Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird

This afternoon, I say David Harrower's play Blackbird at the Belasco Theatre. Harrower wrote the piece more than a decade ago, but it has been done all over the place, and for obvious reasons: small cast, simple set, provocative subject matter.

The play follows Ray (played by Jeff Daniels) and Una (played by Michelle Williams), who meet in an office. Fifteen years earlier, the two had a sexual affair. At the time, she was twelve.

Boom.

But why is the play called Blackbird? Is it the bird-like calls Una made for Ray some fifteen years ago? Or the fact that the play keeps changing its perspective, looking at the same situation from different angles, similar to the Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"?

In the spirit of Wallace Stevens, I offer the following reflection:

                              I
               Among twenty audience members,
               The only thing they agreed upon
               Was that the title of the play was Blackbird.

                              II
               I was of three minds,
               Like three cats
               That had just eaten three blackbirds.

                              III
               The blackbird whirled in the sea of trash.
               It was a small part of the tragedy.

                              IV
               A man and a woman
               Are one.
               A man and a woman and a blackbird,
               Now that's just sick.

                              V
               I do not know which to prefer,
               The beauty of Una's monologue
               Or the beauty of her innuendoes,
               The blackbird calling
               Or just after.

                              VI
               Figures walked past the long windows,
               Appearing in sheets of glass.
               The shadows of the coworkers
               Crossed it, to and fro.
               The blackbird
               Traced in the shadow
               An indecipherable play.

                              VII
               O thin men of Scotland,
               Why do you imagine golden birds?
               Do you not see how the blackbird
               Walks around the table
               In the company break room?

                              VIII
               I heard noble accents
               And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
               But I heard, too,
               That a blackbird might have been involved
               In what I heard.

                              IX
               When the blackbird flew out of sight,
               It marked the edge
               Of the set turning in circles.

                              X
               At the sight of blackbirds
               Flying in florescent light,
               Even the bawds of cacophony
               Would cry out in surprise.

                              XI
               He drove across some unnamed state
               In an easily identifiable car.
               Once, a fear pierced him,
               In that he mistook
               The shadow of his automobile
               For blackbirds.

                              XII
               The audience is gasping.
               The blackbird must be flying.

                              XIII
               It was evening all afternoon.
               It was raining
               And it was going to rain.
               The blackbird sat
               In the balcony.

Back to the '90s

I went this afternoon to see The Vast Difference at The Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, Michigan. The play, by noted Michigan writer Jeff Daniels (he also acts) first premiered at The Purple Rose twenty years ago.

The program listed the time of the play as 1993, and there seemed to be no effort to update the script. In one of the first scenes, a character is playing a CD on a Discman as he waits for his plane to be cleared for take-off. It was probably best there was no attempt to update details, since the plot involved men insecure in their masculinity who talk openly about their fears of being castrated by powerful career women. Even in the early '90s this probably sounded backward-looking, and today it very much feels like a period piece.

In the play, George Noonan (played with comic zeal by David Bendena) is getting ready to go in for a vasectomy. (The play's title is a pun on the technical name for part of the male anatomy.) A married male flight attendant with five daughters, George is thrown for a loop when his urologist turns out to be an attractive woman (played by the cool and confident Rhiannon Ragland). She has a no-nonsense approach to operating on the male anatomy. This makes George more than a little uneasy, as it is not just his private parts that can be a little sensitive.

While the gender politics of the play seemed rooted in the past, it turns out that George's struggles are not mainly with his doctor, nor with his wife (Stephanie Buck, making her professional acting debut), but with his father, Earl Noonan (played by veteran actor Richard McWilliams). Earl appears repeatedly in both flashbacks and fantasy sequences. A loving father, a neighborhood barber, and an avid Tigers fan, Earl represents an ideal of masculinity his son can never achieve. Even as George looks back lovingly at his father, however, he continues to wonder if his boyhood hero was ever really as great as he remembers him.

Though my own response to the play was lukewarm, most people in the audience were clearly enjoying it. It's great to see that a Purple Rose blooms in Chelsea.