The Crazy Plays

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“Jeffrey M. Jones is an artist who shares the conviction that American theatre must be as complex, contradictory, and strange as contemporary life itself. To this heresy they add the notion that language heard onstage must be imaginatively and energetically bent, folded and mutilated as the language one hears on the street, on the news, and spewing from the mouths of our ‘leaders.’ The plays of Jones are dense, wordy, beautiful monstrosities, affronts to every rule of ‘good’ playmaking. They take their title seriously, they PLAY with words, with dramatic structure, with meaning, mocking the idea that a word or a sentence can reliably said to mean anything in so heterogeneous, decentered a world as ours. As in America today, where the gap between word and meaning grows surreally wider every day, nothing is in more desperate need of critical reexamination than the deeply troubled relationship between language and meaning. This weird, fecund impotence of language in late Capitalist America is the favored subject of Jeffrey M Jones, a poet and playwright who has been writing and directing in New York for fifteen years. Jones describes his most recent work as collage: random collections of the shards and fragments of everyday speech, of advertising, church and state, which are then reassembled into a series of ‘scenes.’ The results of this process are so disorienting, disquieting, and resistant that audiences, like the one privileged to see his latest piece CRAZY PLAYS at a festival of experimental work (organized by an uncharacteristically adventuresome Manhattan Theater Club) often get very angry. I’m not sure but that this is precisely the reaction Jones is seeking, not because he prefers, like some overgrown enfant terrible, to see people stream out of his performances, but because his work is about rage, impotent rage, as the driving force (to insist on the paradox) in America today. CRAZY PLAYS is, as of this writing, a collection of six plays, totaling 71 pages, through which characters pass, appearing and disappearing randomly, and resurfacing in a variety of guises. I qualify this description because as many as 45 CRAZY PLAYS may exist, to be shuffled in and out of production as Jones (or chance) dictates. In Jones’s world, there is no true communion, no recognition. Some characters are dimly aware that something is profoundly wrong, but they appear to have no idea how to seek or give comfort … A portrait of a bankrupt patriarchy in its death throes? An extended riff on the degradation of all forms of social intercourse in the West? A satire on the Great American Family Drama? A comedy of bad manners? A celebration of cheesy language? Yes. Imposing one’s own readings on Jones’ highly elliptical, allusive and elusive works is one of their principal pleasures, and an indulgence he generously sanctions … But Jones is perhaps too coy in suggesting that one reading is quite as good as another. For Jones’s critique of contemporary American culture is too acute (and clearly, too upsetting for many of his spectators) to miss. And since his critique is embedded in his chosen form — most Americans just do not want to see their society as being so utterly de-centered, disorderly and damned complicated as Jones’s collage plays insist it is — his political project succeeds in ways that more traditional forms of narrative do not. He de-centers us; he yanks us out of out theatre seats and sets us down in the middle of the mess we’ve made.” —Liz Diamond, Cahiers du Théâtre Jeu, #58

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