Just Wrought

Uplift of Fear

I just ran across these impressions I jotted to myself after surviving my stint as a “virgin” actor in the last 14/48. It seems appropriate to post them, with the Kamikaze artists draw less than 10 hours away.

The terror hit me like a fever about a half hour before the first show’s curtain. The day went by in a punishing blur: a vivid dream in which one is never really sure how much time is going by until suddenly someone is saying “We tech in 20 minutes.” And then someone else is saying, “Let’s break for dinner.” And then someone else is saying, “Places for Show One, people, places.”

“Thank you, places.”

I was in the second of seven ten-minute plays. I stood in the house-right vom looking up and out onto the stage, half-watching and listening to the first play, a funny piece about swinger birds by Doug Willott called "Duck/Penguin". I couldn’t really concentrate on the piece, since I was undergoing a vast existential amazement: confounded and astounded that somehow the individual circumstances of my life had brought me here to this deeply horrifyingly moment. Why was I here? Who does this to themselves? It’s one thing to be an asshole, but only a stupid asshole plots his own very public humiliation. 

It was an oddly uplifted dismay.  Nothing depressed or depressive about it. 

And then the lights were changing and the band was playing and I was going on. As I noted in my earlier essay, as an actor, once you’re on you’re on. The terror doesn’t disappear, but it is forced by the demands of actual performance to sit in the back seat and shut the fuck up. There’s nothing you can do when you’re sliding down the mountain except make your goddamned best effort to steer and maybe hope to outrun the avalanche. 

And then I was marching offstage. And then I was done.  For a couple hours at least. I still had the second show, which now, miraculously, I wasn’t dreading at all.

By the first show of the second day the process had actually become fun, though terror was still sitting there in the back seat, sitting on her hands.

 

The rewards of theatrical risk-taking should accrue, first and foremost, to the audience.

14/48 Raises the Stakes Again, then Again

I was going to write another essay about 14/48 running up to this summer’s festival.  I’m an old hand at essays about 14/48. In fact, I once wrote an essay about how an essay I wrote about how 14/48 is partly responsible for all these essays I wright here at Just Wrought.  Talk about recursion.

I was going to write an essay about how 14/48 serves as a sort of “stealth” semi-annual Seattle theatre convention, encouraging theatre artists of different disciplines, different experiences and varying amounts of “dues paid”, to get to know each other when otherwise they might not. I was going to point out that such a convention has to be “stealth”, and it has to contain as its main component the compressed camaraderie that only producing a show together creates. If someone offered to host a “Seattle Theatre Convention” where we all just gathered to chat, flirt, and share war stories, I am certain nearly no one would come. The younger theatre artists all have better things to do, mostly centered around boozing, bullshitting and getting laid. And the older theatre artists all have better things to do, mostly centered around dealing with the consequences of our earlier boozing, bullshitting and getting laid. It’s not that we old-timers don’t like you, Young Seattle Theatre Artists— far from it.  You are, as the kids like to say, hella fine. But we are never gonna come to your pick-up kickball games or your Facebook arranged Karaoke nights starting after 9:30. Shit ain’t happening. The only thing I start after 9:30 at night is a bath. 14/48 forces us together, young and old, in the only way that matters: putting on a show. Just by participating I have come to know upwards of a hundred amazing artists that elsewise I might only know as names in a program.

Okay. So that’s what I would have said about 14/48.  And it would’ve been enough.  But the 14/48 powers-that-be have sprung some surprises for this summer’s festival, yet again upping the ante of their game. The first week of the world’s quickest theatre festival will take the form of the oft threatened but heretofore never actually implemented “kamikaze” version.  Normally seven playwrights are selected to write 10 minute plays on a randomly selected theme. The plays, written between 10 pm the night of the selection and 8 am the next day, are then randomly assigned a director who randomly casts from a pre-selected pool of actors. Over the next 10 or so hours the plays are rehearsed. At 8pm, less than 24 hours from when they were conceived, the plays a performed before a rather demanding live audience.  At 10:30 pm they are performed again, before a whole new audience. And then all of it happens again the next day. If you’re thinking, “Wow, that sounds like an ass-kicker,”  you are thinking rightly.

