Just Wrought

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 2 / Reason 2 for Going Back to the Theatre: My Sister

Against all better judgement I have begun a 12-part blog series enumerating my reasons for going back to the theatre, specifically to see ACT’s production of A Christmas Carol on December 12. This is day two of my virtual half-advent calendar.

I have never really fully explained why I left the theatre back in 2013. My reasons were personal, even if my retirement was painfully public. Maybe I’ll get to sharing those reasons someday, but before I can do that, I should state for the record who is to blame for me becoming involved in the art form in the first place. That would by my sister, Margaret, or “Maggie” as those of us closest to her know her these days.

Maggie first fully electrified my theatrical imagination playing Puck in her junior high school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was maybe six or seven, but I followed the Elizabethan text better than one might expect. Still, a lot of the language lofted over my head. Except when Maggie spoke, transformed as she was into a mischievous hobgoblin, seemingly in charge of all of the chaos reigning on the stage.

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

I already had it mostly memorized, because I had listened to her memorizing it in her room over the weeks before.

The following year, when my sister played Gollum in the school’s production of The Hobbit, the gas really hit the spark plug.

“Bless us and splesh us my precious. Gol-LUM!”

She would practice her lines over and over in her room with the door shut, but she was loud enough for me to hear everything in the room Eddie and I shared next door.

“What’s it got in its pockets, my precious? Gol-LUM!”

These eponymous punctuations "Gol-LUM!" burst forth from her as seemingly uncontrollable, autonomic eructations welling up from the pit of her gut. Or rather, Gollum’s gut, for she had, indeed, become the twisted little monster.

“We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!"

Looking back now, she was so unlike other girls her age, in the mid-70s: so obsessed with hair and fashion and looks. Oh, Maggie cared about those things too, obsessed about them at times, but she threw them all aside when she came to inhabit Gollum. Once him, she didn’t care one bit about looking feminine, even though the director had squeezed her blossoming body into a green and brown painted body suit. She gave herself over completely to the character. It was really, for me, the first time I had ever witnessed such a transformation.

Now you may say, wait a minute. She was doing theatre, pretending. This wasn’t real. But when your oldest sister by six years is becoming an avariciously murderous monster in the room next door to yours, it’s real all right.

Keep in mind this is decades before the magic of Peter Jackson’s digital capture of Andy Cirkus’ pliable, gamut-running, psychologically insightful portrayal in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It was even prior to the animated version of The Hobbit released in 1977. As far as I know my sister had never seen a performance of Gollum, and I’m not even sure she read the book. My sister had nothing from which to construct her portrayal but the text of the stage adaption and her own imagination. In other words, she did the quintessential actor’s job, and took fresh text (fresh to her anyways) and molded from it a character whom she then inhabited. Her portrayal of Gollum encapsulated everything about the theatrical process that would get and keep me stoked  for the next three decades. As an artist, my sister set me on fire. With Puck and Gollum she showed me how weirdness and audacity could be leveraged into a gift you could offer other people in performance.

The key to my origin story as a theatre artist—which I never put together consciously throughout all those decades of doing it, and only just fully realized writing this—is that I started acting, and then went on to playwriting, because of my sister Maggie. She touched the match to my fuse as an artist, and I’ve been burning ever since.

Every one of my siblings has some experience with the theatre, but I was the only one who went professional. I got my Actors' Equity card at the age of 19 playing Young Scrooge at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. I never used my union card again.

My Christmas present from Maggie that year was a beautiful, hardbound illustrated copy of A Christmas Carol. Here’s how she inscribed it.

1/11/88

Dear Paul,

I saw this book a week or so after we saw your show & I had to get it for you. I know that the show caused some inner turbulence for you but it is a timeless story that touches everyone’s heart. Your show was an excellent adaptation of the story. After buying this book I started thinking about what it is that makes this story so special. What did I come up with? We can identify with Scrooge’s past, present and future “personas”, and we can relate to the loss of Christmas spirit that seems to occur as we get older. We become so caught up in the ways of the world, that we lose touch with the ways of the soul. I’d like to believe that in this story Dickens isn’t merely encouraging the celebration of Christmas, he’s demanding that we celebrate life. The ghosts are merely showing us how we have allowed the control of our lives to be taken out of our hands. To you, dear brother, I wis a full, rewarding, happy, sad, thoughtful, action-packed, glorious and challenging life. I hope that you will enjoy this book & celebrate Christmas every day of your life.

