But it may come three, two, one, two*

It's been several months since I updated this blog.  My last blog entry was written after the attacks in Paris.  I hit publish, but didn't post on social media that I had written anything.  I wasn't sure then and I'm not sure now that what I wrote didn't trivialize something of tremendous pain to so many.

My life and my writing has been in transition for the last year.

Last summer I wrote 90 short plays in 90 days.

Before this I had been working on a play about my experiences as a foster parent.  The play seemed artificial and forced.  I wrote thirty pages that I didn't like.

During the 90 in 90, I found myself writing a large number of short plays about my experiences as a foster parent.  When I returned to the play I was working on earlier, I realized that I had already written a play about fostering.  I gathered the best of the 90 in 90 and compiled them along with a one-act I'd written two years ago for FronteraFest into the play I had dreamed of writing about foster parenting.

I was struggling.  Trying, again, to force the words out.  To make it be a play with "internal logic."  A classical, traditional play with a beginning, a middle, and an end, in that order.  A "well-made" play.  A play with a coherent plot and character development presented in a normal chronological order.

Maybe that's just not me.

What I have is once again... not surreal.  It's not a dream.  Most of what is on the page is autobiographical... very autobiographical.  But as you can imagine for a play made of 30 or 40 smaller pieces scrambled together... it's surreal... with touches of Brecht... just for fun.

I also wrote a high school play.

And then the desert.  I have written nothing for four months.  Some of it was life (household repairs, health, etc.) getting in the way.  Some is just lack of... motivation... or rather focusing on a different area of my life.  Focusing on the practical, the everyday.  Things I often neglect.

I have dreamed of projects.  I've made notes.  I've done research...
...but I have not written more than a few words.

Nothing has inspired... yet.

But I can hear the Siren's call.


*The Monkees - "Ditty Diego - War Chant"

What is my theory that it is*

I was wrong.

I dream of being a surrealist.

I was bemoaning in my last blog post, and to my mentor, that so much of the modern theatre (this is the spelling I am sticking with) is concerned with the "internal logic" of the play.  Nothing wrong with this, but it is very limiting.  And I speculated that Alfred Jarry or August Strindberg never worried about "internal logic."

I don't want to worry about internal logic.

I was doing the dishes and listening to the radio as I do every morning.  On NPR (where so many of the great ideas I have come from), a mention was made of a book called Aluminum Dreams - The Making of Light Modernity.  What a wonderful title, I thought.  The modern world helped along by a manufacturing process.  I wrote a poem years ago called Plutonium Dreams.  I remember the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick, the book the movie Blade Runner is based on.  Anais Nin wrote The Novel of the Future, a wonderful book I read in high school about surrealism in art, with the refrain "proceed from the dream outward," which I have used as a touchstone in my own work and, which I have just learned, is a Carl Jung quote.

Dreams are important to me.  And, no, I am not one of those people who writes down every dream and I spend very little time analyzing my dreams.  I don't think most, or practically any, of my dreams are important.  Most dreams are a response to the previous day and are basically a process of sorting out what the day before held.

But as an excessively rational person, and an artist, I work hard to tap into my irrational mind.  It is a critical element in my creative process.  (Remember what this blog is about... my creative process.)  Dreams, the waking kind, the fantasies that spring into my thoughts unbidden are regularly keys to my art.

And suddenly I understood why surrealism has such a hard time in the modern theatre.

Real life is surreal.  Modern living is surreal.

I can go to a building in my town.  Enter a tiny room crowded with people.  Sleep through the night, and wake up with the Eiffel Tower at my feet.

I've done that.  We call that building an airport and that tiny, overcrowded room an airplane.

This very morning, I was doing the dishes, listening to voice coming out of the ether, telling me about the making of modernity.  Moses would have thought it was the Word of God.

And then there's politics, or international relations, or mega-corporations, or global warming or... on and on.  None of it is rational, logical.  It's surreal.  The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade makes more sense.

