Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

One of my favorite sketches from the San Francisco improv-satire troupe, The Committee, is a scene between a man and a woman that is made up not of dialogue but of brief summaries of what the characters say. So, instead of saying something like, “You fill out that sweater well,” the guy says, “Suggestive remark.” Instead of saying, “Fuck off,” she says, “Contemptuous reply.” He says, “Another sexist comment.” She replies, “Withering put-down.” It’s more elaborate than that, but the point is that, though the words they say are descriptions of the content of their dialogue, the actors play these descriptions with the emotion that would be there under the real words. So she says, “Contemptuous reply,” with the intonation of “Fuck off.” Finally she offers a summary of some length and ferocity and then strides off the stage. He stands silent for a few seconds, somewhat stunned by what she has apparently said. Then he smacks his head with his hand and says, “Ah! The realization of the perfect thing to have said!”

In real life, we rarely come up with the perfect thing to say when we’re in the middle of a heated exchange. Some of what motivates the writing of autobiographic material, I’m convinced, is the later realization of what that perfect thing might have been and the desire to create a context in which we can use it.

The temptation is particularly strong when the other person is dead. There’s been a fair amount of responding to that temptation lately.

Joshua Harmon’s We Had a World is an overtly autobiographic play dealing with the relationships between himself, his mother and his late grandmother. Young Josh’s impression of his grandmother is at odds with his mother’s impression, and that’s intentional on Grandma’s part. What she is able to keep mostly hidden from Josh as a child is that she is an alcoholic with a history of embarrassing herself, something that made his mother’s childhood a misery and something his mother tried to keep from him. Eventually he learns the truth, but, since the foundation of his relationship with his grandmother was going to shows and galleries and concerts with her, his primary impression of her is of a woman who inspired in him a love for the arts who also, yes, drank. Josh’s mother thinks of her as an alcoholic who was her mother. Josh’s attitude is mostly one of gratitude and sympathy, his mother’s is one of anger and resentment. Ultimately, after his grandmother’s death, Josh imagines a scene in which he and Grandma and Mom find a moment in which they make peace. But Grandma has to be dead for Joshua to conjure up the scene.

In another overtly autobiographic play, Liberation, Bess Wohl conjures up a women’s consciousness-raising group from the 1970s. Susannah Flood plays both the stand-in for the playwright and her mother Lizzie, who organized the group in an Ohio town. Part of what Wohl’s stand-in is trying to do is gain a deeper understanding of her mother through recreating the controversies and conversations that arose in the group. But, in order to have the conversation she has dreamed of having with her dead mother, ultimately the playwright has to stop playing her mother in flashback and assign the role to one of the other actresses in the ensemble. What Wohl then gives us is the dialogue she wished they’d been able to have.

The device appears again in Just in Time, the biographical juke box musical with a book by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver. (Spoiler alert. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to know of a revelation that appears later in the play that reorders the audience’s understanding of the characters’ relationships.) Polly, the woman Bobby Darin has grown up believing to be his mother turns out, in fact, to be his grandmother, and the woman he believed to be his sister turns out to be his real mother who had him at a very young age. (Jack Nicholson made a similar discovery about his “sister.”) Polly dies in the first act, but she reappears in the second act for the heart-to-heart Darin needs to have. As played by Jonathan Groff and Michele Pawk, it is the emotional high point of the show.

I first encountered this device years ago in Lanford Wilson’s Lemon Sky. Alan, Wilson’s autobiographic character, has a conversation with a young woman with whom he once shared a household. She has since died in an auto accident. Nevertheless, they have a chat in which she remarks ironically on the stupidity of how she died. Wilson did not set her up as a ghost. Rather, he is depicting the interaction the two would have if Alan could have this conversation with someone who is dead but still capable of holding her own. I once discussed this scene with Wilson. He didn’t have a term for the device. I suggested it be called a hypothetical scene. (And I borrowed the idea in a play I wrote called Bluff, in which three people begin by discussing a fourth person who is 3000 miles away but magically appears in the middle of the scene to declare she doesn’t want any of these people to tell her any of this stuff when they see her. I dedicated the play to Lanford. He thanked me and asked me why. I said, “I either dedicate this to you or you sue me for plagiarism.” He saw the parallel between his scene and mine and took it as the compliment it was intended to be.)

So, yes, in one season, we have three of these hypothetical scenes. Conversations between two people who, because of the barrier of death, couldn’t actually have conversations, but conversations that the plays demand. I have no theories as to why this has happened this season. Any more than I have a theory as to why there are two Broadway musicals this year (Operation Mincemeat and Dead Outlaw) which revolve around corpses being used as props.

This goes back to the Committee scene. “Ah! The realization of the perfect thing to have said!” We mostly can’t do it in real life, but being able to put the perfect thing to have said onto a stage is one of the blessings of drama.