Petesophizing...

I believe the playwright's focus is the sand castle, not the waves, so I'm operating with a strong bias against 'night, Mother, Marsha Norman's realtime suicide countdown, running this weekend and next at the Marian Center and produced by Dramatists Theatre.

The Pulitzer Prize committee in 1983 obviously saw it differently, and maybe they were seeing a different play. As much as artists might appreciate being judged on internal aesthetics, some plays are contexted and re-contexted with the passage of time -- by new works, by world events, by scientific discoveries. Romeo And Juliet may still be a love story, but it's certainly now, also, a case study in bad parenting.

In the years since audiences first met 'night Mother's Jessie Cates, a daughter looking to take control of her life by ending it, sophistication about mental hygiene has reframed the character's statements. Even a layman like me knows that "clarity" -- so prized by Jessie, and so seductive -- is a mindset not to be trusted.

If you don't know what I mean look into Tom Cruise's eyes: He's the product of an indoctrination, Scientology, which transformed the word "clear" into a global financial instrument and seduced thousands into baseline hysterics. (Give me Rosie O'Donnell any day. In a depression-related struggle, she couldn't be less acquainted with clarity. She really doesn't know how she gets through the day, and is rightly loved for that.)

Jessie is also, like Seinfeld's Kramer as he pictured sunny California, "already gone". There's never a doubt about the play's conclusion. Julie Swenson-Petras in the Jessie role, under the direction of Raeleen McMillion, accomplishes considerable stage alchemy in the service of being "already gone".

But you don't have to be a psychologist to lose sympathy for Jessie's "already gone". Her tranquility has been undermined, for example, by the pithy comments Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made to classmates on their way into Columbine High. They were "already gone". And like Jessie, they joked, even extending reprieves to friends, as they walked compulsively into the school building to lay waste to innocent lives and shackle hundreds of others with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Thanks to Harris and Klebold I chucked much of what Jessie had to say into the bargain bin with the statements of sociopaths and psychopaths.

I talked to director Raeleen McMillion this morning. Initially she rejected the offer to direct 'night, Mother, but reconsidered. She seems to agree it's a problematic artifact, though confessed she found the rehearsal experience incomparable for stimulating discussion with the small cast.

We can all make a case for our own suicide, just not so eloquently as Marsha Norman. 'night, Mother is unnerving, convincing, a kitchen table universe, one with a gravitational logic all its own, as well as a "to do" list -- how to prepare your mother, how to acquire bullets, how to rationalize around desperate protests. It has a strong annihilation agenda.

It's the kind of representation that activates "copycat suicides", (sometimes called the Werther effect after Goethe's The Sorrows Of Young Werther.) The "legitimizing" effect of one suicide on another has also been documented in the last twenty years and is still being researched. Some countries, less blindly devoted to "freedom of speech", actually now regulate the way suicides are publicized. Such caution could certainly be applied to 'night, Mother, ironically with deference to its own penetrating impact, actualized here in a high quality, small production.

Raeleen McMillion is right: it certainly stimulates thought. But under her direction, with Swenson-Petras as Jessie and Carol Zippel as Mama, the play received better than it deserved. I don't agree with Damien Jaques in this morning's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In the past twenty years it's been undermined as a human meditation.

And it left me in an odd, dual state of mind. I don't regret seeing it. I had a wonderful talk with Raeleen this morning. Still, I wouldn't see it again. And I'm glad it's having only a limited run.