Friday, April 09, 2004

 

A Letter To The Government:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Recently, a concern of yours has come to my attention. It seems you are worried about an asteroid hitting the planet Earth.

Gentlemen, fear not, for I have your answer. I have invented Asteroid Destroying Briefs, or ADBs. They are fully protecting me from asteroids. I am making this revolutionary device available to you for the low low cost of USD 99,999,999.99. If you will send me a check or money order for the above amount, I will begin deploying this invention around the planet. Except, of course, where you wouldn't MIND an asteroid hitting. Say no more.

What? I'm wearing a pair of ADBs right now! And I don't see any asteroids around, do you? Besides the ones in my ADBs, of course! HoHO! That's one that always makes the boys in the lab break a beaker.

This now concludes my incoherent, childish post. Have a good weekend.

posted by Dan 12:29 AM
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Thursday, April 08, 2004

 

Saints Preserve Us!

More theatre goop head. Next week, I promise, will be nothing but short riffs on random pictures torn from Google. For those who are ready, prepare for the incohesiveness!

We were performing our "street theatre" piece. We were performing it in the cafeteria in the Student Union. It was not going well. People weren't looking at us. No laughter. Just glares of annoyance. We were at the part about a man who took the job of a guard dog, and became a dog. So my friend Josh, playing the dog-man, jumped on a table occupied by four sorority sisters, and began barking at them. Josh is a big man, not to be mistaken for a honeybee, especially when he is barking in your face. Yet the sisters behaved as if he were a honeybee, one better avoided than provoked. They gathered their trays and calmly walked away. I had to admire their poise.

Later in the show, Josh took a baseball bat and Babe Ruthed a saltshaker to the other side of the room. Rhett, another performer, had some lines that contained a particularly nasty word. He took to screaming that word at passers-by. I don't remember what I did to try to get attention, but it was probably something spaztastic.

This was my first experience with political theatre, and I've never quite recovered.

Isaac Butler at Parabasis sent out an APB soliciting opinions on political theatre. Some responded immediately to the call. I didn't. I cringed at that phrase: "political theatre." Then I wondered, What's wrong with me? I like theatre about what's happening in the world. Caryl Churchill's "Far Away" was, for me, a favorite of the past few years. So why does the phrase "political theatre" make me want to jump headfirst into a bucket of "Everybody Loves Raymond"?

The thing that drove me nuts about the response to the "street theatre" piece was that I knew it was funny. It tackled questions about all kinds of things, but it was also a knee-slapper. We had the funny hats and silly voices in fifth gear. How could people ignore the comedy stylings of Big Guy and Little Guy, wearing hats made of newspaper, pretending to be sailors, punctuating everything with "Arrrrr!" At the least, that should make you slow your pace as you pass the circus. Yet people walked on by. My feelings about the play were later confirmed when we performed it in a theater. Suddenly we were getting big laughs, great applause. After the show, several people told me how glad they were to see a college project that was actually entertaining.

The difference was, of course, in the audience. The second one was amenable to the ideas behind, and the very existence of, our little dog-and-squirrel show. The first could care less if we spontaneously combusted. They probably hoped we did.

A performance can transform an audience, intellectually, politically, spiritually, but the audience must be predisposed to that transformation. Jerzy Grotowski. recognized this. Since he was only interested in theatre that transforms it audience, he concluded that his audience would be limited, select, a kind of elite. "Elite," that's a word that makes the blood of any democrat (small 'd', note) boil. But he was being very practical, if not as a democrat, then as a capitalist. He knew his work wouldn't appeal to the large sections of the market (and it didn't), so he made a virtue of necessity and declared his absolute appeal to a niche market. It's focusing on a demographic. It's what successful television programmers do.

Let's face the ugly example. Take a performance of Grotowski, or Richard Foreman, or some other artist whose stated goal is to transform the perceptions of the audience. Force it on a random selection of theatregoers, my highly scientific guess is the results would be about like this:

• 5% transformed


• 5% intrigued


• 15% amused


• 25% confused


• 30% bored


• 10% annoyed


• 5% angry


• 5% screaming at the poor intern in the box office, demanding their money back

And don't hand me a plateful of, "All those are legitimate responses." They may all be legit, but most of them run counter to the artist's stated intention, unless their declared intention takes into account that they're not going to land a majority of those fish.

I know this is a bit far afield. I'm driving with my headlights off.

I am, at heart, a hoofer. Not literally, of course, I couldn't dance my way through a round of the "Hokey Pokey." But I love to entertain an audience, preferably a sizable portion of the audience. Some people don't like to do that. They believe that an ideal performance makes half the audience stand up and applaud, and the other half stand up and cry, "Shame." Sometimes I do too. I make no promises not to contradict myself tomorrow. Today, I like a song.

