Tag Archives: SOSE

A Truthful Fiction

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

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Do you remember how you first got online, when you first “hung out” on the Internet?

Not just sent an email or double checked a piece of info via text message.  When you actually parked it in front of a computer and had whole conversations with someone who you likely had never met in the flesh.  Was it over IRC?  AOL chat room?  Telnet?  Or… did you MUD?  Did you MOO?

If You Can Get to Buffalo, now playing at Son of Semele Ensemble, takes a wild and fun look back into those days of invented reality and the sweetness, as well as the danger, of a space with no rules.

Assuming you’re not one of those millennials who reached puberty around the same time that Myspace or Facebook came online, and you remember sending pings, checking whois, and developing the ability to read a rapidly scrolling screen as half a dozen people “talked” at the same time, then you really know what made the virtual world…”real.”  Even though we had text _only_, no images whatsoever, we connected over what people had to say for themselves, strange, hilarious, kind, self-serving, depressive, excitable, sly, cruel, sweet or some combination of all these, it was all we had to go on.  They could claim to be a 20 year old female college student, or they could be 35 year old male programmer etc… a. you could only take their word for it (and their server location…but that could be spoofed too) and b. asking a/s/l (age/sex/location) was nigh boring when the conversation was formatted around given subjects – a band, a political position or, in the case of MUDs and MOOs, a shared reality created whole cloth from the consensus of the people participating on the given channel.

Forgive me if this sounds curmudgeonly, but back then we could name ourselves anything that struck our fancy and create a backstory and reality that not only ignored facts but disregarded rules of biology and laws of physics.  These days social networking sites (read: Facebook) demand real names and even punish people with names that sound fictional.  The social networks of this day are built around the idea that you will only share your real self and your real experiences – with everyone, not merely with a self-selected group of strangers who share a variation of your brand of weird.

When did we lose the chance to create the world we wanted, no matter how mad or self-serving or frivolous?  Who took it away?  Was it when business people decided to build a platform they could monetize?  Was it when the jerks showed up and exploited holes in the consensus for their own jollies?  Was it fussbuckets who made fun of nerds who were enjoying themselves in a way that didn’t make sense?

Is there anything virtual left in the Internet as we know it today?  Is freedom only a byproduct of naivete?  Come party with us, we’ll explore LambdaMOO together.

If You Can Get to Buffalo closes April 12, 2015.

Never Explain, Never Apologize

19 Monday May 2014

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A woman tries to hide her anger from a man who could determine the fate of her family.  Another woman loves her husband perhaps too much, and takes his vices on, perhaps too deeply.  Another woman suffers under her cruel husband but fights herself to keep from showing her fear and pain.  Another woman travels the world while unknowingly carrying a desire so mighty she can’t see it or say it until some uncontrollable grace forces her to recognize it.

The world of SEX & GOD is entirely internal.  It is truer than true.

The narrative of the lives of four working class women of Glasgow, Scotland over the course of the 20th century works at  level beyond the first person.  They allow us to see through their eyes, but their words do not explain their circumstances.  Rather, the words illuminate the world, the material, the emotional and the spiritual.

From Sex & God at Son of Semele Ensemble

From Sex & God at Son of Semele Ensemble (l-r, Sarah Rosenberg, Melina Bielefelt, Hilletje Bashew)

It’s a world that’s rarely ever shown.  And when we’ve seen it, it has come by way of explanation, perhaps an apology for why women may seem so mercurial, mysterious, etc.  But not here, not this time, not under Linda McLean’s pen.

More than one audience member has left the show confused as to the order of events and the specific details.  And I know very well just how hard the work was to decide exactly what each woman was experiencing externally.  The only clues we have are the words that come from women under duress – or ecstasy – words spawned to fill in an immediacy that doesn’t have action or environment, cause or effect, only feeling.

As I said, it illuminates, it doesn’t explain.

The illumination is unrelenting.  It flows without slowing for any stragglers, and it certainly never entertains making an apology.

Think about the descriptions of stories of working class men, their broiling anger, the great stress they face to provide for their families, the abuses of power they suffer and the destructive escapes they undertake.  The women of these stories are unseen, or mysterious…  or called “strong” and never studied any closer than that.

