The Brokered Heart

Tim Crouch’s England, Skirball Cultural Center, November 9, 2011 –

We’re in the atrium of the Skirball Cultural Center atop the Sepulveda pass in Los Angeles when the tall Englishman begins speaking to us. His voice is clear, his diction flawless, sharpened by the cheerfully aggressive precision of high British elocution. An Englishwoman is with him, and she speaks to us also, her voice equally clear and certain. The two of them describe their love of art. They both have a boyfriend who is an art dealer, and they talk about him too. After a few lines volleyed in this fashion, we realize they are two performers inhabiting the same character, and, listening as closely as we can, it remains impossible to know which of them is the “real” character. As we are pondering the implications of this bifurcated persona, both performers abruptly stop speaking and stand looking at us, smiling. Their silence is friendly and welcoming, but dangerous nonetheless, the way all silence is dangerous when attention is drawn to it. After a time they speak again, trading lines with each other as before, and then, once again, they pause. After another long silence, the tall, smiling Englishman invites us to follow him to where the “show” will begin. As the woman hangs back to take up the rear, we follow the Englishman out through a set of glass doors, along corridors and down a set of steps to an exhibit space on a lower floor. There, we gather again and, as the last stragglers arrive, observe each other, we, the audience of Tim Crouch’s new play England.

Crouch and his female counterpart (played by the actress Hanna Ringham) begin again, telling us more about the boyfriend and his world class art collection. There are more long, smiling pauses too. Silence on stage, as many will know, is the repository of energetic mysteries, full of miraculous potentiality. When enough of this potential energy is tapped by the quality of a performance, silence can spill off a stage and flood an audience with the weight of time as it passes, and with the news it delivers of our own mortality. The silence in the gallery space of the Skirball Center during England was that kind of pure, high-grade theatrical silence. We in the audience shuffled and blinked, our eyes playing around the room, waiting uneasily for the two smiling Brits to pick up again.

The story our host(s) convey now begins to darken. We hear about a medical situation, a crisis that is testing the intense love the speaker(s) feel for their remarkably wealthy and supportive boyfriend. With each long silence the story leaps forward in time vertiginously. And now a boundary is breached; the happy, carefree days with the wealthy, art-dealing boyfriend are now a distant memory. After a shift of position toward another part of the gallery space, we come to understand that the story involves a coronary condition, the threat of certain and quite possibly imminent death, and very little to be done. The boyfriend is upset, enraged by his absurd powerlessness in the face of this, and yet, for the moment, remains loyal still. As the urgency mounts, an unpleasant sound begins to build off-stage, a whirling, crashing storm full of shattering glass. And now Crouch is off again, asking us to follow for Act Two of the performance.

Following Crouch upstairs we reconvene in the front rows of the large main stage theater space of the Skirball that have been taped off for us. Crouch and his female counterpart take up positions in the narrow aisle between the front row and the lip of the stage. Again, the tone has shifted, this time toward relief and gratitude – we have jumped forward again and the medical crisis has now receded. The two actors playing this oddly bifurcated character again stand looking at us, smiling. But the way they relate to us, in the audience, has changed – we are now being addressed as if we were a specific character rather than an undifferentiated, sympathetic Other. They thank us for coming. They tell us that they dreamed of this encounter, and announce that, after their long coronary ordeal, they are now at ease and full of joy. It becomes clear that the Crouch/Ringham character has received a heart transplant, and that the person they are now talking to is the wife of the organ donor. This donor, it also becomes clear, was critically injured in a recent terrorist attack – that crashing sound we heard downstairs. The Crouch/Ringham character was rushed to this foreign country – Pakistan, probably – to receive the fresh heart transplant. Crouch/Ringham’s encounter with the wife of the man who’s heart now beats him his/her chest becomes strained, awkward. Though a large sum of money was paid for this organ donation, all but a few pennies of this money went to the “agent” who arranged the transplant. The woman has lost everything, and her children have been all but orphaned. Worst of all, the woman does not even believe that her husband was truly dead when his heart was removed.

England is a play about transplants. The concept came to Crouch when he was commissioned to create a theater piece that could be “transplanted” into a gallery space intended for visual art. The narrative trajectory of the piece is elegant and sure, but the truly astonishing aspect of the play is how Crouch deploys his intensive pauses to “transplant” the audience across the boundary that typically separates stage spectacles from those who observe them from the safety of the seats. Over and over again, Crouch and Ringham come to a sudden halt, and it’s as if the unique and energized essence of the stage space keeps moving over us like a tide. It’s no accident that the organ being transplanted in England is the heart, the organ ubiquitously associated with human feeling, compassion. Crouch is linking compassion to the intensely present aspect of being on stage, and to the state of heightened, embodied attention we encounter there.

As the evening progresses I find myself looking around at the group of us in attendance, two dozen at the most, and noticing in each face the kind of complex and distinct humanity I might observe in a fictional character isolated and framed within a staged drama. There’s the old woman with the ginger-dyed hair who interrupted Crouch with acerbic questions like “so, what is this all about? What happens next? What was that long walk all about?” There’s the old man in the angora sweater with the craggy features and the kind, twinkling eyes. There’s the smiling, neatly dressed man from somewhere abroad, the Indian subcontinent, I imagined. There’s very tall slender man with the long hair and the weary, handsome face, and his statuesque companion dressed all in black. At another moment I notice, on the face of a playwright I know, a look of unbearable sadness come and go, a small symphony of feeling. With an astonishing economy of means, Crouch has carried us into the heart of our own mortality where we encounter the ineffable beauty of our connection with each other. And yet, the strength of England’s impact has to do with how Crouch has deployed this remarkably effective strategy to underscore, in the most visceral way, our moral jeopardy in West today, and our responsibility for the collateral damage of the global economy.