Lots of Love,

MCM [Margaret Cecilia Mullin]

 

There’s so much I could tell you about everything my sister has taught me over the years, but if I had to boil it all down to highlights it would be these:

• Life is long, but ultimately short.
• Be weird when you want.
• Be loud in your love.
• Celebrate light in the darkness.

Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?

 

It has certainly been a minute or two since I last posted here at my old blog Just Wrought. (Damn! Four years ago, Father’s Day!?) But I am considering blowing the dust off of it. (Metaphorically of course. I would never do anything as rash in this current crisis as literally blowing dust.)

I need a reliable platform from which to communicate, and, alas, very recently I have been hearing about problems with Face Book deleting posts for apparently no reason, and, let’s face it, all of the major social media platforms are utterly non-transparent and frankly a bit suspect when it comes to user data. When I post something here, I can see how many people have looked at it, and therefore have a much crisper insight into how well I am reaching people.

If you’re interested in my future offerings, some of which will be old-school style, essays, and some of which will be more like opportunities for actors, writers and other arts professionals to make a little extra spending money, then by all means, click “reload” a couple times on the ol’ browser, and heck, if you’re tempted, maybe even send a link of this post to a friend or two.

If I get enough hits here at Just Wrought, I’ll know I can use this as my primary form of communication on the internet. (Though of course, I will always post pointers to it on FB, Twitter, and Instagram.)

So if you’ve made it this far, and you like what you see, and you want to see more, say hello in the comments. And watch this space. I will have news on a special project I’m developing soon. Very soon.

Love,

Paul

A Delightfully Disorienting Video Sneak Peak at the French SLOTIN SONATA

When I decided to travel to Quebec to see this upcoming production of Louis Slotin Sonata translated into French, I thought to myself, “Well, this experience will certainly be new, but what will it be like?” I had so little idea that, even though I wanted to write about it in advance, I couldn’t.

And then came this trailer…

 

What I love about it is that its director trusts the play so much that he leans exclusively into the power of the words, and the power of the actors to speak them, to sell it to a potential audience. Of course, because there are no “staging landmarks” for me to follow, I am delightfully disoriented. On my first watching of it, I only really gained my bearings when an actor started speaking Hebrew. Ironically, once he heard the Mourner’s Kaddish, this born-and-raised Irish Catholic boy felt on familiar ground.

It’s a fundamental and powerful truth of theatre that the spoken word is orders of magnitude more primal than the written. Plays are not literature. They are an altogether different form of art.

Seeing my words transformed into another language, and then transformed again back into life by these captivating actors, gives me chills. The good kind.

I can’t wait to see the whole thing. Live!

 

The Misuses of Art

 

 

An essay called “The Uses of Art” has generated a lot of traffic here at Just Wrought in the three and a half years since I posted it.¹ I’m not sure why it’s so popular, maybe because it’s short and quick and has the kind of easily scannable list that’s very attractive on the internet these days.  I’m still quite proud of the piece, even though I should probably admit now that I just sort of tossed it off from accumulated old notes. Recently, however, my thoughts have gone in a converse direction, towards those employments we generally assume art can be put to that it really can’t, or at least not very well: the misuses of art. A few months ago I began brain-brewing a list (by no means complete):

 

• Persuade through rationality
• Sell itself
• Self-evaluate
• Maintain objectivity²
• Manage its own knee-jerk radicalism
• Recognize its own inborn conservatism
• Successfully proselytize for any particular religion or political party
• Know its own strength
• Pay its own way
• Know its own weaknesses
• Maintain its subversiveness beyond a generation
• Properly define the parameters of its success.
• Effectively manage its infection vectors³

 

