Parabasis

How I Work

I try to avoid the inevitable blog-tendency towards narcissism, but whatever, it's time to turn the mirror on myself. I want to stop talking about Writers and Directors and instead talk about the only director I have any authority to speak on whatsoever: me.

The foundation of how I work is built on a series of assumptions and principles that long-time readers of this blog will be familar with. The chief one is the idea in the primacy of the group over the individual. That assumption shapes my entire outlook.

I used to think that theatre was made by individuals. You can dig up an old post on the old blog somewhere where I talk about the various responsibilities of people (the dramaturg to the text, the writer to their vision of the text, the actor to their character, the director to the audience etc.) and such as it is, that's fine. People do have responsibilities that differ from role to role within the production.

The problem with this individualistic approach is that it almost-inevitably leads to competition amongst the individuals for who gets primacy. It becomes about what's most important, who is most important, "whose vision" wins out. Good art can come out of this competiton, this is just not the way I want to work.

In my experience, the process that works has to do with the creation of the group. The group comes together to create a play. That play is (in my work anyway) based on a script, a script which is the reason we are there and the foundation of our work. We together (including the script and the writer) serve this larger thing, the play.

What makes this so anxiety inducing is that it is so fragile and ephemeral. It is a truly existential being-- the play only exists to the extent that we create it. We are simultaneously creating something and serving the very thing we are creating. But if we are truly working to be completative instead of competitive, this ephemeral thing gets born. The other thing that makes it difficult is that it constantly changes and evolves, and its needs change and evolve with it.

It is this larger thing, this play, which is bigger than me, the actors, the writer, the script etc. is what restrains my wankier impulses. Serving this larger this is what allows me to pull back, to look for what serves the play and what doesn't. (For those of you working on In Public it was this that made it necessary for me to cut the introduction to the play that I had staged).

The tricky thing is that who speaks for that larger creation is in constant flux. We give that job to the director. We probably shouldn't. It seems that in response to the mistake of giving that to one individual (the director) we want to give it to another individual (the writer). I think this is also a mistake. No one is virtuous enough, egoless enough or frankly talented enough to be able to do it all the time (although the writers I've worked with came close). In my interactions with Clay and George there were times when I spoke for this larger thing, times when they did, times when actors did etc. And there were times when egos, preconceived notions of what the play (or theatre) "should" be, etc. got in our way and we weren't the best stewards of the work. I would say that in The Amulet the person who most consistently spoke for the play we were creating was David Birn, our positively brilliant set designer, and I found myself deferring to him as we reached opening night.

So what is my job then? Well, there are obvious things (shaping the visual look of the piece etc.) that we all know about. But I consider my job primarily to be creating the environment where this larger thing can happen. Because it's difficult work, creating a purely existential, ephemeral thing and then submitting the individual to it. And thus creating a starting point where that can be possible, to enable the creativity of others is really vital.

I approach the plays I co-create from the perspective of giving the play what it needs. In the case of volume of smoke, which has no stage directions, no guidelines for performance, just text divided into roughly 24 characters, the play needs some kind of conceptualization to give the group rules and to keep choices (especially my choices) from being arbitrary. For us, that conceptualization is that the company is ghosts, enacting this tragedy as some kind of purgatorial assignment.

I think it's safe to say that this concept provides for far more questions than answers, which is part of the point. I don't know what it's like to be a ghost, and neither to the actors. We get to make it up. Together.

Then there are plays like In Public where I felt that what the play needed was as clear as possible a sense of what the world of the play was like. We needed to submit ourselves to that world. I can imagine a version of the play where the process is much more character driven. In fact, I directed that version of it for the workshop of the play. But in this production, we aimed for a process where the discovery of the character dynamics came out of the world instead of the other way around.

Talk of the Walk-Up, on the other hand, needed to be about the characters, the language, the genre work and ultimately the theme of fantasy and delusion in the play. Every idea had to come back to those things or it wasn't worth keeping. The foley work, for example, connected to the idea of fantasy and delusion (did this really happen, or is it just a guy banging a metal can with a spoon?). And the staging had to change styles based on the scene and what genre was being played with. And any attempt to show off on my part had to be suspended so that the character arcs could be clear.