So what is Kamikaze? Nothing short of more randomness, more risk. 45 veterans have been invited to participate without knowing ahead of time which of the disciplines they will working in: acting, directing, writing, band or design. 14/48 co-founder Jodi-Paul Wooster explains the rationale behind adding the Kamikaze twist: “Over the years, we’ve had a number of talented artists say ‘thanks for inviting me to [blank] but I’ve always wanted to [other blank]’ To those brave folks I say: ‘Careful what you wish for.’”

As if these Kamikaze rules weren’t wrinkle enough, a few weeks later 14/48 will twist the festival in a different direction, staging it outdoors for the first time at Seattle in the gardens on the eastern side of the Seattle Repertory Theatre. “We can never rest on our laurels,” says Jodi-Paul. “Our audience and artists expect not only new plays but new ways of creating these plays.”

I must confess a bit of shameful glee at the terror with which many of my fellow invitees are facing the Kamikaze weekend. If you break down the numbers of any given 14/48, you’ll find that actors comprise by far the largest plurality of participants.This mirrors the world of normal theatre. On the other hand, of the 45 total participants only seven are playwrights, or 15.5%. This proportion exceeds that of modern American theatre by an abnormally high value. Normally writers are much smaller minority: maybe two percent, maybe less. For many Seattle actors, 14/48 is the only chance they ever have to collaborate with a living breathing playwright to produce a brand new work.  So the thought of having to wright a new work in 10 hours can be petrifying. One good friend, an actor, reached out to me for advice: “Yo, … can you give me 3 things to help me thru my fear. Maybe 3 tips to help me tell a good if not moderately acceptable story.” I’ll share my reply, lest my buddy acquire any unfair advantage from my advice, which seems damned unlikely.

Hey!

It's all gonna turn out good, you know, and by my math you only have a 15% chance of being drawn as a writer. But still, I'm happy to offer a few tricks of the trade, to be taken with a grain of salt, because if you find something doesn't work for you, toss it right away.

1) Beginning, Middle, End. That's the best trick. You have a situation. It's static, in balance, but only just barely. Something's wrong with it. It cannot sustain. That's your beginning. Something happens to change that situation, throw it out of balance, either from inside or outside, either someone MAKES the change happen or it happens to them. Doesn't matter. But change happens. That's your middle. Things happen in the struggle for a new balance to be struck. …. It could be bad (MACBETH), good (MIDSUMMER) or indifferent (WAITING FOR GODOT), but the lights fall on a new order. This is your end. In 14/48 your best bet is to give 1-2 pages to the beginning. 3-5 pages to the middle, and probably not more than 1 page to the end. Your mileage may vary, but do remember, when you hit the end of typewritten page six, you are done.

2) Start jotting down ideas, characters, snippets of dialogue that strike you. Keep a little notebook. If you find yourself stuck on the night of writing, open this up and draw from it, at random if you have to. Some may say this is cheating, but there's an old saying in baseball, if you ain't cheating a little bit, you ain't trying hard enough.

3) Trust. You'll be working with 45 of Seattle's very best theatre artists, all 14/48 veterans. We're experts at making this shit fly. You don't need to do it all by yourself as a writer. (The dirtiest secretest secret about playwrights is that we're at our best when we are at our laziest.) Trust that some brilliant folks will come in and fill the gaps. And notice that I didn't say you'd be working with 44 of Seattle's best. I said 45 'cuz I'm counting you. Trust you. You're fucking awesome.

Hope that helps. Feel free to bug me some more if you get worried. It's gonna kick ass though, so don't worry too much.

pm

My last 14/48 essay was called “Holy Fear” and in it I argued that  healthy fear is essential to making good theatre. 

It is what keys us into the audience’s experience of the immediacy of the moment. If you’re not feeling it, then chances are the audience won’t be feeling much of anything.  And, alas, they’re used to that. If they want “perfection”, they stay home and watch the boob. Our fear as theatre artists fuels the whole machina ex deus that is theatre.

Oddly, less than two weeks out, I am mostly fear-free. I suppose, like a childish Luke Skywalker, I don’t really know enough to be afraid. And now, having written that, chill bumps rise on my arm, and I hear Yoda saying, “You will be.”

A Pair of 14/48 Rumors

Just heard a delicious brace of rumors about 14/48’s 2012 Summer offerings.  I am solemnly sworn to secrecy, but suffice it to say that the news involves innovation and once again pushing into territory heretofore unexplored.  Doing the undone is what makes Seattle theatre World Class, and 14/48 has consistently shown "go-big-or-go-home" leadership when the putative leaders of Seattle’s Big Houses have shown little.

