Just Wrought

Why a Little Boredom is a Good Thing

I have been thinking a lot about boredom lately, as I work on my book The Starting Gate. Recently I had a reading of an early draft of a chapter called “The Devil’s Workshop” in which I recount some of my childhood encounters with the dangers of being too bored for too long. My good friend and colleague, Pam Carter, mentioned afterwards that she had written an article about this subject with her fellow early childhood educator, Barbara Belknap, and suggested that I might find some of its points useful as I revised. Boy, did I ever.  I liked the article so much that I asked Pam and Ms. Belknap if I might publish it here at Just Wrought. Happily, they said yes. I hope you find it as enjoyable and insightful as I did.

 

 

Why a little Boredom is a Good Thing
By Pamela Hobart Carter and Barbara Belknap

 

 

The Politics of Playmaking

The last time I taught Freehold’s New Play Lab  I explained up front what I think makes this particular course unique: it gives the student playwright the opportunity to explore the politics involved in actually taking a play from page to stage. One of my students muttered, “Politics? I don’t like the sound of that.”

I understand the feeling, but making plays has always been, and always will be, an inescapably political process. We can savor that fact, or bemoan it, but we cannot abrogate it. Now to be plain, the kind of politics I am talking about are usually little more than the affable affairs of a small town assembly; but, in my quarter century-plus producing new plays, there have been times when the struggle took on a much more Machiavellian flavor. I even admit now that on rare and retrospectively embarrassing occasions I have both threatened, and have been threatened with, physical violence. Let’s be honest: the deceptively innocuous sentiment “the show must go on” contains at its core the quintessence of a Corleone threat. Plays, like revolutions, get perpetrated by the tenacious.

Freehold’s New Play Lab helps fill a playwright’s tool box with some of the more pragmatic (and peaceful) implements needed to push through production log jams. It also helps a playwright understand: (1) what is possible to do in the theatre; and, (2) what is not. (Answers: (1) everything you can imagine; and, (2) nothing you aren’t willing to fight for.)  Here’s the skinny straight from the Freehold horse’s mouth:

This dynamic class is designed for eight writers who are in the process of writing the first draft of their play and are ready to explore the rewrite and rehearsal process. Working with a produced playwright throughout the month of August, you'll shape, refine, rewrite, and hone the story you're telling. Then, in September, you'll meet with an experienced director and actors for four hours of intensive rehearsal, culminating in two public staged readings of a portion of your play, as a part of Freehold's New Play Lab Showcase in mid September. Auditions and rehearsal will be scheduled in two weeks prior to the showcase.

Go here for info on how to register for Freehold's New Play Lab. 

This could be the last class in writing for the theatre I teach for a long while, maybe ever. Many are my reasons for my impending step back from theatre, not the least of which my own personal need to take a break from the politics: good, bad and indifferent (mostly indifferent). However, if elected as your Play Lab instructor, I promise I will make it my mission—and pleasure—to help you navigate the Machiavellian machinations to make your good play great.

 

Related articles

Why Curt Dempster Commissioned Me to Write THE SEQUENCE

Messing with Form for Maximum Effect

‘Tis true: I have messed about a bit with narrative over my career as a playwright.  My best known play follows the sonata allegro form.  I have written fugues, concertos and duets as well.  Beyond musical inspirations, I have made plays in the shape of a clock, a single day passing, and a palindrome.  And even when I’m wrighting the “well made” play— putting all my plot peaks and valleys at the proper places on the x-axis of time, like with my farce Gossamer Grudges— I still lean heavily on the lessons I’ve learned playing faster and looser with the Aristotelian rules of story-telling. That’s why I so enjoy the rare opportunities I get to teach my Hugo House class, Exploring Alternative Narrative Structure. 

From Hugo House’s class description:

Aristotle said a story should have a beginning, middle and end, in that order; but how often does life really feel like that? Sometimes to reflect reality we have to challenge old assumptions about how we experience and process narrative. We will explore alternative structures to Aristotle’s cherished mountain of rising action, looking at classical music forms, technology, architecture, political systems and biology for potential models.  Indeed, no source of inspiration will be excluded. Famous examples of effective use of alternative narrative form will be examined, including Pinter’s Betrayal, Thorton Wilder’s “The Pullman Car Hiawatha,” Italo Calvino’s novels and Paul Mullin’s Louis Slotin Sonata. Finally, we’ll examine our current writing projects and determine how they might benefit from some structural shake-ups.

