Waging Waugh
Eclipse Theatre Company
The autobiographical texts were particularly valuable to Roccasalvo, a Catholic priest (and teacher of comparative religion at Loyola) who’s written several novels but is making his playwriting debut with this work. While Waugh’s fiction isn’t easily boiled down to stinging epigrams the way that Oscar Wilde’s plays and stories are, his nonfiction scribblings are peppered with beautifully phrased bitcheries; Roccasalvo, aided by director James Finnipot and dramaturge Nicholas Patricca, has stitched these musings into an impressively seamless conversational tapestry.
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This climactic outpouring of emotion supplies some dramatic conflict, though Waging Waugh needs much more if it’s to have a life beyond this premiere production. While Roccasalvo’s reluctance to compromise his subject with any editorial comment is laudable, his decision to rely entirely on the walled-up Waugh’s writing for his text poses a major challenge. Roccasalvo needs to bring out the tension between what Waugh declared to the public and what he could not acknowledge to himself, building more convincingly to the climactic prayer.
And if Waging Waugh is to have a future, this could be an important selling point: since Waugh himself isn’t a big enough name to draw wide audiences, the script will need to attract a star seeking a vehicle if it’s to have a long life. But for now, Waging Waugh is an interesting, well-played visit with one of literature’s crustiest curmudgeons.
The Infernal Machine does succeed in its earlier scenes, with their quirkily original interpretations of Oedipus’ relationships with Jocasta and the Sphinx. Here that creature is all too human, infatuated with the callow, cocky adventurer whom she questions. She even feeds Oedipus the answer to her riddle, as if she were a crooked quiz-show producer helping a contestant, hoping to win his love–then conspires with her jackal-headed companion, the Egyptian god Anubis, to destroy Oedipus for spurning her. When Oedipus arrives in Thebes, he’s welcomed as “a man” and an “iron fist”–like the playwright’s contemporaries Mussolini and Hitler, who claimed to bring order to politically unstable societies. Since Oedipus’ heroism is false–he didn’t really solve the Sphinx’s riddle–Cocteau seems to be predicting fascism’s eventual failure. Oedipus’ relationship with his mother, meanwhile, is more filial than sexual. Jocasta–whose death is foreshadowed in a running bit about being choked by her long scarf (was Cocteau thinking of Isadora Duncan’s death a few years earlier?)–calls Oedipus her big baby, and he seems to prefer cuddling to sex.
