Re: Dead City

["Dennis Moore" <clayboy56>]

Rejoyce
A playwright's modern-day downtown riff on Ulysses
by Darren Reidy
May 23rd, 2006

http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0621,reidy,73321,11.html

When Marcel Duchamp drew a goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa,
adding the mildly lascivious legend "L.H.O.O.Q." ("She's got a hot
ass"), it was the vandal's impulse that had gotten hold of him: a
personal disavowal of the work's power over the public imagination
and, somewhat paradoxically, an acknowledgement of his inability to
impress his will on it by other means.
The playwright Sheila Callaghan has not been so brash in approaching
one of our greatest novels, an increasingly publicly possessed work in
its own right, James Joyce's Ulysses. Her new play Dead City, a
"highly designed" production with intriguingly "non-realist moments"
(e.g., a flying taxicab), does not confront the book. In fact, perhaps
understandably, Callaghan has gone so far as to insist that it is not
an adaptation but, as its press release says, "a riff." To hear her
tell it, her reasons for taking Ulysses as her model seem disarmingly
casual and willfully innocent.

Callaghan first read the book in 1998 with a few friends, after they
saw that it topped the Modern Library's list of the best 20th-century
novels written in English. She returned to it, creatively, as a way of
"getting ownership of [her] reading." The play, she says, is a
"personal reaction."

One theme she responded to was the death of a child: "I'm in my
thirties, so mother stuff is on my mind a lot." Throughout the day
that Ulysses encompasses, Leopold Bloom tenderly mulls the loss of his
son, who would have been nearly 11 but died 11 days after birth. Here
it's forty-something Samantha Blossommother of a sports-minded,
Disney-loving Vassar girl to whom she can't relateconjuring up a
romanticized punk-poet son who would have been 22, but also died as a
newborn. Enter our Stephen Dedalus, a 22-year-old poet named Jewel
Jupiter. She idolizes Patti Smith, has been canned from her tutoring
gig, and recently had an abortion. (Per Joyce, the two characters
cross paths throughout the play.) According to Callaghan, the gender
flip wasn't, in her words, a "feminist" revision (` la Kathy Acker's
Don Quixote); she simply thought it would be easier for her to write
female characters.

A dead city is, of course, a cemetery, but the title (also the name of
a bar in the play) comes from a Smith song in which she laments both
the death of her husband (Fred Smith, guitarist for the MC5) and a
culture of constrained expression, where "scenes are built on empty
dreams"which could describe the New York, circa 2004, in the play. It
is a loss felt subtly by even Blossom, who tells Jewel about attending
a legendary Smith concert at CBGB. Blossom is based on women Callaghan
has met at temp jobs, whose youthful dreams, while not dead, have
undergone rapid attrition as they've moved further into adulthood.
Callaghan admits that "Samantha has very simple notions of what it
means to be a poet," but that does not invalidate her attempt to
connect with the idea of a poet through Jewel.

Jewel is an easily identifiable type, a burr in a smoothed-over world,
but her allegiance to Smith, a "revolutionary responding to cultural
uproar" in the '70s, is partly a result of that smoothing over. "I
don't know who that idol is now," Callaghan says. She believes it's a
problem that includes gender bias, particularly in the theater world.
The Voice, she wrote me, "just awarded an Emerging Playwright Obie to
a woman who has been operating with some level of recognition in this
field for 20 years, while another playwright (male) won with his first
and only play, fresh out of school. If there are any female heroes,
the tastemakers of our generation certainly aren't looking for them."
But Callaghan remains optimistic: "I see this as an opportunity. We
are ripe for some foundation-shaking in the arts. Hopefully it will be
explosive, and come free of narcissism or savvy marketing. It will
burn people's eyebrows off! Like bad pyrotechnics at a hair-band
concert."