You are invited to participate in a discusion of ARANJUEZ . Use the comment function of this blog.
Handke's THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF ARANJUEZ premiered in Chicago this week.
and has received two interesting review so far, (1) by Tony Adler of the Chicago Reader.
https://twitter.com/taadler
tadler@chicagoreader.com
(2)
BY
Poetry has the incredible ability to use the aesthetics and rhythms of words to invoke a meaning far greater than the face value of a phrase. This ability to elevate a simple message is what makes watching spoken word poetry (and, really, any kind of spoken performance) so wonderful when done well. It becomes the job of the performer(s) and creative team to take the already heightened text and enhance its effect. Unfortunately, with Theatre Y’s production of The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez—a US/English premiere of a Peter Handke play—the team toed the line between aiding the text and hindering it, ultimately falling on the wrong side....
The translation and language of The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez are beautiful. While this is intentionally not a drama and it’s supposed to be a summer dialogue, relaxing and easy, that ease toes a dangerous line between laid-back and uninteresting. It quickly becomes too easy to zone out while they wax poetic at each other while seemingly looking to gain little if anything at all. With a lack of solid goals and an ebb and flow to the story that was devoid of forward momentum, any hope for a plot to follow is lost until you are blindsided by a surprisingly beautiful ending.
========
Adler is
first rate on the performance:
"A
2012 summer dialogue" by that formidable Austrian Peter Handke,
Aranjuez is as heavy in its way as any of the company's previous
efforts—and very, very European. It carries the weight extremely
well, though, under the direction of Zeljko Djukic, best known
locally as the founder of TUTA Theatre Chicago. Djukic's
nearly perfect directorial touch. His approach is light and playful,
sure, but more: It actually fulfills that ideal you hear tell so much
about, of creating a world. Defined in no small part by Natasha
Vuchurovich Dukich's costume and set designs, the atmosphere is so
richly allusive you could go for a swim in it. We're on the lake
where The Seagull takes place, at the Tuscan summerhouse
from Stealing Beauty, witnessing an idyll from a Truffaut film
(before all hell breaks loose). A bit involving an old parlor game
takes on marvelous resonances."
Handke's
opening of this
mytho-poeic text
--
“And
it’s summer again. And it’s another beautiful summer day. And
once again the woman and the man sit at a table out in the
open, under the sky. A garden. A terrace. Invisible yet audible
trees, more as premonition than as presence amidst a shallow summer
breeze whose fluttering pulse at times imposes its rhythm on the
scene. The table is garden variety, on the large side. The man and
the woman sit facing each other, at a certain distance, dressed
unobtrusively, the woman on the bright side, the man darker, timeless
the one as the other. The figures are timeless as well
outside whatever actual time it is and whatever historical or social
context; in
that
respect, the figures, too, exist more as premonitions than as
presence. At the outset the woman as well as the man - no eyes for
each other yet - hearken the rustling of invisible
leaves under the sky, under a sky which one imagines as wide, as
gentle as it is soothing, and do so for a long while.”
--thus
could not be better served by Zelko Ducik & the principals of
Theater Y.
Adler,
in some respects, is hip to
the kind of deep tic-tac-toe that is being played; in others I find
him evasively superficial and/or
plain wrong. Other
comments are worth dwelling on at some length.
"The
premise is disarmingly simple [1].
A Man and a Woman (youngish, but not too young) loll in a garden on
yet "another beautiful summer day." She wears a long,
white, breezy cotton gown of the type one can simply throw over one's
head to be dressed. Or undressed. He affects a beat-up, short-brimmed
Panama hat. He mostly sits at a rough grayed-wood picnic table,
slicing up biblical apples. She mostly orbits him. They've just
started playing a game in which he asks prying questions that she's
obliged to answer. He opens, of
course [2], with, "The first time, you and a man, how did
it go?" But her answer isn't similarly dopey; in fact, it
reminded me of Walt Whitman's account of making love to his own soul,
in "Song of Myself." "I mind how once we lay such a
transparent summer morning," Whitman wrote. "How you
settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me. . .
" And so it goes. Stimulus and unexpected response, eroticism
that's powerfully present yet
displaced, thickly,
into language—into games, stories, philosophy, poetry,
and sometimes into despair.
These discourses have a stilted
air [3] to them
in the new English translation by Michael Roloff and Scott Abbott.
Maybe that's appropriate[3].
After all, Handke's given us
characters who dream about the Pleiades, rhapsodize on the
properties of a robin, and reference authors from Tennessee Williams
and Eugene O'Neill to Ödön von Horváth. Then too, there's
something of the old man's
valediction[4] about Aranjuez, both for better and for
worse. Handke was 70 when the play premiered in German, and despite
all the fascinating summing up it does, it can also settle into
intellectual complacency[5].
