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Thom Pain (based on nothing)as seen at Dobama Theatre on 4 February 2007.

I think the biggest thing of interest to me about seeing Will Eno’s Thom Pain, as opposed to reading it, was the interpretation made in the presentation; or, using the more cliche lingo, the "choices" that were made.

In the post performance discussion, Scott Plate said that he and Joel Hammer had made decisions regarding the character that were different from the New York show. This was based on descriptions provided by Tony Brown, who apparently saw the original show in New York. Brown said that the character/interpretation was somewhat vicious in his incarnation and distant. The performance was menacing and left the audience with a distinct and pervasive feeling of having been ravaged.

The performance I witnessed was that of a more neurotic character, a man who was decidedly in mental chaos: clear and articulate, piercing and insightful; then muddy and worried and uncertain. I found the character, as presented at Dobama, to be worthy of empathy and concern: a human character worthy of compassion.

In seeing the performance, as again opposed to reading the script, I was surprised at how clearly the "spine" of the work became clear: the failure to connect with the family, the loss of the dog, the failure to connect with society, the loss of the lover. These points of the play stood out very well, in my mind–where in the text they were somewhat more difficult to discern. In seeing the piece I found it highly compelling. Additionally, the intentionally theatrical moments of the performance: where the character addresses and interacts with the audience, were very real and had a tantalizing influence on me as a spectator: even though I knew they were coming. In fact, I found this the most peculiar part of the experience: knowing full well something was coming and the nature of that something and yet still being affected by it.

I also noted that one of my favorite lines was botched; but I gained a completely new appreciation for one line that still haunts me, and likely always will. The line that was botched was: "And somewhere in the same night another youth bleeds between her legs, wondering what for, sure she’s done something wrong, unsure whom to tell." I was very disappointed because I thought it so profound. It was either botched or cut. I found it profound and disturbing all at once, along with the line that has become my favorite: "What a surprise to have a body." I am not sure why these two lines resonate so deeply with me, but I will try to put a finger on it. I think it is Eno’s very precise association of bodily events with the mind’s judgment of the self. The mind searches the universe incessantly to make connections between things. That is what makes great artists and inventors and businessmen and–well, any great person–great–is their ability to connect things that are unconnected. It is the true act of creativity in the world. A person can do something or create something or write something never being sure that it hasn’t been thought or written or created by someone else before. But the connection of two disparate things: two things that have not been connected is an original act; unique in that it creates something larger than itself and releases a new energy into the world. The mind is always trying to connect things: connect, connect, connect, connect–what does this mean, how does this relate to this other thing–why me? What have I done? And that is what is haunting about Eno’s lines. The mind judges. Bleeding is bad. Bleeding from your “secret parts” (to use the Medieval phrasing) is very bad. There is no reason for it. The mind is magical. The mind connects unrelated things to create meaning. That is magic. That is why science will always loose to the superstitious mind. We are hard wired to believe, to our souls, things that are refutable: but to the mind as hard as scientific fact will ever be. To the primitive mind, a yellow bird pressed against the skin will take the yellow evil of jaundice away with it out the window. It makes perfect sense. If it doesn’t work, then it is not a reflection on the concept, but on the recipient. The girl lying in the dark will associate this bad thing happening to her with some act that she must have committed. Somewhere a brooding justice falls on her for what she has thought, or may have done, or may have thought, once, of doing. Blood doesn’t just happen. There is a reason. And in the illogical darkness: the murk of the primitive jungle in our unconscious: judgment. Taboo.

I know this feeling. Who doesn’t? And I am moved, wrenched to think of that girl in that darkness fearing that she has done something wrong when the body is just doing what it does to advance the species. Oh, how science takes the magic from us. How clinical and removed it is. Cut off your arm and it becomes a thing. The sensation it has provided you is gone; the utility of movement is lost. Science. Of science, as Yeats says, more poetically than I can ever dare imagine:

from The Song of the Happy Shepherd

"… Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass –
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs – the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth."

