INTRODUCTION

How to read a play? I’ve done it enough to tell you how I do it. I read with a degree of fatalism. It’s like visiting family. Occasionally, the experience is rewarding, but always, suffering is involved. You’re trapped in somebody else’s house or head, their engine of despair or uplift. Face-to-face with a wise uncle, ignorant nephew or enigmatic aunt, you wonder how you fit in, or if you do. You see yourself in an uncomfortable light. You’re a hapless intruder. If the play is good, at some point you realize you’re in it. Shit. This is MY house.

Buckyballs began bouncing in my head scarcely moments into the production of The Revisionist I saw some weeks back. A character named David, a young man who is utterly unable to be present, gets trapped in a very small space with an old woman named Maria, who is ONLY present. As in all the best stuff, the encounter is rich because each character highlights the other.

David is a product of life in America now, a new kind of Peter Pan who flies because he can’t land. He can’t grow up because he can’t commit to any one life long enough to do so. His entire method of operation consists of running, deflecting and avoiding, by every means possible. In a bold stroke, Jesse Eisenberg not only wrote the play, but played the part. His performance physically demonstrated the emotional truth of this guy; he literally spent a goodly amount of his time onstage finding a way, again in a very small space, of staying off the floor. He was habitually PERCHING on something: a bed, the arm of a chair or couch. When that tactic proved impossible, he resorted to tranquilizing himself with marijuana or liquor.

Meanwhile, his counterpart, Maria, a Polish woman in her seventies, wants the one thing the young man can’t give. She wants company. She wants to get to know him, to be with him, to share food and time with him. Her values are all human.

She’s thrilled because this young fellow is her cousin, and he has elected to visit her. She has been suffering from isolation and longs to connect. Her plight is such because she lost her European family in the Holocaust. David is her American family. But Maria wants family in the European sense, and David can’t begin to fulfill that need.

Now, the institution of family in America has been under assault for a long time, but these days there is an additional malaise. Individuals are now losing their connection to humanness itself. The extraordinary onslaught of virtual communication and social media has allowed us to cultivate something unhealthy in our psyches: the desire NOT to be touched. Not only does David express a lack of care or interest in his own family, his alienation goes well beyond that to a loss of connection with the entire human race. He is a true narcissist. He is utterly alone, trapped in a world empty of people, alone with his vague dreams of fame and fortune. Other people exist for him only as props or impediments on his way forward toward glory and comfort. He is a writer, and tellingly, his first book contained no people, only animals.

Fortunately, David’s humanity has not yet been obliterated. Maria has framed a review he got for his book, and wants him to sign it. He refuses because it is a bad review. But in a private moment, he relents and signs. Compassion, weakened but not extinguished, still occasionally animates his world. This lends the piece hope. David may at last land somewhere and relate to another person in a meaningful way. The future is not yet written in ink.

It’s the oldest story. Two lonely people meet. Will they provide comfort and community for each other, or will they fail? The reason this play needed to be written was not the predicament, but the obstacles standing in the way of a solution. The need is old. The obstacles to intimacy are new.

We are living in sterile times. Physically, the most recent thinking on the biological front is that our immune systems are increasingly being disarmed by insufficient exposure to bacteria. We aren’t being challenged enough to exercise our defenses. To put it another way, we’re losing our talent for building a relationship with the wild world. Emotionally, portable devices are providing a similar insulation from social contact. We are losing the ability to BE with other people.

The Revisionist presents a young man who has lost his way try to negotiate his time with another person, a substantial person, without emotional cost to himself. At last, this woman bares her soul to David in an effort to build a bridge. David, because of his loss of PRESENCE, is unaffected. Her reaction is to throw him out. Good for her. With luck, this will be the prompt that ultimately brings David back to his humanity.

I think whom you will identify with depends on what your problems are. If you are desperately trying to find a way to connect with others, and you are getting text messages back, you will probably be feeling Maria. If you don’t understand why you should just sit with people for significant periods of time in order to get to know them, David’s your guy.

Read the play. You’ll be stimulated.

John Patrick Shanley