Oeuvre Thinking: Mark Jackson by / Laura Brueckner

In Mark Jackson’s 2011 play “God’s Plot,” a local justice in colonial Virginia is trying a case to determine whether or not a recently performed play has seditious content. He asks the playwright for a copy of the script as evidence, saying, “For surely, not having seen it, I must read the play in order to arrive at any conclusion as to its nature.” However, a visiting official, slightly more sophisticated in these matters, quickly counters the judge: “What Mister Darby has written will not convey how it was performed. I should think we must also see the play.”

This describes exactly our position as we begin this new editorial feature, “Oeuvre Thinking,” wherein one brave contributor commits to reading the entire body of a playwright’s work, and then writes to us about what s/he finds there. There are naturally some limitations to the project: as theatre makers, we know that the page alone can never “convey how it was performed,” and sadly, we can’t rewind and fast-forward time to see all of a compelling writer’s plays staged back-to-back as though they were episodes of “Firefly.”

What we can do, and what feels very worthwhile to do, is to read these plays and see what is there to be discovered in the world of the playwright’s words. To listen for echoes in motifs and language; to watch for patterns in characterization, decisions and crises.

This is exactly what I’ve done this month with Mark Jackson’s 17 produced plays, including his show currently running at Aurora Theatre Company, “Salomania.” On the other side of this considerable reading voyage, I’m happy to report sightings of fabulous monsters: passionate and articulate iconoclasts, unusually lively statues, soft-hearted soldiers, luckless actors and damsels blushing for a wide variety of reasons. And I’ve begun to understand the contours of a theatrical world that offers audiences (or readers) a great deal to think about, and think hard.

For classification’s sake, let’s start with the adaptations. Of the 17 plays I read, eight are adaptations, requiring a visit to the original versions – two different original versions in one case (that’s 26 plays total, for those of you following along at home). Jackson’s “R&J” (1995) offers a dangerous, hallucinatory “Romeo and Juliet”; “Messenger #1” (2000) reframes the Oresteia; “Io, Princess of Argos” (2001) adapts a Greek myth; “I Am Hamlet” (2002) tweaks the melancholy Dane; “American $uicide” (2007) updates Nikolai Erdman’s 1928 absurdist comedy “The Suicide”; “Don Juan” (2008) works from both Moliere’s weirdly uncomic portrait written in 1660 and Pushkin’s grim 1830 one-act; “Faust Pt 1” (2009) adapts the Goethe play (1808; revised in 1828-29); and “Mary Stuart” (2010) streamlines Schiller’s 1800 “Maria Stuart.” Though not really an adaptation, “The Forest War” bears visible influences of both “King Lear” and Kurosawa’s “Ran,” as Jackson offers in the “Notes on the Plays” that conclude his “Ten Plays” volume (HERE).

Levels of adaptation
One really interesting thing about these adaptations is how widely they range in their approach to (and distance from) the source materials. In many ways, “R&J” (1996) is the most distant from its source. The narrative structure bears little resemblance to the original Shakespeare except that the major events tend to occur in roughly chronological order, with the “In fair Verona” prologue near the beginning and the lovers’ deaths closer to the end. This is a dream world, however, where watershed moments resurface out of context and scenes coalesce for a moment before dissolving again. Identities also shift; one male actor is the wounded Mercutio one moment, then becomes Romeo for the space of a few lines spoken to the panicked Juliet, then phases back into Mercutio as he breathes his last. Three actresses play different Juliets: one is the Juliet having the dream and moving through it, bewildered; the other two take her part in dream scenes from the last week of her life as she watches (and sometimes intercedes). This dream world comes complete with a slightly sinister “dream machine operator” who jumps from body to body and takes the reins for occasional sudden moments; this entity addresses the dreaming Juliet directly, to grimly remind her that though she is dreaming, the violence, loss and death she sees is very real. In some ways, though, this play is very intimately bound to its source material; Jackson’s play uses only Shakespeare’s language, shredded into evocative half-thoughts and spectacular outbursts that combine and recombine to repurpose the words and images in specific and haunting ways. This is definitely an exercise that rewards, and may actually demand, a thorough familiarity with the original for fullest enjoyment of its artistry.

