Plays of the 00s: Blue/Orange

I have to admit, I was hoping for more from Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange, a diverting but schematic and rather limply "provocative" play that purports to delve into definitional vagaries and social tensions pertinent to mental illness, race, health care, and professional turf-wars. "Schizophrenia" is a much-bandied term as one junior and one senior doctor haggle out the case of Christopher, an Afro-British patient due either to be released from institutional care or ratcheted up to more open-ended confinement and intensive study on the day the play begins. The play's truest claim to schizophrenia, though, derives from its critical reception, which on the one hand was strong enough to elevate Penhall's name significantly in the U.K. and, in rather narrower theater circles, over here in the U.S., earning him the prestigious Evening Standard and Olivier Awards in back-to-back years, but also sufficiently mixed to earn the play an unqualified pan from the Daily Telegraph in 2000 and a tepid notice from the New York Times two years later.

Penhall, who later wrote a wonderful screenplay adaptation of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, has certainly hit the target of the kind of "taut" three-character chamber play in which the intense focus on a few characters, the triangulated tensions between each pair of them, and the gradual overlaying of themes, treacheries, and open-ended questions often furnish a kind of potboiler pleasure in and of themselves. The appeal of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, which Blue/Orange supplanted from the Duchess Theatre when it made its West End transfer, inheres partly in these same tropes, although (a huge although) Frayn's play radiates a scrupulous knowledge about its facts and contexts that Blue/Orange rarely achieves. One gets the feeling less of Penhall studying and diagnosing what's wrong with the National Health Service, its "ethnocentric" biases, and its cash-strapped prioritizing of clearing beds over curing patients and more of him working himself into an aloof, targeted, opportunistic lather about these notions by reading lots of inflamed Op/Eds in the city paper. There's a Paul Haggis-ness to the way in which key characters unleash the slimiest epithets in particularly maladroit moments, as a way of achieving dramatic climaxes that the intricacy of characterization and the attempts at articulating personal, professional, and social stakes within the play don't seem able to incite on their own merits.

In truth, a closer structural and intellectual paratext for Blue/Orange is probably John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, which also sparks a clash of local titans around an aggrieved character all but defined by his dark skin and by the play's oblique but insistent construction of him as a figure of epistemological enigma. Shanley, a less trenchant writer than Frayn, at least has the smarts to admit his lack of interior or genuinely empathetic access to Donald Miller, his posing of him as a riddle and a timely phenomenon more than as a character; that's why, in the play unlike the movie, he doesn't appear in the piece. Penhall, however, builds the unstable, surprising, unknowable Christopher right into the play's delimited contest of wills. He thus makes himself responsible to show more of the character, to push past the tortured rhetorics he elicits from others and the racist cultural dysmorphia he both exposes and emblematizes. A strong actor might connect deeply enough with Christopher to make use of the strongest stuff in Penhall's dialogue, including his built-in silences, and thereby make the character dramatically viable: he can hardly have asked for better original-production ambassadors than then-unknown Chiwetel Ejiofor in the U.K. and Harold Perrineau, Jr. of Smoke and Lost in the U.S. Still, the script is finally more interested in blaring contradictions and muddying waters in relation to Christopher than in resolving him, even as a man in crisis. Idi Amin! Patois! Drugs! Righteous anger! Aggression! Suicidal tendencies! Muhammad Ali! Distorted perceptions! Public housing! This erratic chain of signifiers goes way above and beyond the call for "discontinuous"; again, it's the play as much as the character who invites a diagnosis of borderline personality. A smart production would have to underscore the nasty paternalism with which the two white doctors keep asking Christopher to leave the room so they can talk about him and decide his fate. Even here, though, Blue/Orange feels like a "problem play" less because it's articulate and inventive in its evocation of social stalemates than because the script is a promising but jerry-rigged and immaturely conceived series of problems to be worked out in the staging. A successful production would involve saving the script from its own most slickster tendencies and stalled metaphors (including the eponymous one), but the attainments of the piece don't seem worth the labors of working around its deficits.

P.S. Say this for Penhall: he may be onto something with those Crashisms. The raves in both the Sunday Times ("I came out of Joe Penhall's new play in a state of hot, black excitement!") and the Independent ("Provocative, blackly funny!") adopted the most dubious possible language in expressing their enthusiasm, and then Methuen made the obnoxious choice of selecting these blurbs for the jacket-copy on the paperback. Sometimes all you can say is, "...Really?"

