70 SCENES: THE ORIGINAL REVIEWS
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
Jeffrey Jones' plays seem to take place under a strobe light: brilliant flashes of deflated pop culture icons that slowly accumulate into a bitter satire of the emptiness and loneliness of our culture. They are imaginary fun houses with real monsters lurking in the crooked corners. They are also usually sharply paces and sleekly designed. Yet despite these virtues, they are often cold. Every fragment of an emotion is immediately undercut, and when the smoke clears, the dominant impression is of a brilliant but ultimately self-involved vision, the work of a clever but naughty adolescent.
The good qualities of Jones' work are amply displayed in his latest post-modern vaudeville, The Endless Adventures of M.C. Kat, or How They Got From A to B. It’s a lively concoction made all the more vibrant by the elastic and salty actors of the Cucaracha Theatre—a striking improvement over the starchy performances common in Jones' usual company, Creation Productions, proving you can be avant-garde without taking yourself too seriously.
The kaleidoscopic plot interlaces several strands. The title character is a naughty little mongoose-like character with a squeaky voice portrayed by a stuffed animal—one of the many anti-illusionist jokes is that he hates being called a stuffed animal. The framing plot involves a playwright (all-too-self-consciously named Big Dick) wandering a small town in search of M.C. All sorts of commentary about the longing for artistic, religious and other types of transcendence is thrashed about. About the way we encounter a myriad of redneck types, from a lost sportscaster to a fat fundamentalist to a manic doctor who screams lectures at us about the value of stress reduction.
As usual in Jones' work, moment-to-moment the humor is bristling and the pacing is deft. Some of the redneck caricatures don't pay off and the writing veers into condescension. But the set is imaginative—a backdrop of a baseball field and a perversely angled pink-and-lime-green sportscaster's booth that doubles as a puppet stage. And the cast sparkles. I particularly enjoyed Al Cima in a variety of finely distinguished small roles. M.C. Kat does indeed run the full gamut from A to B, taking a delightfully circuitous route. I just wish Jones had tried to reach C.
The Village Voice
Cucaracha Theatre's latest is the saga of M.C. Kat, meerkat extraordinaire, and his reluctant, sinus-afflicted friend, Dick Sorehead, as they traipse a Pop Americana landscape of quick draw cowboys, inbred towns, self-help TV, and "high-concept" Mets games: "Let's become one with the baseball inside us." Jeffrey Jones' wonderful waddle through the vernacular imagination plays through April 27, at the Broome Street Theatre.
The Village Voice
… Jeffrey Jones’ work is the best Creation has to offer, because he manipulates words as elegantly as the others manipulate bodies and props. "All dialog in this play has been plagiarized," he tells us in a program note for Der Inka Von Peru. His chief source is an unidentified schlock romance-cum-suspense tale of a woman trying to balance her career as head of a turbulent hospital and affairs with two of the doctors on her staff, one of whom is trying to kill her. Intercut, and sometimes superimposed, we hear passages from The Conquest of Peru, William H. Prescott’s classic adventure-story history of Pizarro’s defeat of the Incas. Thrown in for good measure are lines from countless other sources, including Shakespeare, the Bible, Oscar Wilde, the Declaration of Independence, and what I take to be The Right Stuff. Moment to moment the dialogue is packed with witty contrasts and slight-of-hand transformations. Prescott’s lush chronicle sets off the blasé melodrama of the hospital plot; Romeo and Juliet suddenly become Cicely and Gwendolyn.
Jones’ direction and design bring out the best in his writing. His actors are dry and blunt and keep the pace lively. Zach Grenier as the murderous doctor has especially strong stage presence and remains convincing despite the expressionist leaps his role requires. Patrick O’Connell as the stiffer, more earnest suitor, is a neat foil. The set, a large hole in a blank wall showing a smaller hole in a wall upstage, echoes the gestalt game-playing of the script and Jones fully exploits the comic possibilities of peephole staging. The music, half tourist-exotic, half classical bombast, is tightly woven in, and the lighting defines the various moods and focus our attention with only scant equipment.
The whole is wry, fun, and refreshingly eccentric.
The Village Voice
… Now comes Der Inka Von Peru¸, an 80-minute drama by Jeffrey M. Jones… The play is cunningly crafted, funny and decidedly nonstandard theatrical fare.
