bevedog

Paul Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, died last week, October 15. He was 75 years old. My college friend Jen was kind enough to email me to let me know. Jen had remained close with Paul, even caring for him up until his death. Jen wrote Paul’s obituary; Northwestern’s School of Communication also has a nice statement on Paul’s passing.

Paul was my favorite professor at NU. I acted in two of his productions and took at least two classes from him. I agree wholeheartedly with the quote from Mary Zimmerman (another person I worked with at NU who had a big impact on me) in that NU statement, “Paul Edwards is and was to me and hundreds of others, the absolute paragon of what a teacher should be… He was constantly connected to his students, who he took very seriously and loved very deeply.” I always felt with Paul that I was a trusted, necessary collaborator of his, even though I was young, inexperienced, and, frankly, cast in relatively small roles.

Looking back at my last post to this blog/newsletter, I see that I gave Paul a shoutout there for inspiring my lifelong love of Madame Bovary. One of the hallmarks of “performance studies” rather than “theatre” is the adaptation of non-dramatic texts for the stage. The first time I worked with Paul, I was cast in his adaptation of two Flaubert short stories. I later took a class with him focused around Madame Bovary which solidified my love of Flaubert and also introduced me to the film Children of Paradise which I have now watched many times over.

In that Flaubert class, I created a performance with two other students which combined parts of Madame Bovary with passages from Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Perpetual Orgy, his book-length essay on Bovary. In it, Vargas Llosa writes of a time when he felt “stubborn despair” and to cope with his depression, he read and re-read the scene of Emma’s suicide (spoiler). “This fictional suffering neutralized the suffering I was experiencing in real life,” he writes. “Emma was killing herself in order that I might live.” (p. 16-17. The pencil marks I made on my copy in 1991 to highlight this passage are still there.

As a depressed (though not exactly suicidal) person myself, I found this passage very moving and my fellow student performers and I incorporated it along with the scene from the novel where Emma eats the arsenic. But something about our tone was off; maybe we were parodying this overly emotional identification? Maybe the comic part of the tragicomic scene of Emma stuffing arsenic in her mouth was what we wanted to accentuate? Some students tittered, and then Paul himself began to laugh, which gave permission for the whole class to laugh. I was fairly devastated at the conclusion of our performance, despite the enthusiastic applause of my classmates.

Paul could tell that we were surprised and that I was upset, so after a little break we talked about the performance as a class. He pointed out ways that some of our decisions that seemed to indicate an ironic detachment worked against the audience understanding of the parts of the scene that were more serious and to be taken at face value. He explained how he responded as an audience member, that he felt there were two ways to take things, and at a certain point he “jumped in the boat” of taking it all as an arch, humorous commentary, and the rest of the class got in that boat with him. It was kind, it was perceptive and instructive, and, as per Mary Zimmerman, he took us very seriously.

Paul also loved mock-seriousness; he was an expert troll. But where today’s internet troll says absurd things with a straight face in order to sow discord and confusion, I think Paul employed his deadpan to try and puncture pretension and bullshit, not exempting his own. Searching the web for his writings or people writing about him, I came across volume 13, issue 1 of Liminalities, a special issue devoted to “Paul Edwards: Selected Video Essays, 2004-2016.” In the first of these, “The Video Essay: Performing Beyond Liveness,” Paul opens with a quote from Wilde, “The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.” The video continues with Paul introducing himself as the President of Northwestern University, where he heaps praise on “Paul Edwards” by attributing every success and publication of the Performance Studies Department to Paul rather than the actual creator.

I didn’t take his “paranoia” class, one of his signature courses at NU where students read and performed work that explored the US Cold War era. But I heard of how he singled out a particular student for the entire quarter, giving that student by name extra assignments on the syllabus, ending the exam with something like “If your name is not [student], you have completed the exam. If you are [student] please continue and answer the questions on the following pages.”

During the Cheever stories production, These Good and Gentle People, Paul directed us to perform certain parts with a straight face and to trust that the context would help the audience understand the intent. I remember him saying “play it straight, but play it slant,” and referring us to Emily Dickinson. But today I see that her poem begins “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —” so perhaps I’m remembering wrong.

And remembering is a big part of the problem here. I haven’t seen Paul in over 30 years. I believe I took the photo above on the occasion of our last meeting, some time within a year after I’d graduated in 1992. So, as I told Jen in replying to her message letting me know Paul had died, I’m finding that I mostly have feelings and impressions, not specific memories. And I’m grateful for those feelings, and I’m grateful that I will always have Flaubert and Children of Paradise and The Perpetual Orgy and John Cheever to remind me of Paul, but I wish I had a little more.

I was struck with a feeling of recognition when read another newsletter a few days after Paul died. Bebe Santa-Wood (whom I don’t really know, but I know her parents, Mr. Santa and Ms Wood) writes a newsletter called Cracks, and in a section of the most recent newsletter, she writes about struggling to remember the details of her very close friend who died years ago. You should read it in full the section titled “Thing 3: Llorando,” but I will excerpt here. Bebe writes,

Grief is a weird thing as time goes on. I’ve written in the past in Cracks about a friend of mine who died a decade ago. He was more than my best friend. I feel like the connection we had was something special, one of those precious relationships that can transform you, make you more yourself, bring out the best in you.

When he died, one of my greatest fears was forgetting him, and an even deeper fear of knowing I would grow older, and he would always be young. …

But the funny thing about loss is that as time goes by—it’s not quite like that. You do forget some things and every time you realize you’ve lost knowledge about that person it feels like you are losing them all over again. I can’t remember some of our jokes anymore—there’s a time I remember us dying laughing in high school biology class and I can only remember half of what set us off (I know the phrase “turkey trouble” was involved.) I distinctly remember crying so hard from laughing that my teacher was genuinely concerned. I suppose that’s what’s important. It could have been a really good joke? But I can’t remember it. If I forgot that, what else have I forgotten I’m not even aware of? Synapses crack and there goes someone you love.

She goes on to write about creating new memories with someone who has passed. It’s really great, go read it.

There’s only one way for me to end this memorial. I think that when Paul was telling us to “play it slant” he was talking about the way we entered the stage for These Good and Gentle People: vamping to Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” If there’s an afterlife, I hope that Paul had the chance to deadpan Peggy Lee’s line upon arrival.