THE LAST SAINTHOOD

An Orison Viagra for the start of the millennium

Clinton's mind, this dawning day, and history
All are clear. Four young deer skitter
Across the gravel road beside the wood,
Above which he can see the shooting star.

One hundred more newspapers yet to go,
One hundred more orange tubes he has to stuff.
The headlines echo "HIV and Democracy:
Extinct, Extinct, Extinct"

To search his recollection was not hard.
He knew the past and, now, could cite it all,
Like walkers in Fahrenheit Four Five One,
He'd memorized Nineteen Nine Nine events,
That late but final freeing of our needs
Of human flesh. It came late, yet it came
And came to stay and came again, in rerun.

Government then prepared us for the end,
Decreeing that the lie would never hold,
The nucleus had loosened, spreading outward
To the rim. Our secrets would be told;
No detail could be spared.

They should have stocked the cellars
To prepare for the millennially rotting chip
With rice and beans and tuna fish.
The water must be purified. We all make do.

Now Clinton brings the news, his new post, door to door.
We have swapped responsibilities, switched roles and class
In a new century, after the fall.
Politicians are the poets; once-professors dig the wells.

He hears the AM talk shows as he drives,
From Pittsburgh, Georgia, Ciudad Mexico.
Dialect and twang and tongues reveal
Their pasts, not now perverse,
Since the lie has gone away for good.

The white crane circles Hiawatha Lake, assessing ice,
In search of landing sites. That trampoline in tatters,
Suspended in a tree, might well suffice.
A pickup truck is hauling pigeons in a cage
Back to the homes they would not home to in their rage.

That orison Viagra rose Niagara-like into the skies,
A prayer of pride and shame and fury, on that day that day.
A mixture iodized, a purifier for the water in our cellars,
For the years we wasted, back before the martyr lay,
Slain the saint of oral sex, the crippled grin, the sad device.

And all knees bent and all heads bobbed that day that day.

Once Barney knew the glories well that Monica had owned,
How she knelt before the offering, its modest point and dull surprise,
Described in court as quarter-thick and penta-length, this stele.
Clinton's arms, outstretched to sides, reached phone and Betty's page device.
The crucifix position, with his back against the desk and Barney sees, envisions,
How the issue came to rise, how the spew of ecstasy and ivory,
A guilt of gilded declaration, fireworks so fixed in time,
History's propulsion, with a splashdown rivaling Apollo's,
Upon the fabric blue, like ocean waves of icon matter,
Pattern worship object for tomorrow's classroom text..

Once Maxine grieved her race, the chains that bound them,
Chains of iron metamorphosed, link by link, to family ties
Unearthed by the founder's love for Sally, how he put his aged hand
Deep in her reproductive roots, his fingers striving, reaching out
For the excuse of ownership and finding naught, an emptiness
So black and rich that Maxine rubs her checkbook to her cheek,
Her chest, in vain, also in search for kin and coal
That might have changed, compressed itself to diamond roses,
Ropes of helix DNA, men twisting in the wind.

And Mr. Hyde thinks of his last transforming, when the draught
No longer served his lust. The child he grunted into life
Now gazes down from far across the continent,
His slavish drool imposing heat on Mr. Hyde's unhampered head.
That child, now grown, had driven spikes between two unions,
Severed vows, imposed a prophylactic curse, a vampire Frankenstein.
The haunting passed and absolution antidotes concocted
In the House of Usher. Webs dangle from the furniture,
All weeping sacrificed.

And Newt, who licked the cantaloupe, comes out of hiding,
Longing openly for Clinton's taste, a sample of her melon sliver,
Fragrant oval crevice where the whitish jet of blissfulness
Splatters nose and teeth and tonsils, such abandonment of haste,
But he can only wish that it were his endeavors
That made monitors ablaze, that hit the books, that flat recorded
Lessons in the way to please and pleasure. His was not the orgy
Taken to the grave yet made eternal, etched in the stone tablets
And the wooden schoolroom desks where children carve
Our nation's new publicity, since privacy was slain that day that day.

