Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2003

[page 17]

Robert F. Gross

Glamour and Frightful Mutilation: Kondoleon, Kierkegaard and Camp

There is a vast critical literature on Søren Kierkegaard.(3) There is a much smaller, but not inconsiderable, critical literature on camp.(4) I've yet to find any overlap between the two [page 18] bibliographies. In a way this is not surprising; the two authors tend to circulate in very different circles. Kierkegaard enthusiasts give the impression of being an earnest lot, seemingly averse to theatrics, while camp followers appear far more inclined to turn to All about Eve than Sickness unto Death.

There is very, very little literature, alas, devoted to playwright, novelist and poet Harry Kondoleon, whose plays first graced the stages of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway all too briefly between 1981 and 1994.(5) A queer author with a highly individual voice and vision, his 1993 play, The Houseguests, constructs a sort of cruising ground in which the religious concerns of Kierkegaard rub up against the Kondoleon's camp strategies. (After all, the two men have more than a little in common: both lifelong bachelors, marginalized in their respective fields and slow to gain acceptance by the mainstream, sharing not only an enthusiasm for masks, ironies and theatricality, but an engagement with spirituality as well, prolific and audacious in their work and premature in their deaths. . . .) Although I am not about to argue for a direct influence on Kondoleon by Kierkegaard, I will argue that Kondoleon's representation of spiritual experience, particularly as it appears in The Houseguests, shares a common problematic with the Danish philosopher, and that not only do Kierkegaard's work and Kondoleon's illuminate each other, [page 19] but that The Houseguests demonstrates how the aesthetics of camp can provide a particularly sophisticated set of strategies for the theatrical representation of spiritual experience.

Since The Houseguests is far from being a canonical text, a brief synopsis may be in order. The play harks back to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with its witty and malicious host couple treating their naive visitors to rounds of Get the Guests, which in turn harks back to Noel Coward's Hay Fever and August Strindberg's Dance of Death. By the 1990s, the Strindbergian couple had become such a stock type on the American stage that Kondoleon is able establish it at once. We see the couple—Vera and John—casually perusing the Sunday papers. Vera says "Could you know how much I despise you?" The husband replies, laconically, "I could guess".(6) After trading articulate declarations of mutual repugnance and undying contempt, they soon turn to the subject of their equally loathed houseguests, the seemingly banal and unremarkable Manny and Gale. When this couple return from the beach, Vera and John immediately set upon them with the full vigor of their shared disdain. The men leave to barbecue dinner, whereupon Gale prostrates herself before Vera with declarations of frenzied passion, which Vera greets with hauteur. When the men return to find Gale sucking Vera's foot, it opens the way for several rounds of Get the Guests, which eventually leave all the participants in despair. Vera admits that she had considered suicide an appropriate solution to their problems earlier that day, but proposes instead that they swap spouses and separate for six months. Leaving a lovelorn Gale with John, Vera takes Manny in tow, announcing that they will all meet in a skiing lodge in the mountains six months hence. Curtain.

The second act presents their reunion. Over the past six months, the Vera and Manny have been reduced to penury and reside in an uncompleted ski lodge without adequate heating [page 20] or sanitation. Vera has broken all her bones in skiing accident, lives with intense chronic pain, and can no longer afford painkillers. Manny has lost most of his hearing, and his equilibrium. They are surprised to learn that the other couple is in worse shape than they are. John enters in a wheelchair, having had his hands and feet amputated due to gangrene. Not only is Gale blind, but is subject to fits of homicidal rage, which are usually directed toward Vera. They are all beset with rage and desolation, which is finally challenged by Vera, who notes that they enjoy the services of a girl who does their cleaning for free. "She's a part of this whole new love principle," she explains.(7) Struck by the idea of love, she suggests that the four of them focus on love by chanting or humming, or merely saying the word "love" in unison. The others balk at this seemingly absurd proposal, but she finally rallies them, and when they finally say "the word" with fear and timidity, the play ends abruptly in an eruption of thunder and lightning.

