On "Everyday Life" by Rainer Maria Rilke

Timing in human relationships seems to be the underlying theme in this rarely produced play by the great 20th-century Austro-German poet Rilke. The few plays he wrote indeed are largely unknowns to the theatre-going public.

Presented by the Pacific Resident Theatre of Venice, California, the play is approximately halfway through its nominal run, which began on August 11. The director is Gar Campbell. The cast of a half dozen includes Kevin Rahm, a PRT regular, who plays the main character, an artist. The play itself is rather short, about one and a half hours in length, including the one intermission. The production I attended last night was up to the usual high standards of the award-winning PRT, which has also been recognized with many "Critic's Choices" by the Los Angeles Times.

The play centers on a couple of days in the life of a lonely artist named George Millner. It is set in his apartment/studio somewhere in Europe around 1900. The other major characters include George's sister, his doctor friend, a model, and a new female acquaintance.

The play opens at a time when the artist's life is in an unproductive mode. His creativity and enthusiasm for work is fleeting. He seeks diversion by staying out and partying until odd hours of the night. As a result, he sleeps in late, squandering most of the artists' valuable natural daylight.

The model, Mascha, who radiates idealism, youth, innocence, and sweetness, secretly worships George. She pays him a visit, and does her best to get him working again. She encourages him to use her as a subject, and reminisces about their more productive period in some months past.

George catches her in the perfect light while she is dusting in preparation to begin their work again. The studio is covered with dust in the first scene, a fact that is emphasized no less than three times. Is this to underscore the artist's spent creativity? Interestingly enough, the playwright himself went through a period writer's block and depression that lasted for 13 years; he even almost gave up writing altogether.

On the spur of the moment, George starts a sketch, only to quit in a fit of rage a few moments later, unsatisfied with the model's sudden burst of emotion, which prevents her from posing still. Interrupted by a visit from George's sister, Mascha offers to pose again later, with the promise of doing better next time, before taking her leave.

George and his sister, Sophie, have a close, tender relationship. Sophie lives with and takes care of their mother, who is totally dependent on her. Sophie views herself as deity-like to their mother, giving her night when she closes the curtains and day when re-opens them. Being lonely, George suggests that he move back in with them, but she rebuffs this for a variety of complex reasons, not the least of which is the fact that their living together just wouldn't be the same happy arrangement as it was when they were younger.

On this particular day, George has grudgingly agreed to attend a wedding reception, and was dressing when earlier Mascha, and then later Sophie, dropped in for their visits. As Sophie was leaving, George's doctor friend arrived to pick him up, since they had previously planned to go to the reception together.

George and doctor had refused to attend the wedding. Both hated such spectacles. The doctor mused that couples should get married as inconspicuously as possible. Moreover, he offered that it is even possible to die without ceremony. And no one envies a dead man.

When Sophie asked the doctor whether he considered himself part of the New or the Old generation, he replied the Old because he wanted to step back and see whether there'd actually be a New generation. Later in the play, there is dialogue on the idea that the New generation needs unoccupied physical space in the world in which to blossom into something different the Old; this is the familiar topic of Turgenev's 1861 novel "Fathers and Sons".

Because Sophie previously rejected the doctor's proposal of marriage, the doctor finds it awkward to be in the same room with her. However, despite their past, Sophie, who is in search of a relationship without the bounds of convention, especially with regard to between man and woman, is eager to remain just friends.

The next day, George told Mascha of a blonde female named Helen, whom he met at the previous evening's party. He told of the remarkable bonding that occurred between him and this woman in the span of a couple of hours, that they swapped their life's stories, and came to understand each other almost instinctively. George then informed Mascha that Helen would be visiting today, and asked her to go out and buy flowers and oranges for her. Needless to say, Mascha was stunned by this new development in the life of her secret love.

Helen showed up after Mascha went out. She was bedecked in a lacy gown, hat, and jewelry - a high society lady to be sure. She stridently told George that they had taken their relationship as far as it could go, and that, in fact, they had come to understand each other so completely in their first meeting that it was as if they had lived together for twenty years. She felt "used up" and wanted to end the relationship while it was still perfect. "You can live a thousand times with such encounters," she told him, to which he interjected "you also die a thousand times." "But you get over it," was her retort. "Besides," she said, "I'd start to dress badly if I lived with you here."

After Helen left, George was overcome with frustration over this abrupt termination, and sought solace in Mascha. He realized from that experience that Mascha had been always there for him, and was in love with him, in fact. But unfortunately for George, this revelation came too late -- Mascha was already crushed after learning that he had passed her over for another, finding a soul mate in a woman he'd met just yesterday.

Like a stone skipping across a pond, the playwright touched on several ideas without getting bogged down in exploring them deeply. In that sense he is a true poet. He used the story's framework as a canvas upon which to paint these ideas, much the same as artists such as George Millner do to record their own creative visions. Some of these ideas may seem ordinary and unoriginal now, given the array of modern-day personages parroting them. But the play was written almost a hundred years ago, at a time when such ideas were much newer and perhaps even considered radical.

 

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