Over and over what we’ve heard is that the woman’s experience is to be borne, preferably with quiet dignity and definitely without complaint.  A woman who accomplishes anything notable is admired because she rose above the challenges implicit in being a woman.  But when have the basic, grueling, violent challenges of the working class life been notable for women?

There is a consistent elegance to SEX & GOD that is not forced or sought, even while a woman is beaten or raped, or when economic instability puts her in a crucible or when war touches her life, and there is grievance aplenty even when solace is taken in religious communion, addiction is indulged, education is sought or exotic experience displaces heartbreak.

The experience of this play can be agitating and troubling.  It is not easy to digest, but when should the truth of any person’s life be soothing?

Separated by a Common Language

18 Friday Apr 2014

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She says something to me and her face looks kind.  She’s trying to help me – us – though we didn’t seek it.  But I don’t quite understand and without realizing it I just smile and nod and back up a bit.  A companion is with me and he has the same cognitive disconnect.  She looks between us, polite smile fading, and says (perfectly clearly) in her lilting brogue, “do you not speak English?”

For that brief moment when I cannot speak English I feel keenly my alien-ness, the solid fact that we are lost in a foreign country.  But then other companions step up and assure her that we do speak English and she explains how to get back to the Water of Leith Shore.

Up to that point everything about being in the UK that was different was delightful – money with the queen on it, cars driving on the left side of the road, the legal drinking age, bobbies, haggis, lifts, knapsacks and hundreds – if not thousands – of years of human history under our feet.  For days we let ourselves think we were walking through a funny looking glass where things worked only slightly differently from what we were used to.

Now, no one will ever accuse me of looking Scottish (although my dad would be highly amused), but as a kid in Southern California I did go to the Highland Games and other Scottish cultural festivals in the area.  For heaven’s sake, when I was in high school we put on the Lerner & Lowe musical BRIGADOON.  My dad has a certain appreciation for the Scottish character and he used to tell me stories about the “Ladies from Hades,” Scottish regiments marching boldly into battle, bagpipes wailing.  Many of my classmates, neighbors and fellow church parishioners could have been taken for being of Scottish descent.

And so it was when I happened to tour the UK and ended up in a bank lobby trying to make sense of a bus map while it rained outside.

I’m now safely home in Southern California and hunting down tidbits of life in 20th century Scotland.  Overwhelmingly this is over the Internet because the questions I have don’t work in the vertical direction that books typically do, but at cross sections, threading different facts together to understand how religious, economic and social factors would affect a particular character in a time and place.  It’s difficult and at times incredibly frustrating because history tries to leave Scotland in the 19th century and insists that modern American history is all that I need to know about the 20th century.  Any other place should simply be considered as a variant to America….

Even as my research went along for the first chunk of considering the play I didn’t realize that that assumption was in the back of my mind.  I can separate out the much older history as a fascinating story of a people from long ago – Robert the Bruce and the Declaration of Arbroath – from modern life.  If an event is well in the past it belongs to people quite unlike me.  But the life that happens now, to people who look like my friends and who speak a language that (despite occasional difficulties) I speak as well, must therefore be somewhat similar to mine.  When that assumption proves unfounded and I can only take the facts as they present themselves, without orienting them relative to facts about myself and my world, it’s then that I feel I am really learning something new.

It’s the same feeling that I get when I really listen, very, very carefully to men talk about themselves.  But it’s only when they’re being as honest and vulnerable as they rarely get.  We understand machismo, we understand self-reliance…we’ve seen it every second of every day.  It’s as intrinsic to thinking “man” as it is to think “fellow wearing a plaid skirt” when we think “Scot.”  But when I finally have the insight to what might be under the bravado the point of view is disorienting to me, and therefore fascinating.

But it requires listening, really, really listening.  It takes removing every ounce of my own ego, every expectation that I might have to in order to hear what someone else is truly saying about his or her experiences, and not merely hear how their life might vary from mine.  I do love exploring people’s lives in other times and places.  I have a continual hunger to learn how other people do what they do, why and where they end up.  But I let myself think I know that we have enough in common; when that commonality is taken from me receiving a foreign culture and point of view is no longer reflexive assumption but an active observation.

