Crossing & Other Plays
C. E. Gatchalian
Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 C. E. Gatchalian
Crossing & Other Plays
all rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in 2011 by Lethe Press, Inc.
118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018
www.lethepressbooks.com • lethepress@aol.com
isbn: 1-59021-112-X
isbn-13: 978-1-59021-112-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: Alex Jeffers.
Cover photo: Nelson Wong in the world premiere of Diamond, 2006. Photo by Mélissa C. Powell.
Author photo: Michael O’Shea.
Production inquiries, amateur and professional, should be addressed to:
Charles Northcote
Core Literary Inc.
charlesnorthcote@rogers.com
(416) 466-4929
Diamond and Ticks both appeared in slightly different forms in the book Broken by C. E. Gatchalian, published by New Bard Press in 2006.
In loving memory of my grandmother
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Bryan Wade for his support and guidance during the writing of the plays in this collection; to Amanda Lockitch and Martin Kinch for their thoughtful dramaturgy on Crossing; to Steve Berman and the gang at Lethe Press; to Seán Cummings, sine qua non; and to Sheck, just because.
Table of Contents
C. E. Gatchalian’s Kinderszenen
by Martin Kinch
by Seán Cummings
Amanda Lockitch and Ryan Beil in the world premiere of Crossing, 2004.
Photo by Mélissa C. Powell.
C.E. Gatchalian’s Kinderszenen
Crossing is an extraordinarily evocative title. It suggests the classical crossroads where we are called upon to make irrevocable and tragic decisions about our future directions: the spot where Oedipus slew his father Laius and bound himself to a life of murder, incest, and expiation. For Christians the challenge implicit in the crossing has been stood on end and formalized in the cross of Christ, an exact geometric figure in which the worldly horizon of the horizontal arm is bisected by a vertical post joining the spiritual realms of heaven and hell. It is this crossing and the acts of crossing and being crossed which lie at the imaginative heart of C.E. Gatchalian’s resonant play.
To cross sounds like an Anglo-Saxon verb suggesting a rougher, more down-to-earth version of crucifixion (although that definition doesn’t appear in the O.E.D.). Crossing is going to hurt and it doesn’t focus on the spiritual or imply resurrection in quite the same way as crucifixion.
To cross also implies resistance, the impulse to thwart another’s plans and desires which traditionally activates Western drama and lies at the heart of this complex spiral of fantasies, games, and manipulations in which Kieren and Lucy, his mother, engage throughout the play.
Finally (or perhaps there are other associations we should explore such as cross-dressing), we must consider crossing from one state to another: the bridge from life to death, dark to light, resistance to anticipation and imprisonment to freedom.
So how do all these dramatic ideas play themselves out? What’s the story? The playwright’s initial note to the designer introduces our first crossing:
On the far left and right sides of the stage, fragments of walls. These walls could be from anywhere—they could be the outside walls of the building these particular characters inhabit, or of some other place completely unrelated to these characters. On these walls, graffiti of a sexist and homophobic nature, i.e. “SLUT”, “FAGGOT.”
This would seem to indicate that the contemporary world lies outside the stage and yet contains the more magical world of the play. The playwright points towards a more ambiguous universal interpretation by suggesting that the graffiti-covered walls could be completely unrelated to the characters; however, Kieren’s later descriptions of his school suggest that the visual context is personally meaningful and accurate to his experience.
At the top of the play, Lucy is heard masturbating to a rising chorus of orgasmic men while her son, Kieren, furiously plays Schumann’s Von Fremden Landern und Menschen (Of Foreign Lands and Peoples) from Kinderszenen in an attempt to drown out the pressure of her sexuality. One is immediately challenged by the action of the play. How have these characters arrived at this particular crossing of desire and culture? It’s by no means clear that there is a verifiable external event outside the protective shell that Kieren and Lucy have built around themselves. Neither of these characters are trustworthy narrators but it appears that, on Kieren’s eighth birthday, his mother Lucy invited seven perverts home. They raped and brutalized her and then turned on her son, leaving them both injured, violated and deeply traumatized.
