Landscape of the Body
Now a failed production is an entirely different matter. You can learn more from some failed productions than you can from any number of good ones. Take Hamlet, of which it’s possible to argue that all productions are failed since the play is too vast to be contained by one director’s interpretation. I remember seeing a version in which all the elements conspired to make Claudius far more vivid than the protagonist. With the murderous usurper brought so far to the front I suddenly saw that, in a sense, Hamlet is the play Macbeth would have been had Macbeth been written from the point of view of Duncan’s son Malcolm (and, of course, had Malcolm gone to college). To borrow a phrase from Eric Burdon, this really blew my mind. And I’ve regarded that failed production as one of my favorites–of any kind–ever since.
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Which is strange and sad. Strange because the director, Steve Scott, is a well-established, well-reputed artist who might have been expected to do better. Sad because Landscape of the Body is such an incredibly rich play. Though not the masterpiece that Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation is, it’s still wildly accomplished and inventive: a sweet absurdist comedy about sick sex, thrill killing, insanity, social degradation, broken families, and hope. Betty Yearn’s journey through the landscapes of New York and her own frightfully disengaged psyche is a Divine Comedy with trick mirrors. As the late Newsweek theater critic Jack Kroll said, “There’s more invention, more feeling in Landscape than in any two plays by most writers.” That Eclipse could make something so inert, so inadequate, from material like this is a kind of perverse triumph. But not one I’d like to see repeated.
