"Life and Death" A Reminder About Stakes on Stage

About two weeks ago, I flew down to Austin to attend a wedding and to see the closing performance of my dragon play.  The director and actors were excited (and nervous) about my seeing the play, I was excited (and nervous) about my fiance and former teachers seeing the play.

They had done a lovely job with it.  The performances were clear, the story was there -- one of the greatest gifts I think you can receive, in a first production of your work, is a clear sense of what's working with your script and what's not.  Their production showed me what it was that I'd made, and the work I still had to do.  I took lots of notes.  I enjoyed the performances.  The audience seemed to, too.

Then, ten minutes before the end of the show, the director came onstage.  She said:

"I'm sorry, folks, but we've had an emergency and we need to end the show now."

She turned to the lead actress, and told her she needed to leave.  She told the audience the company would be happy to offer refunds.

The lights came up.

We all looked at each other.

Someone called out that the playwright was there and could tell everyone how the play ended.  I stumbled to the stage and did my best to recount the final moments of the play -- the crucial moments, the moments that really make everything else make sense.  Really all I can remember is looking toward the wings and seeing the cast huddled together, their faces as stricken as I'm sure mine was.

The audience wanted to know what happened in the play, but even more, they wanted to know what had happened to stop the play.

The lead actor's husband had almost died.  He's fine now, but he almost died, and it was way, WAY more important that she get to the hospital immediately.

It was one of the most memorable nights I've ever had at the theater, certainly at a play of mine, and I hope I never experience anything like it ever again.

Sometimes you will go to see your play and something extraordinary will happen.

Sometimes that extraordinary thing is not your play.

Kirk Lynn on Collaboration

Yes, I'm re-posting.  And there's no shame in it.  Especially when there are words of wisdom to share from my friend and mentor Kirk Lynn, via my acquaintance and comrade Larry Pontius.

Thoughts on Collaboration

by Kirk Lynn 

1. There’s no such thing as an experienced collaborator.  This time is different.

2. The poet William Stafford offered this advice about giving feedback: No praise.  No blame.

3. Honesty requires at least two participants.  Listening requires only one.

4. Never take your own side in an argument.

5. There is enough time to go slow.

6. Tell everyone what you want until you find someone who wants to give it to you.

7. The secret you are keeping right now will be known if we collaborate long enough.  If it is a secret anger, we will fight about it.  If it is a secret desire, why not start as soon as possible?

8. Seeds are small things.  Learn to recognize them.  Learn to plant them in your rehearsals.  Big ideas have nowhere to go.  They leave no room for the rest of us.

9. Think about the difference between these questions: Do you know how to make love?  Do you know how to make love to me?  Then think about these questions: Do you know how to collaborate?  Do you know how to collaborate with me?

10. I cannot forgive you for your secrets.

11. Our sins against one another happen in an instant.  Forgiveness is ongoing.

12. It is easier not to collaborate.

13. Collaboration is not a virtue.  Collaboration is not ‘good’ in and of itself.

14. My wife is in this room.  Shawn is in this room.  Melanie is in this room.  Your collaborators have other collaborators.  They are in this room.  If you don’t feel them, open the doors.

15. No one is replaceable.

16. No one is essential.

17. Collaboration is not an activity; it is a way of looking at things.  We could examine our actions in this room through a lens of Capitalist economics.  The very same actions can be examined through a lens of Communism.  Or racial identity.  The actions don’t need to change.  Collaboration is simply a window through which we see ourselves.

18. It is better if you don’t need to be liked.

19. I would encourage you not to collaborate.  But I would also encourage you not to write and not to direct and not to act and not to design and not to dance.  Unless you need to.  In which case encouragement should matter very little.

20. I don’t need any new collaborators, I can’t please the ones I have.

21. If we do ever work together, it will be because I need your help to please those collaborators who were here first.

22. Let’s say we take a trip to New York together.  If we want to share a cab into Manhattan we can either have it drop us off around 14th street and I’ll walk down to Brian’s and you walk up to the theatre, or we can have it drop us each off one at a time, but we can’t both arrive at our final destination first.

23. I have secrets I am too embarrassed to tell you.  Everyone in this room has secrets.  Be careful with one another.

24. Everyone in this room is also capable of saying: watch out, you’re treading on thin ice.

25. This room is the perfect setting.  Now is the perfect time of day. You are the perfect group of people.  Or not.  You decide.