Whether you craft short stories, novels, graphic novels, plays or screenplays, if your writing involves narrative, in can help to push the envelope of alternatives. 

Come join the fun!  I have spaces left in the class, so click on this link for more info on the class and how to register: https://hugohouse.org/class/exploring-alternative-narrative-structure . 

Exploring Alternative Narrative Structure

 

 

It doesn’t happen often, and when it does I always manage to kvetch about it, but I am teaching again, this time at Hugo House, and with a broader scope than just playwriting.  Here’s the pitch. . . .

 

Exploring Alternative Narrative Structure

Aristotle said a story should have a beginning, middle and end, in that order; but how often does life really feel like that? Sometimes to reflect reality we have to challenge old assumptions about how we experience and process narrative. We will explore alternatives to Aristotle’s cherished mountain of rising action, looking at classical music forms, technology, architecture, political systems and biology for potential models.  Indeed, no source of inspiration will be excluded. Famous examples of effective use of alternative narrative form will be examined, including Pinter’s Betrayal, Thorton Wilder’s “The Pullman Car Hiawatha,” Italo Calvino’s novels and Paul Mullin’s Louis Slotin Sonata.  Finally, we’ll examine our current writing projects and determine how they might benefit from some structural shake-ups.

 

If you’re interested, your best bet is to register on line here.

Long Live Living Newspapers!

 

When The Stranger asked me at the end of the year what my biggest regret of 2011 was, I said:

I regret that due to limited resources, we had to mothball NewsWrights United prior to the Occupy movement blowing up, because I would have really liked to cover that in a living newspaper. Adjacent to that is my regret that none of the big houses in Seattle (or small, for that matter) saw fit to include making topical theatre, based on events happening right here right now, as part of their regular programming this year. 

Well, shade my regret mitigated by the news from across the pond that my former playwriting student German Munoz has organized a living newspaper about the Occupy movement called The Occupied Times.  After spending a month researching and visiting the Occupy sites in London, emerging playwrights will present a night of short plays in the format of a living newspaper. They will act as reporters and cast a critical eye on the Occupy movement, its supporters and detractors, all under the Arcola Tent. 

And color me even more vividly gratified when I saw that the project gave Seattle a shout-out in their press release:  “This project was inspired by It’s not in the P-I: A living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper presented in Seattle in 2009 as a response to the closing of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper by Newswrights United.”

Not surprisingly, The Occupied Times seems to be garnering the same sort of media excitement that the two living newspapers NewsWrights United produced in 2009 and 2011.  The London Evening Standard ran a preview of the piece   and quoted my friend German thusly:

We want the show to explore sides of the movement that have not been heard. We're hoping to reach people of all ages who feel they've made up their minds about the Occupy movement. People who either think of the protesters as a bunch of lazy hippies who don't want to get a job, or see them as martyrs fighting the good fight against a system that is unbearably corrupt. Of course neither of these are completely true, and we want to show audiences our responses as artists and help them make up their own minds.

I heartily encourage my friends in London to check out this fresh, locally grown theatre inspired in the crucible of the right here and the right now.  Here’s the show info:

Six Degrees Productions presents  . . .

The Occupied Times: A living newspaper
about the Occupy movement

Venue: Arcola Tent, 2-8 Ashwin Street, London, E8 3DL

Date: Sunday 19 February, 2012

Time: 3:00pm and 7:00pm

Ticket prices: £12 (£10)

Venue Box Office: 020 7503 1646 or http://www.arcolatheatre.com 

For all enquiries and ticket requests, please contact:  German Munoz of Six Degrees Productions on 07854 231 085 or [email protected]

And as for my friends in Seattle, do you ever wonder why the Big Houses haven’t picked up such a wildly popular and media magnetizing idea?  Well, in fairness, maybe they will now that it is being done in London, one of the two officially approved cities for sourcing new plays.

doyle

Imagine a science fiction species that loses weight by breathing and poops bacteria instead of digested food. Can you picture it? If not, my friend doyle has a suggestion: go look in a mirror.

I met doyle on the internet. I feel closer to doyle than some people I have shared a bathroom with for years. I have only met doyle once in person. I want doyle to bury me.

All of that is tangential to the main point, which is that doyle has a blog called Science teacher and I think you should follow it.

