SPIDERWOMAN THEATER – SUN MOON AND FEATHER –
1981
The ternary structure and motif of
the play is fascinating or even mesmerizing. It should make this play or this
life spin like a top and yet it does not really move. And that is the mystery
of the play itself. Three seems to become a curse. The language is extremely
repetitive with a great number of pairs and triplets and at times structures of
four elements.
“We had a beautiful red and white bungalow on a beautiful beach by a beautiful
bay.”
You have the three “beautiful” but
also the there adjectives “beautiful red and white” and the three nouns in “b”:
“bungalow,” “beach” and “bay.” This music is then amplified with modulations in
the next lines.
“A dilapidated old bungalow in New Jersey on a dirty beach of a dirty
polluted bay.”
“My father bought a great big red and white boat
with a great big windshield
and a great big motor.”
The three examples here are practically
one after the other within ten or twelve lines.
The three sisters are like Shakespeare’s
famous three weird sisters. They have like a magic that becomes a curse.
Elizabeth, Gloria and Muriel, ordered like that according to their age can
either be children with their father, or grown ups at their real age in the
action, but what action? The play itself is the intertwining, at times overlapping
association of three media: We can hear the recording qualified as “poverty
tape,” watch the images on the screen at the back of the stage from a 16 mm projector of films that
were made by some uncle and that show the past, and finally the action on the
stage itself and the three sisters constantly shifting from the present to the
past and vice versa, present or past they just tell.
The quotations I have given are at an
essential moment when the three sisters remember their father in that bungalow
on a beach who renovated an old boat.
The text tells us it took him three years, three summers to restore it to an
acceptable shape. Yet on that third summer he tried to sail it and it took on
water and sank, till eventually the next summer when the father would work on
it again.
If we take this story of the boat we
can consider it represents life and that people are engaged in such a life
without any possible escape from or change in their routines, in their lots. That
is the curse of permanence in this life. So the ternary motif, structure and
language can evoke a top spinning but it is spinning all the time and forever
without the slightest change, the slightest movement from one spot where it
seems to be glued. That’s the vision of this life given by the play. It is in
no way Indian per se, or even feminine per se. It is the fate of all people,
male or female, Indian or not, who take life as a routine, and the vision seems
to imply that life is always a routine, an unchanging repetitive predesigned
and pre-digested sequence of events. In this play the permanent pattern giving
character seems to be the father, though we could also consider it is the
poverty recorded on the tape that is playing behind. It is difficult to really
imagine what the play would be if it were performed. The text itself is far
from being clear enough to “see” the production we could have on a stage. In
fact we may think the poverty tape continues all along and yet we do not have
the full tape, just one excerpt at the beginning and the stage direction (Poverty tape continues.) And that is
all.
That tape tells us two girls are 13
and 15 and we can guess from the play that the third one who is called a baby
is a lot younger. Gloria is keen on saying she is not the eldest but only the second,
whereas Muriel is supposed to be the youngest. But that poverty tape is not
really about poverty but about teenagers who want a dime for some machine to make
60 cents with the two quarters they seem
to already have. It sounds a lot more childish than poor.
Altogether this play is a mystery as
for its feminine or its Indian dimensions. We are dealing with three girls who
are absolutely contemplative in front of the world, which may be a
characteristic of any young teenager who has not been able to have great
contact with the outside world, who has been sort of locked up in her (and it
might be his) family.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:01 PM