Grasses of a Thousand Colours

Reviews

4 stars Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, 19.05.09

Seduced by sex in Grasses of a Thousand Colours

This is a play about sex. Bawdy, funny, provocative and downright weird, its the first new work in more than a decade from Wallace Shawn, an underappreciated master among contemporary dramatists, who is still probably best known for his appearances in The Princess Bride and  as the man who sexually opens up Diane Keatons character Mary Wilkie  in Woody Allens Manhattan.
 
Here, headily, Shawn is in full opening up mode. Set in the near future, yet utterly immediate, Grasses Of A Thousand Colours anatomises the erotic. Its a hymn to the penis that also proves a delicious celebration of female carnality.
 
Initially this isn’t clear. The main character, a scientist called Ben who is played by Shawn himself, begins by telling us he is going to read some sections of his memoirs, and there follows an extended reflection on the subject of Luck.
 
But soon enough, the first consonant changes. Although we are treated to several strongly phrased asides (on the politics of diet, for instance) Ben’s main accomplishment is a massive organ solo.
 
We witness at close quarters Ben’s relationships with three different lovers. His varied experiences enable him to characterise sex as oblivion, self-invention or obstruction  as animal act, solitary pleasure, voyeuristic rhapsody or Gothic monstrosity, and above all as a chronicle of the choices we make. Male sexuality is cherished, yet also slowly revealed to be the most insidious kind of trap.
 
Women’s sexuality, on the other hand, is presented throughout as something complex and puzzling. For a long time in this long play (which runs to three-and-a-quarter hours, with two intervals), the pivotal character seems to be a cat we can’t actually clap eyes on. One might think this a rather limp sub-Freudian innuendo  yet, as with so much in Shawns oeuvre, there’s a much better joke just waiting to be sprung.
 
As Ben, Shawn gives a multi-faceted performance. Often he looks puzzled, and at times he wears the vatic countenance of Yoda, but he’s also disarming, conspiratorial, fierce and wise.
 
Alongside him Jennifer Tilly, as his voluptuous lover Robin, is a revelation  husky, vampish, instantly memorable  while in the smaller role of the poetic Cerise, Miranda Richardson is feline and charismatic. Individually, the two women thrill, and when they intertwine in a sapphic caress the effect is bewitching.
 
The direction, by Shawn’s longtime collaborator Andre Gregory, is dextrous, and Eugene Lees set is intimate and elegantly conceived. Less convincing, yet still unsettling, are the snippets of film projected onto the set, which insinuate notes of surrealism, nostalgia and the tyrannical unconscious.
 
Inevitably, elements of the play will affront some theatregoers. There are repeated allusions to bestiality and masturbation, as well as less sustained ones to donkeys genitals and incest. But Shawn’s writing possesses a remarkable mixture of unabashed intellectualism and visceral appeal, and Grasses Of A Thousand
Colours is richly textured, original and wickedly amusing.

 
 
Aleks Sierz, The Stage, 19 May 2009

Grasses of a Thousand Colours

What do men really think of women? In Wallace Shawns new play, the suggested answer is that they are creatures possessed of insatiable desire, incomprehensible emotions and unfathomable deviousness. And men are just as bad: obsessed with their penises, chronically unfaithful and always longing for a maternal embrace.
 
Inspired by a 17th-century fairy tale, Madame d’Aulnoys The White Cat, Grasses of a Thousand Colours is a memoir narrated by Ben, a medical man, who tells the story of his relationships with three women: his wife Cerise, his mistress Robin and his lover Rose. As the tale unfolds, it is soon clear that we are moving in a surreal dreamscape where nature revolts against reason, humans mutate into animals and unusual plagues stalk the land.
 
The evenings chief joy is Shawn himself, who performs the part of Ben with an seductive mixture of horny relish and arch amusement, his stage presence – dressed throughout in a jet-black dressing gown – illuminating the show with the cool light of an immensely attractive self-irony. As his hilariously dirty stories and wild imaginings whisk you into an absurdist world, the one comfort is that his slippered feet remain firmly on the familiar ground of emotional truth and psychological realism. The play, after all, is a wry account of the sex war.
 
