Just Wrought

A Thousand Words on Grief

One… Two… Three…

When I proposed writing an essay about grief to The Stranger, my editor said I could have a thousand words.

“...Not one single word more. Grief is boring,” he said. “No one can understand except for the person going through it, and talking about it is like telling somebody about a dream you had. No one else understands, no one else really cares, and talking it out makes you look weak, needy, and a little bit nuts.”

I don’t disagree.

Still, a thousand words. Sounds like a lot, but, as we all know, it equals no more than just one picture. And so that’s what I’ll try to give you. A picture. Just one.

118, 119, 120.

At the end of her life my mom insisted on home hospice, which was the teensiest bit ironic because she was homeless at the time. So, here’s the picture I want to offer you: my studio apartment, hospice bed crowded into it, my mom lying upon it and suffering, horribly. Also pushed into this cramped room, a double futon in the corner, where my boyfriend and I sleep.

Now picture that for three months.

195, 196, 197.

When she finally died, I wasn’t there, but my boyfriend was. He’s never forgiven me. He suspects my mom did it on purpose: one last twisted trick; one last assertion of will. It would certainly be like her to try and avoid sharing with me this ultimate moment of weakness, and instead inflict it on this boyish man whom she never really came to respect. Or that’s how my boyfriend sees it anyway. I suspect he might be right. (I keep calling him my boyfriend. He’s not my boyfriend. Not anymore. We broke up a few months after my mom passed. It was like she was the glue sticking us together, and she had evaporated.)

Grief is a mind fuck.

318, 319, 320.

Grief is psychotropic, sometimes even hallucinogenic. In its deepest throes, ghosts and other terrifying apparitions appear, though in fairness, these ghosts and apparitions aren’t always terrifying. Sometimes they are comforting, which triggers the terrifying realization that you have come to depend on them. There’s a derangement that occurs. It still feels insane that she’s not here, not reading this over my shoulder, and then of course, I get chills, because often it does feel exactly like she’s here, reading over my shoulder, whispering the words along with me as I read back through this. It feels insane. And it makes me happy. It's sanity that feels sad. And I’m so goddammed sick of being so goddamned sad.

And now I hear my editor’s voice. “I told you this would be boring, Syd."

453, 454, 455.

Grief is a necromancer. You can wind up romancing the dead so much that you lose touch with the living, who become shades, and everything tastes like ashes.

We eke out our living moments just like I’m stinting on these words in this parsimonious essay, when sometimes it’s far better to squander. For instance, in this case, even though I only have a few words left, it might be better to unroll a long quote from Ulysses:

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

I no longer live in that studio. My “real job” here at The Stranger, allows me to “afford” a “real apartment”, with its own bedroom and bathtub. And I don’t share the place with anyone. And yet I think I would give just about anything to be crammed into that studio again, with my old boyfriend and dying mother, living with the terror of her someday being gone rather than living with… well, with whatever this is.

Why are the main characters in horror stories so often grieving? In that same vein, why do I feel frightened all the time? It’s like her death has torn some vital skin off me, which was protecting my sense of certainty and safety. My fear is not of death, but of living without her: of her both being here with me, and not with me, at the same time, if that makes sense.

It’s been nearly two years now since she left. I can still spend days lost staring at nothing. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to move forward? She took a hunk of me with her and I’m never getting it back.

I still write things thinking she will read them. (She was a journalist. They called her Girl Gonzo, and compared her to Hunter S. Thompson, though she hated the nickname, and believed Thompson was, ultimately, something of a coward.)

She still talks to me. She still edits my work. As I type this now, I hear her: “Maudlin”, “Personal without being intimate or evocative.”

So why is it that I know with a certainty that if someone gave me a pill and told me that it had the power to cure me somehow, maybe magically, of all my grief, I would take that pill and I would flush it down the toilet?

I’m broken by all this. Forever broken. And that’s a bummer. But everything’s broken. It’s the nature of all this. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, that’s how the light gets in.

Is it getting better? I don’t know. It’s getting different. I think. Grief alters your mind.

999, 1,000…

 

 

One.

 

Day 12 / Reason 12: [This Page Left Intentionally Blank]

My favorite set designer Gary Smoot was a big fan of leaving gaps, open spaces in the art being offered, which allow the audience (or viewer or listener, whatever) to find a way inside of the creation on their own terms. Too much of anything leaves too little room to understand it.

