How did you spend the last five minutes?
Shouting at the children? Sipping coffee and staring at the wall? Scratching your dog’s ears and wondering why you keep forgetting to buy more flea shampoo? Reading a long, dull news story about a congressional hearing investigating southern Indiana landfill abuse?
Life, as the philosophers keep reminding us, is short — and definitely finite. Yet we squander the minutes, hours and days of our lives as though they were infinite.
Playwright Richard Greenberg (“Everett Beekin,” “Three Days of Rain”) has a biting new work on the boards called “The Dazzle” that grapples with our penchant for wasting time and leading unfulfilled lives by treating the issue as tragi-comedy.
“What seems to interest me more and more now is how people spend their time,” Greenberg said. “I think the essential question is what do we do with our time, and this play comes as close to being strictly about that as anything I’ve ever written.”
The defining factor in a life, Greenberg suggests, is whether it’s a story.
“Here we are,” he said. “We have a lifetime. How do we fill it? How do we conceive of it? Do we try to make it a story, an arc, a drama that follows conventional principles? Or do we just sort of live in one extended moment?”
Waiting for nothing
Henry James once wrote a story pursuing this theme with the perhaps irrelevant title of “The Beast in the Jungle.” His protagonist was convinced that something very important was going to happen to him in his life, and he waited for it to happen, only to discover at the end that the important thing was simply that absolutely nothing important happened to him.
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Now playing at the Gramercy Theatre, Greenberg’s “The Dazzle” is coincidentally set in James’ time and has a similar elegance of language. But it’s far more Oscar Wildean in its wit and Dennis Potterish in its wildness.
The lives he hangs up on a meat hook for us to see are those of the bizarre, reclusive Collyer brothers, eccentrics who died nearly a century ago in a huge, old, filthy ramshackle house in East Harlem that was found to be crammed to the rafters with more old newspapers and street junk than Robert Rauschenberg could have accumulated in 10 lifetimes.
“As a child, I was constantly scolded to clean my room because I was told it was starting to look like the Collyer brothers’,” Greenberg said.
Enter Milly
The brothers were wealthy, if shabbily genteel. Langley Collyer (played by Reg Rogers) was a concert musician of sorts, whose career ultimately vanished, and brother Homer (Peter Frechette) was a maritime lawyer who became Langley’s manager. Both had a talent for almost manic rudeness — a factor, perhaps, in their neighbors’ penchant for throwing rocks (and assorted junk) at their house all the time.
That’s about as far as Greenberg’s research went into the Collyer brothers — or needed to. In the play, Langley is a man content to spend hours looking at a hairpin. Homer is the one who tries to provide their lives with a dramatic arc, in the form of the intrusion into their midst of a beautiful society girl straight out of Edith Wharton, Milly Ashmore.
Played by Francie Swift (who was so deliciously droll as Jordan Baker in A&E’s “The Great Gatsby”), Milly is the archetypal social-register sweetie who so despises her empty upper-crust life that she wants to marry the bizarre Langley.
Though he’d rather stare into his coffee cup.
“He represents to her everything that is other than where she has grown up and where she has lived,” said Swift (who’s also seen on “Nero Wolfe”). “It’s the idea of an artist and an artistic life; rules that are completely different than the very stringent society rules she’s grown up in. His is a place where being different and passionate is celebrated rather than punished.”
Indeed, it’s interesting to observe that the dullest, most wasted lives in our country and culture today– as in the Collyers’ day — are often those that are most envied and exalted. Which is to say, America’s “old money,” “old family,” faux British aristocracy rich.
“It’s hard for me to imagine what would have become of Milly had she not met these brothers,” Swift said.
A life that’s a story
What does become of Milly is nothing to write home to Southampton about, but she, at least, manages a life that is most definitely a story.
And relevant to our time.
“I had a conversation with a cab driver,” Greenberg recalled. “It was very real and very poignant — he was lamenting, talking about the lives of people who live now in New York City and how essentially horrible he thought they were, and how cluttered and unmanageable and unpleasurable the culture had become.”
Still, it beats the hell out of Keokuk.