26. You don’t have to limit your collaboration to people.  Collaborate with chairs and clocks and birds.

27. You are responsible for your actions and your emotions.  You are also responsible for my actions and my emotions.

28. There is no right way.  There is not even a good way.  There is likely not even a way at all.

29. We will die.  Our collaborators will die.  Our work will die.  Every recordable surface will be wiped clean and the universe will disappear.  We are temporary.

30. Learn to enjoy one another: that’s the only commandment.  Our pleasure is our work.

–

Kirk Lynn lives in Austin, TX with his wife, Carrie Fountain and their daughter, Olive. He is currently working on a novel about Jesus. Kirk also writes plays, generally with the Rude Mechs theatre collective.

Carol Dweck and Heid Grant Halvorson

As a teacher at a small private school, I get to spend a lot of my time thinking about the brain and how it works, and how to help our kids become the best version of themselves as students and as people.

Sometimes, I stumble across information worth stealing/capturing for myself.  Carol Dweck is a CLASSIC example:  her work with "growth mindset" is, at this point, legendary.  The gist of that work is in the video above.

I just discovered a useful book by a protege of Dweck's, Heidi Grant Halvorson, called Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals.  The science in this book looks sound, it's accessible, and she doles out a lot of very practical advice culled from years of study, such as:

• Cultivate a "growth mindset" rather than a "fixed mindset."
• Strong self-control is one of the clearest predictors of success.  You can cultivate self-control by practicing it in low-stakes ways (it's like a muscle; you can build it)
• If you want to work, surround yourself with triggers that will prompt you to work (yes, those dumb posters of runners and Einstein in your middle school social studies classroom actually had some merit)
• Set goals that are specific, difficult, and achievable.  Be optimistic about reaching them, and realistic about the work it will take to achieve them.
• There are three basic human needs (once food and shelter are taken care of): relatedness, competence, and autonomy.  Most of us are happiest when we're working toward those things.  Many of us substitute the pursuit of fame and fortune for these three needs -- that doesn't go as well.

I'm not huge on the self-help type books, but this is a good tool for educators, and for anyone wrestling with their goals.

Mission-Into-Action

I have a first draft of a mission statement.  I can sit at the bar and tell people about my mission, wine glass in hand.

But what IS a mission statement, or what is it supposed to be?  At its best, it's a sort of North Star, right?  The artistic equivalent of a moral compass.  It should be the thing against which I can measure the art I make, or the actions I take in pursuing work.

Once you've got a mission statement (or artist's statement) on paper, you've got a few options:
(1) Live Up To It (or try to)
(2) Change It
(3) Lie About Following It
(4) Throw It Out
Because a mission only counts if you follow it.

So.  The key question, once I've got a mission draft in hand, is: if I follow my mission, what does that LOOK like?

Here's what I've got:

- It means seeking out and/or self-producing free readings and production opportunities.  It means partnering with organizations that are committed to *truly* low-cost tickets.  That probably means smaller theaters, non-equity theaters, smaller stages at big theaters, site-specific opportunities, and readings.

- It means worrying more about getting my work on its feet, and less about chasing opportunities for it to be seen and/or read by "the right" influential people.  Not that I can't invite them to things, but that my energy can be aimed at the audience I want to reach, rather than the taste-makers.

- It means placing a primacy on good story-telling, breaking the fourth wall, embracing spectacle, embracing magical realism, fostering a connection between my audience members, and between my audience members and the material.  What that connection looks like?  That will depend on the piece.

- It means playing more with the aural tradition of story-telling, and pushing into the idea that making theater is connected to fairy tales, the bible, Sophocles, Homer...to all of our story-tellers, especially the ones who didn't write them down.

-  It means valuing what's TRUTHFUL above what's REAL or REALISTIC.  IT means a commitment to telling the truth, and to digging for some Big Truth With a Capital T.

- It means committing to writing for a long time, even when it isn't easy, even in the face of failure.

- It means screwing up sometimes, and embracing that too.

...or something like that.

That said, a mission is also a living document.  If I've got it, and I believe in it, I should WANT to revisit it, often.  I should WANT to make work that lives up to it.  And a mission SHOULD change, as I do and as my work does -- but it should change intentionally, rather than giving over to mission drift.

Mission Statement*, Part IV -- Getting Somewhere!

*Key Caveat:  I BELIEVE these things...and I'm very much still working to make them all TRUE OF MY WORK AND THE WAY I WORK.  My work and I are (obviously) definitely works-in-progress.

