Get The Guests: Nine Thoughts In Lieu of a Review of The Designated Mourner

By Isaac Butler

(1) There are certain fundamental assumptions about the world that The Designated Mourner contains that, at my core, I do not share. Chief amongst them is that the distinction between the different “brows” (high/low/middle) is a distinction that has value, and that one of those brows is better than the others, and that it’s the high one. For what Mourner is mourning is the death of white male high-brow monoculture. And while I’d be a fool not to admit that there were some positives to the reign of that monoculture, I don’t think it ending is a tragedy. At this point, it just is, and I’m way more interested in discussing the effects of this, and looking at what is actually going on.

(2) The Designated Mourner is, however, very very perceptive about the balloons that kept that monoculture afloat and prescient about the fact that they would all deflate or pop. As Jack, the main narrator (played by playwright Wallace Shawn) sheepishly (and then gleefully) admits, his interest in highbrow culture (within the play played by the poetry of John Donne) was almost entirely motivated by a mixture of guilt, social pressure and anxiety. Indeed, by the end of the play, in one of the show’s most riotous moments, he sets himself free by admitting he is a philistine and promptly shitting on a book in a bathtub.  In this, the play, first performed in England in the late 90’s, is prescient. For in our current culture— one that has slowly removed the struts supporting the edifice of the cannon, one that, more and more, abandons core curricula in the humanities—those social stigmas around “low” culture are slowly evaporating.  Again, whether you view this is tragic is up to you. I don’t. The Designated Mourner does.

(3) It’s definition of these things is a bit odd, however. A bit forced, perhaps. For in the world of The Designated Mourner, your choices are to sit around all day reading and discussing John Donne or reading pornography and masturbating. That’s the cultural binary at its core. You can read the Great White Male Poets or watch shit television in your hotel. There’s no in-between. This is—let’s just be honest here—a massive cheat. But it also helps simplify and clarify the matter. So let me just say that, yes, if all books were to vanish from this world and all people who care about books were to vanish from this world and all we did was sit around reading Hustler, I’d be upset. But that world is simply not plausible.

(4) Which may be why The Designated Mourner is a work of dystopian science fiction. It takes place in a New York City that’s been turned into a Stalinist hellscape filled with Uncle Joe’s constant purges of artists, academics and his own inner circle. Indeed, Jack’s father-in-law Howard (Larry Pine) is a kind of Osip Mandelstam figure, one who has fallen afoul of the powers that be for an early subversive piece of writing and is clearly doomed to be killed whenever the State gets around to needing him dead. That The Designated Mourner is an act of mourning high culture while also working within hoary (and until recently disrespected) genres is one of its more interesting tensions.

(5) The Designated Mourner’s other main fascination—and it shares this fascination with Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon—is with bourgeois hypocrisy. Jack laughingly tells us of Howard and his circle’s hypocrisy, while also revealing his own. For he has decided to spend his life remembering a kind of culture (and the people who cared about it) even though he hates that culture and those people. The hypocrisy of the middle class pops up again and again throughout the play, whether it be his secret enjoyment of porno over poems or the general public getting happier as intellectuals are exterminated. Both Mourner and Aunt Dan seem to view hypocrisy as some kind of mortal sin, as horrible and commonplace as lust, gluttony or wrath.  This is the second assumption of The Designated Mourner that I do not share. Hypocrisy is commonplace, yes. In fact, it might just be the human condition. But is it really a sin? Is pointing it out really a worthwhile project for a body of dramatic work?

 (6) It’s ultimately the audience’s hypocrisy that is the target.  At the end of the play, after Jack’s lover Judy and her father Howard have both been executed, Jack recounts how, now free to read porn and wander central park all day, now finally honest with himself about himself (and about his lack of self), he is finally something close to happy. And indeed, the play seems to lighten for a moment, everyone laughing and having a good time—The Designated Mourner is riotously funny, something many members in the audience don’t seem to have noticed—until Wallace Shawn somewhat abruptly stands up, walks off stage and slams the door as hard as he can, a kind of fuck you to the audience for enjoying Jack’s dissolution. When Shawn peaks his head out to wave to the audience and thank them for coming, it’s the play’s most disingenuous moment. I’ve never heard “thank you” more suffused with loathing in my life.

 (7) This play’s opinion of its audience is very, very low. We are Jack, reveling in the wallows of culture, spineless and weak in the face of creeping totalitarianism. We are Howard, consigning ourselves to irrelevancy in order to protect our social status, thinking that we have saved ourselves from the world that will eventually kill us. We are not the far more principled, brave and loyal Judy, played by Shawn’s real life partner, the writer Deborah Eisenberg. We are the targets. But The Designated Mourner is very clever about this. After all, it’s not exactly a bold stand to stick up for highbrow culture in a theatre where tickets cost over eighty dollars a pop. It’s a play that flatters its audience, gains its sympathy and then, slowly but surely, sharpens its knives. If you are the type of theatre artist who sits around going "theatre should challenge its audience!" (if you are, in other words, a lot like me in my mid-20s) then this is the show for you. I'm happy to see it as part of a theatrical landscape and also happy that it's not the dominant mode. 

(8) (How any theatre artist who knows the history of the stage and its relationship to culture at large could believe that high and low brow are distinctions with any kind of real meaning is, again, beyond me. Sorry to keep harping on this.)