I have had so much fun writing these mini-essays over the last twelve days. I have to confess I only had like six solid ideas before starting. I had to find the rest along the way, and if that’s not a powerful reminder of the thrills and terrors of developing new work, I really can’t imagine what is, nor do I have any desire to experience it.

At this moment, I’m feeling very much like I did just before retiring from theatre eight years ago. I’ve said everything I have to say for a while, and I can be happy going quiet again.

Now is the time for the play to have its say.

I look forward to hearing it.

Day 11 / Reason 11: Debt

The playwright, puppeteer, and savage wielder of whimsy, Scot Augustson gave me a book recently. It’s called Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. One cannot call the volume concise, nor is it completely clear to me yet what the author’s bottom line thesis is, though he seems to be circling around a fascinating notion that the responsibilities and complex, nuanced relationships among individual human beings, as well between humans and institutions, ideals, gods, demons, etc., all got flattened into a two-dimensional space with the introduction of coinage and currency. A formerly infinitely complex mapping of memories, obligations and gratitude, became something so stark and simple it could be captured in a simple ledger. Of course, I could be way off: I still have another couple hundred pages to go, plus footnotes, which I can’t stop leafing to; but this is the general whiff I’m sniffing at the moment.

I was reading the book last night before falling asleep five minutes later, but in that short time I started to wonder: what do I owe the theatre, and what does the theatre owe me?

It’s an awkward thing to confess in the wider civilian world that one is a playwright. I stopped doing it pretty early in my career. The inevitable follow-on questions just lead to more and more frustration on both sides.

Have I ever seen anything you’ve written?

Probably not.

Where have your plays been done?

In the Mystic Realm of 99 Seats.

What are your plays about?

The usual: neutrons, genomes, philosophical zombies.

What’s the most you’ve ever been paid for a play?

Less than I drink in a bad year.

It might shock you to hear it, but I have my pride. So I would often attempt to end conversations such as these by stating something wildly arrogant like, “Let’s put it this way: I’m the best playwright you'll ever meet.” And then I'd skulk away, silently hoping that this civilian never met Scot Augustson, or Kelleen Conway Blanchard, or Yussef El Guindi or…”

So yeah, bottom line: I considered myself a pretty good playwright, back when I was wrighting them. I certainly left everything I had out there on the stage before I retired from it. Having written over twenty full-length plays and countless smaller works for the stage, I felt by the end of my run that I had certainly given theatre at least as much as theatre had given me. We were square.

But I’m starting to consider, inspired by this tome which Scot bequeathed upon me, that maybe debt doesn’t work that way. Maybe our obligations, our relationships and responsibilities, our needs and our gifts can never be balanced on a ledger. Certainly not when it comes to creativity.

If it hadn’t been for the theatre, I would have never memorized Sonnets 29, 76 and 130; I’d still have a thickish Baltimore accent (even dough Bawlmore dudn’t have en accent, hon.); I wouldn’t have have moved to New York City— twice, and most likely would never have come to Seattle in search of greener theatrical pastures; I wouldn’t have met the funniest people in the world, whom I now count among my dear friends; I would have never known the sheer terror of having an actor on opening night utterly blow the big monologue I wrote for them while I sat 15 feet in front of her in the first row, or the astounding heart-expanding elation of pulling off a show when only 8 hours before the stage was a mess of cables, unpainted set-pieces and infuriated cast and crew.

If it wasn’t for theatre, I wouldn’t be sitting here on a Saturday morning writing this mini-essay, because I wouldn’t have learned to write at all. Which means my recent books, of which I’m so proud The Starting Gate and Seattle Trust and which ostensibly stand apart from my dramatic achievements, would not exist. And perhaps worst of all, I wouldn’t be able to claim to know the likes of Yusef El Guindi, Kelleen Conway Blanchard, and Scot Augustson. And with no Scot, there's no book about debt in my hand.

So yeah. I’m going to go to the theatre tomorrow. For the first time in eight years. Not because I owe it to myself or to the art form or to anyone or anything. And not because the art form owes me squat. But sometimes friends just want to be with friends and do those things that friends do together.