I believe theater should be cheap or free.  If we really think the stories we’re telling are worth hearing, we shouldn’t guard the temple gates like Pharisees – we should fall over ourselves to the play to as many people as possible on THEIR terms, not ours.  If that means we need to re-think our production values, let’s do it.  If that means we lose a few temples, fine.  If that means we can’t make a living, then we need to come up with other ways to feed ourselves.

I believe theater should welcome the uninitiated.  I don’t write for the brilliant literary managers who’ve read the entire canon (and every new play in the last ten years) twice, because they’re the opposite of the audience I’m trying to reach – the neophyte, the teenager who’s never seen a stage fight up close, the 20-something who assumes theater can’t offer the same adrenaline rush of a rock concert, the passer-by who wanders upon a site-specific production and suddenly sees his evening commute transformed.

I believe in destroying fourth walls.

I believe telling (and hearing) stories is our birthright, and that the act itself is an act of faith.  It says: we are connected to each other, and we are connected to all the storytellers who have come before us.  I believe in theater that connects us to moments beyond our particular moment.  I believe storytelling, like raising children, is a crazy act of faith (both selfish and selfless) in the face of our own mortality.

I believe that we don’t actually live in the present most of the time, or in reality (even when we pretend we do).  Our bodies might be in the present, but our hearts are in the past and future, our heads in our own realities.  Our lives may move linearly, but we don’t experience them linearly.  One of the beauties of storytelling and theater is that it allows you to move away from realism in order to move toward the truth…which is what we need from storytellers.  I acknowledge that one way to phrase this is "magical realism," although I think that term has maybe been used to the point that it becomes lazy shorthand.

I believe in telling the stories that scare me, in telling the stories I fear I have no right to tell, in telling the stories that might make the people I love hate me or avoid me.  I believe the stories we most need to tell, and the stories we most need to hear, are the ones that are dangerous, that force us to confront our own terrors, to gather together and examine them.

I believe in humor, especially in the face of terror.

I believe theater is more than just story-telling.  Aristotle had it right when he included spectacle and music as two of the six crucial elements of drama: theater gives us a place to create transformative moments, moments of beauty, moments of magic.  Transformation, beauty and magic take us outside ourselves.  We need story, but we also need that feeling of wonder and awe, the closest thing we get to seeing the face of god.  Medieval architects knew it when they built enormous cathedrals, artists know this when they create paintings so beautiful they stop us in our tracks.  Ideally, these moments are in the service of story…but sometimes it’s okay if the story is in service of these moments. 

I believe theater-making is a life-long vocation, and that there is always more to learn, further to go, better work to do.  

I believe in hard work, and the long haul.

I believe in change -- in my work, in myself, in the people around me, and in the world.  I don't know whether I believe my work can change the world, but it would be interesting to try.

I believe in experimentation, failure, and reflection.

I believe in making a mess.

I believe there is no such thing as “emerged.”

Mission Statement, Part III

So...those questions I said I was trying to answer, about what theater I want to see, what theater I want to make, and who I want to make it for?

I scrawled these answers in my notebook the other day (yes, I was on the subway...like I said, lately the subway is where the thinking happens).  So far, here's what I've got:

PLAYS I WANNA SEE (SO PLAYS, MAYBE, THAT I WANNA MAKE)
- Plays where people like me are friends with people like my friend Brian (ie, where cross-racial friendships and cross-gender friendships are matter-of-fact) -- stages full of people who are white and black and yellow and brown...and where that isn't the POINT, it's INCIDENTAL.  Plays that look like my LIFE that way.
- Big, fat, sprawling plays with operatic monologues, messy fights that destroy the stage, a whole world full of characters, where the world is changed and the audience cries.
- The most intimate play imaginable...what would that look like?
- A play that exposes EVERY hypocrisy that pisses me off.
- Hilarious plays with great parts for women!
- Beautiful plays set outside, written outside, with huge sections of silence and magic and mysterious, gorgeous imagery.

THINGS I WANNA KNOW, THINGS I CAN'T ANSWER
- How do you deal with your beauty fading, your power fading, with getting old?
- How do you be a good father?
- How do you survive high school?
- How do you survive your own fierce desires?
- When do you give up?
- How do you be alone?
- How do you move past your own insecurity?
- Why am I so depressed?
- How do I raise good sons?
- How does confession work?
- How will I survive my own parents aging and eventual death?
- How do you survive the death of a spouse (or CHILD!)?
- How do you forgive people who have hurt you really, really badly?
- How do you deal with your ex's new partner?

