddest of the six. It is the only one that reimagines an earlier tale—a medieval one—and that ends with a quatrain—a medieval convention. The reimagining identifies loss as life’s most painful experience, and by warning the spectator not to “be too nosy … / About God’s mysteries” (119), the quatrain identifies God’s mysteries as what was lost in the six hundred or so years since Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. Being “too nosy” is the key. The quatrain does not warn the spectator against trying to discover God’s mysteries; it warns against prying where the spectator does not belong. Yet the next four tales do that: pry where they do not belong and thereby construct bogus to bizarre mysteries. Sherry’s island in Lily’s Tale is a “paradise. Eden with a capital E” (124), but its inhabitants are zombies, slaves who have lost their wills, in contrast with Dante’s pilgrim when he enters the garden paradise on the top of Mount Purgatory. His guide Virgil encourages him to act on his will’s bidding because “free, upright and whole is thy will” (Purg. 27.140). Dr. Kremser in Samuel’s Tale wants “direct communication with the upper spheres” (127); he wants to bypass Purgatory, and in another context Samuel mentions “purgatory” (134), and go directly to Heaven. Dr. Landu in Viva’s Tale claims to have restored the dead Olga to life, but the alleged miracle is a trick and an ugly one because it is perpetrated on a retarded girl. Although Elmo March in Zoe’s Tale is no kook like the Professor in American Notes and Silvergirl is not one of the Professor’s invisible shadow people, Elmo invests a spacegirl with the aura of divinity. Only the sixth and final tale discovers one of God’s mysteries. In Hubert’s Tale Bunny and Dick surface from the derailed train car submerged in water to found “Eden for Everyone.” In their symbolic overcoming of death, they regain the lost paradise for humanity on an island that flourishing through the years becomes “our world” (150). Death and resurrection is so central a mystery in Christianity that at a juncture in the liturgy of the Eucharist in the Roman Catholic Mass, the celebrant intones, “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith,” to which the congregation join him in proclaiming, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Death and resurrection is central in Jenkin’s oeuvre too, introduced in the plays this study examines in the early Gogol. The character Resurrection Man is actually a grave robber, but the euphemism stresses the resurrection. Webster’s The White Devil is misquoted to stress the resurrection rather than the burial. And Gogol sacrifices himself

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to be resurrected in Mesmer. The mystery is par excellence the experience of the non-naturalistic order in the naturalistic order: the experience of a parallel universe, multiple frame, or concurrent track impinging on the natural world. In Pilgrims of the Night, Bunny and Dick eventually die because death cannot be avoided, but based on their symbolic experience in the water that approximates an absolute experience, death may be the avenue to the ultimate mystery of existence: death in life that is life in death. Summational for the medieval, modern, and postmodern pilgrimages, Pilgrims of the Night dramatizes three ways of recovering the lost experience of mystery. The first way is discovering the wonder of the quest with the four pilgrims who depart. The second way is discovering the pleasure of the heart with the two pilgrims who stay behind. In act 1 Hubert tries to sell bottles of the love potion he has brought, and when no one is interested, he gives a bottle to Tom as a gift. In act 2 Zoe joins Tom where he is sitting and offers him a drink from her bottle, but since he has his own, they drink from their bottles. Whether the liquid is a “love drug” or “water, with a few drops of perfume,” love is a mystery, as lounge-singer Marlene in Careless Love knows, and love has Tom lying down next to Zoe, “his arm over her” (151). Possible allusions summon the third way. Hubert’s farewell to the dead Samuel as the four board the morning ferry for their departure, “Fair wind and full sails to our fellow traveller” (152), may recall Prospero’s promise in The Tempest of “calm seas, auspicious gales, / And sail so expeditious …”21 for the morning departure from the magical island. Zoe’s farewell to the theatre audience, “Good night! Sleep tight. Pleasant dreams” (153), may be a nod to Puck’s “good night” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.443) to the 16thcentury audience. Addressing the 20th-century audience, Tom reveals that the story of Pilgrims of the Night is his. Since storytelling creates imaginative worlds, the pilgrims’ tales create mysteries. Tom, however, orchestrates them to yield the design from the loss that ends Ray’s Tale to the recovery that ends Hubert’s Tale. As the orchestrator of a performance of dramatized stories, he is the third in the volume’s growth-of-the-artist progression. As the host who knows all of the pilgrims’ biographies, he is a contemporary Prospero or Oberon who creates the magical place that is theatre. In a world in which traditional values have been blasted, theatre brings people together not to solve mysteries for them but to engage them in a search for love and meaning, a pilgrimage of shared discovery and exploration of the mysteries that the stories dramatize. Pilgrims of the Night is the most theatrical of the volume’s three plays. Whereas A Country Doctor has a few actors play the Doctor and Like I Say allows the cast to double in the Coconut Joe segments, the cast of Pilgrims of the Night are the performers of the six tales. They can sit onstage as the audience for a tale or wait offstage to enter and

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exit as the action requires. No one is dragged into the story, as the Wedding Guest is, and the six tales offer a spectrum of roles from the taciturn Son to the glib Dr. Landu, the victimized Mrs. Kremser to the insane Dr. Kremser, and the seductive Darlene to the numinous Silvergirl. Before Zoe bids the audience “Good night!” Tom has advice for the audience: “Tell your own tales to each other, and make those nights before you sail go by with more delight” (153). Since sailing is an image of inevitable death, storytelling not only creates the wonder of life’s quest, it expresses the pleasure of the heart. It may also have another function, as we will discover in the conclusion, the subjects of which are two plays that demonstrate Jenkin’s growth as an artist, for they are beautiful in their simplicity.

NOTES 1. Len Jenkin, “On These Three Plays of Mine,” in Plays by Len Jenkin (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1999). 2. Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, “Kafka and Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, ed. Julian Preece (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 176–77. 3. Len Jenkin, A Country Doctor, in Plays by Len Jenkin 6. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 4. Franz Kafka, “A Country Doctor,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories and Parables, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Quality Paperback, 1983) 220. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. When a quotation involves the story and the play, the story’s pagination precedes the play’s pagination in the parenthetical citation. 5. See The Problem of The Judgment: Eleven Approaches to Kafka’s Story, ed. Angel Flores (New York: Gordian, 1977). 6. Kurt J. Fickert, Kafka’s Doubles (Berne: Peter Lang, 1979) 61. 7. Meno Spann, Franz Kafka (Boston: Twayne, 1976) 130. 8. Lorenz 177. 9. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead, 1994) 426. 10. Len Jenkin, Like I Say, in Plays by Len Jenkin 65. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 11. David Mamet, “Drama That Brings Home the Bacon” New York Times 7 Sept. 2008: AR10. 12. Len Jenkin, Pilgrims of the Night, in Plays by Len Jenkin 106. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 13. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Miller’s Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1957) lines 3120–21. Hereafter the General Prologue, The Miller’s Tale, and The Parson’s Tale to be cited parenthetically as GP, MT, and PT by line number.

