Often (Kenning #11)
by Barbara Guest and Kevin Killian
$7.50
published by Kenning
Available from the publisher:
Patrick F. Durgin
383 Summer St. (lower)
Buffalo, NY 14213
or from Small Press Distribution
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It was only after spending several hours mulling over how to explain OFTEN that I stumbled across Kenning's own description of the piece. I'll quote it here, as I can't hope to come up with anything as coherent:
First presented December 9, 2000, as one of "Three Plays by Barbara Guest" in an evening at Small Press Traffic at CCAC (San Francisco), OFTEN is, loosely speaking, a sequel to Guest's 1961 play, The Office. Strictly speaking, OFTEN is a clever, lyrical, and humorous text that blurs contexts between social polemic, lyric song, modern comedy, and speculative poetics.
Guest, if you don't know, is a celebrated and influential poet who came to prominence as part of the New York School of the 1960s. Her collaborator on this work, Kevin Killian, is a well-established poet in his own right; if you read much new poetry, chances are you've come across his work in anthologies.
And OFTEN? OFTEN is a challenge to explain. While we're asked to accept it as a play, it's best approached as a long-form, multi-character narrative poem that just happens to be performed on a stage, in a specific setting. As drama, it plays like Eugene Ionesco's shorter works: something significant happens between the beginning and the end, but the play's characters do relatively little to serve the dramatic through-line, their interactions and revelations serving to set up -- but never anticipate -- a deus ex machina ending. And getting there is all the fun.
The Yellow Sheet of Paper Company is in turmoil. There's been a murder -- or has there? There's a sinister plot -- or maybe not. There are affairs, and secret longings. There's a macguffin -- an unseen blackboard, supposedly covered in unpleasant writing. There's an actual ghost in the machine -- a dictaphone that regurgitates a dead man's words. There is comedy, and social commentary, of sorts. There's even a walking, talking legal pad -- Mickey, the company mascot, who wears his costume 24/7 and pines for secretary Jennifer Lopez (yes, seriously).
In the end, we learn a little about the characters' outlook on life. Some of them come to dramatic resolutions. Questions are answered. But ultimately, by the standards of more straightforward drama, it's chaos -- albeit of the most poetic kind.
OFTEN's payoff comes from its wonderfully lyrical speeches. Each of the main characters gets one, and they're invariably lovely -- flowing soliloquies that bookend the linear plot developments. Here, Guest and Killian prove that while their office jargon might not ring entirely true (the narrative suggests that Guest's ideas of office life haven't changed since she wrote The Office, thirty-eight years ago), they have a solid handle on the workings of the human spirit. Would this come across as well on stage is it does on paper? Probably not. Needless to say, OFTEN is not intended for a traditional theatre audience, but for the artier-than-thou crowd; it offers far more willful obfuscation than revelation. In the hands of anything but a top-flight ensemble accustomed to working with absurdist-type scripts, OFTEN could be excruciating.
I wouldn't want to be a director charged with bringing OFTEN to the stage; the pressure of doing justice to its poetry and making passable sense of its narrative would be too great. But I'd have nothing but respect for the performers who could pull it off.
-- George Zahora
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