Pretty and Disgusting

 

Inevitably in script analysis classes, I have to dissuade students from explaining away some odd or confusing choice by a playwright in a script by blaming it on expediency (Maybe she knew it'd be too difficult to do X on stage) or propriety (She avoids doing X because it would have been too much for the audience). Neither recourse works. Or, rather, both undercut the playwright's artistic agency--and underestimate theatre's potential.

As Elinor Fuchs says, in the world of the play "there are no accidents." We approach a script, in other words, assuming that the playwright knew what she was doing. What's in there is what she wants in there. What's not in there is what she chooses not to put in there. The actual truth, of course, might lie somewhere else. But we adopt the attitude that the script is as the script is meant to be.

Beyond that, though, I try to disabuse students of the misconception that it's the playwright's job to keep audiences feeling safe and comfortable. Some plays do that, and good for them. But no law exists requiring playwrights to protect audiences from feelings. 

You say Marsha Norman keeps Jesse's suicide off-stage (behind the closed door) because showing it would have been "too much for the audience"? I'll see your presumption of theatrical decorum and raise you Sarah Kane's Blasted. 

Nakedness, violence, sex, rape, cannibalism, sucking out eyes and swallowing them--this play has it all, really. (I don't think it has a single gunshot, though--just one big explosion in the middle.) "This Disgusting Feast of Filth," trumpeted one of the first reviews.

That headline is not not accurate, exactly. If you can imagine a place to go, Blasted goes there. It's pretty disgusting. See these two production photos:

The character with his head sticking out of the floor, Ian, has been a rapey creep in the first part of the play only to find his realistic Leeds hotel room invaded by a Soldier who proceeds to menace, rape, and mutilate him before blowing off his own head. The nice hotel room gets blown apart by some explosion. The girl Ian had been with (unwilling on her part), Cate, escapes for a bit before returning--first with an infant she had been handed. The infant dies, Cate buries it and leaves, and Ian later digs it up to eat it.

After a montage of Ian struggling to survive for days after Cate leaves (including the baby-eating scene), a despondent, blinded, starving Ian buries himself in the infant's grave-hole in the ruined hotel floor. His head sticks out. "He dies with relief," the stage directions read. It begins to rain, and water drops down from the ceiling--right onto Ian. He wakes up, curses.

Cate returns, scarred and bloody from whatever war-torn hellscape Leeds has become (Kane keeps the nature of the conflict vague). She's procured gin, bread, and sausage. She eats it, then crawls over to Ian--and feeds him. "Thank you," Ian says. The play ends.

Having thoroughly debunked any notion that she writes to protect audiences from discomfort, Kane ends this "feast of filth" with one of the most elemental human acts--sharing food.

"In performance," playwright and director Ken Urban observes (PAJ, no. 69, 2001), "it is a gesture of unimaginable generosity" (46). Writing soon after Kane's death by suicide, Urban notes how European critics recognized in Blasted a greatness that initial British reviews missed. Urban in fact sees Kane as searching for ethics in a space of catastrophe.

Since its premiere, the play and Kane's other works have established themselves as hallmarks. Her other plays don't quite match Blasted's level of graphic brutality. (Cleansed has lots of violence, but it's refracted through more theatricality.) But most have that mix of inhumanity and transcendence. Pretty disgusting and pretty and disgusting. 

That doesn't mean I'm assigning it to my script analysis classes anytime soon. But as catastrophe of some sort looms (just constitutional? Civil war?), I appreciate both the frank portrayal of utter breakdown and the hope of human kindness even in blasted ruination.