Watch this space for more news when I’m allowed to break it, or better yet, “like” 14/48’s Facebook page to get the latest first hand.

Holy Fear

More than once someone has come up to me before an opening of some play I wrote saying something like, “Oh, you’ve been doing this so long you probably don’t even get nervous anymore, right?”  My reply is always: “It’s precisely because I’ve been doing this so long that I’m terrified.  I know all the things that can go wrong.”

In two days I will be joining the 14/48 team as an actor for the first time.  In the parlance of the Seattle’s venerable “instant theatre” festival, I’ll be a virgin, and thus forced to fetch beer from the keg for whichever veteran demands it.  The fact that I have served as a writer four times makes no difference.  Nor should it.  As an actor, I am a virgin.  I feel like a virgin.  And I have a virgin’s fears.  Or to be more accurate I should say, I expect to feel a virgin’s fears.  I just don’t feel them yet.  It’s one of the blessings of being an actor.  You really don’t need to plan that far ahead.  Actors are soldiers in the trenches. Sure, it’s their ass in the line of fire, but at least they have something to do when the lights rise and it’s time to go up and over.  A playwright, like a general, has to watch in horror-- sometimes abject, sometimes surreal-- from beyond the action.  Of course there is joy too, but a playwright’s joy comes only in flashes until the final curtain drops.  Until then, anything can, and often does, go wrong.

So my 14/48 virgin actor fear hasn’t hit me yet, but I have no doubts that by the time of the first morning’s “actors’ draw”, when I find out which play I will be performing and who my director and cast-mates will be, my insides will be doing a nasty free-style crawl towards either end of my G-I tract.  And when it comes time to go onstage for the first performance, I fully expect my swollen heart to be thumping in my chest.  This is only right and proper.  It’s how human bodies process performing publically.  And it’s as it should be. 

A healthy fear is essential to making theatre.  It is what keys us into the audience’s experience of the immediacy of the moment. If you’re not feeling it, then chances are the audience won’t be feeling much of anything.  And, alas, they’re used to that. If they want “perfection”, they stay home and watch the boob. Our fear as theatre artists fuels the whole machina ex deus that is theatre.  The audience gets off on knowing that the train can leave the tracks at any moment.  Ours is the crucible where the experiment of art is performed—not re-enacted—but embodied in flesh and sweat and spit.  If we already know we’re right— if we know from the outset that the experiment is going to succeed— then we are also already dead.  Fear is life.  Fear is holy.  And in these darkest Northwest days just after New Year’s, fear is also a much needed bolus of bright adrenaline.  I plan on nursing it until the lengthening days can take over.

The Solo Show: A Risk Averse Artistic Administrator’s Best Friend

The fourth in a series of essays entitled: 
Towards a World Class Theatre

 

Some fifteen years ago Dawson Nichols and I were having lunch at a long gone Japanese noodle house on Broadway when he asked me an awkward question that I will now try to do a better job of answering.  Back then we were not the close friends and collaborators we are now—more like respectful but wary competitors for the title of AHA! Theatre’s Golden Boy.  Dawson had a much better line of attack on the prize, because while we both wrote strong multi-actor plays, Dawson also amazed us all with his impressively diverse catalogue of one-man shows, including Stop/Start, Virtual Solitaire, I Might be Edgar Allen Poe and Three Descents of Darwin.  I have always been captivated by Dawson’s one-person work. 

I have also always had my theoretical reservations about the genre, as Dawson must have suspected that day over yakisoba when he challenged me squarely, “You don’t think my solo work is theatre, do you?”  I must have made a weak apologetic smile. I must have hemmed and hawed. I think I finally answered, “Strictly speaking, no, but—“ and then went on to make some half-lame explication, but the look on Dawson’s face showed it all: hurt and disbelief at my dismissive arrogance, even as I tried to explain how much I respected him as a generative and performing artist.

So perhaps now, with my friendship with Dawson a little more secure (I hope), it is time to make that earlier explication sharper, and then explore that explication’s implications within our regional theatre administrator’s collective half-conscious effort to re-forge by fudging a new definition of the art form and thus raise the number of one-person shows they can get away with and still claim that they are practicing theatre.

Before writing this I decided to do a little research by reaching out to my compadres over at 14/48 via Facebook:

 

Paul Mullin

April 9 at 3:32pm

Hello lovers!