The play's title introduces its dominant metaphor. In the first act, Vera speculates that we are all "God's houseguests",(8) and she further refines the thought near the play's conclusion:

Kondoleon takes the device of the malicious hosts from Albee, Coward and Strindberg, and transforms it into the vehicle for religious speculation. In the first act, we see the mortal hosts humiliate their guests, reducing them to tears and despair. In the second act, we see all the characters suffering horribly from a series of grotesque accidents that frustrate any attempts at [page 21] rational explanation. If we are all houseguests, Kondoleon suggests we may have a host whose game of Get the Guests makes George and Martha seem gentle by comparison.

Summarized like this, the religious vision of The Houseguests might sound like one of bleak despair and powerless rage against a malevolent deity; a gnostic vision of divine malice. Such a reading, however, would ignore the development of the characters in the face of their seemingly gratuitous suffering. While the healthy, privileged characters of the first act squabble over issues of power, pleasure and status, only to fall into despair, the impoverished, suffering characters of the second show moments of kindness, patience and longing. The contrast is most pronounced in the case of Vera. While earlier she was the most snide and malicious of them all, in the second act she is an improbably poised and gracious hostess, hobbling about in splints and casts, offering her guests a few stale cookies and tea brewed from a already used tea bag. Her suicidal fantasies have disappeared, and been replaced by charmingly batty illusions of community: "I thought we could all reunite and be like Gudrun and Ursula and Birkin and Gerald" she explains, using the characters of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love as a somewhat improbable idyllic model,(10) and suggesting they support themselves by selling t-shirts or making batiks.(11) She is the one who becomes the advocate for this new "love principle," accepts the possible efficacy of chanting, and finally persuades the others to join with her in saying the word "love" as the most rudimentary kind of prayer She urges them to "say it with conviction so that it can be heard above the cacophony of devils".(12) Vera's ethical qualities contrast with her external fortunes.

[page 22] Described this way, the ending of The Houseguests may sound as facilely sentimental as the previous description sounded gratuitously nasty—a celebration of the ennobling potential of suffering. Kondoleon's dramaturgical sophistication, however, consists in his ability not only to sustain the sentimental and nasty possibilities side by side as facets of a complex reality, but in his presenting both possibilities through strategies of camp.

Camp is, it is widely agreed, an elusive phenomenon that ultimately frustrates attempts at definition,(13) but it is so intrinsic to the style of The Houseguests that some of its most salient aspects need to be mentioned here. A set of counter-discourses developed in queer male subcultures back at least as far as the early eighteenth century,(14) "camp constantly questions the dualisms of the dominant society".(15) As a queer strategy, it most frequently questions dualisms surrounding gender and sexuality, but does not stop there, extending to question a range of socially constructed oppositions, most notably nature/culture, depth/surface and authenticity/affectation. These terms tend to be questioned, as we will see in examples from The Houseguests, by complicating the dualism through irony and excess, rather than resolving it in favor of a single term.

Jack Babuscio identifies four stylistic hallmarks of camp: irony, aestheticism, theatricality and humor.(16) Although these characteristics can be found elsewhere, in camp they work to question dualisms and express the values of a queer culture. Camp is in part distinguished from the burlesque and spoof by the ambivalent feelings it creates in response to its tactics. While [page 23] spoof and burlesque tend to elicit a response of unambiguously superior laughter, camp undermines the notion that the sublime and the silly, the pathetic and the absurd, the fragile and the tough, the trivial and the momentous, can only be appropriately experienced apart from each other; the questioning of ideological dualisms is accompanied by the complication of emotional reaction.

From the very beginning, The Houseguests displays a camp sensibility. Rather than spending any time establishing the grounds for Vera and John's acrimonious union, they are presented as theatrical types, whose casual perusal of the newspaper ironically qualifies their venomous repartee, as does the cool, articulate style in which they express it. In Kondoleon's hands, a spite-filled marriage become a form of dandyism. The viewer has no recourse to a moment of apparent "depth" that can confirm what John and Vera "really feel" for each other. They exist totally on the level of performance, as do all dramatic characters, but without the usual dramaturgical trompe l'œil provided to deceive the spectator with an illusion of depth. Here, a desperate marriage may be artifice.