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14. F.N. Robinson, page 688, note 4320–21. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically as R. 15. Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston: Northwestern UP; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1991) part 2, canto 1, lines 7–13. Vol. 12 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically by part, canto, line number. 16. Walter E. Bezanson, “Historical and Critical Note,” in Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land 560. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically as B. 17. Robert Penn Warren, introduction, Selected Poems of Herman Melville: A Reader’s Edition, ed. Warren (New York: Random, 1970) 44. 18. Martin Esslin, introduction, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz: Tropical Madness, The Winter Repertory 7 (New York: Winter, 1972) 1. 19. Eric Overmyer, On the Verge, in Collected Plays (Newbury, VT: Smith and Kraus, 1993) 109. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 20. Eric Overmyer, production notes, On the Verge (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1986) 75. The production notes are not included with the play in the collected edition. 21. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Complete Works, ed. G.B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, 1952) 5.1.314–15. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically.

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Conclusion

Kraken and Margo Veil

Premiering in 2004, Kraken has a prefatory note giving background material on the time in November 1856 when Melville, who was on the journey to the Holy Land that gave rise to Clarel, visited Hawthorne, who was the American Consul in Liverpool residing with his family in Southport twenty miles away on the coast. The note goes on to explain that Hawthorne recorded the details of the visit in his journal of that period in his life. The critic would expect, then, that the one of the play’s two epigraphs that comes from Hawthorne’s writings is from The English Notebooks, but it comes from The American Notebooks: the record of their meeting in August 1851 in the Berkshires. Other than details such as their trip to a cathedral in Chester, the relevant passage in The English Notebooks, had Jenkin quoted it, is Hawthorne’s perception of Melville; the focus is on Melville’s desperate mental state. Kraken dramatizes that mental state and quotes from The English Notebooks, but as an epigraph the passage would be misleading. The passage from The American Notebooks that is quoted as an epigraph begins, “Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next. . . .”1 The focus is on both men because the play is a dialogue between the two artists on time and eternity, things of this world and of the next and the subject of the other epigraph, from the Book of Job: “Where is God my maker, who giveth songs in the night?” (35.10): suffering, its place in life, and God’s role or whereabouts in it. The two epigraphs connect early in the play. Scene 2 has the character Melville checking into his hotel in Joppa, the seaport in Palestine, and writing an entry for December 19, 1856, in the journal he kept for the Holy Land journey. As he writes, he awaits the arrival of a female, revealing his depressed state over the failure of his books to receive an audience and critical acclaim and in a flashback his wife’s urging that he travel to relieve the depression. 123

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Scene 3 continues the flashback with Melville on the ship to England, where he is joined on deck by a female who is Death personified. As they talk, she reminds him that by asking “God for comfort and release” from his “pain,”2 he was calling for her. (In The English Notebooks passage that Jenkin could have used for an epigraph, Hawthorne records his perception of his friend as making “ ‘up his mind to be annihilated’ ” because he cannot get “hold of a definite belief.”3) Death aligns him with Job, but so does he align himself with the biblical figure. When in discussing his novels she finds Pierre, or the Ambiguities “terminally flawed,” he protests, “But don’t you think Pierre’s inno…” (7). Completed, the word is “innocent,” Job’s self-perception. Both Job and Melville think of themselves as men unjustly suffering, men abandoned by God. She—Death, that is—aligns herself with Satan when she tells Melville that she is leaving because he is not yet ready for her but will see him in Joppa. “I’m a busy girl,” she says; “I move to and fro on the earth, and up and down in it” (9), repeating Satan’s language in the Book of Job (1.7). Death is Melville’s torment because he knows it is inevitable but does not know what to believe about what follows it. Is death the ultimate naturalistic event in that it ends life or the threshold to the ultimate non-naturalistic event in that eternal life issues from it? “Where will I go?” he asks her; “To Hell? To Paradise? To some shadowy etern…” (9). (In The English Notebooks passage that Jenkin could have used, Hawthorne writes that his friend “began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken.”4) To see how Jenkin uses Melville’s Holy Land journal is to see how he soars with a ground. The journal entry for December 19, 1856—the date the play has the character arriving in “Joppa” (3)—begins, “Passed through Dardenells at daybreak.” Melville did not arrive in Jaffa, the modern name of the ancient seaport of Joppa, until January 6, 1857, and he did not take a hotel room but departed immediately for Jerusalem. He did stay in Jaffa on his return to the coast on January 20 and while waiting for passage to Beirut made the following entry in the journal for January 24: “No sleep last night—only resource to cut tobacco, & watch the six windows of my room which is like a light-house—& hear the surf & wind.” The entries for the 24th and 26th refer to the seaport as Joppa and record rowing to get a closer look at the alleged Jonah’s pier in the harbor. The play’s scene 16 is a continuation of scene 2 with the character Melville in his hotel room in “Joppa. Jonah’s town” writing the following entry: “No sleep last night—spent the hours cutting tobacco, hearing the surf and wind, waiting for her” (47). Jenkin rearranges and alters the source to emphasize the character’s mental state. He therefore does not use a passage in the January 26th entry that shows Melville’s sense of humor. Apparently the hotel was deplorable because the novelist was “amused with

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the autographs & confessions of people who have stayed at this hotel. ‘I have existed at this hotel & &’. Something comical could be made out of all this.”5 Death also connects with the sea monster Kraken, named Architeuthis or gigantic squid, for she alerts Melville on board the ship in the flashback to the creature in the moonlight. Open to as many interpretations as Moby Dick is, on one level the Kraken is the demons within the character Melville. The character Hawthorne, who is suffering from a loss of his creative powers and inability to complete a story despite starting a half-dozen, has his demons too, yet he speaks for a point of view opposing Melville’s. Death indicates the opposing point of view when upon leaving Melville in scene 3, she tells him to visit his friend, the American Consul in Liverpool. In another indication that the play will not be uniformly depressing, she reminds him, as he did the hotel clerk when he checked in, that Joppa is Jonah’s town. In the biblical story, it is the seaport from which Jonah in an attempt to flee the Lord’s presence sailed on his night sea journey to rebirth. Once the two artists meet, the dialogue begins, and that makes for a somewhat static action. I am not suggesting that Jenkin should have done what the Axis Company did in 2004 shortly before Kraken premiered. In a work entitled In Token of My Admiration, alluding to Melville’s dedication of MobyDick to Hawthorne, the theatre company performed scenes invoking the two artists’ friendship. At least that was part of the performance with two actors as characters suffering the depression the artists suffer in Kraken. Other parts, however, had the actors performing in a minstrel show and a vaudeville act. Still another part had them framed against film projections. The play was interesting and enjoyable but not very revelatory of the Axis Company beyond the fact that it creates experimental theatre. Kraken, on the other hand, is very revelatory of Jenkin’s temperament. And the playwright does break up the dialogue with songs and scenes involving a pitchman pretending to be a Russian emigrant who alternately pimps for and physically abuses his tattooed wife, who offers herself to each of the fiction writers, and though neither succumbs, she draws a “long kiss” (27) from Melville. Their coarse language and behavior spice the action. The pitchman’s exhibit, which he sets up on the beach near Melville and Hawthorne, also contributes to the dialogue. His bioscope, a box with holes for viewing, is a variation on the magic lantern in other Jenkin plays. Malkovsky claims that for a fee the viewer can behold wonderful sights. The two men pay, but since they see nothing but scratched slides, they demand their money back—to no avail. Their being duped, however, is another impetus for a dialogue on what lies beyond death and what one can know or believe about the future and eternity. The action also adds a fictitious account to the trip to the Chester cathedral recorded in The English Notebooks. In the play upon learning that

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the two men are not devout churchgoers, Father Jeremy, the vicar, discloses that he is plagued by the same uncertainty about life’s purpose that they are. A variation on Job, he cries out to “GOD OF MY FATHERS” for relief from the pain of “poverty, sickness, death,” only to receive “His Silence” (36). Neither Melville nor Hawthorne cries out for relief, yet their dialogue is the essence of Jenkin’s theatre, encapsulated in two exchanges. To Melville’s question, “Why does the God we pray to let us live this way?”—with “pain and death … minds and hearts … torn”—Hawthorne’s reply is “There are no answers to your questions” before adding a line that recalls Poor Tom’s position in Pilgrims of the Night that even with death the world is beautiful: “Yet the world is still beautiful, my friend, dark places and all” (18–19). The second exchange comes when they are again alone. Melville: We just wander about the world, and then one sunny day we double over in pain, lie down in bed and turn our faces to the wall. Is that it? Hawthorne: There’s only the winding road, my friend. It’s why we need to love one another (24).