Since then, Kieren and Lucy have developed a private mythology spun out of Schumann, children’s stories and Christian iconography. This potent mixture fuels a series of fantasies whose performance allows Kieren to escape from his fear and humiliation into fantasies of power and purity. He casts himself as a holy warrior (in his child’s Halloween breastplate) and the crucified and the risen Christ. Thus, he may have been soiled in life but he is approaching pure spirit in his imagination. In support of her son, his mother assumes the roles of St. Lucy, the warrior, and St. Lucy, the Christian martyr. (In one version of her story, her namesake St. Lucia was thrown into a brothel to test her faith.) She also appears as the oldest living virgin—presumably the mother of Christ. Towards the end of the play, however, she seems to finds her own identity as the Whore of Babylon in the traditional scarlet dress. The ambiguity and interchangeability of these roles allows for a succession of almost musical variations mirrored in the structure of Schumann’s Kinderszenen.
As a member of the audience, it’s easy to be caught up in the succession of variations, but something is working its way out from beneath the surface. Traumatized and guilty, Lucy has supported and nurtured Kieren’s withdrawal for nine years, but the opening act of masturbation indicates an increasing desire to escape the purity of “Saint Lucy” and return to the world. But Lucy’s motivations are not entirely selfish. Burning within her is the desire to force her son towards a necessary crossing from his childhood fantasy of inviolable purity to a more mature lust for life. In her attempt to achieve this, she taunts him with her distinctly unromantic view of his experience, “They nail you to the floor.” No promise of resurrection in that crossing though she follows the statement with, “It is done,” perversely echoing the conclusion of the mass, “Ita missa est.” Caught between her own innate desire and her love for her son, Lucy finally appears to undergo a kind of exorcism in a highly charged physical monologue while Kieren protects himself, and unwittingly accompanies her thrashing, with the ever-present Schumann. Finally unable to break through or reach a resolution, she retires to her room with a tired blessing.
Reminiscere miserationum tuarum, Domine, et formulos tuous aeterna protectione sanctifica pro quibus Christus, Filius tuus, per suum cruorem, instituit paschale mysterium. Per eumdem Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Be mindful, Lord, of Your mercies, and by Your everlasting protection, sanctify Your servants for whom Christ, Your Son, by His blood instituted this paschal sacrament. Through the same Christ our Lord.)
Moments later in a blast of anger and unintended irony Kieren rants:
“We’re past the age of stories. This is the truth!”
So let’s burn down the goddamn curtains!
And in a simultaneously religious and theatrical metaphor, he pulls back the curtain to reveal Lucy hanging above her bed, her suicide destroying the shared fantasy world they have so lovingly created. And a bell rings as it does at the Elevation of the Host. This is the truth.
Crossing is, at times, an obscure play. C.E. Gatchalian is fond of, among other things, Latin quotes from the Roman celebration of Holy Week and musical analysis of Schubert. This is to some extent frustrating but, on the other hand, it challenges us to explore the imaginative depth of Kieren’s withdrawal and the protection implicit in the secrets of traditional culture. It is also a play of magic and of the attempt to respond magically to the terrors of the world we actually inhabit. And like all effective magic, it’s ritualistic, repetitive and hypnotic. It perversely quotes and structurally mirrors the Roman Catholic mass. One is inclined to think of it as a virtually closed circle on first reading, but a closer look reveals that the carefully constructed world is being deconstructed, literally torn apart by the irresistible forces of love and sexuality.
The bell rings to mark the end of the fight. There will be no further rounds. And as it continues to sound we realize it is a doorbell conjuring the almost forgotten presence of the outside world. It may be the seven perverts but it might also be the truant officer forcing Kieren to return to school. Kieren steps out of his protective costume and stands at the still center of the crossing, caught in the vertical light of the spirit, challenged to step out onto the horizontal arm of the world.
“My name’s Lucy,” he states, waiting for the world in a magical fusion of man and woman, lust and purity, immanence and transcendence. “My name’s Lucy,” he states, echoing his mother’s earlier approach to each of her seven perverts, “what’s yours?”
Martin Kinch
Vancouver, British Columbia
December 1, 2010
Staging Crossing
The Beginning
Directing the premiere of a new play is a rare gift. Indeed, this job was a jewel for me as a young filmmaker trying to find my footing in the theatre. Vancouver had an abundance of seasoned directors all scrambling for the handful of jobs available. But I had an advantage that directors well connected, well known, and indeed, well funded, did not have. I was eager to prove myself.
I was making what I thought at the time was a short detour from the film world into live performance. My hope was that working in theatre would allow me to further develop my own sense of dramatic narrative that had been missing in my filmmaking experiences, where I felt the technical and financial aspects were limiting my work.
