The Great Code*: Please Include the Personal Journal on the Table

 The Bible in particular is one grand story of Family. In this autobiographical play, Cain tells his own family story of Bill Cain: growing up.  The Cain family- his mother Mary, father Pete, and brother Paul- are presented to us in a simple format with carefully choreographed stagecraft.  Bill speaks directly to the audience to introduce scenes, give context to the many funny or infuriating moments in the family’s life, and to share his insights. From childhood through each parent’s untimely death from cancer, we learn about how a family functions. He makes it clear that there is no need to apologize for it as dysfunctional, the embarrassed description many of us offer to hide what hurts and comforts us most about family memories.

The scenes of the play move back and forth deftly from the present, in which adult Bill cares for his dying mother, back into episodes from the past to illuminate family “scripture”- his parents’ imperfect but ultimately solid relationship and his brother’s brave determination as a teenage athlete, a student, and later, a soldier who volunteered to serve in Vietnam. The adult actors play their earlier selves; this discloses in a wonderful way the necessary task Bill has undertaken: to befriend the child in himself. At one point the adult actor portrays an early childhood tantrum over a smashed Hallowe’en pumpkin he dropped after his older brother cast aspersions on his ability to carry it, and then steps out of that portrayal to reflect on his loving father’s reassembly of the pumpkin. He reads his “family-as-Bible” to us right onstage to unveil his own revelation: the determination we have all had, and have, even as adults, to stay wedded to our own unhappiness out of sheer pride. Parents will recognize so many scenes that convey poignancy and humor.  In a wonderful interfaith image, he describes his father carrying him as a rabbi carries the Torah, and anyone who has been present for the Torah service in a Jewish congregation knows that the great scroll does in fact rest on the rabbi’s shoulder just like a sleeping child being carried to bed with love, from a car seat or living room sofa.

The weary tasks of eldercare feature prominently in many exchanges Bill has with his mother that resonate well, the playright surely knows, with many in the theater’s audience. It is a chance to laugh at oneself in these scenes of repetitive scripts when we know that they know that we know, about everything, from sneaking cigarettes to avoiding any talk of the dreaded diagnosis until it can no longer be put aside. 

The audience is caught a little off guard when, just as casually as we later learn that the older brother Paul became an award-winning high school teacher, we also learn that Bill became a priest.  This aspect of the tradition and culture are employed in visually meaningful ways to the attentive onlooker.  Vesting onstage for funerals and blessings, son Bill enacts both familiar Catholic rituals as well as everyday sacraments, and he hallows actions we all recognize.  He raises his mother’s dish of applesauce mixed with crushed meds in the Eucharistic gesture of consecration before handing it over to her to try to get down with a spoon in her increasingly weakened state. 

Another indication of deliberate and subtle detail in the production is the open notebook that remains on a table; the table is re-purposed throughout the production, featuring the actors’ use of the minimal props and spare décor of the living room that is the principal set for the entire play. Whether the table becomes a medical examination table in one flashback scene, or takes on the nature of a desk with an invisible phone connecting the family spread apart in later years, the notebook remains open for the entire play, a pen resting in the crease of the open pages. This touch keeps narrative itself ever present, and enables the kind of externalization of a writer’s thoughts that is often done more easily by voiceover in film, but that is most effective onstage using props as deep symbols of creative presence.

In the end, despite the length of some less important scenes, both the Playbill and American University Radio critics have distilled very well Bill Cain’s truth about the family: it is a “crucible to turn passion into love.”  (WAMU 88.5, Metro Connection, Rebecca Sheir, “Playwright-Priest Pens Play about Faith and Family,” April 5, 2013). The onstage actor playing “Bill Cain” makes it clear that we are adding new books to the Bible throughout our lives, passionately resisting or pursuing our many goals, suffering along the way, and a human life-in-family lives out (as stated by theologian Edward Farley) “the inherited symbols and narratives of one’s faith,” such that “one is embodying or incorporating oneself into a living tradition. That’s a creative act and an interpretive act, an act of theological understanding.”

Amen. With applause.

*Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.  C++ and Java all good: not that kind of code, but another language just the same.

New Year's Resolution: blog at least once a week

While many of my posts will be book and film reviews in the form of critical articles, my reading program this year will be based again on books about the Self as a phenomenon. Interest exists in how we experience ourselves and how we might articulate that more precisely. To say how we might articulate it objectively poses already the usual questions about objective truth and the likelihood that we are sufficiently aware of our biases, so I hope to disclose mine.

I'll start with holiday reading over my winter break for Christmas and New Year's- my reading of books given to me by my children, in this case. I also worked on a chapter for an edited book but I'll let the chapter speak for itself, eventually.

I read Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998). The story of Dr. William Minor, a major contributor to the dictionary during his confinement as a mental patient, mainly in the U.K and then in the U.S., is told through anecdotes about his correspondence during the long editorship of James Murray in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite the eventual diagnosis of dementia praecox, aspects of the mental illness suffered by the American, starting most apparently after his service as a Civil War surgeon with the Union Army, remained mysterious. He had many paranoid episodes and a disordered sexual preoccupation that gave rise to self-loathing. None of this prevented him from amassing a large library in his mental institution using his independent wealth and the assistance of relatives. He focused with fierce concentration on creating well-organized lists of word definitions and their occurrences from tireless perusal and analysis of his book collection. The final product, the OED, is certainly indebted to him.

However, and here I disclose my own bias and background, it seems that the real fascination of the story would have been better exploited by more focus on his method and on the full reaction of Murray, if such was recorded, upon learning that this contributor by post was confined as mad after committing a murder under a delusion of persecution by Irish nationals because of his order to brand a prisoner of war with a hot iron while serving as the battlefield doctor. Otherwise, for me as a psychiatrist's daughter and perhaps for many others in this post-Freudian age, the book comes off more as a case history. We know much more on a popular level about mental illness, but Murray and others did not. However,  I kept forgetting that the main focus of the book  was supposedly Murray's relationship with Minor. What did he do with his astonishment and curiosity? A story is told but the psychological and scientific context felt thin.

A major and disturbing flaw of the book was the lack of footnotes or endnotes, at least in the Harper Perennial paperback reissue of 2005 I received and read. I honestly have no way to know how accurate Winchester's research was, although he thanks many people and describes all his hard work. It is not a scholarly book and not meant to be, but still...if we are to be astonished by an odd set of circumstances, we need to know a great deal about its factual details and the sources of same. HE wrote a 2003 book on the same topic of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary and at Amazon it also shows no notes but does have an extensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading section.

Anyone with a serious interest in the topic should seek a work published by the rival Cambridge University Press, and new for 2013, namely Sarah Ogilvie's Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary. The preview shows an extraordinary bibliography but also a list of letters and other sources that for me, at least, make the entire treatment look more worthy of its painstakingly researched subject, which is after all, another work of research. I have not read it but have it now listed in my books to read on LibraryThing.