In Postmodern Territory, Art Imitates Life Imitates Science

“I am moving. I cross the fault line. Shock. Aftershock. . . .
The shock from my body makes waves in the ocean because energy doesn’t disappear.
It’s transferred, it’s a force, it’s nature, it’s science. It’s out of my hands.
I breathe. I’m on my back on the surface. Looking at the sky.”

Quake--vibration, sometimes violent, that follows a release of energy. This energy can be generated by a sudden dislocation, a volcanic eruption, or a man-made explosion. The crust may first bend and then, when the stress exceeds the strength, break and "snap" to a new position. Vibrations called "seismic waves" travel outward from the source causing the entire planet to quiver or ring like a bell or tuning fork.

Astrophysics—The physics of astronomical bodies and their interactions; of the generation and transport of energy within stars; of matter, energy, and the laws of the universe.

Melanie Marnich’s Quake has been called variously an abstract comedy, a picaresque fantasy, an episodic parable, a surreal gambit. The play was selected for a public reading at the 2000 International Writers Exchange co-hosted by ASK Theatre Projects of California and the Royal Court Theatre in London, and in February of 2001, Marnich was the only new playwright whose work was presented at the prestigious Humana Festival hosted by Actors Theatre of Louisville. Like its restless heroine, Quake has traveled the breadth of the country on a dizzying trek across diverse landscapes.

Neal Weaver, writing, in L. A. Weekly about Quake’s West coast premiere at the Hollywood Court Theatre, described Lucy, the main character, as a "naive, spunky female Candide" who hops across America in pursuit of the ever-elusive soul mate. New York’s Hypothetical Theatre Company produced the East coast premiere of Quake in the spring of 2002. Reviewing this production, Jesse Sloane compared Marnich’s script to a “marathon of ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes, with the audience trying to guess how far each episode will get before everything goes horribly wrong.” “In the end,” Sloane observes, “the play is more than the sum of its parts. . . . It manages to give us a serious look at the problems of human connection, of what love is and how to make it stay. [It is] entertaining at the time and thought-provoking at the end.”

Audiences are brought along for the adventure as Lucy seeks balance between her desire for perfect oneness and a perfect partnership. The truth is she wants more than the Big Love. She wants the Big, Have-it-All Dream. But she is at war with the laws of metaphysics. Marnich places her in a postmodern time warp where Lucy discovers that the universe can be extreme and love is, like so much scientific theory, a concept that can’t always be observed in reality. She is caught in the flesh between the force of gravity and the illuminating allure of the stars, and her greatest obstacle may be retaining her innocence and optimism. Like a true postmodernist, she somehow records the distorted memory of failure even as she approaches each new encounter with a Zen state of “beginner’s mind.”

To complicate Lucy’s desperate, dizzy, surreal search, she keeps dreaming about a former astrophysicist turned serial killer. Referred to as “That Woman,” this black widow spider captures then kills her mates—loves them and leaves them. Lucy can’t find a mate and her “dream girl” won’t keep one. Unlike Lucy, That Woman defies gravity (and capture). She is more like a quark—that fundamental particle of matter that always couples, always stays in motion, and has strong interactions. But science tells us that the “strong” force that binds two quarks—the strongest force in nature—also behaves like no other on earth or beyond. Whereas other natural forces decrease in strength with distance, the “strong” force increases indefinitely as quarks move apart. Conversely, like That Woman, the closer the quark gets to its partner, the weaker the force that draws them together. She can’t move away from him without increasing the attraction; she doesn’t want him when she gets him. Life imitates science.

Quake, in many respects, fits Selden’s and Widdowsen’s model of postmodern art that can “no longer represent a real past but only our ideas and stereotypes about the past in the form of ‘pop’ history” (Contemporary Literary Theory, 186). With its “romance” theme and metaphysical explorations, it follows the postmodernist dictum that art should obliterate the boundary between high culture and mass culture--discover its rules rather than assume them--textualize through a world of images and simulations that cease to worry about their relationship to the “real.” For as Marnich has said, “A play is a world you create . . . . If you’re creating this world, remember you’re also creating the rules. You’re creating the terrain, the sky, the souls, everything tangible and ephemeral.”

Marnich's other plays include Tallgrass Gothic, Beautiful Again, Season, and Blur, which was included in the Public Theater’s New Work Now Festival and was produced in the spring of 2001 by the Manhattan Theater Club. She has received two Samuel Goldwyn writing awards, two Playwrights Center of Minneapolis Jerome Fellowships, a McKnight Advancement Grant, and the Francesca Primus Award from the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Playwrights Festival. Her work also has been included in Lincoln Center's American Living Room Festival.

Cynthia M. SoRelle