Just Wrought

Putting the Fail back in “Experimental”

Artists love to talk about being “experimental”, and it rightfully drives scientists nuts.  We artists obnoxiously brandish that word whenever what we really mean is “avant garde” or “edgy”or “provocative” or “abstruse”.  Any actual scientist understands that true experiments have rules and consequences. Experiments are tests of hypotheses hoping to become theories; and theories, in order to prove useful, must be falsifiable.  In other words, true experiments by definition contain the possibility of failure.  However, all too often in the arts, especially theatre, work gets described as “experimental” that is, in fact, incapable of being “falsified”, because it never had a truthful purpose in the first place. Consequently, the worst kind of “experimental artist” will blame the audience for every failure of meaning or impact.

I promise I will not be doing that this coming Monday evening at the Bathhouse Theater on Green Lake. Instead, with the help of my truly gifted colleagues Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith I will be performing a bona fide artistic experiment by reading aloud my very latest play Philosophical Zombie Killers.  I attempt things in this script I have never seen tried before in the theatre, and thus the ominous likelihood looms that some of these things I am trying can, and most likely will, fail. 

I am not asking you to come see my greatest latest triumph, which I happen to have dubbed “experimental” cuz it sounds cool.  I am asking you to come see my latest experiment, and help me make it better, by watching where it fails, and letting me know.

Here are the details:

The graduate level seminar is about human conscious-ness. Or at least that’s what you thought when you signed up for it. Now someone’s telling you that you’re 45 years old and you’re dying. You certainly didn’t sign up for that. Now this alcoholic professor is asking you to explain consciousness to him. And this depressed ex-cop from Missouri is telling you about the epidemic of decapitations in Seattle. And this weird lady from Omnisoft just wants you to admit that there’s no such thing as consciousness and no such thing as you for that matter. Could she possibly be right? Might make dying easier. Who said you were dying?

Who:       Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith

What:     Philosophical Zombie Killers by Paul Mullin

Where:   The Bathhouse Theater in Green Lake

When:    October 15, 2012, 7pm

How:      Pay what-you-will, including nothing at all. You’re doing us a favor by giving it a listen.

Reserve seats at Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/278468

Happy Columbus Day from THE GOOD SHIP MANHATTAN

In honor of this dubious-at-best holiday, I offer a relevant excerpt from my play The Good Ship Manhattan.  (Fair warning: for the most part this is a near exact transcription of a conversation that actually happened.  Politically correct, it was not.)

. . . . GREG:  You gotta live in the real world.

RICHARD:  Yeah.  And apparently you gotta shit in it too.

GREG:  Please.  Cry me a river.

RICHARD:  I’m just saying.

(Pause, as Greg takes a healthy gulp from his single malt.)

GREG:  So are all ex-social studies teachers big whiney liberals like you?

RICHARD:  Actually, my 11th grade American History teacher was a flag-waving, ignoramus Nazi wacko such as yourself: Mr. Capezio.

GREG:  Oh, he was a wop, too, hunh.

RICHARD:  I don’t hold it against the wops.  Some of this country’s greatest Leftists were ginnys: Sacco and Vanzetti, LaGuardia, Columbo.

GREG:  Columbus.

RICHARD:  No, I said “Columbo”.  As in Peter Falk, as in a joke?

GREG:  Yeah, and I’m saying “Columbus”.  As in Christopher.

RICHARD:  Please.

GREG:  Please what?

RICHARD:  Do not talk to me about Columbus.

GREG:  We’re talking about great Americans.  How do you do greater than actually finding the place?

RICHARD:  Oh boy.

GREG:  What?

RICHARD:  Where do I start?

GREG:  Oh don’t tell me.  You got a beef with Columbus.  You’re one of these idiots out here protesting the fucking parade.

RICHARD:  Do you know anything about Columbus?

GREG:  Uh... yeah, I know a little something about Columbus.

RICHARD:  Like?

GREG:  Like Fourteen Hundred and Ninety two.  Sailed the ocean blue.  To tell the liberal schoolteachers, “fuck you”.

RICHARD:  Landed on Haiti.  Immediately enslaved the entire population.  Effectively wiped them out with disease, torture and execution.  Encouraged his men to hunt them for sport.

GREG:  You wanna compare him to a Nazi now?  That’s you people’s favorite thing to do, isn’t it?

RICHARD:  Well, let’s see... he rounds up an entire race of people, puts ‘em in camps and proceeds to annihilate ‘em in a holocaustic blood-fest, all in the name of Queen and Cross.  I wouldn’t say it’s an unfair comparison.

GREG:  And who was it exactly that stopped the Nazis?  Hunh?... 

GREG:  The Americans.    RICHARD (simultaneously):  The Russians.

GREG:  Bullshit!

RICHARD:  Ever heard of Stalingrad?  Got any idea what the casualty rate was for a Soviet infantryman?

GREG:  All I know is, if it wasn’t for us, the Brit’s would be speaking German right now.

RICHARD:  That’s the standard Hollywood fantasy.  Unfortunately utter bullshit.

(The bartender, Ursula, steps closer to listen.)

GREG:  Yeah, I know: nothing I learned in history class is true.

RICHARD:  Well--

GREG:  There’s no such thing as George Washington.  He never crossed the Delaware.  We never kicked ass on the Redcoats and won our independence.

