Hoto Phosting

April 19, 2015

At the end of Columbia College's April 2015 production of Getting Out, the lead character, ex-con Arlene, rips up the contact information Bennie has left her. Bennie is a former prison guard (he guarded Arlene for 8 years) and a would-be friend who has been helping Arlene get settled in her new apartment after her release and who, in the first act, has overstepped the bounds of his relationship with her in an abrupt and grotesque fashion. The destruction of Bennie's contact info struck me as a deviation from the play as written, so I double-checked the book (Dramatists Play Service, 1979). It is indeed a deviation. In Norman's play, Arlene rips up only the contact information of Carl, the ex-boyfriend who now wants to pimp her. At Columbia College, both Bennie's and Carl's information is destroyed.

Maybe the directors just goofed. I think it possible for an audience member to miss the import of this fleeting gesture, and maybe the directors missed it on the page. If the change was intentional, it seems to me a definite editorial intrusion. Seemingly, the directors, Wendi Weber and Colleen Halloran, intend to leave us with the idea that Arlene would - must - reject the man who tried to rape her, while Norman would have us consider that Bennie might not be irredeemable or the worst possible guy to have in your corner, all things considered, and that one way or another, Arlene has to make steps towards trusting someone, and maybe Bennie should not be put out with the trash so hastily. Arlene is intuitive enough to sense when someone is emotionally wounded (it helps her wound people, for one) and surely apprehends that Bennie is genuinely aghast at being called a rapist at the end of the first act.

Why is Bennie aghast? Because, what Arlene experiences as assault, Bennie experiences as the culmination of a flirtation between the two that finally exists nowhere but in Bennie's mind. (Further: Bennie may well have thought, hey, Arlene's feisty as hell, maybe she likes sex with an element of danger.) It is a gross misunderstanding with heinous consequences, but the difficult thing about flirtation, as usually practiced, is that it's something conveyed in small gestures and slight inflections, both easy to misread or even fabricate within one's mind, and the "go" signal may be missed, rushed, or imagined. It's been this way since the beginning of time, but now, thank heavens, on modern college campuses a movement is afoot to codify the seduction process and punish those who break the code. (Did Junior ever have sex without receiving an audible, "enthusiastic" yes, every step of the way? Did he ever proceed without a notarized certificate as to who initiated the behavior? Oops, it appears Junior may have to prove he is not a rapist.) This is the climate in which Columbia College's production of Getting Out is conceived.

Arlene is willing to open herself up to friendship with neighbor Ruby, also an ex-con, after initial skittishness. Ruby is instrumental in helping Arlene understand that her life will be far from ideal, but that Arlene must notice and seize what opportunities there are, and savor and celebrate her successes, no matter how modest. This infusion of clear-eyed realism blended with optimism makes credible the implication that Arlene may give Bennie another chance. The playwright's exit line for Ruby is, "These plants is real ugly." She refers to the plants Bennie brings Arlene in the second act, to cover the burglar bars on the window of her new apartment, about which long-incarcerated Arlene was upset in the first act. The author's suggested line reading for "These plants is real ugly" is "Fondly."

It is risky of Norman to allow audience sympathy for Bennie to the extent that she does, but that's part of what makes Getting Out so powerful. Writing about the play's 1978 off-Broadway debut, New York magazine's John Simon - notorious for his witheringly negative reviews - praises Norman's realistic intermingling of good and bad, and the way it challenges and enriches an audience. It's disappointing to see Columbia take the easy way out by villainizing Bennie, but not surprising. (The guy who plays Bennie even helpfully points out in his actor's bio that Bennie is a bad guy.) If the directors have willfully distorted the meaning of Norman's play to fit prevailing PC attitudes (and, yes, having Arlene destroy Bennie's contact information along with Carl's would be such a distortion), I'd venture they are guilty of theatrical - and educational - malpractice. I can understand if Wendi Weber and Colleen Halloran are not warmly disposed towards Bennie. But this in no way gives them license to rewrite the play with which they have been entrusted.