Corresponding with writers and bibliophiles about what we've been reading lately.
Jerrod Jordahl is a Brooklyn-based playwright.
Nate: You have a new play debuting this August in New York as
part of the ?!: New Works 2023 Festival. What's the premise of your play?
Jerrod: I do, thanks! It's part of The Brick's annual festival of new, short-form work by experimental artists from a wide range of disciplines. I'm very excited to debut my play at this festival and honored to be a part of the community.
The premise is simple, really. With two actors, we recreate a scene from Marlon Brando's 1961 film, One-Eyed Jacks. We repeat the scene to absurd and tragic lengths. Sometimes the whole thing resets, other times the characters get stuck on a single line, word, or movement. In this way it's a bit of a collage. Or maybe dance or performance art.
It's called death as repetition, which gets its name from the Clarice Jensen album The experience of repetition as death, which in turn got its name from a line in Adrienne Rich's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," which in turn was a response to a 1611 poem of the same title by John Donne. At first this was a working title but the further along I got in developing the idea the more appropriate it seemed.
I'm not sure of all the ways in which my play is directly connected to these works. For Jensen, I know Freud was an influence, in particular his ideas about a "Death Drive" and the compulsion to repeat traumatic events. There's some of that in my piece, but I was more interested in the role of violence in all of it. Rich's poem, as I understand it, is about the poet's struggle to write in a language gatekept by men. The conflict between power, agency, violence, myth. The myth surrounding the violence of the "western man." Which is a big part of what my play is about.
The repeated gestures and words are meant to question the transportive nature of violence often found in American mythmaking, in particular the Western genre, which often uses violent acts as a catalyst for change. How men become heroes by way of the gun. That kind of thing.
Without spoiling anything, the scene we use is meant to set up Marlon Brando's redemption, his riding-off-into-the-sunset moment. A moment that follows a great deal of death, by the way. But the repetition keeps the characters trapped. Violence is not transporting. Rather, they are caught in a loop made by violence. One steeped in heteronormativity, whiteness, and aggressive masculinity. In the end (as much as there can be one), heroes aren't heroes. There is no redemption. No great victory. Just violence. Just death.
Nate: Now that I think of it, One-Eyed Jacks makes the connection of violence and masculinity pretty explicit: Karl Malden's character is named Dad! Considering that, Brando's vendetta against him probably has some Freudian undertones that maybe connect back to Jensen's influences. How did One-Eyed Jacks become the focal point for the play? Was it a direct inspiration?
Jerrod: One-Eyed Jacks came late to the party, actually, after a lot of time and some research. First, I was drawn to the idea of writing a piece with repeated gestures. One of those vague instincts you have but are not yet sure of, so you let it sit and collect data. But the original idea to do something with repeated gestures came from seeing a few dance pieces. Works by Pina Bausch and Bobbi Jene Smith. For me, there was something really special about the repetition in their pieces that deepened the storytelling. Funny and weird and tragic and very human. These were very formative experiences and I knew I wanted to do something that used repetition as a narrative device and metaphor, I just wasn't sure what. So I let it sit and collect data.
And while it sat, I also got a little obsessed with Western movies. Or maybe I always have been, but I started to really dig into the psychology of the genre. The things I mentioned before about the knot of violence, masculinity, and mythmaking. I had just finished writing another play called Gregory Peck, a full-length monologue in which a hunter talks about various familial traumas to a fawn he shot while hunting its mother. One of the things the hunter talks about is the 1950 Gregory Peck film The Gunfighter and in talking about it reveals, among other things, his complicity in a chain of violence.
It was the idea of a chain of violence, framed by the Western genre, that brought that old instinct about repetition into focus. It all clicked and made perfect, tragic sense. I realized pretty early that I wanted to adapt an existing work; that I wanted to use the language of the genre and its icons. And for practical reasons I knew the movie would have to be in the public domain. But I watched a ton of movies, first looking at the big names like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and John Wayne. All the movies I watched have scenes like the one I use from One-Eyed Jacks - that moment of redemption through violence. But One-Eyed Jacks worked on multiple levels, many of which are subtle and don't necessarily live on the page but nevertheless inform the work.
