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One prominent notion in Patterns is the character’s act of writing a play as she is acting the play. It is quite self-reflexive and for a large part dominated the content of the play. As the drafts have progressed, this element has been cut way back as it became somewhat apparent that the self-reflexiveness often as not came off as self-indulgent. There was an additional problem of the self-reflexivity being greatly redundant and, being interpreted by some, as insulting to the audience (even though that was not the intention).

Another component of this was to make the play more aware of itself. That is, the convention in plays predominantly is the audience’s agreement to pretend that the “characters” in the play are unaware of the audience and off in their little world. As I have quoted elsewhere, Eugene Ionesco:

Why could I not accept theatrical reality? Why did its truth appear false to me? And why did the false seem to want to parade as true, substitute for truth?… [The actor’s] material presence destroyed the fiction. It was as though there were present two levels of reality, the concrete reality, impoverished, empty, limited, of these banal living men, moving and speaking upon the stage, and the reality of the imagination. And these two realities faced each other, unmasked, irreconcilable: two antagonistic universes which could not succeed in unifying and blending.

So, many aspects of Patterns are directed at the act of play creation itself; to reflect on this as it is happening. One method of super-charging that reality is using the actual names of the actors in the presentation of the play. This is something that the Wooster Group does often. So, below, you’ll see mention of the cutting of this element in the script, as it didn’t seem to be working right in the actual process of staging the play.

Rehearsal Report
Date: 2/9/2011 Start Time: 6:30pm Break: 8:20-8:30 End: 10:10pm

Summary:
– Reviewed blocking pages 1-11
– Blocked pages 11-20
– Ali did measurements

Director/Playwright:
– Line change on page 2 spoken by King. Middle of his first paragraph of dialogue he used to say: “daughter: fill my cup and let not but that my cup continually runneth…” And now reads: “daughter: fill my cup and let my cup continually runneth…”

– Line change on page 11 spoken by Aisa. The actors’ real names are again eliminated near the middle of the page. Aisa now says: “Let’s look at the fairy tale again. I will play the role of the princess.”

Props:
– No new props for today’s rehearsal.

Costume:
– Added a few items to the prop list for the Doc’s costume.

Set/Sound/Lights:
– On page 19-20, it was decided to lose the “playback” on the videotape during the scene with the Doc. The doc will now “review” the raw tape from an actual video cassette tape. The Doc will tear at the tape, look at it, and discard the cassette. The dialogue will have NO changes.

Misc:
– Regarding the plywood for the Queen’s death scene, it only needs to be large enough for her to lie comfortably. Laura is 5’4” so perhaps a 5’8” board in length and 3” wide would work?

Next Day Schedule:
Thursday, Feb 10th 6:30pm
Company review pages 1-20, block pages 20-28.

Mayannah, Rosemary, and Ani prepare to dine.

Went and saw Brainpeople at convergence last Thursday night.  I must admit that I don’t know how to feel about it.  I take that back, I do know how I feel about it; I just…as I so often do…question whether my impression is correct.  I suppose it’s silly, really.  After all, one’s impression is one’s own and needn’t seek any external validation; however, one can be off-base in the variables one puts in one’s calculations, and that is what I fear.  Regardless, this is just an avoidably long way around saying that I thought it was a not very good play. In fact, a bad play.

While no expert, I am familiar with Jose Rivera: References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, Marisol, and I listened and laughed as he described the insults and stupidities endured as a Hollywood screenwriter in Tales from the Script. So I am still a bit shocked.

First, let me disclaim a few things.  The convergence production was very good:  I’m assuming (having not seen it anywhere else).  That is, the set was sumptuous.  The atmosphere was wonderful (lighting, sound).  It was storming when I went to see it and you could hear the rain pounding on the roof which added to the eerie effect of the thing; and the effect of the dystopian environment and fear of a police state was effective.  I thought the acting was terrific, especially that of Kristi Little, which frankly blew me away and was worth the whole trip.  Her portrayal of Rosemary, and her deft powerful shifts through multiple personalities was both terrifying and exhilarating.

The problem I have is with the play itself.  And it could be that I’m in this phase where I’m obsessing with Eric Overmyer and Len Jenkin and the Wooster Group and Megan Terry and reading Brecht and Artaud and Ionesco, in short, dealing with playwrights who are challenging form and structure and authorial position.  But, I was just shocked that here is a very, very good playwright who has three women on the stage and the majority of the play is monologs.  That was just flabbergasting.  And one significant piece of the play has a major character (Rosemary) catatonic on a chair periodically chirping pieces of a rather predictable sentence.  I just could not believe that I was watching a Jose Rivera play (whose past character lists include a coyote , a cat, madmen, guardian angels).  I couldn’t believe that Rivera would handle three characters like playwriting students in a 101 class.  And to make the characters more effective within this stultifying mold, he just gave them quirks which seemed more contrived to me than anything fundamentally real at their core.  I felt, more than once, that the choices Rivera made were intentional and contrived (not developing naturally out of the writing) and pushed in place to serve the plot’s outcome, not, again, any sort of organic meaning from the writing or meaning that rises up out of the unconscious.

The plot is that one woman (Mayannah, played by Laurel Johnson) lures two other women (Rosemary and Ani, played by Laura Starnik) to her house with the offer of $20,000 if they can make it through dinner.  This is one of the plots.  The other plot uses the literal presumption that you are what you eat to suggest that you literally can experience the memories, feelings, etc., of whatever creature it is that you have consumed; this theory is key to Mayannah whose parents were eaten by a Tiger when she was 8 years old.  By eating Tiger every year at this strange dinner, Mayannah hopes to be able to find her parents via one of her guests.  In this case, Rosemary, whose multiple personalities make her susceptible, apparently, to channeling Mayannah’s consumed parents.  Interesting as all this is, I could only see a re-hashing of Hollywood plots.  Since every pitch for a screenplay is supposed to be a combination of two movies in some way, Brainpeople is House on Haunted Hill meets Altered States.

One of my professors, David Todd, has mentioned in passing, and I’m paraphrasing, that once you become a playwright and sit through enough plays there comes a point when you can pretty much see how a play is going to play out right off the bat.  And there are two outcomes for this: one is that you become very cynical about what you’re seeing and the second is that you begin to develop a taste for stuff that really challenges you in new ways–or stuff that is surprising or occasionally you get surprised by more traditional fare that is really, really good.  Unfortunately, with this play, I found myself in the cynical position.  It was very hard for me to be there after a certain point.  Once I realized how this play was working I was just dispirited. Dispirited, I think, by the fact that meaning was going to be handed to me in this utterly conventional way.  There was a clock on a table on the set facing the audience and I found myself staring at the hands while time passed in five minute increments.  The only place that really blew me away was when Rosemary told her story and there I was overcome by Little’s acting which was just flat out great.  I’m certain, too, that some credit is due Clyde Simon’s direction in keeping Little’s transformations on edge like that.  Starnik had her moments as well, describing her love affair with Mayannah’s father through the television, which demonstrated glimpses of Rivera’s sense of humor and the bizarre, which were unfortunately missing from most of the play. Johnson got a moment, too, describing her first communion gone awry.  Regardless, other than those few points, the seams and mechanics of Brainpeople, the formal strategies and plot points, were just way too visible and the rotation of monologs among the women, some of which nearly turned the characters into cartoons, were just disappointing.