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Saw Dobama’s production of Stephen Adly Guirgis‘ play on Friday night, then hit La Cave Du Vin for some beers afterward. On a few occasions during the play I found myself looking forward to the beers, but for the most part it was a good play. I thought the acting was great and Boduszek’s directing was solid, though I don’t know if some of the “longer” parts that made me wish for beer were due to pacing or if they just needed cut down by Guirgis.

The Motherfucker with the Hat is a play about love and trust, and ultimately how love is stronger than a trust that gets violated. This is unfortunate for the main character, Jackie (Jeremy Kendall), who has devoted his whole life to loving Veronica (Anjanette Hall), a woman whose drug addled brain doesn’t seem worth the dedication that Jackie is displaying. Jackie is no saint, having his own addiction problems, and having done 24 months for selling; but at least Jackie is on the wagon and trying to get straight. Helping him cope with the newfound straightness and his past addiction problems is his Sponsor and friend Ralph D (Charles Kartali) as well as Jackie’s long mistreated cousin Julio (Jimmie D. Woody). I say Veronica “isn’t worth the dedication” because right off the bat Jackie comes home, excited, having finally found work, wanting to celebrate, only to stare at a strange hat on the bedroom table. Jackie knows it’s not his hat, and wants Veronica to tell him whose hat it is, hence the title of the play. She won’t, and launches into a tirade about how Jackie won’t trust her. Probably a good choice on Jackie’s part when the inevitable and predictable revelation is made that Jackie’s sponsor, Ralph D, is the offending Motherfucker. How it is that Jackie can smell the Aqua Velva and dick on the bed and not smell the Aqua Velva on his sponsor I will leave you to ponder, but the betrayal comes as a surprise to Jackie.

The play moves in a predictable structure of pairing off–Jackie and Veronica, Jackie and Ralph D, Jackie and Julio, Jackie and Ralph and Julio, Jackie and Veronica, Ralph and Veronica, etc., you get the point. At each interview we are taken deeper into the relationships between each pairing and into the past of each character. Guirgis does a great job with these pairing offs and tells stories and develops characters in a truly engaging way–such that I was pulled in and loved the stories that I heard. However, there were also times when Guirgis got off on tangents of philosophizing that were just too damn long. In particular is the mandatory scene where Jackie confronts Ralph D. about what he has done. There is the necessary physical altercation, during which Ralph D. unbelievably beats down a more physically impressive Jackie; and then the two “discuss” the matter in a more “mature” manner. Undoubtedly the two would fight, especially after the atrocious things that Ralph D. says to Jackie about Veronica (and what he did to her). It is less likely that Jackie would stick around for the ten or fifteen minutes (it seemed to me) that he did to hear Ralph D.’s defense of himself. I can understand the need on Jackie’s part to know why Ralph did what he did. I can understand that Ralph is a no-good amoral scumbag who takes advantage of situations to his own benefit. But the seemingly interminable cyclical nature of the scene was not necessary: Ralph castigates Jackie for ever getting arrested–after all, it was Jackie’s fault that he was sent to jail and left his woman alone–not Ralph’s fault for being a depraved ass-wad. Fine, I get it, but to let Ralph say it three, four times, as he justifies himself in some long-winded psycho-babbled philosophizing was too much. Not that I don’t believe that there are people like that: there are. And not that they don’t drone on and on: they do. But on stage it was too goddam long. And that wasn’t the only section that was long, and strangely so, given the tightness and the pop of other parts of the piece. It’s almost like some self-important workshop director got his hands on this and said “we really need a lot more here from Ralph so he can explain himself”. No, you don’t. You didn’t.

Anyway, there are some truly sizzling moments and Guirgis, to steal from Jean Shepherd, works in “profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay”. Ultimately, Guirgis wins by painting a painful portrait of people who have betrayed themselves and each other and have tried their best to kill any hope or chance of love they have. Jackie’s love for Veronica is undoubtedly true, and that makes the outcome of the play all them more heartrending, but Guirgis holds no punches.

Trying to catch up on my happenings, as a lot has been going on and I’ve been negligent in my posting. A few weeks ago I went down to Cleveland State University to sit in on a class whose guest was Jeffrey Jones. It was a pretty interesting time just sitting and listening to the stories that Jones was telling about all sorts of things, including his own writing process and current project to tales of his days with and around the Wooster Group in New York and earlier days when theater was just breaking out in the 60s with folks around like Sam Shepard and Fornes and even an early encounter with David Mamet, etc, at the theater door: “It’s Mamet, the writer.” (Sexual Perversity in Chicago). I should make clear, right away, that I’m talking about Jeffrey Jones the playwright (Seventy Scenes Of Halloween) and NOT the pederast movie star of Amadeus fame.