Before the scene ends, Melville invites Hawthorne to accompany him on the journey to the Holy Land, where they will “solve the mysteries of time and eternity,” but the latter declines because his life is with his wife “Sophie and the children” (25). Melville speaks for the discovery of the wonder of the quest for an absolute while Hawthorne speaks for the expression of the heart in the pleasure of the transitory, but they do not speak as allegorical figures. They are not bits and pieces of characters as are the characters in My Uncle Sam, and neither is each the exclusive representative of a point of view. Melville enjoys the pleasure of this world, and Hawthorne wonders about time and eternity, as did his real-life counterpart, three of whose unfinished works that include The Dolliver Romance are collected under the rubric of Elixir of Life because they deal with the theme of immortality. The two are whole characters sensitive to the tattooed whore’s appeal, appreciative of a good smoke and drink, and responsive to each other’s needs. Their feelings that shape the dialogue, their relationship with each other, and Hawthorne’s relationship with Sophia, affectionately called Sophie, are among the most moving feelings I have experienced in the theatre. I did not see the premiere but did see the 2007 New York City Walkerspace production. Moreover, I cannot believe that Jenkin went to a library to bone up on the two 19thcentury artists to make a play. With a quotation from Pierre, or the Ambiguities, a reference to a November 1851 letter from Melville to Hawthorne, and references to The Dolliver Romance in addition to all the other debt to

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notebooks, journals, and stories, Jenkin has to be steeped in their art. That debt serves him well. A Seattle review of Pilgrims of the Night captures the dichotomy in Jenkin’s theatre: “In the six tales and in the framing narrative, Jenkin explores many of the raw nerve ends in our society: the deep need to believe in an absolute, while at the same time reveling in the gratification of the present.”6 The root of the bifurcation into two voices must be in Jenkin himself. From time to time, this study has examined the growth-of-the-artist theme as it applies to characters. Now it applies to the playwright whose bifurcation produced the quest in Dark Ride and the pleasure in Poor Folk’s Pleasure. In the interplay between the two giants of 19th-century American literature, he reconciles the two voices as in passages such as the following. Trying to dissuade Melville from self-annihilation, Hawthorne argues that “it’s a great thing to catch the fire even once, and let it burn you down. You’ve done it. You will do it again” (41). He urges the author of Moby-Dick to resume writing and the “fire” of that activity will inspire him to find his lost faith. Of course, the author of The Scarlet Letter floundering from one unfinished romance to another can be telling himself that is what he must do because creating art reconciles the quest and the pleasure, the wonder and the heart in life as in Kraken. Whether it does in death is unanswerable, and death is inevitable in Kraken, yet its—or her—arrival creates some of the most beautiful and powerful scenes in Jenkin’s theatre. Hawthorne dies first. Death personified comes for him as he appears to fall asleep while Sophie reads to him from Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Though he calls to his wife, Death explains that she cannot hear him. He can hear Death, however, as she sings a misquoting, acknowledged in a prefatory note, of a Thomas Nashe song. In the original the fourth line of the four sung is “I am sick; I must die,” repeated as a refrain from stanza to stanza.7 The line sung in the play is “All who live, all must die” (55). Yet Death’s enveloping embrace of the romancer is not depressing. It is followed by Sophie’s loving embrace as she prepares him for his next journey and after an intervening scene Melville’s death as he reads the closing lines of the posthumously published Billy Budd, Sailor in which Billy looks forward to “dream[ing] fast asleep” (57). If these lines imply a fatalistic view that naturalistic death is life’s ultimate event, the play’s soaring with another ground counters the fatalistic view. The ground is biography. Melville, fifteen years younger than Hawthorne, outlived him by twenty-seven years. With the exception of The Marble Faun, Hawthorne was unable to complete the romances on which he worked during the final years of his life whereas Melville continued creating during the twenty-seven years, though forgoing prose for poetry and without the productivity of his first decades of authorship. In the play’s penultimate scene, when

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Death comes for Melville reading from Billy Budd, Sailor, she says to him, “The last time we met, in Joppa, at the final moment, you chose to live” (58). The implication is that by choosing to live, Melville forestalled death because choosing to live implies choosing to create one’s life and art. The penultimate scene clarifies the ultimate scene of Pilgrims of the Night. The four departing pilgrims continue the quest, but the quest by itself does not create imaginative worlds. Imagination stimulated by questing does; it creates stories, and storytelling is a powerful force and not only in the theatre. I wish I had found a Scheherazade allusion to buttress the point yet not finding one does not invalidate the implication. Poor Tom advises the audience to tell “tales to each other” because a benefit is that they bring “delight” (153). Another benefit may be that storytelling extends life by keeping death at bay until time runs out. The image that follows the Kraken exchange is one of the great images in Jenkin’s oeuvre; it is a summational image. Melville requests to see the Hawthornes one more time, at which point Nathaniel and Sophia appear walking along the beach at Southport. One way of interpreting the scene picks up on the Author’s discovery in My Uncle Sam that “our true life … is invisible” (195). Our imagination is our true life because although it is invisible, it has the power to transform visible life. In that play the imagination can transform a visible garden or any place—Pittsburgh, for example—into a map of paradise. In Kraken by choosing to live, Melville chose to continue developing his imagination creatively in storytelling in poems and Billy Budd, Sailor, for example. Thus his heightened imagination transforms the scene into what he desires to see: his friends on the beach at Southport. There is another interpretation, however. As a “gift” (58) Death lifts the veil separating the natural world and a parallel world so that Melville can see what he hopes to see: a life beyond the grave. The interpretation is a possibility, not a certainty. Death is a certainty, but it does not eliminate possibilities, best communicated in “The Story of the Wandering Jew” in the novel N Judah. After Jesus rebuked the shoemaker for mocking him, the one-sentence paragraph states, “And on Jesus went to his death, and perhaps his resurrection.”8 Whatever the interpretation, with a nautical ring to her command, Death envelops the novelist and poet for his next journey: “I am the Captain, the Kraken herself, your true love—and now I take you with me at last” (59). It may be a journey to decomposition, or it may be a journey to an ultimate non-naturalistic event. Death has the last word in the epilogue but not in Jenkin’s theatre. Margo Veil, premiering in 2005, shares with Pilgrims of the Night and Kraken a debt to Melville in naming two of its characters Vine and Mortmain, two of the characters in Clarel. Its stage directions, however, form a more

