Life as we know it has ended, and yet no one is able to
grasp what has taken its place.... Slowly and steadily,
the city seems to be consuming itself.
--Paul Auster, In the Country of Last
Things
British playwright Martin Crimp chose Auster's quote
as one of the ruling epigraphs for his play, The Treatment,
which dares to cross the threshold from the past's verities
to the present's cultural vacuum. Crimp places his play
within the ever-changing tent show of America, where narcissism
and lubriciousness are at center stage while the promise
of "making it" fuels the optimistic misery of American
life in the bleachers. But unlike Charles Dickens and
Frances Trollope, Crimp is not interested in pitting British
superiority against dull colonial custom. He's smarter
than that. He sees America for what it is: the future.
The "treatment" of the title is a film project centered
on the life of a young woman, Anne. She has escaped from
a strange relationship with her husband, Simon, and has
come to sell her story to two film producers, Andrew and
Jennifer. Anne suffers from the delusion that her experiences
will have meaning for others, while Andrew and Jennifer
view Anne's life as merely raw material. It's their job
to loot Anne's life, then repackage it for popular consumption,
something Anne eventually rebels against. Crimp's play
is more than an exploration of art vs. life, for the playwright
asks a more disturbing question: In a time when life is
meaningless, can art be otherwise? Wasn't it T.S. Eliot
who said that each age gets the art it deserves? Ours
is freak shows and façades, which Crimp brilliantly
skewers.
Crimp's command of dialogue in The Treatment is
phenomenal, capturing completely the American way of speaking--the
rush of words carrying incomplete thoughts and the confessional
spillage that is both the death of privacy and the demand
to intrude upon others' privacy, all of which are walls
against reality and thought. "Is it possible to use words
without participating in their meaning?" Jennifer asks.
In the land of artifice and diversion, yes. From the web
of their TriBeCa office, Andrew and Jennifer patiently
wait to entangle people like Anne, whose stories they
can suck away, leaving the teller a husk. "We don't often
meet real people here," Andrew confides to Anne. "We ourselves
have no memories or stories...we started out real, but
the realness was burned out of us." After Anne has been
stripped of her facts, Clifford, a failed playwright,
falls prey to the treatment. Andrew thinks Clifford should
meet Anne, and although the two have just left Anne, Jennifer
has no immediate memory of her. "Who's Anne?" she asks.
They'll never know.
While performing deep textual analysis of a play, the
Sowelu Theater company works to create a collective physical
language for the piece. The current production of Crimp's
play shows the company to be at the height of its craft,
shaped by the interpretive intelligence of director Barry
Hunt and his cast.
Lorraine Bahr gives a powerful performance as Jennifer,
a woman who is trying to embrace the idea of being merely
a cog but can never fully murder her soul (the pull of
the street and its realities haunt her). Bahr's Jennifer
dances on a knife edge throughout, rejecting her past
but secretly troubled by the future she's rushing toward.
Bahr succeeds in creating an almost impenetrable façade
for Jennifer, but when one of the character's old friends
disparages the past, Bahr's eyes momentarily flare with
indignation before dying back down to dead coals. It's
beautifully controlled work. Chris Harder's Andrew is
the opposite, a dispassionate machine that gradually gains
some feeling. Kelly Tallent is perfect as the all-too-human
Anne, a waif who is susceptible to the twin blindnesses
that come with love and faith. The rest of the cast--Sean
Skvarka, Frank Woodman, Torrey Cornwell and Michael Williamson--provides
good work, though Woodman dropped half a scene on the
night I saw it, which disrupted Hunt's meticulous pace.
Though the play is episodic, Hunt cleverly choreographs
each scene change, giving the piece a marvelous fluidity.
As we're hell-bent on consuming ourselves into oblivion,
Crimp's play provides a mirror for reflection. A warning.
A needed treatment.