Any and/or all of you can answer. And yes, I'm going to quote you in my blog. I'm working on an essay about one-person shows. And my question is this: "Why don't you ever have the option of drawing just one actor in the actor draw? Are there any other reasons beyond the fact that that poor schlump would have to memorize too much?"

Let me know.

Love,

Paulie

Shawn Belyea

April 10, 2010 at 3:56pm

Re: Question for the 14/48 Crew

Cuz one-person shows are dumb. Mostly it's memorization and it's supposed to be a collaborative effort so we want actors to have some company.

Jodi-Paul Sanford Brown-Wooster

April 11 at 1:06am

I hate one person shows. And yes, I'm looking at you Lauren. There is no intrinsic dramatic tension with one person, it's fakey.

Peter Dylan O'Connor

April 11 at 3:52p

One person shows are fucking glorified camp fire stories...

Matthew Richter

April 11 at 8:33pm

i love one-person shows. and i think they're an interesting challenge for 14.48.

but i'm retired.

xom

If you seek consensus, you would be wise not to consult the prophets of 14/48.  Once again, I am left to my own opinions and devices.  I proceed with that caution for you, my gentle reader.

Basically, solo shows boil down into two kinds: the actor’s tour de force and the enlarged lecture.  Dawson Nichols shares the first tradition with Anna Deavere Smith, Chazz Palminteri and countless other talented writer/actors, who generate shows that then require them to become all of the characters on stage, even at times performing both sides of multi-sided dialogue.  Over the last few decades, it has become an increasingly effective way of growing an actor’s career.  Palminteri literally leveraged himself into playing the principal role, Sonny, in Robert DeNiro’s directorial debut film A Bronx Tale, which began as Palminteri’s one-man show of the same name.  As Rik Deskin, Aristic Director of The Eclectic Theatre points out, “When you’re self-producing/self-promoting, a solo show is one way to get yourself out there.”

My friend and comrade-at-arms, Mike Daisey, presents from the lecturer tradition, most recently reinvigorated by Spalding Gray, but one which runs the gamut, in just this country alone, from Jonathan Edwards to Mark Twain and right on up to David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell.  This kind of show employs more direct address, less actorly technique.  Instead of primarily inhabiting other characters, the lecturer’s own personality ties the evening together.  In the hands of a Daisy or Sedaris it can be hugely fun, funny and compelling, but no one plying the trade 130 years ago would have thought of calling themselves a theatre artist, even if a particular night’s performance happened to take place in a theater—unlikely in that age, since theaters were rarely dark and there was a plentitude of active churches, as well as all sorts of lecture halls specifically built for this purpose.  As different as these two kinds of solo show are, and as much as it seems the Nichols / Deveare Smith variety is much closer to theatre as we know it, they both represent variations of the much older, and completely honorable tradition of story telling.

Theatre, however, is something really quite different.  It happens in the preternaturally galvanized space between two or more people on stage and the other people in the audience.  It sprang forth from its older sibling, storytelling, in that radical moment when the teller pointed at someone in the campfire circle and said:  “You be me.  I’ll be the wolf.  We’ll show them how it happens.”  Thus a whole new art form was born.

As a solo lecturer, Mike Daisey has a point of view.  And a damned good one too.  He makes no bones about telling you what to think.  And if you want my opinion, you should listen to him.  I have a different role as a playwright and a different box of tools.  I can show you things happening, but it is up to you what to make of them.  Theatre is dialogue.  Not as part of the narrative, like in a novel, but as all of the show.  Even if no words are spoken, dramatic action takes place in a framework of implicit dialogue: people doing things to other people. This is why our collective audience hackles go up whenever a narrator starts telling us the story instead of enacting it.  Good playwrights understand this and know how to leverage the discordance of direct address narration (see Shakespeare’s Chorus in Henry V or Wilder’s Stage Manager in Our Town).  Lesser playwrights never seem to learn: you can’t tell an audience anything.  They can only be shown.  They can only ever come to their own conclusion about what is happening.

Dialogue breeds risk like flowers bloom scent, and risk is the fabric of theatre.  Because two or more people on stage can never know with certainty what an other is about to do, no matter how many times they have done it before, the audience attends the action with a sense of the innate exposure.  “Anything could happen, and we are in the same damned room with these agitated people.”   Risk is not a by-product of drama.  It is the main ingredient.  

