The Fringe Festival is Pop Up Theater that appears every
June in our town. It occurs in what used
to be a fringe neighborhood, Over the Rhine, a ghetto for the southern Catholic
German Immigrants who crowded into our town in the 1800s and lived in tenements
and rowhouses until they made their way up the social ladder and moved out to
better parts of town, leaving the crumbling buildings behind for the poor –
mostly African Americans – to create a ghetto of despair in the shadow of the
skyscrapers of downtown. More recently,
gentrifiers have realized that this is prime real estate within walking
distance of many of the highest paid jobs in town, and expensive new condominium
buildings sit cheek by jowl with boarded up buildings, buildings with tenants
barely hanging on and rehabbed row houses with beautiful new windows and doors.
We parked our car in a garage that is all but hermetically
sealed, and took our ticket as we would need that to re-enter the secure
seeming structure to walk a couple of blocks to the site of this one hour play –
an arts college classroom converted into a performance space for this one woman
play. Megan Gogerty, the playwright and
star, played to a very appreciative audience of seventy five or so. Rated PG-13, the audience leaned toward
women, but included more men than just me – with older, middle-aged,
hipsterish, and a smattering of young teens in attendance with their parents. We were the reluctant wife, the daughter who
is president of her college’s feminist club, and a friend who let us know that
this was likely to be a good performance.
Megan Gogerty is, according to the bio, a comedian and
faculty member at the University of Iowa’s Playwrights workshop and the title
suggested that the play would be about Megan’s relationship with Lady MacBeth,
which it was. And like all things that
are this specific, it was about much more.
It was also a wonderfully psychoanalytic play without ever once
mentioning Freud because it was about the discovery of one's identity - one's character - through interactions with fantasy creations of the world and with very real other people. The plot revolves
around Gogerty’s reaction to her actress friend’s observation that Megan’s secret
ambition to play Lady MacBeth is ridiculous – in part because she has never
read MacBeth, but even more importantly because Megan’s character is not dark,
evil, deep and sexual, but more akin to a Golden Retriever. What follows is her construction of both Lady
MacBeth and herself – and, in a weird and fitting twist of plot, her exoneration
of Lady MacBeth, herself, Hillary Clinton and the feminist movement. No matter how I portray it, I fear that my
representation will feel dry and didactic – for that I apologize in
advance. Megan’s, of course, was funny –
and poignant.
Lady MacBeth is one of Shakespeare’s few really good roles
for women – and, as Gogerty pointed out – it is an almost invisible role with
about a quarter the lines that Shakespeare reserves for MacBeth himself. MacBeth promises Lady MacBeth that they will, when they
have fulfilled the prophecy of the witches in the opening scene, be equal partners
not just in the killing that gets him to the throne but in the governing that
follows it (there are more than a few overtones of House of Cards here). The promised sharing of power with a woman, of course, does not
happen. Lady MacBeth finds out about the
post crowning machinations only after they have occurred and she is increasingly
marginalized in the tragic end to the play, ultimately killing herself,
something that, when MacBeth is told that she is dead, Gogerty intimates he knows
how she has died – by her own hand.
Megan, the comedian, having discovered the tragic life of
Lady MacBeth is now confronted with two dilemmas – how can she become the dark
temptress – and how can she avoid the temptress's fate – to fall on her own sword. This is a thinly veiled description, I
believe, of Clinton’s dilemma. How can
she become the true partner in power – and how can she do that while pretending
to have stayed home to cook pies for Chelsea.
Megan does not imagine herself as Clinton – at least not overtly – but chronicles
her own – and here sordid is called for and sort of fits – trajectory as a
comedian. She makes a go of it first as
a twenty five year old – and finds herself a woman in a man’s world. She sticks with it because, when she kills,
it is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute… and discovering that
you have wings! She makes a go of it a
second time – at thirty five or so – and finds herself a more cunning woman in
a man’s world.