Day 10 / Reason 10: I May Hate It

 

Lest you think I had these twelve blog posts neatly planned out before I started posting this virtual half-Advent calendar of reasons for going back to the theatre after an 8-year absence, please know that the idea for this one came to me in the bathtub two nights ago, when I suddenly asked out loud, “What if I hate it?” I smiled and a familiar sense of delight came upon me, because I knew that there’s a less than trivial chance I might.

I would say that over the decades I attended shows at Seattle’s big houses before retiring, I was wowed by maybe ten percent of the offerings, then moderately impressed with another thirty, disappointed by twenty percent, and then flat out hated roughly the remaining thirty.

Hell, as much I as I heaped praise on Amy Thone two posts ago, it’s also undeniable that she has appeared in shows which I have absolutely loathed. Back in 2010 I took my friend, the journalist Tom Paulson, to see the Seattle Rep’s production of God of Carnage, featuring Amy and her husband Hans Altwies. Tom seemed genuinely confused and shaken by both how bad it was, and conversely, how much the audience seemed to love it. At one point he turned to me and whispered, "Why are all these people laughing?" Before I could even think of something clever to answer, I blurted out the truth: "Stockholm Syndrome."

Hating bad theatre is a big part of being a playwright. Hell, it’s a big part of being a theatre lover. Because anyone who really loves the artform understands that sitting through a bad play is infinitely more excruciating than sitting through a bad movie or television show. In the theatre, you’re trapped, and what’s worse, you’re trapped with other people (Sartre's definition of Hell). The fact that live group suffering is multiplicative explains in large part why the stakes of live theatre are always so high, even when the mere facts would argue that they are invariably quite low.

So maybe you can help me out here. Why is the fact that there’s a better than negligible chance I might hate A Contemporary Theatre's production of A Christmas Carol such a compelling reason for me wanting to go? Am I a masochist? Or is it that I know, deep down, that if we are capable of throwing gobs of money, love, and attention at a production, and it still turns out to be horrible, then maybe we are right on track back to normal after all?

 

Day 9 / Reason 9: I Figured Out How Christmas Carols Work

Maybe Charles Dickens was merely being twee when he called his novella "A Christmas Carol", but let’s at least consider another possibility: he knew exactly what he was doing, and by titling the story as he did, he helped guarantee it would become a perennial holiday classic.

What is a Christmas carol anyway? It’s a song, which we know well, because we have sung it our entire lives, but with just one small wrinkle, a constraint on the magic: we can only sing it during a special time of the year. Outside of that time, the song no longer holds the same power, or really any power at all.

I can imagine Dickens’ wanting to employ similar magic for his story. By calling it “a Christmas Carol” he understood that he was narrowing the space on the calendar during which the story would be enjoyed, while deepening and widening its reach beyond any of his other classic tales. (I actually have no idea, really, what Dickens was thinking. I supposed I could Google it, but why ruin the speculative fun?)

We have a terrible misapprehension of how art works in our current culture. We read a book, Moby Dick, say, and then we think we’re done. “All good. Moby Dick = finished.” We look at a single Jackson Pollack painting, maybe not even in real life, maybe on a computer screen. And we say to ourselves: “Good. ‘Action painting’ = big squiggly mess of colors. Got it! Moving on.” But that’s not how art works. Most art works through the mystical mechanisms of return. You have to keep revisiting, renewing, because each time you do, you create the opportunity for something new to happen. That’s the reward for your faithfulness.

A full engagement with art requires tapping into the dimensions of the sacred ritual and the mystical, even if you—like me—don't, strictly speaking, believe in such dimensions. (Surely if you are reading this obscure blog about theatre, you have at least a passing familiarity with the notion of a willing suspension of disbelief. Theatre runs on this not-so-secret sauce.)

Whenever I talk about the ineffable effects of art, I always come back to the Hopi. The famous religious historian Elaine Pagels tells a story about a particular sect of that tribe who go through an elaborate ceremony every morning to make the sun rise. When asked what would happen if they simply neglected to perform the rite one day, they reply: "Oh sure, let's plunge the world into eternal darkness for the sake of your stupid experiment."

Winter solstices have been coming and going for billions of years before human beings strolled the globe. We don’t make the light bounce back out of the darkness by celebrating Christmas.

On the other hand, why risk it?

Day 8 / Reason 8: Amy Thone

“Actors I know and love.”