Michael Doyle was born in Northern New Jersey, a good-for-nothing Mick like so many no-good-for-nothing Micks born in Northern New Jersey. (By the way, he prefers to refer to himself as “Oirish” as if that were somehow more PC.) He worked briefly as long shoreman. He went to med school. He became a pediatrician and worked in the ER and the projects. Think about that for a second. An emergency room pediatrician in Newark. You may think you know hell, but doyle has a crisper acquaintance with the place.

The reason I call doyle “doyle” and not “Michael Doyle” or “Michael” or “Dr. Doyle” or even “Doyle”, is that “doyle” was all I knew him by for months. We met as contributors to an on-line gathering site for weirdos and writers and weirdo writers called Everything₂, a quasi-prophetic mash-up of Face Book and Wikipedia if the former only allowed text and the latter had a sense of humor. I’m not sure the following piece is the first thing I ever read  of doyle’s, but I do remember it arrested me. He  was on pilgrimage to some mid-western city where his sister had recently died in a car crash.

December 9, 2004 (person)

The driver seat is still intact--inside scattered cd's with burgundy stains, her impossibly colored scarf, glass, pens. A bottle of chardonnay meant to be shared with her love survived. The other side of the car is splayed open, a gaping wound letting in rain, letting in sunshine.

I picked up a couple of cd's--Frankie Allison and the Odd Sox....and now my hands with bright red blotches, my sister's blood when she bled for the last time. I absently rubbed my hands on my jeans--the bright red dulled to burgundy again. I took the scarf with me.

Last summer a feral cat mutilated a mourning dove near my garden. I gave it water. It took a little. It hopped a few feet. It died. Its partner would not leave. It looked sad. A tiny puff of feathers still marks where the broken bird fell.

Her ashes are in a cardboard box, decorated with construction paper, stickers, sparkly glue, and (of course) hearts.

I kept going back in the car, not sure what I was looking for, but sure I would not find it.

At least I got something right this week.

Doyle and I hit it off early. He seemed to like my plays about science and my doggerel poems. I liked pretty much everything he wrote.

During my teaching rounds, I will occasionally show pediatric residents wheat berries, and ask them what they think they are. These fine young minds have been charged with teaching nutrition to parents, so quizzing them about the most common source of grain calories in this part of the world should be fair game.

I have yet to have an American born physician get it right.

My other Everythingian buddy “iceowl” grew up with doyle and liked to fascinate me with stories about him. (Keep in mind when you read the following that iceowl has been to Antarctica three times and has written about it better than Hemmingway ever could have.)

[Doyle’s] done much more for humanity than I have.  I'm just a silicon valley idiot…  He is one of those guys who is blessed to do well doing exactly what he wants in the world.  Classic Joseph Campbell example of, "Following your bliss."  He wants very little from the world, and gives a lot.  So, Doyle couldn't possibly do anything he didn't want to do because the worst that happens is he gets nothing for his efforts, and he's perfectly happy sleeping under the highway overpass if it comes to that …..  He just wants to do things none of us could stomach for more than a day - like dodging bullets and the cops both while illegally vaccinating kids in inner city Newark.

Five years ago doyle hung up has white physician’s coat and traded it for the white lab coat of a high school science teacher. He calls his students his "lambs", though I suspect few of them understand how closely he has observed the slaughter in his former life.

In his blog he mixes the same blend of adoration and frustration that I came to love him for at Everything₂. Here he is breathlessly elevating a discourse on respiration to a paean of the universe, because as he sees it— and trust me, doyle sees it as it is— there is no meaningful difference between the two. (I’ll do my best to capture doyle’s rapturously manic formatting.)

 

Carbon dioxide that traveled through the hearts 
of every child in our class.

Carbon dioxide expelled as a sigh, 
broken down by a few brain cells that would
rather do anything but this school thing.

We ruin it, this carbon dioxide communion, reducing it to hieroglyphics on a page, to be regurgitated by spilling bubbles on a sheet, a religiously messy communion of sorts sterilized to a formula:

 

C₆H₁₂O₆ +6 O₂ =>  6H₂O + 6CO₂

 

And yet, for a moment, the moment before eating the bean, a few students allow themselves the beauty and the power of the story to let them believe what they've always known to be true, that this whole life business, as messy and complicated and incomprehensible as it seems, gets down to this:

Each living thing, every living thing, shares an intimate bond that goes beyond the language of science, beyond the language of art, beyond human boundaries.

The universe belongs to all of us, as we belong to it.