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substantive connection with Pilgrims of the Night in that they specify that the set function on two levels, as a theater and in this case as a broadcasting station. Specifying that the set be a theater is not a late development in Jenkin’s oeuvre. Detective Bucket’s mechanicals track Mesmer to a theater where they replace the performers so that they can address the doctor in the audience, and Gogol stages theatricals for him in the Grail castle. Neither is having the cast of the play being performed function as a cast within a cast new in the playwright’s oeuvre. Various characters take the role of the Narrator in My Uncle Sam, and the cast of Like I Say can double as the characters in the Coconut Joe story, but Pilgrims of the Night was, after Gogol, the most undisguisedly theatrical. Host Poor Tom is a master of ceremonies who at the opening waits for the ferry to leave “so he can begin the play” (105). Introduced, the pilgrims become “performers” who “bow to the audience” (113). Chaucer’s Miller has thirty-eight lines in which to describe Alison. Ray’s description of Darlene, after his description of the plumbing contractor, is confined to a “young wife” at which point the pilgrim playing her enters in “tight dress or lingerie” (115). Ray does not speak again until the tale’s end. He does not have to because the pilgrims who play the four characters enact the tale. But what they say are his words. That is, the audience sees the action as actualizing his tale. All that he has to do is set the stage or establish the situation and the players are his imagination embodied. Once the tale is over, with Ray they become a pool of pilgrims again, available to be called upon to play the various characters in another pilgrim’s tale: speak the words and embody the imagination. The transitions between tales give them the opportunity to change costumes and to essay other roles: the alien beings that in their game-playing they imagine to be on the other side of the river. Margo Veil supplants Pilgrims of the Night as the most theatrical. After the performers enter the broadcasting station, acknowledging “each other and the audience,” the Narrator, a role taken by different cast members, “checks his watch,”9 presumably to ensure that everything is ready, and the play begins, although the opening is more a prologue to the play proper. In the prologue an Odd Man emerges from the fog to threaten a Woman in a scene typical of a horror film before the Narrator signals that the scene is over. Margo Veil is not a horror film, but, like Jenkin’s theatre in general, it is a combination of the naturalistic, for the deformed Odd Man is reminiscent of the deformed Crab Boy in Poor Folk’s Pleasure, and the non-naturalistic. When the Narrator requests a different kind of scene, a girl reads from chapter 1 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with Alice going into the rabbit-hole and skipping lines here and there follows her descent into the dream. Carroll’s whimsical story is not a ground for soaring as are The Canterbury Tales and Melville’s

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Holy Land journal, but it provides an approach to interpreting Margo Veil as the heroine’s dream. The Narrator provides another approach. Taking notes on the reading, he comments, “The fall, fall from grace … into the … no … dark night of the soul…” (3). If the stages of the spiritual life are divided into three, the dark night of the soul is the second stage. If the stages are five, it is the fourth. Whichever division is applied, the self in this stage “is tossed back from its hard-won point of vantage. Impotence, blankness, solitude, are the epithets by which those immersed in this dark fire of purification describe their pains.”10 Yet no matter how painful this stage is—and it approximates the soul’s or spiritual life’s death—it leads to union—to the soul’s or spiritual life’s rebirth: renewed and strengthened. With Margo’s entrance the play proper begins. The Narrator’s description of her state puts her in the dark night stage: “The city that only a few short months ago held so much promise—now seems cold, empty, frightening” (3). An aspiring actress, she had come to the city hoping to commence a career, an aspiration that seemed to be on the verge of fulfillment when she landed the lead in A Distant Candelabra, but when the production closed after one night, the hope was blasted. The description of her spiritual state, which is similar to Elmo March’s state as the years distance him from his childhood vision of communion with another world in Pilgrims of the Night, identifies the experience as that of loss. Life begins by holding “promise” only to leave those who aspire to fulfilling it “empty.” Her hope blasted, Margo must return home defeated. Broke, she accepts a job accompanying a coffin by train to a city a hundred miles from her home. In a wonderful metaphor, she must journey with death as her companion to what was originally the “promise.” As everyone familiar with A Moon for the Misbegotten knows, a train ride can be an unrelenting torment. Jenkin, however, is not O’Neill, with Margo Veil taking off on one of the wildest journeys he has created. With scenes dissolving into scenes blurring the distinction between the naturalistic and surrealistic modes and characters morphing into characters blurring the distinction between identities, the journey is a dream sequence. It has the characteristic of a dream in that it moves by association rather than by rational cause and effect. For example, while in her agent’s office learning about the job accompanying the coffin, Margo comments that the statue on his desk that he said his wife bought near the Baltic Sea resembles an “owl” (5). To her surprise on the train, she discovers the statue in her bag, at which point an archeology professor suddenly appears to correct Margo. The statue is not that of an owl but is that of a “Lithuanian demon” (8). In another example the Mortuary Manager remarks that an inmate from a nearby asylum has escaped. He suddenly appears to sit next to Margo as she drives the hearse

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and to dance with her in the dance hall where they stop and where he comes to resemble a “boy she loved in high school” (12) before the scene suddenly ends. For the Narrator, the action is a dream sequence enveloping the heroine whom he calls Margo when he tells her that she is “deep” (9) inside her dream and Sherry when he likens her dream to a “fantastic” one (11). Were the mode completely realistic or naturalistic, a scene involving identity changes could be so interpreted. In the scene into which the dancing scene dissolves, Margo is joined by Arthur Vine, the author of A Distant Candelabra, now touring the United States. They are joined by a man named Roncallon, who intends to kill Vine because he and Vine’s ex-wife, who is now his wife, are living off the playwright’s life insurance. Intervening to save Vine, Margo kills Roncallon, which means that she and the playwright have to change identities to avoid being arrested. To do so, they go to a Tanning Salon and Styling Academy that specializes in “body transfer between consenting parties” (20). Margo becomes Ruta, a blind Lithuanian girl, and Vine becomes Edgar LeStrange, a sophisticated actor. The problem, however, with thinking of the changes as realistic or naturalistic is that the Narrator calls the heroine Margo and Sherry before she and Vine go to the transfer center, Roncallon is puzzled why his wife calls him Herbert when Milo is his name, and Vine introduces Margo as Vivian Clay at the center. Yet identity changes can be naturalistic. Though not itself naturalistic, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater is predicated on multiple impulses within a person vying for recognition and selection for development. Paul C. Castagno examines Jenkin’s theatre and those of other contemporary playwrights as dialogic, as opposed to monologic, consisting of multiple voices, as opposed to a single voice, and the multiple voices can be within the same character. In other words, these theatres dramatize the reality that a person is a multiple rather than a unitary self, a changing rather than a static self. In his seminal study, Robert Jay Lifton analyzes the postmodern protean self. It is “sequential”; a person changes as he/she has different involvements in life. It is “simultaneous”; a person can hold multiple, even antithetical, images and ideas at any one time. It is “social”; a person presents himself/herself in different ways in different environments.11 A body transfer center, or translation parlor, is Jenkin’s amusing image, but the simple truth is that Margo plays different roles as she journeys from promise to death. The dramatizing of the protean self in the dialogic play does not nullify the dream sequence. Margo Veil can be both oneiric and dialogic. It can be theatrical too. The scene at the dance hall dissolves into a scene in which the playwright Vine appears to commend Margo for her performance in his play, but he does not mean the New York production of A Distant Candelabra that failed. He means the touring production, a fact supported by Roncallon

