naiveté: Wild Mouth to The Sand Factory – More Blood on The Tracks

Monday night, February 4th at 7:30  I participated in the PRAXIS sponsored reading of a new play: THE SAND FACTORY by a talented young writer Taylor Sutherland at the Concord Cafe.
 
The play deals with some issues and thoughts that have been provoked lately in some of the material I've been seeing like the recent production of WILD MOUTH by Maureen Hunter..thought it was an amazing work tackling the great divide that WAR produces particularly between the sexes and particularly when we are talking about the two past World Wars. I was struck and intrigued by the exploration of Blood significance, the Christian male Christ fixation and the attraction/repulsion law of Magnetism - the eternal battle of the Sexes.

THE SECRET, that esoteric new Bible packaged like an infomercial but informative nonetheless addresses the Laws of Magnetism and you are what you think, hence drawing to you, attracting what you are being - (of course it's all true but sometimes the over-simplification is as annoying as the graphics)

In WILD MOUTH, the British teacher, who has lost a son in the ongoing War needs to find some explanation for why her Boy wrote of an experience where he laid beside a dead naked body and felt peace. She is tormented by her inability to understand what could have possibly happened to her son to have him write of something so alarmingly inexplicable, prior to his death and to try to comprehend the unique relationship those who have experienced WAR have to it.

I don't really want to critique The Tarragon's production, directed by R.H. Thompson, I am more interested in the play itself . The fact that I was introduced to the play and enjoyed some of the work is sufficient: The attraction/repulsion between the The Teacher (feminist) and the Ukrainian War Hero (brute): the grieving Mother's attempt to understand what men see in war, or what war is:
“The good and evil invented by people trapped in scenes” is a line someone says in the play and it took me to the Hollywood experience of seeing everything as a “scene”, while working on Tracks, a film that starred Dennis Hopper, I learned a great deal about people trapped in scenes, and about good and evil.

When David Fox says to the woman at the end of the play that what you want to tell the Man who attacked her sexually, and provoked her to shoot him, is that “you are grateful”, she finally understood what it meant to be 'at war' - it resonated with certain of my lessons in life administered in the school of hard knocks by less than nurturing teachers. But sometimes that's what it takes to learn something, like a particularly bad relationship I had, that actually taught me the most about myself.

I remember Dennis Hopper believed that in terrorizing certain women in his life he had given them a gift: The loss of naiveté, is different than loss of innocence. To be naive is a kind of privilege-ness – one discovers that naiveté neither protects you nor justifies ignorance. It is 'precious', in the negative sense of being oh so self conscious, protected, and though sometimes enviable, is not really valuable in the search for truth, for real living and ultimately it is unfair, the very first lesson in growing up..that life is unfair, becomes another lesson, that the real unfairness is the protected one who fails to understand the pain of reality as it impacts those who cannot escape it.
Subsequent to working on TRACKS, I wrote a teleplay for CBC Drama inspired by my experience working on the film. Like TRACKS it dealt with a soldier returning from Vietnam who ends up punching a 'round-eyed' woman,  when she tries to take his photograph and thereby capture his pain..."you want to feel my pain..try this" he says as he delivers a blow to her solar plexus.
In Wild Mouth, the woman is also a photographer,and I have been reading about Diane Arbus, the extra-ordinary photographer who revolutionized photography with her challenging stirring disturbing photos of so-called freaks and marginal types. Arbus delivered a humanity, a comprehensive penetrating and exciting new way of recorded 'seeing'. I ran out to get the movie FUR when I started reading the excellent biography by Patricia Bosworh. As for FUR, they couldn't have gotten it more wrong.