Aria Da Capo

Norma Millay and Henderson Forseyth rehearsing Aria da Capo in the 1919 Provincetown Players production.

I've never read this small piece of theatre history, and somehow never had never even heard of it. I suppose it's not surprising that it launched during those heady days of the Provincetown Playhouse when Eugene O'Neill was struggling mightily against naturalism with plays like Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape.

We start in the midst of a surreal Harlequinade, then a drama unexpectedly takes over the stage which relates the story of two shepherds that erect a wall and proceed to become increasingly greedy and violent until they kill each other. The Harlequinade returns, and the bodies of the shepherds are covered up.

Pierrot:...We can't
Sit down and eat with two dead bodies lying
Under the table! ... The audience wouldn't stand for it!

Cothurnus:What makes you think so? --
Pull down the tablecloth
On the other side, and hide them from the house,
And play the farce. The audience will forget.

Pierrot:That's so.

I love the concept, that blend of comedy and tragedy that Brecht would use so successfully a couple of decades later in plays like Mother Courage and Caucasian Chalk Circle. A jarring juxtaposition of comedy and violence is one of the truly great theatrical effects, as the audience starts to realize they are an audience and are reacting in public. It can raise the awareness of the theater as a uniquely live artform, and this moment in Aria Da Capo should send chills down my spine.

But it doesn't.

Why? It's a strawman argument, this implication of the audience in a glib acceptance of death. I get where Millay's going, but a highly stylized and simplistic parable just isn't playing fair. I can't "forget" the shepherds, because they never reach beyond allegory into anything that I should actually care about in the first place. I can scratch my chin and appreciate the demonstration of "man's inhumanity to man", but it's hard to get beyond that into a relationship that would make me feel bad about covering up the bodies. If the whole play is archly surreal, what's one more oddity and why should I be reacting emotionally to it?

It's another play - and it seems I keep saying this - that must have been shocking at the time, but that dealt its damage and then we moved on. They are no longer what they were, so do you stage them any more? And if so, how: by honoring them, or utterly reinterpreting them?