Generals Anxiety

Posthumous Improvisations

Written and performed by J. Eric Marler

in the Leverett Old Library April 20-22 at 8pm free

In the program for his one-man monologue, Posthumous Improvisations, J. Eric Marler declares: "It is my strong belief that sincerity is the highest value to which art can aspire." On the grounds of sincerity, at least, his play--a 90-minute narration of events from his life over the past year--is a success. From the time we open the program to the closing scene, Marler's personality is on display; we get to see his fears, his neuroses, his failures and triumphs.

The question for the audience is whether this is enough for a play--does Marler manage to transmute his experiences into something artful and important enough for strangers to want to see them?

For the most part, the answer is no. We see Marler worry about and eventually pass his General Exams in the Harvard English department, struggle with a psychotic roommate and fail in the pursuit of Pamela, an enigmatic novelist, but none of these things make the leap from anecdote to art. The monologue often relies on mere local reference to keep the audience interested. We get a sort of thrill from hearing places and people we know mentioned on stage. When Marler does strive for larger meaning, he usually achieves only pretension--as with the title, which has no more concrete meaning after one has seen the play than before.

The play begins with Marler ambling on stage and announcing casually that he is going to talk about his recent life. His preoccupation has been his impending oral exam in English, which would test all of his knowledge about literature. The strain of this make-or-break test induced constant nausea and what he calls "social phobia," a fear of performing in social situations. Things were only made worse by roommate Oswald, an anti-social computer programmer with a bad habit of urinating in a glass jar in various parts of the apartment. Oswald is both comic relief and a warning of what Marler could turn into; it's only a short path, he intimates, form his own awkwardness to his roommate's bizarre aggression.

The narration proceeds at a leisurely pace, as Marler recounts one non-earth-shaking episode after another: a failed date, a concert, his studies. The climax of the play is the day of his exam; Marler cleverly intertwines his own anxiety with a radio documentary about Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, finding inspiration in Kennedy's growing resolve. We even get to hear some of what Marler said during his exam, recited while a passage from The Four Seasons is played.

Marler recounts these events with distinct charm and skill. He uses a breathy, confidential tone for most of the narration, and his stylized hesitations lend a note of naturalness without seeming awkward. When he does assume another voice, as in one monologue imitating a conversation which he overheard at a restaurant, he is equally at ease, building from ordinary chitchat to frantically dramatic pronouncements with subtlety.

When Marler attempts to ennoble ordinary episodes, however, he usually resorts to self-conscious high-culture references that are merely self-indulgent. When Marler recalls a day when Cambridge was buried in an inexplicable shower of white flowers, he is borrowing from Gabriel Garcia Marquez (as he explicitly states in the program) for no other reason than to borrow from Gabriel Garcia Marquez. By the time the play ends with a quote from The Waste Land, despite its near-irrelevance to what has come before, we are not surprised; the temptation to play with his literary knowledge, and stroke the audience by allowing it to recognize his references, is evidently too great to resist.

Which is not to say that there is no pleasure to be had from these references; any audience likes to be stroked. There is no question that Marler is witty, and fellow English majors will no doubt enjoy jokes like "Discuss any references to aquatic mammals in Moby Dick." But the pleasure we get from these kinds of jokes is like the pleasure at hearing Marler name three well-known English professors as his examiners; much of the monologue would be of little or no interest to anyone outside Harvard, if not outside Harvard's English department.

These witty asides constitute the main entertainment of Posthumous Improvisations precisely because there is no dramatic tension in the events being described; we are never absorbed by Marler's struggles. We know that he will pass his exam in the end. Oswald simply disappears, depriving us of any deeper insight into his problems, or at least the pleasure of a final confrontation.

The Pamela subplot, which has the most potential to be something resembling a drama, is the most disappointing element of the monologue; we never hear enough about Pamela to believe that Marler is interested in her, and when he loses her we don't see it as any kind of defeat. The closest thing we get to an absorbing problem is Marler's struggle with social phobia, which he presents honestly and sympathetically; but this too is unresolved, apparently cured by having passed his exams.

But, Marler might say, that is the way things happened. As he announces at the outset, he has avoided "fictionalizing events or characters in any way." Maybe the conclusion that must be drawn, then, is that sincerity is not the highest value in art after all. Hearing about someone's ordinary life can be entertaining and diverting, but rarely dramatic, engaging, or absorbing.