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having seen the production in different cities. Vine’s introduction of Margo as Vivian Clay therefore might be her name in A Distant Candelabra. Thus Margo Veil contains scenes from a play within a play without nullifying either the naturalistic or the non-naturalistic modes, both of which the prologue prepares for. On a foggy night, the Woman tells the Odd Man that she lives “right on Lomas, near sixteenth” (1), an address repeated by a Barmaid to Margo in a later scene (14). The Odd Man also asks the Woman whether she knows where Rudolph Morlock lives; onstage Vine as actor Edgar LeStrange assumes the role of Morlock, the Louisville Poisoner, in a performance so gripping that it draws “wild applause” (24). Margo Veil creates the roles that actors essay on their journey through theatre. Big Betty, the center’s operator, calms Margo’s fear that she will lose her self in the transfer except that she uses the older term “soul” for a person’s spiritual principle: No one will ever find you. If they do, it won’t be you. Just the shell, with someone else looking out of your eyes. (Beat) You’ll have all the skills and memories of your new shell, and somewhere deep inside, you’ll still have yourself. Your soul, if I may use that metaphysical term, is transferred. It’s hard to notice, the soul—but it’s there, like a shadow in your new mind (20).

Charles Ludlam, the founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and an actor himself, expresses a similar idea that acting is “obliterating your own identity to create another one” but adds a warning that if the actor assumes the role for too long a time, he may have obliterated his own “personality on a more or less permanent basis.” That is why he recommends that after a performance the actor “rest” and “reconstruct” his “own true personality, indulge it.”12 Indulging his flair for the ridiculous, Jenkin has LeStrange, who is tired of playing Morlock, hit on the head by a falling piece of statuary. Believing he is Morlock the Louisville Poisoner, he boards a train for Louisville, where he proceeds to poison people as he simulates doing in performance. He does not recover his identity as Arthur Vine who transferred into LeStrange until he is hit on the head again, this time by an owl-like statue. He leaves to reclaim his own personality at the center, but since he exits quoting jumbled speeches by Hamlet, the audience cannot know what his next incarnation will be. Creating the roles actors essay, Margo Veil creates the stories that plays tell in narrative and dramatic forms. A Boyfriend’s narrative told over the telephone about being robbed in Lithuania yields to Mortmain the Magician’s narrated story that flows into the dramatization of a doppelgänger or Jungian shadow story. Falling in love with the blind Ruta, Mortmain marries her, but even as they celebrate the wedding, Cardano, a rival magician who calls

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his show Mortmain’s Realm of Shadows, appears. In a variation on shapeshifting, he has plastic surgery remake his face so that when Ruta touches it, she thinks he is her husband. He flees with her to Louisville, but Mortmain follows forcing a confrontation in which the two men die. Reunited with her grandfather—whether in reality or a dream is unclear—Ruta listens as he recounts family history and utters a line as strange as the story but representative of Jenkin’s theatre. Standing on the ground where Nazis buried massacred Lithuanians, the grandfather tells Ruta to lie down and she will hear the dead because “eternity is long, and they tell stories to pass the time” (42). While they wait in the hope of resurrection into the absolute world? The answer to that question cannot be determined in the transitory world. What can be determined is Jenkin’s growth as an artist in Margo Veil supplanting Pilgrims of the Night as his most theatrical play. In the earlier play, the pilgrims double as actors in the stories being told, stories that are distinguished from the waiting for the ferry to return for the morning run because the action introduces the tellers, who then introduce their stories. In the later play, there are no distinctions; the stories and the action are seamlessly blended together. Mortmain, for example, arrives as LeStrange’s victims are falling to the ground and converses with the woman LeStrange met on the train to Louisville until the Boyfriend phones her from Lithuania to tell his story. Hanging up, she resumes the conversation with the magician, who narrates his story that the entrance of Ruta and her grandfather transforms into a performed story. The closing scenes illustrate the seamlessness. With the grandfather’s exit, Ruta becomes Vivian again, the identity in which Vine introduced Margo in the transfer center, only now she is on a train reversing direction and heading east. Since scenes and images repeat earlier scenes and images, the action reverses as in Careless Love, yet since the action does not reverse in the correct sequence, unlike Careless Love, the play’s narrative or plot is both recursive—into repetition—and linear—into a new beginning. For instance, Vivian views a film version of Margo in her agent’s office where she learned of the job accompanying a coffin—the first stop that should be the last stop in reversal—and then goes to the transfer center to regain her original identity as Margo. The penultimate scene that has Margo falling “ever so slowly” that she has time to observe the moon and stars suggests a repetition of Alice’s fall into a dream that opens the play. Yet her fall through “darkness” that “brightens” (51) suggests that by growing through the various roles that life and the theatre present on the journey, she has passed through the death that is the dark night of the soul to be reunited with her soul renewed and strengthened for the next journey in life and the theatre. Margo Veil picks up on a design in Careless Love. In that play Bobby and Marie have to lose their identities to discover themselves. The design obtains

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in Margo Veil. Thwarted in her career as an actress, Margo has to essay a spectrum of roles—keep reinventing herself—to discover who she really is. So too does the theatre have to keep reinventing itself. Starting from the moribund tradition in Limbo Tales, theatre has to lose its traditional, conventional identity to discover itself. With characters composed of bits and pieces vying with immutable archetypes on static landscapes and in narratives that move by fits and starts linearly and recursively through loops and hairpin turns, Jenkin’s plays are deliriously nontraditional and unconventional. A multitude of diverse grounds for soaring such as epigraphs citing the publisher of Mad magazine William Gaines and Geoffrey Chaucer, the tattoo artist Stoney St. Clair and William Blake, popular songs and biblical allusions, intentionally misquoted authors and reimagined mythological figures not only revives the moribund tradition, it infuses new life into it. A dramaturgy that mixes genres and styles, modes and tones also revitalizes mystery as in a scene in Kraken in which after singing a racy song, the tattooed wife refuses to engage in any discussion about “mysteries” of life and death with Melville, leaving them “to the priests” (26). In the same scene in an obvious counterpart, Sophia sings “as if in church” a song with devout lyrics: for example, “When all my strength is gone / With your love I’ll carry on” (28). A possibility is a belief in a power higher than nature that cares for humankind. In the contemporary world, theatre is an as-if church in that it can be a place for experiencing mystery. At least it keeps open that possibility, and Jenkin’s theatre does so by always presenting whatever is being presented in more than one way of viewing it or hearing it or thinking about it. The removal of the final dropcloth from Schwarzberg’s Dance of Death in Like I Say reveals life’s journey is toward death, yet now that the “plan of the whole can be seen,” the mural is “somehow joyful despite its chilling scenario” (90). One possibility for the joyfulness is the movement of Little Junior and Rose and Isaiah and Helena toward committing themselves to each other. Another possibility is in Helena’s “One world at a time” (99), which suggests that there is another world beyond the transitory one. Life therefore is a journey toward death and the other world. With her “body and soul back together” (50) at play’s end, Margo Veil is poised to repeat her journey interminably, as the Country Doctor must travel his interminable journey, or to begin a new one with an outcome different from the one she took. Scenes are naturalistic—Vivian with an “asshole” student (45)—and non-naturalistic—Vivian encountering the archeology professor who works nights as an elevator operator, calls her Sherry, and invites her to make a wish while touching the nose of an owl-like statue. I think of Jenkin’s theatre as a contemporary, postmodern equivalent to the medieval quest for the Grail. His characters and archetypes search for an

