There’s a phrase in Japanese, “灯台下暗し” which Google will translate as “The grass is greener.” What it literally means, however, is “It’s darkest under the lighthouse.” The point is not that “Things are better somewhere else,” but rather more subtle: that the closer one is to a problem, the harder it is for one to see the problem itself –particularly when it’s inside of you –while everyone else sees it as plain as, well, a beacon of light in the darkness.
The phrase neatly summarizes the plight of Sofia in Mara Nelson-Greenberg’s Do You Feel Anger? Sofia is an empathy coach hired to teach people about their feelings yet won’t even answer her mother’s phone calls while her mom and dad are amid an ugly divorce. Darkness under the lighthouse.
But Ms. Nelson-Greenberg doesn’t take this premise for typical American melodrama. Instead it is a springboard into an incredible burlesque. Take a goody-good empathy teacher, throw her into an office setting with three men who have zero handle on emotions — like, less of a handle than most toddlers — and give her the impossible task of teaching them empathy. Even better, make the office a debt collection bureau where people are already known to be nasty, sorry excuses for humans second only to ICE agents. Add a token female character who gets mugged every time she goes to get coffee. Sit back and watch hilarity ensue.
And ensue it does. This is one of the funniest plays I’ve seen on a Seattle stage in years. The belly laughs are aided by the sacred roughness of student theater production, and by the complete commitment on part of the young cast to parody these grotesque adult types from their detached purview as students who’ve never had to work in an office, least of all one like this. Allan Xuan gives a lovely performance as the boss, Jon, who seems to be the reasonable one, but only just. By contrast, Camden Nauroth and Cash Hoffman are completely and utterly unreasonable, indeed unhinged as the knuckleheaded collection agents whom Sofia is supposed to turn into functioning adults. Both are brilliant in different ways. Mr. Nauroth is perfect at combining the poetic, the scurrilous, and the clearly stupid in his character, a crisp parody of the “sensitive” male that in real life nauseates any thinking human being. Mx. Hoffman by contrast explores the echt masculine trope of selfish machismo that is simultaneously violent and childish, like a little boy who never developed beyond the age of fart and piss jokes with temper tantrums that could easily be solved with a packet of Capri-Sun or Goldfish crackers.
Types. Grotesque. Burlesque. Darkness under the lighthouse. Belly laughs. All these things imply something: this play is satire. Or is it? The first three of the six scenes are completely unserious, with barely an obeisance toward what the playwright herself calls “the menace” in the play. They also avoid excessive psychology. And oh my goodness, someone took George Bernard Shaw’s advice about playwrighting seriously: Give all the knockdown, ten points to Gryffindor arguments to the antagonist, not to the person you’re supposed to like.
In Scene Four, all three of the office employees talk about personal emotions. But where Howie and Jordan end their confessions with high-fives and happy face stickers, Eva’s turns into unbridled horror and worse, awareness that she is horrified. Despite some misgivings about the way this plays out, the tone of the actors remains perfect and I accept it. However, the play shifts away from typology toward psychology. This puts the satire in grave danger. Satire is about social behavior. It’s about having a firm view on right and wrong, and raking the wrong over the coals. This is why most of the best satire in the world, from Aristophanes to South Park, is written by conservatives. Psychology interferes with the process.
Thus in Scene Five, the satire cracks. The playwright still obeys the Shaw rule of giving Jon all the good arguments, but not in the way I think she intends. I think she wants to show that Jon is wrong, an emblem of male power and violence, etc etc. But Jon isn’t wrong. Sofia is wrong. Jon wants to fix his men so that they can have fewer lawsuits. Sofia doesn’t know what the hell she wants, other than to continue to be employed. Yet the playwright states in the casting notes before the play:
More generally, this is a play about power, violence, and complicity. With that in mind re: your casting decisions, please be mindful of not perpetuating insidious stereotypes, and please be aware of what story you are telling based on the actors you cast in each role.
The problem is that casting decisions aren’t the issue the playwright thinks. A more vital issue is that the playwright thinks she knows what the play is about more than the actors and director. This is the intentional fallacy writ large. William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley already destroyed this notion back in 1946, and decades of writers like Barthes, Sontag, Eco, and nearly any other post-structuralist have gone even further in the demolition of what Sontag called “overcooperative authors.”
