Val Kilmer's Citizen Twain and Matthew McCray's Eternal Thou

The constellations appeared as projected images in two productions last weekend. One was a workshop of a play-in-development, closing the day this goes to print, written, directed and performed by Val Kilmer, called Citizen Twain. It was performed in the Masonic Lodge of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Having agreed not to review the work-in-progress, i.e., to withhold expressions of opinion on it, there's no breach in revealing what has already appeared in the press: that Kilmer, in an excellent impersonation of Twain — yes, that judgment breaks the rules a bit, but I doubt they'll mind that part — embodies the ghost of Twain floating through ether into our corner of the 21st century.

PHOTO BY MATTHEW MCCRAY

Eternal Thou: Vonzell Carter, left, Liam Springthorpe, Rachel Appelbaum, Jenny Greer, Jeffrey Johnson

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Atwater Village Theatre

3269 Casitas Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Category: Theaters

Region: Northeast L.A.

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More About

• Val Kilmer
• Matthew McCray
• Mark Twain
• Martin Buber
• Atwater Village

The other production employing a projected image of the heavens is the world premiere of Matthew McCray's Eternal Thou, a sci-fi head trip sprung from the writings of Austrian-Jewish mystic Martin Buber (1878-1965), and examining the relationship between the continually evolving Internet and the people who use it. The play opened over the weekend as a guest production at Atwater Village Theater.

The larger purpose of Citizen Twain is to ponder heaven and hell, and a certain relationship between God and a sometimes embittered humorist, Twain, struggling with life's pointless agonies. Even the excerpts from Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn rendered by Kilmer focus on human cruelty and folly, posing the implicit question of where God may stand on these matters. Hence, the postage-stamp image of thin, crusty Twain, with a shock of silver hair and a crook nose (Kilmer disappeared behind the makeup) staring out at the audience against a backdrop of swirling fog, or against the mighty Mississippi River — the waterway Twain turned into the emblem of a national search for identity, if not purpose. And, of course, those stars in the firmament.

Kilmer is a Christian Scientist, and there are references in his play to Twain's testy relationship with the founder of that religion, Mary Baker Eddy. That relationship may be the basis of a movie Kilmer hopes to make, and this stage workshop of a script now seven years in the making — the production at the cemetery was the latest in a series of tryouts around town — has been discussed as an antecedent to that project.

In one segment of the play, Twain recounts the technological changes that occurred during his lifetime (1835-1910), stirring in him a rumination upon inventions that change the shape of our lives. Twain would have seen the arrival of the telegraph (when he was an infant), anesthetics and antibiotics (in the middle of his life), and the radio and the airplane (nearer the end of his life). These may have changed and saved lives, altered perceptions of where and how we can live and perhaps even our collective relationship to the heavens — especially as we were learning to soar physically in machines that transported us through clouds into an open sky, hurtling toward what Galileo could only glimpse through his telescope.

What remain constant, however, are the more troubling, intractable dimensions of the human character, oft cited by Twain, all circling around man's capacity for malice, which is unique to us among the species — the pleasure we take in causing misery to others, even of our own kind. This inalienable truth led Twain, with an army of authors before him and since, to speculate upon whether God was Himself a humorist or just overly weary when He created man. And this question prompted Kilmer to beam an image of the cosmos behind that of Samuel Clemens, who, behind all his homespun quips, kept asking what we're really made of.

In Eternal Thou, playwright-director Matthew McCray transports us from the invention of the rotary telephone (putting a swath of Bell operators out of work) to a future of androids capable of replicating human experience through circuitry.

The central idea underlying McCray's nonlinear, highly conceptual, at times fascinating and at times impenetrable play is Buber's distinction between "I – it" and "I – thou." The former refers to the more common relationship we use to perceive the world, placing ourselves at the center of things and then objectifying whatever or whomever we're interacting with. This, in Buber's view, is both the foundation of solipsism, of the kind of cruelty that Twain found so vexing, and of war (Buber spent much of his life wrestling with Israeli-Palestinian conflict). "I – it" occurs when we mistake a dialogue for what's actually a monologue, a "discussion" between ourselves and our predetermined view of the other.

The more rarefied ideal of "I – thou" occurs with the click of actually listening to people or entities beyond our own skins, engaging in a discussion based upon our ability to absorb their ideas with an open heart. The most ideal manifestation of "I – thou," Buber believed, was in any individual's relationship with God. With "I- thou," a person can transform and be transformed — the destination being enlightenment.

McCray investigates how our relationship with technology, as a stand-in for God, can transform us, and his view is neither idyllic nor cynical. There are a couple of soap-box scenes railing against the threat to an open network neutrality — "a principle that advocates no restrictions by Internet providers or governments on consumers' access to applications, data, users or businesses within the Internet" — a threat the FCC has so far called "unacceptable." For the most part, however, McCray dramatizes an evolution of technology with more irony than indignation.