The Woman, in particular, spouts
retrograde foolishness at times, constructed out of tired old shards
of the male gaze.[6]"
Thus,
Adler provides occasion to open a discussion about the kind of play
that ARANJUEZ is & is in Amerika
and
in the precincts of Sexual Perversity.
Some
initial comments were put on line a few weeks ago & I kept adding
to them as the premiere approached.
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2015/03/aranjuez-comments-for-world-english.html
=I=
The
Chicago performance may be the English premiere; however, the 1972
ARANJUEZ has had several German productions & French &
Spanish and Portuguese premieres - that is, it has a bit of a quick
past. Here the links to receptions of these productions.
Peter Handke's 'The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez' Receives Standing Ovation at the Lisbon-Estoril Film Festival
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-badt/peter-handkes-the-beautif_b_6163670.html
Moreover
ARANJUEZ is discussed in extenso
in Oberender's four part conversation with Peter Handke
The
most interesting matters that Handke says about the play I think are
the following. He calls the play
“a
sketch,” and is rather liberal in making allowances to its
directors; secondly, he emphasizes that it is his wish that the play
be done in such a way as to direct attention to what the performers
SPEAK, that is to the language & and that the physical action on
stage do as little as possible to detract from that; a wish
he
reiterates on the occasion of its performance in Portugal (see above
Escorial link.) Thirdly, he mentions that at one point he hoped to
end the play at Aranjuez market place at closing time! Instead we
have a denouement that in some ways resembles, in minuendo,
that of the 1983 WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES. The more direct expression
of tristesse implied by the once impulse is absent. Oberender
fails to follow up on Handke's comment.
=II=
Adller
intimates that he knows Handke's work, I see no sign that he has ever
reviewed any other Handke play & he makes no mention of any of
them, most but not entirely all of which exist in English
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2012/07/peter-handke-plays-in-english.html
and
Chicago
has been good to Handke
as
have few other American cities
although
Seattle once upon a long ago:
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2012/09/handkes-theater-in-seattle-handke-among.html
III
Thus
a prolegnomena about the kind of playwright Handke is & is, en
especial, in ARANJUEZ, what kind of beast machine ARANJUEZ is,
would seem in order.
As
of the mid-eighties (after having translated all his early work up to
and including his richest play, if not his altogether richest work,
the
first great of the mytho-poeic texts
WALK
ABOUT THE VILLAGES
http://www.ariadnebooks.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=1572410000
I
had time to give some thought to what kind of playwright Handke is
http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/about.html
and
once the noggin had churned a bit
I
concluded that it was more fruitful
to
approach Handke's stage work as
“happenings”
-
that is as a specie of a very special
that
become manifests itself
as
soon as a space turns theatrical,
that
is as
EXPERIENCES
But
I suggest that on this score you look at what the formidable Handke
specialist KLAUS KASTBERGER has to say:
&
http://www.theatermuseum.at/de/vor-dem-vorhang/ausstellungen/peter-handke/
http://www.theatermuseum.at/de/vor-dem-vorhang/ausstellungen/peter-handke/
It
is the experience that a reviewer needs describe
rather
than approach these texts with
inappropriate
theatrical categories.
Without
recapitulating my thinking @
http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/about.html
and
as it is strewn throughout, in more and less complete comments, on
the various plays @
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html:
let
me be conclusionarily apodictic {adjective:
incontestable because of having been demonstrated or proved to
be demonstrable.
Logic. (of a proposition) necessarily true or logically certain.}
1.
(a)
The
experience of each of Handke's theater pieces changes the spectator/
auditor's state of mind
and
each play does so in its own way which means that the reviewer, in
each instance, needs to work ab novo.
(b)
Thus,
Handke does not repeat himself
although
in the two instances of the 1969 THE RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE
&
the 1991
THE
HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER - the experience of two
extremely different scores is similarly cathartic -
(we
are talking Brecht's non-Aristotelian
catharses*:
no blood, no tragic hero)
yet
the mental discharge of tension & resources made available for
thinking, good riddances, are achieved by seemingly very different
means:
In
the instance of LAKE CONSTANCE via linguistic querying and
grammatical acrobatics
&
in
the case of HOUR by means of the succession of seemingly infinite
series of images that ultimately re-fabulate the world = not knowing
as a new start, as innocence reborn. I am uncertain whether those
great Greel playwright ever achieved anything along those lines.
I
put experiences that other Handke's happenings produce into a NOTE @
the end.
Now
on to an attempt to describe the ARANJUEZ machine & the effects
it produces (ARANJUEZ was preceded by the great prize-winnig STILL
STORM & succeeded by
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2014/10/die-unschuldigen-ich-und-die-unbekannte.html
and
thus is starecely a “valedictory” (Adler) to Handke's
playwrighting.
ARANJUEZ
itself, according to Handke, grew out of a brainstorm of his while
writing
DER
GROSSE FALL
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html
a
fantastic piece of writing imbued with sexuality, say, as the work of
the British lyrical novelist Henry Green
(forthcoming
from Seagull Press).
