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Sarah Kane.
The plays of British playwright Sarah Kane (1971 – 99) are notoriously difficult — for staging, and for what they put an audience through. The warning distributed by the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, for the production of Cleansed, running through Jan. 26 at the University Theater, reads: “Cleansed contains nudity; graphic simulations of sexual and physical violence, sexual intimacy, suicide, incest, death, and drug use; as well as coarse language. These actions are enacted by and on Black people. This production also contains loud sounds, extended gunfire, live flame, fog, bright lights, and strobe lighting effects.”
Yes, all that is true, and it’s best to get that up front. It’s a warning to some sensibilities that they may feel affronted. It’s also an invite to others in search of sensationalism or a theatrical vision they can decry. Come see how outrageous this play can be!
But if one comes away from Cleansed with a sense of outrage at the action of the play, then the play has not achieved its end. The outrage is meant for the nature of the world we blithely live in.
Set in what might be a prison hospital, a ward for addicts, or even a center for renegade experimentation on human subjects, Cleansed consists of a series of scenes that draw out the tensions between several different “couples.” The play opens with a scene in which Tinker (Jahsiah Mussig) gives Graham (Lawrence Henry) a lethal injection of heroin — in his eyeball. Two lovers, Rod (Marlon Alexander Vargas) and Carl (Karl Green), are at the point where Carl would like to exchange rings and some kind of vow; Rod’s not into it, and lays out a sort of pragmatist’s view of romantic involvement. Next, Grace (Whitney Andrews), Graham’s sister, arrives to find her brother’s body has been burned. She insists on donning his clothes, which had been given to an assistant at the institution named Robin ((Vin) Tré Scott). So Robin, naked, dons Grace’s clothes. As the play goes on, Tinker — whose only possible “coupling” is with Woman (Lauren F. Walker), who dances in a booth for his thrills, and whom he calls Grace — will inflict horrible violence and violation upon the other characters, particularly Carl and Grace.
Kane’s vision shows how these couplings turn on need, dependence, sacrifice and violence. Tinker — played with steely reserve by Mussig — is, as a character who might be a representative of some idea (the State, science, sadism), detestable. But he’s also a figure for the implied author, since Tinker’s whims are what drive the play, “tinkering” with the others, creating the abject situations they must cope with. Whether he’s torturing Carl or Grace or Robin, or forcing Rod to insist that he’d rather be killed than have Carl die, Tinker holds all sentimental attachments we have — to one another, to our loves and family, to our humanity — to the flame.
It is, as fourth-year directing MFA candidate Garrett Allen, the show’s director, says, “theater that isn’t boring.” Kane’s drama is not realist; it partakes of the kinds of ideas that Antonin Artaud long ago formulated as “a theater of cruelty,” where all the comfortable, humanistic assumptions about theater are interrogated ruthlessly. Yet for Allen, “the throughline of Cleansed is love.” That’s a large, comprehensive statement, and one that viewers will have to test for themselves. But the love Kane’s play manifests, Allen insists, demands a certain affect, a way of making audiences confront the possibility of change.
Whitney Andrews, who plays Grace, called working on the play “demanding and scary,” and noted “the challenge” of “rising to the space” the characters must inhabit. The actors “can’t be afraid,” she said, “because there’s no place to hide.” She spoke of how, for all its harrowing action, the play didn’t cause her distress as an actor. She expressed great admiration for the “demanding honesty” of Kane’s script. The play’s lines “are short and sharp, without embellishment.”
This makes the action on stage feel all the more stark and motivated. We can’t take refuge in much of what anyone says, and so are forced to confront what we see. Seeing some of the more brutal scenes enacted, I found myself recalling how Andrews told me that, for her, it was often simply a matter of “doing the choreography.” A way to keep in mind that what we’re watching requires not only courage and talent, but considerable selflessness. From that point of view, Cleansed is a moving lesson in dedication to the craft of theater.
In proposing the play, Allen asked that no one be cast who hadn’t agreed to work on this play specifically (a bit of a departure for the drama school, since actors usually must play as cast). The director also insisted that the entire cast consist of Black actors in the Yale program. Kane’s play doesn’t mention the racial attributes of any of the characters, but the homogeneity of casting has an integrity I could appreciate. I haven’t seen a previous production of Cleansed (nor has Allen), but I feel that, with a racially diverse cast, there might be a tendency to construe too much from the characters’ races. The play is relentless in its construction of a site for its “experiments”; placing racial frictions within the play could distort what Kane aims for and at. That could offer further complexity, arguably, but the version of Cleansed Allen and their company has created seems motivated by a clear vision of how this play could and should be staged. And what kinds of meaning it should have.
That the play would be staged at all wasn’t definite at first. Allen had to reach out to the playwright’s brother, Simon, because Sarah Kane’s literary estate wasn’t willing to permit a student production (the play has not yet been staged professionally in the U.S.; its most notable production was at the National Theatre in London in 2016). Simon Kane gave Allen’s proposal the green light, but, even so, many elements in the play — not least its use of nudity and acts of violence, sex, and suicide — meant that it would not be easy to bring Kane’s vision to life (even with two directors for fight and intimacy, Kelsey Rainwater and Michael Rossmy). Allen and Andrews were both full of praise for their collaborators, and with good reason.
Many features of Cleansed require complex staging: a giant sunflower, and rows of smaller flowers appearing magically (Nic Benavides, technical director); an increasing sound as of rats scrabbling and biting (Minjae Kim, sound designer); lighting effects with large movable light fixtures overhead (Yung-Hung Sung, lighting designer); simulations of shock therapy and a hanging (Colleen Rooney, stage manager), and the set, looking like a haunted hospital we hope never to find ourselves in (George Zhou, scenic designer), all contribute significantly, as do costuming (Rea J. Brown, costume designer) and make-up effects to make us believe the more unbelievable aspects of Kane’s story.
Allen’s idea that Cleansed should “activate the audience both viscerally and cerebrally” is well served by this production. As a play “for this time,” Allen says the play should make us “come back to why we love theater. Because it can change people.”
Many of the images in the play will stay with you, and how that affects you is not something one can predict or predetermine. Allen says “changed,” Kane says “cleansed.” Some may say “confused.” But any response requires a willingness to see what the play wants us to see, and to be witnesses to what it works through for us. I’ll just add “clarified.”
Cleansed, by Sarah Kane, runs at the University Theatre, 222 York St., through Jan. 26. Get tickets here.