Comedy? Tragedy?

About an hour ago I came back from seeing a French translation of Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" with the school. Though a little nervous at first about whether or not I'd be able to understand what was going on (hence a swift wikipedia search), I was reassured upon being told that it was a tragedy. Because, thankfully (for me, in this case), 17th-century tragedies tend not to be draw on the subtlest of emotions.

Lovers grasp each other!

Enemies wave daggers!

Characters not to be trusted tiptoe!

etc.

And, of course, at the end everyone dies. EVERYONE.

I loved the first two hours. But with about forty-five minutes left in the three-hour production, you could feel the audience stirring a little bit. Attention was not undivided, to say the least. The play was bypassing tragic and entering well into the realm of the ridiculous as only tragedies can. With about an hour to go the body count began to grow exponentially. And, furthermore, the deaths became increasingly as complicated as those planned by James Bond villains...while the period of pre-death staggering time grew longer and longer. Watching with dismay the characters yet to be brutally offed, you couldn't help but feel a glimmer of hope that Webster had perhaps written a sudden and tragic collapse of an enormous set piece to speed things along a bit...but no. One by one by one by one by one by one by one each character was poisoned/stabbed/strangled, staggered, and then soliloquized -- and yes, in that order. What was at first sad was swiftly becoming unbearable -- but not, perhaps, in the way Webster intended. More in an eyeing-the-emergency-exit kind of way.

And then something fascinating happened.

What first caught my attention was what I originally thought to be the overzealous use of a blood capsule (as though the death of a half-naked man by multiple stab wounds needed MORE embellishment). But, as the actor staggered and soliloquized, I realized...it was going on too long. The actor's indignant cry (mid-stab) of "OW, that hurts" was the second clue. (NO, this isn't what it sounds like, no one was actually hurt.) And suddenly, the chortles issuing from the students in the back rows (both the result of the extravagant deaths and the absurd amount of nudity in this production) grew louder...but the tables had turned. This was no longer laugh-at. In the final thirty minutes of the play, the actors and the director turned the tragedy on its head -- and they played into the over-the-topness, pushing it at first into comedy, and simultaneously, a breakdown of the very theatrical process it had mostly adhered to up until this point (with a few modern-touch exceptions). Mid-staggering, the new fleet of dying characters pulled out the fake-blood sacks tucked under their costumes and let the contents spout forward with gusto. Some crumpled to the ground -- others simply folded over. Without changing a word, the production had taken the tragedy - which, until those last 30 minutes it had been, more or less -- and had turned it (THE WHOLE THING!) into a play ABOUT tragedies, and the absurdity therein.

People always talk about the fine line between comedy and tragedy. And that's a link that comes through in more ways than one. In Endgame, Beckett wrote that "nothing is funnier than unhappiness." But even given the fact that Beckett wrote in part to undo the very notion of characterhood (and as such the line might be read as some sort of strange manipulation of the "characters," to dehumanize them), there's something universal in this. Take Mel Brooks,, for example: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."

I haven't thought much about this, but in the brief time I've spent thinking I have thought INTENSELY about this. Not to be a bore -- because, of course, Mel Brooks is being a little facetiously self-indulgent here. But the question of scale that he lays out also holds true. The play started as the cut finger -- small, affecting. Loss, separation. But as soon as that sewer top opened up, the audience was thrown, the gestures too grand to move us and, therefore, managing only to amuse us at their failure to do so -- until, in making the physical staged deaths as grandiose as the very number of deaths (and then breaking down the theatricality altogether by exposing the seams, via the blood capsules) everything changed. As the actors exposed the creaky machinery that tragedies can be, we were with them, NOT raising our eyebrows at them...and instead of being a play about something, the play became a play about plays.

There were ups and downs to the production. There were things I was interested in, things I thought were poorly done, and things that I quite enjoyed. There were times when I had no idea whether I was supposed to be laughing or feeling the characters' pain. But in the end, the play stuck with me, and I think it will for a while -- not because it was "good" or "bad" or anything in particular, but because, at the moment when the audience started to turn its back on it, it circled around to align itself with our new frustration.

But is that too much of a compromise? Is that an easy-out on the creative team's part -- to play into the absurdity of an undeniably over-the-top play, instead of creating a world in which the absurdity reads as logical?

Thoughts here, thoughts there

Sitting in my room now, preparing lessons...just put down a book of poetry I was perusing for potential material, though so far nothing's struck me as quite right for the students. I hear the Yemeni assistant T. cracking an egg in the kitchen, preparing his dinner -- and all of a sudden, this quiet, compact domestic noise sets my mind wandering. Next door I can hear G., from Italy, talking with her boyfriend. Outside there is full-blown wuthering: it is a windy, tempesty sort of day -- the kind of day where no tree seems like it could be deeply rooted enough to be safe. And I am here, at home, in my apartment, listening to it all.