That is the last line of yesterday’s post. So it’s only fitting that we come now to Amy Thone, who represents, for me, the epitome of that phrase.

But first, I need to stop and explain how I am mucking up the flow of this series of blogs, and mangling the architecture of its suspense. If I were being clever in how I promoted and distributed these little essays, I would save the best for last, and wait until day 12 to reveal my decisive reason for returning to the theatre, saying something like, “Of course, the real reason I’m going back is… ____.” But I will spare you that trivial grift and tell you right here, right now, good and early, because I remember when I first heard about the possibility and I thought to myself, “Oh crap! If Amy plays Scrooge, I’m going to have break my theatre fast to go see her.”

Now, full disclosure: ACT’s production of A Christmas Carol features two Scrooges, playing in repertory, because the role is so demanding, and because ACT offers so many performances. (Hey, if you got a cash cow, milk it, right?) This year features the inestimable R. Hamilton Wright, a seasoned veteran in the part, alternating with Amy, a newcomer to the role. Says Ray Tagavilla, who’s playing Bob Cratchit, and is himself one of this city’s finest actors: “Bob Wright and Amy Thone as both Scrooges on different nights are 2 different shows.” Indeed, I am very tempted to go see Bob’s version, too.

A career in theatre, especially in a town like Seattle, can produce some interesting ironies and some fairly cruel petty twists of fate, because, as long as I have known Amy (since 1991) and as much as I admire her as an artist (profoundly and unequivocally), I have never had the opportunity to work with her as a playwright.

Ironically (I warned you there would be irony) the very first moment I met her was when Amy auditioned for a part in a play of mine at Annex Theatre. She blew the room away with her monologue, and then again, cold-reading sides from my script. We offered her the part right then and there, but she told us that she was Equity, i.e. a union actor, and could not work at Annex, a non-union shop. She explained that she was auditioning everywhere because she was new to town and wanted folks to be familiar with her work.

Talk about heartbreak. There’s nothing quite like the disappointment a playwright feels when he knows in his bones he has the perfect person for a role right in front of him, but he can’t cast her because of the arcane rules of theatre. (Reason #373 why I left.)

Amy and I became friends anyway, and have spent the intervening decades admiring each other’s work from across the unbridgeable gap of show biz circumstance in all its banality.

Amy Thone playing Scrooge has dragged me back to the theatre, because, beyond her being my friend, and despite my determination to stay away, Dame Thone, as I teasingly style her, is one of those performers who will surprise you every time she walks on stage. You’re prepared for it. You know it’s going to happen, but there she is, surprising you anyway.

I have seen at least twenty-five different actors perform Scrooge. I have even played him myself as a young man. But I know with a certainty that Amy is going to show me something about this timeless character that I have never known before. And in showing me something new about Scrooge, she will show me something new about myself. How often are we offered such a guarantee?

Day 7 / Reason 7: My Sons

When I fully and officially retired from theatre in 2013, my younger son Keelan was only eight years old. My older son, Declan, was eleven. This means that the person in their lives mostly likely to spark an interest in them for the artform is also the person who cut it out of his life when they were little.

I was mostly okay with this for most of the last eight years, but this May I was blessed with a unique opportunity, which caused my mind to start changing. May 21, 2021 was the 75th anniversary of the accident dramatized in my play Louis Slotin Sonata, and thanks to generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and additional support from Circle X Theatre and Trial and Error Productions, I got to produce a virtual "Zoom" performance of the play, directed by John Langs leading a cracker-jack cast and crew.

Running up to the night of the broadcast, we had no idea what kind audience we were going to have (as it turned out, quite sizable, thank you very much) but I found that in my heart of hearts the only two people I really I cared about watching it were my two sons. See, most of what I have written for the stage is for grown up audiences. So neither of my sons had ever seen a staging of one of my full-length plays. And I didn’t even know this sad fact bothered me until I had the opportunity to rectify it.

My sons enjoyed this virtual staging very much (or at least credibly claimed to, smart fellows.) And I subsequently promised myself to expose them to more theatre, when more theatre was available, especially now that they are both close to the age I was when I fell fully in love with the artform.