In all of this, the text is central. It is the starting point. Not the end, mind you (that's the play we're doing), but the starting point. It underlies everything. It's the original reason we all came together. I don't make changes to the spoken lines in the text (stage directions are another story for probably another day). I don't demand rewrites. I don't try to take one individual vision (the writer's) and bend it to my own. I am frequently horrified by stories of my peers who do. What i want to do is lead us in the process of creating the play using the text. Not any one individual's vision of what the play should be but rather the play itself. This is my starting point.

Rehearsals Begin

An interesting thing, this revisitng a play.

Some history: This will be the third time that I've directed volume of smoke, after a workshop two and a half years ago at the Kraine, and a production at the theater that commissioned the play, the Firehouse Theatre Project in Richmond, VA.

Theatre is a fluid, dynamic, living art, however. So everytime you do a play, you must have more (and different) things to give to it. Otherwise, the chances of creating boring, deadly theatre multiply. Also, I don't want the actors feeling like they are ventriloquizing other people's performances.

Luckily, since 66% of the cast is new, this provided us with an opportunity to cast quite different people. One major change has been making the character of the Reverend Wife, who is a kind of antagonist in the third part of the play, closer in age to the actress character, who is more of the protagonist, thus making them mirror images of each other.

And now... the strangest thing has happened this week. Due to scheduling, we can't get a full cast rehearsal in until the second week of rehearsal! This is quite odd. For those of you who've done plays, you know that the first rehearsal is full cast. It usually has the following component in some order or another:
(1) Discussion of the design of the play / presentation of images of either design or visual research
(2) Read through of script
(3) Sheepish and self-effacing introductions by everyone on the show
(4) Long, boring speech by the director outlining the approach to the play

But here, we'll have had a week of individual rehearsals with the six cast members first. On any other play, I'd think that was a disaster. Luckily, volume of smoke is largely monologues and largely direct address to the audience. This means that what we really have is more like that week of rehearsing with the music director to learn the score of the play, before you start attacking the staging. Odd. But not fatal. It's just forcing me to flex a different set of creative muscles this time around. Challenge can create growth, after all.

I think a year or so ago, I would've been in a big tantrum about all of this. Now, I just know it means I have to adjust and do the work necessary to make the good. I guess I'm growing up after all.

And yes, I do mean to talk about this at some point.

Dress Rehearsal Tonight

A little less exhausted. I was so tired last night that, teching a scene with Sabrina, I fell asleep while she was writing a cue. Rehearsal went fine. I think I've lost sight of it a little, but luckily I was able to sleep in today and I think that will restore my eye for the thing.

Anyway, slept until 10:30 this morning. Strange dreams. An old friend of mine had become a serial killer. He was trying to kill Anne, my father and myself at my parents house in DC. I had to kill him in really horribly graphic and gorey ways. Then he somehow took over my PowerBook G4 (psychically), which I also had to destroy. Brutally. It bled. Then he somehow was resurrected and coming up the stairs. I woke up at the exact moment at which I was about to dive into him, knocking us both down a flight of stairs. He was carrying sharp object. I was likely going to die. At no point did it occur to me that this was probably a dream. It had underscoring. I watched it from a third person perspective, like a movie.

This dream will in no way help me shape In Public, but hopefully having a small, invited audience at our dress rehearsal tonight will...

Exhausted.

So I realized last night (not in rehearsal, our night off, but I had other personal commitments to attend to) that I am completely exhausted. Waking up at 7:30 to see Anne off to work, waiting for the temp agency to ring, and then doing work regardless during the day, rehearsing at night, having a big ole giant cold and, frankly, being a bit of a wuss have all caught up to me. Rehearsal especially.

So... yeah. So design meeting this morning and then back here to do more work, although I'm hoping to take the afternoon off and sleep if it's possible. I tried to sleep in this morning and managed to get to 8AM. Sheesh. Now i have a caffeine headache, so I'll probably have to drink my first cup of coffee when means I'm definitely not getting anymore zzzs this morning.