Now saints all and the radio explains to Clinton
Wrapping up the paper route
Of fishing spots in Arkansas, of copper flies if weather please,
Or nickel lure those sunny days,
Or fun in hunting squirrel meat.
Another caller tells, confessing, to the station, so routine:

"I have fucked at dusk in flowers on the Croisette by the beach in Cannes.
I have fucked along the railroad tracks of Rome.
I have fucked on grassy mountainsides outside Xalapa, Mexico.
I have fucked in crashing waves and underwater.
I have fucked in doctor's offices in Bogota, Columbia.
I have fucked in a tent in Yellowstone.
I have fucked in a sleeping bag at Big Sur, by the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.
I have fucked in a carnation greenhouse in Denver.
I have fucked in a mobile home outside Miami.
I have fucked in the doorway of a quaint European hotel.
I have fucked while dining in a Paris restaurant.
I have fucked in an ancient stone windmill on a Greek island.
I have fucked in the back seat of a car on Sunday afternoon on a country road outside Urbana.
I have fucked during a Wim Wender's world premiere movie screening.
I have fucked in the Louvre and in the Chicago Art Institute.
I have fucked on the equator.
I have fucked in Golden Gate Park.
I have fucked while listening to "A Chorus Line."
I have fucked in a moving car, while driving.
I have fucked in the back of the bus.
I have fucked on the nude beaches of the former Yugoslavia.
I have fucked in my parent's house.
I have fucked in a very clean park in Zurich.
I have fucked in cyberspace.
I have fucked in the Denver Public Library.
I have fucked on a train leaving Barcelona at midnight.
I have fucked in London.
I have fucked in France.
I have fucked in somebody's underpants.
I have fucked in ancient Mayan ruins.
I have fucked on hotel balconies overlooking the Caribbean and the Pacific, in Veracruz and Maui.
I have fucked in prison.
I have fucked in graveyards."

Owing to the fact government pierced the lie,
Removed the veil,
Destroyed the split between all thought and deed,
There was no difference,
Just like Jesus always said.

To tell the children? How to not?
Or let them overhear?
Sit them down at the beaming hearth and listen, listen well.

A spring of urine, arc transcendent,
Leather in the kitchen cupboard,
Hot and red the spanking bottom,
Anus, mouth and organs pulsing,
Missionary impositions,
Ancient multiples in India,
Those who touch themselves, no other,
Those who cannot touch forbidden,
Fruit insertions maharaja,
Fingers, feet, and penis proper,
Impotence and faithful sadness,
Pure and pervert anesthetic,
He who knew a thousand others,
She who singly had accepted
Stranger's commands for another pat
Of butter on the plate,
And those with fantasies beyond
The reach of an ability to state.

Children read these books and hear the stories told.
Uncle Remus limps to woodshed archives.
Look at woodcuts of affairs official,
A new national geographic.
The box was opened. Christmas came.

A line of 2000 women, naked, standing tall and short, obese and willowed, black and pale and Asian-eyed, those who disdain and look at broken watches, those who gasp and remember rapture, and Clinton must service all, bowed down, his penance for a time, but not eternity, so we may be forgiven, long forgiven, long forgotten what to our forgiveness would be due. Is there time to pay the penance? Who had guessed such penalty was joy?

Still, there is time. The clocks have stopped, the pre-ordained disaster when the numbers rolled around and hit the marker, the millennium, the dates and figs of flavor while the Senators spent their final hours dissecting spots of semen and measuring the penis, counting pubic hairs that danced atop a soda can.

He yawns and sees the ranch house nearing.
The radio plays on, the national confession.
Hillary is sleeping, waiting, outstretched everything
Beneath the goose down comforter.
He's coming back where Y2K had leveled all,
Us all, and nothing more could be sold by showing skin.
We were sated by the secretless of life,
The end of privacy, our home.

A sonnet must be written for order
To be found. Composing thought in heaven,
He sits beside the wood stove, where even
Owls peer in and quiz him. Fence and border
Crumble dusty, like disgust, and are gone.
He could write a speech or he could wander.
Smoke ascends to roof. He waits for thunder.
There is none. Peace in Saskatchewan,
In Vegas, Bombay, Durban, Monterrey;
The world, an image nation, one at last
And free. Clinton stirs the ashes. Night's passed.
Time to rouse mate, roosters and a new day.
"Ask not where finger ends and synapse starts.
We're dreaming; flesh is what composes hearts."

© 1998 Springer-Petrie, Inc.

Rantoul and Die, for old times' sake

My review of Rantoul and Die, first posted in 2006, is revived here in commemoration of the current new production in Los Angeles. I should note that the publicity for the new production (http://www.rantoulanddie.com/about.html) refers to people here as the "ugliest" people, who live in the "grimy little world" of central Illinois, which pretty much confirms my first impression of this Mark Roberts sitcom.