I also heard from David Todd, my one-time professor who now works down south at Otterbein, who had recently referred me to Jones’ blog: http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/, which is quite interesting, revealing, and often aggressive: with Jones not being shy about his opinions when it comes to things theatrical. To tell the truth, I wish he posted more often. One entry that I found especially of this type was entitled “How Theatre Works” from 2008: http://jeffreymjones.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-theatre-works.html; and at some point I’ll post a response to it as I found some of what he had to say quite surprising given his own style of play creation and works.

In his talk at CSU, Jones touched on how he created plays: for instance, that he has a strong interest in creating a “pastiche” of other materials, such as Harlequin romances (bodice rippers) and Nixon’s White House tapes, etc. That is creating a collage of materials and seeing what comes out of it. In terms of his process, he says that he likes to set up a rule or process and to follow it to see where it leads. For instance, on the Flea Theater website Jones has a workshop listed which discusses a process that he uses for play creation. For an even more elaborate discussion of Jones’ approach, take a look at Broadway Play Publishers.

In some ways, the very act of creating plays in this manner flies in the face of the traditional notion of the playwright as authority or playwright as author. The notion of “author” has been a subject of much speculation in general over the past thirty to forty years (See Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, etc.). For instance, what to make of a playwright such as Charles Mee and his (re)making project. Me, who does not “write” the words of his play, but instead “orchestrates” the words of others (found texts) into a play. But beyond this, the question was raised in the discussion regarding the “new trend” of “devised theater”–that is, plays being created using a physical process or a theatrical/spatial approach, rather than a scripted approach. Often you’ll find actors and a director working to create plays as an ensemble, possibly using myth, fairy tale, or other found texts as a guide that is then reinterpreted or re-constructed. This approach to playmaking often cuts out the playwright or, in some cases, has been seen by playwrights as a direct attempt to cut the playwright from the process. Jones’ thoughts on this–while being familiar with this approach under various names–including that used by the Wooster Group, or even Shepard/Chaikin–are that playwrights create story and pattern. Playwrights are responsible for the orchestration of events, and Jones felt that this is not a likely outcome from devised theater or spontaneously created pieces. Jones felt that, while actors may be able to create a character or even a series of actions that have some meaning in a given context, they are, in his experience, not likely to be able to create an overarching story, a grand pattern, and that the pieces are unfocused, and thus lose power, energy, and possibly meaning over the course of the event. Playwrights, as the name implies, are supposed to be master builders of story. Playwrights should be familiar with how story works and the energy potentials of its various constructs, rhythms, and events–be they in a beat unit, a scene, or in larger blocks across the play–even if they intend to violate these rules or work against them. Some actors may have an understanding of the constructs, rhythms, and events in story, but most do not. Directors had certainly better.

I have taken steps into this arena of playmaking by pastiche or collage, though not to the extent that Jones has, nor do I have his track record, pedigree, etc. My thesis play, Patterns, for instance, was a collage of generic forms, as well as a collage of various texts brought together to reflect and refract one another: an effort to force meaning to be created by the audience who experiences the play and, in some ways, to deny that I as the playwright am the sole source of meaning with regard to the text. (That is, not to deny my importance entirely.) My play Andrew Jackson ate my Homework: A racial farce, is another example of this approach to playmaking. The problem that I have run into, or have noted to myself, when writing plays that reject the Aristotelian dramatic structure–or at least one of the issues–is where does the play end? Or how do you craft the ending without falling into the trap of “forcing” the ending or dulling the play, somehow–that is, as Jones might have it, without killing the energy, power, and meaning. This is a question of editing and has been addressed in many locations by playwrights smarter than me, one of which I have pointed to before: an interview with Wallace Shawn in an issue of American Theatre. For Jones, the question of where or when a play ends is when you, as playwright, have exhausted the material or your ability to create new things with the material. Or, to use the words from Jones above, when you set up a rule or process and trace it out to see where it leads, it is precisely when you have run out of leads that the play must be done–in one sense. Then there is the cleaning up. For Jones, this represents the other important facet of playwriting, which he posited in a question: “is it tight”? That is, have you gone back into the work and edited every line to make certain that it is as tight and clear and clean as it can be? That there is no fat, no laziness, nothing imprecise? Has the waste from each line been removed?

The event at CSU was lively and important for me, and I look forward to my efforts at revising the plays mentioned above using Jones’ guidance and thoughts for both ending and tightening plays.