Liar Liar, House on Fire

Photo by Erin Fiedler

When poet W.B. Yeats famously proclaimed that myths and legends hold deeper truths than facts, it’s a shame he wasn’t around to read Henry Waxman’s just-released, prodigiously documented report on the hundreds of lies and deceptions that have been uttered by the Bush administration over the past 15 months. Yeats was traipsing across the Irish countryside with Lady Gregory, the pair of them gathering and recording local yarns, to compare and contrast them with stories from other regions. It turned out that people from all corners of the planet — Jews and Hindus, Celts and the Sioux, people who had never met and never had any contact with the others’ literatures — came up with similar fairy tales and rural legends that helped define who they were. Yeats concluded from his research that in the art of bending facts into fiction, populations, like plants, lean toward the light.

Of course, Yeats was referring to an organic literary process rather than a manipulative one, which directs populations to the shade — Bill Clinton on network TV, wagging his finger and swearing to us that he never had sex with that woman. A poetical lie can hold a larger truth, but the cynical lie mangles whimsy with duplicity, giving innocent fairy tales a bad name. That’s what Jayson Blair did. And Tony Blair and Connie Rice and Donnie Rum, and the clergy who persecuted Galileo. Given the evidence, some of them must have recognized the possibility that they mighthave missed God’s point, that Earth might not anchor the solar system, or that a Tower Records outlet in downtown Basra might not be part of God’s greater vision. Still, they all drove their insistence with homespun fabrications, and even mortar and steel. When we abnegate facts and veracity for the formation of policies in conformity with predisposed views we hold of the world, we’re pissing on the Enlightenment.

These are very much the concerns of Tom Jacobson’s clever new verse play, Sperm(rendered entirely in iambic pentameter and presented by Circle X Theater Company at the 24th Street Theater). The play is adapted from Jacques Miroir’s 18th-century play, Cachalot. If you look up cachalot, it means sperm whale. If you look up Jacques Miroir, you’ll be looking for a very long time, because he doesn’t exist — obviously, nor does his play, though Jacobson dutifully explains in his “adapter’s note” that Jacques Miroir is “almost certainly a pseudonym.” Jacobson also rules out the possibility that Marie Antoinette was the play’s author. (Thanks, that’s very helpful.) Jacobson knows that he’s reinventing history, based on nonsense, for his own agenda. In fact, he’s satirizing that very reframing of historical legend, so prevalent among a small cadre of world leaders who might be said to be tossing around Democracy like a dog’s bone and watching while the hounds vie to retrieve it in their jaws.

His central character, Richard (Joel McHale), as in Dick, makes things up as well. He’s American, the only American in the play, and, if he’s to be believed, the bastard son of Thomas Jefferson. Richard’s a whaler (hence the joke of the title) and rabid proponent of Democracy, so he says. Given how he stumbles into the court of Louis XVI (Jim Anzide) and Marie Antoinette (Michaela Watkins) just as the guillotines of the French Revolution are being greased, you might say this Dick’s floated into the wrong port at the wrong time.

Fortunately for him, Louis XVI sees commercial possibilities in whale oil — the French economy is beached, so to speak, the peasants are livid, and the monarchy hasn’t been particularly sympathetic to the plight of the needy, or to France’s social fabric in general. The rich are very rich, and the starving poor are eating cake crumbs, when tossed in their direction. Only the perilous pursuit of oil can stem the rising tide of fury.

And through the idea of whale oil, Jacobson invents a fanciful parallel with fossil fuel, and how its use awakens the spirits of the fossils from which it came, as though the great leviathans represent a former, ancient civilization whose blood we’re now drinking, whose bones we’re now wearing in our corsets and as jewels, creatures who once walked the Earth as the titans of Atlantis before being forced back into the deep by changes in the climate.

Richard expresses this invented history after a whale hunt (partly narrated, partly enacted) in which he’s swallowed whole like you-know-who and spends an hour or two in the beast’s stomach, where he’s saturated in acid and stripped of his epidermis. When he finally emerges, bald-pated, semiconscious and blind, all Dick can utter are guttural whale noises (until the verse returns), as though possessed by the spirit of Moby what’s-his-name, as though belched back onto Earth like a newborn, or a reborn. That one scene is as fantastic as it is fantastical, played with an amalgam of adventure, horror and spirituality by co-directors Tara Flynn and Tim Wright on Richard Augustine’s transforming set of rope and cloth and a welded steel frame.