After years and years of enigmatic and provocative plays, and after having announced that he was giving up playwriting for filmmaking, Richard Foreman has come back with a new play that at times almost appears to be a kind of film script, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes A True Romance.
There is never a clear set of answers or even a set of codefied speculations to precisely what Foreman is arguing for or against in his provocative plays, but there are often clues to the animus behind them. In this case Samuel expresses it quite early in the work:. But perhaps, ladies and gentleman, it is best never to speak openly about such things But it did happen That travelling these streets In bright sunlight An old man with white hair Shabbily dressed, trudging slowly In the direction opposite to the one In which I was traveling Carrying a large, soiled cardboard box with what personal belongings I could not guess But β whispered hoarsely under his breath "Go to Berkeley, make film".
I did not respond. But I frowned And a few seconds later turned to watch him proceed, slowly Down the street girls giggle. Was he speaking to me Or to himself β yet it seemed appropriate to my concerns And my possible Future. Which could have meant, not the city in sun drenched California. SUZIE But possibly the long dead Irish A philosopher of idealism, Bishop George Berkeley himself, whose view of reality might be poetically re-imagined as a vision of the world in which experience itself was but a thin film, spread in illusionary fashion upon human consciousness.
SAMUEL So that "Go to Berkeley, make film", could have meant, go deeper into the notion of the world as a transparent surface only β depending upon the impress of a mental apparatus β snapping the world into apparent being only β.
In the end, however, it is nearly pure Beckett in the final words of a play which has struggled with self-knowing and reality, with illusion and consciousness:. Emptiness is here all to wall, then pause, then back: Music. THUD End of play. Charles Bernstein.