A similar camp strategy is used to treat Vera's frequent expressions of ennui, despair and suicidality. Early on, Vera compares her "exquisite" fatigue with the "inexhaustible beauty" of the boredom of Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti and Jean Seberg on the silver screen.(17) When Vera identifies her own existential plight with those of these celebrated icons of art film despair, she immediately puts the authenticity of her own despair in question. What does it mean, after all, when one's supposedly agonizing situation seeks validation by reference to glamorous film performances? As Jonathan Dollimore points out, camp rejects a depth model of identity often by taking "depth" to excess and thus revealing its theatricality and undermining dominant [page 24] morality's terms of authenticity.(18) But camp not only mocks the depth traditional models of depth also "mocks the Angst-ridden spiritual emptiness that characterizes the existential lament"(19) as well. To revise Le Rochefoucauld, there are those who never would have despaired, had they not first seen it at the movies. To camp existential ennui as Kondoleon does is to camp it by aestheticizing and theatricalizing it, and thus, ironizing it. though, perhaps in this case, Kondoleon does not so much merely mock the existential lament as complicate it. It is less that existential ennui is simply to be dismissed as a pose. A pose, after all, can be felt at the very moment that it is affected.

The Houseguests quickly establishes itself as camp through its high artifice and irony, and the characters, though ostensibly introduced to us as made up of two heterosexual couples, are soon queered. Gale is infatuated with Vera, who takes pleasure in her admirer licking her feet;(20) John is sexually aroused by contact with Manny,(21) whose hysteric relationship to male homosexuality is either the result of extensive childhood abuse or extreme homosexual panic.(22) Any illusion of sexual orientation as authenticity is subverted in this world in which, as Vera explains "Latency is always overt".(23) The commonly accepted distinctions between masculine and feminine in the dominant culture are completely undermined in the ever-shifting play of pleasure and power—John and Vera could as easily be a same-sex couple as a heterosexual one.

[page 25] Yet Kondoleon's particular use of camp strategies do not work simply to demolish the characters' poses ridicule, but to complicate any simple dichotomy between depth and surface, emotion and affectation. Take, for example, Kondoleon's treatment of director Otto Preminger's 1958 critical and box-office cinematic debacle, Bonjour Tristesse. Based on Françoise Sagan's once-notorious novel of sexual precocity and wayward youth, starring Vera's favorite star, Jean Seberg, the film seems absolutely appropriate to Vera's particular camp sensibility —decadence and existentialist despair with gowns by Givenchy. She shares her favorite moment from the movie with Gale:

Turning to a movie whose pleasures can be truly relished only through camp appropriation, Vera finds a privileged moment of vision in a sequence from Bonjour Tristesse which is not subordinated to the demands of story or character, but is a collection of glamorous objects (Seberg with her Givenchy gown and haircut, sports car, the Riviera setting).

How are we to respond to Vera's epiphanic moment? On the one hand, it is easy to respond negatively, judging Vera as a superficial materialist who mistakes profane values for spiritual ones. From that point of view, the profane noun "glamour" undercuts the sacred [page 26] adjective "spiritual." But Kondoleon refuses to deflate this oxymoron by resolving it so easily. First, he does not make the object of Vera's longing a high art object, say the Sistine Chapel or an ode by Keats, but a movie whose excesses of theatricalization (sexual hysteria, "decadence" and melodramatic plot contrivances) and thoroughgoing aestheticization (one often feels, watching Bonjour Tristesse, that the film's auteur is not Preminger, but Givenchy) render it excellent material for camp appropriation. This appropriation puts into question the conventional, hierarchical separation of "high" and "low" forms of artistic expression that are believed to elicit exalted and spiritual responses in the first case, and materialistic and base responses in the second.

Robert F. Gross teaches Theatre at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where he directed a production of The Houseguests in 2002. He has published essays in Theatre and Religion, Essays in Theatre, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal and New England Theatre Journal.