It's funny how walking down a hallway to the sound of T. singing in Arabic, or the jingle of Y's Chinese keychain has so quickly become familiar. I love to think about the noises that have been absorbed under the heading of "domestic sounds." The egg being cracked in the kitchen here is the same as it would be anywhere -- less common (for me, at home) would be regularly hearing the sounds of my housemate's languages. But here, now, it all feels so normal. It's amazing how quickly we adjust to these things, and it's why I try to pay as much attention as I can to the little surprises that pop up here and there. They so quickly lose their edge and blend into the background of what you're used to. And when you're in the midst of a drastic move, in which EVERYTHING is new at once and, in a matter of time, almost EVERYTHING starts to feel normal, it's hard to know how to preserve that feeling -- that moment where you saw x, y, or z for the first time -- and it shocked you.

Of course, some moments of shock are easier to remember than others.

Take, for instance, a recent trip to the butcher's stand at a weekly market. While waiting in line to buy chicken, I became distracted in looking at an unfamiliar hunk of meat, prominently displayed at the front of the glass.

"A," I asked (for I was with the German assistant), "what is that?"

"What?"

"The thing that's all rolled up."

"Cow tongue."

WHAAA?! My jaw dropped (perhaps not unlike the former owner of said tongue) -- but, as my mother later pointed out to me, it's mostly Americans who would be surprised by this. Our squeamishness in regards to the "ugly" parts of meat says a lot about the way we think about food, I think.

With that said, my reaction to the cow BRAIN being sold to the woman in front of us -- a brain sitting in tupperware and SOAKED with blood, Quentin Tarantino-style -- still seems quite reasonable.

~

And one last thought.

I don't think I will ever adjust to how terrible the radio is here. Not that I'm in any way savvy in regards to music, but listening to the radio is actually OPPRESSIVELY awful. It's as though some national French broadcasting company took the cream of the crop, threw it all away, and decided to use nasty sardine water instead. It. Is. Terrible. The songs that they play have rhythms that are so PAINFULLY awkward and slow you feel like you're slogging through mud in boots that are too big for you. You just pray and pray that you'll get through to the end and it'll be clear, but no! On comes a techno song whose chorus features a sullen man repeating the name "Barbara Streisand" and you think to yourself WOW. So THIS is how it's going to be. It's maddening in a teeth-gritting, eye-twitching sort of way. Just plain awful.

But that's okay. There's always CD's of Harry Potter in french, which make for a much better listening experience.

That's all for now!

Hearing, Overhearing

"Why does he keep staring at us like that?" one of the assistants whispered from across the table.

I looked over my shoulder at the waiter. Sure enough, there he was, standing by the restaurant bar and staring, without any effort at concealing it, at our table. True, we were eating early and were so far the only clients in the restaurant, but still -- this went above and beyond basic attentiveness. At first I felt a similar stirring of irritation -- nosy as I am, at least I TRY to hide my eavesdropping -- but looking back to the four others seated at my table I began to understand.

To my right sat Y., the Chinese assistant. Next to here was G. and her boyfriend L., both from Italy -- and to my left was A., the assistant from Germany. And then there was me, the American. (Back at the apartment in Le Havre were T., the assistant from Yemen, and M., the assistant from Mexico.) Thinking back to when we all first met each other, the waiter's stares seemed less and less odd.

*

At first we only knew each other by our nationalities. "When will the Mexican come?" "Have you met the Italian yet?" "Which is the Chinese assistant's room?" We hadn't yet met each other, we didn't yet have names -- just our countries. And, despite its feeling blisteringly un-p.c. to refer to people as their nationality, it was also strangely appropriate. Terrifyingly enough, to the students, we ARE our countries. A. IS Germany, G. is Italy, I am the United States. (The other day, a student asked: "What is living in the U.S. like?") From the perspective of the French administration, we are here to serve as little islands of our nationality, conveniently drifted across oceans (or continents) for the enrichment of their French students.

It's an impossible task, to stand in for an entire culture. To some extent, I think our students would be surprised by this fact. But we assistants know it, and as a result some of the pressure is lifted. The first week we ate dinner together every night -- and every night there were new things to learn about each other's countries and languages. How do you count to 3 in all six languages? What do you say when someone is taking a picture? When you clink glasses during a toast? My favorite was the night where we went around the circle and sang our national anthems for each other, one little voice for each country...how funny to hear an anthem sung by one person alone, in a dining room!

We've learned fun little things like that about our countries and languages -- but there have also been moments where living together has provided more culture shock than the fact of living in France. Living with someone who hopes to have four wives, for instance. Six people is a lot for such a compact little apartment, but throw in the fact that we're all from such DIFFERENT places, such different cultures...six worlds crowded into such a tiny space! But we

respect each other deeply, and find humor in the most insurmountable of differences...otherwise it wouldn't be livable.

But at the end of the day, yes, we sit down to dinner together, and we talk about our day, our childhoods, our families, each other...we're an odd little family coming from such different places, but we're a family nonetheless, and we all do love each other.

*

Back in the restaurant, the waiter has finally averted his eyes, busying himself with the countertop. And our indignation subsides to an amused understanding of the shameless stares. Five different accents, each raking in mistakes from our respective original languages...five different rhythms and cadences...and, of course, conversation that is broken and slow, ideal for eavesdropping -- how irresistible!

I try to imagine myself in the waiter's situation, and I think back to New York -- which feels oddly far away at the moment. I remember that whenever I heard people speaking heavily accented English to each other, I also tried to listen. I couldn't help but try to figure out who they were and where they were from...and how English came to be the bridge between two unknown -- but almost certainly faraway -- places.