The Strangerer by Mickey Maher, Theatre Oobleck

Now playing at the Chopin Theatre (1543 W. Division, Chicago), and in its third run, is Mickey Maher's play "The Strangerer," an absurd, satiric, dark comedy featuring George Bush, John Kerry, and Jim Lehrer, a news anchor man, who serves as the moderator. The play is based on the debate between Bush and Kerry in 2004, but only in a very loose manner, that is, it is replete with euphemisms for brutality and violence, circumlocution, posing, empty rhetoric, and pursuit of tangents, so much so that nothing really does get said about the Iraq invasion. The actors playing Bush, Kerry, and Lehrer act like bufoons, and I was reminded of Eugene Ionescu's absurdist rewriting of Shakespeare, MacBeth, called MacBett, which I saw when it was staged a few years ago at the Chopin Theatre. In Ionescu's play leaders are presented as possessing all too human failings.

I will not comment on the play itself, but rather make some remarks about the issues raised in the play. For viewers who haven't seen the play, I would give too much away about it, if I discussed it, so I will refrain from doing so.

The playwright, Mickey Maher, who plays Kerry, gives his play an absurd turn by likening Bush to the antihero of Albert Camus's novella, The Stranger, Meursault, who commits a murder on a whim in a nihilistic fashion. Of course, neither Bush nor Kerry nor Lehrer ever get their hands "dirty" and "bloody" as such. The president ordered others, the U.S. armed forces to invade Iraq. In the name of security, in the name of democracy, in the name of stability--you name it--but there were various ideological justifications and explanations for the unilateral invasion of Iraq by Bush, which was supported by U.S. House and Senate. The mainstream media and press, including Lehrer's news hour, can be regarded as complicit in their support of the U.S. militarism, since they would often give the government, especially its representatives and spokes persons a free pass, a forum to drone on and on in their official rhetoric that would justify their militarism as anything--an effort to develop and support democracy, offering political stability, and so on--but what it it really and primarily was--an exercise in unilateral imposition of American economic and military power abroad.

Of course, Bush is quite different than Camus' Mearsault, who is a nihilist, who murders for no reason and who is detached from any feeling of connection to fellow human beings. Likely, Bush and others, in their own minds believe, deeply and passionately, that their militaristic policies are indeed justified, just as leaders of powerful countries have often believed they had some sort of religious and political right to impose control, occupation, democracy beyond the borders of their nation. Thus, the parallel suggested between Mearsault's nihilistic murder and the state sponsored militarist policies of President Bush is an absurd one. A more apt comparison between the two is based on their lack of coherence, which Maher's Bush in the play readily admits to, though quickly adds that that fact is not important. One memorable such and recorded incoherent response of Bush in the second debate with Kerry is still available on video online. When asked by an audience member that opinion abroad has become critical of Bush's invasion and how he responds to it, Bush rambles about the need to take decisive action that may be unpopular. The camera that pans the audience on occasion records looks of incomprehension and amusement and impatience at Bush's response. In Maher's play most of Bush's responses are like this.

But Maher does not write a play with an eye for satirizing the delusions of American imperial power politics that justifies its policies. His real target is the verbal game of double-speak, obfuscation, and misinformation, which is practiced by Bush himself, at times, ineptly. Bush makes many malapropisms in the play. Maher's other targets are the lackluster opposition epitomized by Kerry who cannot or for the sake of not appearing unpatriotic cannot bring himself to call the president and his administration to task for their militaristic policies that are packaged in lies and half-truths. And the mainstream American media which plays along with the government, rather than questioning it, is also a target for Maher's satire.

Maher presents Bush absurdly as someone who wants to call attention to death and murder. Of course, it's well known that the Bush administration has undertaken extraordinary measures to avoid calling attention to the deaths its Iraq invasion has caused. For instance, photographs of coffins of dead U. S. armed service men and women are not permitted to be made. Thus, in Maher's absurd debate Bush wants to stage a death during the debate itself! I will not elaborate on this development, since it would reveal an element of surprise and suspense from the play to those who have not seen it.

