Out and about

I’ve been out in the argy-bargy theatre world lately. In meetings and seeing shows. A nasty recent epiphany (talking to a financial sponsor/ board member at a recent opening): In the US, there IS no “not for profit” theatre any more. The rhetoric continues, but the reality is that it’s all tap-dancing for the dollar. And with less funding (and the cultural argument for serious arts subsidy pretty much lost–hello, the US can’t even get first world health care) there’s more emphasis on the whims of the wealthy who want to see their money effectively and flatteringly deployed. Outcomes! Outreach! Messages! Is this what art is about or for? Imagine this formula applied to science and what it would do for innovation and discovery, which usually presents itself as heresy or nonsense —at first. So much for R&D in the arts, which basically runs on failure in order to find stuff out.

I think of the art and artists who have ripped a hole in the fabric of my cosmos–Beckett, Kane, Churchill, Parks–and I’m damn sure I’d never have seen their work if it depended on the current arts climate in the US to thrive. Instead I would have seen cute, quirky, topical and earnest little fables from artists who don’t threaten the bottom line, who are “topical” in a slug-line kind of way, and with whose bio the producers can tick the hot, or young, or minority, box on the funding application.

OK, I’m taking a Tylenol and going to bed.

 

Will Ferrel’s health insurance video

OK, everyone has already posted this.. but that’s because it’s really good!

And, while we’re at it, there’s also this which is even funnier: (No. 37… yep, that’s a big number.)

Coming from a country with a public option (we call it, er, Medicare) I can attest that most people actually quite like it. It’s not very exciting and dramatic or character-forming to be able to break a tooth without risking bankruptcy and eviction, but there you have it. People get used to it. All sorts of people, mostly not left-wing politically active types. Although I’ve always wondered about librarians… and bus drivers… and nannies…

 

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.

 

What is it?

Is it a play? Or an arrangement of windows all looking in towards an invisible object? I want patterns of light in my mind to turn into sound. I want to hurl the damn thing across the room. I want to write the inside of a train that turns into the world, under pressure of human darkness. I want to be ten again and in the rapture and self-forgetfulness of writing my first novel– AND drawing the pictures!

Why should it be a play just because I think “I write plays”? There’s something in there that needs more air, needs to move. I feel like an itchy exploding caterpillar inside its tight cocoon. I feel like this a lot lately— that the shape of what I’m doing is too small and I need to bust the mold. There’s an ignition switch just out of reach… I know it… right now I can’t find it.

It doesn’t help to measure the work of writing against the likely outcome. But that’s a coward’s detachment tactic.

 

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

 

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.

 

Dying for a visa

I thought I was done for a while with writing plays about war and refugees– so far, two full length pieces and two shorter plays.

However, I have been thinking about this a lot.

From the New York Times:
“He was 17 when he came to New York from Hong Kong in 1992 with his parents and younger sister, eyeing the skyline like any newcomer. Fifteen years later, Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons.

But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.”

This happened in Rhode Island. From the Wyatt prison’s viewpoint, it’s nakedly about money–the need for prisons to make a buck. Human rights don’t even figure near that bottom line. Prisons should not be run for profit. And nobody should be detained indefinitely without trial. I”ve seen what happens in Australia when this was done to asylum seekers. Suicides, mental illnesses, lives destroyed.

What it’s about from Homeland Security’s POV is truly hard to fathom. A combination of malice and stupidity?

 

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.

 

What I don’t miss about Australia

… the sports obsession and misogyny.

BBC – Nick Bryant’s Australia.