A Blasted Question

So... it's looking increasingly unlikely that I'm going to be able to see Blasted.  I had to bag out on my ticket to see it this past weekend due to work on the ten minute plays I'm doing.  I hope to be able to see it, but as I said that's increasingly unlikely.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am fairly vocal an unfan on the script. I don't really want to reopen that whole conversation, although I'd be happy to explain why if you'd like to know.

Here's what I'd like to know though, and what I was hoping the (by all accounts superb) production would answer me: What is the value in putting yourself through the play? I don't understand what the play has to give you once you've sat through the anal rape, the baby eating, the eyeball gouging.  Reading the script I just feel assaulted.  I have to imagine that people who are fans of the play see something of value in the experience of sitting through it. What is it? In what way does the play enrich your experience (or substitute whatever trope of why at is important)?

I promise this isn't a trap, I really want to understand more about why the play has its fans and what they see in it.  I like plenty of writers who site Kane as a chief influence. I even like a couple of Kane's plays. It's just that the violence is so extreme in this play and it seems to me to have little to offer beyond beating its audience up.  Again, this has nothing to do with the excellence of the production, which I'm sure has many things to offer like great acting, an interesting set, flawless staging etc. Most if not all of the reviews I've read assume an inherent value to the play and therefore don't bother to make the case. Which is their right, of course, if critics had to defend the inherent right of every play to exist, where would that get us...

Comments

[Aaron]

Violence for violence's sake is shocking, and if you've just read the play, you're probably getting just that. But Benson's direction is incredibly grounded in realism, and she holds our attention in that world for an excessively long time--long enough to be uncomfortably real about the world, which is why I (and perhaps others) enjoy this play. What it does so well is to extend violence to its furthest point, starting with a simple tongue forced down a girl's throat and getting all the way to a blasted, destroyed world, the result of unchecked passions (i.e., the loss of restraint). Structurally, Kane's play follows that, too, and what you want to see when sitting through it, are the glimmers of kindness and hope. In that, as in Beckett, there's a savage comic tone to some of the more surreal action in the latter half (especially because of Benson's grounded direction), and the violence doesn't come across as mindless or gratuitous: it just comes out of hiding. This isn't Chekhov, where the violence happens offstage, and that honesty is very appealing to me, today.

[Ben TS]

I'm a Kane fan, but I'm also very understanding of those who dislike her work. Part of it is her youth--she died before she really matured as a writer. So a lot of her stuff is admittedly imperfect.

Truth be told, I was less affected by the violence in Blasted than by Cleansed (Kane's second, and more starkly brutal) work. The carnage in the second play is less literal, yet somehow a lot more horrifying. Both works were an attempt to use large-scale violence as a metaphor for the kind of violence that occurs daily (in Blasted it's rape, in Cleansed it's the devastation of heartbreak). I think that Cleansed was more effective in making this connection.

However, I still think Blasted is a powerful play. To me it's not so much the violence as much as the disturbingly recognizable humanity of the characters. Kane takes our daily foibles and kind of expands them to their most vicious extremes.

For example, any heterosexual guy can recognize the specific kind of wheedling, passive-agressive tone that you take when you feel sexually rejected by your girlfriend. Kane expands that kind of behavior so that it's embodied by a guy who alternates great tenderness with literally holding a gun to his girlfriend's head. In her world, the only difference between you and the creep on stage is the extremity of the situation. She roots her plays firmly in everyday psychology.

So I don't know if that's a defence or not. I have to admit that I don't entirely care for the last third or so of the play, which doesn't really follow through on the earlier premise (she doesn't flesh out the intriguing England-as-warzone milieu, instead retreating into sheer absurdism). But as a whole, I think the characters are so brilliantly etched that it makes up for some structural flaws.

[shaygo]

I'll start by saying that I don't think that the violence in the play is just gratuitous or violence for violence's sake. I think that it is there to show us a true brutality that forces us to confront a: the reality of the landscape of war and b: investigate how humanity either stays in tact or becomes obliterated. Our discomfort with the situations onstage is a luxury -- because we don't have to live it and some people do. It is a telescope for us to look through so we can see war without sanitization.

I also think that the play is ultimately about love -- as I think all of her plays are. Whatever you want to call Kane's world view (depressed, nihilistic, etc.) it is a play that grapples with love and it's place in people in a grotesque but honest situation.

It is "exciting" to see violence like that on stage. I always wonder how Kane's play could possibly be staged and to see an entire team go into it head-on and solve the challenges in the script was electrifying.

The play & production don't apologize for the violence shown but they don't glorify it either. I think it's really one of the most gratifying nights of theater I've had in a long time.