Record Corrector

Saying that what Mike Daisey does isn’t theatre is not equivalent to saying that what Jackson Pollock painted isn’t art. Rather, it’s equivalent to saying what Jackson Pollock painted isn’t photography. I make this argument in greater detail in my essay, “The Solo Show: A Risk Averse Artistic Administrator’s Best Friend” which is, beyond a reasonable doubt, what Omar Willey refers to in his withering list of “nonsense” and “childish territorialism” nestled within his hot-off-the-virtual presses criticism of Culturebot’s recent evening  Everyone’s a Critic. Omar’s essay is worth the read despite the red herrings and half-thrown gauntlets. Just as— I like to think— my essay on one-person shows is also worth a glance, despite its putative shortcomings.

Easily one of the three smartest people I know, Omar Willey is a mensch’s mensch. His contributions as the founding publisher of The Seattle Star are profound, and his thinking on how criticism can make Seattle theatre better is vital to the conversation, no matter how proudly he praises his own prolixity and opacity. (Trust me: it’s quite not as bad as he hopes.) If, however, Omar were always right, I would be compelled to worship him as a fearsome god, instead of treasuring him, as I do, for the dear friend he is.

The Cartoon Physics of Art

 

“You haven't shown any sign at all of respecting what I have to say or even wanting to hear it. I'm not gonna go stand under that safe.”

This from a gun-loving former Facebook friend in response to my invitation to join an on-stage conversation about how to reduce gun violence in this country. I actually get this sort of response frequently from gun lovers, because whenever they come trolling at my virtual door with whatever twisted logic their addiction has tortured them into accepting, I always invite them to join a future evening of theatre that I am planning, so they can put their counterfeit rationalist money where their soon-to-be-no-longer-virtual mouth is. I think the reason for their reluctance is related to something I touch upon in an explanation I posted here on Just Wrought about why I delete cloaked commenters:

…I know it's considered the custom of internet country to post anonymously, but there is no tradition of it in the theatre. In the world of live performance, one says one's words in public and stands by them with [one’s] body. So as a rule I won't be accepting any more anonymous posts. Stand and deliver, people!

What’s particularly disappointing in the case of my gun loving former Facebook friend is that he’s an experienced— and damned talented— actor. Therefore he lacks the excuse offered by so many other trolls who claim that I have the advantage of them onstage, being show folk myself. (I suspect my friend may also belongs to that vast majority of performers who believe, sadly, that the world owes them their next show, instead of vice-versa.)

In the past few years I have produced or been a part of quite a bit of theatre that deals with the immediate and difficult issues of our times, especially involving gun violence. I’m deeply proud, for instance, that my short play “White Boy Can Take a Punch” was part of last May’s magnificently uplifting offering, Hoodies Up!: The Trayvon Martin Protest Plays. My Living Newspaper production company, NewsWrights United  also covered one of Puget Sound’s most egregious gun massacres in our second edition, The New New News, staging the manhunt for Maurice Clemmons after he murdered four cops in cold blood.

Here’s what I learned from the above experiences: theatre is one of the safest places to explore the implications of real life tragedy. As uncomfortable, challenging, frustrating, even humiliating, sometimes boring, often righteously indignant or unrelentingly Leftist as theatre can be, it is also uniquely illuminating, uplifting, life-affirming and much more respectful of our many differences as citizens than nearly any other communications framework I can think of.

So my friend who claims to be so worried about the Acme safe falling on his head also knows that according to the rules of his Looney Tunes metaphor, if such should befall him in a theatre, he would instantly be able to open his eyes, stand up, dust himself off and again join his battle against his wrong-headed road runner adversaries. So he’s bluffing, essentially.  My friend doesn’t really want to avoid danger, or even pain. No, he’s too much of a gun-toting tough guy to want to spare himself those risks. What he wants to avoid is humiliation. And no one who steps into the theatre for a conversation can be guaranteed to duck that. Audiences are can be harsh, and humiliation, along with its nobler twin, humility, are deeply woven into the fabric of what we offer, and what we receive in return.  If one seeks, at all costs, to avoid disgrace, then one is wise to always avoid the stage, and not just when it is serving in its noble capacity as a crucible for societal discourse. 

