Theater Has a Gender Bias? Do Tell – NYTimes.com

Well worth reading!  I went to this town hall meeting and it was well presented and thoughtful work.  Lots to think about in terms of the implications… especially the point that plays by women with women protagonists, are rated lower by artistic directors and are far less likely to be produced, than plays by either men or women with male protagonists.

This last doesn’t surprise me because our performance culture–driven by movies rather than plays–is overwhelmingly skewed towards male protagonists and the films young men want to see (starring some pumped-up version of themselves).  How could this profit-driven, movie-based model NOT affect the way people receive and program stories told in the theatre?

Theater Has a Gender Bias? Do Tell – NYTimes.com.

 

Bears…

…and wild turkeys, deer, buzzards, an eagle, toads, frogs, chipmunks. Thunderstorms then beautiful blue skies with brilliant clouds, tonight a clear sky with stars. I’m at the Millay Colony and it’s stunning. Here to write a draft of a new play, and after a week I realized the strange lumpy thing inside the piles of pages was a sort of two-headed creature that wanted to be two different plays. So now I have two small beginnings and think it’s time for a beer.

 

SIEVX Memorial Project

SIEVX Memorial Project.

Home grown Australian art response to the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Australian waters– sinking of an overloaded boat full of refugees whom the Coast Guard failed to rescue.

 

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

 

Theatre’s new stage | The Australian

Theatre’s new stage | The Australian.

Very thoughtful and cogent article by Alison Croggon on the shift towards an Australian theatre with more formal variation than what she calls “decadent naturalism”.  Particularly of note: the point that new kinds of work come out of different collaborative models.

 

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?

 

On the road

Tomorrow I’m headed to Millay Colony for three weeks to do some writing. And some staring into space and snoozing in the afternoon. This year has been the Year of the Suitcase. And I’m still terrible at packing!

One day I will live and work in the same city with my sweetheart and not constantly be on the train or getting a plane somewhere. I just planted tomatoes and now they will have to grow on their own til I get back in July.

Been missing music lately—playing it and writing it. The side of my brain that dreams and doodles really needs some time. Enough of being organized and efficient and goal-oriented for a while.

 

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”.