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.

[Scene Change] Good Job: A Conversation between Terese Svoboda and China Marks

The grotesque Pinocchio-nosed image on the cover of my new hybrid text Theatrix: Play Poems was made by China Marks. We met at a wild 70th birthday party. She was part of a friend's study of geriatric artists — ha! laughs purple-haired China, geriatric? Recent exhibits are accurately titled: “China Marks, Not Quite Human” and “China Marks: Time Traveler”. Although I found this sculpture most appropriate for my title, it is her more recent work, primarily “sewn drawings” and “sewn books,” that has most inspired Theatrix. We share hybrid forms, the seductive line, visual wit, an interest in patterns, appropriation of found objects and images,  narrative drive, idiosyncrasy and flamboyance. Here is an excerpt from Theatrix: Play Poems published by Anhinga in March.

What? is your line

I think I’m panicking
I think I’m panicking
etc.
crying practice

[windowless]

quick, a dream:
one of you accuses the other

What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

and rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn’t like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then

WE

the chorus     too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: even the building is burning

[insert choreography]
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

Men and Their Ways

As ornery and subversive as a video by Matthew Barney, Marks' broadsides, books, and text-based drawings both invite and repel interpretation. Some pieces exercise Oulipian restraint, using only text found on the fabric itself, but more often texts appear in bubbles, titles, commentary and dialogue that she sews into the image by a computerized embroidery machine. Her visual iconography is often  found re-imagining 14th to 19th century tapestries in the style of Max Ernst meets Donald Barthelme. Part of the fun is trying to decipher the original. She's rethought a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens of “The Battle of Anghiari” and a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and she doesn't hesitate to acknowledge her sources, providing a link to the original. But it's hardly an imitation or even “in the style of” — the original is the springiest of springboards.

Winging It

“I don’t know if the fellow on the left really wants his wings washed,” writes Marks, “or has something else in mind. But their eyes have met. The one bent over her laundry, who answered his question with another question, is waiting for his answer. Something deliciously fraught is going on. Whatever it is, we have a ringside seat.”

To me "deliciously fraught" suggests play. And there's theater in "ringside seat” that depicts situations of tension and conflict, like a circus, play, film or novel. Like me, she is in the audience as well as on the stage, often, as China says, “surprised, sometimes thrilled at what I see, or so bored and restless or unhappy that I make drastic changes, until my own jaw drops….”

Terese Svoboda & China Marks

T: Theatrix: Play Poems is not so easy to appreciate read aloud as my other work, although there's still sonic considerations. More of the play in these poems occurs visually, in the spacing and typography. I make visual decisions that are not completely foreign to yours. My choosing where to place a piece of text is similar to your positioning text where it sometimes "rhymes" with a brush stroke of sewing.

C: Of course there’s drama in my work, because I tell stories. I am a compulsive story-teller, ask anybody who knows me because I answer questions in the same way. Though I suppose there are other ways to do it, I not only draw, but also must draw attention to my art. Story-telling is a useful strategy for women, to get children to go to sleep or eat their vegetables and to keep men from killing us and to get people to spend some time looking at at my latest drawing, maybe even buy it. Women who lived to tell the tale were probably the best story-tellers.  It must be built-in to at least some of us by now. Look at you.

T: Are we engaged in Q & A?

C: We are engaged, darling, kiss me.

T: I'm puckered.

C: How/why did you come up with Theatrix? I mean, there’s theatrics, but capitalizing it and changing  cs into an x changes everything.

T: Best to cap a title anyway, and it's all about play: “trix” as “tricks:” and even the multi-colored breakfast food. It's also a portmanteau of “theater” and “-trix" — the suffix that turns masculine agent nouns ending into feminine. You get to re-hear the last syllable of “theater” and gender-switch it, a performance all on its own.

C: Didn’t notice the gender switch, very nice! And why do you think you were able to “cut loose” with Theatrix?

T: You, dear. All the sotto voce's, those mutterings, lie at the core of what's important. In that, I believe, we are joined. I no more put down two words on paper and I see sparks between them and the page and the space and sometimes each letter, yet I endeavor to thread a story through, with bits that remind the reader of his own story. Your storytelling is never straight-forward narrative either.

Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans

C: Never straight-forward. A curator said she’d recently noticed (after 7 years) that the man sitting in the flower in “Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans” had a black eye and wondered why. I said I didn’t know why. The characters in my drawings live their own lives. As I keep saying, I am only part of the process, a process that wakes me up in the middle of the night with suggestions, concepts, apercus, most recently to reset the direction of something I’d already been working on weeks, but it was right to do so. The drawing is much better already.

Then also, seduction, to pull the viewer close, using the dynamics of the plot, if there is one, decorative elements, workings of the stitches and sewn lines, textures, what’s matte and what shines, the very plasticity of my figures. I make these drawings to have access to this material.  I am the first to be engaged and then my drawings pull viewers in. But I make it up as I go along, revising endlessly, simultaneously making it and watching it happen under my hands. I give myself over to the process and it all comes from that, the interminable process..

You mentioned the spacing and typography in Theatrix. Made me think about the charged spaces between elements in my drawing, my decisions about grounds, possible colors and patterns, what typefaces to use for certain texts but not for others. Text can take forever, re-written as the drawing changes. I draw the more-or-less human figure. I believe that there is an intuitive homologous knowing when human beings look at drawings of human figures and a need to see such things.

T: The cover image on my book, although singular, evokes a multitude of animalistic and human identifications, crippled, deceitful, yet innocent. Is that complexity evident early on in your work? Monochrome you are not.

C: I am after as complex a truth as possible. Your play begins before it begins and begins several times more in Theatrix. And it is as if there is a giant hand (the artist’s mind?) manipulating the characters and speaking for them. Simultaneously cozy and strange. Reminds me of when I was a child and we used the back of a sofa as a stage, with stuffed animals as the actors…. moving them and speaking for them as we liked….

T: That's exactly it. I have used my own tiny theater experiences, the ghost-texts of Shakespeare, Beckett, and downtown experimental theater and “sewn over it,” with some animation (see “Cast”) of characters that are not usually animate because why — animists are pre-animatronic.

C: Theatrix, the morphing, the high-jinks, the this-into-that, compression and expansion of time, etc.

T: All those things you do as well.

C: The only thing is, it goes both ways: my current drawing is derived, not literally of course, but formally, from Theatrix, which is crammed with tricky bits. The little drawing I began to work on a while ago, has been punching well above its weight, requiring many revisions, waking me up in the middle of the night to work on the text and title, insisting I get up at 4 this morning to finish the sewing, maybe. Have to look at it again, but I think so… Still must write the text file, sew it out and sew it on, clean up the edges, make and sew on the hangers. Another day or two… But I need to know.           

My title is a cue for applause, but of course this isn’t a theatre.

Will this do? “Applause” Or does it need parentheses ? Or should I put it in parentheses but without italics? Please advise.

T: Brackets.

[Applause]