But here’s my ultimate question for my friend, and for anyone who holds the doomed gun advocate’s position: given that humiliation is an unavoidable risk of wider life, isn’t it wiser still to serve yourself an inoculation of it in the safe space that art offers? Otherwise, aren’t you running the risk, out in the big scary world beyond, of being more tempted to “protect” your point of view with that all-too-deadly, non-cartoon gun you’re clutching?

More to come.

 

Related articles

Reach for your Culture

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

Theatre Requires Hope Beyond Logic

Nobody in the last fifty years has gone to live theatre to kill time like they would slip into a cineplex.  Nobody has sat and blankly watched theatre like they would TV because they don’t have anything better to do. There is always something better to do.  People go to the theatre because they hope—more often than not against their better judgment—that what they will experience there will change them, open them up, break down some poisoned part of them, help them live with some unbearable pain, give them more hope.  People who go to the theatre are frequently disappointed.

Tyrone Brown asked me to share with my colleague Sharon Williams the honor of giving the curtain speech at tonight’s sole performance of Hoodies Up!, a series of short plays inspired  by the Trayvon Martin tragedy.  Tyrone surely intends for us to keep our remarks exquisitely brief and practical tonight, but as I started thinking about it my brain, as it is sometimes wont to do, erupted in about five different directions.  These moments of mind spasm are, in part, why I created Just Wrought: that is, to spare everyone me blathering on at curtain speeches and the like.  Here’s what I won’t be saying tonight:

My reason for joining the Hoodies Up! writers team can be boiled down into one word: selfishness. I wanted to work with Tyrone Brown, a director whom most folks in the “Seattle theatre know” recognize as a coming powerhouse. I wanted to write for African American actors, a chance as rare as hen’s teeth in the Pacific Northwest and, sadly, in the nation at large. I wanted to tell a story I had never publically told before, from a time in my life that I cherish. All good selfish reasons. (When I start doing theatre for non-selfish reasons let’s all start worrying, okay?)

Hermann Göring famously declared, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.” Nazism at its nastiest, and most honest.  Fascists hate art and anything else they don’t understand, or that causes people to prick their ears up and say, “Whoa!  What’s going on?”  Of course, there’s a simple syllogistic trick that flips fat-headed Göring on his ear: “When I hear the world ‘gun’ I reach for my culture.”  That’s what Tyrone did when he began processing the Trayvon tragedy, and that’s what the writers he invited did in turn, and then in turn the actors and directors.  Tonight it’s your turn: the audience, the final hopeful piece of this hope-against-reason puzzle. Tonight, when you come watch Hoodies Up! you’ll be reaching for your culture, and countering the insidious icon of the gun that holds America mesmerized.  You will be taking the risk of being bored, confused, annoyed and generally disappointed, but you will have chosen hope over every empty and utterly logical reason why you shouldn’t have bothered.

Because theatre requires hope beyond logic. 

Just like living.

Bookmark THE SEATTLE STAR

Here’s the link.  Just go bookmark it.  Then come back and I’ll tell you why, okay?... Okay, go! . . .

 

 

. . . . There.  All bookmarked? 

Good.

Living up to the promise publisher Omar Willey made when he kicked it off at the beginning of this year, The Seattle Star has consistently provided cogent, in-depth criticism (no flip, self-regarding drive-bys here) of Seattle’s arts offerings, including but not limited to Cole Hornaday’s piece on Sandbox Radio IV: The Chase which details not only that most recent episode, but also how it fit into the on-going series.  Witness as well, José Amador’s latest critique of Annex Theatre’s Team of Heroes: Behind Closed Doors, offering a similarly thoughtful big-picture approach.

What’s more, like icing on an already yummy and healthy cake, The Star also provides unprecedented access to a variety of Seattle’s unsung poets, including some of my all-time favorites like Pamela Hobart Carter and David Penn.  (Full disclosure: they also published one of mine once.  Hey, nobody's perfect.)

So now that you’ve bookmarked The Seattle Star, you might also considering liking them on Facebook and following them on Twitter.  You won’t be sorry.  Of that I’m sure.