Der Inka Von Peru, first staged last May be New York’s Creation Production Company, is a Frankenstein monster, a patchwork of passages from dozens of seemingly incompatible literary sources. Jones derived the main plot--a soapy tale about a female hospital administrator caught in a love triangle with two doctors--from a pulp romance he picked from a used-book bin. A heavy dose of suspense--the bad doctor is intent on poisoning the heroine, while the good doctor tries to save her--was inspired by a bad movie Jones once saw. Woven into this story line is a parallel tale of deceit and exploitation lifted from William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, an epic chronicle of the Incan emperor Atahualpa’s defeat at the hands of Prescott (hence the title: the Inca from Peru). Jones didn’t write a word of the play: he borrowed all the dialogue spoken by the six characters from other authors: Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and Tom Wolfe, to name a few. Even Richard Nixon, cribbed from the Watergate tapes, has his say.
… Der Inka Von Peru, unlike representational theatre, doesn’t rely on literal, causal relationships to make its point; the play’s meaning is brought home by a successive layering of cultural associations. When Cliff, the good doctor, tells Shannon, the hospital chief, that she should "call me Ishmael," bells ring in our heads. The quote from Moby Dick is completely out of context, but the words cast a shadow of foreboding over the scene and are turned into irony at the play’s end.
Jones says that Der Inka Von Peru isn’t about Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, nor is it about a surgeon’s triumph over innocence in a nameless hospital. Instead, the play offers a cockeyed commentary on the fall from grace that heroism has suffered in the last 400 years, and it examines the parallels between the trival and profound.
"The events of Prescott’s story were horrific and tragic and had monumental implications for a continent," Jones says. "The events of the soap opera have no implications for anybody. Yet, when they are reduced to stories, they become equivalent." Like Post-Modern architecture, dance and literary criticism, experimental drama today turns inward to contemplate its own forms, conventions and history. The pretense of realistic theatre--that plays are reflections of the world outside--is stripped away, leaving stage artifice as the only reality.
The Reader
Before the discussion gets too rarified, let it be said at the outset that Jeffrey Jones’ experimental play, Der Inka Von Peru¸ is a hoot, a funny compilation of literary plagiarisms that make sense and nonsense in true post-Modernist fashion.
…In a way, it’s like spinning the dial on a television set, picking up the essential details of five or six different stories. In a sense, Jones is making an argument for the standardization of modern stories, particularly about the way such mediums as television and film are more about editing than writing.
… Jones calls Der Inka Von Peru a history play "that categorically rejects the possibility of knowing … events, except as stories." If he’s saying that history is an interpretation of events, he’ll get no argument from me. I think, however, that Jones is reflecting on the way fast communication and short attention span reduces [sic] an undercurrent of culture to familiar, elemental stories--and more accurately, to cliches.
Whatever the meaning--and there are more than a few in this play, I think--the performance is both engaging, entertaining and perplexing.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Even paranoids have enemies, goes the old joke; Jeffrey M. Jones’ Tomorrowland is a 90-minute incarnation of that line. The second of his projected trilogy, "A History of Western Philosophy," this piece is a logical sequel to Jones’ first installment, Der Inka von Peru, which romped through colonial history and western literature, juxtaposing a Harlequin romance with a William Prescott adventure tale on a peephole stage: a blank wall with a hole in it revealed an upstage wall with a smaller hole. Tomorrowland tightens the focus implied by that telescoping set, concentrating on postwar America in a suburban living room with an upstage window. Beyond it stretches the Moon’s surface, full of promise, and the earth rises in the distance.
Like Der Inka, Tomorrowland is a verbal collage; its dialogue, says a program note, "was constructed from source material all dating from the year 1950." Movies, TV game shows, advertisements, H-bomb descriptions, the Fuchs spy trial, Korean war reports, and McCarthy’s charges of communism in the State Department are the found objects from which Jones sculpts his ominous image of American anxiety. Three interweaving plots—a western in which Jimmy Ringo hunts down an outlaw, a sci-fi thriller about extra-terrestrials spying on earth, and a family sitcom—depict the exuberant optimism of the American Dream at the advent of frozen orange juice, television and suburbs.
