Landscape of the theater

I finally read John Guare’s play, Landscape of the Body. I loved it–a dream of flesh and song made of “what if . . .” and grounded in a gritty time in his city. (I was curious because someone told me that my writing reminded them of his… Ah, I said sagely—then decided I’d better catch up!)

However I note the following about this play, to measure the distance between 1977 and 2009’s production landscape:
1. It has a cast of 11
2. In the preface, the author wrote this:
“I finished the play. I wrote the title page. I wrote a page dedicating it to Adele. I was exhausted. I was thirsty. I put the phone back on the hook. Bill finished reading the play a few pages after I finished typing. He said, “I’ll produce it.” “When?” “It’s May. Let’s do it in July.”

 

Guardian piece on female playwrights

Finally–from Max Stafford-Clark, writing in the Guardian– an intelligent and thoughtful piece about gender and playwriting. 
Looking for the next bright young female playwright? | Max Stafford-Clark | Stage | guardian.co.uk.
Notable in this piece and absent from recent American articles is a sense of history–he points out the many excellent female writers (in the UK) who have been breathlessly sensationalized as “the next hot young thing” and then discarded and forgotten.

I’m so glad to read this. The breathy American valorization of the “hot new thing” which infects every level of the theatre, not just the media, is another obstacle on the formidably difficult path of building a body of work and a career in the theatre. It’s product oriented, not art-oriented, and certainly not artist-oriented. If everyone constantly demands world premieres from 22 year olds (for “workshops” or perhaps one world premiere, then the scrap heap) the theatre will look like, well— what it does. Callow, shallow and undercooked in the “development” fringes, and hoary, old and conservative in the regional dinosaurs.

 

Homeland Guantanamo

Homeland Guantanamo.

This is an amazing site. It’s set up as an interactive memorial and activism site to honor the memories of those who’ve died in US immigration detention. It’s counter-writing in that it writes back in what’s been erased or stone-walled by the official record.

Connects to what I’ve been thinking about ways to stretch theatre to interact with audiences in new ways– and my long-standing concern with detention and refugee rights (Slow Falling Bird and other plays).

What is a memorial? The word suggests materiality, place, mossy overgrown stones.  An internet memorial?  Maybe the internet is the perfect non-place, space to honor ghosts. inter

 

Opening the door

I’ve been thinking for a while of how to find and walk through the other door. The door to doing the creative work on my own terms, actively finding collaborators, writing what comes and what excites me rather than starting with “product” and “market” and the hope that my work will be “picked up”.

 

Ubu film

Here’s an amazing online archive of avant-garde film and sound.
Thanks to papertheatre.org for pointing me towards this.

 

On Boston

“And as we know, the pilgrims who founded our country hated the theater, because they hated sex and the irrational. (Have you ever wondered why Boston is not a theater town?)”

I have to say, this made me laugh out loud. I’m quoting Sarah Ruhl, from a longer essay she posted on the fabulous website and writing engine papertheatre.org

I’m quoting without doing justice to the context here; it’s well worth reading Sarah’s full essay, which advises, among other things, not to send your characters to reform school (in the guise of making them “learn something” during their incarceration in your play).

 

Projects — UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities

Projects — UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

So, this is what I’ll be up to for the next month or so as one of the writers of the Virtual Performance Factory.  I’m fascinated to be learning about these new modes of writing/ designing.

I’ve been thinking lately about the need to find other paths through my life as a playwright.  The regional model is timid and broken; it’s about product and (as Morgan Jeness puts it) serving the oligarchy.  And frankly, my plays are not going to function well as “product” in those contexts.  In one of the most thoughtful reviews of Trojan Barbie, the writer said “The playwright is not interested in our comfort, though there are many entertaining moments in her writing. Instead, she asks that we consider the suffering of people we do not know in lands we may never visit. “

And that is true, but it doesn’t mean I want to insult or alienate an audience.  I want them to come with me in looking at something painful, but in a form that’s beautiful and compelling so that we can bear to do it.  I think a feeling of truth in art, and moments of beauty (formal or thematic) are rare joys and the pathways to these experiences for audiences are systematically blocked through lack of arts education, a frantically materialist culture, and the deeply patronizing view that audiences aren’t up to–nor up for– complex, intense, problem-posing art.

However, as Spencer Golub has said repeatedly, it’s all in the frame.  Perhaps it’s just that they(we) are not up for being sat in rows and made to look at the same thing together any more.  The blackboard, the stage, the monument… there’s something about those forms that seems to recede into the 20th century already.

The question, then: what IS the relationship (or array of possible relationships) between work made for performance and its audience?  Maybe it’s fractal rather than perspectival now.  The relationship of a physically unified audience to a singular spectacle on a proscenium stage dates to Renaissance discoveries in painting, and is organized around the God-king’s eye.  Now we are all tiny gods with our insect-eye computers and iPhones, and perspective is multiple and dispersed, although still very much formed in and by a field of power relations.   This new connectivity is both too intimate and too fractal for the stage.  Yet there’s something about bodily presence that I still believe we crave–it’s telling that isolation is the least bearable of stresses in captivity.

So that’s what I want to figure out. How to write supple, intimate, fractal performance texts that have form and shape but function as strands in a web of dialogue with an audience.   Preferably by June.  Any clues, post ‘em here!  And I’ll write more about the VPF as it unfolds.

 

Inaugural Playwrights’ Festival — The Harvard University Gazette

Inaugural Playwrights’ Festival — The Harvard University Gazette.

What with this and Trojan Barbie, it’s been a really busy semester!

The Playwrights Festival went really well and affirmed my conviction that you can’t just teach playwriting by sitting in a room sharing writing and talking about plays– though that’s important too.  Writers need collaborators and the breath and body of actors to learn their craft and bring plays to life.

 

Virtual performance factory

Have just started work as a writer in a team building a virtual performance environment, as part of the Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology (CHAT) Festival at UNC. We’re working with a game company (Icarus) in North Carolina to create a live/ virtual performance, where the writers create “rooms” with story-lines, avatars, etc. for a live audience to walk through. I’m very excited about this commission which mixes dramatic writing skills with learning a whole lot about game theory and structure. I love the challenge to place the audience as a “player” and to build multiple possible pathways through the room/ story/ game. It will also be interesting to see how the team of writers can create connections between the different rooms/ stories.

I’ve been thinking lately about the need to expand theatrical practice and theory to new audiences and media.

 

constellation

OK, here I am in the revision phase of my dissertation and I’ve ground to a squeaky halt. So here goes—blog, save me from brain death! In trying to revise a chapter (“The Rules of Appearance”) I’m linking the work of American Playwright W. David Hancock with Forced Entertainment and also with Tadeusz Kantor. All of these “post-dramatic” artists refer me back to the verbatim theatre which like a dark star pulls on these aesthetically incompatible theatres through its shared fascination with the actor-as-object, with staging real things, with objects that testify to their own presence.