A Look at Two Plays, “Cherry Taste” and “Excuse Me, What Time Is It?” Written by Amir Amjad
Jalal Tehrani
We often force ourselves to think about a play; because we think theatre is a thought-provoking phenomenon. Being thought-provoking is not the duty of theatre; but it is a characteristic of a range of it. Recently, a young group, Vida Theatre Workshop, has revived the small and abandoned hall of Mehr Theatre through performances presented in repertory, and for completely well-known reasons, this effort has remained quiet and unknown. For now, these are simple and short experiences, and it is precisely this quality that gives them the scent of freshness, dynamism, and health. So much so that even the natural and probable errors add to the intimacy with the audience and make the new even newer.
It is true to say that more than half a century has passed since the first experiences of the absurd, but this is one of its last experiences, and its ink has not yet dried. Besides, modern theatre still has staunch followers. A large part of the world’s theatre still does not recognize a newer process and regards the developments of the past two or three decades as passive and instinctive choices that, instead of solving the puzzle, have eliminated the question itself.
But the two experiences of this workshop, “Cherry Taste” and “Excuse Me, What Time Is It?”, are two treatments of modern theatre that have affinities and differences with the absurd manner. “Cherry Taste” has approached the absurd through parallel dialogue-writing. Language in this experience is polished and has its actual function, and yet it does not lead to communication either, and the people move forward parallel to one another until the end. The difference between this work and absurd works lies in the kind of catastrophe. The pain of the people in this work is personal and is related to the world around them; but it has a personal identity card and is related to an event in their individual lives. The absurd person suffers from a shared pain and is afflicted by a collective catastrophe. There is a pervasive situation in which everyone is trapped. We may see personal dramatic knots in Ionesco’s works; but these knots belong to a story whose contentual void gradually reveals itself and becomes ridiculous. In Beckett’s works, that same shared pain is the main knot, and unlike Ionesco’s works, it is not played with; rather, it itself affects the play of the people in the play.
In Iran, Shamasi deals with this subject more than others. In his works, too, this shared pain exists; however, it is approached symbolically, and its content flows from the mouths of the people in a symbolic form and within a symbolic situational story. Beckett’s and Ionesco’s people are depicted in a real situation, a reality that the writer sees. Shamasi employs that reality in a symbolic situation, and each of his stage elements, in the innermost function of its dramatic role, represents the various kinds of essences that he has found in reality. Perhaps this kind of symbolism (not to be confused with Symbolism) can be considered an effect of Iranian culture. It can also be put this way: Shamasi’s absurd has been Iranianized.
But the way the events are treated in these two experiences is more real than one could find a symbol in it. Unless we take the entire performance as a fist, a sample of the heap. On the other hand, most absurd works move forward, whereas these two works, particularly “Cherry Taste,” review the past, although each person reviews his own past. One lost his job; the other, his lover.
The plot of “Excuse Me …” has disrupted more affinities with the absurd form: a woman and a man, caught in the grip of everyday routine, have been engaged in repeating moments for 19 years. This plot and its events evoke Pinter’s The Lover; not the nature of its plot and the subject of its events, but the way it has crisis. The crisis both puts the content of the absurd on display and possesses the social plot of the works of, for example, Chekhov. It is good to go back and move a little closer.
In absurd works, identifying the main crisis and perceiving the disconnectedness and lack of identity of the people, and the lack of content which itself is the content, is left to the audience. The actor may play a complete nothing with complete seriousness. Estragon earnestly and strenuously searches inside his hat and his shoe; so much so that he brings the audience along with him in this search in a completely real and serious manner. This seriousness in the performance assures us of the existence of a pebble or an extra object in the shoe and hat, but perhaps he is looking for “Godot”! And this matter is very serious to him. The humor of the absurd emerges from here.
Ionesco’s humor also requires this realistic seriousness: “An aristocratic and also somewhat artistic drawing room, one or several three-seater sofas, several one-seater sofas, one of the sofas green … The walls are covered with paintings on which the words honorary doctorate can be seen … Doctorates, doctorates … The woman is seen in ordinary house clothes.
Probably she has got out of bed … Their friend in neat clothes, holding an umbrella and a hat … Bouffant, stiff and upright, dark jacket, striped trousers and black shoes … . This is the description of Ionesco’s play The Oversight.
Ionesco needs these realistic details for the treatment of a serious situation: they have asked a member of the French Academy to present a new diploma; a secondary-school diploma. He has various doctorates, but for some reason has never obtained the diploma, and now, in order to remedy the deficiency in his file, he has taken the secondary-school examination and failed! Well, this is an absurd situation, but the member of the Academy does not know this. Therefore, there is no distance between him and his role, and he confronts the subject with seriousness. That is, the performance of an absurd work does not distance itself from the judgment of the role, and in this judgment it does not share a position with the audience; perhaps it could be called an introverted performance.
But the experiences of the “Vida Group” have artifices such as functional and abstract scenery, exaggerated and theatrical make-up, workshop clothing, and so on, which tell us that this is a game, a workshop, a theatrical experiment, or an experimental performance. Well, this is an extroverted theatre that wants to involve the audience in the performance, and consequently the performance and the audience together take the role in play, and this creates a distance between the actor and the role. The dialogue of “Cherry Taste” can be given as an example.
The two have a parallel and calculated verbal exchange that at certain points appears to become related, and the play takes place when the two are placed face to face and engage in a serious conversation with each other. It is a real and full-fledged performance that can reveal the humor of this kind of dialogue-writing and can also carry the burden of suspense. Because when confronted with this kind of dialogue, the audience must constantly move back and forth between certainty, conjecture, and doubt in determining whether “these two are speaking to each other or not.” But here, the artifices that result from the workshop’s choices make the matter clear. They seat the two actors parallel to each other to deliver the parallel dialogue and make it clear in advance that the two have nothing to do with each other. This kind of artifice removes the dramatic weight of this kind of dialogue and brings the performance closer to a reading-through. A reading-through can also be theatrical, but the dialogue in a reading-through is not parallel. It is continuous and sequential and moves forward a single story.