I find that I am strangely drawn to this play. I enjoy it. The more I think about it the more I find myself discovering. These are excellent qualities in anything. But I also don’t like that I am drawn to it. My mind rebels against these postmodern plays, or these post post modern absurdist plays. The plays that all the "hot" writers write; the "up-and-coming" writers. They seem to me hyperpersonal. It is as if each is vomiting his or her neuroses. I feel at once like quoting a Neil LaBute character and a character of F. Scott Fitzgerald. There’s an odd combination. In The Shape of Things, Adam says, outraged at the end,

I’ve completely missed the point here, and somehow puking up…all your own shitty little neuroses all over people’s laps is actually art–

Nick Carraway, at the beginning of The Great Gatsby remarks,

I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accuses of being a politician, because I was so privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon…

I feel often that I am somewhere in between these poles when it comes to "new" theatre. I am pulled constantly between the poles of expressing myself and hoping that my own little, neurotic experience is universal enough that it connects with people; or expressing myself through attempts at displaying universal, epic themes, and flinching away from the postmodern accusation that you cannot generalize anymore–that horse is dead and beaten and buried.

I am clearly moving into a new phase in my own writing. I know this. I can feel it, and feel the urge to explore. This is good. I just wonder if it will lead me to a clearing in the jungle that no one wants to visit. A place that is not only unremarkable, but perhaps, repulsive.

That is to say, to sort of crystallize this, what is theatre today? What is the point of it, what is the goal of it, what should it be? I am torn between my traditional expectations of the Aristotelian model: the proud and noble character who experiences a reversal, fails, repents, and is destroyed in front of everyone; to the now post, postmodern offerings of completely destroyed personalities offering up their dreadful experiences as something universal. One could argue that it is a reversal of what is right (or is it just beginning at a different point?). I am reminded of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

The slave revolt in morality begins when the resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the resentment of those beings who are prevented from a genuinely active reaction and who compensate for that with a merely imaginary vengeance. While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant self-affirmation, slave morality from the start says No to what is “outside,” “other,” “a non-self”. And this No is its creative act. This transformation of the glance which confers value–this necessary projection towards what is outer instead of back into itself–that is inherent in resentment. In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself. Psychologically speaking, it needs external stimuli in order to act at all. Its action is basically reaction.

That is, what has been viewed as good, right, and moral is viewed by those who are disaffected as evil, wrong, and immoral. Hence, the inversion begins. I am torn by this and think often that what I am seeing in modern theatre is nothing more than the utter dissolution of anything noble or (hating to use the loaded word) moral. And I don’t know that I mean that in a religious judgmental sort of way, but a more humanistic way: that we elevate what is debased and dismiss what attempts to lift.

Well, there is no easy way to wrap this commentary up. So, it will be left as it is, with that flat and petered-out ending. These are my thoughts, though, on the 19th of February, 2007. Where they shall lead me on the 20th, and 21st, and all days after I must wait, like everyone else, to see!

[Re-post from Playwrights Local]

Millwood Outpost by Tom Hayes opens on Friday, March 18 and runs through April 2. Directed by Rachel Zake, this new drama features Joe Milan, August Scarpelli, Zach Palumbo, Sean Seibert, Quin Johnson, Tom Hayes, and Juliette Regnier. Thanks to Tom for this preview! 

What kind of play is Millwood Outpost, and how did you get the idea for it?

I originally started writing this play many years ago, probably fifteen or so. I was going through a David Mamet phase and I’d just read Lakeboat, a play about a bunch of men out on a cargo boat on Lake Superior. I was fascinated by the window that the college kid provided on the lives of the working men and the stories that they told.

When I was just out of high school, and during my first summer out of college, I worked summers for the Ohio Department of Transportation. I was one of those people you see with “Stop/Slow” signs. I also cleaned-up dead animals and weed-whacked endless miles of guardrail. The environment was both similar and dissimilar to that in Lakeboat: similar, in that there was a hypermasculine atmosphere, dissimilar in that ODOT had several women working there, and they were greatly resented.