It’s not a variation from the American lifestyle that today a child in Scotland has approximately the same chance of being born to an unwed mother as to a married one.  American births are only at a quarter unwed-to-wed mothers.  Maybe in another generation that will become 50%, but who knows really.  Scottish women aren’t living a variant of American priorities, they are making their own choices in their own society in a time known as “now.”

Linda McLean‘s play Sex & God is entirely concerned with women living their lives over the course of the 20th century in Glasgow, Scotland.  The details of their life and times are intrinsic and barely worth the mention as they proceed through their experiences…and yet it’s those prosaic details that make their lives so different from what I know.  We know the proud, strong Scotsmen, we know the tartans and bagpipes, we may know the factories and mines, the economic difficulties… but we don’t necessarily know how the women lived.  How it affected how they loved and what work they did, we don’t know their internal lives, their thoughts, their spirituality, their motivations.

So it is that my mind is turned again to this far away land that has people much like you and me living their daily lives.  And so it is I feel like I’m relearning how to speak English.

Sex & God plays with Lamentations of the Pelvis for an evening of theatre called WOMAN PARTS.  Opens at Son of Semele Ensemble on Saturday 26 April, running Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and some Mondays.

Son of Semele Ensemble

26 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Ever since 2008 when I hopped aboard the production of MELANCHOLY PLAY at Son of Semele as stage manager I’ve felt like I was on a hell of a trip. Not trip to anywhere, except maybe deeper inside of myself, but the kind of trip where you tumble and dance and laugh and everything is weird and right and challenging and aggravating and hair raising and madcrazypsychowhereyouneedtobe.

I’ve been associated with the company since then, off and on, though mostly on since 2010 when I became a member. A few years ago I wouldn’t have known to say that this wacky kind of experimentalist theatre is what I want to do…though it would have been in the back of my mind and the dark corners of my heart ever since I saw those pictures of a Robert Wilson production in an artsy theatre book when I was in high school – though these embers would heat up again in 2006 when I got to see The Black Rider at the Ahmanson. At that time I wasn’t doing any theatre, just working a day job that was slowly killing me.

For whatever reason I don’t tend to enjoy the straightforward as much as the byzantine in art; even though perfectly straightforward narratives can and have brought a lot of satisfaction. I just… respond better to the surreal, the abstract, the absurd and the expressionistic. To me, they don’t hide the point or make it deliberately abstruse, but bring everything out that they are trying to say without simplifying a single thing or leaving out awkward details.

When I found a theatre company willing to go there and not flinch at the difficulties of these complicated thoughts and feelings, I knew I’d found a special place.

Our artistic director Matt McCray has more than earned his status as a visionary, whether directing Wallace Shawn’s DESIGNATED MOURNER or getting quite the hat tip from LA Weekly’s Stephen Leigh Morris. Matt has made sure that SOSE makes some of the most excellent and riskiest theatre in LA. And somehow finds the time to make rather remarkable theatre elsewhere too!

Even though I’m a dramaturg at SOSE the bulk of my time and effort has been as a stage manager. I’ve put in my time on four productions now (more than any other stage manager who has worked at SOSE, which is a figure I think is both cool and …idunno…not cool.) I’ve had to fill and then drain a moat, load shredded paper into a snow carriage, hang fake meat, hang real dead animals, set and reset and set some more material over dirt skins that regularly scratched the skin from my knuckles, prep food that will end up all over the stage and then clean up after and on and on… to say nothing of making sure actors have everything they need to carry out the director’s wishes. It’s ridiculously fun, if time intensive.

And when I have gotten to do some dramaturgy as an official part of a production (because I’m likely to do some unofficial dramaturgy work no matter what), it’s let me take on an aspect of ownership in a project that I otherwise haven’t known. Certainly, I take some pride in stage managing. But it doesn’t always feel like my show so much. But when I share what I’ve discovered, organize a bunch of information and present it in a way that serves and bolster’s the director’s vision and when I can take that information out into the wild, I really dig into the play we’re doing and it comes alive for me. I see all the connections and I participate in them.

