- OTHER MEDIA
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- Three Little Pigs
Mud wallows in existential slop.
- SF Weekly January 21, 2009 (Chloe Veltman)
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- Everyone loves a good rags-to-riches story. The idea of a downtrodden
person overcoming the odds to rise to the heights of success has been a
narrative archetype since classical times. Tales about Aladdin and Cinderella
continue to delight children, while adults look to the biographies of the
likes of Oprah Winfrey, Eminem, and J.K. Rowling for inspiration and hope.
Here in the U.S., we take the notion of the self-made man or woman very
seriously. The ability to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps is fundamental
to the nation's sense of self-respect. Forget Oscar Wilde's line about
lying in the gutter and looking up at the stars —here in America we
reach out and touch them.
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- Or so we like to think. If María Irene Fornés' brutal
1983 play, Mud, illustrates anything, it's how little we understand the
concept of self-improvement, and how getting by in the world is, for many
of us, less about rags to riches than about survival of the fittest. The
Cutting Ball's claustrophobic revival of Fornés' drama about a young
woman whose dimly defined dreams of leading a better life end in chaos
struggles with its challenging mixture of social realism and poetic abstraction.
Nevertheless, it succeeds in delivering the themes and emotion with voluble
force.
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- Set in a rundown shack in some unspecified rural dustbowl, Mud revolves
around the relationships among three bottom-of-the-totem-pole characters:
Mae, an ambitious young woman who irons shirts for a living and aims to
better herself by going to school to learn basic reading and arithmetic
skills; Lloyd, her illiterate housemate and erstwhile lover, who spends
his days grappling with poor health and tending the household pig; and
Henry, an older neighbor whose rudimentary reading abilities make a deep
impression upon Mae. When Mae asks Henry to decipher a technically challenging
medical pamphlet that might shed light on Lloyd's condition, she finds
herself completely overawed by her neighbor's intellect. An invitation
to stay for dinner leads to an invitation to stay for good. At Mae's request,
Henry takes Lloyd's place in her bed and asserts himself as the alpha male.
The new domestic order is soon reversed: While Lloyd fully recovers from
his sickness, an accident turns Henry into a semi-vegetable. Finding herself
no longer able to stand her home life, Mae decides to flee. But the ever-dependent
Lloyd has other plans for her future.
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- Mud runs a little more than an hour; it's one of the darkest hours
I've ever spent in the theater, because the characters are so vigorously
unpleasant to one another. At one level, we empathize with the female protagonist's
struggle to pursue her dreams of self-improvement in a male-dominated culture.
Yet Mae isn't remotely sympathetic. In some ways, she's like the embittered
spinster Maureen Folan in Martin McDonagh's 1996 play The Beauty Queen
of Leenane, a woman whose sense of domestic entrapment, like Mae's, leads
her to do dastardly things in pursuit of freedom.
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- Balanced against Mae's desire to pull herself out of the mud is her
compulsion to rub other people's faces in it. She treats Lloyd as though
he's a retard. She calls him a moron, mocks his sexual impotence, and answers
questions on his behalf. When Henry arrives on the scene, she has no qualms
about kicking the invalid Lloyd out of bed and making him sleep on the
floor. Mae handles Henry in a similar way after his accident, when he stops
being someone she can look up to. She leaves the newly recovered Lloyd
to nurse the house's latest cripple. The sweet-faced Marilet Martinez'
perfunctory, unsmiling delivery emphasizes the disconnect between Mae's
passion for betterment and apparent lack of compassion for those around
her.
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- The male characters fare little better on the warm-and-cuddly front.
Before he's even gotten to know Mae and Lloyd, Henry (a heavy-limbed, empty-eyed
Garth Petal) puts them down. His self-important diatribe about the negative
effects of drinking condemns Lloyd as an alcoholic even though Mae says
Lloyd can't afford to buy booze. "If Lloyd had money, he would drink.
He'd be a drunk," Henry pompously concludes. Meanwhile, another speech
prophesying a future where consumer resources will be so plentiful that
people won't have to waste time "caring for things: washing them,
mending them, repairing them" belittles Mae's livelihood at the ironing
board. And Lloyd's renewed health merely makes him capable of following
through on the violent impulses that had previously bubbled away powerlessly
inside his physically depleted body. Alan Kaiser's startling switch from
looking like a prison camp detainee at the start of the play to more closely
resembling a particularly virile and threatening prison officer by the
end underscores his character's no-holds-barred will to survive.
- In a play whose funniest moment is an argument revolving around the
propriety of carrying an ax to a doctor's appointment, it's not surprising
that we feel an uncomfortable relationship with Mud. Director Paige Rogers
capitalizes on Fornés' combination of deliberately earthbound language
and hyperreal denouement with a suitably stylized mise-en-scène.
The cast members deliver their lines with pedantic definition and broad
physicality, stepping out of character between scenes to assume temporarily
naturalistic postures. Although this approach creates some stultifyingly
inert moments that seem mechanical and overrehearsed, it astutely estranges
us from the action, thus increasing our awareness of the darkness surrounding
the characters.
- Just like the shirts that hang limply around the edges of Liliana Duque's
Dickensian tenementlike set and the shell-stealing hermit crab described
in Mae's reader, we ultimately come to see Fornés' characters as
empty husks. The play concludes in a gutterlike gloom from which the stars
couldn't be further removed. No matter how much the characters try to scramble
up out of the mud with their half-hearted stabs at self-realization, they
end up wallowing in it to the end.
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