That early play, like Lakeboat, was more monologues and two character interactions. Events were episodic and seemed to focus more on the joy of what people said rather than any plot or story. I knew that this approach wouldn’t work, at least, not the way I wanted it to, so I set about moving it toward a more dramatic structure. At first, I was interested in the two college kids (the characters Zak and Nick). They offered that “fresh” insight into the world, and were also not jaded by it. I also was interested in the initiation aspect, that is, men bringing a boy through a ritual ceremony into manhood. But even more than this, I was interested in the notion of a perverse idea of manhood, which made a sort of negative ritual or negative initiation. It occurred to me that another focus for the play was the resentment that these men feel about having to change — or being told to, at least.

The best way, it seemed to me, to get at the problem of forced change was to create an external environment that is threatening everyone inside the outpost. At first, it’s innocuous, normal even. But, as things move along, the character of the threat changes. No one inside can define it. They’re forced to tell each other stories of past experiences that touch on what is undefined, but they still can’t put their finger on it, and it scares the hell out of them. All of these elements combine to create a dramatic play that also has elements of magical realism, I guess. A sort of strangeness that I believe will come through in the production.

As a playwright, were there any other models for Millwood Outpost, or did you see yourself as working in any other particular genre or tradition?

I don’t know that there are any [other] models that I was thinking of for this play. I know I enjoy plays where there are strange, unexpected things going on that point to a bigger universe or dimension. I can think of plays by Mac Wellman, Conor McPherson, Sam Shepard, Will Eno, Erin Courtney, Carson Kreitzer, Anne Washburn, and others. I like plays in which there are not only elements of the theatrical experience in terms of light and sound and strange story elements, but also in the language itself, like Harold Pinter and the patter, unanswered questions, and bizarre situations people find themselves in, as well as the equally bizarre or understated reactions to the predicament.

What has the process been like so far of working with director Rachel Zake and the rest of the cast and staff?

I’ve had a wonderful experience working on the play. Rachel is smart, professional, and demanding. Her process of getting to dramatic moments in the play has been exciting to watch and has drawn my attention to aspects of the play that I either hadn’t noticed or that I hadn’t focused on. She can really see what’s in the script and figure out how to get it out of the actors for everyone to see and experience, which I think is great. Rachel has an eagle-eye for detail and makes actors stay focused when things get a bit…unfocused during rehearsals, which can happen. Rachel’s the first director of this play, which takes a special type of creativity and imagination. 

The actors have been great, too. Sean has brought a stern, ferocity to the character of Rollo. Joe has dredged up a truly mean-spirited Digger which he, literally, spits out. August brings out the no-nonsense dignity of a man who just wants to get his work done and go home. Zach brings an energy and truthfulness to the character of Nick, which is a critically necessary foil to the men at ODOT. Mugs is doing fantastic as an earnest and naive high school grad who is being initiated into something he may want to avoid. 

[I’m playing] the role of Dad and I won’t speak about the process of working with myself because it’s rotten. (Laughs.) I’ll let others answer that question. We also have Juliette Regnier as The Voice, and she does a wonderful job as the ominous expression of doom coming through the radio, striking fear in the hearts of the men.

In addition to being the playwright, you’re also the Managing Director of the company, Playwrights Local. What do you think is the value of this type of new work to the community?

When a group of us founded Playwrights Local in 2015, we wanted to be a theater committed to staging the work of local playwrights. At the time, there were virtually no theaters producing the work of local playwrights on their main stage. There are plenty of theaters around that will run some staged readings or some other small things, but they don’t put local plays on their main stage. The consequence of this is that the plays that come into town are written by people from other cities and other states whose interests and concerns don’t reflect those here in Cleveland. Another consequence is the lack of production of local playwrights creates a huge hole in the theater scene. The people of Northeast Ohio, believe it or not, actually do have something to say, and often have a pretty interesting manner of saying it. That should be represented on the stages in town.