Jackson’s “Don Juan,” premiered in 2008, is the impulsive, brash middle child, and feels like the most confident and daring of the adaptations. Here Jackson builds his adaptation from two different source plays, Moliere’s jarringly episodic full-length and Pushkin’s one-act, which have very different sets of characters and events. This adaptation dispenses with the language and identity games of “R&J” entirely; instead, Jackson attacks the source texts with huge shears, hacking the narratives apart, transforming or eliminating characters, and inserting theatrical touches that fundamentally refigure even the main character and his motivations. In general, all of these changes serve to better integrate the events of the play into a causally related dramatic whole, and the result is a sound, fast-moving romp that is nevertheless more psychologically grounded than either of the two originals. One example of Jackson’s logical handiwork is the question of Don Juan’s wife. Moliere has Juan fleeing a living wife, Elvire, who follows him to Sicily to win him back. An icy Juan rebuffs her, and she returns wearing a veil several scenes later, more or less apropos of nothing, to release him from their marriage and join a convent. In the meantime Don Juan juggles the affections of a couple of peasant girls but eventually wanders off from them too. His later encounter with the stone statue is therefore detached from any preceding plot considerations; he just happens upon the statue of a guy he once killed one fine episodic day. Jackson instead follows Pushkin’s Juan, who is already a widower; his wife, Inez, fell victim to his charms and died, ostensibly of heartbreak and shame when he abandoned her. Pushkin’s Juan arrives in Madrid and first looks up his casual lover Laura, then begins to pursue Dona Anna, the gorgeous widow of the Commander he once killed, whose looming stone statue...you get the picture. Jackson retains Pushkin’s logical thread tying Don Juan’s actions (killing the Commander and wooing his widow) to his demise, but kicks the narrative logic up one more notch: Jackson’s Don Juan has come back to Madrid specifically to pursue Dona Anna, for whose, um, love he killed the Commander, her husband. In one stroke, Jackson gives Juan a reason to have killed the man, a believable motivation to return to a city where he is a wanted criminal, and a less happenstance scene of becoming involved with Dona Anna than merely glimpsing her near a graveyard one day and resolving to pursue her. All that is standard dramaturgical craftsmanship to strengthen the play’s logic; it adds momentum to Pushkin and smooths out Moliere’s jolts.

“Mary Stuart” stands out as the most streamlined adaptation; Jackson’s version eliminates all secondary characters, including multiple servants and redundant lords, but retains almost every plot point and the content of almost every conversation. The result of this stripped-down approach is a more naked and aggressive play; without the human trappings of the usual “royal court” scenes, the courtly modes of verbal address, with the elaborate titles and niceties demanded by etiquette between unequals, is likewise disposed of. Mary’s accusers snarl “you” at her without a flicker of deference or a single “your ladyship”; Mary bites right back with the same candor. The conversations Mary has with her servants in the original, which contain much of the play’s exposition and soul-searching, are transformed into monologues that Mary delivers in a room alone, rendering her both more sympathetic and stronger, if a little unhinged as the only character who engages in this activity in the play.

One signal thing about Jackson’s adaptations is that most of them focus on a single iconoclastic character. It’s true that “R&J” has a very different focus and does not follow this pattern, and “The Forest War” has a fairly even character balance; however Io, Hamlet, Sam Small, Don Juan, Faust, and Mary Stuart dominate the plays they appear in; their struggles are the stories of the plays.

Check Your References
Jackson’s plays repeatedly reference one another, some in significant ways, some in moments so small you could blink and miss ’em. “American $uicide”’s hero Sam Small chooses Hamlet’s soliloquy to rehearse when he decides to become an actor, providing not just the expected comic opportunities (weighty classical speech plus over-earnest, working-class novice actor) but fuel for the plot; when Sam’s wife overhears him going through the acting exercise of putting Shakespeare’s language into his own words, she takes his musings as proof that her husband is suicidal, and calls on her neighbor to help, which starts the whole play rolling. Another reference between the same two plays, this time on the blink-and-you’ll miss it scale, is an unexpected and unexpectedly funny exchange between Sam Small and his porn star/porn director neighbor, Albert. In Jackson’s 2002 “I Am Hamlet,” Hamlet tears his way through four-hundred-plus years of misguided academic criticism, and spends an especially energetic moment exclaiming, “My problem isn’t that I think too much. It’s that I think too well!” Five years later, in “American $uicide,” Jackson has Albert react to Sam reading “Hamlet” by telling his stage-struck friend “So, you’re thinking too much, Sam. Too much but not too well.” The line isn’t signaled on the page as lifted or quoted at all; it flows as naturally as any other bit of dialogue in this heightened-language scene, which is what gives it its charm.

