Sitting through Mac Wellman's pedantically titled Description Beggared; or the Allegory of WHITENESS, (the caps and punctuation are his) commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville for this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays, is a trying experience. Trying to make sense of it, to figure out what is going on and why, yields slim results. Yet the play's visual and verbal effects are striking, even as they confound us.
A program note adds another element of mystery by revealing that portions of the play -- one wonders which -- have been adapted from Arthur Machen's The White People and August Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata. Like the Strindberg play, WHITENESS revolves around some decidedly unpleasant people. Wellman has invented the Ring family (ring meaning circle; there's no connection with Wagnerian opera), who, having cornered the market on mechanical flea circuses recently or generations ago, have made their fortunes and are squabbling as they pose for family photographs in their dazzlingly white outfits. They are the whitest of the white, with "whiteness of an extraordinary kind" (are there some racial overtones here?) in "a vast, metaphysical Rhode Island" with "deep interior regions" stretching for 3000 miles.
Cousin Julia (Adale O'Brien) is called "The Eraser" because she has a wicked habit of causing people to disappear. Aunt Bianca (Anne O'Sullivan) "is a sort of human Blank, perhaps a parrot." Uncle Fraser (Edwin C. Owens) is billed as "a damnable marplot," a marvelous word to define "one who mars or defeats a plot, design, or project by officious interference." Moth (Eleanor Glockner), an elegant older person, used to be Mother, but Julia made the "er" syllable disappear, and poor Louisa (Lia Aprile), labeled by Wellman as "something of a ninny (not really)," often utters an agitated "er" in stressful moments. Wellman obviously loves wordplay and keeping an audience off balance.
A diminutive "White Dwarf" (Claire Anne Longest) in clown makeup and wig angrily pedals a tricycle onto the white stage ringed with concentric circles, then rushes into the seated audience and tears up a program grabbed from a theatregoer. A stuffed zebra (a god of some kind?), its whiteness defiled by black stripes, appears now and then. A group of musicians called "Purveyors of Transcendental Music and Bad Jazz" perform some really good songs by Michael Roth, including one called "What Will You Say to the White Zebra?" Louisa, of course, says "er." Uncle Fraser at play's end is "not coming back" (a "disputant," also played by Lia Aprile, has accused him of "disrupting the fundamental plan"), so he will not be able to say anything to the white zebra.
Besides Strindberg and Machen, other literary antecedents come to mind as this wind-up toy of a play spins to an end: The Madwoman of Chaillot, Alice in Wonderland, and writings of Gertrude Stein (Wellman may, in fact, be telling us that "there's no there there" in his strange universe or ours).
Description Beggared, that odd phrase Wellman (well man?) (well, man!) puts at the beginning of his cumbersome title, bears pondering. "Beggar," according to the dictionary -- in addition to being a word for a person who begs alms, is penniless, or is a wretch or rogue -- means "to exhaust the resources of." My dictionary even gives "to beggar description" as an example of usage. And from Description Beggared it's just a change of two letters to get to Description Buggered. Perhaps the word-playful Wellman is steering us in that direction.