One of the delights of this play, by the way, is that
multiple story lines are evolving simultaneously as this apparently ditzy but
actually well-crafted comedic narrative unfolds. There is something about being in the hands
of a comic who knows her craft that there is a kind of hypnotic experience –
the narrative unfolds – we are increasingly willing to follow her where she
leads because she has repeatedly met our concern that she is going off the beam
with a laugh that reinforces that we are on the same page. At one point she tells the story of being
invited to headline for one of the comic masters that we all would
recognize. She was – and this was
another consistent thread in her tapestry – concerned more about what she would
wear – as a woman she is constantly aware of being evaluated based on how she
looks – and so she has to be brutally honest with herself about her looks as
she works through the narrative to articulate who it is that she is – and to
incorporate this into who she is – and so, in this case, her concern with what
she will wear derails her from preparing for the moment on stage – and she
bombs. The comic takes her under his
wing and advises her to get to know herself better because what a comic does is
to expose themselves on stage. Her
response to his question about who she is – a person who has nice skin –
exposes the need to look deeper – to look inside herself.
The failure to make use of her big moment causes both self-doubt
but also a kind of doubling down on the self (and Lady MacBeth) exploration
process. She works to both emulate and
find a different way out of the dilemma.
She discovers darkness within herself – darkness that she both owns and
denies – as when she earlier states that she doesn’t have stage fright, but that she
does occasionally experience stage concern.
And in this owning and denying of the selfsame thing she seems very real
and immediate and human. She then does
the same thing with her sexuality – exploring it as she takes on a different
persona. And she walks us right up to
the edge of the destructive capacity of owning her sexuality before reassuring
us that this doesn’t occur (whether it did or not is irrelevant - for the arc of this particular narrative to work, it mustn't have).
Ultimately, she connects deeply enough with Lady MacBeth to be able to re-create her – giving her a first name – something Shakespeare
neglected to do – and humanizing her.
But rather than identifying with her – rather than becoming her – she chooses a different identity. She identifies
with the witches in the play and works to deputize us, the audience, as auxiliary
witches – who use our magic to rehabilitate the newly minted Colleen (or
whatever Scottish name she gives her) MacBeth – not through comically killing (though she does some of that in her bits about Lady MacB) but through
love. In a parallel manner, her comedy
is transformed – from the harsh masculine killing – the sin that our Lady
MacBeth can’t wash off - into the laughter and inclusive playfulness of
childhood.
In one brief hour, Megan has, indeed, conjured magic. She has transformed one of the truly bloody
tragedies of Shakespeare into a comic feel good moment. Along with that, she has managed to exonerate
Hillary Clinton, clarifying that Hillary was trapped by role expectations that
tragically doomed her to political suicide – because she was not able to
function as herself. But she does not
leave us rolling in the mess, but instead offers hope that we, through living
with integrity can achieve a positive outcome – when she returns to her friend who dismissed her wishes to
play Lady MacBeth and announces that she is a witch. Her friend totally agrees that she is a witch and could easily play the part.
This comic ending plays well in the moment. Megan was met by an enthusiastic standing
ovation. But I fear that it does not
acknowledge some of the difficulties in wending our way through an ambitious
life in which many of our ambitions are realized. We fail along the way – when tempted by the
siren call of sexuality we are lured onto the rocks – we can get stuck in our
dark nights of the soul – we portray ourselves on stage to escape
objectification and invite that very same objectification simultaneously. We need to laugh at all of this, and at
ourselves. We need to offer expiation
and atonement. But this won’t prevent
our having done the deeds to begin with – nor in doing them again. After a year of hearing Ta Nehisi Coates and James Cone – after reading Viet Than Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, after seeing a potential terrorist elected president, and because I deeply care about the
world – it is hard not to be in a tragic mindset. Even though Megan mirrors my own inner Golden
Retriever – the hopeless optimist who sees lots of good in the world, a
position that I have taken in these posts countless times – and despite this
having been a great respite – I am increasingly feeling myself to have a tragic
impression of the world. I don’t think
that we can achieve all that we would without cost – whether on the global
stage or the ones we inhabit on the fringes of the world – in our own homes and
local communities.
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