The debate constantly veers away from the questions posed by the moderator. The main diversion of debate becomes an argument on the nature of theatre, the theatre of politics and the theatre of death. How does one present political policy, and how does one present the death that it can cause? Bush and Kerry argue about a play they had gone to see together the night before the debate, and this serves as a meta-commentary on how their own politics, the posing, the rhetoric, the appeals to voters, is itself a staged performance. In the case of pursuing an invasion of another country, the question becomes for the administration how to stage the event, package and present it to the public. Kerry, in turn, plays along with the administration; he does not so much as protest or oppose it, as simply offer suggestions on how to modify it. In effect, this is a toothless opposition, one which in making itself "moderate," palatable to the entire game of staging politics, is not a viable alternative.

Another issue the play raises is that the lack of substantive debate and discussion in the 2004 presidential debates suggests that much of the American public is either tuned out or already has its mind made up. At one point, Maher's Bush observes that no one is really listening to him, for his supporters already agree with him, and his detractors only focus on his malapropisms. Kerry in contrast at one juncture asserts that the best theatre is the theatre that will put its audience to sleep, which is a commentary on his own inability to differentiate himself and his policies from those of Bush.

Short Films by Asliuk, Strembitsky, Loznitsa, Pakalnina, Buraja

Falling Out of Time
Gene Siskel Film Center
Curators, Oona Mosna and Jeremy Rigsby
Thursday, April 3, 2008

"Once the home of state-sponsored social realism, the former Soviet Europe has given rise to a new breed of documentary featuring the observational ambiguities and formal rigor more familiar to experimental cinema."

The Mine, Victor Asliuk, Belarus (2004) 16 min

Wayfarers, Igor Strembitsky, Ukraine (2005), 10 min

Halt, Sergei Loznitsa, Russia (2000), 25 min

Papa Gena, Laila Pakalnina, Latvia (2001) 10 min

Mother, Oksana Buraja, Lithuania (2001) 10 min

Five short experimental, documentary films from the former Soviet Union were shown. None of the films had narration or extended dialogue; some had background music. Before the films were shown, the curators gave some background information about them. Though the union came to an end in 1991, seventeen years ago, directors from nations that were a part of it, were strongly influenced in the 1990s by the film schools and documentary film studios that had been formed in the 1920s in the Soviet Union. Each province or oblast in the former Russian Soviet Union had a film school and studio, as well as the centers of Russia, Leningrad and Moscow. Each of the Soviet republics also had its film schools and centers in their capitol cities.

"The Mine" was shot in color and follows a crew of miners to their work site. There is no narrative commentary, no dialogue and some background movie only towards the very end of the film. The sound of the film is strictly on the machinery. The camera shows the workers trudging down a tunnel to the elevator, which then follows them as the elevator takes them further underground. A sensation of claustrophobia, feeling confined, is likely to develop in the viewer as the camera pans the faces of the miners in the elevator. The elevator reaches its destination and the workers leave one confined space to enter yet into another such space--the system of tunnels. The camera follows a few of the individual miners as they split up in order to attend to their particular tasks.

There is an implicit commentary being made by the director: the life of a miner is grim and grimy and harsh. We get closeups of miners attentive at some task; they are stoic, reserved, suggesting not the laborer as hero--as the 1920s propaganda films suggested--but rather a detached and dutiful attention to the task at hand. A triumphant sounding classical music score begins at the end of the film as workers depart from the mine; this is clearly an ironic comment, a suggestion that departure from confined and dusty underworld is the one source of solace for the miners from their difficult work.