I never regretted not encouraging Declan and Keelan to do more theatre. They have their own interests, and to me there’s no one quite so cringey as the quintessential stage parent, foisting their dreams of show business glory onto their children in hopes of vicarious fulfillment. But, on the other hand... a man does prefer for his sons to understand what he wasted his youth on.

An added reason for taking them to this particular production of A Christmas Carol at ACT is the fact that neither one of them really knows the story beyond the Muppet movie version. (A fine iteration, for the record. No need to fight me in the comments on that point.) So I will be delighted indeed to sit with them and watch a great story, staged at one of Seattle’s great theatres, performed by actors I know and love.

 

Day 6 / Reason 6 for Going Back to the Theatre: John Langs

 

Yesterday I called out A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) as a reason for my going back to the theatre. What I didn’t include in that short essay is a disclosure of my profound bias, namely John Langs, who has been ACT's Artistic Director for the last five years, and served on its creative staff since 2013.  You should know that for even longer than that, John has been my artistic collaborator and very good friend.

I first met John when we were vetting candidates to direct my play Louis Slotin Sonata at Seattle's now departed Empty Space Theatre back in 2006. He was living in Los Angeles but had directed some shows up here, including a very well received King Lear at Seattle Shakespeare Company. Before I even met with John, let alone hired him, I did my due diligence and asked around with theatre artists, mostly actors, who had worked with him. The praise they gave was effusive. To hear it from them, Langs was like some sort of directing savant always drawing the best out of every performer while making them want to do better. Their unadulterated adulation made me nervous. I get suspicious whenever I hear actors heap praise like this on a director. Stage directors have a tendency to build cults around themselves, with actors serving as acolytes. This arrangement can be deadly for a playwright trying to get a “clean” production of their play, unplagued by high concept and schmaltz . So I insisted on meeting the guy over beers. He seemed normal enough, offering questions and concerns about the script that were sharp and incisive without being arrogant or overbearing. And an additional fact helped weigh the scales in his favor: we didn’t have a lot of other options. Langs went on to give me the best production of the play it has ever had. And so when it was time to hire someone to direct the world premiere of my play The Sequence, his name was at the the top of my list. Since then John has served serious time with me in the trenches of new play development, and has became a treasured friend, remaining so long after I retired from the art form in which he continues to toil.

From what I hear, Langs is catching some flack for ultimately deciding to open ACT back up to live audiences with the theatre’s beloved annual cash cow A Christmas Carol. As I understand it, the argument goes something like this: “In this moment of radical artistic re-envisioning and reorientation, when the theatrical slate has been nearly wiped clean, why on earth would someone restage a dusty old play based on a dusty old book by a dusty old white guy about a dusty old white guy?”

I would love to avoid wading into the current quagmire of cultural revolution, while also pointing out that it was me calling for radically new work since the inception of this blog in 2010. So I'll bite my tongue and offer the shortest riposte possible: theatre is an art form which feeds on repetition. And it is precisely those plays most familiar to us that can sustain the most radical re-thinkings and reimaginings, while still offering the "clean" essentials of their stories. Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor-in-chief of American Theatre explained this better than I ever could in a eulogy for the recently departed giant of American stage, Stephen Sondheim.

This, after all, is what a canon is, if we must have canons: not invariable paragons of perfection, necessarily, but works that somehow stay alive with surprise, with the shock of recognition, with argument. The musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote with a handful of deft collaborators remain among the most teemingly alive works anyone has ever composed for the stage, and it is hard to imagine a day when they won’t feel that way. As he put it in the second volume of lyric collection/memoir, Look, I Made a Hat, “The very thing that makes theatre impermanent is what makes it immortal. In a sense, every night of a show is a revival.”

Revival.

The word takes on a much deeper meaning in the context of the vast challenges Seattle Theatre now faces.

Langs understands that in order to get back to telling new stories with force, he has to let us have the old ones, with love. I don’t doubt for a second that John Langs’ future holds huge opportunities for him far beyond his work as the creative leader of downtown Seattle’s flagship theatre complex. He personifies that rare blend of cultivated charm, raw talent, and confident leadership that allows someone to excel in pretty much any career they choose: business, politics, the law. John chose the theatre— God help him— and the collective life of my plays has been bettered by that decision. The least I can do is go see this show he’s producing.

