Just Wrought

Chicago Posts: Dead and Alive

Three nights ago my old friend Louis Slotin and I each got one of those chances that only theatre can offer.  He got to be alive while I got to be dead.

Everybody loves a dead playwright.  The deader the better.  Living ones are prickly and unpredictable.  Actors and directors assume, sometimes rightly, that living playwrights have special insight into their plays because, well, they wrote them.  Such insight can be resented as often as welcomed.  Rehearsing a play is a process of discovery.  No one wants to do an Easter egg hunt with someone they suspect knows where all the eggs are hidden.  Smart playwrights understand when it’s time to walk out of the rehearsal hall so everyone else can breathe a little.  They do this even though they know that they do not in fact have all the answers and really might like to stay and hunt for a little treasure too.  In other words, a smart playwright knows when to roll over and play dead.

As I confessed in an earlier essay installment of these Chicago Posts, I have seen every full production of every play I have ever written.  Often I have been part of the development process, even if the play has already had its world premiere.  For Louis Slotin Sonata’s second production which was staged off–Broadway at Ensemble Studio Theatre I rewrote substantially, adding at least one scene, which I would later cut.  I was living in New York at the time, so I could attend as many rehearsals as I wanted (and thought wise.)  The same was true for the third production at the now dead Empty Space Theatre.  By then I had moved to Seattle with my wife and kids and was able to work with the director, John Langs, to touch up the script, and most importantly, completely swap out the second act song, replacing it with the utterly original “Sodom Saki Shuffle” for which I wrote all new lyrics which the incomparable Mark Nichols then brilliantly scored.  (Click this to hear the Seattle version of the Sodom Saki Shuffle.)

For this fourth production of the play at A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago , I had nearly zero input.  I answered a few small script questions via email from the director Karen Kessler, but otherwise I really might as well have been blissfully departed.  So I had no idea what I was in for when showed up at the storefront theatre in Old Town two nights ago.  I have sat through productions I had nothing to do with that blew me away with their unforeseen brilliant interpretation of my script, and I have sat through shows so awful, so utterly antithetical to the play I imagined that I was struck quite literally catatonic with horror, rage and shame.

Louis Slotin was just about to leave Los Alamos when he had his accident.  His bags were packed.  He was showing the “crit test” to Alvin Graves, his replacement at Pajarito Canyon labs.  The next day he planned to fly out to the South Pacific to see the Navy explode the very plutonium core he held in his hands.  From there he would head to the University of Chicago to continue his studies in his original field of biology.  Of course, Slotin never made it to Chicago.  He never made it out of Los Alamos alive.  They put his radiation-ravaged body in a lead-lined casket and shipped it to Winnipeg, Manitoba, his hometown.

Two nights ago I saw Louis Slotin alive in Chicago.  He was occupying the body of an actor named Steven Schine, who through happy happenstance looks a hell of a lot like him.  I watched as that long-ago dead man was forced to, via long distance phone call, break the news in Yiddish to his father Israel Slotin that he was dying.  Israel was inhabiting the body of an eminently accomplished veteran Chicago actor named William J. Norris.

I watched those men relive a pain that no one should even have to live through once.  I watched and I wept.  But I also felt a great strange satisfaction.  After 64 years Louie had arrived where he was going.

Maybe I should play dead more often.

Chicago Posts: Why Chicago Still Thrills

I figured out why Chicago thrills me so.  I wish the answer was more nuanced or complex, but the fact is, I love tall buildings.  I always have. 

Skyscrapers have always stirred me, since before I can remember.  I always knew I would live in New York City some day, not because I wanted to be an actor (I did) but because of the skyscrapers.  I wanted to live among them, in them.  I wanted to look out from the tops of them.  As fate would have it, I got to work as a window cleaner for a few years in New York and later a few months in Seattle.  I got to hang from these amazing human constructions by thin lines.  The job ultimately carved scars on my face, head, back and arms but if that was the price of getting to see Manhattan and Seattle in ways only a handful of people can claim, I say I got a bargain.