No wonder "internal logic" has become so important!  Real life has no internal logic.  Perhaps modern drama must.


*John Cleese & Monty Python, "Ann Elk's Theory on Brontosauruses"

Resolution of these Two States, Dream and Reality*

I went to a reading yesterday afternoon of a play I liked very much.  The play was a science fiction set in the not-to-distant future.

I stayed for the "Talk Back."

The moderator and, I presume, the author asked questions about how well we, the audience, understood and followed the internal logic of the play; did the "world" of the play make sense.  I listened, added a brief comment or two, and left happy with the whole experience.

It wasn't until I lay in bed trying to go to sleep that it struck me.

I've been to a quite a few "Talk Backs."  One discussion point always seems to be the internal logic of the play and I thought of one of my touch stones in modern theater, Alfred Jarry.

Did Alfred Jarry ever wonder about the internal logic of his plays?  Did August Strindberg?

My sense is "no."

But is there a market for this sort of thing, plays without internal logic?  A market is important.  I don't write plays for my health..., not that I'm likely to get wealth, but I would, at least, like a few people to see my stuff.  In fact, if I must be honest, and I don't, and, in fact, rarely am, I would like to make a living from writing theater... or film... or television.

I grew up on television.  Internal logic is a high priority for most standard adult fare on TV.

And so much of the modern theater seems... driven is to strong a word, influenced (?), informed (?), I don't know, by TV and film.  TV and film is where the money is.

But there are/were some exceptions - Bob Newhart, Mary Hartman, Green Acres, Warner Brothers cartoons.  And that's just off the top of my head.

All comedies.  Probably explains, partially, why I am attracted to comedies.

But the anti-rational does not have to be comedic.

I want to create a non-rational, illogical, free-spirited theater.

Now... how do you do that...?

And get anyone to attend?


* Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism

Notes for "Go Home, Mister Chaplin"

Below are my notes for my 20-minute play, Go Home, Mister Chaplin that had it's first performance at FronteraFest Short Fringe, 29 Jan, 2015:

Title: Go home, Mister Chaplin; Under the paving stones; Piggies; Holy Innocents; Herod’s Pig; Childermas; Feast of the Holy Innocents; Unto Dust ; Rachel’s Children; Danse Macabre; All Fall Down; The Rosie; Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust;  We all Fall Down; Ring Around the Rosie:  Pocket full of Posies; Rape of Persephone; The Madness of Orestes; Iphigenia crosses the Delaware; Occupy Hell (Hades?); The Kids in Art School; The Joy of Mechanical Force; No More Flat Feet; Lipstick Traces (on a cigarette); the knot surely knit

Tagline: "Die soon: we can guarantee you a first-class funeral." - The Letterist International

A filing cabinet in a funeral home filled with unclaimed cremated remains.  On top of the cabinet is an urn.
http://www.kutnews.org/post/bill-would-give-unclaimed-ashes-veterans-final-resting-place
“In Odessa, funeral director Bill Vallie has the same problem.
“We have a locked filing cabinet, four drawers, legal-sized filing cabinet, so that once we get a cremated remains back they’re placed in a safe place so that no one can tamper with them,” Vallie said.”

Set:  Two old metal filing cabinets - One filled with manila envelopes with dust (remains) inside each envelope, the other filled with metal parts used to repair human bodies that would not melt in the crematorium.

Characters: Phylicia Spektor (Phil)- old funeral director, former foster child ;Susan or Cory (Caridwen?) - new funeral director, her first job, pregnant (!), filled with anxiety; Sen. Scarsdale - trying to make a name for himself by exposing the tragedy of the unburied dead and their treatment;

Culture:  The culture of death, High culture, religious culture,  the loss of culture, the victory of culture, cultural icon.

