Seeking Salvation: The Connection

In the original script for The Connection, Jaybird is the "author" who has lived for four months with heroin junkies and Jim Dunn is the "producer" who has hired a couple cameramen to film the happenings on stage. Jaybird agrees finally to shoot some dope himself to understand better the people he is writing about. Playwright Jack Gelber here is, I think, critiquing the old artistic saw about having to live through something in order to write about it. In her film version of the play director Shirley Clarke convinced Gelber to have Jim Dunn become the character who "turns on" and reduce the role of Jaybird to an off-screen voice. This, too, is a critique: in this case, a critique of the idea of cinéma vérité and the detached auteur of documentary.

In the current Sight by Sound production, director Gavin Reub has chosen to transfer the play to a reality television context. Presumably this would form a basis for a critique of reality television. Unfortunately Mr. Reub has made some crucial mistakes that undermine the production completely and weaken any possible dialectic.

The world of The Connection is a world of confusion and chaos. It is, after all, the Eisenhower era. It is a world in which every human being has become completely powerless, cogs in a machine they cannot stop. All that remains for characters in such a world is to bide time in a sort of hedonistic self-indulgence while waiting, waiting, waiting for it all to end someday, either in one's own death or the destruction of the entire species under a nuclear firestorm. It is one part Pirandello, one part Beckett and one part J. Robert Oppenheimer.

There are various responses to that world. Accept it smiling. Reject it crying. Ignore it completely and pray it will go away. Those in fact are the responses in order of Sister Salvation, of Jim Dunn and of the junkies (Solly in particular). Where Jim Dunn is square enough to think he can still change the world or at least profit from its misery, Sister Salvation represents the smiling face of the old, reactionary bourgeois. She represents everything rotten about the world from which the junkies have withdrawn, all its archaic and irrelevant values. Even the visual image is clear: she enters at the same time as Cowboy, the heroin dealer on whom everyone has been waiting for almost an hour. She poses a choice, an alternative way of life to that of the junkies and forces them to make a decision. And they do: they blow her off to go get high in the bathroom.

So why does Mr. Reub omit the character completely? Her character is the intellectual underpinning of the play. Even in the very title: the author is exploring "the connection" not only between his heroin-addicted characters but also the bland, vacuous yet evil society around them. They cannot turn to the emptiness of state religion, so they turn to drugs instead. In one careless stroke, Mr. Reub has removed the play from the realm of intelligence and turned it into a melodrama - or a docu-melo-drama, if you prefer.

Furthermore, the reality TV spin simply doesn't work. Reality television exists as a tacit covenant between makers and viewers that simply when people use their own names instead of character names what is then staged is acceptably real, even though everyone knows it to be pure bunk. By contrast, the difference between Shirley Clarke's film of the play and a documentary is patent. Ms. Clarke's film uses the script as an opportunity to examine how very artificial documentary vérité can be, but still with a very real respect for what is empirically real. Reality television has no such respect. But without that respect for the empirical truth there is no motivation whatsoever why Jaybird should commit to turning on. In a pure reality TV context he would simply do so as a spectacle, not because of caring about "what it's like, man." Recontextualizing the script to fit a contemporary fad doesn't say anything about reality TV and certainly doesn't say anything about the society that consumes such drivel with reckless abandon. If Mr. Reub intends to criticize the prey-predator relationship of reality television, he needs to go much, much farther than this. He must change the entire rationale of the characters onstage.

Above all else, reality television is about fame and more specifically about fame as currency. It is the tool of glory merchants. Gelber's characters are about as uninterested in fame as it gets. They have rejected money, religion, law and everything that makes America what it is. Why on earth would they be interested in fame? Of course they are not. But to do a play about reality television and not probe into the idea of fame and celebrity is to miss the entire point of reality television and its appeal.

Mr. Reub has made some other decisions that strike me as questionable but not overall harmful to the play. I think substituting a soccer ball for a hula hoop is justifiable - a statement of American fad - but not changing the dialogue that refers to the hula hoop as a Roman symbol of death is not. Change both or neither. But there are other things within the play that are similarly sloppy, giving the whole production a feeling of superficiality.

There is talent on stage. The music is fantastic. Evan Woodle, Mark Hunter and Raymond Larsen are fabulous local "outcats," and it is definitely enjoyable to see Ivan Arteaga doing his unconscious impression of Jackie McLean onstage. Too, even where his pacing lacks, Mr. Reub's sense of theatrical imagery is strong. Evan Anderson's stark lighting design in the central portal image where the junkies re-enter after their "salvation" is absolutely brilliant. The scene between Leach and Ellie talking about Leach's boil is effectively disgusting. Josh Ryder's portrayal of Cowboy is excellent and DeSean Halley makes an effective Sam. But for all that, a play really should go somewhere - even if the play is about going nowhere, slowly. The production sets up well enough, but without a real intellect to tie it together in the final third it unravels.

Seattle has enough theaters with convictions. What we lack, especially in our smaller theaters, is genuine intelligence. Not "bright ideas," but real ideas, real interpretations, real discussions. I believe Sight by Sound are trying to unite artists across disciplines - in this case, jazz and theater. This is an excellent goal. But one must take it seriously enough to be thorough. The Connection is not thorough enough. It is filled with good intentions, I am sure, but good intentions need unity with deeper meaning if they are to convince anyone.

Through August 14 // The Little Theater 608 19th Avenue East // Tickets $10-15, available from Brown Paper Tickets