Spirited Away

Photo by Matt Smith

When it comes to showing us the way, political theater is about as dead as political discourse in this country. On the campaign trail, we watch and hear the prevalence of smears, mangled logic, lies, hysteria and rage in the place of openhearted discussion. Slogans may tidily sum up fury, but they don’t actually penetrate an idea. “Strong leadership.” “Flip-flop.” “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot.” In this polarized nation, the hecklers have seized the day, leading the way to a greater understanding of absolutely nothing.

A recent, telling example appeared on the editorial page of The New York Timesshortly after the Republican National Convention. Blowhard columnist William Safire, seeking to prove that both God and the American people are on his side, argued that the president’s 11-point lead in the then latest Newsweek poll demonstrated that, contrary to the whining of “thumb-sucking” liberals, the nation is not polarized at all, that the larger wisdom of the Republican agenda made itself apparent in the swing states, and that Democrats should now wipe the snot off their noses and retire to their corner. It was, as usual, an exercise in derision passing for discussion. Three days later, eminent pollster John Zogby confirmed that, in light of so many voters not being home over the Labor Day weekend, the president’s 11-point upward “bounce” was actually a mirage, that, as of September 14, the presidential horserace remains neck-and-neck. Safire’s premise was, as usual for Safire, planted in marshmallow goop.

Yes, this isa conflicted nation in which one camp is shouting at but not speaking to the other. As a character in Federico Fellini’s last film points out to the noisy people around him, as he pokes his head into a wishing well, “If you’d all just stop talking for a moment, we might actually understand something.”

In the theater, little Bushes are springing up on stages all over the map. Locally, you can find the U.S. president in plays at Evidence Room in Homewrecker, and at Sacred Fools in Dubya 2004. He’s also been sighted recently at Hollywood’s MET Theater, Actors’ Gang Theater and, some time ago, at Santa Monica’s City Garage. Not surprisingly, in New York Tony Kushner incarnated him last month for a work in progress (Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy). And in London, David Hare’s Stuff Happensand Tim Robbins’ Embeddedfeature our incumbent as a central player. In none of these plays does Mr. Bush appear even remotely sympathetic or halfway intelligent. And though it may be deeply satisfying to vent one’s frustration through art, the half-truth conclusion “He’s an idiot” is not a signpost on any road to wisdom.

 

Enter Tom Jacobson,among our city’s most brilliant dramatists. His new play, Ouroboros — a reference to the circularity of a snake eating its own tail — at Road Theater Company, is a political play in the abstract, a theological one in the concrete. If you’re swimming in the sewage of the current election, Ouroborosmust be seen for the way it floats above histrionic political cesspits, offering the wisdom and beauty of a broader view of what’s in our control and what isn’t. Ouroborosis a heady play, but eerily emotional at the same time. It’s political only to the extent that its core elements, religion and spirituality, are playing such a pivotal role in current American politics.

As a backdrop, Jacobson takes us to the art and architecture of Medieval and Renaissance Italy, with its angels and devils and ghoulish Byzantine influences that are really the source material for the good-versus-evil mentality of our pop culture and, of course, our current White House administration. The contemporary characters, however — Americans abroad — are trying to find moral nuances in their own bad behaviors against this militantly harsh canvas. As in Jacobson’s play, Sperm, presented last year by Circle X Theater Company, Ouroboros(which is considerably more audience friendly), is about the American Character and, like Sperm, is set on foreign shores. Spermstudied an American whaler–con artist who stumbled into the French Revolution. Ouroboros looks at two unrelated modern American couples, refugees touring Italy in order to find some relief from the spiritual malaise of home. It’s as though Jacobson sees Europe as a beacon with some imaginary statue calling to America, “Give us your tired, your confused, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

A woman named Catherine (Shauna Bloom) gazes into the mummified head of her namesake, St. Catherine, and, losing her mind (as she does routinely on antidepressants), sees a reflection of herself. In a further underscoring of the play’s theological impulses, another of the characters, Margaret (Taylor Gilbert) is an Episcopalian postulate nun who literally lost her singing voice after observing the death of a friend from AIDS; in her friend’s final moments, she says, he claimed to have seen heaven, and in it God’s throne — vacant. Her five-city trip, accompanied by a gay choir director named Tor (Paul Witten), is a pilgrimage to Milan where perhaps the opera at La Scala will trigger the return of her singing voice.