Perhaps more crucial to Chicago’s thrill, over, say, Seattle or Baltimore or L.A., is how these buildings I love are all jammed together to form the canyons that turn far off sirens and car horns into the most comforting music.  Yesterday, Heather and I meditated with that song as background before heading out to drinks and dinner.  I fell asleep to it last night.

The song of aspiration.

Chicago Posts: Light Rail to Sea-Tac

For most of the 17 years I have lived in Seattle I have been poor.  Over the latter half of the Zeroes I suppose I have to cop to having climbed to “lower middle class”.  Also, I was car-less for about ten of my 17 years here, so I know a little something about getting to the airport on the cheap.  I have taken the 194 Express bus from downtown to Sea-Tac more times than I can remember.  It’s an entertaining coach—not as adventure-filled as the 358 that shoots up Aurora—but it still has its “people moments.”  I have witnessed on the 194 the racial tension that Seattle likes to pretend doesn’t exist erupt with an open nastiness that would make a New Yorker blink.  Now that we live in the future, you can avoid that certain strata of humanity almost altogether by taking the new light rail which has begun running from the downtown bus tunnel directly to the airport.

Heather and I did it this morning.  Overall, I give the new route a B-minus.  Certainly the price was right.  With my work Orca card I rode free.  Heather fed $2.50 into the automatic ticket machine.  The cars are clean, well-lit and, at 6:40 AM south-bound, uncrowded.  I didn’t realize that that course of the train dives directly under Beacon Hill after veering east from the Sodo District.  That was cool.  We saw some fun movement-animated LED art as we came into the Beacon Hill station, which had an appealing retro-modern design, albeit still under construction in spots. 

The airport train loses points on speed.  It took about 35 minutes from the University Street Station under Benaroya Hall to the Sea-Tac stop, and I would swear the old 194 ran quicker than that on its straight shot down the I-5 express lane.  Also, the train currently lets off south of the main parking garage.  So add another five- minute walk in the weather for you to get to the airport itself.  Not that Heather and I minded, but I am not sure we would want to do it while trying to wrangle young kids, or lugging lots of bags; and I certainly wouldn’t ask, say, my 76-year-old mother to hoof it that far.

I will probably take the Light Rail to the airport again, but I might also see if the 194 is still running, fast and furious.

Chicago Posts: Awesome Theatre Town? Or the Awesomest?

Chicago is an awesome town.  I know this because I have been there once and I had a blast.  Chicago buys you whiskeys and beers-back in friendly, binged-in pubs, and Chicago puts its arm around you and tells you about its job as an assistant district attorney and how it married its high school sweetheart and has a nice family though one of its kids is disabled with something you cannot remember because of all the drinks Chicago has stood you.  And then later when you go to take a piss you find Chicago making out with this kind of skanky chick in the men’s room stall, and you’re pretty sure she’s not Chicago’s wife who Chicago was just telling you about--what was it?  Five minutes?-- or half an hour ago?  Doesn’t matter.  Who are you to judge?  Doesn’t change the fact that Chicago is an awesome town.

 

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But how awesome is Chicago as a theatre town?  My personal experience on this subject is much more limited.  This production of Louis Slotin Sonata that I am going to see this weekend is my first full production in what is, by nearly everyone’s estimation, one of the United States great stage cities.

Certainly everyone in the business likes to point to the Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company as the model for how to be both commercially successful and artistically relevant.  How many nascent ensemble-based theatre companies have promised you, with their collective hand out for a donation, that they intend to be Seattle or L.A.’s next Steppenwolf?  Me, honestly have no idea if Steppenwolf is all that great.  I have only seen one production by that team, nearly two decades ago, in New York City.  It was their adaptation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and it was… oh right, it was frickin’ awesome.