[Laura]

I haven't read or seen Blasted. I am, like Ben, though, a fan of Cleansed. Had I read it beforehand, I never would have seen it, but I went in cold and saw an absolutely stunning production that had me weeping at its beauty and sadness. There was definitely a takeaway, I thought, a beautiful message about love overcoming loneliness that was would not have carried as much power without the play's nearly unbearably harsh circumstances. However, it would be REALLY easy to lose that. A couple years later, I rushed to a different theatre to see a production of the same play that felt cold and empty and performed entirely for shock value without revealing any of the characters' hearts or vulnerability. This production failed miserably and probably would have put me off Kane forever, much like reading the script would. It's not worth the brutality of the experience unless the production is literally transcendent.

[Mark]

I loved the production of Blasted. And I disagree with anyone who says the play is somehow flawed, but promising. I think it's a masterpiece and absolutely deserves its canonical stature.

What was meaningful about the experience of seeing the play for me is that it puts the audience viscerally in touch with the human capacity for cruelty -- then, unexpectedly, it shows us how compassion can exist in even the most hopeless circumstances. Experiencing these things in a sensory manner is much a much deeper experience than reading about them in the news (as Kane did -- the violence is all things that real people do to one another) or even reading the script. That's what theater does -- it puts us in touch with who we are and who we might become. Unmissable.

[Rocco]

Clearly I'm a big fan of the play, but its not a one that I expect my friends to appreciate or even see. But if you think of seeing Blasted as sitting through anal rape, baby eating, and eyeball gouging, then you're entirely missing the point and you're never going to enjoy it. The play makes those events inevitable (as frightening as that is), and to focus on them is cheating yourself of the experience.

Check out David Greig's preface to Blasted in Kane's Complete Works. He sums up why the play is incredible in a straightforward and spot-on way that I can't. Something about, "the structure of the play buckling out from under you", and such.

Also, I totally agree with Ben above, but I would add that homosexuals recognize that tone as well.

[Jaime]

I loved Blasted when I read it, but found that seeing it live pushed me closer to Isaac's camp.

This is without a doubt a stunning production, and the performances are all that anyone could wish for.

But I found myself, somewhere between the rape and the eyeball-sucking, wishing I weren't there. It's like being on a particularly brutal amusement park ride, or in the theatre at a horror movie, and thinking, "I'm okay, but this is just unpleasant, and I am ready for it to be done."

I think the humanity and love, the flickers of which are vital to this play, get overwhelmed by the violence and brutality. I didn't go in even thinking it *might* be gore for gore's sake, but it really started to feel like that.

I get what the play is trying to say, or is saying, but it became about the play's assault on me, and not in a sort of discomfort that makes me think, or feel, or consider. I was just thinking, "Eat the baby and get in the hole and let's be done with this."

[Rob]

I found it to be an emotionally engaging narrative meditation on the value of human life in light of mankind’s perpetual cruelty. Sarah Kane uses an interesting device by expressing idealism and innocence only through a character who is mentally impaired. I believe each act of onstage cruelty asks the audience whether one has to be mentally impaired to be idealistic. My least favorite part of the play was when the man and the girl began debating the value of human life (which I believe when he was begging her to facilitate his suicide) because I felt it was telling me what the rest of the play was showing me. I also found it to be about love, as the characters are imprisoned by their needs for people that they cannot help but hurt and be hurt by.

[Jaime]

Rob, I don't think making Cate mentally impaired is an interesting device - it's a cheat. She's instantly and necessarily a victim. It's 100 times crueler, and easier, for her to be manipulated, cajoled, and abused. Ian's not just raping a woman, he's raping a retarded girl. She never stands a chance.

[Ben TS]

Wait though, I don't think Kane wrote Cate as retarded. She's deeply introverted, kinda Aspergian, unstable ... but not retarded. She's profoundly fragile because realistically, that's the only kind of personality that's going to get wrapped up in Ian's bullshit. I also don't think she's written as an unwitting victim, necessarily. A victim, yes. Not so much unwitting.

[Jaime]

At least in the current NYC production - and this is no dig to Marin Ireland, who is giving a superlative performance - Cate is retarded. Not severely, but retarded for sure. It goes beyond Asbergery or fragile or odd. I think this production pushes it farther in that direction than is in the text, but she's not of full mental capacity in the script, either. Giving what seems to me a medical condition to account for character traits - vulnerability, fragility, slowness - still feels like a shortcut.

[shaygo]

i didn't find her to be retarded at all. perhaps "slow" but not retarded. i felt that was pretty clear at the end when she seems to know exactly what's going to happen to her when she leaves to go get something to eat.

at least that was my read. that she was willing to put herself in that position because her need for food was greater than her need for safety.

i think the text pushes her further towards mentally disabled than the production & marin ireland's take does.