The Bathroom
Trap Door Theatre and Ensemble 1500
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Few books deserve a paper shredder more than The Bathroom, Toussaint’s 1985 debut novel. Heralded as “hysterically funny,” “highly entertaining,” and even “a masterpiece,” in reality it’s a pretentious, structureless bore masquerading as a piece of existential absurdism. The dust jacket aims to convince the browser that the book is about a young graduate student named Rene who lives in his bathroom–when in fact he spends only the first five pages there. We’re also told that Rene is on a “search for immobility,” a task about as difficult as searching for the floor. In fact Rene leads a perfectly ordinary if rather dull life, making love with his girlfriend now and again, admiring the fixtures in his bathroom, chatting with two Polish painters redoing his kitchen, imagining a party at the Austrian embassy, staring at the rain. Through it all he’s preternaturally disengaged. If you wrote down everything you did during a particularly uneventful week, giving each item the same weight so you’d never remember what really mattered, you’d have your own Bathroom.
Cooper accomplishes everything that Toussaint does not, putting real characters into urgent situations. Cooper’s Rene is not searching for immobility but fleeing desperately from it, explaining early in the play that perfect immobility is death, toward which all things tend. Yet Rene knows in his bones that immobility suits him best; he’s never happier than in the play’s opening moments, sitting fully dressed in the tub, listening to his Walkman and reading a book. Rene’s impossible situation–he’s running from the thing he desires most–becomes the central concern of Cooper’s play, driving the story forward at a breathless pace, twisting and turning instead of plodding through the novel’s trivialities.
It would be easy to accuse Cooper of corrupting Toussaint’s postmodern meanderings, retooling his cool antinarrative into a red-hot plot machine–to say that he’s been seduced by the “pleasures of narrative.” And he’d be guilty as charged. But audiences are better off for it.