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experience that approximates the experience of an absolute world that gives meaning and purpose to the transitory world, and the experience may be the juxtaposition that becomes merger and interpenetration of naturalistic and non-naturalistic images and scenes. But the questers are not Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, who flees wife and children for “ ‘Life, life, eternal life,’ ”13 for even if they are unsuccessful in discovering any certainty about the future, they discover certainty in the present in the transitory world, the world in which they live, die, and quest. By questing—by exploring the wonder—they stimulate the imagination to create their lives and art. They recover constituents of the moribund tradition that the imagination revitalizes in innovative storytelling that in turn revitalizes the tradition and the theatre. Enjoying life’s pleasure, they discover love that expresses their hearts. Since these explorations, recoveries, and discoveries celebrate the triumph of life over death, they stimulate a renewed quest for the Grailequivalent experience, renewing the hope that ultimately life will triumph over death. In the search for love and meaning, Jenkin’s theatre truly is a theatre of wonder and heart. NOTES 1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, ed. Claude M. Simpson (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1974) 448. Vol. 8 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 2. Len Jenkin, Kraken (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2008) 8. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New York: Russell, 1962) 432. 4. Ibid. 5. Herman Melville, Journals, ed. Howard C. Horsford with Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern UP; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1989) 68, 79–82. Vol. 15 of The Writings of Herman Melville. 6. Wayne Johnson, “‘Pilgrims’ Exudes Character,” Seattle Times 12 July 1990: D6. 7. Thomas Nashe, “The Song” from Summer’s Last Will and Testament, in Selected Writings, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965) 129–31. 8. Len Jenkin, N Judah (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006) 105. 9. Len Jenkin, Margo Veil (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2008) 1. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically. 10. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness 12th ed. rev. (London: Methuen, 1957) 381. 11. Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic, 1993) 8.

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12. Charles Ludlam, Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly, ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992) 21–22. 13. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (London: Penguin, 1987) 13.

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Index

Character names are in SMALL CAPS. Aeneas, 60 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 129 alternative perspective of REPORTER, 15 America (Blake), 53 “American Dance of Death,” 99, 134 American Dream, 30 The American Notebooks (Hawthorne), 123 American Notes (Jenkin), 52–65; mixture of naturalism/non-naturalism, 55; stage set places, 54; three approaches, 52 Angel City (Shepard), 32 animal magnetism, 4, 6 archetype of MAN, 23 Aronson, Arnold, 77, 80, 81–82 artist and irrationality, 5–6 avant-garde theatre, 80–82, 85–87 Axis Company, 125 Barber, Richard, 28 Based on the Story by Franz Kafka, 106 Berle, Milton, 33 Bezanson, Walter E., 111, 118 Bleak House (Dickens), 23, 63, 67 Bloom, Harold, 98

“B movies,” 25 BOATMAN, symbolism of, 46–49 boat/ship from the other world, 46–47 body/soul, union of, 83 “bookended construction,” 81 Book of Job, 123 boundaries: absolute, 75; descent from upper, 78; lower/upper, 75, 77 Broadway Play Publishing, 1–2, 48 Campbell, Joseph, 24 The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 107– 11, 116 CAPABILITY BROWN, 34–35, 38–40 Careless Love (Jenkin), 75–87; narrative is core drama, 77; as theatrical experiment, 85 Castagno, Paul C., 1, 131 characters: fragmented, 32, 42; types of, 43; unitary, 32 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 107–11, 116 Christian Video Players, 78, 82, 83 cinematic style of scenes in Poor Folk’s Pleasure, 45 Clarel (Melville), 110–12, 115 Coconut Joe story, 100–105 Cohen, Hennig, 3 137

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138

Index

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 22, 23 “Come Go with Me,” 74 Commedia (Dante), 43 concurrent tracks, 12 The Confidence Man (Melville), 2–4, 11–12, 33 connections between the tales, 106, 112–14 consciousness, artist of, 10 contrasts: of characters, 12; of language, 12 core drama, 77, 78 A Country Doctor (Jenkin), 89–98, 106; author’s note to, 98; closing speeches in, 95–97; prefatory note to, 98; problem with text of play, 89–90 “A Country Doctor” (Kafka), 89–97; several versions of story, 90–91 couples: in American Notes, 58; in Careless Love, 76–77; in Five of Us, 74 creativity, spiritual gift of, 80 crime, organized, 14–15 Dance of Death in Like I Say, 99, 134 Dante, 40–41, 43 dark night of the soul, 130, 133 Dark Ride (Jenkin): as beginning of quest, 24; quest in, 127; as second of trilogy, 24; stage set, 25; as surrealistic play, 50; synopsis, 24–28 death, 61–62; fatalistic view of, 127; in life, 120; life as journey toward, 134; life in, 74; messenger of, 71; as naturalistic, 57; and resurrection, 8, 11, 119–20, 128; as ultimate event, 105, 124, 127; as ultimate reality, 61; VOLES as figures of, 104 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 30 Death personified, 124, 127 “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (Poe), 79 descent to the underworld, 111 detective fiction, 35, 39; to tell story, 33 deteriorationism, 38

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Dickinson, Emily, 61–62 disappearing from the world, 41 “disc of snow,” 61 A Distant Candelabra, 130, 131 doctor/quack, MESMER as, 4, 9 The Dolliver Romance (Hawthorne), 126 “The Domain of Arnheim” (Poe), 65 drama, activation of, 100 dramaturgical mixture in Jenkin’s theatre, 81, 134 dreams: bringer of, 71, 74; disorder of, 27 dream sequences, 130–31; in Careless Love, 78; in Kid Twist, 13–14 dream visions, 85 Duchamp, Marcel, 86 “Easter,” 112 “Eden for Everyone,” 113, 119 Eden/paradise, 114, 119 “Ein Landarzt,” 89, 94 Eliot, T. S., 23 Elixir of Life (Hawthorne), 126 end-of-the-world play, 106 The English Notebooks (Hawthorne), 123, 125 Eno, Will, 32 epigraphs in New Jerusalem, 67 Ericson, Jon, 27–28 Esslin, Martin, 114–15 eternal life, question of, 124, 126 “Experimental Drama at the End of the Century” (Gussow), 1 faith, loss of, 114–15, 118, 127 father-son relationship, 93 Feffer, Steve, 30, 41 Feingold, Michael, 81 femme fatale, in detective fiction, 35 ferry terminal, 106; as theatre, 107 fireball: creates opportunities, 116; effects of, 106 Five of Us (Jenkin), 70–74; as mythological, 70

