The Eternal Mystery: Richard Foreman's "Sledgehammer"
I don’t like having to read up on something before I go to see a play - and I don’t mean reviews. I mean having to read the dramaturgy beforehand in order to understand the play. I love-love-love reading dramaturgy afterwards. But in most cases, I like the play to speak for itself.
Bertolt Brecht, when he was rehearsing a play use to drag the poor janitor of the theatre in to watch a run through and ask him if he understood it. Of all the things I love about Brecht, that’s one of them.
I went to see Richard Foreman’s “My Head was a Sledgehammer” at the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in NYC because an actor whom I had just directed was in it. If there was ever a theatre piece that defied any attempt to prepare for it, this was it – as is the case with the bulk of Foreman’s work. Which is not to say that there is not a lot written about him. There are truckloads. And interviews. But I believe that nothing that you can read will allow you to step into his world with any more advantage than someone who has read nothing.
Richard Foreman in his theatre the 1970s / Courtesy of NYU & Richard Foreman
Foreman has been creating theatre for over 50 years, is one of America’s most influential writer-director-designers, and his work is considered “avant-garde.” That is Sentence One of his Wikipedia entry. The term is still used liberally – by critics, academics, theatre makers and theatre watchers. Is there anything you are less likely to enjoy than something that is “avant-garde”? For that matter, is there any agreement on the definition of that phrase?
Richard Schechner wrote an essay entitled “The Five Avant-Gardes or…or none?” in which he dissects the term and its categories. He concludes that “It no longer serves a useful purpose. It doesn’t really mean anything today.”
George Orwell, in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” gives a list of words – like democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic and justice – which have no agreed-upon definition and so have become meaningless. I would add “avant-garde” to that list. (But I will still probably use the term myself sometime this month…)
So now, let me describe Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to you. Oh, that’s right, I can’t. That puts me in a perfect state of mind to not-describe “My Head was a Sledgehammer,” which is one of the most exquisite and abstruse theatre pieces I’ve seen.
Here’s a metaphor: Someone comes to you and puts a brick, a snake and a hula-hoop on a table and says, “Using only these three objects - make me a glass of lemonade.” This analogy represents the kind of alchemy Foreman regularly achieves with this theatre.
Let me try to conjure it back.
My crude representation of the stage, with a bunch of stuff left out. That thing in the back is a poster of cuts of meat.
I walk into the theatre at St. Mark’s Church and hear a repeating phrase of classical piano music, the same two measures of seven notes, over and over again. It reminds me of Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent where a man is imprisoned in windmill, and a phonograph plays the same song - again and again and again and again.
This piano mantra has a slightly hypnotizing effect as I gaze at the brightly-lit set.
The music of Sledgehammer is relentless, not giving your mind time to breathe. My friend said that he could always tell when Foreman didn’t like his acting. Foreman worked the sound at every performance and the sound would get “inexplicably louder” during certain speeches. My friend surmised that at those moments Foreman was critiquing his acting.
The space has no raised stage. I am sitting on raked seating and the actors are on the floor in front of the audience. The space has strings strung across the proscenium, which separate the actors from the audience and painted like dotted lines.
Thomas Jay Ryan, Jan Leslie Harding, Henry Stram, in Richard Foreman’s “My Head was a Sledgehammer” Photo copyright by Paula Court / Courtesy of NYU and Richard Foreman
There are three main characters: the male Professor, the Female Student and another Male Student.
The piece has something to do with academia; something to do with authority and rebellion; something to do with male dominance and female subjugation; something to do with the impossibility of learning. Or it might have to do with none of these things.
The Professor is hunchbacked and growls and whistles his lines in a bass monotone.
The Female Student speaks with a high voice, part girly sing-song, part sassy, 1930s Hollywood ingenue.
The Male Student hisses his lines like Clint Eastwood.
The piece also has a chorus - four characters in red wigs and dunce caps who move props in and out and become the visual spackle for the stones of the drama.
There is no plot. The fascination of the play is the characters and the rhythms of the performance. The play starts with these lines delivered in a completely unnatural way:
Thomas Jay Ryan, Henry Stram, Jan Leslie Harding in Richard Foreman’s “My Head was a Sledgehammer” Photo copyright by Paula Court / Courtesy of NYU and Richard Foreman
Female Student: OK, Mr. Professor.
Professor: Yes?
Female Student: Are you as weird as I think you are?
The characters are very funny. The play is very funny. Much of it is like a metaphysical Vaudeville show. Foreman has described himself as a comic artist and that is so true. But it’s not funny because the text is funny, although it frequently is. Mostly, it’s funny – like all of the greatest comedy – because of how the actors deliver the material.
Some lines are meta-theatrical:
“Imagine a play called ‘Dogs on Duty.’ What could happen in such a play?”
This theme is repeated at various times throughout the piece.
“Imagine a play called ‘The Pretend Hat’…”
“Imagine a play called ‘Fingers Alert’…”
Other lines are mock-philosophical:
“In a certain play entitled ‘My Head Was a Sledgehammer’ a certain character falls in love with his mirror image, although his mirror image does not resemble him in many important ways, but it is a much more beautiful image.”
Oh yes. And there is a cloth horse with a bullseye on its butt which at one point the chorus ritually parades across the stage to 1930s big band music.
That was spectacular, by the way.
As a climax to the absurdity, after an hour of philosophical twaddle, the Male Student asks pointedly, “How many people really attend your lecture course, Professor?”
This gets a huge laugh.
I’ve quoted some dialogue here, but it’s the physical life of the play that’s most beguiling. The rhythms, as the actors accelerate, decelerate, and freeze are absolutely crystalline, and those rhythms are the chief wonders of the piece. (I’ve described this woefully insufficiently, as I knew I would). Stage rhythms of this kind, which are like visual music, (without being musical) are the hardest theatrical facet to execute.
At the end, when the Professor enters wearing giant platform shoes and a huge feathered crown, it is startling - and yet at the same time I’m thinking, “Well, of course, he is.”
Part of the experience is watching to determine what it all means, while at the same time enjoying that you don’t know what it means.
But it was so beautiful and mesmerizing to watch.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault said of Foreman’s plays: “I could tell there was some rigorous system at work - but I couldn’t figure out what that system was.”
And Foreman himself has said that “theatre should be an eternal mystery.”
Amen.
I’m going to leave it at that and drink that glass of lemonade.