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Theater Guare the Obscure
By RETTA BLANEY
At the end of Chaucer in
Rome, John Guares latest play that opened earlier this month
Off-Broadway, my friend turned to me and said: He gets more obscure with
every play. Then he commented on the one thing that may be the only
obvious element in this nearly two-hour dark comedy: He sure does have
Catholic issues.
For those who know Guares work, which includes The
House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, obscurity
is a given, and Catholic issues are a good bet. The challenge is
trying to wade through the obscurity to understand what the playwright is
saying about those Catholic issues. Or one can just accept that in a Guare
play, we may never know.
Set in Rome during last years Holy Year, Chaucer in
Rome centers around Matt, his girlfriend Sarah, and Pete, all American
fellows at the American Academy there. (In real life the playwrights
wife, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, is president of this institution.) Along with a
swirl of fanatic pilgrims who have come in this Jubilee Year seeking
forgiveness, also in Rome are a Vatican priest, Fr. Shapiro, whose mother was
Irish Catholic and father Jewish, and Petes parents who arrive from
Queens, N.Y., having won the trip in a church raffle.
Matt, an artist, Sarah, a curator, and Pete, an academic studying
the fingernails of the crucified Christ in Italian art, have no interest in
religion other than finding it amusing. The pilgrims are at the other extreme:
They come off as lunatics, desperately trying to visit four basilicas so they
can say a few prayers and be forgiven for all their sins, which include murder,
prostitution and other biggies. Fr. Shapiro, rattled from dealing with the 45
million pilgrims who have descended on Rome within the first seven months of
the year, is delighted to find the unbelieving threesome. Its so
refreshing to meet people who dont give a rats ass about the Holy
Year, he tells them.
Matt has learned that a growth removed from his body is not
melanoma, but if he is to avoid cancer in the future, he must give up the
paints he has been using. He has been mixing toxins like carbon monoxide and
asbestos into his paints to create toxic paintings. Saying these are the only
paints he can create with, he wallows in self-pity, declaring his career is
over. Pete and Sarah challenge him to find a new way of expression, but when
Pete inadvertently leads him to it, the results are disastrous.
Pete, who has been trying to avoid his parents during their short
visit, talks Matt and Sarah into posing as a priest and nun to trick his
parents into a fake confessional to videotape them pouring out their sins. When
Matt brings up the question of privacy, Pete dismisses it. Its the
21st century, he says. Theres no more privacy. But
Petes flippancy ends after he hears what his parents say. Disturbed, he
tries to get the tape back from Matt and Sarah, but they are turned on by the
experience, realizing they have a new form of expression -- videotaping Holy
Year pilgrims, toxic with sin, confessing. They lure in a multitude
of other unsuspecting souls.
For the playwright, issues of sin and redemption are deep-rooted.
Born in 1938 into the pre-Vatican II world of Sunnyside in Queens, Guare has
described his childhood as 100 percent Irish Catholic, with 16
years of Catholic education before he attended Yale School of Drama. He has
described his role as dramatist as the Irish-Catholic high-comedy
playwright, a bit removed from life, going about and observing it
wittily. For his efforts, his plays have won numerous theater awards,
although some critics find them disorganized, unfocused and downright
incomprehensible.
Guare has said that as a child he dreamed of going to Rome to see
the pope. When he finally got there as an adult, he arrived on the very day
Pope Paul VI flew to New York to address the United Nations. Guare picked up a
newspaper in Rome and saw a picture of the pope riding down Queens Boulevard.
Struck by the irony, he began thinking about the impact of Catholicism on his
family and his childhood. Out of those reflections grew The House of Blue
Leaves, a savage farce set in a Queens apartment on the day of a papal
visit.
In that play, the son, Ronnie, wants to blow up the pope but
succeeds only in blowing up two nuns. Ronnie and the papal trip to Queens find
their way into Chaucer in Rome when Ronnie, now Petes father
and called Ron, confesses to having seen his father kill his mother during Pope
Pauls visit to pray for peace.
As for the Catholic issues in Chaucer in Rome, Guare
could be telling us that only lunatics believe in forgiveness, or at least in
the Holy Year formulaic path to forgiveness. Or, based on Matt and Sarahs
success, he could be telling us its ridiculous to even think people need
forgiveness. Or maybe Guare was just wittily observing life in Rome last
year.
Forgive me, I dont know.
Retta Blaney, a theater and religion writer in New York, is
editor of the anthology Journalism Stories from the Real World.
National Catholic Reporter, June 29,
2001
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