Nothing wrong with masturbation, but everyone knows you cannot tickle yourself.   Likewise, I cannot, as a performer, ever surprise myself to the degree another performer can—arguments about unexpected inspiration notwithstanding.  When there is another actor on stage with me, I have to watch, I have to listen, I have to be wary.  Other actors can push you around, and you can push back.  No one can manufacture this kind of risk in a solo performance, no matter how earnestly the performer tries to convince his corpus callosum  not to tell his left brain what his right plans on doing.   Sure, an actor can mimic dialogue, playing both sides of a conversation, but even at its very best this trick still contains an unconscious but unavoidable note of condescension, like Donald Rumsfeld asking himself ostensibly difficult questions about the Iraq War in a press conference and then answering them with ostensibly matter-of-fact brilliance.  True dialogue adds a crucial dimension which defines theatre, just as surely as the third dimension of physical depth defines sculpture. 

Theatre also trades on what we show folk loftily refer to as “the willing suspension of disbelief.”  Wikipedia defines this notion as “the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment.”  (I should fully disclose here how I hate this term, mostly for its gratuitous gracelessness.  I mean, is the double negative really necessary to nail the point?  What would be wrong with, say, “fabrication of belief?”)  In a solo show disbelief can never be truly suspended.  At best, it can be sent to detention, where it still manages to sulk and grimace and call attention to itself.

Let me be clear.  By pointing out that one-person shows are not, strictly speaking, theatre, I am in no way trying to denigrate them or argue for their banishment.  It has been a long standing tradition for regional theatres to opt for filling one slot in their season with an easily produced, low-overhead solo show, but indications are rising that Big Houses in this town intend to lean on this option more heavily in the future.  The Seattle Rep recently announced its 2010-2011 season in which they will be offering not one, but two solo shows,  The K of D in the smaller Leo K venue and Mike Daisey’s new piece on their Bagley Wright mainstage (a relatively unheard-of placement of a solo show for them.)  If Daisey does well (and as his friend and colleague, I cannot help but hope he does) you can bet you will be seeing more mainstage solo offerings from the Rep.  It is just too cheap for them not to.  And as long as no one’s complaining that they are not actually doing theatre in their theater, well…

Meanwhile, next door at the Intiman, they have answered with unblushing cynicism the call for more locally grown new plays by staging The Thin Place which they laud on their website as “the second world premiere by a local writer in Intiman's history.”  Note the pride with which they admit a fact of which they should rightly be ashamed.  Using a solo show to rectify their abysmal record reveals how little they wish to risk on the attempt.   How quickly will Intiman abandon and distance itself from The Thin Place if it does not do well with critics or audiences?  How likely are they to offer up the now tired Big House refrain when a locally grown piece does not catch fire right away?  “See?  We tried ‘locally grown’.  It just doesn’t work.  Can we please go back to retreading Pinter, Mamet and off-Broadway’s last season?”  Always behind such excuses are obfuscated variables of production and promotion that contribute to a given show’s putative failure but that go unnoticed and unconsidered in public.   In this case,  the crucial factor that will not be mentioned is that The Thin Place is a one-man show, and not, strictly speaking, theatre at all.

Regional Big Houses defend their solo performance offerings like a richly-endowed sculpture gallery might defend an exhibition of paintings.  “We love sculpture.  And of course we are a sculpture gallery, but sculpture itself is expensive and difficult to maintain.  Instead, why not enjoy some lovely paintings of sculptures?”  Paintings of sculptures can indeed be lovely, but not even an idiot would call them sculptures, any more than Mark Twain would have referred to himself as a theatre artist 130 years ago.  Solo performance billed as theatre is a pig in a poke.  The unpredictability of human beings interacting lies at the heart of what we are selling in the theatre.  We trade it out and bank our future on its diminishment at the very risk of our art form’s soul.

Next up: "Good Friend for Jesus’ Sake Forbear and Never Build another Proscenium Stage"

Seattle Gay News comes late but strong to the 14/48 love-fest.

http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews38_03/page26.cfm

Question is, are there even any tickets left to buy?

The SunBreak - 14/48 beyond “artful obfuscation & middle-brow pandering” of Big Houses. http://thesunbreak.com/2010/01/09/a-few-notes-on-last-nights-14-48

Once again, Declan makes it into the 14/48 blog.

http://1448fest.blogspot.com/2010/01/mad-for-mad-lib.html

14/48 updates from the sausage factory.

http://1448fest.blogspot.com/