I love that SOSE has always gotten prominent attention – in 2004 the company was profiled in American Theatre magazine! We’re so tiny for any theatre scale, everything we do is on the shortest of shoestring budgets, our space is teeny and our patronage is…well, let’s call it intimate. But SOSE doesn’t screw around. We make good damned theatre that we can always be proud of.

…Of course, even if our budgets are shoestring in scope we still need to raise that shoestring, er, funds somehow. It’s tough – at least for me, most of my family and friends just aren’t into theatre and don’t have the spare cash to support my theatre. But I have to ask: won’t you support great theatre in Los Angeles? We accept any help at any level, from physical labor to monetary donations. All I can promise is it will go to a mighty cause. }:>

Brutality Theatre and Discomforting Arts

21 Thursday Jun 2012

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The killing is the worst part, and the best part. It’s the worst, because it doesn’t feel right. …And the fact that it makes you feel awkward, uncomfortable, like something’s not right – that’s the best part. —Siobhan Keogh, “Eyes on The Last of Us”

In a word, we believe that there are living forces in what is called poetry and that the image of a crime presented in the requisite theatrical conditions is something infinitely more terrible for the spirit than that same crime when actually committed. —Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double

Trevor was contemplating her next project. She didn’t know what form it would take Nor how much time Nor even what material She only knew It was to be brutal.   —Sheila Callaghan, Roadkill Confidential

There are moments written into ROADKILL CONFIDENTIAL as well as some we’ve extrapolated in our production at Son of Semele that push the audience to a precipice, and which way any member goes from there is entirely up to the member herself.  A person might be outraged or entranced, she might be heartbroken or she might be giddy.  There’s just no way to know until one of those moments arrives.  I have to admit, it’s an odd feeling to sense that the unity of the audience has been smashed and every individual has to decide whether to laugh or grind her teeth on her own.

Antonin Artaud’s essays were assembled into the book The Theatre and Its Double in 1938, an age which he found catastrophic as well as without suitable theatre.  Of course, he couldn’t see the future and therefore didn’t know World War 2 was imminent, however he was entitled to his disgust at the state of contemporary theatre.  In fact, he wrote, “it is no wonder the elite abandon it and the great public looks to the movies, the music hall or the circus for violent satisfactions, whose intentions do not deceive them.”

At least a part of the goal of Theatre of Cruelty is to get audiences to a state of visceral relating to the harshness of life/reality depicted on stage.  The other side of that coin is to goose the theatre practitioners just as much as the audience so the urgency and truth remain vibrant and expression avoids becoming cliche.

So why refer to THE LAST of US, a video game that will be coming out next year?  Here’s the story: My friends are largely either theatre/performing arts geeks or comic book/gamer geeks, with some crossover here and there.  Thus, even as I was up to my eyeballs with putting up ROADKILL, my Twitter and facebook feeds were awash in announcements from E3.  LAST of US, from articles I’ve seen seems to have wowed quite a lot of people with groundbreaking insight into survival scenarios where the player’s primary antagonists are other perfectly ordinary humans just as desperate to survive.

It’s striking to me, a non video gamer (purely out of protection for my time, I burned entire years on LARPing and some table top gaming – I’m sure if I picked up a video game I wouldn’t see the sun for weeks), that there are articles like the one I quoted above in PC World that speak from a point of view well over the spectacle of violence in the medium.  Of course, articles like those are written to the gaming enthusiast who’s pretty well inured to incidental thrills of destroying all opponents for points.  This new take on needing to kill in order to survive and the truth of what taking a life might be like is so startling to Keogh it’s almost exciting.

It tells the truth.

Or it seems to.   I wouldn’t know and likely neither would Keogh and her reviewing compatriots.  The point being, the act of playing the game itself may just alter the gamer.  THE LAST OF US promises an emotionally complex journey, one where the player will have decide for herself how to handle ethically questionable situations in an environment where the usual system of societal consequences has fallen away.