So that's me right now. Nothing much else to report.

Getting Away From The Table

So, it appears that, without consciously trying to do so, I am now recording a kind of "Director's Journal" of the process of putting In Public together. This is good. It's been awhile since I've done this. Actually, the whole title "Lifting Up The Curtain" comes from a series of posts I wrote on the old site about the process of making First You're Born come together. Those posts are what first put me on the map as a theater blogger a long time ago (in internet time). So it's nice to return to my roots, shall we say.

I haven't blogged much from a day-to-day process point since then for a number of reasons. Doing volume of smoke I was too busy. Doing the first In Public and a few other shows, the rehearsal process was too short. Doing The Amulet I was too unhappy, and I knew there was a good chance that, if I were to talk honestly about what was going on, I would offend people I was working with (that being said, The Amulet is a show I'm immensely proud of, going to show you that bad process doesn't necessarily mean a bad product).

So now with In Public I'm back to keep a blog journal of the process. Which is great. Part of this is the immense joy I'm feeling in rehearsals of working hard and feeling fulfilled. Really enjoying the work and the people I'm working with... without too much goofing off.

And part of this connects to trust, which I've written about previously here. I am working, for the first time since my first show out of college, with a cast of people who I have worked with before and whose work I know very very well. And this allows us to ditch trying to impress each other and get down to brass tacks.

So... what have we been up to over the past few days?

In Public is a play that is fairly easy to rehearse in a traditional American theater way. This way = (1) One week of book work, (2) One week of blocking, (3) One week of refining the blocking, (4) Run throughs, tech, dress rehearsals for a week.

Not that there's anything wrong with this, but I'm bored of it. I'm bored of what happens in theater when you set most of the important emotional and textual choices in the first week of rehearsal, and I'm bored with what happens when actors try to integrate choices that they've made intellectually into a character they're suddenly creating physically as well. Furthermore, I actually think going too realistic with In Public is a kind of trap the play sets for you. It is both realistic and not at the same time, and discovering the "not" and what it is exactly is very important.

But there are corellary questions... Why am I not worried that the performances will be vague as a result? Simple. I trust these actors to do their jobs. I know that they'll go home and look at their script and structure it. I know they're well trained and know how to do that in a way that will be effective for them. I know if they're struggling, they'll ask for help, and ultimately, since there's not a whole lotta blocking in this play about people sitting in restaurants, I know that if this experiment doesn't work and we need to take time to do that, we can.

Also, this is the first play in awhile that I've done where the designers and I aren't giving the play some conceptual framework from the top down. We're instead developing those choices from the ground up, in the rehearsal room, based as much on what the actors are briging to the table as anything else. So this is refreshingly (and unsettlingly) unlike a lot of work I've done, where the designers and I created a world that operated by certain rules which then helped dictate the staging and events of the play.

So what have we been doing, given all of this? Well, after spending a few days finding music and art that we relate to the world of the play and the characters, we started making lists. What do these people do in the morning to be able to face the outside world? What do they do at night to strip away those layers of armor and give the self a little time? Interestingly, and depressingly enough, those lists did not in general involve their spouses in the play.

This play is also about couples falling apart-- and the bad things about the characters are readily on display. So we talked about the opposite-- what they love about each other. Some interesting discoveries there. Not sure if they'll read, but they are good things to bring back into the room to try to create nuance in the performances.

Finally, we moved away from the table with a long day of improvisations based around the idea of status and composition exercises. The actors were asked to create compositions (short performance pieces with beginning middle and end) that had to satisfy an semi-arbitrary set of rules (must contain one work of art, the only text you can use is the line you are most worried about delivering etc.). And then they made three compositions as a group, one for each day of the play, with yet more rules (must use one thing from each person's list, must use music, one moment of laughing, one moment of violence, artwork etc.). George and I marveled at what a creative and soulfull group of people we have assembled for this project. And much of that work will get blatantly ripped off for the staging and the emotional texture of the play. One thing we're discovering is how much fear of being alone motivates all of the characters in this play.

