In spring 2004 poets Peter Gizzi, Kevin Killian and Aaron Kunin uncovered Jack Spicer’s dramatic version of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story, “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), amid the Spicer papers donated to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, by the poet’s brother, Holt Spicer, and his executor, the late Robin Blaser. Its appearance in The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 [pre-orders by subscription only: using a credit card, or via direct mailorder] marks its first publication.

Spicer submitted Young Goodman Brown (1946) for a grade, receiving an A- and these anonymous comments (published here exclusively) from his professor:

This seems to me about the most successful dramatization of the story that could be achieved. I have a few questions to ask; and as you will note, they imply certain criticisms, but none organic. The plan of the play is not, I think, much improvable. After all, how can you beat Hawthorne, Eliot and Sophocles, not to mention Spicer. The form in general, then, we pass over. I think allegorical morality plays must be given the highly stylized presentation you manage here, in the Greek mode. As far as I can see, the form is almost exactly that of the formal stasimon-episode alternation, and I think I detect the pathos scene, the catastrophe and the lamentation.

Inquiries:

1. Why do you allow YGB to be saved? So that you can blind him in good Sophoclean style, or as a commentary on the rest? (Or is he the symbolic figure of Milton) . . .

2. Why a Chorus of corpses? (A) to add macabre note; (B) to indicate the dead are no worse off than the living; or what? Why wouldn’t it be more effective if the chorus turns out to be made up of YGB’s townsfolk themselves?

3. Your irrepressible sarcastic note, the Spicer trade mark perhaps, sticks out in this, in a passage of somewhat plethoric ghoulishness, which promotes a laugh just at the wrong place; to wit, the broomstick-riding of Goody Whatsis. Maybe I am especially sensitive to this sort of thing, but whereas I can take the Devil seriously enough (unlike most Californians), I can’t withhold a grin at the broomstick routine.

4. Don’t you think the dialogue is colloquial to a degree that mars the effect of the play? I think you are trying to write a morality play which, like the plays of Chekhov, can be taken as a joke, and can also be taken quite seriously. (If, indeed, you weren’t writing satire.)

5. What’s the advantage of employing 4 actors (or 2 ea. actors & actresses) to squat on stage & say nary a word. If you are only using 1 voice for the choruses, I think you might do better to put them in another shape (as suggested above), or integrate ’em into the story line, or leave them as the merest outsiders . . . picnic-ers, leaning against the proscenium, or whatever your inventive imagination can contrive.

Comparing this to the script, one can see where Spicer flouted each of the professor’s recommendations.

Killian’s Halloween, 2005 production of the play at the San Francisco Poetry Center featured Brandon Brown in the lead role, Dodie Bellamy as his wife, Faith; Spicer’s friends Lewis Ellingham and Landis Everson played the Deacon and the Minister respectively; Killian played the tempter. Here is Killian’s photographic record:

Landis Everson

Ben Mazer, who with Jason Morris, Rodney Koeneke and Taylor Brady, played the First Chorus

Part of our fantastic stage set which really did look spooky from the audience.  This is the famous Halloween Spooky Tree available at Spirit stores everywhere (advantage to staging the play on Halloween, the spirit stores are open)

Kelly Holt played Goody Cloyse

Dodie Bellamy played the doomed Faith in a “Corpse Bride” outfit from the Spirit Store.  She made her entrance to the music of Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen,” the most Godforsaken song we could think of.

*   *   *   *   *

1st C:

When will it start?

2nd C:

He’ll be here soon. The Black Man is waiting for him. It’s one of their nights tonight.

1st C:

Yes, but no one has come yet.

2nd C:

Except us. [Both look slowly around the full circle of the audience including them.] There are too many of us here. Can there be enough blood [to] feed us all?

1st C:

There always is. It’s surprising how much blood the heart holds. I remember –Do you hear someone coming?

2nd C:

Just the wind in the trees. Hear the wind rattle the trees. Just a quiet forest full of corpses.

1st C:

It must be his wife that’s keeping him. Maybe she kept him a longer time tonight over dinner. Maybe he had to fix the broken stair-step before he left. Maybe she’s standing on the stair step now, sobbing and looking toward the woods. The pink ribbons in her hair are bobbing as her face cries.