And (BIG QUESTION) 

How can I make theater 

to RADICALLY forge community 

across time and space?

About this "Ghost Light"

In my post, "Mission Statement II," I quoted Mark Chemers's book, "Ghost Light," which is an introductory handbook on dramaturgy:

"The ghost light's lonesome existence is dedicated to protecting us, just in case we wish to venture into the dangerous space." (9)


I talked, in that post, about the dangers of the dark, empty theater, about the perils inherent to wandering in the dark, about the "shadow selves" we meet in theatrical space -- the dangerous, uncivilized versions of ourselves, the raw versions.  I love this idea of the ghost light, this idea that the ghost light's existence is lonely, that it exists to protect us IN THE EVENT that we venture into the dangerous space.

And I thought "yes, we playwrights, we're the ghost lights!"

Then I realized -- oh.  No.  Of course that isn't what he's saying.  Chemers is saying that the dramaturg is the one with the torch, the one in the lead who invites the audience to follow, the bearer of light.

That didn't sit as well with me -- first, because it sounded, then, like the dramaturg was the one in charge, the one who got to direct an entire audience's attention to whatever seemed worthy of the glare of the limelight.  I wasn't sure whether I liked that relationship, that authority.  Where the hell was the director in this scenario?  Where the playwright?

Then it hit me:

If the dramaturg is the one shining his/her light to shepherd the audience through the dangerous dark...then...the playwright is the one who had to wander in first.  Without the aid of light.  Scared shitless.  Not sure whether to pray that she steers clear of an unseen abyss...or whether to pray that she falls in.

Because...if the dramaturg is going to help guide an audience through whatever's in the dark, it's only because the playwright got there first.

So...yeah...we don't get a ghost light.

Scrapbook...

I'm really grateful to Robert Faires at the Austin Chronicle for this review.

I'm even more grateful to director/producer Shannon Grounds for taking a chance on my play, and for our terrific cast for bringing it to life.

Mission Statement, Part II

I'm getting married in two months.  Two of my friends just got engaged.  Three others are pregnant.   I've been thinking about life transitions (moving, marriage, kids).  I've been thinking, too, about these transitions' accompanying rituals: housewarming parties (which, basically, you hold so that you can introduce your friends to the new place you live, so that they can picture it), about weddings (which celebrate a new relationship but also mark the end of some of your old relationships), about wedding showers (which mark the transition of friends into the role of "parents."

Change is scary.  Even "good" or "happy" change. It makes you a stranger to the people who love you, a stranger to yourself.  Rituals exist to make the strange feel safe.  And thank god for it.  I sleep next to my fiance every night, I love him with every breath in my body...and still, there have been nights when I lie awake wondering who this man is, who I am, what are we doing and what have we done.

Which is why I need the ritual of marriage.  But it's also why I need theater.  

Because theater -- ah! theater! -- theater exists to make the safe feel dangerous...or to show us the danger in ourselves that ritual, and the civilizing influence from which it springs, exists to contain.  What does theater do, if not show us the extremes of human potential for good, evil, love, lust, terror, jealousy, cruelty...etc?  The most important theater, the most immortal theater, might speak to its particular moment, but it is always aimed at these much, much larger questions -- questions that go beyond politics, beyond historic event, to our darker, deeper, more reptilian (or maybe most human) impulses.

Mark Chemer, in his book "Ghost Light" begins by talking about the tradition -- or ritual -- of a ghost light in a theater.  He says:

"The ghost light's lonesome existence is dedicated to protecting us, just in case we wish to venture into the dangerous space." (9)

I love that quotation.  Because, as anyone who has ventured into a dark, empty theater knows, an empty theater is both literally and figuratively a dangerous space -- there are seats and steps and set-pieces and ladders to trip over, there are pits to fall into and a stage to fall off of.  More than that, a theater is the place we go for moments of catharsis -- it's a place that exists to contain and reveal our most extreme emotions, the shadow versions of ourselves we most admire and most fear (think Lear, Gabler, Medea).  An EMPTY theater -- well, it holds the MEMORY and the POSSIBILITY of all those shadow selves at once.  OF COURSE people think theaters are haunted.  EVERY theater is haunted by all the dangerous, disruptive power of all its past and future productions.