Compellingly directed by Andre Gregory, Shawn is supported by a dreamy Miranda Richardson as Cerise, a feisty Jennifer Tilly as Robin and a childlike Emily McDonnell as Rose. Beautifully designed by Eugene Lee, with video projections by Bill Morrison, the entire play takes place on or around a white sofa, where at first the animal spirits rage and then, gradually, there arrives a final reconciliation with the absurdity of life, love and loss.

 
John Lahr, The New Yorker, 1 June 2009

Catnip

London’s Royal Court Theatre has made this spring a Wallace Shawn season. In addition to showing Shawn’s cult movies My Dinner with Andre (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), the theatre has staged his 1990 one-man show, The Fever (with the estimable Clare Higgins taking on Shawn’s role), his 1985 play Aunt Dan and Lemon, and Shawn’s first new play in more than a decade, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, in which the pug-nosed provocateur himself performs the central part. This is a big deal. The Royal Court, one of the most influential theatres in Europe, is doing for Shawn what the Beatles did for Little Richard: rediscovering for a new generation a singular American talent who had been marginalized in his own country. In the United States, Shawn, as a playwright, is a relatively unknown quantity without an artistic home; in England, his works, which prey on both consciousness and conscience, are published under the rubric of contemporary classics.
 
“What do you think a human being is?” Shawn asks in The Fever. “A human being happens to be an unprotected little wriggling creature . . . without a shell or a hide or even any fur, just thrown out onto the earth like an eye thats been pulled from its socket, like a shucked oyster that’s trying to crawl along the ground. We need to build our own shells.” In life and onstage, Shawns carapace of congeniality is rock solid. An aesthete and an intellect, he dissimulates the rigor of his fierce brain and the clout of his princely pedigree-his father was for thirty-five years the editor of this magazine-behind a droll mask of tentative comic collapse: he’s a wolf in schlubs clothing.
 
At the beginning of the three-hour Grasses of a Thousand Colors (superbly directed by Andr Gregory), Shawn is at it again: he stands before us as Ben, a scientist and a memoirist, in a black dressing gown, black monogrammed slippers, and black cravat, and plays his familiar wrong-footing game of self-deprecation. He is dressed as an agent of darkness, but he is bright with good will. “Well. Hello, everybody. Hello! Hello there!” he says, in his lisping, halting, high-pitched voice. He goes on, “When you’re all so nicely sitting there and listening to me, Im deriving a great deal of pleasure from each and every one of you, as if you were chocolates I was eating.” In this futuristic dream play, eating and being eaten are important leitmotifs. Ben, we learn, is one of the barbarians who have devoured the planet, and, beneath his charm, he is as unrepentant as a hedge-fund manager. Loaves, with Fishes, for Dinner is the title of the memoir from which he reads to us, and which hints at his majestic self-infatuation.
 
Ben is perhaps the most unreliable of Shawns many unreliable narrators. His smugness-“I was born lucky”is rivalled only by the imperialism of his convictions. “We’re fixers, improvers,” he says of his optimistic generation. The thing that he has fixed, it turns out, is the problem of food. As he pompously puts it, “There was, on the one hand, an enormous crowd of entities-ourselves and others-roaming the planet, trying to sustain themselves, or, in other words, looking for something to eat; and on the other hand there was a tiny, inadequate crowd of entities available on the planet to be eaten.” The appliance of Ben’s science allows the animal kingdom-frogs, cows, his own dog, Rufus, and, by implication, Homo sapiensto feed on its own kind, as well as on the corpses of other animals. The discovery has made him rich; it has also destroyed the food chain. Things have gone disastrously wrong: animals are dying, and people are vomiting and keeling over.
 
Unnerving memory flashes of his first wife, Cerise (Miranda Richardson)brilliantly designed by Bill Morrison to resemble surrealist Rayographs, which are projected onto the entire back wall of the stagehaunt Ben with news of the sickening world. Cerise reminisces nostalgically about the time when people ate and digested the same foods for their whole lives. Blond hair piled on top of her head, her legs and face lightly brushed with glitter, she then enters magically through the back wall and slithers over the back of the sofa and onto Bens lap. As Richardson piquantly plays her, Cerise is at once lithe and lethal, as cool, mercurial, and flirty as a cat; in fact, in Shawns fairy tale she is half cat, half human. “Cats like to tease mice. They like to play with them a little. Are you with me so far? she asks when she enters, adding, And, of course, everyone knows that cats punish mice.”
 
