JEFFREY M. JONES is the author of the recent J.P.MORGAN SAVES THE NATION, a site-specific musical with a score by the late Jonathan Larson, for EnGarde Arts in New York, as well as the series of "Crazy Plays": LOVE TROUBLE (commissioned by the Undermain Theatre in Dallas and also presented at the Ontological at St. Mark's in New York), WRITE IF YOU GET WORK (Ontological at St. Mark's Theatre); THE ENDLESS ADVENTURES OF M.C. KAT and CRAZY PLAYS QUE FUMAR (Cucaracha Theatre); THE CRAZY PLAYS (BACA Downtown, Manhattan Theatre Club Downtown/Uptown Festival), ANNUNCIATION WITH WRANGLERS (HOME); and OFFICEWORK (New Dramatists).
Other plays include PUSS-IN-BOOTS, a play for children (1996); the historical-quotation trilogy A History of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones, comprising VOL I: DER INKA VON PERU (1984), VOL II: TOMORROWLAND (1986), and VOL III: WIPEOUT (1988); THE CONFESSIONS OF A DOPEFIEND (1982); 70 SCENES OF HALLOWEEN (1980); NIGHTCOIL (1978); and THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE (1972).
Mr. Jones is an instructor at the Yale School of Drama, and has received fellowships from the NEA and NYSCA Playwriting programs and support from the NEA Opera/Music Theatre & Interarts Programs, The Rockefeller Foundation, ArtMatters and the Peg Santvoord Foundation. He was a member of New Dramatists from 1980 to 1987, and a MacDowell colonist in 1991. He is published by Sun & Moon Press and Broadway Play Publishing. He is also co-author of a book about corporate Intranets for Microsoft Press.
Jeff and Joan are a youngish couple who have been living together for nine years in a state of mild antagonism. They talk to one another as if through the television set they are constantly watching, each misreading whatever the other has said. This ritualized dance of mutual miscomprehension come across as the very token of their togetherness: even in their bickering, familiarity breeds content. But it is All Hallow's Eve; mysterious forces are abroad and within. Two unacknowledged guests, a Witch and a Beast, gradually insinuate themselves into the tight emotional world Jeff and Joan have constructed. Even the house, as built (down to the last crack in the windowpane) and lit by Jim Clayburgh, becomes a loomingly ominous creature. Fantasy intrudes and takes over and finally it is reality that seems to be the intruder.
Matthew Maguire has directed 70 Scenes of Halloween with a deft hand, keeping up a brisk pace and seldom letting what should be sharply ridiculous descend into the merely frivolous. He wisely never wanders far from the concrete naturalism of the play's surface, although he manages to invest most of the scenes with a proper aura of surrealism. Christopher McCann plays Jeff with an oddly graceful klutziness appropriate to a man who's teetering on the edge of a frighteningly dull insanity but keeps himself from falling by a self-regarding sense of humor. Frederikke Meister portrays Joan's never-ending boredom with a fervor that makes ennui seem almost attractive. As the Witch, Caroline McGee, her hair permanently electroshocked, conveys a caged intelligence and a sexuality all the more tangible for the way it is gently mocked. Kevin O'Rourke does not mock the sexuality in his Beast; he lives it as he pillages all before him with raging animal gusto.
Jones's deadpan farce with intellectual aspirations ends long after it should, but on the other hand it could end anywhere. Time in the play is out of joint, non-continuous, as fragmented as a series of television programs. It does not flow forward with the certainly of out-and-out narrative; events follow one another in a series of near repetitions, so that you feel they are overlapping. Unlike most plays, 70 Scenes does not seem to be taking place in time at all, but in space. It is as if each scene were a discrete sketch traced onto the thinnest of translucent paper, and then all 70 of the tracings were juxtaposed one on top of the other in order to create a complex, multilayered drawing in which the lines were sometimes a little fuzzy but the total image was deep and singular and memorable.
It is also possible to interpret the play with old fashioned Freudian tools. Then you would say that the Beast and the Witch personified the sexual underminds of Jeff and Joan, although I would prefer them to remain the separate creatures they so palpably are on stage.
Although he gently needles them, Jones seems to have an affection for the characters he created. One thing I take him to be saying is this: In a sexual age which rightly relegates D. H. Lawrence to a dim time of prerevolution, the dominion of the libido is finally populated with likable citizens.
By Roderick Mason Faber
Matthew Maguire's terrific production of Jeffrey M. Jones' 70 Scenes of Halloween solves the problem of writing style vs. acting style in an interesting way. The play is almost a cartoon, a succession of brief scenes--some Stan Mack-realistic, some perfectly absurd--separated by blackouts. A Young, hip, suburban couple sits at home on Halloween watching TV, greeting trick-or-treaters, drinking, quarreling and so on, while two all-purpose alter-egos, known as "the Witch" and "the Beast" make strange appearances. The acting could be similarly stylized, but it's not. It's "real," at least for the "real people," named Jeff and Joan--after the playwright and his wife--and played superbly by Christopher McCann and Frederikke Meister. This works because two different things interact implicitly (the flat writing and the organic acting, the abstract characters and the concrete ones), saying two things rather than saying one twice.
The play would be better if it didn't try to get heavy and vague at the end and start invoking the harvest gods and the universal spirit of man, because it's really about a man and a woman sitting home at night, and that's a whole world in itself (see Wallace Shaw's Marie and Bruce which 70 Scenes would resemble if it were bleaker). Flaws and all, the play makes for a funny and theatrical evening; it has the something's-creepy-in-suburbia air of Sam Shepard's Buried Child (which McCann also acted in), the quick takes and precisely overheard dialog of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago
. Jim Clayburgh, the Wooster (nee Performance) Group's resident designer, did the wonderful set, an evocative slice of suburban double-decker.
By Don Shewey