You might call out the irony of theater's "danger."  Most theater, at least most theater in the United States, happens in beautiful buildings with lobbies and M&Ms and plastic wine cups and plush seats and coat checks and subscribers with the inevitable cellophane lozenges to unwrap.  Most theater-goers are coming from or headed to a lovely dinner, maybe with a prix fixe menu.  They'll debate whether they have time for the molten chocolate cake, then decide whether they want "to be bad" or just grab a brownie at intermission.  What on earth is dangerous about chocolate cake and coat check?

But what are all these things -- the dinners, the plush seats, the intermissions -- but the shrink-wrapping of theater's inherent danger inside layer upon layer of (say it with me:) ritual.   What is a (traditional) theater but a temple, what do temples exist for except to create a sacred space for our rituals?  What is theater, if not its own very special ritual?

Yes, plays and performance exist to create a dangerous, liminal space where we can collectively experience the most dangerous, the most unutterable, the most disruptive facets of our own shadow selves.  And the People Who Know About This Stuff have been wise enough to know that such a space must be a BOUNDED, FRAMED space, buffered on all sides by the rituals that will pull us back OUT of that dangerous space, that will put us back together in such a way that we can put our masks back on, collect our coats and go back home to pay the babysitter, lie down next to our spouses, and sleep through the night without screaming in our sleep.

And if, sometimes, we long to leave the mask off...if we want to tear off our clothes and run out of the theater into the streets, if we are moved so far past the edges of ourselves that we can't find our way back from the shadows...well...

...that, of course, is where theater gets sticky.  And interesting.  Where you begin to have activists calling out for "new forms," where you begin to hear very smart, very engaged people pointing out that the "dangerous" ideas on most stages often feature people who look very much like our hypothetical audience full of wine and molten chocolate cake, and is written by people who ALSO look very much like* our hypothetical audience full of wine and molten chocolate cake and (AND!) (MOST WORRYINGLY!) is curated by an artistic staff who looks very much like our hypothetical audience full of wine and chocolate cake...you begin to foster the theatrical equivalent of "Sunday Morning Christian,"someone who can go to the theater, walk out feeling elated, disturbed, and inspired...and shake off any lingering sense of unease before he or she reaches the car.

Because Here's The Thing about those People Who Know About This Stuff.  Maybe they're wrong.  Maybe we're not supposed to pay the babysitter.  Maybe we're SUPPOSED to scream in our sleep.  Maybe there are things that are WORTH causing us to scream in our sleep.  Yes, politics, yes, corruption, Yes, Injustice with a Capital I.  We need plays about oil spills, we need plays about Katrina and 9/11 and we sure as hell need plays about Occupy Wall Street.  But we ALSO need plays about lust, horror, good, evil, etc...even when it doesn't come attached to something topical or easy to market.

And that's where it behooves us to move away from the Steps of the Temple, to grab some of that holy fire and run like hell down the alley, to break away from those comforting, comfortable frames that let us be moved but only as far as the edge of our seats.  And we see it -- the Hypocrites' "promenade" productions, displaced's theater in a motel room, Jaclyn Pryor's "Floodlines," Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, Exit Pursued By A Bear theater's loft performances, dinner included...not to mention "events" like "Sleep No More."

Maybe we've reached a time when life's too comfortable as it is, when we need to be a little bit more afflicted, when we've all got insomnia anyway, when we want the permission to scream, to tear our clothes off.  Maybe we've reached a point where the boundaries imposed by our temples to art are doing more to protect the art from US than US from the art.


* Please, please note: when I say "looks like" I *am* talking about skin color.  And I *am* talking about gender and age.  But, even more, I'm talking about sensitivity and school-larnin' (all those "Yale Mafias" and "Brown Mafias" and "Columbia Mafias" that we joke about); when whole generations of taste-makers train at the same places and attend the same conferences and are inspired by the same few brilliant, inspirational teachers, whether they're taught to deify Aristotle or taught to that it's groundbreaking to speak stage direction or encouraged to write plays shaped like a feather, starring snack food and inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, you're still tightening the noose around the question of what sees the light of day.  "Quality" and "Taste" are slippery, slippery ideas, dangerously (that word again) easy to elide.

What's Your Mission Statement?

I read an article this week from a dramaturg, talking about Mark Chemer's "Ghost Light."  It discussed the importance of an artistic institution's mission statement in guiding its programming, its development, its outreach...its everything.