The "Wayfarers" also offers us a grim view of life, in this instance, life at a home for mentally ill men, but there are occasional cuts in this narrative focus to shots of women sitting alone, a child, and a woman with a child. All these shots are presumably references to the social world outside the nursing home, a world that its inhabitants have left behind (in childhood) or dream about (meeting a woman to share life with). The film opens with the nursing home's director making his morning rounds with a forced cheerfulness and sarcastic comment (Here is our hero) to a former veteran confined to his bed. In one scene an elderly man reads aloud a nostalgic love poem near a tv that is playing, but is not tuned to any station, but simply showing static. There is no need for commentary or narration for this poignant scene, which shows us an older man's loneliness and estrangement from the world. In another similar scene, as the men mingle and sit outside the building, one man is prompted to sing, and he obliges. In several shots, individuals are seated and face the camera, but none of them talk nor seem to be quite sure how to respond to being put on the spot or interviewed. The film ends with a woman singing a lullaby in the background. Again, an ironic comment on the subject of the film--the tragic separation and isolation of mentally ill men confined to a nursing home.

Halt by Sergei Loznitsa is a black and white series of images that focuses on people sleeping at train station, which is full of them. The camera lingers on one or two or several people. Usually the edges of the screen are slightly out of focus, and often the angle of the camera is from the floor. The distance of the camera from the sleepers is uniform throughout: they fill the screen. Each sleeper or sleepers seem to get a minute or two of time on which the camera lingers on them, and usually there is some subtle and slight movement to observe

Each individual has fallen asleep in a different position--seated, slumped, stretched out, curled up, and so on. The only sounds we hear are the people breathing, stirring slightly, the occasional train whistle and the train rumbling nearby. The absence of action, the repetition of poses with slight variations leaves the viewer free to begin to form his or her own reflections; in effect, I see this as an open ended occasion for the viewer to reflect on whatever topic is on his or her mind. In this regard, a parallel experience would be looking at and reflecting on an abstract painting. In this film the burden of finding and making sense of the film is placed almost completely on the viewer.

Papa Gena by Laila Pakalnina is a black and white, gritty film that contrasts mundane life in a flat, urban, industrial landscape with Figaro singing Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. There is a strong contrast between the lively music that people are listening to on headphones and the gray setting they inhabit. The music, Mozart, often brings the dead scene to life, and on occasion puts a smile on the listeners face, usually on older listeners. The children and young adults don't seem to take as much pleasure and joy in the music as the adults. The film is made up of a series of scenes in which the listeners to the music are standing still and waiting, it seems, for the music to begin. At that point they listen to it for a time, and then walk away off camera which doesn't follow them. From one perspective, listening to the music is an indicator of the interviewees mood--are they amenable, open to the joy of the music, or are they indifferent to it? Will it make a change in their mood? If not, why?

The last film shown "Mother" by Oksana Buraja is shot in color and ironically, we never do get to see the mother of the boy in the film. As the film opens, we see a boy staring at a tv, and then a room full of smoke and people sitting around a table drinking. Presumably, the boy's mother is at the head of the table. All we see is her her back facing the film as she sits at the table full of bottles and glasses offering guests more to drink. A nonstop party seems to be in session, and the only people not partaking are the boy, who is about age six, and his friend who appears later in the film. Most of the film follows the boy around; the adults don't seem to pay much attention to him, except when he plays with the stove and is asked to get some water for a drunk man (his father?). The man talks about the struggle for good and evil in the soul; clearly, he has lost his battle, and is in the grip of alcoholism.

The residents of this apartment speak in Russian, and they are part of the Russian minority in Lithuania; such a Russian minority remains in all the new nations that formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This particular group illustrates not only the prevalence of alcoholism among Russians, whether it is in former Soviet republics that have been independent nations, or in Russia itself, but a widespread health and social problem throughout Eastern Europe and in particular the former Soviet Union.

From the naive perspective of the child, his life is boring, and he lacks structure and direction which his parents and family are supposed to be providing him. From the viewers perspective, we can only cringe and wonder what will be the long term consequences of this parental neglect on his development.