And then yesterday was the beginning of blocking, with both of Arthur and Lila's scenes. These scenes are both in the middle of the play (Schedules meant we couldn't block chronologically). The first scene you block is always odd-- you have to deal with the tension of moving from talking about to doing. One benefit of not doing a lot of moment-to-moment work around the table is that we've been doing in some sense for awhile now.

Lila and Arthur... it's tricky. In some sense there's less hope for their relationship than for Drew and Linda's, but Arthur is so much more emotionally giving than the other character's in the play, that it's hard to see it sometimes. The reason why there's less hope, is that Arthur and Lila have grown in two different directions and just aren't compatible human beings anymore. Drew and Linda still clearly have the materials with which to make a good relatioship, if they wanted to. The problem in the play is that they never want to at the same time. Like an O. Henry story on downers.

So Arthur and Lila's two scenes, back to back, from a moment of feeling hurt that she didn't call in a restaurant to the height of jealousy in a Rite-Aid. The scenes feel really different, not the least of which has to do with the staging (sitting, cheating out to the audience and having breakfast vs. baring their vulnerabilities quietly, backs turned to each other). We continue to discover what it means to be in public and in In Public.

Tonight we rehearse the big confrontation scene between Drew and Arthur, a scene which one of the actors dubbed "The Evil Head" scene. If you've read the play, that joke'll make some sense.

Two By Two Hurrah

I'm thinking about pairs today. Pairs on people on stage, interacting. The basics of acting in our tradition, namely, one person talking to another.

Why am I thinking about this? Two reasons, first, I'm directing a play largely made up of two person dialogues, and second, because I'm rewatching the UK version of The Office.

The Office, as long-time readers of this blog know, is in my estimation a Great Work Of Art. But leaving aside all of that for a moment, one excellent permutation of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's craft as writers is the creation of characters who can be subbed in and out of pairs with seemingly endless variation.

If you just watch The Office one thing you'll notice is how often the characters are in either two person scenes or in two person teams. I think this comes from Merchant and Gervais' own interplay, and the manage to make it work excellently in the show. The main duos are:

David and Garreth
Tim and Garreth
Tim and Dawn
David and Tim
David and Finch
David and Neal
Tim and Rachel
etc.

Even scenes that have more than two people in them are (in general) built around a pair at the center, and then outsiders. Take David's staff meeting about redundancies in the first episode, where Garreth demands to be told the news first. Although there is a crowded room in that scene, that room exists as a platform to the pair of David and Garreth and the comedy and character development to be found in that duet.

Likewise Dawn and Tim. Most of the time, we see them around Garreth, who simply exists (in those scenes) so that we can see what a highly evolved comedy duo Tim and Dawn are.

Anyway, I mention this because with the exception of two scenes, In Public is a series of dialogues punctuated by interruptions from a third party. All eleven versions of this third party are played by the lovely and talented Brian Silliman. He has the job of creating a coherent character to come in, usually for the purpose of either highlighting or changing the dynamics of the dialogue currently going on.

So how do pairs work? That's the question. How do pairs of people talk to each that's different from large groups? How does the social context the character is in determine how they behave?

This is what's on my mind right now. we probably won't talk about any of this in rehearsal tonight. Why? Because we've got a lot of other stuff to get to first.

On Tuesday Night, we did what I call a character-through of the play. This being an ensemble play, the four recurring characters each have their own journeys and arcs. No one is in every scene. So we read through the play four times, from the perspective of each character, starting with the character we meet last, Arthur.

Let me say that reading the play in this way (first time i've ever done this out loud, actually) was incredibly informative. I found myself understanding the character of Arthur a great deal, and found myself sympathizing with him more. I think in the workshop all of us in the rehearsal room had a tendency to judge Arthur, who is (in many ways) the least mature character in the show. But he still has a lot going on that's worth exploring, including his sincerity (he's the only character of the four who really expresses himself consistently) and his love for Lila, the wife whom he may or may not be losing to an older and better educated man.