RANTOUL AND DIE

The first act of “Rantoul and Die” repeats an old fable about a scorpion crossing a road on the back of a turtle. Or maybe a rabbit. There is disagreement on this point.

The animal is inconsequential. More to the point, playwright Mark Roberts does not tell the story in the traditional sense. As usually told, the scorpion rides over a body of water, not a road, on the back of the animal. The scorpion promises not to sting the animal. After all, if the animal drowns, so will the scorpion. Halfway across the lake, the scorpion stings.

"Why would you do that?" the animal asks when the scorpion strikes, and the scorpion, although about to die, claims he has no choice. It is his nature.

“Rantoul and Die” takes the sting out of the story. In Roberts’ version, the scorpion strikes because it is his nature... and then goes on to kill another day.

After the first act of the play, my fear was that Roberts himself was like his specialized scorpion, the stinger shown on the ad for the play. He could make vicious fun of the low-rent service employees of Champaign County and enjoy watching the local audiences laugh, unwittingly, at themselves.

When someone writes a comic play about rural Americans, the operative word is usually "affectionate." You can spoof them, even ridicule them, but in the end there is some feeling for the bizarre and simple foibles of the characters, characters you have come to know and love. Think "Junebug." Think Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart." Think Larry Shue's "The Foreigner."

“Rantoul and Die” is given a smidgen of this sensibility in the second act, with the entry of a new character played by Joi Hoffsommer. As Callie, the manager of the Dairy Queen, she spoonfeeds the afflicted her soft serve ice cream while rattling off the reasons for her quirky behavior, her fondness for her 13 cats, her early memories of Peanut Buster Parfaits. Her unaccountable bursts into one-note laughter, a sound that trails off into the far distance, is a kind of laugh you are likely to recognize.

The first laughs in the first act on the night I attended were drawn at the first mentions of 1) Rantoul High School, 2) Rantoul Dairy Queen, and 3) vomiting while giving a blow job when drunk.

"Rantoul and Die,” act one, contains a similar degrading string of jokes, plus a constant stream of explicit sex talk and foul language. Whether these jokes emerge from a place of superiority and condescension is hard to tell, since Roberts writes in lengthy, personal program notes that the play was written "during one of the most insane, self-destructive periods of my adult life."

But why did he write it? These are not stories from his life. I doubt he would be associated with any of these characters. By the second act, there is a sort of sympathy generated for a character, brain dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The final image of that character falling to one side is inexplicably funny and almost moving.

Mostly, though, I think Roberts deals in the stock in trade of the Los Angeles television and movie industry: contempt. I don’t think he is willfully mean toward his characters; he merely writes in the language which he’s most familiar, and I don’t think it’s all that funny unless you are willing to laugh at the people themselves, the characters in his play.

"Rantoul and Die" is not by a long shot the worst play I've ever seen. I seriously tried to consider if it would have a chance to be performed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where they are known for their midwest rural shit-kicking comedies. But I think the answer is clearly "no."

The problem is, at least in the first hour of the play, nothing happens. It is not “plot-driven,” the reviews admit, hard pressed to discover any story or theme at all.

The performers can't be faulted. Nor can the director. These are well honed, professional performances. I laughed at non-joke lines because of the delivery given them by Mike Trippiedi and Anne Kearns, not by the jokes themselves, which often seem incongruous (or randomly ascribed) to the action and characters.

Just hours before the play began, I flipped channels and landed on the redneck comics on Comedy Central: Larry the Cable Guy, Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and a fourth guy. I was impressed at their timing, their wit, and their interaction with the audience, despite the trailer park stance and crude perspectives about life in rural America.

I didn’t feel bad identifying with their rural, redneck jokes. You sort of know they’re kidding, that they identify fondly with the people they are making fun of. I’m not sure I got that impression in “Rantoul and Die,” where the people behave the way they do because "it is their nature" -- in this case, to be venal, unfaithful, violent and stupid. Other than “sweet” (but perhaps also mentally challenged) to describe Callie in the second act, one would be hard pressed to find other adjectives to apply to the characters in “Rantoul and Die.”

I originally posted comments about “Rantoul and Die” on this site, so that my lawyer friend could read them and argue with me. We Tweedledee'd and Tweedledum'd back and forth heatedly. There was never any intention for those notes to be read or published openly. Mark Roberts found those notes with a Google search and was offended, not surprisingly, in what he saw as a personal attack. I guess it is my nature to write criticism. I’ve done it for too long. Far too long. And, in keeping with the correct telling of the parable, both scorpion and target got hit by this particular poison.