It was in early 2004 when a group of enthusiastic and driven young theatre artists approached me about a play they were producing. They had a script ready to stage, some seed money, but no director. Those they approached had either been unavailable, or too intimidated by the script. I would soon realize that for most of them it was probably the latter.
Directing
My advice to those directing future productions of Crossing is from the heart. Throughout the process, I came to value three pillars in staging the play: trust the performances, have faith in the script and have confidence to listen to myself. Like no other project, before or since, Crossing tested my sense of self, of my own voice as a director. But it also reinstituted my faith in the power of an honest performance and the immediacy of live theatre. It so clearly illustrated the value of a unique voice and the need for brave players to bring it to life. Have fun with this script. You will probably never work with one like it again. It has a lot to share with you.
The Fantastic Play
At first glance, the evocative and aesthetic qualities of Crossing’s text read more like poetry than a standard play narrative. The dialogue was spare but felt verbose. The hyperbolic nature of the character’s stories was daunting given the sexually charged subject matter of their fantasies. To be blunt, the prospect of readying this script for an audience scared the crap out of me. Staging this play seemed so difficult that I felt the odds of failure were better than good—primarily because I was not sure I understood the playwright. In reality, what I feared most was that I understand him too well.
Crossing is rhythmic and repetitious in its approach to a raw, sexually charged, isolated world containing a mother and her son. And while the characters never actually cross that line between sexual fantasy and sex with each other, the inference is always there hanging over every scene, challenging our comfort and tolerance. All this challenged my sensibilities, both artistic and professional, which just made the project that much more alluring because here were a seemingly endless number of questions to which I just had to know the answers.
With Crossing, Gatchalian seems to be asking, what would play be like without innocence? When is play fantastic and when is it mimicry? When is it pretend and when is it psychotic? But more importantly, when does a protective act become abuse?
The setting of Crossing is best described as a microcosm seen through Kieren’s mind’s eye. Once I had firmly planted my feet in Kieren’s mind, the rest of the script began to coalesce. The need to have Lucy’s actions make sense was of secondary importance once I realized that we are seeing Lucy through Kieren’s eyes. There are times where we can see Kieren struggling to enter reality, hesitant but eager. And those moments ground the play.
On stage, Lucy and Kieren live in a world where the lines between the real world and fantasy are permanently blurred. Lucy has nurtured this scenario in order to protect her son from the dark history they share. By continually playing fantasy games with her son, she has kept him from assimilating his childhood as the adult he has become. It is Kieren’s eighteenth birthday, and Lucy has decided that today is the day that he will take ownership of the past from which she has been sheltering him. The problem is that Lucy has also been living in this fantasy world and is seemingly out of touch with the world outside.
Crossing is as much metaphorical as it is fantastic. One never knows if there were ever really “seven long-haired perverts”. But we do get a sense that this imagery is universally accepted by the audience as an excessively strong, sexually predatory allegory. Gatchalian uses these tools often to build Kieren’s world only to have the integrity of it shattered by Lucy.
The Queer Play
Crossing is certainly a sexual play in that it uses sexuality to drive the narrative. Eroticism is found in abundance throughout the text. But more than being merely erotic, Gatchalian takes his audience to a place where “normal” concepts of sexuality have been left behind. To an extent, Gatchalian plays bait and switch with his audience in that he challenges our comfort level by breaching the sacred bond between mother and son. Barriers are broken, lines are crossed and we come to a place where we are at the mercy of the playwright to provide some order before he releases us back to the world. But by knocking us off balance, he forces us to drop our expectations and be more open to the queer inner workings of Kieren’s sense of gender. The playwright is boldly stating that sexual identity is more than what bits we have and the clothes we wear, but an integral part of our sense of self and how we relate to the world around us.
Narrative vs. Music
Knowing that Gatchalian was a classical musician before becoming a playwright helps one understand that his sense of narrative is informed by musical structure. This can be most clearly found in his early works such as Star, Motifs & Repetitions and Crossing. At his best, he builds layers of text that crescendo in their attempt to match the lingering effect of the components of an aria or concerto. It can allow the audience to be transported into a world previously unseen but somehow familiar in its honesty. The structure of the make-believe scenarios created by the characters is childlike, yet the content is extreme in nature, suggesting Kieren’s lack of innocence. In many ways Crossing is Kieren’s song, the ballad of his young life sung here as a duet.
