This week, for a very limited run, Kinetic Theatre Company is producing Sam Tsoutsouvas’s performance of his own adaptation of Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street.” It’s a small chamber piece – both simple in production values and compact in stage time – but it offers outsized emotional and philosophical rewards.
Tsoutsouvas plays Melville’s narrator, a lawyer whose work consists primarily in the preparation and execution of legal paperwork – bonds, mortgages, titles, deeds, that sort of thing. The story is set in the mid-nineteenth century, so he employs clerks – “scriveners” – to make the necessary copies of documents. The narrator’s tale centers on one such scrivener, Bartleby, a “motionless young man” he hires to augment his staff when his workload increases. Bartleby is, at first, a welcome addition to the office: he puts himself to the task of copying papers with assiduousness. But when the narrator asks him to assist with verifying copies by reading them aloud with the other scriveners, he quietly refuses: “I would prefer not to.”
From there, things get troublesome for the narrator. Bartleby’s behavior grows increasingly odd: he soon stops working altogether, instead spending time staring out the window, yet also never seems to leave – indeed, refuses to leave – the office. The narrator is torn between his empathy and sense of fellow-feeling for the obviously troubled Bartleby, and his irritation at the man’s irrational and stubborn behavior. Eventually the narrator moves offices, leaving Bartleby behind; the next set of tenants has Bartleby arrested for vagrancy, and by the story’s end Bartleby has died of starvation behind bars, “preferring not to” eat.
Melville’s portrait of this strange, quiet man – whom Hernan Diaz has labeled “an unclassifiable weirdo” – has a lot of mystery at its core. On one hand, Bartleby seems to be suffering from a mental health crisis – today he might be diagnosed with depression, or schizoaffective disorder – but Melville’s narrator, lacking the language of modern psychology, has no framework through which to understand his behavior, so he remains puzzled and mystified by his scrivener’s mental paralysis. On the other hand, the narrative’s setting – Wall Street, the center of capitalist profit-mongering – opens the question of what constitutes a “normal” psychology and mode of being: that is, which is insane, Bartleby’s refusal to work, or the expectation that he will capitulate to the urgency of the market, hustling about and selling his talents for four cents per page? At the same time, the writing also leaves open the possibility that Bartleby is in some way a projection, or double, of the narrator himself, a representation of his own misgivings or doubts about his work and his contributions to the greater good.
Tsoutsouvas’s compelling adaptation and performance is as much – if not more – about the narrator’s emotional and psychological journey as it is about Bartleby’s withdrawal from rationality. The narrator struggles to order his response to Bartleby and to sort out his own ethical and moral responsibilities to the situation. At times, he seems to feel genuinely sorry for Bartleby, recognizing in him a lonely and suffering fellow-being; at others, he is self-congratulatory, observing that his generous tolerance of Bartleby’s difficult presence allows him to “cheaply purchase a delicious self approval”; and at still other moments he finds himself feeling resentful and angry at the way Bartleby has manipulated and taken advantage of his indulgence and kindness. Tsoutsouvas brings a gorgeous nuance and clarity to this complex and at times contradictory constellation of feelings and thoughts, limning a portrait of a man who is at once well-intentioned and also cognizant of the need to set boundaries and work within the constraints set by society, rational (or irrational) as those may be.
Under Andrew Paul’s direction, Tsoutsouvas also builds a lovely tension over the course of the hour-long performance: the sense of impending catastrophe that hovers over the telling of this tale makes it almost feel as if you are listening to a ghost story. Intimate as this performance is, it will certainly make you shiver.
This piece was originally published at The Pittsburgh Tatler.
