1
In Balzac’s work a word or a cry is often sufficient to describe the entire character. This cry belongs essentially to the theatre.
-Émile Zola, “Naturalism on the Stage”
In the 1880s Richard von Krafft-Ebing published 45 case studies that comprised the first volume of his monumental Psychopathia Sexualis. A previously unimaginable panoply of preferences was suddenly visible: apparently much of what we humans like to do is perverse.
Earlier in the same decade, Émile Zola declared that the theatrical stage should be harnessed to that accelerating carriage called Naturalism, “the impulse of the century.” Shattering convention in its wake, Naturalism had already redefined the Modern novel in the service of analysis, particularly of a human’s behavior in the context of her “proper surroundings.” The application of the so-called “scientific method” to the drama of social situations would allow Zola and his fellow “followers of the truth, anatomists, analysts, explorers of life, compilers of human data” to reimagine the theatre in a sense closer to how the anatomists used the word: as a forum in which to dissect and observe, with eyes particularly trained to determine the normal and pathological relations between part and whole.
What makes me who I am? For Krafft-Ebing and many of his contemporaries working in the “sexual sciences,” no detail was too insignificant to matter in determining an individual’s psychological profile. His Case 10 “sometimes laughed to himself and did silly things.” As a child, ladies with silk gowns featured regularly in Case 121’s dreams. Case 123 liked to kiss flowers. Like Clara Lo’s concussion or Jessica’s overuse of ointments, the accidents and peculiar habits of a life might, for a “compiler of human data,” mean as much or more in drawing character than one’s career, family, and moral purpose. What Naturalists and Sexologists shared was a faith in this kind of atomizing investigation as a technique by which otherwise invisible secrets and connections might be brought into the light.
2
In the theatre, we can allow ourselves to risk mistaking correlation for causation: the theatre is the space perhaps ideally suited to what Tony Kushner playfully calls “pretentiousness” (“a good play…has a bursting omnipotence up its sleeve”), in which we use the details of life to posit grand, even conspiratorial, theories and trace preposterous networks. Filling the stage with as much of the world as could fit (as in Jez Butterworth’s recent hit play Ferryman, which comes complete with a live goose, a rabbit, and a baby) was often Naturalism’s way of allowing spectators to create a causal narrative out of a chaotic microcosm, which is ultimately an act of pretension, and of theory. Such acts abide in the theatre: Krafft-Ebing deduces that “the case of Henry III shows that contact with a person’s perspiration may be the exciting cause of passionate love.” The play’s the thing that catches the culpability of sweat.
Scanning Mikesch’s cast of characters, we can immediately recognize an enactment of Kushner’s provocation in favor of a generative form of pretentiousness, which, “if it’s done well, performs a salutary parody of carving out, in the face of the theorilessness and bewilderment of our age, meta-narratives, legends, grand designs, even in spite of the suspiciousness with which we have learned, rightly, to regard meta-narrative.” In Angels in America, Kushner gave us such a meta-narrative; in her Dramatis Personae, Mikesch gives us the ingredients to make our own. The highly-reductive composition of her characters – like Balzac’s, they can contain everything in a word or a cry – necessarily begs for us to make our own interconnection, patterns, architectures, systems. That process is almost forensic: we begin by positing questions about the elements in the list. How many Big Macs did the Hamburglar have to steal before he got his name, and from whom? The Would-Be Butcher? Is that why he’s only a Would-Be? And thus named, how could the Hamburglar ever appear as something other than himself?
The extreme austerity of Mikesch’s classifications, unlike those of the Sexologists, suggests not only that the characters in this Dramatis Personae are fungible, but that they are also capable of transformation. Precisely when does a draft become a vow? Is the Single Bed a form of Largesse or a Prank? Does it matter whether the Scenester or the IT Guy designs the Sitemap? Mikesch proposes not only that the theatre is the proper surrounding in which to see what’s in a name, but also to ask (or ask us to ask) what forms these names might otherwise take, or have taken.
3
When I began, I was not sure which among all the foul harassers, molesters, traducers, swindlers, stranglers, and no-goods I’ve known were going to make the final accounting.
-Jean Carroll
As I read this list of characters, I can’t help but be pulled towards one particular way of finding relations between them, though the possibilities suggested by Dramatis Personae are infinite. Her list begins by first describing and then simply naming human types; it then graduates from the human to the subhuman (in the moral sense), and ultimately away from the human altogether (things, feelings, concepts). I can’t help, though, but notice that this stage is filled mostly by hideous men (The Furnaceman; Waiters in a Fight; The Mama’s Boy) and the things that tend to adhere to them in the world (The Ire; The Boat; Offense vs. Defense; The Second, Third, Fourth & Fifth Business). I find a Heroine and an Actress (specifically “My Actress,” suggesting Mikesch’s own presence in the cast); and Soltero, single though his name implies he should be, has a daughter (perhaps the product of The Moan). Otherwise this is a man’s world. From this perspective Mikesch’s list of characters seems to describe nodal points along a vast system of male crime – each represents a manifestation of that diffuse force of toxic masculinity whose strafing of our culture has become all too visible in the last few years. Here it is the cry not of the perpetrator but of his victim that is sufficient to describe the entire character.
Beyond its apparent determinism, though, Dramatis Personae seems to ask us – in an almost Brechtian way – to imagine how these particular forms of aggressive male energy have taken form, which might also let us imagine how they might have been formed otherwise. Is watching Anthony Bourdain what causes the Noise Musician to rip off Lo’s clothes, or is it what prevents him from becoming The Stalker? As parts of a list, these names are fixed; and in their radically reduced fixity, they are paradoxically also more open to becoming each other. The theatre is not the world, especially the more it fills up with everything we think we know: as Brecht showed us, its basis in (and suspension of) human gesture allows the spectator to recalibrate significations, especially social ones.
4
Almost buried three entries from the end of this pile-up of characters, I find one name that sounds familiar, like it comes from the world I inhabit: Almanzo Wilder. This man, it turns out, was the husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who immortalized him in her series of Little House on the Prairie books. Wilder was not, in any account I can locate, a bad man. On the contrary, he was an almost archetypal Perfect Man: quiet, brave, sensitive, loyal, “representative of the time and culture in which he lived.”
The name Almanzo may derive from the Old German “precious man.”
“Madrachod” (the 28th entry in Mikesch’s list) is a slight inversion of “Madarchod,” which in Hindi is an expletive that means motherfucker.
What makes me who I am, or lets me become what I am not?
Works Cited
Carroll, E. Jean. “Hideous Men.” The Cut, June 21, 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/06/donald-trump-assault-e-jean-carroll-other-hideous-men.html. Accessed July 11, 2019.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis. First US Edition, Berman, 1900.
Kushner, Tony. “On Pretentiousness.” Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. Theater Communications Group, 1995.
Zola, Émile. “Naturalism on the Stage.” Playwrights on Playwriting: from Ibsen to Ionesco, edited by Toby Cole. Cooper Square Press, 2001, pp. 5-14.