For one, I liked that Rio (Brando's character) tries to escape the chain of violence in the third act but can't. And I liked that the film tries to be subversive but ultimately engages in many of the same old tropes (its hero still finds redemption through violence), like the movie itself is caught up in a chain of violence it can't escape. And on an even more meta level, I liked that the making of the movie, Brando's one and only time behind the camera, was steeped in aggression and masculinity. There are a number of examples here but the fact that even Stanley Kubrick, the film's first director, lost his stomach for arguing and left the project is telling enough.
But finally, I really just loved the scene. It's one filled with the promise of life and love, which is in conflict with the proceeding scene and its death, anger, and terror. The switch between the two is a weird and awkward beat, and I think it will be nice to bounce between the two as the repetition cycles through.
Anyway, that was a long-winded way of saying it all kind of got pieced together as time did its thing.
Nate: You're looking back at classic 20th Westerns, many of which were themselves looking back toward the 19th century, but today we're still trapped in an endless loop of gun violence committed by men. Do you feel the play speaks to our present moment, was that on your mind at all as you conceived the work?
Jerrod: Oh yeah, the current crisis of gun violence was absolutely on my mind. For me, the device of repetition is a (probably pretty on the nose) metaphor for that endless loop of gun violence we experience nearly every news cycle. How it feels unending. Hopeless and absurd. How even as bystanders we are trapped, made into witnesses of trauma. I'm not sure how the audience will react, but I suspect seeing Louisa scream in terror over and over again, denied a happy ending, will feel something adjacent to our own terror. I didn't mention this before, but another reason why I chose this scene is because it doesn't show the violence. Rather, it shows the effects of violence and the tension it spawns. The aftermath. The terror of watching another news alert about another tragedy.
I'm not sure how the play will handle all of this, to be honest. There's still a lot that needs to be explored, most of which I won't know until we begin rehearsals and get a chance to develop some ideas, which I'm very excited to get started on.
Nate: Can you tell me a little more about the ?! Festival where the play will be debuting? Are you familiar with any of the other artists presenting at the festival?
Jerrod: I'm very excited to explore these ideas at The Brick's ?! festival. The Brick itself is a beautifully inclusive and accessible theater company, for both emerging artists and its audience. It's been around for twenty years, I think, maybe a little more, and has created an incredible home for the experimental performing arts community in New York. This festival is a big part of that community. It's all about bringing together a diverse group of artists and forms to work out, as they put it, "disastrous" ideas. I'm not familiar with any of the other artists in the festival, which means I'm excited to make a bunch of brilliant new friends and future collaborators!
Nate: That sounds like an exciting community to be a part of. Good luck with preparations and rehearsals!
Have you been doing much reading lately, what are you getting into?
Jerrod: I end up reading a lot as I work on a project. Usually a bunch of different plays. And usually plays I've read multiple times. Sources of inspiration, I guess. While I worked on death as repetition I read Heart's Desire by Caryl Churchill. It's also a play that resets and replays scenes, and I wanted to see how she went about it. The narrative is deceptively simple. A family waits for their grown daughter to arrive for a visit. Through the resetting many different scenarios play out and what seemed very straight forward becomes incredibly complex and even tragic. Churchill is an absolute master in disrupting form in the most beautifully affecting way. I reread many of her plays as often as I can - they've taught me so much.
I also just finished writing a series of short monologues about the sacred nature of everyday objects and while I was writing I read Will Eno, another one of my favorite playwrights. His are long-form monologues, but I reread Thom Pain (based on nothing) and Wakey, Wakey. It's fun to see how other writers deal with the specific language of the monologue, and I really love Eno's voice. Another playwright whose work has taught me a lot.
The short monologues ended up having a bit of a poetry vibe to them, so I kept a few collections close by. Mainly Patterson by William Carlos Williams and Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer. Her collection, which tracks one day of her life and all its grandeur of everydayness, was particularly inspiring. And I don't have any of her collections, but I read a ton of Stevie Smith online. I probably read her poem "The Galloping Cat" a dozen times or more. I love her use of repeated words and phrases (I guess repetition might be becoming a bit of a thing for me).