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Index

fluidity of images/scenes, 24 The Flu Season (Eno), 32 Fordyce, Ehren, 1 Foreman, Richard, 82, 131 fortunate fall, 84 fragments, collection of, 25 framework scenes: in Careless Love, 75, 85; in Poor Folk’s Pleasure, 46, 47 fusion: of unitary self/fractured self, 14; of verbal/visual images, 16 Gaines, William, 33 garden interludes, 30, 34, 37–38, 40 garden paradise, 119 gender roles in Kafka’s fiction, 89, 97–98 Gerontion, 23 “The Gift of the Magi” (Henry), 77 God of creation, 40 “God’s mysteries,” 109, 119 Gogol, Nikolai, 3 Gogol (Jenkin), 2–12; prologue, 12–13; reimagining Parzival, 28; synopsis, 3–5; synopsis, part 2, 7 Grail/Gral quest, 7, 134; symbolism of, 10, 28, 46, 68–69 ground, lack of, 5, 100 ground for soaring, 26, 43, 52, 89, 94, 124, 127, 134; specifically American, 52–53 ground/roots analogy, 10–11 growth-of-the-artist theme, 64, 65, 105, 120, 127, 133 Gussow, Mel, 1, 55–56, 57, 63 Half Moon Hotel, 13 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, and Melville, 123–28 head coverings as similarities, 113–14 Headlong Hall (Peacock), 34, 38 heart: absence of in Dark Ride, 44; defined by Jenkin, 11; lack of, 29; pleasure of the, 120, 121; as possibility of love, 48; required to recognize violence, 17; revealed in “Hotel,” 21; theatre of, 6

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139

heart, but no wonder, in Dark Ride, 48 Henry, O., 77 “Here in the Castle” theatrical, 7–8 HERMAN, three roles of, 73–74 HERMAN/Hermes parallels, 70–71 Hermes, story of, 70–71, 73–74 hero: AUTHOR as, 43; myth of the, 35–36, 39 “Highway,” 19–20, 42 Hindenberg, 14–15, 77 historical grounds for Jenkin’s imagination, 14–15 Homeric Hymn (Hesiod), 73–74 “Hotel,” 20–23, 42; stage set of, 21 Hotel Splendide, 106 “House” implies theatre, 5 “I am My Uncle Sam,” 42, 44 identity: changes of, 131; to gain, 42; loss of, 79; transfer of, 81 illness of theatre: shown in GOGOL as artist, 5–11; shown in MESMER as scientist, 5–11 imagery, light, 24 images: appearing and disappearing, 24, 26–27; to revive dying theatre, 2; verbal/visual, 13–14 imagination: as curative power, 10, 43; death of, 104; lack of, 9; power of, 41, 69–70, 104; questing stimulates, 42; use of, 73, 74 “I’m Late, I’m Late,” 77 immortality, 61–62, 126 inflating/deflating technique, 14 inheritance, quest for, 32 “Intermezzo,” 20, 42 In Token of My Admiration, 125 “it,” how it ends, 26–28 Jenkin, Len: about American Notes, 52; about trilogy, 24; author’s note to Pilgrim’s of the Night, 109; dramaturgical principles, 23; first play, 23; as master of visual image, 101;

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Index

in prefatory note to Like I Say, 101; study of, 1–2; on three plays, 89 Jenkin’s theatre: dichotomy in, 127; as dramaturgical mixture, 81, 134; neither programmatic nor predictable, 75; in published form, 1–2; salient features of, 2; sources/ allusions in his theatre, 3; surrealistic plays, 50; as theatre of wonder and heart, 135 Jerusalem, 110 Jesus, 8 Jewishness, Gentile view of, 97–98 Jezebel, story of, 78, 84 Jonah, story of, 24, 124–25 Joppa/Jaffa, 123–24 journeys, 89–90; with death, 130; different ways of, 95; to the Holy Land, 126; never-ending, 89; night sea, 24, 63, 125; to the underworld, 60 “The Judgment” (Kafka), 93 Kafka, Franz, 89–90, 93 KAFKA’s doubles, 95; PATIENT and DOCTOR as, 94 Kamoro cult, 68 keph extract, 67–69 KID TWIST, based on Abe Reles, 12 Kid Twist (Jenkin): afterword of, 2; dream sequences, 13–15; prologue of, 12–13 Kitty Hawk (Jenkin), 23 Kraken, sea monster, 125 Kraken (Jenkin), 123–28 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 22, 23 Laemmle, Carl, 25 LAMMLE, MRS. CARL, and connections, 25–26; storytelling of, 27 landscape garden: in Arnheim, 65–66; design controversy, 34–35, 38; in New Jerusalem, 65–66 language: as basis for playwriting, 1; contrasts in, 12

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language-based theatre, 1–2 “Let’s Get Physical,” 76 life: can begin anew, 105; in death, 120; defeats death, 84; going around again, 28, 44, 49; as journey toward death, 134 “Life is But a Dream,” 45, 48 Lifton, Robert Jay, 131 Like I Say (Jenkin), 98–106 Limbo Tales (Jenkin): experimental set of, 23; as first of trilogy, 24, 42; non-naturalistic set of, 20; synopsis, 19–23; unites three modes of theatre, 23 literary allusions, 22 LITTLE PERSON/DARLENE, 35–36, 39, 40 Loman, Willy, 30 loss, identification of, 114, 119, 130 love: death of, 104; is a mystery, 120; as motivation for quest, 31, 43; power of, 41, 63, 69–70, 104; without caring, 75 love stories, in Pilgrims of the Night, 109 Ludlam, Charles, 132 magic lantern slides, 33 Mamet, David, 100 MAN WITH SHAKING HANDS, 46, 47, 48 map of paradise, 40, 49, 69, 128 Margo Veil (Jenkin), 128–34; connection with Pilgrims of the Night, 129; as most theatrical, 129, 133; stage set of, 129 meaning in life, quest for, 69, 79, 80, 83, 118 meaningless of life, 114 mechanisms in garden, 38–39 Melville, Herman, 2–3, 4, 11–12, 107; and Hawthorne, 123–28 mercy: death of, 104; power of, 104 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 4, 6 MESMER-GOGOL: interaction between, 4–5; opposition of, 6; united as whole person, 10–11

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Index

messenger: to Hades, 71 The Miller’s Tale (Chaucer), 107–9 “modern equivalents” as reimagining, 25 monologue: of AUTHOR, 30; of DRIVER, 19–20; in Five of Us, 70; of GOGOL, 3; of ISAIAH, 104–5; of JACKY, 75; juxtaposition in Gogol, 12; of MASTER OF CEREMONIES, 20; of MAYOR, 53 A Moon for the Misbegotten (O’Neill), 130 Morrison, Herbert, 77 Mother Shipton, 115 Mount Purgatory garden, 40–41, 119 movies: allusion to, 25–26; fantasyhorror, 25 MR. MILESTONE, 34 Murder, Inc., 12 mystery: about UNCLE SAM, 30; of illness and cure, 8, 10; loss of, 118, 120 mystery plays, 8 My Uncle Sam (Jenkin), 29–44; fourth quest in, 37; order of scenes, 29, 32; prefatory note to, 33; review in New York Times, 29–30; songs in, 31, 41; synopsis, 29–44; as third of trilogy, 24, 29, 42; wonder and heart in, 40 narrative: as core drama in Careless Love, 78–79; and landscape, 80–84 Nashe, Thomas, 127 naturalism, 11; MAYOR as spokesman for, 56; in theatre, 6 naturalistic drama, 14, 87 naturalistic/non-naturalistic mixture, 44; in American Notes, 53 naturalness in garden design, 38 “New Jerusalem,” 111 New Jerusalem (Jenkin), 65–70; grounded in fantastic, 68; image of city, 66; names in, 67; plot synopsis, 67–68; source of title, 65 New Playwriting Strategies (Castagno), 1