(9) Is The Designated Mourner good? This is a tough question to answer, for The Designated Mourner plays by its own rules. It’s largely a monologue play, braiding together the accounts of Judy, Howard and Jack, except when it isn’t.  Those three voices tend to give interrelated pieces of information, except when they don’t. There’s never any thought given to more logical questions of how these people are able to speak to us, where we are, or what our relationship to the speakers is (and thank goodness for that). If you brought The Designated Mourner in to a creative writing workshop, it would likely get torn to shreds. It meanders greatly over the course of its nearly three hour running time. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to know what it’s about. You could make the argument for cutting the role of Howard in its entirely. But all of the above craft concerns are utterly beside the point. The Designated Mourner is so true to itself and what it wants to be doing that you can’t help but respect it. It invents its own vocabulary and craft and rules, makes no apologies about any of these things, and blazes straight ahead. It is also frequently beautiful and hilarious. And also hectoring and tiresome. These things are inseparable. You are free, in other words, to like it or not. But don’t forget: The Designated Mourner fucking hates you. 

Comments

[Mac]

Both Designated Mourner posts make reference to Jack deciding to dedicate his life to remembering the intellectuals. I don't believe this to be supported by the text. The role of the designated mourner, as described by Jack, is someone assigned to carry out a mourning ritual when there are no remaining loved ones to do so, but he doesn't suggest anywhere in the text that I can see that this ritual is to be carried out in perpetuity. Moreover, Jack says at the end:

"The bit of paper wasn't very big, but it burned rather slowly, because of the cake crumbs. I thought I heard John Donne crying into a handkerchief as he fell through the floor -- plummeting fast through the earth on his way to Hell. He name, once said by so many to be 'immortal,' would not be remembered, it turned out. The rememberers were gone, except for me, and I was forgetting: forgetting his name, forgetting him, and forgetting all the ones who remembered him."

This suggests to me that Jack has not made a decision to spend his life remembering the readers of Donne, but rather the opposite.

[Isaac]

Hey Mac,

Obviously I'm going on just seeing it once cold and never having read it, so I defer to you. Although Iw ill say, if that's true than the play is far less conflicted about its subject matter than I thought, far more didactic and, I'd argue, less interesting.

[David Cote]

All due respect, Isaac, but I'm kind of stunned by this post. It's beyond reductive: There's so much simplification, misreading and assigning of single-layer authorial intent, it reads like a projection-filled rant. I know the intersection of art, culture and politics is your bag, but this post makes me think you can't distinguish between a complex work of art and a Brookings Institution position paper.

Jack explicitly frames the notion of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" as an antique and not terribly true (however useful) dichotomy. That he uses this distinction to explain his moral and human failings should speak for itself. He is the classic unreliable narrator. No, scratch that: his narration is fairly reliable. He's an unreliable human being. He's a shit. Likewise, Howard and Judy are both decent folks and somewhat useless cultural parasites. Their lives are rich and beautiful but part of a system that wants to destroy them. In the play's "society" (scare quotes because Mourner is so allegorical) there are various class types: liberal aesthetes like Howard and Judy; murderous government tools; the "dirt eaters" who presumably want revolution; and then there's Jack. Jack kinds of drifts through the various classes. If you think he speaks exclusively for Shawn, or if what he has to say about Donne versus porn should be taken at face value, then you've completely misunderstood the play. It's not an elegy. It's not a celebration. It posits that our cultural decisions inform our moral character, but not in any proscriptive or even calculable way.

Think Shawn's attitude toward "high" or "low" culture, disenfranchised people or bourgeois hypocrisy is naive or clichéd? Fine, but don't try to distort a big, baggy, magnificent piece of writing for the theater because it makes you feel or think two things at the same time.

Of course, I write as someone who loves the piece already. My review is here: http://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/the-designated-mourner

[Adam Feldman]

For what it's worth, I'm 100% with David here. The play described above has very little to do with The Designated Mourner as I see it. I also must take specific issue with the claim that Aunt Dan and Lemon "seems to view hypocrisy as some kind of mortal sin," which is not just wrong but exactly the opposite of what Aunt Dan and Lemon actual portrays, which is a world in which hypocrisy at least testifies to the straggling survival of a real value system to be violated guiltily, in contrast with the insouciant and much, much more dangerous NON-hypocrisy of the two title characters.

[George Hunka]

I was unable to see the production, but also feel this analysis was unsatisfactory; in the play there is also some very disturbing material about family and sexual relationships (the possibly incestuous relationship between Howard and Judy, for example) and how they are affected by cultural assumptions. And the name of John Donne isn't merely dropped as an example of "high culture" but has a very specific meaning in the context of Jack's character and the extent to which art of any kind, whether it can be characterized as high or low, can broaden human experience and make us susceptible to compassion and love; high/low culture is a false dichotomy, and it is this dichotomy that is under attack through the play. (Indeed there is a scene in which Jack describes Howard having a very good time at a popular play or film of some kind. Jack believes that Howard is being condescending towards the audience at the film, but Jack, as others here have said, is profoundly unreliable; and Jack is far more hostile to the "high art" he doesn't understand than Howard and Judy are to what Jack might describe as "low art.") Anyway, more here:

http://thetheatrebar.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/program-notes-the-designated-mourner/