Games
The most challenging and perhaps rewarding aspect of staging Crossing was the opportunity to bring solutions to the table for problems that presented themselves. As with all scripts, coming to an understanding of the story and its underlying meaning is half the job. Maximizing the impact of the narrative is the other.
It was with Kieren’s sense of play and Lucy’s willingness to take part that we focused our time. We imagined how the stories started and how they might have evolved to become those found in the play. This led to our biggest breakthrough. We found that since it is within the rules of their pretend world that Lucy finally gets through to Kieren, we therefore had an abundance of tools from which to draw. We just had to turn it into a game.
By introducing marionette play into the scenarios, we allowed the characters to more fully illustrate the inclusive nature of their play, and gave Lucy a mechanism by which to force Kieren to relive his past. By doing so she starts a chain-reaction that leads to his coming-of-age.
Since Crossing, I have been privileged to direct and dramaturge two additional Gatchalian scripts, Broken and Falling in Time. I personally mark each project as a milestone in my career—they have each brought out the best in myself and the actors lucky enough to delve into the mind of a playwright brave enough to go where others fear to tread.
Seán Cummings
Vancouver, British Columbia
November 2010
Ryan Beil and Amanda Lockitch in the world premiere of Crossing, 2004.
Photo by Mélissa C. Powell.
Crossing
For John Juliani (1943-2004)
Crossing was the founding production of Meta.for Theatre Company and premiered at the Playwrights Theatre Center in Vancouver on June 7, 2004, with the following cast:
KIEREN - Ryan Beil
LUCY - Amanda Lockitch
Director & Sound Designer - Seán Cummings
Set and Costume Designer - Marcus Wu
Lighting Designer - Erin Harris
Dramaturges - Martin Kinch, Amanda Lockitch
Stage Manager - Mélissa C. Powell
Prior to this, the play was given a public staged reading as part of Playwrights Theatre Center’s New Play Festival in Vancouver on May 9, 2004, with the following cast:
KIEREN - Andrew Vokey
LUCY - Linda Quibell
Director - Amanda Lockitch
CHARACTERS:
K: Kieren, 18, shaved head
L: Lucy, 33, Kieren’s mother, long hair
SET:
Very spare. Stage left, a piano. Upstage, a bed. Curtains divide upstage from down.
On the far left and right sides of the stage, fragments of walls. These walls could be from anywhere—they could be the outside walls of the building these particular characters inhabit, or of some other place completely unrelated to these characters. On these walls, graffiti of a sexist and homophobic nature, i.e. “SLUT”, “FAGGOT.”
LIGHTING:
Dark, save for pools of light on K. and L.
TEMPO:
Must be carefully orchestrated. The pauses are crucial.
Act I
Darkness.
Male voices, laden with sexuality, crescendoing: “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. YEAH!”
Pool of light on K at the piano. He is wearing a shining knight’s breastplate. His hands are over his ears.
Graffiti on the walls: SLUT, FAG, and other sexist and homophobic epithets.
K starts playing “Von Fremden Landern und Menschen” from Schumann’s Kinderszenen, op.15, very carefully, very slowly—much more slowly than the score directs.
L is upstage in her bedroom, behind the curtains. After K finishes the piece we hear L masturbating.
K rushes to the piano, starts playing the piece again, this time quickly, frantically, as if to drown out L’s voice.
L suddenly emerges from the curtains.
K [rising]: Mother.
L [closing the curtains]: Kieren.
They look at each other silently for 5 seconds as if waiting for the other to speak.
K [hesitantly getting into the act] : Bonjour, ma belle Maman.
L [Ibid.] : Et toi aussi, mon petit chéri.
K: Comment ça va?
L: Trés bien et toi?
K: Comme çi, comme ça.
Pause.
L: Comme çi, comme ça?
Pause.
K [darkly]: Comme çi, comme ça.
Pause.
L [darkly, knowingly]: Comme çi, comme ça.
Silence.
L [forcing a light tone]: Only comme çi, comme ça? Mon petit chéri, why?
K [retaining dark tone]: It’s… [checks himself] school, Mother. I hate it.
L: It’s Friday.
K: It’s hell.
Pause.
[Struggling to get into the act.] But let’s talk about you. How divine you look.
L: Kieren.
K: So noble in shining knight’s armor.
L: Kieren.
K: Your long hair a civilized bun.
L: Kieren!
K: You are strong. Clean. Untouchable.
L: Kieren.
K: The fairest fair woman in the world.