 

 

Day 5 / Reason 5 for Going back to the Theatre: A Contemporary Theatre

 

When I attended the University of Maryland on an acting scholarship, I was required to meet at the end of every semester with the faculty advisory board to discuss my progress as a student of the theater arts. At one such meeting, in the middle of my sophomore year, the head of the department expressed his concerns that I was “not a team player”. At the end of that academic year, I left college, for good as it turns out, though I didn’t know that at the time.

I have been a practicing Buddhist for over thirty years. The three jewels of Buddhism are the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha. “Dharma” is just a fancy sounding Sanskrit word for “the teaching” or “doctrine”. “sangha” is Sanskrit for “community” or “monastic order”; what Christians might translate as “the congregation” or “the church.” I feel pretty good about my relationship with the first two jewels, but I am the first to admit that I am bad at sangha.

I have an inherent distrust of institutions, and I am especially bad at trusting large theatre institutions. The larger they are, the less I trust them. From my perspective as a playwright, large regional theaters operate to maximize their own survival as institutions over the quality of the work they produce. I used to relish comparing the Seattle Rep to the Queen Mary ocean liner, now permanently attached to its mooring in Long Beach, trotting out the old adage, “Ships are safe at harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” I used to think I could do something to help change this sad status quo, but after doing my damnedest to move the needle for at least ten years, I gave up. This impasse can certainly be listed among my reasons for retiring from theatre, but I’d be lying if I claimed it was the only one.

I always assumed that Seattle’s Big Houses would survive, regardless, because that’s what they were designed to do. I assumed they would always be there for people who wanted to watch safe theater, and, because I wasn’t one of those people, I didn’t have to care. Now, after nearly two years of lockdowns and dark stages, I am not so sure.

With eight years to think things over, I will straight up own my institutional distrust as a character flaw, particularly egregious for a playwright, for whom every achievement is necessarily the result of a team effort. I will also openly admit that A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) has been a pretty good friend to me as a theatre artist over the years. In 1997 ACT commissioned me as one of four playwrights to participate in a new play development workshop, and my play Louis Slotin Sonata received its first ever staged reading in ACT’s Bullitt Cabaret space. I have acted and written for many iterations of 14/48 at ACT, and for many years I was a teaching artist associated with the theater’s FirstACT program, which brings playwrights into Seattle high schools to teach young people the craft.

ACT has two mainstages, and several other smaller performance spaces, and has been very generous in opening these venues up to outside performing arts organizations, like New Century Theatre, The Seagull Project and 14/48, just to name a very few.

Until The 5th Avenue Theatre comes back online in January, ACT is the only live theatre actively producing in the downtown corridor. Think about that. Then think about the relationship of live theatre to the health of a city. What would Seattle look like without a flagship complex of performance venues like A Contemporary Theatre?

Would it look like Seattle’s downtown core does right now? Half-empty, garbage-strewn, whole blocks lined with tents and active drug markets obstructing the entryways to the small businesses.

Do we really want live in a city devoid of live theatre?

I’m not interested in that.

I want ACT to survive, so I am shifting gears, breaking my fast, and heading back to the theatre on Sunday, December 12 to join the crowd coming downtown to see A Christmas Carol.

Maybe I’ll see ya down there.

 

 

 

Day 4 / Reason 4 for Going back to the Theatre: The Darkness

When I was a kid and saw various versions of A Christmas Carol on the TV featuring scenes of old-timey Christmastime London (51.51° N), like the street outside Scrooge and Marley’s or Bob Cratchit at his standing desk, I remember marveling at how dark it was even in the afternoon. (And I knew it was afternoon because Scrooge kept saying, “Good afternoon!”)  I grew up in Maryland (39.29° N), and it certainly gets cold there in the wintertime (and godawful miserably humid hot in the summer), but it wasn’t until I lived through a winter in the Pacific Northwest (47.61° N) that I understood fully about this kind of darkness.  Come December, the edges of the night here squeeze in on both sides and gloom takes over. (As I write this at 8:15 AM it is dark and raining, and it will rain on through the dark day without cease. There will not come an hour I won’t need to turn a light on to read.) Here’s how I describe it in my novel Seattle Trust:

Seattle slowly circles December’s drain. Days will now march past like lumbering ghosts, as the border between day and night softens like bruising fruit into a barely varying sameness. Gray in/gray out.

