A Variety Show in Two Acts: Terese Svoboda's Theatrix
Mary Pickford once called acting an “emotional exercise.” The audience also undergoes this wringing-out, a process that allows our emotional centers to react to imagined scenarios without consequence. Certainly we could apply this to the act of writing, as well as the act of reading. Research indicates that the tears we cry when watching a sad movie are chemically distinct from those that we shed in reaction to internal sadness. It is a dress-rehearsal, so to speak, for the real thing.
While I haven’t seen a live production in quite some time, reading Terese Svoboda’s latest poetry collection, Theatrix: Poetry Plays brought back so many of the sensations of witnessing live performance: the giddiness of the curtain rising, the suspension of disbelief granted the actors, and our activated empathy when they succeed. With her playful manipulation of language and knowing winks at our voyeurism, Svoboda draws us into the emotional peaks and valleys of her acts.
The cover art alone is arresting, featuring what appears to be a clay, humanoid model with mask-like face and gaping mouth, the torso buckled over withered, misshapen legs. The red right hand (apologies to Nick Cave) clutches the right leg, the left hand gripping the neck as though in pain. Through the nose protrudes a long tree branch. Most unsettling, though, is the right eye; the only one visible to us, it fixes us with an uncannily human, blue-eyed stare. Pinocchio comes to mind, a knowing wink at the possibility for untruths, our humanity rendered imperfectly, even primitively. What are plays, after all, if not artful lies? Acting an uncanny reflection of humanity?
In a collection punctuated with positively vaudevillian acts of drama and drollery, it is fitting that the title should be so rich and varied in meaning; are these “Poetry Plays” hybrid forms, ie. poetry/plays? Or does poetry play? I imagine Svoboda answering, “Yes.” In fact the poet is playing on every level, using props and ventriloquism to challenge our notion of knowledge and self. She works within a wide range of settings and modes, from HBO documentaries to the silent dramas of silverware. In variety show style, the poems shift from the tragic to the jocular.
The literal meaning of the collection’s title is supported by the appearance of a cast list, which preludes the collection. The first listed name is Stage Manager, as if the tech hands are in front of the curtain. Other entities include familiar faces and names: comedian Jack Benny, Debussy, and the corpse of Emma Goldman. At the bottom is a note: “Many non-speaking parts, or parts that can’t speak, or parts speaking inaudibly.” Svoboda uses brackets liberally, suggesting stage directions, asides, intrusions of outside voices, or even the whispers of prompters in the wings.
The collection is divided in two sections, with the first feeling more outwardly performative and the second more intimate. It is as if we, the audience are traveling from a proscenium to a black box theater, a theater-in-the-round, and even the red brick of the standup stage. Appropriately, the first poem in the collection is titled, “STAGE MANAGER: LIGHTS UP.” Nervous energy bubbles as bracketed lines bear the urgency of stage directions, and a voice asks, “What about this is false: the scale, the alien plastered to the wall in a green/you can’t see? the trust you place [like an acorn] in the seat?” The first question, “What about this is false” could be a sincere invitation to criticism, or a peremptory challenge, as in “how could you say this isn’t realistic?” It takes on a tone of irony with “the alien plastered to the wall,” as I’m picturing the inflatable green aliens we bring out at Halloween in my home. Who else is alien, but the audience member, the outsider who watches the simulation of human experience from a removed vantage point? Our trust as the audience is fragile, though offered willingly, bolstered by the careful attention of actors and stage hands, and sprouting under the blaze of immersive stage design and engaging acting. Svoboda, of course, occupies all these roles simultaneously, allowing these curiously selected voices to dance the dance of suggestion.
Svoboda is one of those writers whose work you just cannot skim. Whether it is her fiction or poetry, her writing rewards careful reads and re-reads. Like any script or play, one is advised to slow down and read the poems in Theatrix out loud, so as not to miss her wordplay and double entendres:
Waves of light breakfast glamorously/with English spelling,/a woman/peeling hair from her face,/waves turning [away] wet, lapping/lapis [humid],/a shore where hair sticks blue.
Under Svoboda’s nimble hands, poetry is as much a visual art as a literary one. Take “Silverware Dialogue,” which begins: “A fork and a spoon lie together/to spoon and to fork.” There are no knives here to abscond with said spoon, however, in fact neither utensil poses a flight risk; “It is as if we lie on a vast table/says the fork. Useless.” Though inert, the fork has needs, and pride to be hurt:
The table was laid, says the spoon/not me. Tines, my dear, are everything,/says the fork. My tines are retired./They spoon through course/after intercourse, the hunger being/incurable, inconsolable.
If I hadn’t read this out loud, it might not have occurred to me that I was reading a love poem. In fact, the more I read it, the more I pictured a married couple in mid-life, saddled with ailments, contemplating their purpose after years of “usefulness.” And suddenly I’m wondering if are we no more than implements, simple tools created to feed the consumption of others?
Block quotes do no justice to Svoboda’s attention to aesthetics. “Silverware Dialogue,” for example, naturally appears in couplets. “Scatter Force Two,” which opens, “We’re two girls and we’re left/and we’re right” makes liberal use of line breaks and white space. The first line is left-justified while the second, beginning with “and,” fits directly beneath “left,” with “we’re right” extending beyond the line above. This structural effect mimics the image of two girls walking side by side, but also emphasizes the double-meanings of “left” (abandonment or simply directional?) and “we’re right” (as in, “correct,” or simply standing to one side?). Certain repeated words, like “pink,” throughout the poem take on holographic significance, as turned this way a word like “bars” signifies a pub where you’d have a drink, and turned that way it makes us think of imprisonment. I’m suddenly thinking of the “prison” that some might consider femininity or gender identity generally, the “pink fools” that a woman might meet and abandon in a bar, and the way in which young girls lean on each other for support in the world.
As I read (and reread, and reread, and reread) Theatrix, I reminded myself that theater—indeed all live performance—is experiential. We may not glean every line’s full significance, or catch onto Svoboda’s particular cleverness and lightning-quick wit the first time. But like performance itself, this collection is astonishing, if occasionally befuddling. These poetry-plays are worth each and every read, allowing them to stretch into the stages (pun intended) of our lives.
I am reminded of Heraclitus, who stated that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Like gazing at the surface of water, the poems in this collection may reflect my current sense of inadequacy as I wrestle meaning from each line. But where there is a preponderance of questions, one is assured there is vast depth. Next year, the poems will likely take on brand new significance for me. And perhaps this is the point of performance, the way in which we should approach it: as demonstrative of life’s complexity, an unearthing of wonder, and a startling realization of the contents of our own consciousness.
