Remembering ‘Rabbit Remembered’

 

Why reread Rabbit Remembered, Updike’s unexpected coda to his Rabbit Trilogy (included in his collection Licks of Love, 2000)?  Perhaps to seek refuge from the extreme craziness of today’s world. His writing remains as relevant today as when it was written 25 years ago.  Family dramas endure. Here we revisit the vestiges of Rabbit’s family, as Y2K is approaching.

 

Janice, Rabbit’s wife, is now remarried to Ronnie, a glad-handing ex insurance guy, with still some clients around, but basically he golfs with the boys at the Club.  He used to be Rabbit’s rival, for women particularly. Other than Janice, they’ve shared the sleep-around Ruth and Thelma, Ronnie’s now deceased wife with whom Rabbit had an affair as well.  These two guys have crossed metaphysical swords before and Ronnie’s antipathy to Rabbit lives on.

 

Rabbit’s son, Nelson is now divorced from Teresa who has moved to Ohio with his two emotionally damaged children.  He has an email relationship with the 14-year-old Roy, while his 19-year-old daughter Judy has withdrawn into a Walkman headset (if written today, she’d be a TikTok dependent). Nelson now lives in his childhood home with Ronnie and his mother.  He has recovered from his cocaine addiction and fiscal irresponsibility and Nelson now ironically has a job as a mental health counselor at the Fresh Start Day Treatment Center.  

 

Suddenly Janice is visited by a woman in her 30s, Annabelle, who claims to be Rabbit’s child. Her true father’s identity was revealed to her by her mother, Ruth, on her death bed. Nelson now has a half-sister.  He is elated and sees a path to his own “fresh start,” for him and his family.  Updike deflates such delusions and retains his gift for observing minutia, making it an important part of setting the emotional story:

 

[A] cloud passes overhead, and the shadow is almost chilling: that’s how you feel the new season, the shadows are sharper, and darker and the crickets sing under everything. With the terrible drought this summer, the leaves are turning early, those of the horse chestnuts curling brown at the edges, and the front yards were no one has watered have turned to flattened straw, a look Janice remembers from childhood, when you are closer to the ground and summer is endless.

 

Janice still thinks, even lovingly, about Rabbit in one of her reveries: how beautiful he had been…. in those high school halls– the height of him, the fine Viking hair slicked back in a ducktail, but trailing off in like sexy strands like Alan Ladd’s across his forehead, the way he would flick it back with his big, graceful, white hands while kidding with the other seniors, like that tall girlfriend of his called Mary Ann, his lids at cocky sleepy half-mast, the world of those halls his, him paying no attention, of course, to her, a ninth grader, a runt.

 

Nostalgically she also remembers the town of Brewer driving through it: Brewer pours by in her Le Baron, a river of bricks and signage….Janice can scarcely believe so much is gone and she is still is here to remember it…. She navigates without thinking under the Norway maples that she can remember half the size they are now, small enough that a child could reach the lowest branches with a jump…. Now the maples are grown so big, the sidewalks in some sections of town are buckling.

 

There is no end to the speculation about what Annabelle wants. “Ronnie,” Nelson almost never uses his stepfather‘s name, and says it now, swiftly, “This may be my SISTER. Dad used to hint sometimes there might be a sister. Here she has come to us, putting herself at our mercy.” “But what does she want, Nelson?” Janice asks. She feels better, cleaner in her mind, finding herself now on her husband’s side. “She wants money,” Ronnie, insists. “Why, she wants,” Nelson says, getting wild-eyed and high-voiced, defensive and, to his mother, touching, “she wants what everybody wants. She wants love.”

 

Nelson’s job as a mental health counselor gives Updike the opportunity for extensive social commentary about his modern world (what would he think and write of today’s?).  The inner voice of Nelson speaks: Schizophrenics don’t get wholly better…. they don’t relate. They don’t follow up. They can’t hold it together. It makes you marvel that most people hold it together, as well as they do: what a massive feat of neutron coordination just getting through the day involves. These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is. They don’t bother him as normal people do. There are boundaries. There are forms to fill out, reports to write and file, a healing order. Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world, there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others…. [B]ut it may be that his ear is jaded, hearing all day about families, dealing with all the variations of dependency and resentment, love, and its opposite, all the sickly interned can’t-get-away-from-itness of close relations...If society is the prison, families are the cells with no time off for good behavior good behavior…..