“The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer.” (Wiki)

Stuff:  Coventry Carol.  Manure fork. Feast of the Holy Innocents - “The liturgical colour of the Roman Church is purple, not red, because these children were martyred at a time when they could not attain the beatific vision. “  Shearmen and Tailors' Pageant.  Behold, a virgin shall conceive (Ecce virgo concipiet).  the knot surely knit. To rage with thee.  Demeter and Persephone.  Elysium.  (Elysium mystery - kiste, a sacred chest, and the kalathos, a lidded basket)
According to Thomas Taylor, "the dramatic shows of the Lesser Mysteries occultly signified the miseries of the soul while in subjection to the body, so those of the Greater obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of the soul both here and hereafter, when purified from the defilements of a material nature and constantly elevated to the realities of intellectual [spiritual] vision." And that according to Plato, "the ultimate design of the Mysteries … was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, … a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good."

In order to qualify for initiation, participants would sacrifice a piglet to Demeter and Persephone, and then ritually purify themselves in the river Illisos.

This "festival within a festival" celebrated the hero's arrival at Athens with his daughter Hygieia (goddess of health).

At a certain spot along the way, they shouted obscenities in commemoration of Iambe (or Baubo), an old woman who, by cracking dirty jokes, had made Demeter smile as she mourned the loss of her daughter.

Iambe - the Greek Goddess of Humor and Poetry whose bawdy jests roused the grieving Demeter from her profound depression during her search for her daughter Persephone.

Note: I just noticed doodlebug's inquiry. Yes, the legend of the cutty black sow or Yr Hwch Ddu Gwta in Wales. This was a demonic pig that chased people on Halloween. A saying from Cardiganshire goes:
A cutty black sow
On every stile
Spinning and carding
Every Allhallows' Eve

when Jesus casts the demons out of the man he sends them into a herd of swine, an action appropriate both because pigs are sacred animals, and thus able to absorb and carry off evil, and because as underworld creatures themselves, they have an affinity with  the demonic that makes them receptive to it.

Dionysis - Father of grape harvest, drunkness, and theater

Hekate - goddess of witchcraft;  She is variously associated with crossroads, entrance-ways, fire, light, the Moon, magic, witchcraft, knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants, necromancy, and sorcery.

Pluto - underworld, wealth (!)

In Douglas Adams' book Mostly Harmless the fictional, newly discovered 10th planet is named Persephone. However it gets given the nickname Rupert after "some astronomer's parrot".

Some consider that the Statue of Freedom, atop the United States Capitol, to be a representation of Persephone.

Pussy Riot - Punk Prayer

The Situationist International - the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.
-In other words, any method of making one or more individuals critically analyze their everyday life, and to recognize and pursue their true desires in their lives. The experimental direction of situationist activity consists of setting up temporary environments that are favorable to the fulfillment of such desires.[5]

"Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle," he writes, "the theatre is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds." By "cruelty," Artaud referred not to sadism or causing pain, but rather a violent, austere, physical determination to shatter the false reality that, he wrote, "lies like a shroud over our perceptions."

‘Pan’ic Movement

Lett(e)rist International(e) (joke: LIe)  “The LI was the first breakaway faction from Isidore Isou's Letterists. (They would be followed in turn by the Ultra-Letterists). The schism developed when the 'left-wing' of the Letterist group disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference for Limelight at the Hôtel Ritz Paris in October 1952. They distributed a polemic entitled "No More Flat Feet", which concluded: "The footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man. Go home Mister Chaplin."”
--"the most urgent exercise of liberty is the destruction of idols".
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/flatfeet.html
Chtcheglov declared, "The Hacienda must be built", a remark which would later inspire the name of the famous Manchester night-club.  “Madchester”
Ivan Chtcheglov's plan to blow up the Eiffel Tower, on no other grounds than that its lights were shining through his bedroom window and keeping him awake at night. He was subsequently confined to a mental institution.
Decades later, Debord would nostalgically (though also somewhat ambiguously) sum up the spirit of the times in his Panegyric (1989): "Between the rue du Four and the rue de Buci, where our youth so completely went astray as a few glasses were drunk, one could feel certain that we would never do any better."
A 1950 letterist attempt at the liberation of a Catholic orphanage at Auteuil, causing a small-scale riot in protest at how "youth suffers in slavery, or is super-exploited by the seniority system."
 Eliane Papaï


The play begins with a flash of light that momentarily blinds the audience and a tiny puff of smoke center stage.