I also found the character of Lila to be emerging in different ways. The trick with Lila is making sure she remains a subject. Because we meet Drew, the person whose spiritual reawakening she causes first, and because Arthur's actions in the play are largely in response to things that Lila does, it's easy for Lila to become an object, a catalyst towards other character's journeys/arcs/stories/actions, but with little to say for herself. Needless to say, I don't think that's the version of the play that any of us want to do... Lila, although we love her, cannot be an ideal. If she becomes that, the balance of the play is fatally off.

Tonight is the culmination of some research I've asked the actors to do. We'll be looking at images, listening to music, touching objects, and doing all sorts of other things to try to get into the headspace of the play. So far, I've found that the actors' interpretations of the characters get more and more complicated each time they say the lines, which is lovely. What is beautiful and fragile about this is that too much explanation of what they are doing would destroy what they are doing by setting it in a permanent, unchanging mold. The process would become an object. This is why I'm not really doing moment-to-moment book work in the old fashioned way. I want to develop a different kind of understanding of this play... something that is more ephemeral, something that, even in this very-wordy drama, can't necessarily be put into words.

Music

I'm thinking about music today. What music comes to mind when thinking about In Public. George has given me some CDs that he finds relevant (Weill, Morton Feldman, Camille O'Sullivan), that I'll make my way through over the next couple of days. And, of course, there are the two musics mentioned in the show itself: Kurt Weill's Berliner Requiem and, in general, the tango.

Right now I'm listening to a lot of WOLF PARADE while thinking about this play. For those of you who don't know Wolf Parade that well, I'd say they're a little bit like Radiohead, except Radiohead paint a portrait of losing the battle to alienation and technology, while Wolf Parade are still desperately fighting it.

And that, in some way, is what is going on in this little tragicomedy George has written. Four dead people who aren't sure if they want to be alive, and if they do, how to accomplish that and, more importantly, who to accomplish that with.

Lyrically, it is in some ways Wolf Parade's poppiest song ("Grounds for Divorce") that seems most relevant here (and not just cause of its title):

You said you hate the sound
Of the busses on the ground
You said you hate the way they scrape their brakes all over town
I said pretend it's whales
Keeping their voices down
Such were the grounds for divorce I know

On the radio
And the bouncing bodies' drone
Found eighteen reasons I can't pick up on the phone
I said look at the clouds
It's a show all on its own
Such were the grounds for divorce I know

But the darling is dead
We hit her on the head
It looked like a wedding cake
Though the darling is dead
We hit it on the head
It looked like a newlywed

But look at the lovers
And they way they stand
And the way they move and the way move their hands
And look at their babies
And their tiny little hands
And the way they get loved and the way they get loved oh

Oh look at the lovers
And they way they stand
And the way they move and the way move and the way move their hands

Said you hate the sound
Of the busses on the ground
Said you hate the way they scrape their brakes all over town
Said pretend it's wales
And keeping their voices down
Such were the grounds for divorce i know

Looked like a newlywed

On the radio
And the bouncing bodies' drone
Found eighteen reasons I can't pick up on the phone
Said look at the clouds
It's a show all on its own
Such were the grounds, such were the grounds, for divorce I know

What I'm Reading

(1) This article on Jim Webb and George Allen in the NYTimes.

(2) George's down-to-the-wire new draft of the play we go into rehearsal for. Said draft can me found here.

(3) F. Gozanelz-Crussi's On Seeing, picked up off the street for a dollar.

(4) The Decay of Lying.

(5) George's Theatre Minima writings (the first, the mission statement, can be found here)

(6) Two plays sent to me by writers over a month ago (sorry, gents!)

(7) Les Miserables (passed the halfway mark, finally!)

(8) The latest draft of Clay's play that we did that reading of a few weeks ago.