Perhaps it’s a flaw in my character, but I have a streak of the populist, and I like a bit of pop in my shows. Now, I'm not about to give the old "spoonful of sugar" advice regarding political theatre. It's a given that, when telling your story, it's best not to spit mucus on your listener. My argument is that, while the stated intention of most political theatre, of any sort, is to change the mind and spirit of its audience, it is in actuality merely girding the converted in that audience.

Yes, apparantly my brilliant point is about preaching to the choir. Hush, my wee one.

It's a real problem. Take a non-theatre, political example: the anti-Iraqi-war movement. What a catastrophic failure that is. Yes, failure. If its intention is to stop the war, then it has failed. I think it failed because it didn't try to change the minds of those who were pro-war, or even those who were sitting on the fence. It primarily tried to hype up people who enjoy expressionist puppet plays and romantic radicalism (this includes me). In that sense, it was a complete success. But there was still that war thing.

I have no grand conclusion. All I can postulate is that the reason I cringe at the phrase "political theatre" is that, when a show claims that moniker, it's usually hypocritical about its own agenda. It doesn't seek to change me. It's just mixing to its own rhetoric. It's like a condo salesperson that's pushing you hard on the joy this timeshare will bring into your life, because they are really trying to convince themselves that their life is not joyless. At such a performance, I will have the same experience I could have at home, pulling out my toenails with rusty tweezers.

I have fond memories of that "street theatre" show, and especially the people involved. But as far as life-changing productions? Pretty low on the list. As far as, "Wow, I really got to the crowd tonight?" Way low. That honor belongs to another piece of political theatre...but that's for another time.

posted by Dan 1:54 PM
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Wednesday, April 07, 2004

 

Is This Thing On?

Today my playwriting group met. I brought in three of the four monologues I posted yesterday. The monologues are all, to my thinking, comic. Light. Meringue-like. Suitable for audition or class. No blood will be drawn.

So one of our group's lovely actresses begins reading Luanna. It clips right along. Good audience response. It's amusing me.

She describes to her mother how she murders her own spirit in a dream. Plenty of laughs. Golden.

She says that things have been going well for her since she killed her spirit. More laughs. Solid.

Then she says a couple of lines which made me giggle out loud when I wrote them: "I never really understood you, Mom, until I killed my spirit. I mean, you had dad to kill yours..."

Not only no laughs, not only dead silence, but a palpable body blow to the collective rib-cage of the audience. It was like she'd just described some violent trauma.

Needless to say, the piece never recovered its comic meringue. By the time we got to the end of the monologue, it had become very dark, and the punch line was more like a stab-in-the-throat line. The weird part is, the audience liked it. They just had a very different experience with it than I imagined they would.

"I mean, you had Dad to kill yours..." Meanwhile, Matsushita has a guy say he stabbed a nun to death, and everybody yuks it up.

posted by Dan 5:11 PM
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Tuesday, April 06, 2004

 

Mono-rama

I've polished four monologues first written on Venal Scene, and posted them to my playwriting site.

I'm not big into the monologue thing. When I do write them, they strike me as jumping off points for larger plays. A couple of these pieces feel like that, but they also feel like they can stand on their own.

Besides, I'm constantly getting hit for audition monologues, and I should have something up.

#1. Rene (teens, comic)
#2. Luanna (20s-40s, comic)
#3. Agnese (20s, comic)
#3. Terry (20s-40s, comic)

more monos

posted by Dan 1:00 PM
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Monday, April 05, 2004

 

lookie here

This relates to the previous post, but I didn't want to bury it beneath the mountain of theatre-weenie yapping.

One of the actors in The Lower East Side Project that was particularly funny was Brian Sack. He played an unlovable loser, a spectacular loser, one that has no redeeming value. Yet I couldn't take my eyes off.

Here's his blog, www.banterist.com. It's much funnier than mine. So is a paper clip.

UPDATE: A good place to start with Brian is this open letter to his wife.

posted by Dan 1:35 PM
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The Lower East Side Project

Oh boy! Delicious theater goop ahead! For those on a diet from that, the science behind Pop Rocks.

And a disclaimer: What follows isn't a review of the play, the actors, or the director. The show I saw was a work-in-progress, billed as such, the and ticket price (free) reflected it. These are my thoughts on what's on the workhorse, for those who like shop talk.

I went see the work-in-progress presentation of the show my friend Kayla Solomon is the dramaturg for, The Lower East Side Project. It was at Tribeca Art Center, or as I like to call it, Hidden Theater Fortress. The project's director, Karen Sommers, created the piece out of the improvisations of actors. The current incarnation of the piece exemplifies the benefits and pitfalls of that method.