Nuclear Art Movement -  The truth does not belong to you: it is within the atom.   (Against Style, nuclear Manifesto, Milan, September 1957)  Eaismo

"Pure psychic automatism" was how André Breton defined surrealism, and while the definition has proved capable of significant expansion, automatism remains of prime importance in the movement.

No More Flat Feet - Stavisky[reference to a thief] of weeping unwed mothers and little orphans of Auteil, hail Chaplin, swindler of emotions, master-singer of suffering
the cop's nightstick behind the rattan cane
You are a Max du Veuzit (Alphonsine Zéphirine Vavasseur (!)) with flat feet, and we don't believe in the "absurd persecutions" you say you are the victim of.[4] The French for immigration service is advertizing agency. The kind of press conference you gave at Cherbourg would turn a complete dud into a sensation, so you needn't worry about the success of Limelight.[5]
Go to bed, you budding fascist. Make lots of money. Mingle with high society (bravo for the groveling before little [Queen] Elizabeth.) Die soon: we can guarantee you a first-class funeral.
May your latest film be your last.[6]
The footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man.
Go home, Mister Chaplin.

The Bernadette Corporation - While other artists might have feared accusations of "radical chic", BC encouraged them – as if to say that all left activism had become so ineffectual that all one could do is make a fashion statement.

One of the dead wants to be in the file cabinet.

A memorial ceremony .

An act of Civil disobedience -
Signed consent forms - You may not join in.  You are the percipients.  You are to watch.  You are the eyes and ears of the world.  The Reporters.  You’re ticket is your agreement to observe, to listen, but not to interact.
There will be no Violence.  (Scary Leer)
We will show proper respect.  Respect for you.  Respect for the dead.
Heartsucker.

Reification - Marxist theory, Typically it involves separating out something from the original context in which it occurs, and placing it in another context, in which it lacks some or all of its original connections yet seems to have powers or attributes which in truth it does not have. Thus reification involves a distortion of consciousness, ranging from the rather innocent, to the grotesque.

The Society of the Spectacle - In the society of the spectacle, the commodities rule the workers and the consumers instead of being ruled by them. The consumers are passive subjects that contemplate the reified spectacle.
-the autonomous movement of the non-living
-The value of a commodity is abstract and not tied to its actual characteristics.
-We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience.
-Irreconcilable claims jockey for position on the stage of the affluent economy's unified spectacle, and different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting social policies. The automobile spectacle, for example, strives for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of old urban districts, while the city spectacle needs to preserve those districts as tourist attractions.
-In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord asserted ideology is "the abstract will to universality and the illusion thereof," which is "legitimated in modern society by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion."[7]

Graffiti during the May 68 French Rebellion:
Je suis Marxiste — tendance Groucho (I’m a Marxist — of the Groucho variety)
Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.
The more you consume, the less you live. Commodities are the opium of the people.
Même si Dieu existait, il faudrait le supprimer. (Even if God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.)
Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre le risque de mourir d'ennui. (We don't want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.)
Sous les pavés, la plage. (Under the paving stones, the beach.)
Be cruel.
I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!

Les Enfants Terribles  - Cocteau  (translated as the Holy Terrors)  In her final moments, knowing that Paul is dying, Elisabeth senses that this is yet another twist in the game and by dying he has beaten her to the final move. She then shoots herself and by a matter of seconds beats Paul, leaving a frightened Agathe with two dead bodies.
-Inspired - The Holy Innocents (1988) is a novel by Gilbert Adair
-The Bernardo Bertolucci film The Dreamers (2003), based on the novel The Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair, tells the story of an American university student in Paris during the protests.