Guided by Television Star Shannon Malleson, we visit the Wilfred family in their Delray Beach, Florida, home, where Jason complains from his easy chair about his country’s wimpy defense. Carol makes Wednesday her casserole day and imagines creatures in her backyard, and their daughter, Divina, asks her dad about the Cold War and has a study date with Selden, the high school football star. The characters’ fears edge seamlessly into paranoia as the family scenes dissolve into the western in which Jason plays the gunman, Selden the outlaw, Carol and Divina their devoted girls. Shannon and her co-narrator, a health department doctor, provide an ironic point of view that deepens the play’s obvious connectoins between red scares and cowboy heroics. Doubling as the aliens who inspect Earth after its (presumably nuclear) destruction, Shannon and Dr. Sinclair, always cheery, offer hysterical warnings of modern horrors: communism, polio, madness, radiation, and body odor.
Daniel Moses Schreier’s relentless soundtrack underscores the intersecting genres with electronic music, homey Muzak, and cowboy arpeggios, all maintaining the same even rhythm. Jones has paced Tomorrowland, unlike the frenzied Der Inka, with uninterrupted smoothness, creating some lulls, but he gets textured performances from Barbara Somerville as Divina, Karla Barker as Shannon, and especially, as Jason, Zach Grenier, whose repellent charisma makes him the quintessential actor for Jones’ sleazy heroes.
Near the play’s end, crazy Carol confesses her role in a spy scheme, describing her experience as "controlled schizophrenia," which could describe equally well Jones’ diagnosis of the U.S. and his multi-focus dramatic form. If at times Jones’ ideas about theater and history rise to the surface of this play more than they issue out of its action, that’s a welcome improvement over similar experiments (even Der Inka, to some extent) whose complex issues are peripheral to their cleverness. Jones’ vision, alas, is as intelligent as it is bleak.
The Village Voice
For the last several years, Jeff Jones has been wandering the shores of popular culture, gathering images of heroism and love like a kid collecting seaweed. From the flotsam and jetsam of William Prescott adventure tales and Harlequin romances (Der Inka von Peru) or H-bomb descriptions and 1950’s game shows (Tomorrowland), Jones has fashioned a hilarious way to reveal the self-serving myths through which we understand the past. Wipeout, which completes his trilogy—"A History of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones"—gets literal about myth: Here, Jones looks at 1960’s beach movies through Greek and Roman lenses.
Constructed, like its predecessors, entirely of found texts, Wipeout tales dialogue from Frankie and Annette flicks and plays it against chunks of Homer, Plato, Pliny and Plautus. In the play’s first act (the tightest of the three), Delores, Frankie and Butch hang out on the beach; the boys fight over Delores while she ponders the waves. Above them, through a long rectangular window, a chorus ominously narrates tales of battles and burials intersecting with the scenes below. "He’s cute," says a beach bimbo sizing up Frankie, and from the other world behind the portal comes the line, "That’s the great tactician Odysseus."
Unlike most theatrical collagists who stick pop icons in some historical mud and presume, thereby, to make a political statement, Jones does not settle for easy equations. Sure, you get the sense that beach bums pumped themselves up into the Homeric heroes of their era, but Jones goes further. Beach-movie bimbo brokering looks all the more propagandistic when played beneath a legend about gods inventing women to give men "an evil thing in which they may be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction." Meanwhile, actors change roles constantly, mixing gender in varioius permutations. More often than not, Delores is played by Gary McCleery with a gruff, gravelly gangster voice that would make Annette squirm.
What distinguishes Jones most from the usual postmod (juxta)posers is his skill as a playwright. He mixes his two contrapuntal worlds so fluidly that it seems natural for Socrates to wander among the surfers, or for "the girl-next-door" to end up among the gods. In the final scene, you can no longer tell "Beach Party Bingo" from Plautus. Wipeout has an insistent narrative drive—you always want to know what is going to happen next—though there’s no discernible plot: The things that do happen don’t make sense. Did Delores kill Frankie so she could rise to stardom all by herself, or did he commit suicide? Has Socrates really turned into a mermaid? And how magic are those bathing trunks, really?
The cast of six plays as though it knows the answers to these questions—but not to any others. Mary Shultz and Zivia Flomenhaft especially have perfected that I-don’t-know-where-I-am-but-I-know-I’m-in-the-right-place stupor so essential to Jones’ work. With their perplexed smiles and confidant stares, they look just like those Greek characters of yore, specimens in a grand design they know nothing about.
The Village Voice
Last updated August 12, 1999