Harbaugh !

James Harbaugh

Hooker

10/17/18

A Journey Round’ the Cape of “What the Absolute F@#K” and Back Again

A double header of dark versus light, Charles Mee’s Night and Day is certainly

not the easiest thing to describe. The most appropriate thing I can come up with is that it is an all

together absurd blender concoction of the physical and the musical within a mashing together of

text. Night, based on the tragedy Thyestes by Seneca, is a dark tale of twin rivalry, revenge, and

darkness. In contrast, Day is a love story taken from Daphnis and Chloe by the Greek poet

Longus. Classical drama and contemporary self-indulgence are collide In this explosion of

sounds, words, images, emotions, and ideas, characters and storylines emerge as fleeting images

race by. These two dance theatre works aim uncover the savagery beneath the veneer of our

outward pleasantries. At least, this was the message that I took away from the Arthur Miller

theatre during the play’s opening weekend at the University of Michigan. Then again, with

Charles Mee, you can never be completely sure.

Often referred to as the “public domain playwright” (NPR, 2000) Mee works in a rather

interesting fashion. In a world where almost all known works are governed and policed by rights

agencies, Mee offers his own up freely online by way of something he calls the (re)making

project. Through a sort of underhanded criticism of how we structured the world of performance

rights can be, Mee has built his project on the belief that “there is no such thing as an original

play,” and in this way, his scripts are to be treated as blue prints, or jumping off points by the

companies that perform them. In other words, they can be rewritten however each individual
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company sees fit. That certainly is not normal, and there again, neither is Mee. In his career,

Charles Mee has often hopped back and forth between the fields of history and theatre. Between

1960 and 1965, Mee participated in the Off Off Broadway movement as a playwright and a

journalist. From 1966 to 1999, Mee wrote nineteen books: two memoirs, three children’s books,

and fourteen novels on historical events. In 1986, Mee returned to playwriting, with his Obie-

award-winning Vienna: Lusthaus. The plays Mee created after 1986 are heavily influenced by his

career as a historian. So, unsurprisingly, many of his plays take on historical events as their main

topic of conversation. In addition, Mee started to create many of his scripts from here on as

collages of sorts, by taking bits and pieces from other pieces of literature. Going even further,

some other plays Mee wrote were simply rewrites of famous works such as Orestes and Trojan

Women. As pointed out earlier, Mee himself believes there are no original plays, and therefore

sees all texts as part of a collective culture from which he can borrow and sample, provided he

returns anything he creates, like these collages or rewrites, back to the collective culture via his

website when he is finished. Mee’s battle physically shapes him, but has also significantly

shaped his aesthetic views. Mee describes himself in some early memoirs as “nearly normal” (A

Nearly Normal Life, Mee) and credits the disease’s destructive power with his found love of

fragmentation in theatre. This, above anything else, was certainly evident in the Arthur Miller

Theatre.

As I sat near the back of the theatre watching Day, a rare feeling crept over me…I was

completely lost. Now, full disclosure, I can often find myself a bit disconnected from even the

best of works I see for a period of time, due to fatigue, my generally jaded personality, etc., but I

almost always find my footing at SOME point. This was not one of those nights. After I left the
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theatre with my peers, I sang along in a chorus of general dislike of the piece. All criticisms put

forward were based on a very simple question; “what the [redacted] was that about?” I resolved

that I did not know, and carried on with the night. In speaking with Malcom as one of his

directing students, he talks a lot about about the ideologies of absurdist playwright Eugene

Ionesco, who argued that a story doesn’t absolutely have to have a linear narrative or make literal

sense in order to have an impact. True to form, Malcom’s production of Night and Day features

scene upon scene that almost always completely ignore the one before. This is the fragmentation

that Mee was so drawn to. Upon further tossing and turning of my ciritiscims, and finally getting

my hands (or eyes) on the original script, it struck me…maybe Night and Day wasn’t supposed

to make any sense at all. Suddenly the entire experience looked different. I realized my reactions

of confusion, and disconnectedness were all desired effects of the piece as a whole. As an

audience member, it was my job to sit back and absorb this absurdity and then decide later what

stayed with me or what I felt during any particular scene because there was no correct answer or

outcome.

Mee’s life has been one of hardship and brokenness. His own broken body does not work

the way everyone else’s does, and therefore, his plays don’t either. His works may not be easy, or

clearly accessible, but they are wonderfully, strange, and absurd. Night and Day has pestered me

more than most plays do. Every single day I run into some fellow student who saw it, and

exchange criticisms and ideas. After so much discussion, I have completely reversed course from

my initial feelings of indifference, and find myself marveling at just how manipulative theatre in

its most bizarre forms can be. I almost feel as though I was tricked into not liking it, just so I

could discover that was the point all along. If nothing else, Night and Day is a brilliant reminder
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that art is a strange beast that comes in so many forms and colors. It is not up to any individual to

determine what is good or what is not, and sometimes there is no easy answer when we ask what

something is all about. Charles Mee will never be associated with anything that is neat and tidy,

but then, I suppose life never is.