I get asked, a lot, for artist statements.  I've been told, more than once, that it would be a good idea to have a mission statement.  I've always (sometimes secretly, sometimes not-so-secretly) resented those requests/suggestions -- it felt too "professional," it felt like bullshit busywork to make myself sound good on paper, to justify my admission to "the room" or "the profession."

But over the past week or so, I've been asking that question of myself, or, rather, asking variations of what is your mission -- ie, Why the Hell Are You Doing This?  Why Are You Putting Yourself Through This?  Why Not Just Enjoy Your Life, Which Is Otherwise Easy And Meaningful?  Why Keep Writing, Even When It Doesn't Make You Happy?

I can't quite answer those questions, yet.  But I'm trying to work toward answers.  I started with a few easier questions:

What do I think theater should be?  And where do I want to sit within the world of theater?  If I could make ANY kind of plays, for ANY kind of audience, what plays would I write and what audience would I write for?

I think I'm more interested in theater that goes for peoples' hearts than for their minds...not that you can't go for both, but that I am most in love with theater that goes for the most primitive, reptilian parts of the brain, the parts that go BEYOND words.  I walk away from terrific plays, remembering only one particular gesture or stage picture...I want to write to help make those moments of magic and transformation.  I want to make theater that's silly and fun and creates opportunities for wonder.

And I'm mostly interested in the audience that doesn't show up at the theater.  I want to write for my dad, who doesn't go to plays, hardly, except with me.  I want to write for my students, who have only seen the occasional Broadway musical, and for the engineering majors at public universities, and for people who obsess over video games and barbecue, not Havel and Racine adaptations.  I want to make theater outside the theater.

By extension, it's fair to say that the people I'm trying to reach aren't the people who read all the plays.  They're not the people who are programming at the O'Neill, at Sundance, at the Off-Broadway theaters.  Those people are fantastic and smart and, yes, many of them would love to reach the same people I do, but they're the temple priests, and the people I want to reach are at the colosseum down the street, watching the gladiators.

So why am I spending so much time and energy begging at the temple gates?  Shouldn't I be selling hot dogs at the colosseum?

While I'm Comparing Cities...

Ari Roth wrote a lovely piece for Howlround about DC theater, where he talks about its history and genetic make up in comparison to, say, New York and Chicago.

I'm pretty intrigued by DC these days...

From Henry James via Greg Moss

...I like this because it's an affirmation that the same things I struggle with, every day, are the same things that writers always struggle with.  And the ones who don't struggle like this, I don't wanna be friends with.

Some Articles on Writing Like a Girl

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/jul/18/women-theatre-equality-myth

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-gunderson/theatres-audiences-are-ma_b_1388150.html

http://bechdeltest.com/

http://thehathorlegacy.com/why-film-schools-teach-screenwriters-not-to-pass-the-bechdel-test/

On Collaboration, and the Battle over Brahms

I just heard a short segment on NPR that stopped me in my tracks and sent me straight to the computer.  It was about a collaboration, in 1962, between Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic and pianist Glenn Gould.

I first encountered Gould in  the 1993 film "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould," and then again when I found his Goldberg Variations. If you know Gould's work, you know that he often approached music like...well, I think of him like a monk, a contemplative, someone who treats music as a kind of meditation.  Bernstein, well...he was a fixture in New York for decades, the first American born and trained composer to reach international acclaim...and...the guy who did the music for West Side Story.

It would be fair to say that their styles weren't an obvious match.

It would be equally fair to say that their week-long rehearsal period, preparing to bring the Brahms D Minor Concerto to the stage, was...fraught.  Gould wanted to play it like a contemplative, Bernstein wanted to lean into the piece's virtuosity, both men were stubborn and both men thought they were in charge.  In fact, the process was SO fraught that Bernstein stood up in front of the audience and gave a speech about the week's disagreements, and says "distinctly different from any I've ever heard or even dreamt of...I cannot say I'm in complete agreement with Mr. Gould's conception."  "I'm conducting it because Gould is so....serious an artist."  Gould, Bernstein, and the Philharmonic then gave a piece that sounded like a musical wrestling match -- a "musical argument," says Sara Fishko of NPR -- sometimes Gould's interpretation was winning, sometimes Bernstein did, sometimes their interpretations melded beautifully, and sometimes it sounded like an unholy mess.  Or at least that's what the (very critical) critics said the next day.

I ran to the computer because...well, because I thought the piece, as played by the two of them, was beautiful, full of tension, dynamic.

My first thought was: "see?  COLLABORATION doesn't always mean AGREEMENT  -- SUCCESSFUL collaboration has room for disagreement between creators!"

