Guthrie Review: Third

As usual, I have decided to put down a few thoughts about the most recent play at the Guthrie. This time it is Wendy Wasserstein's "Third." For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Wasserstein, she was a popular New York playwright who focussed on women's issues before her death from Lymphoma in 2006. Wasserstein is most famous for her work "The Heidi Chronicles."

(From Jewishwomen's Archive jwa.org)

As you know I am a big fan of the Guthrie Theater community and as usual they come through beautifully. Direction by Casey Stangel is sensitive and intelligent and Sally Wingert may have produced her greatest performance ever. Her rendition of New England superstar, Left-Wing Feminist college Professor Laurie Jameson rings with accuracy from the boots and long wavy blonde hair to her method of sitting on her classroom desk and twiddling her glasses as she lectures the audience with slides and sharp commentary. Wasserstein's language is piquant, costumes are superb reflections of their characters and the way the Guthrie turns the space into a large College auditorium is just right. The "antagonist", the young man that Dr. Jameson will accuse of plagiarism, was sitting three seats down from us during the opening lecture on Goneril and Reagan as the true heroines of King Lear before bounding onto stage to ask his questions and begin the real action of the play.

(From Chicago Broadway world broadwayworld.com)


In case it is unclear to anyone, I think the cast is absolutely fantastic!


The essence of the story is that Jameson - a child of the early feminist movement - is suspicious of the student, at her college for a sports (more specifically wrestling) scholarship and his perfectly written Lear paper, so she brings him up on charges of plagiarism. This affects his life in a significant way. Tony Clarno does a stellar job as Woodson Bull III, an enthusiastic and bright-eyed student who prefers to be called Third and whom Jameson accuses of being a privileged White male slumming at her East Coast institution. He portrays just the right balance of polite manners and good natured idealism to be convincing as the elusive Mr. Bull.



He is joined in excellence by Emily Gunyoo Halaas, playing Jameson's disaffected daughter, Angela Timberman who plays a principalled Jane Austen scholar with cancer and Raye Birk as Jameson's pathos-inspiring alzheimer-afflicted father. Halaas in particular does a good job of depicting the next generation with its insecurities about the future and petulance search for an individual way.

(From www.parksquaretheatre.com)

The cast, the direction, the costumes and even the set (an opened up cube with images projected upon it to suggest various locations such as a kitchen, a bar, a classroom) was fantastic and yet for me the play was vaguely dissatisfying. This led to an extensive discussion between my husband and myself on the two hour ride home from the theater. This means something, because that ride is usually spent in reflective silence. In searching for what bothered us about the play we ultimately had to settle on the structure and writing of the play as being responsible for our disppointement.

What follows will contain spoilers.

In fairness, I must disclose that I am a College Professor that teaches the same kind of courses taught by the main character Laurie Jameson. For this reason I already had difficulty in the opening sequence with the way that Jameson treats her student athlete and insinuates that as an athlete he is unlikely to get much out of her class. As a feminist, surely she must realize that the White male privileged are precisely the people whose minds she must change. The opening scenes set up the primary kernel of the play which is that this person who has fought so hard for tolerance and acceptance of women as equals has become calcified in her own anti-patriarchal ideology, making judgments based on external factors and being every bit as unfair as the people against whom she has struggled all her life.

Wasserstein strives to make her main character likeable despite this flaw, giving her a difficult family life with a husband who is always off-stage and never visible, a father who is in mental decline and two rebellious daughters, but something just doesn't click.



I believe there are two primary problems here - both are structural and make the play a bit difficult to stomach. The first relates to the fact that the play focusses on the development of a single character. Jameson is flawed and the young man for all intents and purposes is innocent and ill-used because of our main character's prejudice. The clash of ideas seems to me unsatisfying, because as her friend must remind her after the plagiarism review, jameson is simply wrong and unwilling to admit it. It will be a play about change - about how a young man becomes less idealistic because of the ways of the world and about how Jameson needs to change in her third season (post menapause) of life. This you see, is a comedy.

Comedy of course means a happy end. Wasserstein ends her play with an apology and the two characters walking off into the woods each heading his/her own way to start afresh. The tying up of all anguish into conciliation, the curing of the Jane Austen scholar/friend of cancer and marrying her off to a Rabbi she met while on drip is just too facile an answer and rings hollow against the opening of the play with its serious issues.



Then there is the resultant ideology. Wasserstein was dying of cancer as she wrote this play and no doubt she longed for and was seeking just this kind of happy ending. Personally, however, I have problems with so blithely accepting the popular myth of the humorless and excessive postmodern lit Prof. Bob Verini, critic for Variety, notes in writing about the Geffen playhouse production, that Wasserstein could just as easily have reversed the political vectors, adding,

"For the contempo audience, especially given Wasserstein's impeccable progressive credentials, "Third" can't help but raise hackles in suggesting that the Left's assumptions, forged in the fires of the antiwar '60s, need to be continually reassessed lest they petrify. No traitor to her views, scribe is brave enough to point out that a professed commitment to openness and free inquiry may serve to shield behavior actually designed to shut down minds."

The student, Bull, who prefers to be known as Third, says at a political open-mike rally, "when someone like me, a Midwesterner, and athlete, on the fence politically, comes looking to you for answers, I am dismissed, even before I ask the goddamn question. And from my point of view, that’s how you lost this country. " Third's response to Jameson at the end is that we need to feed the world on hope.

While all this is true, it seems to me that the conclusion that people who have fought so long for fairness and equality need to lighten up and have hope is not only naive, but also doing an injustice to those who have struggled so hard and are still fighting to equalize the tables. That of course is my own personal bias. Would I have been happier if the political roles had been reversed, if the arch conservative male Professor walks off having apologized to the innocent liberal feminist student? No, I think that ending (although for me more emotionally satisfying) is equally unrealistic and unfaithful to the earlier tone of the drama.



It is hard not to compare this play with Mamet's Oleanna which does reverse the roles giving us the sympathetic male Professor accused of sexual harrassment by the strident feminist student. In both cases, I think the cards are stacked against the feminist and it bothers me (despite claims that the theater tends to embrace the liberal side of the paradigm) that the answer is for women to be less confrontational and get a sense of humor. Finally, I don't begrudge the cancer victim her chance to beat cancer a second time, but surely she doesn't have to be a confirmed bachelorette Jane Austen scholar who at the end is reborn to fall in love, marry the Rabbi and live happily ever after. (Feel free to substitue doctor, dentist or professional of your choice for Rabbi in that previous sentence). I just have to wonder, haven't we women been fighting against those dreams inflicted on us by our mothers and society long enough to find ourselves a much better happy ending?