Back to ROADKILL: set aside for a moment that one of the characters is a 14 year old boy who expresses himself best through the extraordinarily violent dance/fight moves of his video games, and look at the relationship it has with violence.  Instead of imagining a world post-civilization, ROADKILL is utterly contemporary to us, where the most likely tragedies that could befall the characters would be a car accident or perhaps a virulent infection contracted through contact with an adorable woodland creature.

Instead of exposing us to invented tragedy, ROADKILL reminds us of the horrors currently in progress in other parts of the world through the obsessive news consumption of the central character, Trevor.

Early 21st century in upstate New York is about as far as an American can go to get away from war and strife and critical shortages and still participate in society.  In American terms, the region is synonymous with a comfortable, unchallenging lifestyle.  Thus, even hinting at the possibility of intentionally messing up this lifestyle would scare the powers that be.  The answer to the unasked question is to send in an agent to assert security and mastery over the frightening situation.  This conceit lets us elide the issue of how or why we are entitled to safety at the first sign of a potential threat.

So let’s go back to the 14 year old with the violence issues.  He doesn’t play the games that ask hard ethical questions but the ones that give him the option of eating the hearts of his vanquished foes.  And for some reason his step-mom (Trevor) won’t let him play them in the house.  Even given the gruesome nature of his mother’s death when he was six, we tend to assume teenage boys will be into expressions of violence and pastimes that exploit these, and even if we haven’t any proximity to teenage boys, Bowling for Columbine will connect the dots for us.  So we accept that he’s going to seek violent outlets and just about imagine we can  understand how his childhood trauma would lead him to it.  And finally we agree with the choice to keep the violence and casual horror of his games away from  him.

So. Randy, the boy, can’t play his excruciatingly violent video games but Trevor, his step-mom, can create a work of art that by its nature may threaten the health and well-being of the community.  To put Trevor’s work on a par with a real world event, remember Bill Gates releasing mosquitoes into a TED audience?  His Foundation said the mosquitoes weren’t infected with malaria, but his own comment at the time was “not only poor people should experience this.”  It’s a little more challenging when an adult wants to scare us.  They might have a point.  (Is it enough to have a point?  Ah, good question.)

Even if we do live in a relatively comfortable first world, where maybe we have to perform some financial legerdemain to pay the cable bill but we won’t know what it’s like to go hungry or protect our stores of food from the neighbors, there’s still going to be that hinge, that regard, that relationship with the concept of a lack of societal structure.

If we choose to keep up with the news we have the privilege of knowing about the parts of the world that struggle in abject misery, with no security apparata worthy of the name.

If we wish to simulate a test of our mettle, we can walk through an immersive experience, told with as much verisimilitude as game designers can invoke. (“…guns, ammunition and other resources are rare. Enemies will flee for cover and warn one another if they see Joel brandish a pistol. They’ll also charge when they hear the click of an empty chamber. Health is finite–it doesn’t regenerate” –Jared Newman, “The Last of Us E3 Preview: Violence for a Reason”)

If we want to express to our community the potential for everything going wrong we have but to flex some creative muscle, blur the lines between safety and civilization and the wilds beyond and let the chips fall where they may.

Whether it’s a naturalistic story about getting from point A to point B or a surrealistic hodge podge of a situation developing in intensity until the stage can’t take anymore and erupts into epic rubbernecking, that axis point is there.  That is the spot on which we turn from having been people who kept a coolly detached, intellectual understanding of the relative ease of our lives and become people who have had to choose a reaction on the fly without a society to praise or condemn our actions.

Its through experiences of such art that we learn a little bit more about who we really are.

Beasts

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

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The terrible things we do to animals, the terrible things we do to ourselves and each other. ROADKILL CONFIDENTIAL is the second play at Son of Semele Ensemble with a central theme of dead animals that I’ve worked on. Of course, years before I heard of SOSE, they put on the mother of all animal metaphors – ANIMAL FARM. 

Unlike in Sheila Callaghan’s ROADKILL where animals are (at least at first) killed on accident, in SLAUGHTER CITY (by Naomi Wallace) the animal would be put to death intentionally. But each time humans are the agents of death. Where in ROADKILL the destruction flows out of the need to go faster, reach greater glory, in SLAUGHTER CITY death was the last stop of exploitation and degradation that flowed down from management to senior workers to junior employees to the animals.

