Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

One of my students once went to the administration of the school where I taught to complain about the language being used in my class.  It was frequently graphic and sexist and she felt that this made the class an unsafe environment.  And so I had to sit down with people who had the power to fire me and answer her charge.

Here’s the thing: I was teaching playwriting, and the language wasn’t anything I or any of her classmates were using in the lectures or our discussions about the plays they were writing.  What she was objecting to was the language her classmates wrote for their characters.  They wrote a lot of characters who were assholes. When this became clear, the representatives of the administration said that, though they could weigh in on what words I or her classmates used as ourselves, they weren’t going to tell playwrights what the characters they created could say.  If I remember correctly, the complainant left the class not long after.

This memory came back to me as I was watching Babe, Jessica Goldberg’s new play about the music business.  Gus (played by Arliss Howard) has grown rich from discovering, producing and promoting rock acts, with the considerable assistance of his longtime associate Abby (Marisa Tomei).  Truth to tell, Abby has done much of the work Gus has been paid outrageously well for.  She isn’t starving by any means, but she also doesn’t have multiple homes or the money in the bank he does.  She has also had to shrug off a lot of his casually bad behavior as what goes with the territory.

But then part of the mystique of the rock world has its roots in bad behavior.  The image of rock personalities is frequently based on the purposeful violation of societal norms.  They famously trash hotel rooms, party hard, lurch in and out of rehab, and have sex with anything that moves.  What’s more, the language in much popular music includes words that, if you used them in an office, would secure you an appointment with HR.  In the play, Gus is about to be jettisoned from his job for indulging privately in behavior celebrated by the music and artists he has helped promote.  The play adds a complication with the observation that, by putting up with Gus for years in order to keep the job she loves, Abby is also in danger.

Howard and Garcie McGraw (in the demanding double role of a new employee in the office and the memory of a dead rock legend) do strong work under Scott Elliott’s direction in this production for the New Group.  I admire Goldberg’s writing for its clear-sightedness. From my sporadic dealings with the music industry, I believe she’s caught some of the power dynamics accurately. But I wish I cared more about Abby’s dilemma. This is not a criticism of Tomei, who gives Abby a caginess which goes a long way towards explaining how she has managed to continue swimming in a business filled with sharks. Maybe it’s that her passion seems to be most engaged with her memory of a dead star rather than anything or anyone in the present. Whatever the reason, I felt curiously unmoved by her dilemma.

Incidentally, much of the language in the play would have driven that student of mine nuts.