weebelly.com

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.

Freakshow (Carson Kreitzer) and directed by Geoffrey Hoffman is another delivery straight from clubbed thumb on the menu at convergence-continuum. Very like its counterpart from the 1930’s (Freaks) the play takes a hard look at what it is to be a freak and who may fall within the boundaries of this definition. Usually, of course, those who society would characterize as being “normal” are the ones that truly deserve the “brand” of freak: for behavior that is egregious on the soft side and utterly repugnant on the hard.

Mister Flip (Clyde Simon) is such a character. For most of the play Mr. Flip didn’t particularly strike me as being terribly offensive or vile. He ran his freakshow as the business it was; the one striking feature being that he kept a boy, re-labeled the “Pinhead” (Kellie McIvor) in a cage—which isn’t particularly humane, but neither was the roughly two – three hundred years of mental health management practices of Western civilization which did essentially the same thing with ‘unmanageable’ persons. It isn’t until 4/5ths of the way through Freakshow, when the Dog-faced Judith (Lucy Bredeson-Smith) delivers the story of how she became the Dog-faced Girl and of her time “as the star” of Mr. Flip’s traveling freakshow: prior to the arrival of Amalia, the living torso (Laurel Brooke-Johnson). It is Judith’s story of how she became the central attraction that reveals the true capacity for depravity that Mr. Flip commands—or perhaps he is simply brutal enough to do what needs to be done? Other occasions where Mr. Flip shows his capacity for brutality are mainly those that involve tough business practices, which can be understood given the context in which he operates; but none-the-less, all reveal that Mr. Flip, at least, has a soul that is to the “freaks” what their bodies are to his.

The other big current rushing through the play, like blood through an engorging… well, I won’t go there…is that of sexuality. Obviously, it goes hand-in-hand that the main attraction of seeing freaks is their physical deformity and the fear and self-consciousness that it drives onto the viewer; which is then logically followed by arousal (at one end) and simple speculative considerations regarding sexual practices…or other practices (at the other end). Kreitzer rightly recognizes this paradox and puts it squarely at the center of the play, in fact, opening the play with Amalia’s confrontational statement, “You are wondering if I have ever had sexual intercourse.” Judith, the Dog-faced girl, is also appropriates an overwhelming sense of sexual power, highlighted graphically in her story of the “old days” when she was the “star” of the show and lorded it over the men of the various towns the freakshow passed through. Sexuality drives many of the relationships between the characters, too. Matthew (Stuart Hoffman) is the “caretaker” of the traveling freakshow—“shoveling out the elephant shit”—but also ‘services’ Amalia in the evenings. And Aquaboy, the Human Salamander, (Shawn Galligan), has a tryst with The Girl, a runaway farm teen, (Sarah Kunchick). If one looks that the sexual or love trysts throughout, the only one that seems ‘normal’ is that of Matthew’s love of Amalia or possibly Amalia’s love of the Pinhead. All other relationships seem to be distorted in some way—Amalia’s relationship to Matthew is skewed by utility (she sees it serving a purely sexual function and eventually ‘fires’ him); The Girl’s love interest in Aquaboy seems to lose it’s luster when Aquaboy discusses running away and working in a factory for a living.

For the most part, in Freakshow, we see the stories of several characters presented in an episodic manner—that is, there is no real plot orientation driving the story any particular direction. The freakshow seems to die out of natural causes—lack of attendance due to numerous external factors. So our eye is placed squarely on the human interactions and their implications for who we are as people, as a society, culture, etc. Many times throughout Mr. Flip makes reference to P.T. Barnum, contextualizing the activities we’re seeing in both time and as a pattern of societal behavior and expectation in entertainment. Most other elements fall along predictable lines: the townies that want the show closed, at least on Sundays; running away from something to join the freakshow; the ‘selling’ of freak babies to the show because the parents don’t know what to do—or worse, want to make a fast buck; a bit of light romance; jealousy, envy, fear: all that is human.

Sade Wolfkitten, who usually relegates her talents to the lighting or sound control, steps out big for this production—and I means STEPS out—as in, on glass. Brining a bit of the carnival to Freakshow, Sade gives the audience what they want in a mesmerizing glass-walking feat followed finally by a jump from a stool—barefoot, of course!

The production is strong and Geoffrey Hoffman does an excellent job pacing the performance of a script which has the capacity to slow down and get choppy at times. His choice of lighting and tech effects is good too and directs the eye of the audience with subtlety. The use of Mark “K” Korneitchouk on the guitar fills in some of the “traveling” time effectively. Visually, the play was well done, too, from costuming to the set build to the flapping banners on the wall advertising the “products” of the traveling freakshow. The two big shout-outs go to Laurel Johnson for the at once torturous binding she endures as the torso Amalia, and, at second, for her ability to completely command the audience while having no arms or legs to use for gesture or motion—only her face and the bob of her head and neck for emphasis–and, of course, her powerful command of language. Lucy Bredeson-Smith also delivers hard in Judith’s story, which is profoundly engaging and held the audience wrapt as she subtly wove a tapestry between love and family to sexuality and desire through to brutality and rage. Lucy is showing a true command of her art and its ability to hold an audience fixed. I also enjoyed Stuart Hoffman, who lent a sense of dignity and strength to the character of Matthew which I felt was compelling.

Next up for con-con: Buried Child. Ah… Sam Shepard…