Outside of all of that, the most recent book I read for fun was Zama by the Argentinean writer Antonio Di Benedetto. It's narrated by Don Diego de Zama, basically a bureaucrat for the Spanish crown, while he's stationed in remote Paraguay in the late eighteenth century. He's not a very likeable character. Actually very pathetic. He spends the book waiting to be reappointed, failing at many things, and indulging in paranoid grudges. His obsessions and delusions eventually lead him into a bit of a nightmare of personal failure. But the kind happily blamed on others. Like I said, he isn't a very likeable character. I guess the book is part of a "trilogy of expeciation," and I really look forward to checking out the other two. This book was actually made into a movie a few years ago, which I also recommend.
Nate: That's some great reading, I love William Carlos Williams and Stevie Smith, I'll look into the other writers. I'm drawn to repetition in poetry as well, nothing breaks my heart harder than a tight villanelle! Also, your description of Caryl Churchill's play reminded me a bit of Alain Resnais' film Last Year at Marienbad, an encounter being re-interpreted as it is continuously re-told.
We've been discussing some works, including your own, that dramatize and complicate the act of storytelling. So, in that vein, I wanted to bring up a devastating short novel I read recently called So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, originally published in 1980. I had the chance to go pretty deep on this one for a writing assignment and it was quite a mindblow.
The book has an interesting origin, which is detailed in Barbara Burkhardt's biography William Maxwell: A Literary Life. When Maxwell was a child, he was friends with a boy whose father murdered his neighbor. Memories of the crime haunted the author through his life and decades later he decided to try writing about it. He drafted a story based on his memories, which he believed to be accurate. But when he later researched the murder he discovered that his memories were fundamentally wrong, down to essential details like the number and identity of the victims and the location of the crime. The falseness of his memories was what inspired him to write So Long, See You Tomorrow. It's an autobiographical work that directly confronts the fictional quality of autobiography. But there's a bit of a postmodern magic trick going on because even though he carefully establishes the impossibility of knowing the past (he even refers to the past as a "lie"), when he finally recounts (or invents) the circumstances leading to the murder it could not feel more real, it's absolutely convincing and gut-wrenching.
At the beginning of the book, Maxwell notes that the murder left him with a lifelong feeling of guilt. We don't know what the guilt could be referring to at first but (and I don't think this is a spoiler really, it's a thread throughout the novel) we find out that after the murder took place, Maxwell had a chance encounter with his friend (the murderer's son) and they passed by without acknowledging one another; they never talked again. His failure to speak to his friend is the source of his guilt and the novel - an elegant act of speech - is his penance. He can't know what really happened and he can't comfort his friend. But he can imagine what occurred and speak on behalf of an innocent survivor. I'm literally getting choked up right now just thinking about it, it's truly beautiful.
I think these ideas maybe resonate a bit with death as repetition. In So Long, See You Tomorrow we see a man seeking retribution through gun violence but instead initiating a cycle of trauma and silence. Maxwell is a relative bystander, but even he is drawn to imagining the crime over and over, remembering it, misremembering it, researching it, writing it, re-writing it. That kind of mirrors the repetitive form of your play, the emphasis on the cyclical, endless quality of violence, as well as the failure of violence to provide redemption.
Jerrod: I haven't read So Long, See You Tomorrow, but will check it out as soon as I can. Your description alone is beautiful and affecting. And it certainly sounds like what I'm aiming to do with my play is in conversation with what Maxwell articulated of his experience. I'm so taken with the ways in which violence impacts its witnesses. That Maxwell, though a bystander, carried with him a great deal of guilt and trauma, much of which he didn't even understand at first.
I'm
beginning to understand that a big part of death as repetition is
about the lingering impact of violence on the witness. There is the
chain violence that one violent act breeds, but there is also the guilt, shame,
and hopelessness that's forced upon those along the edges. Louisa, the
audience, someone watching the news, Maxwell, the little boy who grows up
believing masculinity is defined by these forms of mythmaking. The list is
endless. Our own dumb, hopeless loop.