But each time animals suffer because we need to get from point A to point B. Whether it’s moving in a fast, heavy vehicle which could cause an even bigger mess if a poorly calculated swerve was taken at the wrong moment, or because our common and most socially accepted diet calls for steady consumption of meat. I suppose our society immediately tries to find the ethics of it – is it necessary, that is, what is reasonable when it comes to the consideration of other creatures while pursuing our own interests? But it doesn’t matter – animals still receive the end of our agency, whether it is dismemberment or mercy.

The way that things are, though, is what these plays see. In a rural area, especially where the roads are dark and windy, we tend to assume there’s little to be done but accept that people will have to run down small critters as they go into town. Just like we tend to assume there is little we can do about the poor people in disaster areas and war zones who must live chaotic and short lives. And we figure our hamburgers and hot dogs have to come from somewhere but we’ve been told not to look too closely into it because the process is really pretty gnarly. Just like we avoid looking into the realities of factory working conditions and present day labor exploitation.

We may ask ourselves how much we should really invest in caring about our fellow man – after all if getting broken up by women mass raped in the Congo doesn’t help them one bit is there a real point to empathy? Quitting eating meat won’t slow the thousands of animals that are slaughtered every year and it definitely won’t engender safer and better paying working conditions for slaughterhouse employees; realistically, it’ll just weird out everyone around you.

It’s the divide over the extent of our agency. We can drive slowly enough so Thumper can make it across the road safely. And we can find sources of iron and protein elsewhere. But we can’t make such a direct impact to people suffering due to the institutionalized methods of preserving the status quo. Conflicts in foreign lands will develop to protect financial interests of those who live much closer to us, and power plays will develop in the workplace that push people in every direction (physical, sexual, financial). The pursuit of one goal will have all of these unintended consequences. But solving the consequences (while trying to avoid creating more negative fallout) requires a huge battery of tasks by an enormous number of people armed with such comprehensive knowledge that can’t practically exist.

It almost makes a person want to dedicate herself to never leaving the house and switching to an all grass diet. But then how will the earthworms hide from the birds?! And we go around again.

Funny Thing Happened while Creating Roadkill

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

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A shooting in Seattle. Call the ASM. A shooting in Toronto. Plot the props. A massacre in  Syria. Follow up on call times, ask the costumer to work on the bandana, type up to-do list for the director’s assistant, establish task list for my assistant, notes to myself on colored pencils, blacks to wear for performances, driving schedule, when to eat and what will be available, tape my book so pages stop falling out, pay the car insurance–wait, wait, middle brother’s birthday is on Thursday.  Crud.

I’ve gotten so busy doing a play about becoming distressed over the state of the world that I can’t pay attention to the world.  It’s such an irony that it actually gets hard to say anything about it.

We’re coming down to the wire so I barely get to leave the theater.  When I do I’m desperate to decompress and so dunking my head in the days’ atrocities is just not on the agenda.  But when should I? Is it when I’m most stressed that I might identify best with people who are literally under siege?  Is empathy a worthy goal for a person?

It’s telling that the idea that it’s ok to dissociate, to not have to carry the tragedies of others is voiced by one of the most tedious characters in the play.  She’s daffy and uncomplicated – however, her view is most merciful to an individual.  Or, rather,   she says what most people would say: that it’s ok to shut out terrible news and shrug off the stress and anxiety other people have to suffer.  Ultimately, we tell ourselves, we have no responsibility to bear the pain, particularly when it serves no useful purpose.  It’s good to be aware of what goes on in the world, but we don’t have to cry just because someone else in the world is crying.  We say.

Maybe it’s just me; I don’t want to identify with that sort of giving up and tuning out.  But the effects of anxiety are very real.  I lose sleep, my appetite gets messed up, I get more gray hairs and more acne, my perspective gets skewered, my temper is shot… I do have my spates of avoiding the news – in between my usual setting of being very tuned in.

Should we all be as radical as the journalists who risk life and limb to be on the front lines of hot zones?  Is anything short of a Doctors Without Borders fieldworker morally lazy?

