A whirligig is a spinning top, pinwheel or other whirling device, revolving madly in a repetitive cycle. The term has become an idiom for giddy motion: a merry-go-round, the social whirl or, as Shakespeare put it, “the whirligig of time [that] brings in his revenges.”
Mac Wellman’s play of that title, playing this weekend at Mount Holyoke College, is a brief, dizzying spin through Reagan-era America and intergalactic space. Set in a bus station waiting room, that trusty souls-in-transit metaphor, it brings together a teenage runaway with green hair (played by Jane Bradley) and a silver-skinned spaceman (Bryna Turner), both of them adrift in alien territory.
She’s fleeing a morally bankrupt America epitomized by the parental home, where ’60s idealism has morphed into suburban complacency. “Mom, the hippie honey… Castro, Che Guevera, born-again, Jews for Jesus, puke. …Summer home somewhere. CDs and money market. Double yawn.”
He’s been wandering from planet to planet since his own—called Elmer—was destroyed in a thermonuclear accident. “We call it The Big Boo-Boo. Gizmo out of control on 37th level. Kablooey.”
The dialogue in Whirligig is playful and elliptical, and so is the plot. The action, punctuated by surprising demises and a double-twist ending, is interlaced with Joycean, stream-of-consciousness monologues—”rants,” as director Roger Babb calls them—that lay bare the characters’ psychic terrain.
Babb is a former colleague of Wellman, whose skewed social satire and pyrotechnic wordplay made him an influential figure in late-century experimental theater. “I love Mac’s plays,” Babb says. “They’re really funny and so much fun to do.” This one, written in 1989 at the beginning of the first Bush presidency, has prescient echoes of today’s perturbed politics (the whirligig of time).
The young woman at the bus station has a fantasy (or is it?) of a sister who is a Girl Hun, a warrior horsewoman who eats raw meat and kills with bow and arrow. But her real-life sister (played by three different women), who shows up to castigate her as a “rotten-minded little good-for-nothing slut,” is no neo-Amazon. She’s a domesticated liberal who enjoys “choral readings of the New Republic” and, in her own self-righteous rant, scolds her sibling for dissing her destiny: “Have you thought about Smith College, about Bergdorf Goodman, our holidays at Key West?”
Although two of the play’s characters are specified as male, the Mount Holyoke cast is all women. It’s not just a function of the all-female campus, but an aesthetic choice. “That fluidity of gender is something I’ve always been interested in,” Babb explains. “I really like the way it gets confused and complicated.”
Mac Wellman has described himself as “a cheerful pessimist.” Whirligig is a cynically whimsical look at an America that has become a gizmo out of control.”
Whirligig: Dec. 9-12, $5/general, $3/students and seniors, Rooke Theatre, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, (413) 538-2406 or email rookeboxoffice@gmail.com.
