Experiments in Theater
Susan Sontag’s work in the theater began as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where she met Mike Nichols, who would become a renowned theater and film director, and where she worked on theater productions. She includes her Partisan Review theater pieces in Against Interpretation as well as discussions of avant-garde directors and playwrights. She soon abandoned work as a theater reviewer because so much of what was presented on the American stage displeased her. The tradition of the well-made play and of dramatic realism, in which characters were presented in scenes that were meant to faithfully represent life outside the theater, seemed jejune to her. Even plays that probed human psychology seemed, to her, to avoid the implications of drama that theoreticians and practitioners such as Brecht and Artaud explored.
In 1979, when Sontag directed a play for the first time, she chose Luigi Pirandello’s As You Desire Me, which purposely played with the very notion that biography or history could define the nature of the main character, Cia. Similarly, Sontag’s direction of Milan Kundera’s adaptation of a Diderot play, Jacques and His Master, dislocated a linear plot. The two principal characters are on a journey trisected by the love stories of Jacques, of his master, and of Madame de La Pommeraye. Each story is a variation on the others. The stories interrupt each other, repeat each other, and complete each other, anticipating Sontag’s direction of three sets of Vladimirs and Estragons in her 1993 production of Waiting for Godot.
Realism in such stagings was displaced by stylized, intellectualized theater, aimed at undermining bourgeois society’s confidence in itself and its ability to interpret human character. Sontag could not abide the philistine confidence of Westerners, especially Americans, whose complacent beliefs form a seemingly impregnable fortress of self-justification. Hence a Susan Sontag production would entail considerable confusion about her characters’ identities (Who is the master? Who is the slave?), as if their stories do not really belong to them but are part of the playwright-director’s conception of a stage platform that interrogates the very meaning of human character. Thus Sontag was drawn to such writers as Brecht and Artaud, who challenged theater conventions in what Brecht called the “alienation effect,” which does not allow the audience to identify with a play’s characters. On the contrary, the play itself, the effort of art to express itself, becomes the paramount subject matter.
Sontag began writing for the stage in 1991 with A Parsifal, although this play, only six pages long, was not originally intended for production but as a commentary on Wagner’s Parsifal. This brief tour de force turns the Christian hero on his head, so to speak, since he becomes, as Julia A. Walker notes, “antihero … incapable of being moved to sympathy.” Whereas Wagner’s opera is a story of redemption, Sontag’s absurdist protagonist is so lacking in admirable traits that he affronts the audience’s sensibilities. It is not a hero who must act to save the world but the audience, Walker suggests.1
Sontag signaled her disenchantment early in a “Going to Theater” article published in the winter 1964 issue of the Partisan Review, where she criticized a production of Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, suggesting that the director had encouraged the audience to behave as voyeurs wishing to “see a deformed person without being seen back.” Like Brecht, she wanted to create a theater that put its audience on the spot, so to speak, and make it uncomfortable. In sum, she sought to destroy the viewer’s sense of privilege, of just looking on, as though observing a spectacle. She demanded that the audience become part of what is staged.
Instead of questing for the Holy Grail like a Christian hero, Parsifal appears in a press conference clutching a glowing red microphone. He broadcasts, in other words, only his own fame, although what is implicit in his success, Walker argues, is a condemnation of our own complicity in a world that values fame, not spiritual transformation. Parsifal goes to his execution having saved no one—not even himself. And so A Parsifal concludes with the protagonist’s contradictory last words and actions, which also call attention to the very artifice of the play itself: “This is a play, this is a death, this is slowness. If we slow down enough we will never die. (Reaches top of scaffold.) If we move, we move into the future. We will die. (Remains motionless. Lights up.) We will not die.”2 Like the characters in Godot, he knows what needs to be done, but he cannot exert himself.
Such gnomic, self-reflexive drama defeats the normal expectations of audiences. Thus it is not surprising that reviewers split over how to react to Sontag’s subversive plays. One critic saw A Parsifal as a product of Sontag’s camp sensibility, treating the serious Wagnerian opera in an almost frivolous fashion, and yet with a serious intent, with Parsifal appearing as “the leader, an all-too-recognizable politician corrupted by experience, wooed by power, and lulled into meaningless sexual activity.”3 Another critic dismissed the play as appealing only to “Susan Sontag completists,” noting that “Ms. Sontag’s clueless young Parsifal, confessing his general ignorance early on, says: ‘I’m not good at talking. Perhaps I am retarded.’ Try wedding that to transporting music, Dick!”4
The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (An Interlude), published in the New Yorker (March 4, 1991) and reprinted in Where the Stress Falls, is, like A Parsifal, a satire—this time taking up a story as old as Ovid and one that has been retold many times, including the interlude in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sontag’s brief play begins with the disappearance of the wall that had separated the two lovers. Without the wall they seem unsure of themselves, as if without an obstacle, without a barrier obstructing their love, they do not know how to regard their relationship. The wall seemed to have presented, like the Berlin wall separating East and West Germany, a way of defining limits—a set of conditions that proscribe behavior. The lovers are free now to meet, to indulge in a consumer society. Behind the wall, each lover had a clearly demarcated identity, but now they are merely part of an undifferentiated mass. Enter the Spirit of New York, predicting the coming capitalist economy and its disparate elements, a cultural mismatch of real estate developers and trendy restaurants, independent films, and “your rude mechanicals” (an allusion to the ludicrous performance of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The lovers now are fixated on getting rich. They proclaim themselves free, but free for what? The rapid changes in their lives confuse them. What does freedom mean, what does their love mean, in a world where “everything is for sale” (290).
