Caught

0. Catch as Catch Can is a play in 15 scenes. On the surface, it could not be more simple. There are two families: the Italian-American Lavecchias and the Irish-American Phelans. They are working class and live in New England. The families are deeply intertwined, the children grew up together. Tim Phelan, the prodigal son who has been in California for over a decade, returns for mysterious reasons and announces he has a Korean-American fiancee, Minjung. Three actors play both the aging parents and their adult children. Yet the play is anything but straightforward. The three actors are not Irish-American or Italian-American but rather Asian-American. The first half is largely comic, at times quite broad, building to a riotous climax of a holiday dinner in which the three actors switch back and forth between their characters on a dime, sometimes seeming to play both at once. The second half is an increasingly dark and despairing drama in which ties between the characters come undone. The connections between these two halves are mysterious, and difficult to put into language. This is not a play where narrative moves along a line of clearly visible causality. It is hunting after a deeper, more mysterious, game.


1. This semester, I am teaching Shakespeare for the first time in many years. As a way of organizing the class and narrowing down which plays of his we are going to tackle, I decided to focus on Shakespeare and identity. College students love talking about identity, and I figured this would be an easy way into his work. We read some of the cross-dressing ones, and the three plays that significantly feature Moors, and of course The Tempest, because how could you not. Somewhat at the last minute, I decided to toss Hamlet onto the pile. I wanted to ask what does it mean to be a human being? I also wanted to know what does this play, which has been so central to our conception of the human subject, have to tell us about whiteness and maleness? After all, for so much of our history, when we ask what it is to be a human being we really meant what it is to be a white man. Whiteness and maleness were our assumed neutral, the mean from which everything else deviated.


2. Robbie: I mean, the goal’s to, like, to change yourself, to be different.
   Tim: Right. But then: how will you know it’s the right self?
   Robbie: …
   Getting a little weird for me, Tim.
   – Catch as Catch Can, Scene 15


3. Being the neutral has all sorts of benefits, but it can leave you rather at sea over what your identity actually is. If you’re told over and over again that you are capable of being anything, it is also the case that you might be, well, nothing. A blank canvas isn’t all that interesting, except in terms of its limitless possibilities.


4. One running motif in Catch as Catch Can is the older generation’s attachment to certain pieces of Asian culture that appear to have washed onto the shore of their consciousness like treasures on a beach. Roberta visits a psychic with the name Glorisha who does the I Ching. Lon venerates Yamaha pianos. 


5. Acting holds out the promise of self-transcendence. In the place where the actor and character meet, both are changed, both become more than they were before. This, at least, is what Konstantin Stanislavski taught. He believed that through a combination of rigorous research, physical training, textual analysis, imagination, and their own experiences as human beings, actors could reach beyond themselves and touch the peculiar individuals that they were playing. It was only this meeting of character and actor, which he called perezhivanie or experiencing that would allow for the most truthful, the most powerful, the most alive performances. This was a very different model from the mainstream of his time, which was more focused on types, and in actors working within whatever type suited them for the bulk of their careers.


6. As a Jew, I am both neutral and not. I am both white and not. I have a whiteness that can be revoked if it becomes inconvenient to the project of white supremacy. For some Jews, this creates an endless anxiety, a drive to reinforce their whiteness at the cost of people of color. For others, it fuels a desire to dismantle white supremacy. I like to think of myself as the latter kind of Jew, but I fear at times I may be the former without even realizing it. If whiteness is the neutral, it’s also the default, the reflex. To give one example of this: there are Black Jews—including my nephews— and the above paragraph completely ignores them.


7. We live at a time when identities are in flux. Or, to be more accurate, we live at a time when we have a heightened awareness of how in flux identities can be. Identities are always in flux, their boundaries are always renegotiated, always being policed and resisted and transgressed. Does an identity have intrinsic meaning or value? If so, what is it? What do categories like “Asian American” or “Jewish” or “Italian-American” contain, exactly?


8. One reason we come to the theater is to see actors transcend themselves. It is a powerful thing to witness. We often feel trapped within the self, and, by transforming into the character, the actor helps us to feel on a deep level that perhaps some transformation of our own self is possible. The odd paradox is that the characters actors play are almost always trapped within themselves. So the act of performance gives us hope even as the content of that performance dashes it on the rocks. Thus the comic delights of Catch as Catch Can’s first half and the crushing bleakness of its second. 


9. While we’re talking Stanislavski and transcendence and becoming other people and so on, I should probably mention that Stanislavski was a little fixated on Othello. He played Othello (and Shylock!) early in his career, and based his performance on an Arab merchant he met in Paris once. He wrote about Othello often. The prologue of An Actor Prepares is about Othello. In it, the young Stanislavski (who is named Tortsov) is trying to figure out how to play the Moor of Venice. Eventually he smears his face with chocolate frosting so that he can see how the whites of his teeth and eyes catch the light. He feels within this moment that he has discovered something. We have discovered something too, but not the thing that Stanislavski intended.


