Just Wrought

St. Peckinpah

 
"Come" she told me, "with your shame and your gringo." I looked up & stepped toward
the old woman, black habit
standing under the sun-white arch of the church.
She was called Agatha, mistress of God.
And I would be called graverobber, trapped in a movie
trapped in Mexico, some hundred & eight miles from the border,
with a man's head in a Scotch plaid hatbox. Fucking flies. And not a whorehouse in sight.
This is a dirty old town without clear pavement markings
& I drove right into the doorway of the little apostolic house of Jesus
before I noticed the labored eyes of Our Lord looking down on me.
I parked the sedan. It purred raggedly, panting exhaust
like a hole in a lung. Then the engine stopped altogether & I took my cue to get out
& get religion. Head, I'm taking you with me.
There's nothing sacred about a hole in the ground. The Church
cuts off lips, fingers, the petrified genitals of saints made merchandise ...
but me I'm seventy miles an hour
out of midnight, the village cemetery in Jalisco,
men shouting in Spanish on brown horses, women on horses
shouting & everybody's got a gun.
Hypocrites, double-crossers ... Head, you're the only one in this country who's not trying to kill me
& I appreciate that. Bygones are bygones, the past is the past & the past
wants us all to be happy. I'm going to stagger into the confessional
& stagger back out. Then we'll go see Mr. Big
& his boyfriends. So don't touch anything on the tables. So stop looking at me
with your goddamn fucking eyes.

David Penn
1995

 

“peckinpah”
by Omar Willey

 

 

Tony Kushner Cannot Support Himself as a Playwright

Is this true?  Is it significant?  What does it mean to Seattle in its struggle to become a world class theatre town?

I have to admit, for all my complaining about lack of institutional support for new work, especially outside New York City, I was still shocked when I read this in Scott Waters blog, Theatre Ideas  (crucial reading as far as I’m concerned): 

"I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does." -- Tony Kushner, in Time Out.

My question to you: if Tony Kushner, who I would argue is the best playwright in America today, can't support himself as a playwright, can anybody? And if not, should Kushner's statement be seen as an earthquake that might lead to the examination of the overall theatre business model?

Over a year ago, at Seattle’s Outrageous Fortune discussion, one of our Big House Artistic Administrators stood up in defense of his theatre’s relative neglect of new work development by saying, “We are looking for excellence and we’re just not finding it.”  At the time, outraged as I was, I thought he was just talking about local playwrights.  But now I understand he really meant everywhere and everyone.  When Seattle’s Big Houses claim to want to address vital current issues, they go one of two ways: they mount one-person shows like I am Rachel Corrie and The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, or they yank a “classic” off the shelf and say, “Here, Glengary Glen Ross shows us something relevant about the recent mortgage meltdown that had its epicenter a mile and a half south of here at the WaMu Tower.”  When, of course, it does nothing of the sort.

Somehow this nation can support hundreds upon hundreds of regional theatre artistic directors, managing directors, development directors and adjunct staff—a whole class of workers that can only be described as “artistic administrators”; but even our very best writer for the stage must go to film and television for his bread and butter.

We all nod sagely and agree the system’s broken.  But if you want to fix it—do more than watch sadly as it dies the death of ragdoll—then I continue to suggest you follow the money and ask impolite questions.

Lost and Found

Circle X Theatre’s world premiere of An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, designed by Gary Smoot, was the most visually evocative production of any show I have ever written.   The tableaus and scenic effects were so unique and so profoundly stunning that it’s damned near impossible to describe them in words.  So imagine how depressing it has been these nine years to think that the only two surviving images of the show were this…

  

And this…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now don’t get me wrong: the incomparable Kellie Waymire ravishes us posing above as the troubled proto-supermodel Jacqui Potts*; and Blink Bodie (Kevin Fabian) flanked by his spokesmodels (Jamie Bullock & Daniele O’Laughlin) wrapped in Old Glory certainly hits the “American” part of the title on the nose.  On the other hand, not only do both shots fail to tell us anything novel about the show, they also, more importantly, don't tell us what we don’t know about it, thus piquing our curiousity enough to maybe come see.  Compare them with this newly unearthed shot, again of Kellie as Jacqui...

This not only screams “sex”, but “mystery”, “exposure”, and somehow, oddly, “death” itself.  If we had captioned this “Jacqui Potts about to enter the bardo realm by dropping acid and posing nude for the first time”, we might just have been able to get your butt in one of Circle X’s seats, mightn’t we?   Why we did not try to sell the show with the countless more evocative images than those first two, I will probably never know.  The fact is, however, that because those two shots were used for publicity, they alone survived.  Or so I thought for nearly a decade.

A lot of life got lived between 2002 and now^†, and the rolls of film that all of us knew were captured in that meticulous marathon photo call somehow disappeared  somewhere along the way.  I confirmed the loss when I started blogging here at Just Wrought and wanted to write about how I love to work with designers as early as possible in the development process.  Even though I was living in New York City when I wrote ABOD and Gary Smoot lived in Los Angeles, we somehow managed to meet in Seattle over a long post-9/11 Thanksgiving weekend, and in the living room of Gary’s boss’s house we brainstormed ways to stage the bizarre effects I was imagining.

I described the process in my essay on designers:

We needed three isolation booths for the afterlife contestants.  I wanted something straightforward and on the nose, similar to the glass boxes they used in Twenty-One.  Naturally, Gary zagged off my zig.  We went through a lot of ideas, including bubble packs for life-sized action heroes, file cabinets and morgue drawers.  Finally he landed on simple genius, and of course had the skill and the luck to bring it together:  three identical, perfectly white refrigerators, with plastic magnet letters to spell out each enclosed contestant's name. When the intense gelled Fresnels were focused on them, the white surface utterly transformed into whatever deeply saturated color the lighting designer chose to call up.  The “contestents” blithely climbed in and out of them, emerging unexpectedly from one after entering another, like so many peas in a karmic shell game.  For the audience the layers of meaning dawned almost imperceptibly but no less forcefully for that: the three fridges were uniquely American icons of consumption, comfort, death and banality all at once, and as they were signifying these things, it was also obvious that they were nothing more or less than refrigerators, or isolation booths, or maybe some vast gentle joke played on everyone from patron to playwright.  When Gary’s designing the sense of play never leaves the play, even if the play involves death at its very core.

When I wrote that I had no reason to believe anyone would ever again be able to see what I was trying to describe.  When I called Gary to ask if he had captured any photos for his own records, he said he might have, but that he would have to dig for them when he had some free time.  That’s Smoot code for, “It ain’t gonna happen.”  Gary never has free time.  Even so, a few months later he told me he had looked and hadn’t find anything.  Now we were both bummed.

Then, a few months later, I was on the phone with Tim Wright, the current Artistic Director of Circle X, pitching him a new script when a mini-miracle occurred.  Tim casually mentioned that he had the ABOD production shot negatives and if I wanted, he would send them to me!  The rest was logistics.  This past week I got the negs developed to digital at a respectable mom and pop photo shop, and spent most of Saturday uploading the images to Flickr and Face Book and tagging them with the names of old friends.*^†    I smiled all day as folks involved with the production chimed in to say hello, share memories,tag more photos and grab shots for the profile pics.

So you wanna see those fridges, and how well they worked?  Well, in lieu of a few thousand words, here’s a few pictures…

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Deep inside information:  It is a testament to Kellie’s wide-spectrum of talent and tireless dedication that she also helped to sew and hang the sumptuous red curtain behind her in this shot.

^†Not to mention death: Kellie Waymire died in 2003.

*^†You can enjoy the full set on Flickr, here... 

 

 
 

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Help! I Need a Word

 

Gentle readers, can you help me?  I just invented a brand new art form about which I am very excited.  Check it out: this art form employs the interplay of two or more persons seen and heard live by an audience.  As far as I’m aware there is no art form like it.  Remember, it has to have more than one person because the interplay is key, because as a fool once said:

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. 

So what do I call my invention?  Please do not say theatre.  I have been told by experts that that word actually means:

• “Whatever takes place in a theater.”
• “...But also anything which takes place outside of a theatre but sorta feels like it could’ve taken place in a theatre.”
• “...But also anything else I decide it is.”

I’m collecting suggestions below, most especially from non-theatre artists and non-academics, because I am really hoping to convince you to come see my new art form.

Thanks in advance!

By the Whites of Our Eyes

While reading Brian Christian’s evocative new book The Most Human Human, which manages to explore an impressively wide and variegated territory while covering the secondary contest at an annual Turing Test competition to determine which human entrant seems most human, I ran across this random fun fact:

.... Humans are known to have the largest and most visible sclera—the “whites” of the eyes—of any species....  There must be some reason humans developed it, despite its obvious costs.  In fact, the advantage of visible sclera—so goes the “cooperative eye hypothesis”—is precisely that it enables humans to see clear, and from a distance, which directions other humans are looking....  Chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos—our nearest cousins—follow the direction of each other’s heads, whereas human infants follow the direction of each other’s eyes.

All evolved traits have costs associated with them.  A peacock develops his tail to attract a peahen at great nutritive cost.  In fact, he does so as a way of signaling, “I must be really special because I can squander resources on this utterly useless and even detrimental fancy fanny fan.”  So likewise, there must have been costs to developing these large and prominent sclera of ours.  The most obvious leaping to my mind is the fact that when I can easily see what other people are looking at, they can just as easily do the same with me.  This is mutual mind-reading, plain and simple.  And we have to assume that being able to read each others’ minds was ultimately more advantageous to our forbears than permanent obfuscation.  We were stronger when we understood each other well.   We still are.

As usual, I see implications for theatre.  A while ago I posted here an essay explaining why solo shows are not plays, and therefore not, strictly speaking, theatre.  I conceded, however, that they belong to the even older art of story-telling.  Now, based on some of the newest science available, I am no longer convinced it really is the elder form.

Communication based on gesture, eye movement and even sympathetic neuronal patterning (more on that later when I abstract research on “mirror neurons”) may well have preceded verbal communication, which leans so heavily on semantic content.  Put more simply, our evolutionary ancestors may have been “play-acting” long before they were “story-telling”.

Time is Memory and Might not Exist

I like to book surf. If something I am enjoying references another intriguing book, I try to hunt it down. And if that second book mentions a third tempting tome, I go after that too, following the thread as far as it will take me. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr cites some research described in What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, a collection of 18 short and eminently readable essays by scientists working at the cutting edge of their respective fields.

In a piece called “Brain Time”, David M. Eagleman recounts his investigations into how the brain reconciles multifarious streams of incoming data into a coherent perception of “now”: a feat much harder than it seems. Unlike fiber optics, neurons don’t communicate at anything near light-speed. Indeed, the signal from a pin prick to your toe takes considerably longer to reach your brain than one given simultaneously to your nose. So how does the brain register them as concurrent? Or as Eagleman asks: 

Why didn’t you feel the nose-touch when it first arrived? Did your brain wait to see what else might be coming up the pipeline of the spinal cord until it was sure it had waited long enough for the lower signal from the toe? Strange as that sounds, it may be correct. It may be that that unified polysensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest overall information.  Given conduction times along limbs, this leads to the bizarre but testable suggestion that tall people may live further in the past than short people.

Also, different senses communicate to our brains at different speeds, which, if you think about it, isn’t exactly news. It’s why we start foot-races with gunshots and not light-flashes.

So how does the brain resolve all these variously arriving inputs into a unity? Well, the answer Eagleman postulates is as fascinating as it is simple. We understand the world by involving ourselves in it:

It has been shown that the brain constantly recalibrates its expectations about arrival times. And it does so by starting with a single, simple assumption: if it sends out a motor act (such a as a clap of hands), all the feedback should be assumed to be simultaneous and any delays should be adjusted until simultaneity is perceived. In other words, the best way to predict the expected relative timing of incoming signals is to interact with the world: each time you kick or touch or knock on something, your brain makes the assumption that the sound, sight and touch are simultaneous.

Eagelman is keen to emphasize that the perception he is investigating here is conscious awareness. Humans, like all higher animals, are completely capable of making “pre-conscious” decisions with their spinal cords, which is how you can remove your hand from the hot stove before the pain even registers. This difference between pre-conscious perception and consciousness itself leads Eagleman to stare down the ultimate question: what do we need the latter for anyway?

What is the use of perception, especially since it lags behind reality, is retrospectively attributed, and is generally outstripped by automatic (unconscious) systems?  The most likely answer is that perceptions are representations of information that the cognitive systems can work with later.  Thus it is important for the brain to take sufficient time to settle on its best interpretation of what just happened rather than stick with its initial, rapid interpretation.  Its carefully refined picture of what just happened is all it will have to work with later, so it had better invest the time.

Humans don’t have sharp claws, or big teeth, or wings or echo-location.  We have something ultimately much more powerful: clear, cogent, handily referable memories. We experience time as a stream because that’s the best, and perhaps only way to accurately record experience with the level of retrievable complexity that we require to be, well, human. In fact, Eagleman concludes by casting doubt on the notion of time as a scientifically sound first principle.

Most of our current theoretical frameworks include the variable t in a Newtonian, river-flowing sense.  But as we begin to understand time as a construction of the brain, as subject to illusion as the sense of color is, we may eventually be able to remove our perceptual biases from the equation. Our physical theories are mostly built on top of our filters for perceiving the world, and time may be the most stubborn filter of all to budge out of the way.

With this line of thought, Eagleman follows down a trail blazed by Henri Bergson and Kurt Gödel, whose evocative investigations of time have been all too often ignored or poorly understood by serious scientists and philosophers over the last century.

Implications for Theatre:

What’s more, Eagleman may have unwittingly stumbled on an answer to the most persistently nagging question of my chosen art form: why is live theatre so much more excruciating than movies or TV when it’s bad, and so much more powerfully transcendent on those much rarer occasions when it is good?  Well maybe it is because film and TV do most of your brain’s work for you, pre-packaging all the various elements of sight and sound into a perfectly corroborated unified mega-signal. In the theatre, the data hits our brains like it does in real life—like it did on the savannah a million years ago— as an unreconciled rough draft. Our brains are working harder in the theatre to piece it all together.  Film and television tell our brains stories; theatre makes our brains do the telling. (For my own theatrical explorations of time’s mutability, check out my play The Ten Thousand Things.)

David M. Eagleman’s bio says that in addition to serving as the director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Laboratory for Perception and Action, he is also the author of a book of fiction called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Cowabunga baby! Surf’s up!