Alice in Bed (1991), a play about Alice James, sister of psychologist William James and novelist Henry James, is more grounded in history and biography than Sontag’s earlier work for the stage. Alice is an invalid dying from breast cancer. Although she is in no position to exert authority over anyone, she has a compelling presence even when she is attended by a nurse and carrying on badinage with her brother Henry. Organized in eight separate scenes, Alice is juxtaposed against her importunate nurse, her aloof father, whom she almost brains with a brick but also consults as to whether she should commit suicide. She seeks but also thwarts Henry’s attentions, debates the merits of her secluded life with Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller, the former another recluse, the latter a worldly woman who perished in the waters off the New England coast. Alice also engages in a dialogue with a male burglar, a Cockney, who seems flummoxed by her lack of fear and willingness to part with even her most treasured possessions. In short, Alice has a vivid imagination and strength of mind that is equal to all the other characters in the play, and yet she refuses to get up and engage directly with the world. Hers is the triumph of the imagination, but as Sontag points out in a note to the play, the triumph of the imagination is not enough.
Even though the play is anchored in the life of Alice James, Sontag has freely invented the words she gives to her characters. If she is making a point about how women have been secluded and diminished, her Alice is no simple victim since she is counseled to act by no less than Margaret Fuller (author of America’s first great feminist text) and Emily Dickinson (arguably the country’s greatest poet). In the genteel setting of a tea party, Alice acts out her conflicted idea of her own femininity, which is also indissolubly connected to her close relationship with her brother Harry (Henry James). And to make the drama more phantasmagorical, Wagner’s Kundry and Myrtha (from Giselle) make their operatic appearances and articulate through their very presence Alice’s options: rebellion or passive acquiescence to her lot. This is also, of course, the tea party world of Alice in Wonderland, with the wonderland in this case being the inside of Alice James’s imagination.
That Alice James is sovereign in this play is indicated by Alice’s saying, “Emily was saying she found it intimidating to be alone with me. Don’t you hate it, when someone says that to you” (41). The line refers, of course, to Sontag herself, who often expressed her frustration with those who said they were daunted by her presence. Like Sontag, Alice feels “ambushed. Either you take it as a compliment, and then you’re straddling your flatterer whether you want to or not. Or you start reassuring, groveling really, to put the other at ease” (41). Unlike Sontag, Alice cannot get up from her bed and travel. She is, like Parsifal, defined by her stasis. Alice finds no way out of her self-imposed isolation, but the play, so Walker argues, urges the audience, as in A Parsifal, to take responsibility for acting on its own behalf. No hero, or in this case heroine, can displace or enact the actions of others.5
Alice in Bed treats her invalidism not only as a feminist issue but also as one of the central problems of humanity. What are individuals supposed to do when they get out of bed? Take the world by storm, as Margaret Fuller did? Or should they stay at home, creating a world just as adventurous through the medium of language, as Emily Dickinson did? Sontag seems to ponder everything: what it means to be a woman in the distinguished James family, the nature of language (“tenses are strangely potent aren’t they” [26]), the patterns of history, class structure (Alice has a talk with a Cockney burglar), and the paradox of Alice herself, who does not get out of bed and yet says, “My mind makes me feel strong” (97). As with A Parsifal, the characters’ commentary on their own ideas has drawn ambivalent responses from critics who deem the play more essay than drama, sketchy and superficial.6
In 1993 Sontag was invited to stage a play in besieged Sarajevo. She chose to direct Waiting for Godot, reasoning that what theatergoers wanted most was not light entertainment that relieved them of their suffering but, on the contrary, a serious drama that articulated their frustration and despair, as they hoped and doubted that the international community, especially the United States, would intervene and stop the war. She decided to perform only the first act of the two-act play and later rationalized her decision, saying that the second act was even bleaker than the first and that she wanted to preserve at least some of the expectation that, in fact, the dire situation in Sarajevo was not beyond salvation. And more than ninety minutes, the time it took to perform the first act, would be beyond the audience’s endurance in a theater lit only by candlelight, with both the cast and the audience straining to remain alert after entire days taken up just with procuring water and the other necessities of life.
That Sontag took liberties with Samuel Beckett’s text seems not to have troubled her—not even when she tripled the couple, Vladimir and Estragon, so that on stage three pairs of characters were seen: two men at the center, two women on the right, and a man and a woman on the left—“three variations on the theme of the couple” (Where the Stress Falls, 304). In an essay about her production, Sontag does not say in so many words what that theme is. But it seems to reflect her wish to show women and men confronting the terrible conditions of their existence with varying degrees of optimism and pessimism and forming couples, or alliances, so to speak, to deal with their common fate.
Sontag’s sense of inclusiveness may have been just what her audience craved. David Toole called the production a “collective enterprise,” so that Vladimir and Estragon no longer seemed so isolated, which is to say that the play no longer seemed quite so bleak. Another critic, Erika Munk, thought Sontag had made the play too relevant to its environment. She thought the moment at the end the play when the candles were extinguished was too calculated. “I was left dry-eyed,” she concluded.7
Sontag’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea (1999) has rarely been produced. Julia Walker calls Sontag’s last play a “female captivity narrative,” in which Sontag has her heroine return to her husband, Hartwig, even as Ellida casts doubts on what her return means: “So now that I am free to choose I can even choose you.” He agrees, but then she adds: “But will I still be free, Hartwig, if I choose you?” Now his answer is ambiguous: “There are no certainties in freedom.”8 These dramas of irresolution seem to be Sontag’s commentary not only on the contrivances of conventional drama—even in the work of a great realist such as Ibsen—but also statements about the precarious autonomy of the individual, a drama that she would enact repeatedly in her diaries.