The Effects of Modern Medicine on Literary Heroines-to-Be

I first read "The Glass Menagerie" when I was fourteen. I found it in my anthology for English class, and I couldn't put it down, mainly because there was Laura, and how can you turn away from her? It also helped that at fourteen, shy and not yet ready to test the waters of adolescence, I identified with her as strongly as I've ever identified with any character. As I get older, I see more and more that in fact it's Amanda who's the main character, the charismatic one, the one you can't take your eyes from. But Laura's still the one who does it, for me - scared and not quite hopeful and so very breakable.

As I think everyone knows who's even heard of the play, Tennessee Williams based Laura on his sister Rose. Here they are in New York.


This, of course, was after Rose's lobotomy at the age of 28. Can we talk about lobotomies for a second? Lobotomies are hideous. The fact that they were ever even a marginal portion of medical science is despicable, let alone that they were in use for twenty-some years (between the 30s and 50s) as a cure for mental diseases - like Rose's schizophrenia.

Here are some cringe-worthy facts about lobotomies:
- The point of a lobotomy is to cut some of the connections inside your brain.
- The methods for doing this were varied and fascinating, ranging from drilling holes in a patient's skull and destroying brain tissue with alcohol, to putting an ice pick into a patient's eye socket and pounding with a hammer.
- The first doctor ever to perform a lobotomy, a Swiss psychiatrist named Gottlieb Burckhardt, said (I'm paraphrasing, but this is the gist), "There are two kinds of doctors - the "do no harm" kind and the "something's better than nothing" kind. I'm of the second kind." He later shut down his research because - shocker! - it was making people nervous.

- Lobotomies were the golden children of state mental hospitals, which didn't always have the facilities for anesthesia. So the major proponent of lobotomies in America, a real sicko named Walter Freeman (that's him there working on a patient), suggested that they use electroshock therapy instead.

Are you vomiting yet?

I'm going to say it again: Rose was 28.

And thanks to this brilliant breakthrough in medical science, Rose had to be institutionalized for the rest of her life.

Let's think for a second. Without Rose's lobotomy, we wouldn't have Laura Wingfield or Blanche DuBois. We wouldn't have the bitter indictment of the treatment of the insane in "Suddenly, Last Summer." We would have lost a good deal of the energy that drives Tennessee Williams' marvelous plays. And Rose might have lived her adult life like an adult. And the people to whom this was done (did I mention that the patient's consent wasn't a big deal?) might not have shut down and lost the basic control over their lives and actions that we take for granted.

Was it worth it?

Verfremdungseffekt, or How to Make Your Audience Think

Confession: At the time of this writing, I haven't yet read "Mother Courage." But I'm kind of glad I don't have any formed opinions about it yet. Because if I had, I think it would be tricky to analyze the impact of the distancing effect for which Bertolt Brecht is famous. (Verfremdungseffekt, in the original mellifluous German.)

For example. This is Brecht (and a more radical departure from the fantastically eerie Pirandello I could not have imagined).

What does this photo have to do with whatever the distancing effect is?

The distancing effect (the unpronounceable German term for which Brecht coined, incidentally) is in essence forbidding the audience to fall into the theatrical illusion - and forbidding the play to produce that illusion. And isn't he kind of doing that in the photo - staring right at you, announcing his presence, and making you think about who he is, and who you might be in relation to him?

Brecht's shtick (say that five times fast!) was always to engage the audience's thoughts. In order to do that, he figured that they could never allow their emotions to be swayed by the illusion of reality that theatre generally considers crucial to its success. In Brechtian theatre, the play and the audience should work together, aware of each other, trying to figure something out.

To this I can attest. Two summers ago, I saw "Life of Galileo" in Philly. If that was anything to go by, an audience's mind can't help but be engaged by Brecht's text - I was doing mental gymnastics the whole night trying to keep up with incredible actors playing dazzlingly intelligent people, speaking words that wove in and around each other like spiderwebs. I did fail to keep my emotions from being engaged - I held my breath (along with everyone else in the audience) when we were all waiting to see whether or not Galileo would recant his position, even though I already knew what happened. But the production was clever at reminding us over and over that this was play, not an illusion of reality. Take a look at the set they built:

Basic, structural, almost looks incomplete, like the set crew went on strike halfway through the rehearsal period. I particularly loved the banners (there were more than the one in this photo) they strung across the top, like the Star Wars opening summaries. "Read along to catch up. Think, audience, think!"

