A METAMORPHOSIS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

By Marvin Carlson

As I read this ambitious new collection of challenging explorations of the human, non-human, and post-human works  by the ever-innovative Karen Malpede, I was reminded, not for the first time but more sharply than ever, of one of the  most innovative and ambitious of the classic authors, Ovid, who introduced his greatest work, the Metamorphosis, with a  phrase that I would argue could with equal accuracy introduce a collection of Malpede’s works. The Thomas Riley  Gutenberg translation of Ovid begins: “My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.” The necessity,  indeed the inevitability of change, along with its difficulty and dynamics, may be said to provide the driving force for  each play in the present collection, as it does for much of Malpede’s work. Of the four full works collected here, the two  most Ovidian in their frank embrace of the symbolic, the fanciful, and the mutability of forms and bodies are clearly the  two futuristic and visionary plays: Better People, created in 1989 and Other Than We, from 2018. 

Before discussing them, I would like to open with a few comments on the more realistic Us from 1987 and Blue Valiant,  from 2021, less obviously Ovidian in both structure and imagery, but still deeply involved, each in its own way, with the  dynamics of change and its central relationship to the life process. Us is the darkest and cruelest of these four plays,  depicting through the historical lens of the late 20th century the divided and destructive condition of the modern world.  It is performed by two actors, a man and a woman, who portray a variety of characters — husband and wife, parent and  child — but in every combination (including the switching of genders and the introduction of dreams) they find  themselves trapped in an endless cycle of division and violence, apparently as intractable as genetic composition. These  dark forces seem built into all human relationships — even the most basic, like male and female, or parent and child.  The powerful and stunning opening of the play makes this point in one theatrical coup after another. We begin with a  scene all too familiar in our society, a man brutally beating and verbally abusing his wife (represented here by a dummy).  His rage spent, he weeps over her in remorse, then removes his clothes to reveal himself as a woman. She then  introduces herself as the daughter of this suffering pair and immediately resumes the abuse of her “mother” begun by  her “father.” 

It would be difficult to imagine a more effective and theatrical way to demonstrate the interrelatedness of gender,  genetics, generational tensions, and violence in human society. Nor does this concern remain on the largely personal  level. The suffering of these protagonists, we soon realize, is part of a seemingly endless cycle, the infernal machine of  history that replicates their personal sufferings on a social level. Behind the central figure of Hannah, who opens the  play, lie the horrors of the holocaust and indeed the suffering of her ancestors from Abraham onward. She was, she  suggests, “born of ash.” Her lover Michael grew up surrounded by the atrocities of the seemingly endless Algerian war  and is haunted by the vision of streets filled with disconnected body parts, the results of that protracted and devastating  conflict. Like these grisly parts, the human products of this cruel and violent world seem doomed to a condition of  isolation and fragmentation. As Michael informs Hannah, “I cannot attach myself to anyone.” 

What makes Us particularly dark is that although its characters are well aware of the pain and emptiness of their existences, they see no possibility of change. Their articulations of their conditions suggest no hope for the future but  are best what the existentialists called creative expressions of despair. A more hopeful exploration of the human condition is offered in Blue Valiant, one of Malpede’s most direct and straightforward plays, but also one which hits the  deepest emotional notes. Set in the present, it shows a human and an animal, both, like the characters in Us, bearing  deep emotional wounds, but who, unlike the characters in Us, sense a kindred need for healing through change in the  other and grope painfully and determinedly toward it. A bridge between them is created by a migrant child, who bears  deep psychic wounds of her own. The apotheosis of change that will free these separated and suffering souls is clearly  anticipated but not achieved in this drama. To turn to another classic parallel, Us may be seen as bearing parallels to  Dante’s Inferno, a place of continual pain and suffering with no hope of change. Blue Valiant, in contrast, has more the  feeling of a Purgatorio in which suffering has not disappeared, nor happiness been assured, but where the promise of  eventual change to a happier and more fulfilled condition is clearly felt.

Two plays in this collection in fact offer a vision of this fulfilled condition, offering at least a glimpse of a Paradiso beyond the division and sufferings of the lower worlds. The deceptively simple titles, Other Than We and Better People,  suggest at first an observation based on contrast, between some accepted norm and something else “other” or “better.” Hardly surprisingly, their web of reference is much more complex. “Better,” for example, bears an ironic double  meaning, suggesting both the “better” humans sought by the hubristic scientists and the actual “better” beings of a  completely different sort which eventually emerge. The dramatic arcs of these two plays are similar. Both begin in  dystopic future worlds, move through a crisis and experience a metamorphosis quite outside the control of the  manipulative human agents. The result is a totally new order of being, hopefully free of the divisive and self-destructive features of the old order. 

