Freaks Are Really Greeks?

Things are not so simple in Crawdaddy. For one thing, there are no “normal” people in it — their presence is felt only as showers of coins and greenbacks. Crawdaddy describes his show in lofty terms, as “extraordinary people doing extraordinary things” and promising “magic and mystery.” But also “the transcendent and the twisted.”

Early on, Veronica has dreams of creating an excellent troupe, but that creation turns out to involve murders and perhaps other violent acts (the degree to which these are specified appears to be an ongoing experiment), as well as the grotesque exhibits of stillborns, who can still be “useful.”

The most unexpected element of this show, and the one that most impressed me at the rehearsal, was the central story of a family. The play begins with Crawdaddy telling about a hard lesson his father taught him as a child. Then the relationship between Crawdaddy and Veronica develops, and leads (after several stillborns) to the twins, who appear to be literally joined at the hip.

I was taken with Veronica’s innocence and her powerful maternal feelings, and especially the performances of Sabata and Haddad as the twins, literally quivering with life and energy, two girls becoming young women. The courtship of one of the twins by Val, the somewhat dimwitted young man who sweeps up after the show, provides humor, vitality and then a sexual tension running between innocence and perversity.

Perhaps it was additional makeup and Dandenau’s necessary restraint, or maybe just because I was sitting farther from the stage, but on opening night even these scenes seemed darker, less “human,” whatever that may mean in this context. And the play certainly gets very dark later.

Without giving more of the story away, this darkness brings to a climax another central theme: the identity and morality of the characters and their world, in relation to the audience. How does the audience define them, even to themselves? In starkly reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 121, Crawdaddy echoes the God of the Old Testament, as well as St. Paul, the poet Wyatt and of course the poet Popeye, in asserting, “I am who I am.” Yet he justifies his evil in the eyes of observers: “All men are bad and in their badness reign.” But is that reality, or denial and evil itself?

In the end I was struck by how much these “freaks” resemble the freakish gods of the Greeks, especially in their grotesque family relationships. I’ve just started reading Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, and I was intrigued by her suggestion that the Greek myths of gods who murder, rape and torture each other, present a family model that was more perverse and tragic than any in nearby civilizations, and this may have been a product of the preceding “dark age” — four centuries of chaos and privation.

This in turn focuses something I noted about Crawdaddy. Though the Dell’Arte press release said it takes place in the 1930s, I detected no indication of time or circumstance or any outside world in the production itself. I wonder if that is an avenue yet to be explored. In any case, this piece has extraordinary potential, and it may do extraordinary things.

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