In “Faust Pt 1” Mephistopheles gets in on the reference game too, admonishing a suddenly lusty Faust: “Listen to you. You talk like Don Juan, as if every lovely flower exists for you to pluck.” Premiering just the year before, Jackson’s “Don Juan” indeed includes a scene where Don Juan approaches the young and lovely Charlotte, who drifts around the stage wearing a sign around her neck that reads “Charlotte in the field picking flowers”; the nobleman lays her down and plucks her right there on the boards.

The reference game isn’t limited to the adaptations, either. In Episode Eight of “The Death of Meyerhold,” Meyerhold mentions “Hamlet” and, within a couple of lines, also says, “Nikolai Erdman has been putting ‘finishing touches’ on ‘The Suicide’ for two years.” Last, the group of colonial Virginians who meet in secret to rehearse their political play in “God’s Plot” begin their labors with lines lifted from the mechanicals’ famous rehearsal of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the play-within-a-play from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I find it interesting that it’s only this last reference that falls outside of plays that Jackson has adapted; is it possible that a Jacksonian “Midsummer” is in the works?

The purpose of these and other snack-sized references seems to be simple fun and pleasure for those theatre lovers who catch them; there’s a cleverness about them that shows the playwright’s calculating hand, for sure, but because of their brevity, cheerful context, and the way the lifted lines blend into the surrounding dialogue without calling attention to themselves, they land more like little treats then showoff moments.

The Other Nine
Jackson’s adaptations aren’t his only works that traffic in iconoclasts and the great crush of history; his original plays share many major motifs and character types. Some of the motifs most central to this body of work, however, reiterate with an almost obsessive sameness that—rather than feeling merely repetitive—gives the sense of a determined explorer hunting for treasure. He’s looking for something, something immensely valuable, and he knows it’s around here somewhere, so he keeps digging. This focused reiteration serves to encourage us to think harder about each particular device, ethos or character type too, to work out for ourselves what all of its possible resources are for helping us make sense of the workings of the world outside of the theatre.

Metatheatricality
Ten of Jackson’s plays involve metatheatricality, from the fully backstage-and-onstage theatrical worlds of “BANG!”, “The Death of Meyerhold” and “American $uicide,” the specifically theatrical performance sequences of “Salomania” and “God’s Plot” to the aggressive boundary-rending gestures of “I Am Hamlet and “Don Juan.” “Io” contains songs and a stand-up routine performed for an audience; “Megan and the Magic Compass” and “Messenger #1” also have their metatheatrical moments. Even “Faust” gets in a couple of jabs at actors, in reference to their untrustworthiness (like politicians) and low repute (if female). The motif of theatre as crucible is obviously a central and driving metaphor for Jackson, who explores the possibilities of the stage for expressing beauty and truth (Salomania), for stripping the soul bare in painful ways (Io), and for producing lies, alienation and misunderstanding (BANG!). The variety of ways in which Jackson has framed the theatrical impulse and its consequences shows that he has in no way exhausted his explorations of the richness of the theatre as metaphor What is clear, though, is that characters who hate the theatre are the bad guys; the scorn that Billing holds for performers in “Salomania” and the antitheatrical fury of Edward Martin in “God’s Plot” mark them as enemies to the human in ways that ensure they will end up on the outside of the impending reconciliation.

The Courtroom
Courtroom scenes surface repeatedly in Jackson’s plays (“R&J,” “God’s Plot,” “The Death of Meyerhold” and “Salomania”); legalistic or political debate occur in even more. The revisiting of the fairly complex trope of the courtroom in such different plays points to this as another central metaphor in Jackson’s work. What is a courtroom, in Jackson’s dramatic worlds? What is it for? There are a few clues. In each of these instances, the person standing trial is innocent: Juliet’s crime is disobeying her parents’ wish that she marry anyone other than Romeo; the defendants in “God’s Plot” are actors, and the good-natured victims of a bitter religious fundamentalist’s rancor; Meyerhold is put on trial simply because shifting political tides have turned against him, rendering his art illegal; and Maud Allan wants nothing more than to follow the call of her art and dance. In both “God’s Plot” and “Salomania,” the warring parties’ arguments are brought head to head, the strength of their logic tested, the truth of the matter eventually exposed through intelligence, wit, and integrity. That the other two courtroom scenes fail to achieve this result is part and parcel with the tragic nature of those plays; the courtroom should be a place where truth and logic win.