The concerto felt like a validation.  Here are these two brilliant men at the top of their game, spending a week arguing and then bringing that unresolved argument in front of a paying audience, framing it for the audience, and then showing them where they are with it.  Isn't that art?  Isn't that part of what art is here to do?  Start conversations that don't have easy answers.

Maybe I should have stopped there.  But I kept thinking.  And I found myself thinking, first, about the musicians (who were likely sitting there torn between who they should follow, or who knew it was their job to follow Bernstein even if, secretly, they preferred Gould's ideas).  And I thought about the THIRD lead collaborator in that 1962 endeavor -- Brahms.  That's right, the guy who wrote the thing.  The dead guy, who didn't get any say, beyond his notation, in how the piece played out.

And I started to think about the massive, massive difference in collaboration on an EXISTING piece, a piece that has been judged and found worthy, a piece that has, in and of itself, stood the test of time, versus a piece that is getting its first, second or third performance, a piece that hasn't yet joined the ranks of "timeless," or "enduring" work.

No one was going to walk out of that concert hall in 1962 and say "well, that Brahms piece was sure a stinker, wasn't it?"

There are different stakes for a collaboration on new work.  Because that piece just might live or die, based on the strengths of the collaboration.  Now, I'm not saying agreement=strong collaboration, in fact I've seen plenty of love-fests where the results suck...I just wanted to flag that there are stakes for COLLABORATORS on a project, and there are also stakes for the work ITSELF.

Dietz says "your work isn't fragile -- you might be fragile, but your work isn't," and I've always found comfort in that.  But I wonder, now, thinking of the Gould-Bernstein, if there aren't limits to that lovely idea.

Also, nota bene:  Gould stopped all live concert performances at age 31 -- from then on, he chose to work in the controlled (conductor-free) environment of recording studios.

He turned 31 in 1962.

So there's that.

One for the Scrapbook

So this might be the nicest "interest piece" I've ever gotten (scratch that -- hands down, it IS).

I'm including it both because I wanna hang onto it...and because the interview was...interesting.  Basically, Georgia called me as I was scrambling to get in the car to get to a meeting (in Los Angeles).  She and I talked for maybe ten minutes.  I just sort of chattered at her about the play...and I think she got to the heart of why the play is working.

- Because I was writing from a place of REALLY not having answers
- Because I didn't give myself time to second-guess the craziness of what I was writing (I mean...dragons?  really?)
- Because I was writing about something INTENSELY personal, not something I thought other people would necessarily find interesting
- Because I just kind of let it rip
- Because only THEN did I start doing a lot of revision.

It's the creator brain/editor brain thing that Anne Lamott (and just about every other writing teacher) talks about all the time.  You have to give yourself room to find things.  You have to separate the creator from the critic, at least long enough to make something to begin with.

I had to be reminded of this when I started dating K, too, come to think of it.  I distinctly remember our mutual friend telling me to "shut up and stop over-thinking."  So.

Notebook on the Subway

I'm scribbling on subways.

Starting a new play.  I don't know what it will be -- I'm going in without a plan.  So far, it's snatches of conversation.  They feel mundane, they feel petty, they feel like the characters are maybe gonna be a little ugly and unlikeable.

And I'm fine with that, because I'm writing.  It feels both good and weird to write without an outline -- for the past year and a half, everything I've written has had an outline -- but mostly, it feels necessary.  I'm also writing longhand, in notebooks, which I haven't done since early in grad school.  I may be risking carpel-tunnel.  C'est la vie.

I got on the subway the other day with a new notebook, rode the F train to the end of the line, then back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I wrote the whole way.  Then I moved from exhibit to exhibit, writing wherever I found a bench, until I got bored.  I sent K the sexiest text of his life, when I wandered through the Greek statues (and what is it about this visit that I appreciated, for the first time, the beauty of the Grecian urns?).  I saw all the reconstructions of old American rooms.  I wandered through the museum without a map...much like I'm writing without a map.   

It felt like I found corners of the Met I wouldn't have found otherwise.

I'm not sure whether I'll find places in my writing I wouldn't have found otherwise.

But I know I won't find them if I plan my visit.

Humble Brag...

Hey, how cool is this?  I just found my blog on a recommended list for film and theater students!

...I'm posting this, and will probably include it in good links, because there are a *ton* of other blogs here that I either already read, or am glad to now know about.

Nice.

