Talk is an Obie Award-winning play written by Carl Hancock Rux, commissioned and premiered by The Foundry Theatre (Melanie Joseph, Artistic Producer) at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival in 2002. The play was directed by Marion McClinton; set by James Noone; costumes by Toni-Leslie James; lighting by James L. Vermeulen; video, Marilys Ernst; sound by Tim Schellenbaum; dramaturgy and music supervisor, Jocelyn Clarke; production stage manager, Scott Pegg; production manager, Jody Kuh; assistant stage manager, Neelam Vaswani.
Characters
Moderator
Apollodoros
Ion
Phaedo
Crito
Meno
Synopsis and themes
The play explores themes of mixed race as both an aesthetic challenge and a social concern, gesturing toward a poetics of social justice for the “mulatto millennium” as well as art as both social memory and cultural production. Influenced by Euripides' play The Bacchae, the entire play is held in the ruins of a museum of Greek antiquities, and has characters inspired by the Socratic dialogues (Phaedo, Crito, Meno, Apollodorus, and Ion) written by Plato, which attempts to determine the definition of virtue and the meaning of art. TALK also delves heavily in theoretical arguments regarding the reading of performativity as interdisciplinary concepts by examining the works of André Breton, Clay Felker, Mark Van Doren, Jonas Mekas, James Baldwin, Wayne Shorter, Jack Kerouac, Maya Deren and Robert Giroux (among others) with clips from an alleged unfinished experimental film ( heavily influenced by the French New Wave and Maya Deren's expressionism) [1]made by Aymes, shown and narrated by Phaedo, one of his collaborators.
Set
The impressionistic set was designed to resemble a panel discussion held in the interior hall on the ground floor of a Victorian mansion converted into (the now-defunct) Museum of Antiquities. Center stage there is a large triclinium (a three-sided table) set with food and wine, similar to the setting of a symposium In ancient Greece (Greek: συμπόσιον symposion, from συμπίνειν sympinein, "to drink together"), a Hellenistic social institution and forum for esteemed men to debate, plot, boast, revel with others and to celebrate the introduction of young men into aristocratic society.
Music
The music is atmospheric, at times influencing the mood and action of the play.
Plot
The play takes the form of a heated panel discussion regarding the identity of the late enigmatic (fictional) writer named Archer Aymes.
Prologue
A woman (Apollodoros) exhibits to the audience ancient Greek amphora painted with scenes from The Bacchae, and introduces the architectural history of the play's setting (the Museum of Antiquities), alluding to the death of an unidentified woman some years earlier. The Moderator proceeds to read an excerpt from Mother and Son, a "novel by Archer Aymes", then welcomes the audience into the "curious room of forgetting what had been remembered" (both a complaint about forgetfulness, since the play revolves remembering a forgotten artist and a call to action that requires letting go of moribund or memorialized Truths). The Moderator introduces five invited panelists who knew Archer Aymes, (Ion, Crito, Ion, Meno, Phaedo and one uninvited guest, Apollodorus, who unexpectedly insists she be included as a participant in the conference even though she elects to sit apart from the others, quietly observing and occasionally interrupting the proceedings with remarks of intentional ambiguity as she serves food and wine to the panelists.)
Act One
During the course of the play, the Moderator interviews each panelist. He learns from Meno, an aging television talk show host, that Archer Aymes, a Columbia University graduate, became an overnight literary sensation for his first book, an experimental novel titled Mother and Son, published during the McCarthy era. Closely affiliated with the Beat poets, and openly associated with the Communist Party, Aymes was initially uncomfortable with his newfound fame, using it as a platform to express his Marxist class politics, social reformism and to assert himself as an African American (though initially perceived to have been white). Failing to author another book, the author quickly faded into obscurity, and ten years later, during the turbulent 60s, was formally charged with inciting a riot after encouraging a horde of angry protesters to destroy The Museum of Antiquities in Manhattan. Before he could be brought to trial, Aymes was found dead in his jail cell, a death that authorities characterized as suicide and remains refuted by several panel members.