Plays of the 00s: Goodnight Children Everywhere

I happen to have read Richard Nelson's Goodnight Children Everywhere while re-perusing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's seminal theoretical opus Anti-Oedipus, in which the authors maintain that post-Freudian culture insists upon incest as its founding prohibition in order to privatize our contexts for thinking about law, taboo, and possible anarchy within the framework of the individual and the family, instead of framing these notions more lucidly in the social terms of power, capital, production, and domination. Furthermore, by positing incest—something very few people desire—as that which must be avoided at all costs, we overcompensate with discourse about scapegoated desires we may never have harbored, displacing coherent attention away from more foundational threats to modern culture that might actually rally an angry crowd of insurrectionists: social revolution, radicalized sexual desire, and demolitions of false ideas of "personal" identity, individual fantasy, discrete subjectivity.

Goodnight Children Everywhere, though it's tense, moody, and delicate enough to prompt an involving production, is the kind of art that, in exploring the "dangerous" idea of incest, may actually avoid exploring what's more deeply at issue in the stories of four siblings, now ages 21 to 17, who have spent five years apart after three of them were evacuated to different sites to escape London during the Blitz of World War II. Now it's 1945, the war is over, their parents are dead, and the most distantly deported of their brood—young Peter, shipped off to Canada—is returning to live in the old family flat with his three sisters, and with the husband of the middle sister, Ann. Ann's husband, Mike, is 30 years older than she is, a doctor, and a friend-provider to all three sisters, including 21-year-old Betty, who works as one of his nurses in surgery, and 19-year-old Viv, an attractive would-be actress. You can hardly fault the sisters for not quite knowing how to pick up the threads of their former life, or whom to recognize as an adult and whom to indulge or instruct as a child. You can see that Nelson has worked out from the idea that, in the wake of a national trauma, the naturalized relationships of parent/child, elder/youth, brother/sister, and father/employer are badly scrambled, and the dynamics of family and sexuality stop feeling like shared, stabled geometries, diffusing instead into a spooky, unsettling, unbounded question.

Still, I have to agree with the Village Voice reviewer that Goodnight Children Everywhere "feels like a conceptual working-out of this question, rather than a play drawn from actual life." When Ann makes her first erotic advance toward Peter, in a scene that might work better as heightened ritual than as spontaneous reality, the script seems on the cusp of a stage direction like, Audience gasps, in the way some films and performances pause for a few self-satisfied beats after a punchline that seems sure to score. Much of what follows in Goodnight Children Everywhere is so handed over, subliminally but hardly subtly, to the frissons around the Peter-Ann relationship and to the riddle of how this pairing will affect the rest of their close, tiny circle that almost no other relationship in the script breathes or fills out as much as it could. It's not a question of missteps but of steps not taken, and perhaps of Nelson investing more in broadly conventional figures of Abandonment, Transgression, and Confusion than in the particulars of his own imagination. In a way, Nelson's success in writing four complexly playable and basically plausible youths—a welcome rarity on any stage—makes us crave comparable specificity and detail in story development, historical context, or thematic and psychological undertones. He has contrived some artful dialogue and some interesting palimpsets of overlayed emotion, but he hasn't followed through on any of these needful frameworks. The play has fewer emotional ramifications than it might (the finale doesn't help) and even fewer intellectual implications. What creative "give" there is in the script would fall mostly to directing careful, exacting turns from young performers, to fixing on the proper pace and range of moods, and to the overall atmosphere of the stage: portentous, I would imagine, but not obviously or overbearingly so. A cracking production might well have the audience leaving with an insinuating vibration under their skins; it's harder to imagine a production good enough to get the audience gripped in the who's, what's, and why's of these particular people and this particular scenario.

Its limitations notwithstanding, Goodnight Children Everywhere impressed enough people to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2000—basically London's equivalent of the Tony, and as narrowly West End-focused as the Tony is Broadway-restrictive, which means that Children, like many a Tony champ and nominee, reached this apogee of critical awardage years after several audiences had already experienced it. Because they are awarded in March, the Olivier Award in a given year, like the Oscar, also tends to celebrate work that really made its impact the year before; the production that earned Nelson his gong opened at the Barbican Theatre in February of 1999. Consequently, by most counts the most esteemed new play on English stages in 2000 wouldn't qualify for the Olivier Award until 2001. It won, and it constitutes the subject of my next write-up.