Lost Angeles

I went to Los Angeles.
It was for "a meeting."

...Like the kind you get flown out for, the kind at a television network, the kind where you get offered water by a receptionist with much better shoes than you.

The meeting came at an opportune time -- during my spring break -- which gave me a few additional days to drive around the city, catch up with talented friends, hike Griffith Park, visit colleges (because hey, that's still the day job, to work with high schoolers, and if I could help them on a network's dime, why not?), and imagine my life, were I to live there.

Note to self: when navigating Los Angeles by car, for the first time, GPS might be useful.  Or at least a smart phone.  Or hey, perhaps a map.  There's a reason this post is entitled "Lost Angeles."

So yes, I did get lost (literally) roughly once every two hours.  Asked directions at gas stations, grocery stores, state park entrances, and (memorably) an Episcopal church, retraced my steps, found my way again.

But I guess the reason I titled my post thus is that I FELT lost there.  Saw people who I love, most of whom SEEMED (and hell, maybe I'm projecting) a little lost.  See, I talked to a lot of friends who told me lots of good things -- about new jobs, great auditions, drinks they'd had with such-and-such a movie star, terrific workshops they'd joined, amazing upcoming opportunities -- but laced in among all the upbeat news were moments of...glazed over eyes...thousand yard stares...helpless discussions of breakups...fixations on looks...stories of violent relationships...envious descriptions of so-and-so's insanely huge house... it felt like a lot of people were searching, seeking, grasping, coming up short, pressing their noses against the glass either in terms of career, beauty, or relationships.  In conversation after conversation, I felt like I was talking to people who were driving without GPS, afraid they'd missed their turn or were about to miss a turn, not sure where to get off the highway, not sure whether they could trust the barista to give decent directions.

A lot of people seemed trapped in their cars, standing still on the freeway.  Metaphorically.

I'm probably over-thinking it.  I tend to over-think things.  And to pay more attention to "vibe" than to anything else...and maybe some of what I was noticing was just because I, myself, was in that unhinged, liminal state that we often enter into when we travel, and when we encounter the unfamiliar.  I was ready to notice it.  Still, it felt like a city full of people...waiting.  Isolated.  Separated by mountains, forced together into canyons.

Would I move there?  If I were offered a terrific opportunity?  Yes, yes I would.  And I'd do so happily.  I think ANYWHERE is a good place to be if it's a place you're busy, you're useful.  But to go there to wait for an opportunity, to go there to knock on doors?  That sounds, to me, like deciding to head to Santa Monica during rush hour.

...of course, you can play with similar analogies for New York, right?  And people have...Federico Garcia Lorca talked about its "rootless beauty,"  E.B. White talked about the three New Yorks, comprised of three kinds of New Yorkers (natives, who accept its turbulence, commuters, who devour it and spit it back each day, and transplants, who are here on "quests").  There's the sense that all but the native New Yorkers are here to "get" something, to "climb," and not just in theater but in EVERY field, every aspect of life.  It's why we're always checking each other out on the subway, why New York talks about itself (endlessly, incessantly, obsessively) in magazines and on film and in books...is there ANY city more written about than New York?  The way it writes itself into the center of the universe, the way we can wrap ourselves in some mantle of "seriousness" or "legitimacy" or "success."  You can scoff at this, say it doesn't apply to you, but it's the cliche of the city for a reason -- there's truth to it.  The same "trapped in the car" truth that defined my time in LA?  Here we're trapped TOGETHER on the subways, in the crowded cement canyons of our streets, like it or not.  Here we live vertically, hungry to get high enough for a decent view of sky.  You wanna get to work?  You gotta walk by Bloomindale's, by boutiques, gotta navigate through the women strolling with strollers full of shopping bags (the kid's with the nanny, mom's got yoga).  You confront everything you ARE and everything you AREN'T, everything you have and everything you'll never have (but that someone else does) every day.  We have limited space here, so when we want to change, to rebuild, we have to erase what was there before to make room for the next thing -- every making is an un-making, every gain is a loss (note the current NYU construction plan controversy).

I know none of this is NEW or earth-shattering or revelatory.  I've thought about all of this a million times since I got here, thought about it before I got here.  But it was thrown into relief by this trip, was thrown into relief as I begin to think about the benefits (and booby-traps) of each place, about the next move.

The question is: what's gonna feed you artistically, what's gonna feed you as a person?  What terrain is most conducive to making art, to make a life?  You can survive anything...but how do you thrive?