Theatre in Review: The Designated Mourner (Public Theater/Theatre for a New Audience)

	Larry Pine, Wallace Shawn, Deborah Eisenberg. Photo: Joan Marcus

The Designated Mourner reminded me of the old Monty Python sketch in which Neil Innes, playing a Bob Dylan-style folk balladeer, tells the audience, "I've suffered for my art. Now it's your turn."

This is because The Designated Mourner, like some of Wallace Shawn's earlier works (including Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Fever), intended as intellectual provocations, are in fact trials of endurance constructed as lengthy harangues in which the abrasive effect of Shawn's authorial voice is meant to eat away at the audience's smug bourgeois complacency. In The Designated Mourner, the effort backfires; one is likely to leave the theatre not contemplating Shawn's dark conclusions about human nature but meditating on the sheer affectedness of the writing and direction.

The Designated Mourner is not a play. Instead, it is a prose piece for three voices. (In an interview in The Paris Review, Shawn once admitted that he has difficulty writing dialogue, preferring direct address as his default mode.) The main voice belongs to Jack (Shawn), who amusingly describes himself as "a former student of English literature who went downhill from there." Jack is married to Judy, the daughter of Howard, an eminent poet and essayist. Howard is described as "a man born into the heart of the ruling elite" of an unnamed country with Fascist leanings.

Despite his provenance, we are told, Howard "knew himself to be an enemy of the existing order." Indeed, Jack is awed by Howard's "capacity for contempt" and is bemused by the family's bohemian ways. (With some embarrassment, he describes how Judy sometimes appeared topless in front of her father.) Jack also admits to being "a vague hanger-on" to their entourage and adds, "I couldn't get near to the great writer." Indeed, Jack is at some pains to portray Howard as occupying a hermetically sealed world of intellectual self-gratification, communicating only with the other members of his intellectual and aesthetic elite. Howard is present in the play but stops short of being a full character. He has much less stage time than Jack and Judy, and, in Larry Pine's performance, his lines are delivered in a rapid-fire murmur that makes them hard to hear, even though the actor is miked. (More about this below.)

A short story's worth of material stretched to three hours, The Designated Mourner follows Jack's growing realization that he is largely immune to the seductions of literature and art and that his sense of self is nothing more than a collection of physical sensations -- mostly for food and sex -- with little or no continuity from one day to the next. "I feel like a criminal trying to stick to the story he told yesterday," he says. "My body is simply a shell, waiting to be filled by one person and then another." As the country falls under the rule of a military dictatorship, Howard and his circle become objects of suspicion, ending up in prison and ultimately being executed. By then, Jack is long gone, ignoring politics and preferring to "repose in a delicious square of chocolate," amid other enjoyments. As for the fate of his nation, he says, "The government was kicking people's teeth in. One might possibly trip on a few teeth, and that could be annoying." As anyone with any kind of higher consciousness -- of art, politics, or anything remotely spiritual -- is wiped out, Jack, realizing that "everyone on earth who could read John Donne was dead," becomes the designated mourner for a culture he never really appreciated or understood; unlike his fellow citizens, he at least knows that something has been lost.

Before The Designated Mourner collapses under its own ponderousness, there are many turns of phrase worth savoring, including Jack's definition of a highbrow as "someone who saves the Rembrandt from the burning building, rather than the baby;" Judy's description of the underclass as those "made to eat dirt and kept away from the songs of Schubert;" and Jack's account of his departure from Judy and Howard ("It was my body that ran out of that house."), a comment that is a devastating assessment of his debased state. But the terror at the heart of The Designated Mourner remains muted, mummified under many layers of verbiage as Jack talks and talks and talks, with Judy chiming in from time to time. The lack of specifics is another problem; the world of the play is an all-purpose house of political horrors, so vaguely rendered as to lack any reality whatsoever.

This production is a revival of the original New York staging of 2000; the director, Andre Gregory, and the cast are the same. It is difficult to see what Gregory has contributed, since all three performances are out of sync with one another. The effect of The Designated Mourner depends on our developing a sense of kinship with Jack; the more we learn about him the more we should be appalled, yet somehow complicit in his deadly indifference. But Shawn's performance is suffused with the same mannerisms used by him when playing lovable fussbudgets in countless films -- the ultra-nasal intonation, the sing-song delivery -- and listened to at length it becomes painful to the ear.

At least you can understand what he is saying. As Judy, Deborah Eisenberg, a writer of note but not a trained actress, is trapped by her lack of technique; even with heavy miking, her delivery is muddled and indistinct. (Why all three actors must be amplified in the tiny Susan Stein Shiva Theater is a mystery; it's a choice that adds another unwelcome layer of artifice and does nothing to make Eisenberg and Pine more intelligible.) Furthermore, Eisenberg, who has a strong natural presence, isn't acting so much as reciting the text; her minimalist approach makes Shawn's work look phony and overthought.

The combination of extreme length and clashing styles takes its toll. By the time we reach the climax -- in which Jack, having lost any sense of humanity, urinates and defecates on a volume of Donne's poems, largely because he can -- any sense of disturbance has long been replaced by an awareness of Shawn's button-pushing ways. Intended as a powerful vision of Western civilization in collapse, The Designated Mourner plays more like a shocker for subscribers of the New York Review of Books, in which the victims are books rather than the usual pretty girls.

Given the scant details offered up by the script, it's not clear why Eugene Lee was pressed to deliver a set that extends into the house and foyer, but anyway, the theatre is dressed in weathered wood, as if to suggest that the characters are in a hideout somewhere. Bruce Odland's sound design is the usual generic mashup of sinister, unidentifiable effects that is so popular in avant-garde productions. If you saw The Testament of Mary and Alan Cumming's Macbeth, you know what I mean. At least Jennifer Tipton provides her usual seamless lighting and Dona Granata's costumes are suitable to each performer.

Shawn has many admirers, but to my mind his exercises in theatrical anhedonia are becoming increasingly difficult to take. In his entirely admirable effort at shaking us up, he confuses punishment with provocation. There is a dark despair at the heart of The Designated Mourner, and a vexing question: In a post-religious world, in which high culture no longer exerts any influence, what is left to define us as human? It's enough to keep you up at night, but there has to be a better way to ask it. -- David Barbour