With her talk of the good old days of shrimp and asparagus, Cerise certainly punishes Ben; he throws his memoir into the trash and, in the following two acts, escapes from the toxic environment he has helped engineer into an unrivalled, often hilarious saga of priapic pleasure. Not since Barry Humphriess well-hung Sir Les Patterson, with his mythic frequently felt tip, has the male organ received such eloquent and side-splitting objectification. Ben’s tale is an epic account of the battles of his penis, a sort of Iliad of onanism. “My erect penis is monstrous, actuallyit looks violent, extreme, almost out of control,” he says. “And yet, particularly when its in repose and completely relaxed, I do think my friend has a wonderful face. Its so simpleno eyes, no nose, just a simple mouth-a face that looks out at the world with just a sad, hopeful smile.”
 
Traditional fairy tales are exercises in sublimation; in Shawn’s retelling of parts of The White Cat, a seventeenth-century French folktale, the impulse is turned upside down, and the id runs riot. Between his sexual bouts with Cerise and other womenthe zaftig, smoky-voiced Robin (the excellent Jennifer Tilly) and the vulnerable Rose (the compelling Emily McDonnell), for whom he seems to have feelings-Ben is compelled to sneak away into the woods, where he is introduced to cat society and where he finds Dionysian ecstasy with Blanche, a long-haired white. “My God-finally. Finally, to be known, I thought, as hot sperm flowed out of me, flowing over her paw as if it would never stop,” he says. Over the course of the tale, Robin decapitates Blanche, only to have the cats head begin to grow back as she lugs the eviscerated carcass home. In this protean landscape, Blanche becomes a woman, and Cerise appears to become Blanche. (The gorgeous intercut projections of Richardson as a cat with green eyes, a red collar, and whiskers make this metamorphosis all the more surreal.)
 
Like all dreams, Grasses of a Thousand Colors resists interpretation, even as it blurs the distinction between the natural and the civilized. In its imaginative dissonance, the play seems to me a model of the grotesque as Edgar Allan Poe once described it: much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. In Shawns 1996 masterpiece The Designated Mourner-which predicted the terrorism and the philistinism of the past decadethe narrator will do anything to survive. In 2009, Shawns narrator, sitting at the edge of a barbarous and convulsed world with his own death partially in view, shows some small signs of humanity. By the end of the play, Ben can at least acknowledge the folly of his intellectual arrogance. “As I approached the age of sixty, I could feel the ghosts of all the things I’d never get to do, crowding around me, suffocating me,” he says. “I’d been wrong about people, about why things had happened, even about facts that had seemed completely indisputable.”
 
“I’ve decided to take a bet on my subconscious,” Shawn told the Guardian recently. In Grasses of a Thousand Colors, that bet is hedged by his collaboration with a number of expert theatrical talents. Gregory’s subtle, suggestive staging adds a witty counterpoint to the torrent of Shawns articulate but prolix text (which would be even stronger with some muscular editing). Eugene Lee’s cunning minimal setwell lit in warm hues by Howard Harrisonis primarily a large white sofa and a back wall that is a field of high, waving grass, through which the characters vanish. The grass plays as a coda of hope. If we leave nature alone, Shawn seems to be saying, regeneration and beauty may still be possible. In the meantime, his visionary satire of decadence powerfully dramatizes our country at a spiritual tipping point.
 

4 stars Michael Coveney, Independent, 21 May 2009

Grasses of a Thousand Colours

Are you a cat person? Wallace Shawn certainly is, appearing in his own new play as a cat that got the cream in the shape of Miranda Richardson, Jennifer Tilly and Emily McDonnell  fine and feline actresses  as well as a white whiskery mouser called Blanche. It’s Blanche’s lot to get drenched in sperm and abused with the music of Mantovani.
 
The title is invoked in an epigraph (spuriously attributed to the non-existent “Count D’Aurore”), quoted by Shawn when he comes before us as Ben, a scientist and a businessman, who is about to read from his memoirs: he awakes on a battlefield, his sword drawn, rabbits leaping and running like horses through grasses of a thousand colours.
 
This sounds like an authentic dream, no great deduction given that Shawn spends the entire three hours of Andre Gregory’s leisurely but compelling production in his elaborate black silk dressing gown. He presents himself, this bald and cuddly gnome, with a permanent frown and a lisping delivery, as a champion swordsman of the bedroom, with or without his women.
 
