OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THOMAS MERTON
When I first read in the “New York Times Magazine” that BAM was
producing “The Glory of the World”, a play celebrating the one hundredth anniversary
of Thomas Merton’s birth, I thought it might revive my early and now somewhat
lapsed interest in his work, which had spun its magic on me when I first read “The Seven Storey Mountain”. That narration
of his inner and outer journey toward a conversion to Catholicism while a
student at Columbia contained a yearning for truth that was reminiscent
of my youthful desire to be an artist. His description of life in New York City
evoked a mix of anxiety and hope typical of the difficult start of any journey
that knows what it wants to leave behind but is not exactly sure of where it
wants to go. His later works written after years as a Trappist monk attempt a
fusion of Christian and Buddhist monasticism. He had observed that the meditation
exercises in the Buddhist tradition in many ways were more refined and subtle
than those of Christianity and sought to integrate them into the monastic
tradition of the Church without changing the importance of Christian
notions of salvation. At a moment when his drift toward Eastern thought was
picking up speed he died accidentally from electrocution due to bad wiring in a
Thai hotel.
The play's story line, according to the “New York Times Magazine”s
article, is a centennial birthday party with seventeen celebrants, who toast him
and I imagined would try to reveal something about his inner life and
contribution to many facets of his intellectual and spiritual life: Catholic,
Buddhist, Communist and Taoist.
I got my first warning that the play would be antithetical to my expectations prior to seeing the play from my daughter
Eve , who is an actress in NY. A friend told her that her movement coach encouraged her to see it as some of the scenes were wild and wonderfully
choreographed. Originally performed in Louisville Kentucky, not far from the
monastery where Merton lived as a Trappist monk, it was funded by a local
philanthropist, who won millions of dollars in Power Ball and written by Charles
Mee collaboratively with the director Les Waters of the Actors Theatre of Louisville.
It starts out well enough with the director playing Merton in silence with his
back to the audience framed with Merton’s sayings projected repeatedly on the
walls to either side of him.
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| Actors in their Lazy Boys quoting Merton |
Suddenly, the all male crew of actors breaks the silence when
they burst onto the stage ready to celebrate. They are raucous and seem to
function more as a group of bros than as individuals. As the celebration moves
from scene to scene, it becomes clear that little wisdom will escape from their
lips. In several scenes they quote famous mystics but before long find
themselves spouting banalities about solitude originating from such pop icons as
Lady Gaga and Christina Applegate. Some of the sayings seem not to mean
anything at all, starting out with some weight but slipping quickly into
absurdity. At times some of the men seem to distinguish themselves as older and
wiser and I anxiously waited to hear something of depth coming from their mouths
but all ends up platitudinous.
At one point a conflict erupts from the frustration experienced between
two characters about some unrequited love, although we never get a clear sense
of the origins of this misunderstanding. The couple resolves the conflict by
dancing romantically to “The Street Where You Live” as the rest of the cast
joins in dancing in pairs cheek to cheek.
One critic of the play has asked why the playwright decided
on an all male cast and suggests it may reference the all male life of the
monastery that Merton lived in. Homoeroticism is not veiled in any way,
especially in the aforementioned dance scene but also in the wild fight scene at
the end of the play where one character threatens to insert a plunger in the
buttocks of a naked man scurrying wildly around the stage.
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| Reginald Marsh |
A major dichotomy in the play exists structurally between the solitary
Merton and the undifferentiated mass of revelers. This dichotomy becomes
heightened in the fight scene that meanders between food fight, orgy and prison
melee until it reaches a crescendo of outright mayhem ending the play with the
stage strewn with trash. It is said that Mee, a student of mythology, often
uses Greek myth as the conceptual underpinning for his plays. In “The Glory of
the World”, the actors start out playing shallow frat boys but devolve into Dionysian
revelers. Although no murder is committed the energy generated by the fight
scene, which lasts fourteen minutes, gets close to it. This fight scene raises a
question: Do these seventeen characters represent the limited emotional and
intellectual capacity of the world that Merton wished to escape by entering the
orders? Their thoughts, as manifest by their shallow questioning and understanding
of Merton, are a thin facade hiding their attachment to the world in
its lowest common denominator of physicality. At one point the crowd breaks out
into a body building show, where, except for the few actors who were probably not
buff enough to participate, they try to out-flex each other to flaunt their masculinity.
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| Image salvaged from Coney Island |
I got some hunches about the play’s meaning, as I reflected on a visit to the
Brooklyn Museum, that afternoon, prior to seeing the play, where
I saw a totally engaging exposition of the history of Coney Island. It started
with paintings of the beach from the early 19th c, when it resembled Cape Cod, continuing to its
heyday as the world capitol of mass entertainment in the Thirties, when there
were three competing amusement parks, to its deterioration in the Sixties and Seventies and up to its almost complete demise in the present. Its climax as the epicenter of mass hedonism seems embodied
in the photo by Weegee of an overview of a massive horde of bathers in 1940
that was used as the basis of a funky collage by Red Grooms done in the 90’s. Another hunch came when I
recalled a book of poems that I bought in college by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
called “The Coney Island of the Mind”. A little research led me to Henry Miller
who coined the phrase in order to capture iconically Coney Island as the
epitome of the superficiality and crassness of mass capitalist culture. Of
Coney Island he said:
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| WeeGee Coney Island 1940's |
“Everything is sordid, shoddy, thin
as pasteboard. A Coney Island of the mind. . . . In the oceanic night
Steeplechase looks like a wintry beard. Everything is sliding and crumbling,
everything glitters, totters, teeters, titters.”
Upon reading this, I intuited that there might be a parallel between Miller, who left America behind to pursue an almost spiritual pursuit of erotic exploits
in France and Merton, who as a child followed his artist father and his father’s
mistress to France, where he first encountered the glory of French
Catholicism. In so doing, intentionally or unintentionally as in Merton's case, they turned their back on the erotic identification of the individual
with mass culture that was so poignantly evoked in the poetry of Walt Whitman
and was a touchstone for so many artists such as Reginald Marsh, who is well
represented in the Coney Island exhibit. For Miller sex was pursued with a
religious fervor as a sort of vehicle for personal transcendence. For Merton it
was religion in its concentrated monastic form that offered him a transcendence
from the modern mass culture and also the personal suffering he experienced when his emotional life fell apart after World War
Two, with the deaths of all his family members in
particular his brother who was killed in the war.
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| Merton1951 |
Maybe it is the fault of the play’s structure that the transcendent God that
Merton encountered in his solitude as a monk is conveyed abstractly and weakly by the periods of silence that frame the play and in no way can function as a
potent anti-dote to the shallow antics of the revelers. Even the quotes of
Merton that are projected on the walls of the stage express his own doubts about knowing the sacred. In the end the exuberance
of the birthday celebrants is such ecstatic good theatre (one critic imagines
that future generations of theatre goers will see the fight scene as one of the
great fight scenes of all time) one gets the impression that the playwright
comes down on the side of the boisterous physicality of the masses.
Maybe that is the meaning of the play’s title. In writing this article I kept
typing “The Glory of the Word”. No! This play is about the overwhelming glory
of the world. If you came to learn more about the sounds of silence and
transcendence in Merton’s life as a monastic you will be sorely disappointed.