(9) The Man Who Would Be King

All of this is for theatre work (except the Allen/Webb article), and almost all of it is for In Public, and obviously some of it I won't finish (or probably even get to) for awhile. But it puts me in a weird place. I'm around people who read a lot pretty much all of the time, especially those friends I made while working at the bookstore. So I'm constantly getting book recommendations from people and I just have to say I'll get to it later. Haruki Murakami has a new book out, and I haven't even looked at the back cover to find out what it is (I think it's a short story collection, but I'm not sure).

It also means I have to change my reading habits. Over the years, it has gradually become almost impossible for me to read unless I'm on the subway (has this happened to anyone else?). Now I need to find ways to read pretty much anywhere, but especially in my apartment, with it's computer, stereo, television, pets, girlfriend, life and other non-reading-type activities.

And this is on top of movies/art/music/misc. culture that I should be imbibing to get me in an In Public headspace (on my list: Richard Linklater's Waking Life, Kurt Weill's Berlin Requiem and some John Cassavetes... George, wanna give me any more?)

So now I'm in a place where I must create two itineraries for myself: when I have temp work, I'll need to do that, and when I don't, I have a back up plan: experiencing as much of these tangientially related cultural points as possible.

God, I love this job.

I'm Not Hot Shit But I Sometimes It's Nice To Get Treated Like Hot Shit

Went to the launch party for the Starbucks Salon, a guest-list-only event featuring a performance from Aimee Mann, an open bar (which I did not take advantge of), an open coffee bar (which I took advatage of) and some food service.

I've only been on the guest list for rock concerts before. And only because I knew the frontmen of the groups I was seeing. I've of course been comped to theater events. And sure, that felt like being reasonably hot shit.

But lemme tell ya, those corporate paymasters sure know how to throw a good shindig! It was a total fucking blast. And, I'll admit, it was nice to feel like hot shit. I mean, I didn't recognize anyone there or anything (other than the married artistic directors of a downtown theater company who I recognized because I worked on a show that rented a space they manage) so it wasn't like Dude, I'm on the same guest list as Run DMC or whatever. But it was (I'll admit) kinda an ego boost to be at an exclusive event, with a free concert by a well-known artist thrown into the mix etc.

---
PS: I'd like to take this moment to apologize for the sub-par nature of my posts this week. I think I'm suffering a little post-show depression from the Lee's Miserables reading, and I'm just feeling in general a little exhausted.

What I'm Up To

UPDATED BELOW WITH LOGISTICAL INFO!

Okay, blog. If I'm not going to abandon you for a week, you can at least help me get organized.

My next few projects, in chronological order:

(1) Lee's Miserables (Friday, Sep. 1st). A reading of a new play by Clay McLeod Chapman, directed by yours truly. Clay is my most frequent collaborator. Not counting Rapid Response Team, I've directed four of his plays and acted in one. I'm in the process this week of directing a developmental reading of the piece to help take the script to the next level. We've got three rehearsals, on every-other-day with Clay and I meeting on the off-days to do rewrites and talk about the script.

(2) Starbucks Salon (Sunday, September 17th). Author Jonathan Lethem and I are performing together an adaptation (by me) of an unpublished short story (Their Back Pages by him) as part of the Starbucks Salon. UPDATE: The website is a little confusing. The event is at 4PM, the performance is at 76 Greene St., in Soho. There's a PDF map on the website, but it's kind of hard to find.

(3) In Public (Oct. 18-28, rehearsals approx. Sep. 15th-17th) The remounting (And re-invisioning) of George Hunka's play which we presented in workshop about a year ago. George details last night's callbacks here.

(4) The Rapid Response Team (ongoing, resumes first week of October). We'll be back. And in the meantime, we've gotta get enough marketing materials together that people will actually want to see us.

(5) Avow (First week of November) I'll be in Richmond, VA, to direct a reading of a play about gay marriage and Catholicism staged the same week that Virginia considers a bill vis-a-vis the issue.

(6) The Shadow (Ongoing). Matt Freeman and I are working (as you probably know) to adapt one of my favorite Hans Christen Andersen short stories, about a man whose shadow learns to pass for human, and then turns against him. Not sure when that'll be ready to go, but I'm definitely excited!

so the next month is pretty full. And then after that? Not a whole lot. Yet.