cover photo by Peter Cunningham
this collection contains three full-length plays:
CRAZY PLAYS
THE ENDLESS ADVENTURES OF M C KAT
TOMORROWLAND
CRAZY PLAYS:
The Death And Life Of Language: Three New American Voices
"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, totalling 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' 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' 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' 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
2 M, 3 W
THE ENDLESS ADVENTURES OF M C KAT:
"Jeffrey Jones' plays seem to take place under a strobe light: brilliant
flashes of deflated pop culture icons that slowly accumulate into a bitter
satire of the emptiness and loneliness of our culture. They are imaginary fun
houses with real monsters lurking in the crooked corners. They are also usually
sharply paces and sleekly designed. Yet despite these virtues, they are often
cold. Every fragment of an emotion is immediately undercut, and when the smoke
clears, the dominant impression is of a brilliant but ultimately self-involved
vision, the work of a clever but naughty adolescent. The good qualities of
Jones' work are amply displayed in his latest post-modern vaudeville, THE
ENDLESS ADVENTURES OF M C KAT, OR HOW THEY GOT FROM A TO B. It's a lively
concoction made all the more vibrant by the elastic and salty actors of the
Cucaracha Theatre-a striking improvement over the starchy performances common in
Jones' usual company, Creation Productions, proving you can be avant-garde
without taking yourself too seriously. The kaleidoscopic plot interlaces several
strands. The title character is a naughty little mongoose-like character with a
squeaky voice portrayed by a stuffed animal-one of the many anti-illusionist
jokes is that he hates being called a stuffed animal. The framing plot involves
a playwright (all-too-self-consciously named Big Dick) wandering a small town in
search of M C All sorts of commentary about the longing for artistic, religious
and other types of transcendence is thrashed about. About the way we encounter a
myriad of redneck types, from a lost sportscaster to a fat fundamentalist to a
manic doctor who screams lectures at us about the value of stress reduction. As
usual in Jones' work, moment-to-moment the humor is bristling and the pacing is
deft. Some of the redneck caricatures don't pay off and the writing veers into
condescension. But the set is imaginative-a backdrop of a baseball field and a
perversely angled pink-and-lime-green sportscaster's booth that doubles as a
puppet stage. And the cast sparkles. I particularly enjoyed Al Cima in a variety
of finely distinguished small roles. M C Kat does indeed run the full gamut from
A to B, taking a delightfully circuitous route. I just wish Jones had tried to
reach C."
Robert Massa, The Village Voice
"Cucaracha Theatre's latest is the saga of M C Kat, meerkat
extraordinaire, and his reluctant, sinus-afflicted friend, Dick Sorehead, as
they traipse a Pop Americana landscape of quick draw cowboys, inbred towns,
self-help T V, and `high-concept' Mets games: `Let's become one
with the baseball inside us.' Jeffrey Jones' wonderful waddle through the
vernacular imagination plays through April 27, at the Broome Street
Theatre."
Brian Parks, The Village Voice
6 M, 4 W
TOMORROWLAND:
"Even paranoids have enemies, goes the old joke; Jeffrey M Jones' TOMORROWLAND
is a ninety-minute incarnation of that line. The second of his projected
trilogy, `A History of Western Philosophy', this piece is a logical
sequel to Jones' first installment, DER INKA VON PERU, which romped through
colonial history and western literature, juxtaposing a Harlequin romance with a
William Prescott adventure tale on a peephole stage: a blank wall with a hole in
it revealed an upstage wall with a smaller hole. TOMORROWLAND tightens the focus
implied by that telescoping set, concentrating on postwar America in a suburban
living room with an upstage window. Beyond it stretches the Moon's surface, full
of promise, and the earth rises in the distance. Like DER INKA, TOMORROWLAND is
a verbal collage; its dialogue, says a program note, `was constructed from
source material all dating from the year 1950.' Movies, T V game shows,
advertisements, H-bomb descriptions, the Fuchs spy trial, Korean war reports,
and McCarthy's charges of communism in the State Department are the found
objects from which Jones sculpts his ominous image of American anxiety. Three
interweaving plots-a western in which Jimmy Ringo hunts down an outlaw, a sci-fi
thriller about extra-terrestrials spying on earth, and a family sitcom-depict
the exuberant optimism of the American Dream at the advent of frozen orange
juice, television and suburbs. Guided by Television Star Shannon Malleson, we
visit the Wilfred family in their Delray Beach, Florida, home, where Jason
complains from his easy chair about his country's wimpy defense. Carol makes
Wednesday her casserole day and imagines creatures in her backyard, and their
daughter, Divina, asks her dad about the Cold War and has a study date with
Selden, the high school football star. The characters' fears edge seamlessly
into paranoia as the family scenes dissolve into the western in which Jason
plays the gunman, Selden the outlaw, Carol and Divina their devoted girls.
