It’s hard to recall why I thought it was a good idea to buy tickets to Bruce Norris’s new play, A Parallelogram, at the Mark Taper Forum last Saturday night. I didn’t much like his previous play, the much-praised Clybourne Park, which struck me as mildly clever and perfectly watchable but finally shallow and cheap. Still, I generally believe in giving new playwrights a second chance. Besides, going to live theater in Los Angeles is usually a treat because the acting and production values tend to be better than what I normally find on my home turf. I must have figured the risk was worth it.
For a Northern Californian, the biggest risk to going out in L.A. is having to negotiate the complicated freeway system. On this visit, that problem was greatly ameliorated by the presence of the new Google Maps on my iPhone. Thanks to this miraculous invention, a dulcet-toned woman (well, dulcet-toned compared to the Stephen Hawking voice you usually get on mechanical objects) guides you intelligently and accurately wherever you want to go. Ms. Google Maps, as I came to think of her, has certain quirks: her pronunciation can be a bit odd (Beloit, for instance, is Bellow-it in her world) and she occasionally has flashes of brain fever during which she demands a sudden U-turn on a freeway. For the most part, though, she is an extremely reliable and helpful companion. She can be a bit of a nag (“Turn right onto Highway 10 in 800 feet,” she’ll say, adding a more peremptory “Turn right onto Highway 10!” when you get there, so that even if you are driving alone with her, you will find yourself responding, “Okay! Okay!”), but she is never a chatterbox. If she tells you that you will be on Route 5 for the next 47 miles, you will not hear another word from her until you have covered most of them. And she seems to know the ins-and-outs of every city’s tiny streets as well as its major freeways.
So, due to her considerate attentions, my husband and I reached the theater in relatively good shape, well in advance of the curtain. In the elevator that took us up to the theater-entrance level, we ran across a Los Angeleno going to the same production. “Did you read the article about this play in the paper?” she asked us. No, we said. “Well, you have to read the article to understand it!” she insisted. “It’s a very complicated play.”
A Parallelogram is the kind of thing that passes for a theater of ideas in L.A., and much of the audience seemed suitably elevated by the experience. I found the whole thing arrant nonsense: a silly, pretentious time-travel story with ludicrous aspirations to scientism—parallel lines meeting each other in space due to the existence of multiple dimensions and so forth—all of which led to a prolonged encounter between the attractive young female character and her slightly overweight, elderly, glasses-wearing self. (This kind of visible aging is what counts as a horrifying destiny in Southern California.) Or perhaps she was going mad and merely imagining she was meeting her future-knowledge-bearing self. Whichever. By the time I had finished watching two acts of this stuff, I didn’t care what was true and what wasn’t.
The essential principle espoused by the play appeared to be that whatever is going to happen is inevitably going to happen, even if we know about it in advance, so there’s no point in trying to change anything. When you add to this worldview a set of four characters who make no claims whatsoever on your sympathy (they are simultaneously personally irritating and patently unreal: a difficult combination to pull off, but Norris has managed it), you have an evening that sinks you deeper and deeper into surly moroseness. The only thing that kept me in my seat after the intermission was curiosity about whether the offensively portrayed Hispanic character—a lawn-care employee who spoke with one of those hokey “Jhes” and “Noh” accents that used to afflict all Hollywood Latinos—would turn out to be the hidden genius of the show. I thought maybe Norris was trying to trick us with our own prejudices, as John Steinbeck did, for instance, in East of Eden, where the pidgin-speaking Chinese character turns out to have a perfect grasp of English and a brilliant mind to boot. No such luck: the so-called “lawn jockey” turned out to be a loser from start to finish. This Stepin Fetchit version of a Chicano would not have been allowed on any major stage in the country if he had been black, so how is it that the Mark Taper Forum let him through in this retrograde form? That was the only intellectual puzzle the show left me with.
When we got back to our car, reeling with a sense of having been assaulted by virulent idiocy, I programmed Ms. Google Maps to take us back to our hotel. And from the moment she began to speak, I felt profoundly grateful. “Take West First Street in the direction of Hill Street and make a right on Broadway,” she said. This was truth. This was reflected reality. This was magic and science, forecast and enactment, all rolled into one. If only Bruce Norris had been able to offer me a tenth of that in the theater.