Courtroom protocol may give the innocent their say, but it can also stifle truth underneath piles of legal jargon and verbal attack. There’s a real tension in Jackson’s courtroom scenes between a neo-Apollonian valorization of logic, orderliness, hierarchy, boundaries, roles and duties and the knowledge that truth is sometimes a chaotic force that threatens to—and sometimes manages to—break through all that fine filigree and tear shit up.

Grab Bag!
A final grab bag of oddments and echoes: “Don Juan,” of course, concludes with a stone statue dragging the protagonist to Hell; “Tough Love,” however, features a stone statue whose subject “loved music,” and who not only comes alive but plays an instrument and sings to close the show. In “little extremes,” a Man and Woman pick up a purse dropped by a little old lady running for the bus; inside the purse is thousands of dollars in cash. Three years later, in “Brave,” a young woman traveling on her own loses the wallet containing all the money she has in the world. “Don Juan,” “BANG!” and “The Death of Meyerhold” all involve a Director character; the first, who metatheatrically plays the role of the statue, is a berserker who attacks the actors and demolishes the stage, the second is a whiny imcompetent and the last is “Mark Jackson,” a pleasant, articulate, informed, comfortable type who opens the show by cordially giving background on the play and then strolling off, leaving us to be devastated by the play’s violence and loss. “Mark Jackson” also shows up as a reference in “American $uicide” as a “hot young director and playwright,” which could possibly have landed as a moment of jarring egotism if it weren’t for the fact that the character doing the name-dropping is the executive director of TCG, performed as a comically manic, insincere donation hound desperately trying to make theatre sound Important. Guns show up in six of his plays, secret loves or affairs pop up in nine, and in nearly a quarter of the plays a character breaks the fourth wall just for the sake of doing it, and comment on the gesture.

Wives, Widows, Women
Of course, some of the recurring motifs are disheartening. Wives don’t fare very well in Jackson’s plays, for instance: the repressed, neurotic Wife in “little extremes”; the ice-cold and inevitably slaughtered Clytemnestra of “Messenger #1”; Hera in “Io,” stuck in a permanent vindictive rage that feels almost consigned to irrelevance by the other characters’ lack of engagement with her and it (except for Io complaining about the inconvenient bovine consequences); Meyerhold’s wife Zinaida, denigrated for her lack of acting talent until her final bloody curtain at the hands of government agents; Don Juan’s wife Ines, who’s betrayed and dead by the time the play begins, and the timid, ineffectual Mary in “American $uicide.” These women tend to suffer from some form of lack that prevents them from being actualized and effective, and none of them are heroes. Even Ema from “The Forest War,” who acts rationally and is praised for her intelligence, is a sideline character who is first betrayed and humiliated by her husband’s infidelity and then stabbed to death by his enemy.

Women who begin the plays as widows do better. Both Mary Stuart (who actually had a part in her husband’s death) and Don Juan’s conquest Dona Anna have substance, intelligence, much-described beauty and greater freedom of mind and heart than the wives do; they come closer to heroic stature.

The women that the plays really celebrate, however, are the unmarried, innocent girls and young women. Hope in “little extremes” is a sweet, young thing who loves Hasty and just wants to go to Disneyland; alongside her we have the Juliet(s) in “R&J,” Gretchen from “Faust,” Tryal from “God’s Plot,” Ange from “The Forest War,” Maud Allan with her deep bond to her brother and Sara who sweetly takes to a war-weary soldier, both from “Salomania,” and more. I want to point out that the innocence these girls possess isn’t of a sexual nature, nor are they demure, obedient damsels; they are sensual beings who say and do what they wish and push back against the threatened consequences. This is actually the balance point of their innocence: they all display the kind of absolute and pure emotional integrity that complex worlds and lived experience tend to demolish. These characters are fascinating in their strength and, whether their ends in these plays are good or otherwise, their admirable idealism reminds us all to look around a little more and sit up a little straighter.

