You know me. Well, some of you do. I like to dress eclectically and mix up Target with Givenchy, although my Burberry raincoat will not see the light of day ever again, being banned to the closet. In addition, death has been a maid-in-waiting way too many times during my 6.5 decades. So Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer and playwright who received the 2004 Nobel Prize in literature, should be close to my heart. Some of her main themes, suffusing almost everything she writes, are death and fashion – not necessarily in that order.  They pop up in many of her “ novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power” (words in  italics are from the Nobel Committees announcement.) 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfriede_Jelinek

I like her fierceness, but not her voice. “Mein Ton ist Hohn,” she once proclaimed, “my voice is contempt.”

Last week I photographed rehearsal for a staged reading of one of her plays, Jackie O., presented here in town by the incomparable Boom Arts. The play features a monologue by Jackie Onassis, musing about her life, about the role clothes play in hiding the emptiness of her existence or providing the exoskeleton for someone slowly disappearing.  It was a sparse, discerning show directed by Alice Reagan from Barnard, played elegantly and at times with such vulnerability by JoAnn Johnson that you could hear your own heart cracking.

http://www.orartswatch.org/global-voices-get-a-fair-hearing/

Now,why all this during the week devoted to “connectedness?” The play made it brilliantly clear how Jackie Onassis was connected to the corpses around her, literally dragging them by a rope wherever she went. Not just her murdered husband and brother in law, but the many miscarriages she endured due to venerial disease that her husband’s philandering had inflicted upon her. Psychologically she was even more connected to visions and memories of JFK’s mistresses, Marilyn Monroe chief among them. An invisible triangular bond between wife, husband and lover choked her thinking, forcing her into attack mode alternating with extreme defensiveness.

It is scary to see the long lasting effects of moral violations, taking hold in our hearts and making our brains into garbage cans filled with obsession, even when death has long removed the players.

(By sheer coincidence, this is what I found yesterday at Jefferson High school in North PDX.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this in the NYT last evening. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/world/europe/letters-from-jacqueline-kennedy-to-the-man-she-didnt-marry.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Let’s hope Jackie found some peace in her connection to Onassis.