Media culture busted, dusted, and 'Tone Clusted'

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Brown and Roger watch themselves on the news.

When you turn on the news these days, all you get is who got shot, who got maimed, who got nailed by a car, and who got hit by the President. What happened to relevant news like the domestic effect of economic turbulence in Asia and the latest in the ongoing race to cure the common cold? Is the "if it bleeds, it leads" motto here to stay?

In Tone Clusters, Joyce Carol Oates does not concern herself with such questions. Instead, the play, directed by K. Elizabeth Stevens, DRA '99, takes a look at the average, TV-watching, married couple. But this time they're not watching TV; the TV is watching them-- literally. Hanging above and slightly to the side of Mr. and Mrs. Gulick (Brennan Brown, DRA '00, and Alicia Roper, DRA '00) are a pair of monochrome television sets, each one emblazoned with the unsettling, too-close-up images of their poor old faces. As they take their seats, a disembodied voice gets the ball rolling: "Mr. and Mrs. Gulick, thank you for being here..."

In the beginning, we don't know why these people are being interviewed. The interviewer (Denver Latimer, DRA '00), who is never physically present, asks all kinds of unrelated, off-the-wall, and just plain convoluted questions. "How long have you lived in Lake Point?" soon segues into "In the development of identity there is chance and determinism...please comment on that." The Gulicks remain unfazed by this weirdness and deal with the onslaught by answering every question, whether or not the answer even remotely applies. And so it continues, until Oates' restricted narrative allows us to learn why we should care about what the couple has to say.

The Guliks are being interviewed because their shiftless, unemployed son Carl raped and murdered a neighborhood girl. Mom and Dad just don't understand why he did it, since Carl was raised to "love Jesus" and "was such a good boy." Even the audience is agape that such a stable youngster (who kept his room locked to hide pornographic magazines, stilettos, naked barbies, and women's magazines with the models' eyes, breasts and nether regions cut out) could be implicated in such a mess.

The interviewer insists on pressing the visibly agitated couple about all the DNA evidence and eyewitness testimony piling up against their son. They remain composed, however, and continue to answering the questions. When they start running out of anything substantial to say, which actually happens in the first 30 seconds, they do their best to act the part--the part, of course, being "that person on TV." They prove to be up to the task, using a repertory of blasé media soundbites to get the job done. The Gulicks inform us of everything from the woes of the taxpayer to that scary greenhouse effect.

You'd think Oates, a prolific novelist, dramatist, and poet, would be able to write a play without using clichéd dialogue. You 'd be right, if clichéd dialogue weren't intrinsically connected to the play's central meaning. Tone Clusters is about the shots of numbing apathy that the media injects us with daily, and makes its point only by raising the dosage. Even the small-town, God-fearing postal worker and his wife are less than dazzled by the imminent conviction of their son. Roper's Mrs. Gulick cannot emphasize enough her son's innocence, but beyond that she seems unfocused and at one point launches into a brilliantly delivered soliloquy about how she saw a lunar eclipse the other night at aunt so-and-so's house. But the questions continue as the interrogator probes the Gulicks about such sundry topics as the extraordinary's intrusion into the ordinary, humankind's desire to know its position in the food cycle, and their plans for the future.

The play is short and sweet, thoroughly attacking the question of just who's on what side of the TV camera. While Brown portrays Mr. Gulick as a pathetically ignorant, Hard Copy everyman who thinks he's in the know, Roper skillfully makes Mrs. Gulick a sweet but tormented woman who knows nothing. Latimer, as the interviewer, is amazingly adept at not tripping over any of his long lines, which he delivers in a condescending tone and with a slow and deliberate voice for the benefit of his guests. The set is modest, but the director's touch of the cameras, TVs, and microphones is all that is necessary to add the requisite icing to the Tone Clusters cake.

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