The imitation turd.  Sartre - "These jokes," he said, "have a revolutionary value. They disturb. There is more destructive power in them than in all the works of Lenin."

The old lady

1.  A mega-corp wants to build a new mega-mart on a spot where an old funeral home has been for a hundred years. Bodies have been in the basement for the entire time.  Unclaimed bodies that could not be buried.  The funeral home went out of business a few years back and the bodies have remained there since in the vacant building.  Also down in the basement is the last resting place of a one of the early morticians of the funeral home who made this place his last resting place.  Protestors have glommed onto this last resting place of veterans and children and the poor and the funeral director as their symbol of what a heartless corporation is trying to do.  The protestors are currently occupying the basement.  A leftist liberal priest is among the protestors.

2.  A young crazy person decides that to restore his/her sanity s/he must steal the remains of a person or maybe just an old headstone in her family who has gone unclaimed and unburied.

3.  People have been driven into this basement crypt by a storm!

Bullhorn voice?
One head stone has the name Iphigenia on it.  Born and died in Brooklyn.

A young crazy woman has used a protest against a mega-corporation to sneak into the crypt to steal her brothers unclaimed remains.  A storm with a tornado moves in and she is trapped when a radical protestor ( a modern dancer), a cop, a funeral director, and the head of the mega-corp. (Mike Duke),  seek refuge and a woman trying to bury her son.  The people who retreated from the storm have blacklight Zombie make-up under their regular make-up.

“This looks like a job for the masked avenger!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wej1LoOzaLY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bHtxbqVCsk



I. Act 1
A. Crazy (pretty, flowery dress and combat boots, peircings, tats) enters - looks around, grossed out by metal body parts, “Iphigenia?”  born Brooklyn died Brooklyn, starts sorting through the envelopes in the second cabinet.
B.  Voices at the top of the stairs.  Enter.  Lights flash off and we see the blacklight make-up.  Lights up.  Crazy hides.  Others enter.  Talk of the storm.


A young woman (soaking wet, Orestia Orrie Cocteau) trying to recover the remains of her “little brother” (actually her son who she mistakenly thinks she killed, Iffie, Iphigene), takes a funeral director(Dionysis, Dennis, Denny) and a woman (Athena, judge, Minnie) trying to burying her brother hostage and leads them down into the basement of the funeral home just as a big storm hits.  A protest has been going on outside the funeral home.  The owner of this historic building and property sold it to a mega-corporation to build a new super-store.  The protestors don’t want the super store in there community.  When the storm hits, the lawyer for the mega-corporation(defense lawyer, Apollo, Pythius, Pithy), the head of the protestors(prosecutor(The Fury, Tizzie, Tisiphone)), and a female cop (Iambe, Yoni) arrive in the basement for shelter.
Act 2 is a sort of trial.  At the end, Orrie shoots everyone and leaves.

Sturm und Drang

Setting - The basement of a Funeral Home in the Litchfield neighborhood, Tulsa, OK

Cast:
Orrie - female, 22
Denny - male, 29
Minnie - female, 38, pregnant
Pithy - female, 35, corporate lawyer
Tizzie - male, 28, pregnant, protestor, hipster lawyer
Yoni Baubo - female, 42, pregnant, security guard, artist

Topics of Discussion:
Pussy Riot
The Filing Cabinets
Death
Recycling\environmentalism
Body morphing - Borg\ robocop\ Man and machine (tats and piercings)
Individuality vs. Social responsibility
Occupy
Pregnancy
Letterists vs Situationists
Sturm und Drang  (Storm and Drive)
Burial ceremonies
Ritual
Corporate Responsibility
Fake vomit
The Holy Innocents
God and Religion
Spectacle
Marxist Theory\ the History of Red Square (http://www.moscow.info/red-square/history-red-square.aspx)
Reification
Civil disobedience
Non-violence
Surrealism
Radical Chic
I left my heart in Metropolis
Romantism
The Enlightenment
Rationalism
Art School Kids
Guns
Bullying
American Imperialism in the Muslim world
The Muslim who couldn’t find a place to be buried