Or if we sit back in our relatively comfy lives and conserve our energy, maybe we can give more of ourselves to the those around us, prioritize our tribes of friends and family and give love and attention to those we actually interact with on a daily basis.  In contrast to the character who advocated shutting out bad news, the character who sought it out was just about cruel to those around her.  Perhaps not intentionally, but in the end there are few other words that capture what the other characters suffer due to being in proximity to her.

Note: the above was begun last week.  Haha, I didn’t have time to finish the post.  So I’m catching up now, a couple of days after opening the play.

The play is about far more than looking for the “right” reaction to the pain suffered by strangers.  But it was interesting to me to realize that the last couple of weeks have had me so busy that I really have no idea what’s going on in the news.  Odd for someone who identifies as an information junkie.  And who, as such, has occasionally lost patience with people who put no effort into keeping up with news outside their immediate spheres, believing if they can’t do anything about it they shouldn’t even be troubled by it.

Well…does being driven by the news to a heightened level of anxiety mean the same thing as being a compassionate person?  Does our reaction to a broken animal by the side of the road tell us everything about our humanity and connectedness?  What do I get out of reading every single news article that comes my way, the entire New York Times, sometimes, or a full two hour block of NPR?  What does the world get out of me consuming all that news, besides one more disillusioned liberal?

There are no answers, just doing.  Creating, expressing.  At Son of Semele we’ve opened ROADKILL CONFIDENTIAL.  It’s a crazy show; it’s demanded a lot of us at every level.  I did some dramaturgy for it in the early days (April-ish) and have been the stage manager throughout.

In order for me to work on output I have to pause the input.  I may or may not owe the universe an explanation for why I’ve taken my eye off the ball, but that’s what I’m going with.

ROADKILL runs through June and the first weekend of July.

Committing Dramaturg-ery

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

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“Dramaturg” is a noun, it’s a position, the office in charge of dramaturgy.  But how do you articulate the job of a dramaturg; what is the verb form?  Dramaturging?  Do the dramaturgy?  Dramaturgical efforts?

“I’m the dramaturg” seems to do the least violence to the language, so I stick with it, even if it tastes of the insipid, uninspired motions people assume I go through when I say I spend my days in libraries and researching things online for fun and profit.  It seems to me people do think it’s terribly boring and that I must hate all the effort it takes to research a subject, read up on a writer, study the material referenced in a given work.  Not even remotely.  I love plowing through information and digging up whatever exists as a first hand source and taking a look at other creative works that touch on the same themes….

A quick scan of online definitions of the work of the dramaturg leaves me a little cold.  Adaptations of plays…yes, sometimes.  Curating contextual information (or even writing it myself) to go into programs, yeah that happens too.  But what I’ve done the most and that I’m repeatedly asked to do is look stuff up.  Suss out esoteric information regarding this occurrence or that event, answering hypothetical questions with real world information.  What is the process volunteer rescue units in mountainous areas go through to train for evacuating injured persons from the wilderness?  How do cognitive behavior therapists approach autism patients?  What is the neuroscience of memory and memory loss?  How do the Berbers of northern Algeria bury their dead and think on them afterword?

I don’t get to do it very often, but I really love getting to dig into theatrical forms and philosophies.  This is because the task that I serve is to support the director’s concept by fleshing as much of the context of the play as possible.  There are always elements and approaches to the material that aren’t entirely obvious in the text, especially if it comes to us from another part of the world, and from another era.  It’s kind of adapting, but more like, it’s bringing in the information that will bring the play and the director’s vision to something like a unified state where both are the stronger for it.  And so looking at who was influencing whom when the playwright took quill in hand sheds light on the dynamics of the sort of theatre he was originally anticipating.

Also, I suppose I should admit, while I’m a general nerd and love learning pretty much all I can about anything it wasn’t an accident that my degree is in theatre.  It’s the subject I love best.  That’s all.

