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

Spit out another picture of a girl with a gun*

I decided, having completed the first draft of my new play currently entitled "Self-Awareness and Other Delusions," that it needs the "animatronic" Riot Grrrl band, Piggies,  I had initial envisioned, but tried to do without.

I did finish the first draft.

I was given the opportunity to go to Creede, Colorado for a writers' retreat the first week in August.  I want to thank Ann and Manuel and HBMG Foundation for the opportunity.  It was great.  Beautiful, cool, friendly, fun, and plenty of space to work... And I did.  Finished the first draft.

It needs work.  Second act in particular.  It's a bit uneven and clunks in a few places, but overall, I'm pleased with the play.

After discussion in Creede with my mentor and Manuel (a great playwright), I tried to make the ending a happy one... This did not work.  I knew when I went to bed the evening I finished that this play needs to be a tragedy.

I am a product of my times.

I don't know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.  At least I'm not creating Disney's next princess.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

And there is a duck reference in the play. Le petite motif.

I'm a little nervous about writing song lyrics.  And I need someone to write some punk music to go with the lyrics.  Don't have any idea who might do that.

And my next couple of projects have come into view.  A re-write of my first play... too many characters.  And taking one of my historical screenplays and writing it as a play.

But today is rehearsal of one of my pieces for the Austin One-Minute Play Festival.  YaY!


*Bikini Kill, "Tony Randall."  Reject All America, 1996

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

After Us the Savage God*

I haven't been reading or doing much research in the past few weeks.  I have done a little writing.  A ten minute play based on three weird news stories during the two weeks 22 May - 31 May and one tragic news story during that same period.  It was a "challenge" from some playwright friends of mine.  I enjoyed it.

But why haven't I read or done research?  My first professional production was on stage.  And I was distracted by this.  And there were serious family issues.  But all that is in the past, at least for today.  Back to work.

The play I was working on before I was sidetracked still excites me.  And I'm glad that the break in my routine occurred.  I discovered two crucial elements that this play needed.  1) The critical revelation my main character needed, and 2) A small but important character that was needed to give the play a heartbeat.

This is important.  If I had just pressed ahead, I would have missed some things that I believe are important to this piece.

Back to work.

I did a little research and bought a book, "Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance."  A little light summer reading.  Vacation material.

And I have deadlines.  I like deadlines.  I like the pressure.  There are two contests and a writing retreat this summer.

The contests are for full-length plays and what I have planned meets their general guidelines nicely.  And the summer retreat offers a chance to rewrite and, as a bonus, perhaps the opportunity for a staged reading.

I enjoy staged readings.  I never know if what is going on in my head has been translated to the page, although, the last year has showed that I'm not bad at this.

But my confidence is not deep.  There have been plenty of rejections to go with the successes.

But rejection is good.

First, it means I have put my work out there.  It's not just sitting on my hard drive gathering "dust."

Second, it makes me work harder.  It makes me more... savage.



*William Butler Yeats commenting on the premier in Paris of the play "Ubu Roi"