The genesis of the project is intriguing. A nameless citizen found acetate radio discs on the sidewalk. The citizen learned that the discs contained the only known recordings of "Rabbi Rubin's Board of Peace and Justice," a staple of Yiddish radio in the 40s and 50s, and perhaps one of the first "on-air courts." Thank Yahweh that the word "eBay" didn't pop up in said citizen's eyes, accompanied by cash register sounds. Instead, the discs found their way to NPR. You can read more about the show here, but basically Rabbi Rubin served as an adjudicator and counselor for the Jewish community around the Delancey Street neighborhood in New York. Thinks "Judge Judy" meets "Dr. Phil," with a heap of that old-old-old time religion thrown in.

Karen Sommers heard the Board recordings as part of NPR's series in conjunction with the the Yiddish Radio Project. However, that ended up being merely the leaping point. As she developed her ideas for the piece, she became interested in the back-stories of three of the plaintiffs seeking the Rabbi's judgments. This is what she had her actors develop, using improvisational script development.

(For those who don't know the jargonese term "improv script development," here's brief explanation. For those who do, next paragraph please.)

Improvisational script creation is nothing new. It's a method used by Paul Sills, Second City and Caryl Churchill, to name a few. My undergrad playwriting teacher, Jon Lipsky is a big proponent of this method. I used it in his class to develop my first one-man show, which incarnated into my first play that was worth a damn, Toy Planet. The major challenge of it is that, if you're trying to create a story and not a series of disjointed moments, at some point the director needs to sit down and hammer out the structure of the play, or bring in a playwright to do so.

Actors are good at winging their way through individual scenes, but they can't think about big-picture stuff while they're doing it. If an actor is in the middle of the big scene with Molly and thinking, "How does what I'm going to say to Molly serve the overall story arc?" they will suck, guaranteed. They'll be, as the old saying goes, "in their head," and not acting on instinct.

Not that every theatre piece needs a story arc. Caryl Churchill's plays veer far from traditional story structure, and yet they're still great theatre. You don't even need a story to do theatre. Just ask "Fruit Cup" Richard Foreman. But don't, he's busy. Take my word for it.

Sommers doesn't seem to be interested in time-hopping, outer social forces, or any of the other tricks of Churchill's trade. She wasn't slinging the boobyhatch jive like Foreman. Her piece called for a conflict-crisis-climax-resolution structure, or at least the first three. The play left the character's problems unresolved, putting their problems before the rabbi (and us). Sommers' piece, though, appears to have a natural story arc imbedded in her concept, beginning with the characters kissing, boffing or cohabitating, and ending with the crisis that leads them to the Rabbi. But we need to see links in the chain from the beginning to the end. Not all, but some.

Illustration: one plot is about two sisters. We meet them after the funeral of the sisters' mother, while they are sitting shiva. At the end of the scene, we learn that one sister, who has been living with the mother until now, wants the other sister to invite her to move in. Great start, when we can see from the scene that the two sisters don't get along too well. But in each scene that follows, we don't see what's connecting one to the other, or why the characters are changing. We peek in their lives at some high-emotion points, but not necessarily points that further their story.

Doesn't mean I didn't like the piece. I did. I thought the actors gave terrific, connected performances, another benefit of letting them develop the characters themselves, instead of searching the text. But I think the next step is clear: figure out what the story is. A does what to B and why, and B answers by doing...what? This is oversimplification of a truly difficult and complex process. It's odd that it should be so, since our brains seek cause-and-effect automatically. That's the belt sander I would take to this piece. I'll be interested to see where Sommers goes with it.

* * *

self-important glossary:

Hidden Theater Fortress: The Tribeca Art Center is, I swear, located in the center of a labyrinth. Before going, in to find it, tie a string to the table leg of the guys handing out flyers out front. They're against something. Just say you're against it too. back

Improv Script Development:Normally a play is written by the playwright, and actors and director only come in after the script and story are, for the most part, etched. In the improv method, actors and director take rehearsals to improvise various scene possibilities and develop characters. The director chooses the favorite lines and segments from the improvisations, and turns those selections into a script, sometimes with the assistance of a playwright or dramaturg. back

Sitting Shiva: from Elliot Feldman's story at jbooks.com:

"Shiva," (shiv'a), is the Hebrew word for "seven". In Judaism, it refers to the seven-day mourning period, which begins immediately after a funeral and is observed at the home of the deceased. The Jewish custom of mourning for seven days is based on the verse in Genesis where Joseph mourns his father Jacob for a week. "Sitting shiva" refers to the low stools customarily used during this period of mourning. These seven intense days help survivors face the reality of a loved one's death, and help them move from mourning to living.

back

posted by Dan 1:14 PM
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