2nd C:

Does she think he’s being unfaithful?

1st C:

They’ve only been married three months.

[Laughter, then silence.]

2nd C:

I hear him coming.

1st C:

Someone ought to pray for him.

Fiona Templeton is a figure so prominent in our understanding of today’s poets theater practice that we completely failed to notice that she had already written a number of accomplished plays before our 1985 cut-off date (“well yes,” she said dryly, “I’ve been at this game since 1975”) and she must have been just about the last person we asked once this omission sunk in.

Templeton’s play Against Agreement (1982) has a loose, open structure like the intersticed netting of a hammock, belied by the increasingly difficult constraints poured across its surface, like glues of varying origins and flavors, by the elegant prompts of her “Characters and Structural Characteristics (and Ploys).” She describes it as “game structure,” wherein characters are “ways of behaving in relation to others.” Hence the lead roles are synonymous with the collaborators, who probably deserve equal billing in performance: Fiona Templeton and Peter Stickland realizing the piece at The Red Bar in New York’s East Village, 1982. But Against Agreement is a collaboration in performance if not in script, and the mere act of anthologizing it as a text reinforces its thematic and gestural self-reflexivity. The “Time Diagram” referred to on page 453 is both extraneous (literarily) and essential (to a production).

The absence of “Peter’s text” marks “contradictory simultaneities,” the accommodation of unforeseen and subsequent tandems. (While, the song lyrics cited on the diagram reflect the piece’s basically claustrophobic aura as well as a tin pan alley motif the setting, itself perhaps somewhat adaptable, already suggests: “I’ve got you under my skin,” “Me and my shadow / strolling down the avenue,” and “Should I reveal / exactly how I feel?” as examples.) Peter and Fiona progress from “agreement,” past a pure state of uninvolved disputation, to “something else” that transcends but looks a whole lot like absolute disagreement. This narrative maintains the limpidity of its surface bubbling along against a large cast of bar patrons, while aiming for a gradual decline in naturalism.

Staged in a bar, Templeton’s piece replicates the classic “off-Broadway” conventions of the saloon play (think The Iceman Cometh, or Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life) but changes them up with her “Scenic Metronomic Drunk,” her “Rhythmic Metronomic Barmaid,” her chorus of bartenders each with his or her own scraps of personality, the traits of character bestowed by the writer to be really worked up by the actors. Can you imagine, originally “Steve” was played by actor Steve Buscemi, since those days a well known film performer, but in the production photos of Against Agreement impossibly young, his mournful features like a child painted up like a clown’s.

For the original production, Templeton wrote these notes, helpful to those of us trying to think about the difference between reading and, well, life:

In the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the complex perspective of the trompe l’oeil behind the tiny stage is best seen from one seat in the theatre—the Duke’s, to whom actors would turn to deliver speeches that ostensibly addressed another actor. In the cinema, everyone sees the same because it is bigger. In conventional proscenium, the art consists in making everyone look at the same aspect and not see what does not conform to the illusion, or, if there is no illusion, the point.

The linear nature of playscripts suggests that nothing happens simultaneously. This is a feature of writing:  even where a narrative is broken, or there is none, one can only read one thing at a time. Although a great deal more went on in a Shakespearean production than he wrote as text, the texts are taken as the model for academic playwriting, which suffers from its literary analogy. This need not be a feature of theatre, where the inclusion of space allows contradictory simultaneities (as in life).

Agreement is not multiple. In contradiction, a choice is necessary and mutuality impossible. In paradox, a mutual impossibility must be apparent though not prohibitive. In a mathematical tautology, the negative is just as true.

If you think I’m your enemy, and I do not, who is the enemy? If I think you are my friend, and you do not, who is the friend?

Against #l. the best. the biggest, the first, the only, the winner, the right, the end.

[Kevin Killian & David Brazil, culled from The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, forthcoming early 2010. Drawing and photograph by Fiona Templeton, used by permission, all rights reserved, (c) Fiona Templeton and Patrick Durgin for Kenning Editions. Pre-orders by subscription only: using a credit card, or via direct mailorder.]