I count on the Christmas season to boost me through until the Solstice, when the days start getting longer again. Usually, by the middle to end of January, I start feeling the light gently seeping back.  But until then, the “artificial light” of art in all its forms: Christmas trees, and music, and plays, has to do the heavy lifting of my soul.

So yeah, one reason (reason number four, to be exact) that I’m going back to the theatre, is because…

 “I need a little Christmas. Right this very minute.”

Day 3 / Reason 3 for Going Back to the Theatre: A Christmas Carol as Stage Play

Yesterday I mentioned that I got my Equity Card at 19 playing Young Scrooge in an adaptation of A Christmas Carol at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D. C. If the name of that venue sounds familiar, it should: it’s where Lincoln got shot. (I used to nap between matinees and evening performances in the box beneath the one in which he was sitting that fateful night. By long-standing tradition the Presidential Box is never occupied, and is decorated in the same fashion as it was the night Lincoln was assassinated: red, white and blue bunting with a portrait of George Washington.)

In the copy of A Christmas Carol my sister Maggie gave me just after that production, she said, “I know that the show caused some inner turbulence for you but it is a timeless story that touches everyone’s heart.” It’s been so long since then that I can’t be completely sure which turbulence she’s referring to. There was a lot going on for me at that time. But what leaps out to me even after all these years is that the actor who played "Old Scrooge" hated my guts.

I don’t remember his name, and if I did, I wouldn’t mention it now. Saying an actor’s name publicly, whether in praise or condemnation, is like offering blood to a vampire. He was British, a bit of a washout over there from what I gathered, and a dedicated drunk over here, but he looked and sounded the part and the crowds loved him. I wasn’t the only actor he hated. He managed to alienate all of the young men in the ensemble, such that by the time we were in actual performance, we used to hiss and moan at him as ghosts at Scrooge’s window, just loud enough, we hoped, for him but not the audience to catch the words: “Scroooooge! You’re my BITCH, Scrooooge! Ima fuck you UP, Scroooooge!”

"Old Scrooge" never quite forgave us for that, while never fully acknowledging our idiocy either. Somehow he found out that I was aspiring playwright and relished mocking me for it. After one performance—on Christmas Eve, no less—he pulled me aside and scolded me for blowing my blocking. Apparently, I had spun clockwise instead of counter in the dream sequence, and it had throw him off terribly, or so he claimed. He pulled me onto the stage after the house had cleared to the very spot of my transgression and lectured me in his posh flutey British: “Now look here, Paul. It’s important to get these things right. This isn’t David Mamet or Arthur Miller. This is a British play and precision means something.”

Oh the things I wanted to say. Things like, “Now look here, fuckwit! It’s not a British play, it’s a British book. This stage adaptation is American. (In point of fact, it was newly crafted that year, by the show’s director, and the Ford’s artistic director, David Bell.) So fuck off, you boozy limey bastard, and if you think Miller and Mamet don’t require precision, then I won’t bother wondering why you can’t get work on either side of the pond, besides playing a washed up bitter British wanker, such as yourself.”

Of course, I said nothing of the sort. Instead, I nodded mutely, and walked away with my face burning. I might have been nineteen but I already had some idea of how the world worked. If I had thrown down on this asshole like he deserved, it would be me shit-canned and blackballed, not him.

Fact is A Christmas Carol is almost perfectly suited for adaptation into a stage play. The book is divided into five sections, or “staves” as Dickens calls them (since he wants you think of it as a piece of holiday music. Get it?). These five sections match Shakespeare's five-act structure quite nicely. The story's action takes place in one night and keeps returning to Scrooge’s apartments, thus satisfying, with a bit of mystical fudgery and flashbackery, the unities of time and place called for in Aristotle's Poetics. Combine that with characters as crisp as fresh Saltines, and in modern show biz terms, you have a cash-cow you can present on one set, while double and treble-casting the character assignments, and still keep almost all of of the story without losing any of its sense. One could almost accuse Dickens of having the stage in mind when he wrote it, just like Steinbeck did for Of Mice and Men. Heck, the first stage production was mounted just weeks after the publication of the novella by C. Z. Barnett, at the Surrey Theatre in February of1844.

So yes, it’s a British book (thanks for stating the obvious, my boozy “Old Scrooge”) but it also makes a dandy American play.