10. Does neutral exist? And what happens if something other than whiteness—and maleness—is treated as neutral? Catch as Catch Can playfully provokes both of these questions by having actors of East Asian descent portray white people. The opening of the play is a riot of stereotypes. In playing Roberta and Theresa, Jon Norman Schneider and Rob Yang wear whiteness like a mask. We know before the characters say more than a few lines that they are white women, that they are from New England, that they are in late middle age, that they do not come from money. It’s remarkable how much information about Roberta and Theresa can be derived from ten seconds of exposure to their accents, facial expressions, and gestures. But there is a second deployment of stereotypes—the exoticization of Asian women voiced by Roberta as she discusses Tim’s impending marriage to Minjung. It turns out her son Robbie’s ex-wife is also Korean. Asian women, she claims, are tighter than white women. They stay wet longer. Their vaginas are also horizontal instead of vertical. Five feet away, the actor Cindy Cheung, who plays Roberta’s husband Lon and daughter Daniela, sits, silently in place, dimly lit. In a few minutes, the lights will crossfade sharply and she will begin scene two as Lon. Watching her not respond to Roberta’s claims about Asian women—words that are written by an Asian woman to be voiced by a white woman played by an Asian man—we cannot help but have a heightened sense of… well, everything. Who is actually speaking?  And who is listening? And who are we, to witness this? Every line begins to exist in multiple realities and contexts at once. The play, as comic as it is at this moment, is also a vertiginous, dizzying experience. 


11. When I speak to acting teachers about their lives and jobs, the thing they often say they are worried about is the increasing constraints on who can play what. Yes, yes, they’ll say, practices like blackface are abhorrent. But must gay characters be played by gay actors? What about characters with disabilities? What about Jews? Or fat people? If transcendence is one of the goals of acting, one of its most powerful purposes, are we losing something if we insist too strenuously on a one-to-one correlation between actor and character when it comes to identity? I find these questions provocative and do not know a good answer to them. All I can usually say is that these are norms that are constantly being renegotiated, and that the ongoing conversation about who can play what is a healthy one for us all to be having, regardless of the results. This is both true and feels like a cop-out, but the honest answer is I don’t know. I was furious when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was played by a British shiksa in On the Basis of Sex, but don’t really care about Louis in the most recent Angels in America revival being played by a straight Scottsman. I have no defined coherent ideology here, and I doubt most other people do either. What we have is deep-rooted, mysterious, feelings, responses we cannot really control that we try to rationalize into something coherent. But we are incoherent, on this issue as in so many other things.


12. Daniela: Sure, it’s easy to say I’ll be different, I see that hole and I’m not fallin’ in.
    – Catch as Catch Can, Scene 3


13. The characters in Catch as Catch Can are burdened by whiteness, but they cannot see it.  Whiteness is the air they breathe. Instead, they experience deep pain that comes from seemingly nowhere. They walk as if carrying great weight. They look tired all the time. The younger generation all yearn for some kind of escape, but everything feels like a trap, whether it’s a new job, or marriage, or parenthood. Their parents all yearn for the opposite: a stasis that never ends, a way of keeping their children and the world from changing. Neither is a real solution to the problem of being alive.


14. Stella Adler, the only American acting teacher to have studied directly with Stanislavski, often talked about what she called “modern drama.” These are plays, beginning with the naturalists of the late 19th century, where the characters are mysterious to themselves, ones in which unknowing is highlighted, rather than the kind of certainties the enlightenment ushered in. The problems in these plays cannot be solved, even when the plots resolve, because the problem is actually modernity itself. What these plays offer us is not a solution to the problem of living, but rather an experience of the problem of living, a new point of view on that problem. To paraphrase James Baldwin, they expose the questions that the answers have covered up. 


15. One answer we cling to often is that identity is coherent, and that it offers us a home that we can carry with us, one that shelters us from the storm of the world. In Catch as Catch Can, Tim refers to Daniela as his home in the pivotal scene in which the play shifts from comedy to drama. The play reveals, first as farce, then as tragedy, that the various homes the characters live in—their physical homes, their families, their identities—don’t shelter them from anything. Instead, they leave the characters more trapped, more unable to navigate the world. In the second half of the play, the borders between characters break down, eventually even language breaks down. Daniela, in trying to express her pain, can only say “Ihh, Ihhca cah qwiy…. Ahauhhughuh. Aoww uwwndu-uhuhuh. Mmm.”  There is no language that can capture the terra incognita that the play has taken us all into. The answers have all imploded. Now we must find new questions to ask. 

Isaac Butler is the author of The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act and the co-author, with Dan Kois of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. He also co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process, for Slate.