“Quite outside their control” is the key concept here, to which one might add quite outside even their comprehension.  The enormity of this change is far greater than anything envisioned by Ovid because the assumption of how the universe  operates has itself radically changed. For Ovid, metamorphosis was a dynamic in the hands of the gods alone, not of  man. It was the gods, however whimsical and inscrutable, who were thought to determine the course of history and the  dynamics of change. With the passing of time, however, humanity essentially banished the gods and seized this power  for itself, inaugurating a new era, often referred to as the Anthropocene. The fact that human beings now claimed this  power would seem to promise the coming of a world more favorable toward improving the human condition in general.  On the contrary, however, humans have proven no better, and arguably much worse at this responsibility than were the  Greek gods. The story of Frankenstein’s monster haunts the Anthropocene, and human planning has created such  horrors as the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. In short, the human ability to change the world has grown steadily both  greater and more dangerous. 

Better People and Other Than We consider this growing danger, if from different perspectives, and ultimately share a  common hope. Humanity’s unchecked desire to explore and more importantly to control every part of the universe, including humanity itself, could be examined from almost infinite perspectives. Malpede has chosen to represent it in two of its most widely recognized and dangerous aspects. Other Than We deals with surely the most familiar example of Anthropocene mismanagement — the massive and largely negative impact of human activity upon the entire ecosystem, from climate change to species extinction. In this drama the world has been irrevocably changed by “The  Deluge,” a clearly climate-related Anthropocene catastrophe. Better People explores the dangers of human intervention in  an area less widely reported in the current media, but one of equal consequence to humanity — genetic engineering of  the human race itself. Although this play does not begin, like Other Than We, after human activity has brought about a  major catastrophe, its major characters are already themselves products of grotesque and nightmarish experimentation,  one of them created from Jewish sperm collected by the Nazis. 

In both plays, however, a new and clearly superior order finally appears, not by the eco-challenging experimentation of the human scientists but almost in spite of it. In both plays it enters the dramatic action through a non-speaking character, a body and form quite outside the established world of the play. In Better People, this is the Beast, described by Malpede as a “Yak with Kudu horns, a rare, near extinct species.” Even before the mid-play appearance of the Beast,  its appearance is anticipated by Edward, the most sympathetic of the scientists, who intuits the word “rendezvous” as  the single linguistic tie he has with the Beast. That thin connection seems however to give him an insight into the creative heart of the universe itself, what he calls — in unconscious echo of Ovid, “the ability to generate form.” Edward is ultimately unable, however, to use his Anthropocene strategies to allow him to fully reach that heart, even  when, later, he is literally swallowed by the Beast. In the phantasmagoric end of the play, though, he moves out of his  modern library and through an Ovidian world, becoming a series of animals. At last the Anthropocene laboratory  disappears, replaced by the symbol of apotheosis ending each section of Dante’s epic — a star-strewn night sky. But this  metamorphosis, even apotheosis, still remains in the more familiar universe. Edward and the Beast lie down together,  but do not merge. They remain separate entities, and the play ends with the word rendezvous. Two entities have met and  made critical contact, but they have not attained the assimilation necessary for a full metamorphosed, Ovid’s change, of  “forms into new bodies.” 

It is from this perspective that I see Other Than We as both an affirmation and completion of the dynamics of metamorphosis suggested in Better People. In the earlier play the walls of the laboratory disappear only at the end, and the ultimate metamorphosis of Edward, if it occurs, is not shown. In Other than We, the four protagonists escape from the laboratory (Dome), the authoritarian last outpost of the Anthropocene world, to develop, outside that world, a new post-human form that will hopefully grow into an entity in harmony with itself and the universe. These innovative “forms in new bodies,” appropriately called “The Newbies,” are still developing at the end of the play and are visible (to our human eyes) as “merely flashes of light.” A more central figure involved in this process is the wise elder Opa, who actually completes the change into a new form to which each of these plays, in its own way, seems to aspire. Malpede’s stage direction itself calls this a “metamorphosis,” and what occurs is not simply the miraculous change of a man into a bird, which bears close visual similarity to many sequences in Ovid. The bird is what our human senses can register, like the flashes of light, but Opa has joined the Newbies in a place beyond human imagination. Perhaps his metamorphosis is better evoked not by the words of Ovid, but by the haunting and visionary words that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Ariel, who like the Newbies, is a non- or post-human voice. 

Nothing of him that doth fade  

But doth offer a sea-change  

Into something rich and strange.