 

Janice is not the only character with Rabbit reveries.  Nelson is frequently thinks about the larger-than life Rabbit, Updike continuing his portrait of a man lost in America:  his father, had been a rebel of a sort, and a daredevil, but as he got older and tame he radiated happiness, at just the simplest American things, driving along in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heater, giving off heat, delivering his son somewhere in this urban area that he knew block by block, intersection by intersection. At night, in the underlit ghostliness of the front seat their two shadows were linked it seem forever by blood. To Nelson as a child his own death seemed possible in so perilous a world, but he didn’t believe his father would ever die.

 

Nelson takes Annabel for lunch at a “new green” restaurant that he’s gone to for years and becomes hyperaware of his half sister – and Updike even dangles a question mark of the nature of this new found love – and in watching her he has an epiphany of where they are, swathed with symbolism:  [S]he still has, after living 20 years in the city, a country girl innocence that, if she has taken as his date, embarrasses Nelson. In his embarrassment, he studies the wall above the booths, whose theme is greenery -- ferns and bushes and overhanging branches, brushed on in many Forest shades. What he has never noticed before, all those years grabbing a bite at the corner, is that a pair of children are in the mural, in the middle distance with their back turned, a boy and a girl wearing old fashion, German outfits, pigtails and lederhosen, holding hands, lost.

 

At the heart of the novel is a family still in turmoil, the remaining wake of the passing ship of Rabbit:  [F]amily occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first, our parents and elders, and then our children and their children…Nelson thinks about Rabbit’s sister, Aunt Mim: [A]t  Dad‘s funeral, Aunt Mim seemed an animated, a irreverent slash of black among the dowdy mourners, but Dad had loved her, and she him, with the heavy helplessness of blood, that casts us into a family as if into a doom.

 

And that sense of doom hangs deeply in the novel: Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake up in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong — you in the wrong, and the world, too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.  But Nelson is on his own to deal with his angst.  His mother loved Nelson for all they had been through together, but she was past the age where she could oblige his neediness. She and Ronnie left alone tended to each other’ needs one of which, never stated, was getting ready for death, which could start anytime now.

 

The ghost of Rabbit wanders throughout the novel.  In spite of Ronnie and Nelson’s adversarial relationship, Nelson turns to him and says, “Another reason I like you, Ronnie,” Nelson rushes on, the insight having just come to him with a force that needs to be vented, “is that you and I are about the last people left on the earth my father still bugs. He bugs us because we wanted his good opinion, and didn’t get it. He was worse than we are, but also better. He beat us out.”

 

The Rabbit tetralogy by John Updike still has the relevancy of a great family drama, no matter what the times.

 

Palm Beach Dramaworks Debuts the Hyperrealistic ‘The Science of Leaving Omaha’

 

 

If The Science of Leaving Omaha makes you feel uncomfortable then this World Premiere succeeds.  It is a deeply affecting but frequently disheartening social commentary.  Playwright Carter W. Lewis explores so many themes in this tightly developed work: death, love, violence, and in particular the marginalization of a segment of our society.  It is a rare play that can convey philosophical weight, drama, and black comedy at the same time, concluding with a breathtaking scene of magical realism.  The Science of Leaving Omaha has been under development at the PB Dramaworkshop. 

 

Lewis’ play is brought to life by a cast making their PBD debuts.  The director Bruce Linser, who has been fully involved with its development, brings a deep sensitivity and passion to this project, which is clearly obvious from the opening scene.

 

There is a heightened sense of realism with an eerie dream-like deterministic inevitability as the play unfolds in front of a retort or cremation oven.  The “Science” includes details about the cremation process, as the occasional strange sounds from the retort seem to call out (as amusingly noted by the off-stage character “Mrs. B” in the play) “ask not for whom the cremator clunks it clunks for thee.”  The action takes place in real time late one night in this macabre setting.  The retort becomes a looming character onto itself and the technical details of its operation a metaphor for getting out of Omaha.

 

Nicholas-Tyler Corbin and Georgi James Photo by Tim Stephien

 

Two young people, each with issues of finding a place in a society that seems to offer them little hope or opportunity, are thrown together by chance.  There is no shortage of adversity in their lives, simply because of parents and birthplace.  Iris, played by Georgi James, is minding the nighttime basement office of a crematorium as the owner, “Mrs. B is super religious, and she thinks no one should crossover alone.”  James channels her character’s frustration, as she sits there working on an essay which she needs to qualify for her GED, but clearly this is a discouraging struggle for her and she feels marooned in Omaha.  James’ outstanding performance captures the anxiety of her character, along with her kookiness.  It is a particularly difficult part as her halting speech and erratic, fragile personality are purposely abstruse and she is on stage for the entire play.