Furthermore, the ultimate goal of satire is to correct the incorrect. But the real incorrect behavior here is coming brass-balls into a dysfunctional family with the messianic belief you can make them see the light, when they simply want to be left alone. The author’s note suggests you to think that this dysfunctional family holds the power. She also wants you to think that there is “complicity,” presumably in things like Sofia wearing a dress under pressure in Scene Four. It’s not that simple.
In fact, Sofia holds the power. She’s the one who is hired as an expert to correct the office’s abuses. She’s the one whose form Jon has to fill out in order for his office to go back to “normal.” Without her signature, the office fails. Furthermore, it’s not complicity that’s the problem with Sofia wearing a dress and saying “norvis.” It’s that she’s disingenuous. She tells Eva to dump her boyfriend–then pretends herself to have a boyfriend. She tells Eva that she’s truly, deeply concerned about her muggings and abuse–then completely fails to defend her when Howie and Jordan sexually harass her because “they don’t mean to make you feel unsafe.” This is not just darkness under the lighthouse; it’s a supermassive black hole. Sofia herself is the one in need of correction, and if this were Aristophanes or Jonathan Swift or Dario Fo, she’d be tossed out of the office window into a dustbin or a common sewer, stripped of all pride.
If I’m unsympathetic to the ending of Scene Five, I absolutely call bullshit on the final Scene Six. Having a surreal vision of the other abused women in the bathroom and then having to run and call Mommy — the Mommy she’s ignored the entire play — is complete rubbish. Sofia has absolutely earned the state she’s in at the end of Scene Five. Let her deal with it, and let the audience think about it. Instead the playwright scripts a scene that is pure homily, as if to say “Oh sure, dear. You failed this time but Mother is always here to pick you up again, even if you never return my calls, or ever practice your much-ballyhooed empathy skill with me.” It rings more hollow and fake than a carbon fiber Liberty Bell and, frankly, to me illustrates the obnoxious cowardice of American playwrighting in the 21st Century, where everything needs a tidy resolution, where no one as bourgeois as Sofia ever really suffers from their unbridled arrogance, and where audiences never need to bear the discomfort of unanswered questions.
I don’t pin this on Devyn Mattson. She does an exceptional job making Sofia come to life. Given the constraints of the character and the playwright’s desire to make her into a victim, I think Ms. Mattson does the role a remarkable service just to make me not want to throttle her by Scene Two. I’m also a big fan of Gracie Jones as Eva, the infinitely put-upon “office girl” who understands the way the office works far, far better than the woman who comes to “make it all better.” She balances that mixture of manic shielding, fatalistic acceptance, and shattered purity quite well, and if anyone is sympathetic in the play, it is she. She has no power; she is the subject of violence. But she’s not “complicit.” On the contrary, she is in survival mode, literally trying to stay alive. Blame her, and be damned.
I would complain less about the playwright’s failure to follow through with her initial premise if it didn’t waste such an excellent play. It’s obvious Ms. Nelson-Greenberg has the necessary skill for satire. But satire isn’t safe. Failing to do it all the way isn’t just an aesthetic problem. It’s a moral one. Pull one punch too many and satire degenerates into mere buffoonery. Dario Fo called this sfottò and noted its danger:
A pioneering cabaret theater, the Bagaglino was a Roman theater that, already twenty years ago, was adopting a distinctly far-right political tone, shamelessly reactionary right-wing, openly fascist. The Bagaglino group and its work always contained ferocious caricatures of workers, trade unionists, communists, leftists, along with a good-natured, winking, and captivating caricature of the men and culture in power….
[This sfottò is] a very old, buffoonish way of thinking, which comes from detachment. It plays with external attributes while never touching on the fundamental problem of a serious criticism, which is the grotesque analysis of the behavior, the ironic evaluation of the position and ideology of these characters.
As Fo notes, people in power love to be caricatured. It reaffirms their status as important in your brain. If those caricatures do not call one’s ideology or nature into question, then the artist is praised. If it dares to rise to the level of satire, then the artist is castigated, shot at, driven out of the country. I suspect Ms. Nelson-Greenberg does not wish to be driven out or shot at. Neither did Dario Fo, or Lenny Bruce, or Aristophanes, or the staff of Charlie Hebdo. But the decision isn’t between being cozy at home or being driven out. The decision is between tearing down the house of the master and serving the master colorful dinners nightly in a revealing ensemble. I’d like to think American playwrights can finally stop being so culinary.
