Memory's Dramas, Modernity's Ghosts: Thornton Wilder, Japanese Theater, and Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home

Abstract

The close relationships between theatre and memory have been recognized many cultures and many different fashions.... Central to Noh of Japan, one of world's oldest and most venerated dramatic traditions, is image of play as a story of past recounted by a ghost, but ghostly storytellers and recalled events common coin of theatre everywhere world at every period. --Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (1) For an American dramatist, all roads lead back to Thornton Wilder. --Paula Vogel, Forward, The Skin of Our Teeth (2) Whether explicitly or obliquely, Paula Vogel's plays often respond to and rewrite works by canonical writers from Shakespeare to David Mamet. In her 2003 play The Long Christmas Ride Home (hereafter LCRH), Vogel revises Thornton Wilder's one-act plays The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and The Long Christmas Dinner, while incorporating aspects of Japanese No and Bunraku puppet theater. Like her 1992 break-out play The Baltimore Waltz, LCRH commemorates Vogel's brother Carl, who died of AIDS 1987. And like return of Uncle Peck's ghost at end of her 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning play I Learned to Drive, LCRH is haunted by ghosts--of Carl, of Thornton Wilder, and of a social history that is both personal and collective. LCRH bears all Vogel trademarks--sharp juxtapositions, a combination of humor and pathos, use of circular form, and a focus on a political issue examined through lens of American family--but it is also markedly distinct from her previous work. It is a highly conceptual, poetic, and formally complex piece, and contrast to embodied historicity and social specificity of her other plays, LCRH invokes notions of time and place that are, at once, more abstracted and more immediate. It marks a shift her oeuvre away from a central female character and toward a more diffuse ensemble of perspectives, striking notes of solemnity and reverence contrast to irreverent humor of her previous plays. In its use of Japanese theater techniques, LCRH also marks Vogel's first experiment with a non-Western theatrical tradition. Given these differences, I would like to examine LCRH relation to Elin Diamond's provocative question: How does one of key features--its way of inventing/thinking about historical time--get dramatized, and what would 'modernity's drama' as a configuration do to ways we think about drama? (3) Whether conceived of as linear progression, cyclical repetitions, or postmodern ruptures, time has been invented, various ways, as a method for organizing human experience and making sense of relationship between past and present. Likewise, has been invented as a body of legitimized, canonical texts and performances that hierarchically organize theater history and construct value and meaning we associate with certain plays. Modern time and neither disinterested nor universal, but rather human constructs bound up with broader technological, scientific, political, imperial, and ideological developments that characterize era. And since performance contains an irreducible historicity, thinking terms of modernity's drama rather than modern drama invites a method of interpretation that examines way theater and its literature register the new modes of historical thinking that modernity fostered. (4) Diamond's argument dovetails interesting ways with Marvin Carlson's theory of ghosting, which he defines as uncanny effect created by theater's recycling of specific material which generates repetition, memory, and as effects that are deeply involved nature of theatrical experience itself and yet that also manifest in a very different manner different periods and cultures. (5) The plays of both Wilder and Vogel represent time ways that generate a ghosting effect and that complicate cause-effect narrative logic and naturalistic characterizations of Western realist drama. …