 

There is a body bag there that night holding Ruth Ellen who was shot while on the back of a motorcycle driven by Baker, played by Nicholas-Tyler Corbin, as they were escaping from a bar.  Ruth Ellen was Baker’s wife for only one day.  He breaks into the crematorium to see her and make sure Ruth Ellen would “approve” of how her body is being handled, wanting to know about the details of her impending cremation.  Corbin flawlessly plays the volatile yet sensitive Baker, who also has been looking for answers to an amorphic future.  The actor projects a palpable sense of grief along with his anger at the system.  He played baseball and was hoping for a scholarship but found out his high school taught him nothing.  Anger, because he is stranded in Omaha where there are “lame ass people workin’ lame ass jobs n’ doin’ a lame ass job of it all.”

 

What begins as, possibly, a set up for more violence develops into a story of kindred spirits, Iris even seeing the possibility of running away from a life without opportunity with this stranger.  She’s quite jealous of Ruth Ellen as she sees how much she is loved.  Iris, however, does have a close relationship with Mrs. B, the owner of the Belladonna Funeral Home, who has assumed a motherly protective relationship to Iris.

 

Baker has been on the run ever since his last job as a ward attendant at “Lasting Hope Recovery Center,” yet another ironic touch, “with the young crazies.”  He and Ruth Ellen were bound for Albuquerque before their encounter with the police.  There are shifting moods in the play, ebbing and flowing with Baker’s volatility.  He makes it clear he’s mad at the world, not Iris. 

 

Merrina Millsapp and Georgi James Photo by Tim Stephien

 

Into the mix comes the night watchperson, “Security Sally” poignantly performed by Merrina Millsapp, who has never imagined she would ever actually have to draw her gun in her part time job.  She is yet another victim of society, raising children as a single parent, having to take this night job to survive.  But she is yet another “protector” of Iris and was assigned to a mall where Iris once had a melt-down and whose shame was captured on social media which went viral. 

 

The building tension is palpable and foreboding, the resolution surprising but fated as Iris – tearfully and plaintively delivered by James -- beseeches advice from the remote, offstage Mrs. B: “I mean, damn. Damn Mrs. B, I don’t know what to do, I just–Oh Mrs. B, I’m so scared.”  The best advice Mrs. B can give is to allow her to put on one of her opera records, which has been off limits, the music soaring at the conclusion.   Mrs. B clearly has aided Iris, given her a job (actually created one for her), and wants to help her succeed.  Could Mrs. B be a surrogate for a compassionate but powerless god?

 

 

The Scenic design by Michael Amico reflects the morose nature of the play, the basement of a funeral home owned by a Catholic Italian American family.  There is a replica of a cremation oven almost front-and-center and “a gurney garage” or what Iris amusingly calls “the wine cellar,” a place to temporarily put a body behind velvet red curtains.  Family pictures are scattered about (Amico uses ones of his own family), as well as a portrait of Jesus.   A sign hangs prominently, “Fire is the most tolerable third party,” which Henry David Thoreau meant for two people huddling around a campfire.  It has a more profound meaning here. 

 

Kirk Bookman’s lighting design is critical, insightful, full flat light in the middle of the night in a basement balanced with spots following the actors, but breathtaking when red hot lighting emanates from the open retort.

 

Sound design by Roger Arnold cleverly captures the strange clunking sounds of the retort, some unexpected, helping to build the tension.  There are sounds of metal expanding and flames heating up as well as the creak of the opening door.

 

Brian O’Keefe, the indefatigable costume designer captures the everyday dress of two unmoored contemporary young people, naturalistic and appropriate.  Iris is in jeans and a plaid shirt, poor serviceable clothing while Baker has that worn LL Bean look with ripped-knee jeans.

 

Director Bruce Linser pours his heart and soul into this piece, the action flowing and pausing where appropriate, the tension rising and falling like waves in an agitated ocean.  Both characters have their quiet contemplative moments and outbursts as well.  He succeeds but be prepared for an intentionally bumpy ride. 

 

So many plays are about the pursuit of the American Dream.  This one deals with the struggle for mere survival; there are no aspirations other than escape.  The Science of Omaha dramatically illustrates what happens when we abandon a large swath of our society, deprive them of opportunity and education, subject them to the microscope of endless bullying on social media, and corporate America adopts them as their servants at low-paying fast food or superstore jobs.  Such as the extreme classes of H.G. Well’s Time Machine where the underground Morlocks do the menial work to benefit the privileged, hedonistic Eloi, two classes of people that have become almost different species.  This is America today and the playwright perfectly captures the essence and the tragedy of the consequences. 

Nicholas-Tyler Corbin and Georgi James Photo by Tim Stephien