Shannon and her co-narrator, a health department doctor, provide an ironic point
of view that deepens the play's obvious connections between red scares and
cowboy heroics. Doubling as the aliens who inspect Earth after its (presumably
nuclear) destruction, Shannon and Dr Sinclair, always cheery, offer hysterical
warnings of modern horrors: communism, polio, madness, radiation, and body odor.
Daniel Moses Schreier's relentless soundtrack underscores the intersecting
genres with electronic music, homey Muzak, and cowboy arpeggios, all maintaining
the same even rhythm. Jones has paced TOMORROWLAND, unlike the frenzied DER INKA,
with uninterrupted smoothness, creating some lulls, but he gets textured
performances from Barbara Somerville as Divina, Karla Barker as Shannon, and
especially, as Jason, Zach Grenier, whose repellent charisma makes him the
quintessential actor for Jones' sleazy heroes. Near the play's end, crazy Carol
confesses her role in a spy scheme, describing her experience as
`controlled schizophrenia,' which could describe equally well Jones'
diagnosis of the U S and his multi-focus dramatic form. If at times Jones'
ideas about theater and history rise to the surface of this play more than they
issue out of its action, that's a welcome improvement over similar experiments
(even DER INKA, to some extent) whose complex issues are peripheral to their
cleverness. Jones' vision, alas, is as intelligent as it is bleak."
Alisa
Solomon, The Village Voice
"The essence of Jeffrey M Jones' TOMORROWLAND, his second
`historical-quotation' play to be produced by Brass Tacks Theater, is
collision... Cultural memory collides with present realities. Genres collide so
hard they take on each other's characteristics. The American dream crashes into
the manipulative impulses and paranoias behind it. Conventional images careen
into walls of tension, anxiety and neurosis. What seems to be real keeps banging
into what actually might be real. It's not pretty. It is very funny and
unusually stimulating. TOMORROWLAND has been created totally out of found texts
quoted from movies, pulp fiction, T V sitcoms and game shows, advertisements,
political transcripts and journalism, all turned out in 1950, the salad days of
the post-War period and the peak of American feel-good optimism. The stories are
intercut and juxtaposed, each commenting on and influencing the way we see the
others. They ultimately become so thoroughly mixed that they meld together
becoming a fascinating, interwoven collage that shows American culture in ways
we've seldom viewed it. There's clearly a lot of play in this play, but Jones
takes it far beyond the parlor game of spin the radio dial. His intertwining
narratives are intelligent and insightful without losing the ironic wit and
sense of play at the theatrical heart of the work.... Jones' work deals
insightfully with the way language is misappropriated and used to create
illusions... Jones has created an interesting arena for contemplating the often
illusory ways we perceive our world."
Mike Steele, Minneapolis Star &
Tribune
"Moibius strips in which formal experiment twisted into and
became satire..."
Alisa Solomon
3 M, 3 W
Plays By Jeffrey M Jones
I S B N: 0-88145-183-5
$19.95