November is the cruellest month

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Who knew that death had undone so many?

As with the film William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the title of Gerard Passannante's, BK '00, performance piece T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land forces us to react to the play not only on its own terms, but on Eliot's as well. Thus, the audience is asked to accommodate two divergent emotional respon-ses: an enjoyment of Passan-nante's ach-eivement, and an unsettling conviction that it is as far from Eliot's own intentions as Annie would be. As a reaction to The Waste Land, this performance has much to recommend it. As an interpretation it leaves much to be desired.

Passannante and his three performers, Shana Crystal, TD '01, Lyric Benson,
PC '02, and Cleo Godsey, BK '02, use the poem as a springboard to consider female imprisonment in strikingly choreographed ways. A silent chorus wielding picture frames hovers over the actresses, challenging the women to break out of their entrapment or forever enact the neverending drama of longing, jealousy, and betrayal that the poetry imposes upon them. Passannante's strength is his orchestration of movement, language, and sound; where another director would treat the falling of the picture frames to the floor as an embarrassing indulgence, he culls from their crunch a poetry of friction. The actresses shine when playing with their voices, sometimes imitating Eliot's formal drone and sometimes revoking it in favor of hyper-feminine giggling.

In fact, the play's strongest moments come when the actresses impersonate Eliot's female characters with a recklessness that quickens the pulse. As the poet's ailing and demanding wife, they highlight the delirium of duplicity, dividing the long-suffering and provocative woman into three different parts: her naïvely sweet libido, her girlish imp, and her overbearing, overwrought hysteria.

Yet this strength is also the performance's greatest flaw, both from a theatrical standpoint and from that of an Eliot purist. Passannante relies too heavily on the "feminine" as a trope. Something more than "trapped women" is needed as a guiding image, especially when one considers Eliot's distaste for the feminine in poetry. Passannante's obsession with women longing, women suppressing rage, and women ogling women strikes the viewer as an unforgivable betrayal of the poet's intentions; rather than elucidate the poem's meaning, this approach obscures it.

Another significant shortcoming is Passannante's heavy reliance on the text to lend richness to the production. Favoring an abstract, blank whiteness, Passannante refuses to locate the poem anywhere in the real world, leading us to ask, "What unreal city?" Even the voices, which are arranged with a savory attention to accent, stress, and overlap, suffer from their indeterminate portrayal of women, as if this were enough of a characterization. Eliot's haunting barkeep refrain, "Hurry up please, it's time," may be rendered nonsensical here by the New York Jewish women who recite the passage, but at least it's a rare moment when the actresses make a specific choice of character.

This Wasteland is many things--musical, fresh, and passionate among them--but it is not Eliot's. Passannante wisely opts not to attempt a narrative interpretation of the poem, but he instead relies too heavily on abstraction, especially in his characterizations, which are distinctly feminine but indistinctly human, like Little Orphan Annies lost in a world which demands more of them. If it does not provide a new understanding of the poem, however, the play does offer a new appreciation for the marriage of word and motion. Part muses and part sirens, the actresses make their language and movements sound. It is, after all, no small achievement to add new music to a 20th-century cornerstone.

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