Memory Play

DESCRIPTION: 1994, 72 pages.
In the Treatise on Equivocation (1950), Catholics, in order to avoid persecution, learned how to tell the truth in such a way that they could "lie" without offending God. Their sentences were divided into two parts–that which was said out loud and that which was not:

When asked under oath whether a subject saw a certain someone, he can truthfully answer "no" reserving a continuation "no, I didn’t see him in Venice, although I did see him here." [A True and Perfect Relation of the Proceedings at the Several Arraignments of the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, London, 1606]

In this way, equivocation resonates with a familiar testimonial strategy: "I don’t remember." [See Ronald Reagan in A True and Perfect Relation of the Proceedings of the Criminal Trial of the Most Barbarous Oliver North.] However, whereas in the moment of Catholic equivocation, the speaker (not the listener) knows that his speech has two meanings, in the contemporary form of potential lying on the stand, it is the listener who believes in the duality of phrases. Memory, in Carla Harryman’s Memory Play, performs the politics inherent to the duality of sentences–both for the speaker and the listener.

Child: You don’t know or you don’t remember? Pelican: What’s the difference? What you will remember of this conversation will be nothing like what went into its construction.

What makes theater different from "real conversation"? When something is designated a memory (i.e. testimony), is that something more "real" or is it more "theater"? These are some of the questions that the character Reptile poses at the beginning of the play. After a number of provocation conversations with the likes of Pelican, Fish, Instruction, and the Miltonic Humiliator, it becomes clear that the line which we assume divides the two levels of the sentence (the real and the theatrical, the truth and the lie) has dissolved: memory encompasses both simultaneously. Once a memory enters into language, it becoms theatricalized, a construction for the purposes of presentation, that both the listener and the speaker believe to be real. Memory Play provides a lively platform from which to examine the moral and political implications of such poetic processes. (Traffic #18, Winter 1996)

"Going to a reading by Carla Harryman is to confront a room full of enraptured writers. The more one understands the craft’s intimacies, the deeper the appreciation of her discoveries. Unlike her prose, Carla’s plays seem to have a constant shift of purpose–at one turn the audience is invited into a whirlwind exploration of hierarchies through the mouths of Bosch-like talking animals. Around the next bend we are abandoned like old employees sitting around in the swamp. Just when all seems lost it is the author, herself who comes to our rescue, riding a silver steed of breathtaking explanation".

"Suppose you had a dream life and woke up not a person interested in telling as a story what you could recall of it as it could be translated and tricked into the words and images of a narrative that made sense by referring to the things of this world as your interlocutor knows them as well as you do but woke rather or also as a polyvocal congruence much as the clouds and birds in flight make sense to that visionary in you that doesn’t mean anything until you find yourself looking back at its patterns and wondering through it. They are you in this world. Perhaps that is how you will read Memory Play."

In Memory Play, one is neither fixed in a memory nor is one in the (non-reactive) politicized moment of the present without memory. The child-non-innocent Pelican, Child, Reptile, and Fish, of Carla Harryman’s play are lucid Alices (in Wonderland) observing history which as if backwards is creating phenomena: "In the beginning, there was no apoliticized moment of the absolute and no political critiques. Neither was there hibiscus flowering bearded orchid cunt juices or a male suspect. Neither black nor brown nor white. No maiming and nothing to maim. No future and nothing to preserve."

Harryman’s play creates a state that is non/innocent in that it is our real present in our really being innocent, rather than an idea of such in a myth state of ‘Garden of Eden.’

The book’s design and graphics are by John Woodall, who designed the set for the play’s performance. Pieces of text are visible on the pages following the translucent pages of graphics, which gives the impression of discrete as well as extended-connected experience.

From: Memory Play

A bedtime story/conversation in a little tent town out in the salt flats.

Reptile

If I tell you one thing that i remember, you will

think I’m an idiot for remembering only one

thing. This is one thing that makes theater

different from real conversation. If I provide you

with several of my most esteemed memories, you

will probably believe there are more where those

came from, and I will have earned your respect.

This will make theater a little more like real

conversation.

Pelican

I have a job and it is virtually all I can think

about; however, I think this: memory is nothing

but words stored up in an efficient computer.

What you will remember of this conversation

will be nothing like what went into its

construction. Such understanding promotes

success in business. I know that people want to

see the tip of the iceberg only. Business is like a

successful cabaret.