Talk (play)

Talk

ISBN		978-1559362269

Talk is a play written by

.

Characters

• Moderator
• Apollodoros
• Ion
• Phaedo
• Crito
• Meno

Synopsis and themes

The play explores themes of mixed race as both an aesthetic challenge and a social concern, gesturing toward a poetics of social justice for the “mulatto millennium” as well as art as both social memory and cultural production. Influenced by Euripides' play The Bacchae, the entire play is held in the ruins of a museum of Greek antiquities, and has characters inspired by the Socratic dialogues (Phaedo, Crito, Meno, Apollodorus, and Ion) written by Plato, which attempts to determine the definition of virtue and the meaning of art. TALK also delves heavily in theoretical arguments regarding the reading of performativity as interdisciplinary concepts^[1] by examining the works of André Breton, Clay Felker, Mark Van Doren, Jonas Mekas, James Baldwin, Wayne Shorter, Jack Kerouac, Maya Deren and Robert Giroux (among others)^[2] with clips from an alleged unfinished experimental film ( heavily influenced by the French New Wave and Maya Deren's expressionism) [1]made by Aymes, shown and narrated by Phaedo, one of his collaborators.

Set

The impressionistic set was designed to resemble a panel discussion held in the interior hall on the ground floor of a Victorian mansion converted into (the now-defunct) Museum of Antiquities. Center stage there is a large triclinium (a three-sided table) set with food and wine, similar to the setting of a symposium In ancient Greece (Greek: συμπόσιον symposion, from συμπίνειν sympinein, "to drink together"), a Hellenistic social institution and forum for esteemed men to debate, plot, boast, revel with others and to celebrate the introduction of young men into aristocratic society.

Music

The music is atmospheric, at times influencing the mood and action of the play.

Plot

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The play takes the form of a heated panel discussion regarding the identity of the late enigmatic (fictional) writer named Archer Aymes.

Prologue

A woman (Apollodoros) exhibits to the audience ancient Greek

, who unexpectedly insists she be included as a participant in the conference even though she elects to sit apart from the others, quietly observing and occasionally interrupting the proceedings with remarks of intentional ambiguity as she serves food and wine to the panelists.)

Act One

During the course of the play, the Moderator interviews each panelist. He learns from Meno, an aging television talk show host, that Archer Aymes, a

Disrupting the panel, Apollodoros suggests Aymes never went to Columbia University, nor was he a member of the Beat Generation; insisting Aymes actually decided to write experimental literature after meeting the poet turned homeless panhandler Maxwell Bodenheim. Once known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians during the Jazz Age of the 1920s, Bodenheim allowed Aymes to engage in a sexual affair with his wife Ruth (28 years her husband's junior) who shared her husband's derelict lifestyle and often worked as a prostitute, and it was Bodenheim who first introduced him to poetry. The relationship with the couple was cut short around 1954 when Bodenheim and his wife were famously murdered by a dishwasher with whom they shared a room in a flophouse at 97 Third Avenue in Manhattan, New York City.

Act Two

Arguing the absurdity of the earlier Bodenheim claim and assertions of her fellow panelists, Phaedo (

somewhere in Mississippi where Aymes took up residence with an elderly African American woman. Upon this revelation, Phaedo admits the film widely believed to have been solely directed by Aymes, was actually directed and edited by her because Aymes had abandoned the completion of the project.

When the subject returns to Aymes' riot in

son. Phaedo suddenly recalls a night Archer Aymes took her on a walk through Manhattan and broke into a boarded-up mansion, after which he had one of a series of nervous breakdowns. Ion, a journalist, who has in fact exposed most of the other panelists, suggests Aymes was in fact not an African American at all but in fact a white man posing as African American.

Coda

Disillusioned with the perceived lies and deception of the panelists, the Moderator dismisses the panel and is left only with Apollodoros who asks the Moderator to connect to what initially attracted him to the novel of Aymes. When he admits his own frustration with art and academy, she ritualistically leads him through a recreation of the night Aymes leads a group of protestors to the Museum of Antiquities when an unidentified woman threw herself from the upper balcony. Having discovered "the truth" of Aymes' book, the play ends with the Moderator alone on stage in an empty space, reading the last page of the novel.

Production history

The play was originally commissioned by The Foundry Theatre in New York City, conceived as a response to A Conversation on Hope, a Foundry community dialogue held at The Great Hall of

, (produced by the Foundry Theatre, Melanie Joseph, producing, artistic director). It was later produced at Theatre X, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in Jan. 2003, directed by David Ravel with scenic and lighting design by Stephen Hudson-Mairet, and costume design by Amy Horst; as well as Brown University's Leeds Theater, in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2011, directed by Erik Ehn.^[5]

In print

Theatre Communications Group published the script. For the book edition, Rux included an index, endnotes, and footnotes in the document body, indicated in-text by superscript Arabic numbers after the punctuation of the phrase or clause to which the note refers. Each endnote attempts to offer some background to both real and fictional characters and events mentioned throughout the play, particularly as it relates to definitive artistic movements and sociopolitical events in America during the post–World War II era and the unrest of 1960s counterculture. Talk began stocking in stores July 1, 2003.

Original cast