Chicago is certainly less shy about promoting its theatre scene than Seattle.  The Tribune’s critic, Chris Jones calls his blog “Theater Loop: News from America’s Hottest Theater City.”  What critic in Seattle would ever be so boldly boosterish?  By my admittedly loose estimation, Louis Slotin Sonata received more reviews per capita in Chicago than in Seattle, Los Angeles or New York.  The fact that they were not all unqualified raves does not really matter.  Coverage is coverage and wide coverage is a sign of health for a theatre town.

To be fair, Chicago does seem to have more than its fair share of block-headed, Broadway-bedazzled reviewers.  Back in January, the above-mentioned Mr. Jones offered his thoughts on Outrageous Fortune, TCG’s ground-breaking analysis of the plight of American playwrights.  He dismissed us as “whining” and “absurdly self-indulgent.”  More recently he began the meat of his review of my Louis Slotin Sonata by saying, “By reacting fast, blocking and ending the reaction, Slotin saved the lives of the men who were with him in the lab that day,” thus moronically parroting the blatant falsehood that the U.S. government began spinning within hours of an embarrassingly avoidable accident.  One might forgive Jones for perpetuating this historical and scientific deceit if the precise counterpoint were not demonstrated over and over throughout the play, providing (I hope) the essential underpinning of Slotin’s unique path to redemption.

So critics can be patronizing blowhard nitwits in the Midwest, too.  Doesn’t matter.  Who is Seattle to judge?  (We can’t even get our best reviewer to commit to staying past intermission.)  Doesn’t change the fact that Chicago is almost certainly an awesome theatre town.  On this trip I want to learn more about how and why this is so.  I think the Emerald City could learn some things from the Windy One.

 

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*A note on Gary’s illustration:  I’m so excited by this one because it gives an inside view to a process usually only seen by myself, Gary and the director of whatever show we might be working on.  Gary likes to diagram.  I think he calls these things bubble charts and they represent one of the ways he gets his arms around a play. 

I stared at this one for like fifteen minutes last night after it came across the inter-tubes.  I could make sense of pieces of it, but the whole eluded me.  I chalked this up to Gary being smarter than me.  The next morning I looked at it fresh and realized my error.  The main path represents not “Paul’s” progress, but “Chicago’s”.  Of course!  I’m not the main character of this piece, Chi-town is (especially in the first paragraph, which this picture maps to perfection.)

Gary’s diagrams cut straight to the heart of a story and expose the essential mechanics that even the writer didn’t fully understand when he constructed it. 

Plus they’re funny.

Chicago Posts: My Shameful Little Secret

In the days of development ramping up to the world premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata in Los Angeles, I once spent a week in a Hollywood apartment in which the same three inches of scummy water never drained from the bottom of the bathtub. As for the New York premiere of my play Tuesday, even though I had attended early rehearsals and had high hopes, I wound up falling asleep during an actual performance, thereby poisoning forever my relationship with that theatre company and its artistic director. I once sent my most obscure and arcane play The Septarchy to an even more obscure little company in Louisville, Kentucky on the recommendation of a gorgeous stage manager running a Twilight Zone I was acting in at Theater Schmeater. Unaccountably, they produced the play and staged one of the best versions of “The New You Boat”—the quantum particle-crewed, Schrödinger’s Box-based mini-submarine play-within-the-play— that I have ever seen.  And I’ve seen them all.  That is my shameful little secret.  I have seen every full production of every full-length play I have ever written.

If you don’t know already, I am obliged to inform you that, among my fellow American dramatists, this fact identifies me as an abject amateur. Playwrights of a certain caliber simply do not attend every production of their plays.  Worse than being impossible it would be unthinkable.  It would be tacky, pedestrian.  One’s ideal play distribution process goes like this: workshop in Manhattan, and ideally premiere there.  Less preferably, emulate that sequence at one of the regional big houses scattered throughout the nation. After a respectable world premiere production (thought don’t even get me started on the esoterica of what constitutes a “world premiere” and how many times an unprincipled playwright can apply that term to the very same play). Finally, trickle the play down through the theatrical food chain, to smaller and smaller houses, not unlike a wholesale supply network.

