Tuesday night at Soho Rep I saw Artistic Director Sarah Benson’s astounding production of Sarah Kane’s “Blasted” –a much-anticipated first American production of an almost unbearably brutal play. I know the play fairly well on the page, which was why I was a little scared to see it. But I didn’t so much see the production as witness it, the way you might witness a bombing or tornado. Or maybe I slammed into it, as one might a window, spending the rest of the night picking little shiny bits of it out of my skin. I can trace my experience by tracking my hands. Here’s a breakdown:
- hands over eyes: 10% of the play
- hand over mouth, holding breath: 10%
- classic horror-movie pose (fingers laced over eyes at the ready to shutter over them): 30%
- hands on chest, heart-level: 10% (most of last two scenes)
- hands clenched: 5%
The rest of the time I was fine.
For those unfamiliar with her, Sarah Kane is pretty much the Sylvia Plath of playwriting: fundamentally disturbed, violently gifted, privy to a rare level of pathological pain, dead from suicide at 28. Like Plath’s, her work burns a hole through the page; and like Plath, her death altered perceptions of her work.
When she was alive, many felt her plays were needlessly cruel and abusive to the audience, especially Blasted;: when it premiered at the Royal Court Theater in London in 1995, the critics slammed it with descriptions like, “this disgusting feast of filth”, a “gratuitous welter of carnage”, and “a sordid little travesty of a play”. Ah, critics; charming as usual (although compare these comments with Brantley’s in the Times yesterday). But writers like Edward Bond and Harold Pinter reacted with praise; Bond admired its “strange, almost hallucinatory quality”, and Pinter, who became a personal friend to Kane in the wake of Blasted, said the play was “facing something actual and true and ugly and painful”.
Their support isn’t totally surprising; as a writer Kane shares their weirdness and brutality. But as an audience member, I am somebody who’s never made it through a Tarantino movie with my eyes open, and I resent the man for it. I do not deal well with gratuitous violence. So why did I love this play so much? The lady sitting next to me did too, who kept squirming and hissing, “Oh, come on!” at every gruesome turn, and so did the guy next to her who spent about 30% of the play with his head bowed like he was praying. Maybe he was praying. But we all really loved it.
It’s the “facing” in Pinter’s comment that made Kane’s play bearable to me, and gratifying, and important. Kane’s cruelty is a necessity. The world of Blasted has to reflect pain at its extremity in order to give us the gift of witnessing. I felt I owed it to her characters to keep my eyes open; they are a little too much like me to ignore or detach from. And they’re suffering things I will probably never witness outside a theater. People do suffer in these ways. They are suffering right now, in ways I don’t have to. But I can, for a few hours, turn my attention towards it; I can face it. The play’s conflation of the real and the hyper-real gives me a place from which to watch; just close enough to care, just distant enough to bear it. In the end, Kane requires that we stretch our gaze over an entire Brueghel landscape of anguish–war, rape, death, fear–and this expansion of pain past a single personal event makes our identification unavoidable. It’s unbelievably hard to evoke both fear and pity in a piece of theater; each are such grand emotions in their own right. But Aristotle was right–the clean relief of catharsis does follow.
I can’t say I fully understand how this works. But I am grateful to the play, to Ms. Kane, and to Soho Rep’s Sarah Benson for dragging me through disturbance on the way to empathy. Maybe disturbance is actually the price of empathy.