This is a noteworthy event, an important experience for a workshop. Two choices with different dramatic charges, both of which have been treated equally well and acceptably, neutralize each other’s dramatic weight; isn’t that interesting? A theatre full of creativity, taste, and thought reaches a zero point in terms of the emotions of the performance because of the confrontation between two dramatic vectors!
This same event can also be examined and considered from another perspective; that is, what brings most absurd performances here closer to the zero point is the performance’s over-intellectualization. This over-intellectualization, which imposes itself on most of the performance, occurs because of an approach based on the thought and logic of history, that is, understanding the role through analysis, and it should. But our distance from that shared pain causes us to play part of our analysis as well! A Western character is a possessor who has been possessed. In the process of modernity, he is a master who has become a subject, terrified by this process. He lives this kind of terror and does not need to analyze it in order to feel it; although, in order to understand it, he also turns to analysis. To put it better, a Western character is a modern human being, and in order to see modernity, it is enough for him to look at himself. What does he see in the mirror? The actor who has lost the role. He lives this loss of the role and exaggerates it on stage. In his relation to the absurd as well, sensory, internal, instinctive, and emotional vectors come first, and then it is the turn of thought and reason. But in order to understand and comprehend that process, we inevitably begin with thought and analysis and then put the emotions of the performance at the service of that thought by making use of codified conventions. This causes the actor to become the master of the role, and he plays out the loss of the role. That actor who has lost the role becomes the actor of role-loss, and that humiliation of role-loss becomes the actor’s credibility, and now, if the absurd mode is a loud scream for modern man, here it turns into a reasonable and rational conversation. This brings the theatre closer to the zero point, to that same interesting event: a calculated theatre that possesses the proper rhythm, a considered and varied mise-en-scène, an acceptable acting ability, unadornment, and other theatrical elements at a desirable level, nevertheless becomes afflicted with a void. Let us go back and change our perspective.
Why the initial experiences of most of our playwrights in the field of the absurd are more successful is a subject worth examining and too much for this writing, but there is an entry point here for approaching a new perspective. Some may think that the reason for this relative success is that absurd theatre is free from the logical structure required and made obligatory by realistic or classical modes. Whereas absurd theatre, because it has lost the dramatic possibilities of those conventional modes for creating suspense and attracting the audience, follows a more difficult path and has a more complicated structure. That conventional structure which Aristotle defines, and which has acquired more realistic definitions over the past few centuries, usually begins with an initial equilibrium and, if this is not taken as an explanation of the obvious, can be described as initial equilibrium, complication, climax, resolution, and secondary equilibrium. Observing this academic curve alone creates a relative attraction and suspense. Absurd theatre loses this possibility and begins the play after the climax. It eliminates the resolution and takes place entirely within the secondary equilibrium.
The absurd person suffers from secondary equilibrium. He suffers from everyday routine. The exciting crises of that curve have settled in him and made him into the being we know. Well, such a condition is, above all, tedious, and every writer finds devices to overcome this tedium. Beckett, because of his mastery over the structure of the story, can employ its constituent elements in small, consecutive sections and, without needing an overall story, keep the audience engaged through all kinds of curiosity, surprise, suspense, and so on. At times, through short and shadowy narratives, he also visits other points of that curve and quickly returns. These small, consecutive, and apparently unrelated pieces, taken together, chart the content of secondary equilibrium, as well as that shared pain. “Cherry Taste” has a similar method, and I said that what is charted in its entirety has a personal identity and is not pervasive. This play, too, begins after the catastrophe. The news of that catastrophe is properly distributed throughout the play, quickly arouses curiosity, and gradually the dimensions of the catastrophe become clear.
In most of his works, Beckett has passed through a time and place distant and far removed from secondary equilibrium, and the action takes place in a situation in which the dimensions of the catastrophe have settled into the people and given new dimensions to their skeleton, which may make them appear to us as psychotic beings, whereas Beckett’s person is not mad and his mind has a real relationship with the situation in which he has been placed. However, the reality that Beckett sees in those distant places may also be very far removed from our mentality, which it is.
“Cherry Taste” has another device. The date of the catastrophe goes back three days, and the character is still shocked and is experiencing a stream of consciousness, and this is a theatrical justification for allowing him to review the past in a disordered manner and complete the information.
“Excuse Me …” is closer to Ionesco. Ionesco creates a completely serious dramatic situation that is empty of content, and this empty space is ultimately filled with the content of secondary equilibrium. That deceptive situation, with the help of that seriousness, the description of which has been given, frees theatre from tedium and everyday routine and creates suspense. A woman and a man whose tedious life has lasted for 19 years gradually convince us that the arrival of a child will free them from their everyday routine. At the end, the child is found, and we understand that their expectation, too, has been a deceptive consolation. If Ionesco were writing this play, perhaps, in order to break the inertia of that everyday routine, he would construct his formal situation around the arrival of that child from the beginning, and perhaps the choice in “Excuse Me …” to spend most of the performance describing that everyday routine is because the tedium of secondary equilibrium, in itself, is interesting to us who reason about it from the outside and creates suspense.
The two experiences, “Cherry Taste” and “Excuse Me, What Time Is It?”, regardless of which style or manner they belong to, are works that are necessary and worth seeing, open to discussion and examination, honest and straightforward, and consequently instructive. From this perspective, this new event is a glimmer of hope. Because when we encounter a theatrical experience, we can add to our stage knowledge only if the creators of that experience have added to their own knowledge in the course of creating the work.