As he frankly admits in the funniest passage of his sex-crazed confession: a dick, not a dog, is a man’s best friend. For all the women he loves, he’s happiest spending time alone with this best friend, and nobody else’s, thank you very much: “Two dicks in one house is one too many, and that’s the long and the short of it, really, to coin a phrase.”
 
The play is genuinely masturbatory without being offensive. And that’s because Shawn takes us on an extraordinary journey of wonder in, and exploration of, his sexual secret life. There’s an element of dark fairy tale in his excursion to a castle in the forest where he feasts on mice and is suborned by cats, an echo of the orgies in the novels of the Marquis de Sade, a feeling of inexplicable arrival in forbidden territory similar to those strange sequences in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
And it’s genuinely shocking, and even exhilarating, to see the women in Ben’s life play along with the horrible honesty of Shawn’s proposition that our sexual relations anyway are much more about those we have with ourselves than with anyone else.
 
Miranda Richardson’s Cerise emerges on video like a troubled, tangled wood sprite, finally assuming the identity of a cat herself, while Jennifer Tilly, his second partner, has the full-blown pneumatic charm of a severely over-ripe plum, or damson in distress.
 
Ben’s third partner is the subdued cat-carer Rose, played with a timorous sensitivity by Emily McDonnell that suggests that she, too, might end up as just one more pussy on the sofa.
 
Having early on declared that food and sex were the main needs on earth, the first gets swallowed in the pursuit of the second, but there is an assumption that appetite of all kinds can only be satisfied in the comfort of your own dreams, and it’s Shawn’s need to share these thoughts in his beautifully wrought and highly fraught language that makes his theatre so real and unusual. Plays don’t really come into it.
 
  3 stars David Jays, Sunday Times, May 24, 2009

Wallace Shawns first new play for more than a decade is very long, very funny and about sex and food and cats.

Wallace Shawn’s first new play for more than a decade, Grasses of a Thousand Colours, is a strange, low-voltage affair. It’s very long, very funny, and it’s about sex and food and cats. I think. It resembles the sort of hallucination Larry David might suffer after reading the Brothers Grimm. On comes Shawn, looking like a hobbit in a dressing gown, and begins to chunter complacently. As a scientist responsible for various questionable improvements to the food supply (Cows who formerly could live only off grass, he boasts proudly, could happily live off skunks and rats and foxes instead), he is here to talk to us about his forthcoming memoirs.
 
Soon, he is interrupted by a Doctor Who-style time slip  an image of Miranda Richardson is projected behind him, speaking urgently and disturbingly on distorted and crackly film. Richardson herself later comes in and puts him into a sort of suspended animation. What started out as an autobiographical lecture gives way to what at first seems to be a dream sequence, before it becomes clear that this is more like the eternal recurrence of the afterlife: a loop of hell.
 
Ben (Shawn) talks about, and is talked about by, three lovers. He left his chilly and feline wife, Cerise (Richardson), for a younger married woman, Robin (Jennifer Tilly as a splendidly blowsy New Yorker). Cerise retreated to a cabin in the woods; Robin gave way in due course to the still younger Rose (Emily McDonnell). Through their stories pads Blanche, a shape-shifting, unkillable cat who is Bens lover and tormentor, and who is and is not Cerise. Meanwhile, the world is at odds. Humans, as a result of Bens experiments, are finding food progressively more inedible. Animals are going mad. People are dying of vomiting sicknesses.
 
This elliptical, dreamlike play is 3¼ hours long and seldom boring. There isnt a weak link in the cast, and Shawns dialogue  more accurately, a series of monologues  is tumblingly funny, line by line. Its overall architecture, however, is dreadfully incoherent. Whats happening? Ben asks, and so does the audience. Themes flash by. Cerise is Ceres; but shes also Circe. Is the cat the feminine principle? Is the chief theme the peril of bodily appetite? Or the struggle against nature? Or one mans besotted relationship with his private parts? The mash of fairy tale, dream sequence, posthumous phantasmagoria and near-future dystopia seems to glance portentously off all these things, but catches proper hold of none of them. What carries you through is the comedy of manners. I, for one, wont soon forget the sight of Richardson licking the top of Shawns bald head.

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