It got even more fantastic when most of the actors were on the stage proper and only a few were let loose on the catwalk-set:

This was a heartbreaking moment in the play (Galileo's daughter Virginia, running in her wedding dress to meet her long-term fiance, finds out that he's been using her to spy on her father, and that since he's found out what he wanted to know, the wedding is off). And it's so surreal here that you can't help but remember: THIS IS A PLAY. These are other people's thoughts, put here for you to make your own thoughts out of them.

Or even here, near the beginning (as I recall) where most productions want you to fall right into the play's world and never leave:

You can't see it, but the telescope is pretty much pointing right at the audience on the balcony level. "Look at those crazy people coming to watch us!" says Greg Wood. "And look at them thinking about what we're slyly doing!" says John Campion. It worked, for me at least, and I didn't know squat about the distancing effect.

If I had, I think I might have enjoyed the play even more. In the same way that knowing Shakespeare enriches Shakespeare performances, I imagine that knowing what Brecht was going for would only have made this (pretty fantastic) production better.

Which is my very long and roundabout way of saying, I'm glad I get to read "Mother Courage" with that in mind. Maybe someday I'll get to see it, and I'll annoy all my friends by telling them what it is that Brecht is doing.

Disclaimer: I do not think that the distancing effect is even close to an excuse for people to talk IN the theatre.

Sixty Minutes in Search of an Answer

Luigi Pirandello (that's him over to the left, looking a bit like Rasputin) had daddy issues, a mad wife, and a controversial relationship with fascism and Mussolini. So maybe it's not a surprise that we're still puzzling over what his plays mean, exactly. With major problems in his life that, at the same time, were so ephemeral, so hard to pin down, maybe it's not a surprise that he was preoccupied with the question of reality.

I've only ever read two of his plays - "Six Characters in Search of an Author" and "Right You Are (If You Think You Are)" - but there are definite thematic similarities - the strange, the unexplained, the unknowable. "Right You Are" is about a small town's total inability either to understand who a neighbor's new wife is or to stop trying to figure her out. And "Six Characters" ... well, do we even have to summarize? The title alone is bizarre, unique, and instantly memorable. Something strange is about to happen here.

Maybe the strangest thing, for me, was how the Characters rather interchangeably called their story a "drama" and a "comedy." Drama I can see - lots of drama. You might even call it a tragedy; the Manager's line that ends the play - "I've lost a whole day over these people, a whole day!" - is brutal in its denial, to the Characters, of any kind of reality. But comedy? Yes, the play's funny; yes, it's unnerving, and sometimes laughter is the only way to deal with what's unnerving.

But comedy? Are we talking in a "Divine," Dantean sense, where "comedy" stands for "life"? We're not meant to laugh at the Characters, are we? Not at the end? Is it a comedy of unreality, where what's mocked are the Actors and the Manager, and what's real are the wandering Characters? Just what IS real here; what's okay to laugh at, and what's okay to be moved by?

Calling it a comedy implies that it's all fair game, even the strange metarealistic nature of the Characters. But I've been poking around on the Internet, and I haven't yet found an image of the Characters that contains that comedy, the hilarity of having figments of someone else's imagination gate-crashing your rehearsal. This one, for instance:



A bit eerie, no? The Characters are so sharply defined by the light and the camera focus that they really do look somewhat unreal - and at the same time, so much more tangible than the grumpy Actors in the background. The all-black really does help with that - dare I say it - illusion, both of reality and unreality. Here they are, sharp-edged and precise; here they are, but how can such precision be real?

So where does it get funny? Not here either, at least not for me:



AAAAAHHH! Ghost painting that's going to come alive at night and eat my beating heart!

Maybe a bit extreme. But creepy nonetheless. What are we supposed to do with these somber black clothes, this delineating, ethereal light they're surrounded in? These direct gazes that demand recognition? What's real here? How do we know it's real? And where, God help us, is the comedy?

Because I think we need it, at this point. A whole play of these dead-serious, not-quite-real stares? These intense demands? We need a break - the human mind needs comedy to make it easier to swallow the point of the play. But where do we get it?

The first video on YouTube that pops up when you search "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is this promo for a college production:



Tres gloomy! Ending the promo on the Mother's scream makes this look like a suspense thriller or even a horror. Yes, yes, suspense sells tickets. But where's the comedy? It's there in the reading - where is it here? The Characters call their story a comedy, and a play this relentlessly dark would be kind of unpalatable.

I like this one a lot better.



Maybe to American ears, the Scottish accents in themselves lend a little levity. But I don't think that's all. This trailer takes itself much less seriously. Not UNseriously - but this production seems like it would acknowledge the presence of the word "comedy," and the touches of real humor in the play. Plus the fuzzy faces are extremely awesome, AND remind us that the play's big concern is with reality. What IS it? Who has it? How do we know?