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.”

 

Trojan Barbie in print

Theatre Forum, Issue 35 includes my play Trojan Barbie, with accompanying article by Robert Scanlan, along with other interesting fare such as Kirby Malone’s “Silence and Darkness: A Live Movie for the Cellphone Age”.  Malone and White have been working for years at George Mason Univeristy to produce “live movies”– a form of live performance that incorporates film, video projection and virtual elements.

 

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.

 

Angel wrestling

I’m at the Millay Colony, a beautiful quiet artists’ colony in upstate New York. Today I saw and heard frogs, deer, and lots of trees and sky. Wild thyme and strawberries in the grass. On the door of the studio I’m in (where people carve their name after their stay) someone has written THIS ENORMOUS SIMPLICITY. And that’s about right. In the quiet lurks whatever you’ve brought with you–the fear and dark as well as the inspiration— and here you are to wrestle it into form.

In THE SATANIC VERSES there’s a wonderful section where a man, perhaps the Prophet (it’s a while since I read it) climbs up a mountain every day to wrestle in a cave with an angel. The angel always beats him to a pulp, and Rushdie writes (I’m paraphrasing) that the Prophet was never sure whether the angel had invented him, needing a sparring mate–or whether the angel was formed from the cord of longing emanating from the center of his own body. (In any case, the angel kicked ass).

Today, by those terms, I chickened out. I spent the day moving furniture and sharpening pencils while the angel crouched on the door-frame and mocked me for being too scared to step into the ring (“into the wring” I almost wrote. Or rote.) Tomorrow… I’ll dip my toe in. I will.

 

Fear, bad teeth and comedy

Just had a lovely evening with a playwright friend, talking about the drive towards “uplifiting’ comedies in the theatre at the moment. The conventional wisdom seems to be that in grim times, people want to laugh. But when people tell you that a play is “too dark”–what are they saying? Too dark for whom? (And what would Toni Morrison make of the “dark/ light” poetics of cheer vs. gloom here?) There’s always a ring of fear behind this assertion of the need for comedy. Now, I like to laugh too, but I don’t like ONLY to laugh in the theatre. I want to feel connection, and truth, and for the world to look different afterwards because my perception has been re-aligned by the force of another vision of the world.

 

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.

 

Post on Trojan Barbie

A blog review from Bam’s Brambles on Trojan Barbie that considers the question of the relative value we place on Western vs. “other” lives.

And another review in the Harvard Crimson:
The Harvard Crimson :: Arts :: ‘Barbie’ Revives, Revises Tragedy.

 

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.