What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate
Jackson’s worlds are overtly socially and politically complex. Theatre lovers looking for complex and nuanced games with language, though, will go away hungry; in these plays, generally psychologically realistic characters tend to say pretty much exactly what’s on their minds. In delicate situations, a play’s structure will make this candor possible by way of clandestine meetings, courtroom protocol or the strategic absence of key antagonists. “Mary Stuart” is full of seditious conversations in rooms populated by only two, with no servants or spies about; characters in “The Forest War” inhabit a world that is so theatrically unpopulated that no one will overhear Lord Kain’s bloody machinations; the cross-examinations in “Salomania” enable each character who takes the stand to say his or her full piece, because court procedure prevents Billing from substantially interfering.

Though its characters also say exactly what they think, “R&J” is in some ways an exception to this tendency, because its different theatrical goals make psychological realism a nonpriority. “R&J” presents utterances as elements of memory that the central Juliet must sift through or attempt to leverage to gain control of the reality unfolding in front of her. Another partial exception to this is Andre in “Brave,” who delivers a panicked, stream-of-consciousness monologue toward the end of the play that—while it still presents the exact contents of his racing mind—also makes it clear that the real message behind the avalanche of words is a howl of pure terror at the idea of actual closeness with another human being.

And there we have the real juice. Word games and fancy multilayered subtext may not be Jackson’s bag, but the simplicity in his language helps point out what is, in these plays, a far more urgent issue: the barriers to true communication between people. Jackson’s characters tend to know what they want and aren’t afraid to say it, but a thousand varieties of fear can make them shut down to one another, lie, or panic and lash out, all with lamentable results. “Little extremes” thrusts us into a tense and brittle world where too much emotional disclosure from one person can drive the other to desperation and even violence. “Brave” approaches the problem on a number of levels, chiefly through its politicos who spout public relations messages that develop into an aggressive form of hysterical anticommunication, and a young man who thinks it’s fun to “get to know” strangers, until one of them takes him up on his offer of a place to stay. “BANG!” comically demolishes the “experimental” play that retains actors’ names as characters as a guarantee of the authenticity of the emotional experience but gives the actors nothing true to connect to and the audience nothing to connect to that is true. Jackson’s courtroom scenes, from “R&J” to “God’s Plot” to “Salomania,” are arenas where language itself is often on trial for its failure to adequately capture the motivational and emotional realities of the people taking the stand.

Conclusion: The Gospel of Freedom
If Jackson has a message for me, it’s the gospel of freedom. That’s one of my main takeaways from this excursion through his theatrical world, anyway. From the neurotic, controlling Wife in 1995’s “little extremes” to the ideologue Billing in this month’s “Salomania,” Jackson’s plays depict the power-mad, the egotistical, the overly conventional, the greedy and the intolerant as more or less miserable slaves to a need to control others, and shows quite plainly how they suffer deeply from their own compulsions even as they make others suffer. Freedom, on the other hand, enlarges and ennobles, and many of the positive values in Jackson’s work are easily understood as varieties of freedom: reason/rationality, freethinking (in the context of religion), selflessness, genuine loyalty, courage and integrity (personal, emotional, artistic).

Before this project, I’d never seen a single one of Jackson’s plays (sorry, Mark!). All I knew was that he’d written a motherlovin’ truckload of plays, that many people whom I respect respect his work, and that he is a highly articulate essayist who has issued a sustained, public and unapologetic call for more serious discussion of theatre in the Bay Area. In April, in fact, Theatre Bay Area republished his essay regarding the necessity of criticism, which you can read HERE. All that, plus his complete generosity in supplying me with even the unpublished scripts, put him in the crosshairs for this project.

All in all, reading these plays has left me intrigued to see what Jackson will develop next. As much as I love it when playwrights strike out into new territory (and I do!), I also hope that Jackson keeps obsessing over the questions of justice and integrity that he raises in these plays, topics that are as essential for a mature society as they are thorny and unglamorous. Things may fall apart, and there may always be artists willing to scramble over one another to describe the trajectory of the fall, but a precious few would rather use their talent to show us possible paths to something better. With his abiding interest in reason, intelligence, and freedom, I find it reassuring that somewhere, out there, at any given moment, Mark Jackson may be writing another courtroom scene.


Laura Brueckner is associate editor for Theatre Bay Area. She is also the director of new work for Crowded Fire Theater. http://www.crowdedfire.org Email her at laura@theatrebayarea.org.