Word: leib
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...LOOKS INWARD on itself and finds art, looking in on itself, and back; the artist portrays the artist portraying himself, and lands somewhere in between. Asymptotic maunderings, these, on the ineffable relation between art and the artist that animates Mark Leib's brilliant and vertiginously profound Terry by Terry, a new play which joined the American Repertory's repertoire last Friday at the Loeb. Terry is obsessively theatrical--it concerns a playwright and the play he has written, and its most visceral impact is on other writers. But to characterize such concerns as esoteric, to cubbyhole theater as some sort...
Terry by Terry consists of two one-act plays: Terry Won't Talk and Terry Rex. Word of mouth has already decreed that Terry Won't Talk is the superior play; I would disagree, and add that Terry Rex, the second play in performance, is the heart of Leib's drama, and the first an essential gloss on it. Terry Rex presents Terry (Robertson Dean), the young author of Terry Won't Talk, (which is being performed "downtown"). Terry is tortured by his inability to write, a block he tries to dissolve through both hallucinations induced by lack of sleep...
Hyperintellectuality is the taproot of his paralysis, an acute self-consciousness and an encyclopedic, even frightening, knowledge of what has already been done in the theater and what little there is that remains to be done. Leib masterfully limns what W.J. Bate has pithily called "the burden of the past" with a virtuoso monologue in which Terry splices memorized quotations from a drama anthology while Wheeler, a translator, punctuates with footnotes. Terry declaims wildly and Wheeler answers, "Hedda Gabler--I think the Reinert translation," launching Terry into another recitation, from another play, which logically follows in the train of conversation...
...internality of action in Terry Rex (much is thought, little happens) presents a dramatic dilemma for Leib, what might be called the problem of the inactive character. Talk, even when it is not "soap talk," is still talk, and begins, after a while, to beg for action. But Leib prefaces Terry Rex with the performance of Terry Won't Talk. This play, after all, is the product of Terry's mind, and serves to mirror that mind, highlighting in dumbshow the roiling preoccupations which, although related to Terry's burden of the past, more directly prevent him from writing...
These ideas are not meant to be taken altogether seriously; Leib's artistry in creating a fine one-act play, and the softpedalled wryness of the pretentious program notes (including quotes from Kafka, Steiner, and Beckett, as well as Wittgenstein) only enhance the subtlety of what amounts to an elaborate parody of an absurdist drama. This is not to say that Leib does not believe in an absurdist view of the universe--he clearly does. He just doesn't believe in writing a play about it. His focus is not on the ideas themselves, which are, as Terry should...