Scene 1:

Minnie crying, Denny, pleading, enter followed by Orrie, with a gun, soaking wet.  Orrie rants about Maria and Nadezhda.  Who?  Pussy Riot!  Orrie shots Denny in the arm.  Now do you know who Pussy Riot is?!  Uses clothes for bandages.  Occupy Red Square.  You’re with the protestors.  Do I look like I am with those non-violent little shits?  Radical Chic.  Civil disobedience.  Marxism.  The history of Red Square.  What’s in the box?  File cabinet?  Do I have to shoot you again?  The box contains...
The unburied.  Reification.

You think she’s on drugs?
If she not, she ought to be.

ORRIE
Drunks and criminals wandering the Catacombs.  Tzara’s disciples.

MINNIE
My baby’s a boy, not an it.  I hope he grows up just like his father.
ORRIE
Dead?
MINNIE
(indignant)
His father was a hero and a martyr.
DENNY
A martyr?  Was you husband...?
MINNIE
Shahin Shahzad.  He was shot by the police.

Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.

RE_WRITE:
The bodies in the filing cabinet are stored in coffee cans from the coffee-maker upstairs.

Pithy, 42, female, a sympathetic corporate lackey. Straight-laced and well dressed in a tailored business suit, but she has a sense of humor.  But also a hard bargainer.  She’s in it for the money and prestige.  She swaggers as all good Texas cowgirl lawyers do.  She’s a vet.  She was an officer in a supply unit back in the states.

Tizzie - 29, male, hip, slick, and cool, a lawyer who thinks he’s beat the game by not being a lawyer.  Dressed down with a bright pink tee-shirt, plastic wrist-bands, sun glasses and an old hat.  Always ironic, but never funny.  He takes life way too seriously.  He works for a community organization, stop gentrification that he is a part of, community gardens, etc.  He thinks he’s important and doing work that “matters.”  He patronizes Yoni and Orrie.  He’s a tree hugger.

Yoni - 45, female, black.  She’s an artist.  She hates hipsters.  She takes her job seriously, because that’s the type of person she is, but she’s never had to actually do anything violent.  She paints.  A born negotiator.  She has an skewed view of life.  She has a wicked sense of humor.  She sees the humor in everything and is always looking for the joke.  She’s going to Community College, not to get a degree, but because it’s the only way she can get the painting and art classes she wants.  She’s a perpetual student.

Norah Jones - Waiting

Name of Orrie’s Brother:  Volto F. Eaismo

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois*

I gave my two latest plays to my mentor and friend to read and he faithfully did so.

He really liked them, the ideas, the language, but said that they lacked emotion, putting his thumb on my major problem.

I have known that I struggle to get emotion into my plays.  They are often filled with ideas, but lack intensity.  That's why I often write comedies.  I have no problem writing jokes.  Emotions other than laughs, I find difficult to embody.

And it's not that I struggle with this in my personal life.  I have no trouble recognizing and talking about my emotions to others.  My wife recently remarked that I'm quite good at it.  She too wondered why I had so much difficulty getting my emotions into my work.

There are two issues here: 1) the way my brain works; 2) the subjects I choose to write about.

When I write, my brain is always looking for just the right word.  This is an intellectual process for me.  The part of my brain being used is disengaged from my feelings.  This is a good thing in that I write often lovely and well expressed thoughts... and a bad thing in that they are thoughts being expressed and not emotions.  I suspect that with work on my editing, I can overcome this problem.

The second, the subjects I choose to write about often come from my intellect and not from my core.  This is both a good thing and a bad thing.  Good in that I have no lack of ideas that I find interesting and that get me writing.  Negative in that instead of writing about what moves me, I almost always write about what interests me.  Even when I put a gun in a characters hand, I struggle to bring the violence inherent in the weapon to the stage.

And my solution... rationally, I know I have to write something emotional.