RICHARD:  I’m not saying that.  I’m saying there’s always more to the story.  Like if it hadn’t been for the French, we’d all be--

URSULA:  What?  Speaking English right now?

RICHARD:  What?  That makes no sense.

GREG:  Makes sense to me.

URSULA:  That fact is, the French only brought their full support to bear once they were convinced the Continental Army would ultimately beat the British.

RICHARD:  Which they could only do because Britain was over-extended with her empire stretched across the globe.

URSULA:  Agreed.  But you can’t deny that the symbolic victories Washington won at Trenton and Princeton after crossing the Delaware-- as this gentleman mentioned-- and the subsequent winter of drilling and reinforcement at Valley Forge, effectively transforming a motley crew of rag-tag citizens into an inspired fighting force, had nothing to do with the ultimate victory of the Continentals and the formation of the United States that you call home.

(Ursula steps away to another part of the bar.)

GREG:  Holy fuck!

RICHARD:  Whatever.

GREG:  You think she’s ever modeled?

RICHARD:  Reductionist claptrap.

(He drains his glass.)

GREG:  How much would you pay to fuck her right now?

RICHARD:  I wouldn’t pay your money to fuck her with your dick.

GREG:  Yeah.  Okay, teach. . . .

My Friend Goes to LA, Becomes Famous Raccoon, Returns to Seattle to Kill Philosophical Zombies

William Salyers and I met during Seattle’s fervent 90’s: a now hazy golden age when you could beg an actor like Paul Giamatti to be in your play workshop, or witness a writer like Karl Gajdusek premiere his deeply surreal, nearly inaccessible Dr.s F.s in the Terminal Ward twenty years before he would premiere his eminently accessible action series, The Last Resort, on national network television. So Bill Salyers and I already sort of knew each other from the scene when were forced by the exigencies of corporate temping into the close proximity of the licensing department of Northern Life Insurance. The two of us would blunt the boredom when we could by improvising various scenarios. I would open with something like:

PAUL (best British Colonial Officer voice): Do you remember that time in the Congo when the battalion lost its way and we were forced to eat grubs?

BILL (way better British Colonial Officer voice): Oh, yes. Sergeant Major Grubbs. Terribly good man. Such a pity.

No one can match Bill for voices and improv.

When I began writing my play Tuesday— a piece which I now, in retrospect, recognize as my first post-journeyman work— I could only manage to finish it by assuring myself that Bill would play the main character, Audie McCall. That development process, and culminating first production at AHA! Theatre, began a collaboration that lasted over the following 17 years, with Bill premiering the title role of my Louis Slotin Sonata at Circle X Theatre in LA and then playing it off-Broadway, then playing Walt Whitman among several other rolls in An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, and then inhabiting the skin of the now real-life head of NIH, Francis Collins, in my play about the race to decode the human genome, The Sequence. And it’s not just my plays that Bill has helped to mid-wife. Having run the math, I am now convinced that William Salyers has participated in the world premieres of more plays than any other person currently on the planet. I am still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.

While the size of the houses my plays premiere in has stayed, well, let’s say “cozy”, Bill has happily gone on to much wider success as a stage actor. For instance, he’s currently premiering Dan O’Brien’s The Body of An American at Portland Center Stage. Beyond the boards, Bill has achieved exponentially greater fame —the kind only Hollywood can offer— for work he’s done as a voice actor. I finally managed to impress my nephews with my show business connections when I told them that the guy who voiced Rigby the Raccoon on The Regular Show was my good friend. (Congratulations to Bill and everyone on TRS for their freshly won Emmy!)

All this history is just my a long winded wind-up to telling you that Bill will once again be helping me bring a new play to life by playing the role of Simon in a very raw reading of my latest stab, Philosophical Zombie Killers, along with Susanna Burney, John Q. Smith and Amy Love.

Here’s a sort of synopsis of the play:

The graduate level seminar is about human consciousness. Or at least that’s what you thought when you signed up for it. Now someone’s telling you that you’re 45 years old and you’re dying. You certainly didn’t sign up for that. Now this alcoholic professor is asking you to explain consciousness to him. And this depressed ex-cop from Missouri is telling you about the epidemic of decapitations in Seattle. And this weird lady from Omnisoft just wants you to admit that there’s no such thing as consciousness and no such thing as you for that matter. Could she possibly be right? Might make dying easier. Who said you were dying?

And here are the details:

Who:       Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith

What:     Philosophical Zombie Killers by Paul Mullin

Where:   The Bathhouse Theater in Green Lake

When:    October 15, 2012, 7pm

How:      Pay what-you-will, including nothing at all. You’re doing us a favor by giving it a listen.

Reserve seats at Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/278468

 

I Love Shout-Outs from Across the Pond

In this case, it’s from Honour Bayes, on WhatsOnStage.com referencing my essay “The Problem of Horror in Theatre”. Parsing horror, terror and dread for the stage is a challenge that continues to fascinate me. I think we did a pretty excellent job exploring it in last night’s taping of Sandbox Radio Live’s “Something Wicked This Way”, but I still wonder if true horror can be developed and sustained throughout a full-length play.

Check out Ms. Bayes’ thoughts here.

After all, ‘tis the season.