Needless to say, I don’t do it that way.

While I make more money in a year from theatre than most union card-carrying actors, I will not shrink from being called an amateur, if that is the appellation that seeing every one of my plays earns me. For one, it’s just way too much fun. Even if the production is less than inspiring, going to some new town and partying with perfect strangers who treat me like a cast-mate merely because I wrote the show is arguably the best thing about being a living playwright. (The very best perks, of course, are reserved for the dead.)  How else would I know that Louisville has one of the most beautiful graveyards in the nation? Or that Los Angeles, surprisingly, has some of the best breakfast spots. (I wouldn’t have guessed they even ate breakfast in LA.)

(Let’s take a break for a moment and enjoy Gary' Smoot’s 15 minute mash-up illustration for this installation.) (As Gary happily pointed out when he sent this to me, the above crowd would actually represent a pretty good selling night for a lot of my plays.)

I part ways with my colleagues who seek to distribute their plays like wholesale book-sellers. It’s boring. It’s corporate. And, heck, let’s face it: our dying art form, absurdly or not, is starting to look like a lot better bet than the book business. Besides, our nation’s best work has come from amateurs. Our Founding Fathers, for instance, found the notion of professional politicians anathematic. Our best soldiers have always been citizen-soldiers. And give me any day the amateurs Thoreau and Whitman over the professional philosopher Rand and pro poet Pound. Plus, despite all I’ve said, who says a professional playwright can’t see every production of his plays? I suspect Shakespeare saw every one of his before finally leaving London for good.

The day may come when I will not be able to attend a particular production of one of my plays. The coming of that day may mean I have finally become a fully professional playwright.

You know what?

I can wait.

Chicago Posts: Kick-Off

Even when I try to keep my Just Wrought posts short, they still end up longer-winded than I’d like.  So I’m going to try something a little different with this series about my upcoming trip to Chicago.

Heather and I will be flying to the Windy City next Friday, ostensibly to see the Mid-West premiere of my play Louis Slotin Sonata at A Red Orchid Theatre, but if you think the fact that the Seahawks are playing the Bears at Soldier Field on Sunday has nothing to do with it, well, you obviously don’t know me and my wife very well.

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I feel like I can defend the choice to blog this trip by promising to share with you my singular experiences as a playwright traveling to see his plays.  When you think about it, this is a particularly odd occurrence in the broad realm of artistic endeavor.  We playwrights create these action/dialogue designs, send them out into the world for other people to work on-- often, as in this case, with almost no input into the particulars of the production-- and then, should we choose to and be lucky enough to have the means, we travel to the other cities to see the results.

Who else does this?  Fiction writers can carry their finished product around in a bag or Kindle.  Painters and sculptors have their hands on their handicraft until it goes up on some wall or pedestal.  Performers-- actors and dancers and musicians are their work themselves in a sense.  But what other kind of artist does this weird dance of intimacy and distance-- sending their kid off to boarding school and then showing up for the graduation ceremony?  Composers maybe?  I don’t know much about composers.  More’s the pity.

I will try to keep these posts short, 500 words or less, unless I feel like I got something crucial to say about theatre.   “Something crucial to say about theatre.”  As soon as I typed those words I snorted a little.

 

*(A fun note: Gary Smoot has agreed to provide illustrations for these short posts, with the caveat that he will spend no more than 15 minutes on any given image.  The above “f ing drama”,  is the first.  Going forward with this experiment, please understand that I have very little control over what Gary chooses to produce.  I can make a initial few suggestions, but the ultimate product is purely his commentary on my commentary.  Come to think of it, that’s not unlike what happens when he designs for one of my plays.)