ARANJUEZ
starts of a an interrogatory tic-tac-toe and keep taking recourse to
this method although not in a predictable manner. (A note to Adler's
of course [2]:
ethe
game could be easily reversed, or become mutual, if that was what
Handke was up to.
The
second major driving force is indeed Whitman's “the cradle forever
rocking”
and
experiencig ARANJUEZ
ensures
the audience's participation in an hour long mating
ritual,
that is what is going on between the two actors: this is one of the
great pieces of pornography, it turns you on it makes you hot, and of
course not the way customary pornography does.
If
you and your date don't want to screw after this aphrodisiac... it's
time to be friends!
As
you look back on the experience...
The
game that is being played may have started simply but complications
ensue
on
every level.
Thus
Adler has a point when he finds that ARANJUEZ is the work of someone
with a body of experience. Whether it is a
“valedictory” to Handke's sybaritic sexuality I would not venture a guess, Handke's grandfather Sivec was known to reach under the skirt of the milkmaids well inti his 90s!
“valedictory” to Handke's sybaritic sexuality I would not venture a guess, Handke's grandfather Sivec was known to reach under the skirt of the milkmaids well inti his 90s!
For
every woman with such a rich yet ultimately unsatisfied erotic
history
there
is a man's -
how
easily the table could be turned,
I
could re-assign the roles:
however,
one thing for sure:
- ARANJUEZ i a truly amusingly pornographic product, what else would you expect from this forever also linguistically GEIL now aging whore-master and exhibitionist! Perhaps that is what Tony Adler refers to with what he terms “shards of the male gaze”? I ask him to be more specific and and do a bit of citing. After all, he shows nice differentials in describing the performance. The text has some longeurs and if one wants to perform it to its own advantage (in service to the author's wish that as little as possible distract from its language) some cuts would seem useful.
this
is a truly heterosexual play no matter the author's bi-sexual
conflicts & his ability to write from a woman's experience in
books such as THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN & CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL
GREDOS (and his saying about SORROW BEYOND DREAMS “ma mere c'est
moi.”)
As
works of literary art,
Handke's
plays obey certain formal rules, no matter that someone writing in
the Austrian tradition is also a rule breaker.
These
are independent formal creations.
These
texts don't mimic, don't duplicate, don't evoke other worlds but, as
independent creations, produce
particular
states of mind.
The
language, thus, that Scott and I devised - me in the lead and
finalizing and taking ultimate responsibility -
sought
first to breathe rhythmically the way the original text does -
that
is the initial response.
Then
the realization sets in that you are recreating a linguistically
artificial {an artificer's artifice} text in another language,
sculpting, kneading digging it out of the other
language, sometimes working crazily as an animal will for truffles,
and then introducing your own kind of playfulness, i.e. a bit of
Spanish spice if not Spanish fly, urged on by Handke's “Flores
Flores par los muertos.”
What
you, WE ended up is not the language at you neighborhood bar, but I
asked the director and actors to smooth out anything that stuck
awkwardly in their craws.
It
is a text that acknowledges its own artificiality. It has touches of
the formal that heark back to its origins in Schiller's DON CARLOS:
1. Akt, 1.Auftritt: ACT I, SCENE I
Domingo (a priest):
”The beautiful sojourn in Aranjuez has now come to an end. Your Royal Highness are not leaving it any happier. Our having been here has been futile. Por favor, my Prince, break your puzzling silence, open you heart to your father's heart. His son's - his only son's - silence is beginning to exact too dear a price from my Monarch.
Carlos
looks to the ground
and
remains silent.
Perhaps
that is what Adler means by stilted. Again, I ask him to be
citational.
- Brechtian catharses always struck me a dependent on the exquisite aesthetic experience of his dramaturgy, and not inherent in the texts, though Mutter Kurasch pathos approximates the effect of Greek tragedy)
- ===========
A
NOTE
The
experiences that Handkes plays elicit range from
a
The
extraordinary self-consciousness induced by experiencing OFFENDING
THE AUDIENCE.
to
{b}
the
linguistic pain of KASPAR
To
{C}
the
auditory hallucinatory projection screen of QUODLIBET
TO
{d}
the
above-described LAKE CONSTANCE
TO
the
variety of mytho=poeic texts
from
WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, to ART OF ASKING, to the untranslated
PREPARATIONS FOR IMMMORTALITY
via
THE
HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER
(a
text without words!)
to
the 1993 VOYAGE BY DUGOUT
(the
play about the film about the war)
that
shows how Handke has absorbed the lessons of his immediate
predecessors Brecht, HorVarth and of his contemporaries Kipphard,
Weiss, Grass.
To
the play that immediately precedes
ARANJUEZ
the
great STILL STORM
Michael
Roloff, June 2015,
the
city named after Chief Sealth.
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