No matter how we do in school, no matter what we know, now matter what we do.

I would trade all the biochemical pathways we "teach" for a child's grasping, for more than a moment, that we are indeed the stuff of the universe around us, and that this stuff cycles through us, is us.

 

Without an iota of the effort I put into it, Doyle writes the way I yearn to, with a high-wire walker’s combination of improvisation and precision. Because he flat-out knows so much, thanks to an enormous education and equally enormous experience, he can produce an uncannily free of flow of ideas without the so-much-smoke-blowing of so many formally educated, professionally self-identified “writers”. After I’ve been steeping myself in his prose for a while, I start to feel my own prose improving, taking flight. It could just be my imagination; but given how much both doyle and I believe in imagination, I’ll take it.

Neil Gaiman first introduced me to the Talmudic legend of the 36 Tzaddikim in his Sandman series. "They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints – 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world." I’m not going to come out and say Doyle is a Tzaddik. Such a pronouncement would be absurd, given the the legend’s clear and emphatic stipulation that no one can know who the 36 are. 

I just have my suspicions is all.

 

Photo by Susan LaRusse Eckert, used with permission of the subject, who only asked that I note: "She's a little pissed off at me now--I tend to do that. I'd be much obliged if you mentioned that I'm truly sorry for my, um, knuckleheadedness."

 

A Sample of Marya's Wisdom

Click here for some wisdom about teaching art and doing art from Marya Sea Kaminski, one the finest actors and people I know.  She's easily one of the top ten reasons Seattle has a shot at being a world class theatre town.  I only hope I get to play with her again on some fun project, like I did with The Ten Thousand Things. 

Here she is in her final scene of the Washington Ensemble Theatre world premiere of that play, in the fabulous "octopus dress" designed for her by Heidi Ganser.

 

 

A Cooper, a Cobbler, a Candle-Dipper and Playwright

So ideally this would be a brief blurb whole-heartedly encouraging you to consider joining my beginning playwriting class at Freehold this summer; but I have never been able to bring much more than a half-heart to the effort of shilling for my classes.  And those of you who know me know that shilling is not ordinarily something I am uncomfortable with.

Bitterness is an occupational hazard of being a playwright.  I manage my bouts as best as I can, and honestly, since my boys were born, I am a lot less plagued with it:  quite happy, in fact, with my individual fate as an artist, while still remaining deeply unsatisfied with the slow progress of the art form itself, especially in this city that I have chosen to live and practice it.  In my less cheerful moments, though, I have been known to half-joke that my chosen profession has a lot in common with the kind of occupations you might find at colonial Williamsburg.  The apparent misspelling of the second syllable serves as dead giveaway for its goofy old-timey contrivance.  Does anybody really “wright” anything anymore?  Wouldn’t I be better off moving to some 17th Century throwback village, hanging out a sign that says “ye Olde Playwrighte” and scribbling out sides for “players” on parchment with a quill?  Certainly one must question the ethics, let alone benevolence, of asking for money in exchange for teaching anyone such an anachronistic craft.   But I have also come to realize that there is a small but considerable subset of otherwise rational, intelligent adults that actually want to learn how to craft barrels, or shoes, or hand-dipped candles, or even-- heaven help them—plays.  So long as everything is honest and above board I do not believe I need to feel guilty about taking their money for teaching them how to wright.  (A more unrelenting question might be: “Should I feel guilty about the fact that I am convinced I learn more from every class than my students do?”)

So if you know anyone who might like to study wrighting words for people-- or rather, their perilously attractive facsimiles, actors-- to speak aloud and live on stage, or if you yourself always dreamed of the kind of arrogance only anachronistic obscurity can forge, then you should know that I will be teaching at Playwriting I: Exploring the Craft at Freehold this Summer.  Details below.

Love,

Paul Mullin, Ye Olde Playwrighte

****

Playwriting I: Exploring the Craft

Theatre tells stories using actors, with powerful objectives, living at specific moments in time. Explore the many ways playwrights create interesting, truthful characters and dynamic stories using the language of the stage: words: movement, light, sound, and silence. This interactive class includes both sit-down writing exercises, and up-on-your-feet work, so please dress comfortably.

Upcoming Classes
July 14 - September 1
Wednesdays 6:30pm - 9:30pm
Freehold's Bev Kelly Library
Open for Registration: http://www.freeholdtheatre.org/studio/class/707