I have always been drawn to the emotional in other's art work.  I read about anti-rationalism, the Counter-Emlightenment, Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, melodrama, etc.  I believe that the universe is a non-rational place.

And yet, I love mathematics and the physical sciences.  This is what I studied in college.  I still remember basic Calculus and it's been thirty years since I was in a classroom using this on a daily basis.

But if I am to become a "successful" artist, and isn't that what we all want, even if defining what success means is different for all of us, I have to tap into my emotions... somehow.


*Gustave Flaubert

ivresse du discours — an inebriation with the spoken word*

I met with my mentor this weekend.  I'd given him two new plays to read.

He loves the ideas and the language.  But says they have very little emotion.

I know this is my biggest problem.  Even my emotional pieces are restrained by my head.

He said that my writing was like French music, all melody with no bass.

And when I fantasize about playing a musical instrument I dream of being a bass player.

Time to rewrite.

"Hearts will never be practical"

*Susan Sontag - The Complete Rolling Stone Interview by Jonathan Cott

White Feathers Dragging in the Uneven Ruts*

Here but not here.  Now but not now.  Real but not real.

I am about half way through writing a new full-length play.  I may have even found a title. (I keep a list of possible titles that currently runs to eighteen.)

And my new book arrived, Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance by Ralf E. Remshardt.  I read the introduction online and knew I needed to read this book.  I hoped... and feared that it would change the way I looked at my work.

Half way through a piece is not the time to change the way I think about my work.

I didn't want to read it until I was done with the first draft of my new work.  But what is beach vacation for if you don't read a book?

I took other books.

I didn't read other books.

And I only read about 50 pages of this one.  I had to go slow.  Nearly every page held something I needed to consider.  I marked passages.  I dog-eared pages.

But it is not time to digest yet.  There is more to learn.

And the new play has me in its thrall.  I know when I'm doing good work.  I keep looking at it; tweaking what I wrote last week, adding a line, changing a word, even if I'm not adding pages.

And I'm adding pages.  Two or three everyday and I can feel the momentum building in me, in the story, in the characters.  I can sense how the characters, themes, and plots are and will weave themselves together.

And the new book hasn't changed the way I think about my work... yet.  Just reinforced the direction I have been heading in.


*The Swan, Charles Baudelaire

Waxy Yellow Build Up*

Am I the only playwright who asks himself over and over again, "Who am I?" and ever time comes up with a different answer?

I love Ibsen and Shaw and Wilde.  " I should write 'well-made' plays."

I love Aristophanes and The Marx Brothers and Neil Simon. "I should write comedies."

I love Dada and Surrealism and Theatre of Cruelty. " I should write experimental theater."

...and then there's this voice...it's not like those others, the one's above.  I value those voices.  I listen to those voices.  I have learned a great deal from those voices.

But this other voice... this emerging voice... I hesitate to say this... my voice is... Groucho, and Tristan, and Jack Tanner...

And Kathleen Hanna...

And Kimberly, and Maria, and Ashley...  

And Spaulding.

And Lily Allen.

And Regina Spektor...

and...

Back to the play I started in the spring.  Well, not the play... the main character.  The setting was all wrong.  I wrote pages of notes, and even, ten pages of dialogue, but I didn't like it.  But I kept going back to it.  Finally, I asked myself what it was I did like about the play... the main character.

I thought the setting was contrived... not that I'm against contrived settings.  I mean, I have play set in a remake of the Garden of Eden.  I have a play set in the underworld.  But both of those rose "organically" from the characters.  The main character for this play was just plunked down on a set where many, many other different characters would have fit just as well, if not better.

Setting is very important to me.  I've learned that recently.

And it came to me.  The set that this character needed.  I said "came to me."  I sweated over it for days.  And by "sweated," I mean my mind wandered aimlessly.

But with a level of anxiety.  And frustration... but mostly anxiety.

And then I knew!

How?

<shrug><head shake>

*Daniel Gregory Browne, Ann Marcus, Jerry Adelman - Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman