DONALD MARGULIES, or WHAT’S AN AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT?
By Michael Feingold
The following is an excerpt from Michael Feingold’s introduction to SIGHT UNSEEN and Other Plays by Donald Margulies, Theatre Communications Group Inc., New York, 1995.
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Portrait of an artist as a woman, 1989. *By Eric Fischl. |
When I see one of Donald Margulies’s plays, I always end up thinking about my cousin Abe. He and his wife were among the lucky ones. They had been in Theresienstadt, which was not one of the worst camps, and had actually married in the camp itself. They had survived to settle [in the U.S.] after the War. However, in the late ‘60s, he and his family emigrated to Israel, because he said, “It is going to happen again. It is going to happen here. And I want to be with my own people when the time comes.”
Back then I thought Abe was funny, a bit cracked. We all did. Nowadays I’m not so sure: Israel, where Abe’s family still lives, is slowly struggling toward peace with the Palestinians. Meanwhile, I sit here in New York, flanked by Louis Farrakhan on one side and Pat Robertson on the other. Maybe it is going to happen here, but I was not born in Europe, and don’t find it so easy to say who my own people are.
Jews are used to being hated; once you have met the hatred, you never get over it. Your consciousness is always marked by a sense of being in some way separate. And your history — like the Holocaust history that sneaks or strides into all of Donald Margulies’s plays — hangs over you, a permanent cloud in even the sunniest sky. There is no escape; what you believe to be permanent and comforting can be taken from you in a second, can vanish without a word.
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| Crouched Woman with Scissors, 1982. *By David Salle. |
And this, too, hangs over Margulies, who very properly uses his plays to test the validity of such concepts, sorting out what it means to be creative along with what it means to be a Jew. Margulies’s gift for raising troublesome issues subtly comes with a concomitant gift for ironizing his way around them, for seeing them from all sides. Because troublesome questions don’t have simple answers; that’s why, like history, they never go away. For Margulies, the troublesome questions are about family ethics, friendship and money, and in Sight Unseen, they’re about love and art. But the underlying question that is more deeply troublesome is about Jews and identity in America, and the real beauty of Margulies’s work is that he’s managed to create an ethnic theatre without the tub-thumping self-consciousness that often mars ethnic-minority art. In art the things you assert are your identity; the questions you raise are your way of transcending it.
Pretending that you have no ethnic identity is no use for purposes of transcendence. Death of a Salesman is a Jewish play too, for all of the little impulses on Arthur Miller’s part to make it more universal by making it abstract. What Miller wrote, in effect, was the story of the Jewish spirit’s failure to find a home in the American system; everything Margulies writes, one step further on, is an implied critique of the system on that basis, the chronicle of a land which is all model apartments and no home for anybody’s spirit. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night – an Irish Catholic play the way Death of a Salesman is a Jewish play – also seeps into Margulies’s work. The cruel banality of American life, with which both Miller and O’Neill are at war, is a kind of terrifying wonder-world to Margulies.
Miller and O’Neill’s obsessive focus on the family represents one American approach to art; the other is that consolation of displaced souls, the desire to include everything: Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Pynchon. Margulies, coming after so many such efforts and sensitively aware of them, seems to be struggling to strike a balance between the two modes. The American everything is in his plays: street slang and Greek myth; the form of naturalism and a determined stylistic disruption of it; the assertion of ethnic identity and a systematic effort to see around it.
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Madison Nude, 1967. *By Jack Beal. |
So Donald Margulies’s plays remind me of all the reasons why I am not, despite the premonitions of my cousin Abe, going to leave America. I am going to stay here “because I was born here, and my great-great-grandmother baked bread for George Washington’s troops when he crossed the Delaware, and I am going to stay here and have a piece of it just like you.” The part about my great-great-grandmother isn’t true. I didn’t say those words; Paul Robeson did, to a session of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was trying to deprive him of his passport because of his political beliefs. And when they asked him why he liked Russia so much, he said, among other things, “the great poet of Russia is a Negro,” which is true; he was speaking of Pushkin. Well, the great playwrights of America are African and Latin American and Irish and Italian and Chinese and Eastern European. And Jewish. And when I see Donald Margulies’s plays, I see America. And I like America. And I fear for America. And I smile at America. And I decide not to emigrate.
Michael Feingold has worked in the American theatre for over three decades as a translator, playwright, lyricist, director, dramaturg, and literary manager. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for his work as the chief theatre critic for New York's weekly newspaper, The Village Voice.
*The artists featured on this page provided inspiration to playwright Donald Margulies for the work of "Jonathan Waxman" in Sight Unseen.
. . .AFTERWORD
BY Donald Margulies
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| Photo by Susan Johann |
The following is an excerpt from Donald Margulies’s essay entitled “Afterword by the Playwright,” The New York Times, 1992.
Sometime in the early ‘60s, when I was around nine years old, my mother and father and brother and I checked into a cheap hotel in the West 50s of Manhattan, and for six days we saw every hit on Broadway. As the house lights dimmed each night and each matinee, I remember feeling almost unbearably excited by what lay ahead.
Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns was the first nonmusical play I ever saw, and I remember how the muscles in my face hurt from grinning in pleasure for two hours. For a boy like me, whose father worked all the time, it must have been invigorating to see a play about a man who preferred being home to toiling at a demoralizing job. In retrospect, it seems fitting that my first exposure to drama was a play about a complex father figure and his surrogate son, for the theme of fathers and sons has long figured in my plays and in my life.
My father was a taciturn man, physically affectionate but prone to mysterious silences, who worked six, sometimes seven, days a week selling wallpaper in Brooklyn. His days routinely began at six in the morning and didn’t end until eleven at night, but his rare days off were often devoted to playing records on the living room hi-fi. The great composers whose music wafted through our tiny apartment weren’t Beethoven and Mozart but Loesser and Styne and Rodgers and Hammerstein. That was my father at his most content: playing his Broadway musical cast albums, dozens of them, on Sunday mornings throughout my childhood.
My father’s silence created in me a hunger for words that drew me to surrogate fathers, men I knew only through what they wrote. Herb Gardner may have been my earliest spiritual father, but Arthur Miller came into my life not long after. Death of a Salesman’s uncanny reflection of my life and worst fears also exhilarated me and made me feel less alone. I studied it with great fascination, as if it were a key to understanding what was happening to the people I loved, so that I might somehow alter my family’s fate.
After Miller, and as adolescence approached, I discovered in J.D. Salinger a spiritual father so empathic that he seemed to know how I felt about everything. Once I’d read The Catcher in the Rye, I devoured everything he had published — all three slim paperbacks. I wanted more, but Salinger proved to be the ultimate withholding father.
Philip Roth was not withholding. He was brainy, naughty and bursting with words: the cool daddy with whom one could talk about sex. I was fifteen when I first read Portnoy’s Complaint and for all the wrong reasons; I was scanning for tales of sexy shiksas, but what I found were stunning insights into what it meant to be a Jew and a man.
While I was at the State University of New York at Purchase I discovered The Homecoming and The Sound and the Fury. On the face of it, Pinter’s stark, nightmarish black comedy and Faulkner’s gorgeously poetic family saga had little in common and yet, in my mind, they coexisted, thrillingly. If I was to be a writer, why couldn’t I be an offspring of all these spiritual fathers, a son of Pinter and Faulkner — and Miller and Salinger and Roth?
Not until I was an adult did I understand that, in his lonely abdication, my father sought refuge from his demons, from the terrible fear that, not having had a relationship with his own father, he wouldn’t know how to be a father himself; rather than try and fail, he simply retreated into silence. Years after I became a playwright, I realized that playwriting — the craft of dramatizing the unspoken — provided me with the tools I needed to get inside my father’s head and figure out what he was thinking. Through the echoes of my father that occur in my plays, I have been able to give him a voice he only rarely used in life.