Everything may and likely will go into dramaturgy.  Shapes and forms of the things that people do reach me from such a variety of directions that I wouldn’t dare think that any particular subject or bit of arcana could never be put on stage.  Not necessarily for the task as dramaturg, but just in a conversation with a director a while ago I recalled a photography spread from the 90s that shared themes with a play we’re about start working on.  I’ve cited plots from comic books, themes from anime, rock songs, religious rituals, sports superstitions, and American communist rhetoric.  Oh, and Monty Python, but that’s not really a stretch if you think about it.

One of my new favorite discoveries is the dramaturg column at Bitter-Lemons.com.  In that article he gives a playful look at instances of theatricality that blow right past most people.

The more specific we are in the theatre the more like we are to match the semiotics deep within the minds of our audience.  And specificity is aided by knowing what the hell you’re talking about.  We strive for that as a measure of telling the truth.

It doesn’t do any good to put on a show that is wholly alienating because it wasn’t adapted to anything the audience will actually relate to, much in the same way it wouldn’t do much good to put on a play entirely in Russian for an audience of English speakers.  In the first place, the people working on the play have to understand the material they’re working with – and understand as a unit, as led by the director.  And in the second, if the audience does not resonate with the show in some way (typically by empathizing with the characters, though with the surreal plays we do at SOSE we’re often focused elsewhere) then we’re just wasting everyone’s time.

A lady turning into an almond, crows stealing an old woman’s shoe, a child of conflagration igniting a slaughterhouse…  evocative, sure.  But we’re not in it just to paint one picture.  The more we have on hand to express the nature of the pituitary gland, memory loss and the exploitation of labor, the more we can tell a story that might not be forgotten five minutes after final bows.  Like seeing a tree that reminds you of a song, or driving down a highway and remembering a conversation, I work to support the task of all storytelling that brings unconnected, even absurd practices and ideas together inside the same thought.  But what do you call that?

Theatre Nerd Powers Activate! form of: Dramaturg!

20 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in Theatrical

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I really should go to sleep.  But there’s just one more article I could squeeze in….  And instead I’m writing a blog post.  In my defense I’m tired as hell and that makes me a bit loopy and prone to dumb jokes (on myself).  I am aware this is not the best time to write anything respectable.  But…

I don’t quite know how this week got quite so out of whack.  It just sort of happened.  At first I just had one voice class on Wednesday and another two on Sunday.  For my own purposes I was going to refresh my memory on the Japanese I studied last semester since 204 starts next week.  But then along came the workshop on Jean Genet’s The Screens that my company, Son of Semele Ensemble will be starting this coming weekend and, as I’m a member in the capacity of dramaturg, I need to find out absolutely everything I can about the play, its themes, its artistic style, its history, the history of its playwright, the facts that inspired it, the culture it came out of… and on and on.  And this is in addition to reading it, of course.  The Screens is nearly 200 pages long.

It’s work I love doing, don’t get me wrong.  It just kind of showed up and instantly became my top priority.  I could grouse about not knowing I’d have to do this earlier, but now I’ve spent the week neck deep in research about Algerian culture, the French-Algerian war, Berber mysticism and Islamic rituals.  And in my breaks I go and read lighter material on Theatre of Cruelty, absurdism, surrealism, Derrida, Artaud, Sartre, and of course any detail I can find on Genet’s life and his own thoughts and theories.

Fuck, I love this stuff.

I love feeding my brain.  I love filling in the gaps of my knowledge.  And I love working it all into a performance.  It’s the only reason I could give for still being awake at five AM nearly every day in a week.

Stripping – No, not like that

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Background, context-ual, Uncategorized

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Have you ever been working long and hard and get to the point that you should change your clothes and wash up but don’t quite want to because the fresh air and scrubbing feel like they’ll bring on an invasion to the mojo you’ve put together? Sure, it’s childish, but you earned that grit why not just press on?

It’s kind of felt like that over the last month and change.  I didn’t quite notice August slip by without blog updates, though I had started the month quite gung-ho about getting this site rolling.  I even paid for my own URL and everything.  But…stuff happened, like it does and I forgot to get back around to this, no matter that this blog is specifically for documenting such …uh…stuff.  But as time kept sliding by without writing anything of substance in public I found myself even more reticent to make the time.

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