Theater: 4 Days in Bed premiers Thursday June 19th

If the political is personal, then Jonson Y. Kuhn and Ariel Marks catch us with our pants down. “4 Days In Bed,” a play based on a true story and co-written by Kuhn and Marks documents the confusion, exaggeration, banality, joy, aggravation, error and quirky brilliance of Denver, a penniless, frustrated writer, and Tucson, his girlfriend, a recovering alcoholic visiting him from Arizona.

Denver and Tucson are metaphors for geographical points, but they’re real, baffled, insecure, passionate people as well (as if it isn’t already challenging enough to be in a long-distance relationship). The play is distinctly set in the City of Denver, referencing such landmarks as the Mercury Café (where, of course, poets weekly brave the stage to lyrically expose those sensitive –and often gritty- matters of the heart). But as the affectionate, cranky, familiar, disjointed, tragic, humorous, well-trodden conversations between Denver and Tucson evolve, subtle layers of many a political controversy about Colorado arises as well. Tucson often implores Denver that he is never giving her enough –a nod toward Colorado’s own increasing problem with drought and growing population to provide enough reserved water for the greater southwestern United States. Tucson asks an even harder question later on, wondering if it’s possible to keep one moment between herself and Denver private, just for them, not for the demanding eyes and ears of an audience, –a question asked not only by the voters, protestors and lawmakers of the mile-high city, but by the rest of the country –do erotic relationships have a right to privacy (gay marriage, for example)?

The strange but all too necessary bedfellows of economy and love unravel and get tangled up with each other. Denver never has enough time, is emotionally distracted, too short on money, wants to have more resources to work on his plays, indulging the question: how does one (an artist, nonetheless) have time for love in the go-get-‘em landscape of a capitalist society, particularly one in the slow backward grind of a recession? (It should be added: only in recent centuries have courtly love and art been practiced by more than the wealthy classes as leisure activities). Need is the ever-present question in an itchy juxtaposition to addiction (in other words, a desperation of emptiness versus hyper-consumption).

It is here that perhaps what makes the vulnerability of this love story so uncomfortably universal, and the rather normal characters bigger than life, that Kuhn and Marks self-consciously trace the philosophical edges of romance. I am reminded of a passage from Decreation* by Canadian writer, Anne Carson, in an essay in which she critiques the poems of Sappho: “She is posing not the usual lovesong complaint ‘Why don’t you love me?’ but a deeper spiritual question, ‘What is it that love dares the self to do?’...Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.” Carson is discussing a more abstract poverty, a “poverty of self” as a spiritual process of loving selflessly, but there is still potential for a more visceral and actual poverty to her critique. “4 Days in Bed” definitely has a lot of that “usual lovesong” complaining (and why shouldn’t it, if it is to take a stab at genuinely recreating the wages of a "true" love affair) but this deeper, political, aesthetic investigation of “impoverished love” is there too. Denver declares something to the nature of this very idea in one charged argument, saying that until love really happens in his life, it’s in his best interest to be “as selfish as possible,” or in other words, that love is an all or nothing transaction. Countered to his point of view is Tuscon, grappling with her impoverished solitude of Cosmo magazines and AA meetings, more than once demanding that Denver “be more present” (“present” operating as a double-entendre to evoke a mutual gift-giving barter system, perhaps). The resolution (if there is one) in the end, is language, another daring battleground. Words (as any writer or lover knows) are the most compromising, incriminating, draining substance in human experience, the tools/crutches/burdens/flourishes with which we bankrupt ourselves in any personal relationship or act of creativity. The paradox of communication is that language is required to express the self, but it’s also how we give too much of the self away only to find (lose?) ourselves even more bewildered (after all, “What does communication communicate?”**).

“4 Days in Bed” is a story about two utterly selfish, confused, generous, obsessive, honest people. It’s about two dreamers sifting through their separate broken realities. It’s a tense condensation of a long-term affair into a 96-hour tryst. It’s about gender and personal, private lives located in a bigger, more difficult horizon of America, environment, urban metropolis and globe.

“4 Days in Bed” is playing at Crossroads Theater, 2590 Washington St, Thursday June 19-Saturday June 28th, at 7pm. $10/person, $5 if you wear pjs. For more info see www.denvercrossroads.com.

*Carson, Anne. Decreation. “How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God.” Vintage Books, New York: 2005.

**Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. “Signature, Event, Context.” Northwestern University Press, Illinois: 1988.