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141

N Judah (Jenkin), 98, 128 non-naturalistic order in naturalistic order, 55–57, 65, 75, 120 “Nooze or Mirra” chant, 100 OLD SAM/YOUNG SAM: interaction of characters, 29–31, 42; quests joined, 37 O’Neill, Eugene, 130 “On These Three Plays of Mine” (Jenkin), 89, 106 On the Verge (Overmyer), 117 Ontological-Hysteric Theater, 131 Our Town (Wilder), 54, 62 Overmyer, Eric, 117 paradise: in Arnheim, 65–66; as BOTTLER’s hotel, 36; brother’s garden, 40; first, 38; second, 38; third, 39–40 paradise/Eden, 114, 119 “paradise for all seasons,” 38 parallel universes, 12–13; ancient Mayan and the present, 19–20; as concurrent tracks, 16; divergence of, 15–16; of HERMAN/Hermes, 72; intersection of, 73; of KID and REPORTER, 15; of SARGE, 13, 16; of underworld and spectators, 13, 16 parallel which is contrast, 73 The Parson’s Tale (Chaucer), 110, 111 Parzival story, 3, 7–10, 28–29 Peacock, Thomas Love, 34–35, 38 perfectibilianism, 38 personal power as motivation, 36 philosophy for answer, 27–28 Pierre, or the Ambiguities (Melville), 124, 126, 127 Piers Plowman (Langland), 85 Pilate, Pontius, 8 pilgrimages, 106–21 Pilgrims of the Night (Jenkin), 106–21; as end-of-the-world play, 106; multiple tales in, 112; review of, 127 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 85

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Index

play: new type for new images, 2; within a play, 132 “Playwrights Who Put Words at Center Stage” (Gussow), 1 pleasure of this world, 126 Poe, Edgar Allan, 65, 79 poetry in Careless Love, 76–79 polymorphism, 26–27 Polyphemus story, 102 Poor Folk’s Pleasure (Jenkin), 44–50; cinematic style of scenes, 45; final scene, 47; order of 28 scenes, 44–48; pleasure in, 127; review of, 49; as surrealistic play, 50; two scenes as framework, 44–48 powers, three (mercy, love, imagination), 104 prologue: of Margo Veil, 129–30; by POOR TOM, 107 publishers of plays, 1–2 puppet show and narrative, 99–101, 104 Queste del Saint Graal (Map), 46 question, importance of asking, 7–8 quest/questing, 24, 49, 135; of AUTHOR, 29; changing, 37, 54, 69; end of the, 28; excitement of, 74; for identity, 37, 43; of JAKE, 31; for keph, 67–69; LILA’s instructions for, 31; for love and meaning, 79, 80, 83; for meaning in life, 69, 118; for missing brother, 29–30; motives for, 42, 116; in My Uncle Sam, 29, 32; as sacred, 39–40; for self-identity, 59; for sexual satisfaction, 75, 76; storytelling as form of, 105 RAY’s Tale, 107–9, 119 reality, visible or invisible, 39–40 Reles, Abe, 12 religious drama, medieval, 8 resurrection, 8, 11, 119–20, 128 Ridiculous Theatrical Company, 132 river/s: crossing, 67; for travel, 53 “road to nowhere,” 106

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Robinson, F. N., 109 Roger of Wendover, 89 roots/ground analogy, 10–11 sacrifice, 8; by GOGOL, 10 salesman: traveling, 30; of snake oil, 33 “salon,” definition of, 6 Savior, self-sacrifice of, 8, 9–10 scene-by-scene reversal in Careless Love, 75 scenes: order in My Uncle Sam, 32; order of, 54; transitions of, 54 scientist and rationality, 5–6 search: for love and meaning, 79, 80, 83, 84, 105, 120, 135; for meaning, 116. See also quest/questing self: disintegration of, 79; multiple, 131; postmodern protean, 131 self, divided: doctor or man, 91; of KAFKA, 96; personal/professional, 94; private need/public expectation, 92–93, 95; social/solitary of KAFKA, 98; unitary/fractured, 14, 131; of WEDDING GUEST, 97 separation from the world, 31, 98–99. See also stepping back set as a theater, 129 “shadow people,” 58, 60 Shepard, Sam, 32 soaring, ground for, 26, 43, 52–53, 89, 94, 124, 127, 134 Soho Rep production, 20 “Some Notes on Theatre” (Jenkin), 2, 11 songs: in Careless Love, 76, 77; in Five of Us, 72, 74; in Kraken, 127; in Like I Say, 100; in My Uncle Sam, 31, 41; in Poor Folk’s Pleasure, 45–46, 48, 100 soul (spiritual principle), 132 sources for this book, 1–2 Spann, Meno, 94–95 spiritual principle (soul), 132 “Stay,” 72 Stein, Gertrude, 80–81, 87, 92

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Index

Stelbesil B wonder drug, 66–67, 68 stepping aside/back, 30-31, 40, 62 “The Story of the Wandering Jew” in N Judah, 128 storytelling, 36, 63–65, 77, 87, 89, 98, 100, 118, 120, 121, 128, 135; of AUTHOR, 37; as form of questing, 105; power of, 105 study, approach of, 6 subsurface/invisible reality, 39–40 suffering, 123 summational image, 42, 128 Sun & Moon Press, 2 surface/visible reality, 39–40 talk, as Jenkin’s third approach, 63 tapestry, 63–64 technique of creation/subversion, 14 “Testimony” prologue, 12 theatre: avant-garde, 80–82, 85–87; as central subject, 5; connection of two types of, 10; illness in the, 5–6; images to revive, 2; MESMER’s salon as, 6; mixture to revive, 23; naturalistic, 6 theatre, American, in dying state, 11, 23 theatricals, 9 themes as strands between tales, 114 Thérèse Raquin (Zola), 6 time and eternity, 123, 126 Time Watcher, Mayan, 19 towns, American, 53–54 tradition as moribund, 22, 23 unconscious, artist of, 10 union of body/soul, 83 “useless learning,” 82

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143

vaudeville, tools of, 5 Vaughan, Henry, 79, 82 violence of ordinary men, 13 Walkerspace production, 126 wandering in the other world, 93 Wandering Jew, 89, 98, 128 Warren, Robert Penn, 112 The Waste Land (Eliot), 22, 23, 112 weave of stories/tales, 27, 63–64 Webster, John, 2, 3 The White Devil (Webster), 2–3 Wilder, Thornton, 54 withdrawal from life, 40. See also stepping aside Wolfram von Eschenbach, 3, 7 wonder: created by fusion of verbal/ visual images, 16–17; created in Dark Ride, 26; created in “Highway,” 20; created in “Hotel,” 20; in Gogol prologue, 12–13; in Kid Twist prologue, 12–13; of life’s quest, 121; mixture that creates, 42; non-naturalistic, 29; of the quest, 120; sense of, 2; theatre of, 6 wonder and heart: in American Notes, 61, 63; in Careless Love, 85 wonder without heart, 28; in Poor Folk’s Pleasure, 48 world, transitory, 48 “The World” (Vaughan), 79, 82 YOUNG SAM/OLD SAM: interaction of, 30–31, 42; quests joined, 37 Zola, Émile, 6

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