Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith acknowledges that a play about a middle-aged man who leaves a long-term marriage to frolic with a hot young thing is not exactly ground-breaking material. But that's not the point, she stresses. "Everyone knows what will happen. But the tension arises, I believe, from how the story reveals itself."
The intermissionless piece "Honour," which opened at the Belasco Theatre, April 26, is essentially a series of stark confrontational scenes within a tense little family constellation; each family member, in turn, clashes with each other and with the "other woman," the ultimate interloper. Evoking David Mamet by its repetitions, truncated sentences, overlapping dialogue, and characters completing each others' statements, it is a play of language, says Murray-Smith, who admits to a Mametian influence.
"If you are not interested in language this is not the play for you. It is demanding. The audience is not pandered to, but is asked to come up to the very speedy and eccentric nature of this work." But the stylized dialogue--Murray-Smith maintains it reveals larger truths than does naturalism--is part of an overall theatrical vision. "I wanted an economic quality, a paring back without reference to an actual world. We don't know what year this play occurs in or what the geographical location is. I wanted to do something almost Greek, eliminate everything except the cut and thrust of the characters' psychology and emotions, without kitchen-sink naturalism to pad them."
The articulate and affable 30-something Australian playwright, with whom we meet in a theatre dressing room, is the author of several plays, a novel, and a children's book. "Honour" was commissioned by Australia's Playbox Theatre Company--"It's equivalent to Lincoln Center Theater," says Murray-Smith--and was written in New York City in 1995, while she was attending Columbia University's playwriting program. The work received a public reading at New York Stage and Film's Powerhouse Festival at Vassar in 1996.
No Villains, No Victim
Despite its familiar subject matter, Murray-Smith contends her play takes a new look at infidelity. "I am telling the story from Honour, the wife's [Jane Alexander] point of view. She's the center of the story and I think that's rare. I was intrigued by her experience for several reasons. It [the breakup of a marriage] is certainly a common occurrence among my parents' friends. But more important, in the wake of having a child--and that experience has given me the most profound wisdom--I began thinking about what it must be like for a woman to nurture that child, watch it grow, watch her husband grow, professionally, personally, only to discover at the age of 58 that she's been abandoned. What extraordinary wisdom and sorrow are in that story."
Murray-Smith insists there are no villains in her tale, nor is she engaged in special pleading. "Honour is not a victim. She's had a rich, full life; she enjoyed being a wife and mother. But at the end, she has a brutal awareness of what it cost her to give up her own life for the sake of others. She says, 'How will I survive?' She means emotionally and financially."
Antipodean Author
Raised outside of Melbourne, the daughter of an editor--"He headed one of Australia's first literary magazines, 'Overland' "--Murray-Smith always had her sights set on a career in the arts. She began writing early and by the time she was majoring in English at the University of Melbourne, she was headed towards a career as a short-story writer and novelist, she recalls.
Playwriting came into her life almost accidentally. "At university, I became friends with some students who were interested in theatre. I was very close with one of the students and the two of us wrote a play for the group. The play, which was produced at the school, was then picked up by an outside theatre company. I believe that's the first time that had ever happened, at least in Australia." The unexpected success of the collaboration, notwithstanding, Murray-Smith stresses, "I made up my mind never to do it again. But my writing partner, Ray Gill, and I did get married. So I got something out of it!" she laughs.
Murray-Smith has had an unusual career. With the exception of one play which she wrote on spec, every other piece has been commissioned, starting with her first solo endeavor based on her college thesis. "I wrote about an episode in literary history known as the Ern Malley Affair. In the 1940s, there was a left-wing magazine in Australia, 'The Angry Penguins,' that was trying to advance avant-garde writing. Two conservative poets, who despised experimental writing and wanted to show it up, created two poems by tearing up pieces of paper, ripping numbers out of the phone book, and then bringing them all together. The piece was accepted and the fictitious author 'Ern Malley' was discussed seriously. When the hoax was revealed, modernism was set back in Australia for a long time."
Murray-Smith says that all of her plays attempt to merge ideological discourse with "emotional punch." "Love Child" centers on a meeting between a mother and the daughter she gave up for adoption 25 years earlier. The mother embodies a '70s vision, feminism and social responsibility. Her daughter, on the other hand, is a child of the '80s, self-centered and self-serving. Murray-Smith's most recent piece, "Rapture," focuses on a heated encounter between a murdered man's ex-wife and his brother. The play considers issues of middle-class social responsibility vs. the need for retribution, feeling vs. ideas.
"Australian theatre does not have any unifying elements of theme or style," notes Murray-Smith. "There are no real trends, although my work is probably less naturalistic than that of most other playwrights. Australia is a relatively young country and its theatre culture is even younger. This works two ways. On the one hand, Australian playwrights are less inhibited than their European counterparts. We have no great playwriting history, so we're free to create our own traditions. On the other hand, we have no mentors either."
Murray-Smith adds, "There really isn't much of an audience for theatre in Australia and playwrights are not held in the highest regard, even if they're successful. There's a blasƒ attitude towards artists, generally. There is the suspicion that if you're an artist, you are by definition pretentious. Artists in Australia have to fight to survive, perhaps more so than in America. They're fighting their own inner doubts as well as a kind of social scepticism." q
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"The tension arises, I believe, from how the story reveals itself."
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