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Attended the Writing from Character workshop last night at CPT, which was run by the heroes of Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and that is good as I was somewhat nervous being one of the only playwrights in a room filled with actors.

 

The workshop, loosely described, is about creating character by using a variety of techniques, including clowning. The main idea being that you have a character in mind based on a prop, and combined with movement and various other techniques you identify some biographical information about your character which then you can develop more fully into three dimensions.

I have been through a variant on this process before in a workshop at CSU. Interestingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, both focused on getting into one’s own body prior to the activity; and it is remarkable how much physicality can influence quirks of character in the development phase.

The evening started with everyone circling up and going through a quick name game to, as much as anything, loosen everyone up. That was followed by a five minute period during which everyone stretched on his/her own just to loosen up. This was the outset of my being thankful for doing, albeit half-heartedly, P90X. The stretch techniques and CardioX came in helpful for not only the stretching but what followed immediately upon it. We were encouraged to move around the room, walking, exploring the space.

We were in the Orthodox Church at CPT which is a quaint, baroque, and highly engaging space. The vaulted ceiling, tumbling into a cupola, is painted the hue of the lightest bluest sky of summer, set off by the brilliant gold paint liberally scattered about. The silhouette of tree limbs peeped at the windows and the wood floors felt immensely real under my bare feet. (I owe that description to the elevated awareness to which my senses were subject by the exercises. )

The exploration quickly turned to simply walking around the room, engaging the eye on whatever it took rest. Then the pace was increased. We were next encouraged to identify open space between all of the bodies moving about and move through them. Circles circled and then reversed, people dashed diagonally across the space. The clip increased. A rule was added that if you encountered a person you were to turn and move the opposite direction, as if you ricochetted off the individual. We were admonished to keep loose and lithe so as not to bash anyone we might bump into. Next we were encouraged to follow persons. Then to either stop or deflect when we bumped into another. The pace continued and we were encouraged to become aware of those around us, to pick a person and keep him/her in our peripheral vision at all times. Next it was two, then three. My eyes seemed to slide sideways in my head as I became increasingly aware of the breadth of the space around me. When the exercise concluded I was drenched in sweat, and yet was strangely un-tired. As one person described it, it was very much a constant exchange of energy from everyone in the room; and it might have been a sort of sustenance.

We did an exercise where we imagined we had extra limbs; where we contorted our bodies into odd shapes and physical expressions. Next we donned our outfits: pieces of clothing we brought along to help us envision a character. I wore a tremendously gaudy dress splattered with a rainbow of colors; I looked, no doubt, like an Amish Moony. We sauntered the room soon after listening to the coaxing commands of Jeffrey Frace to imagine that we were happy, to imagine that this was the happiest day of our lives, to imagine that we were infinitely desirable: that the world’s leading thinkers sought us out; the leading politicians called us on the phone for advice; etc. We were to inflate ourselves as much as possible and strut about the room greeting all the other inflated personas who inhabited the room. It was quite fun.

Then we sat and picked up a pad and paper and in response to Jeffrey’s commands, created a biography for a character that had emerged for us. The questions: Name, Age, Where from, Education, Key Moment in life, personal eccentricity, Greatest Fear, Greatest Dream, etc, required immediate responses (we were given approximately five minutes in which to get the details of our character in order). Then, as the main body of the workshop attendees sat, some several of us where called up in a group and Jeffrey pummeled us with questions about our biography. Many of the questions required on the spot generation of new facets to our personalities. We were then all given a scenario in which we had to act together: the first group was that a ballet troupe was unable to make their performance and the characters in the group had to fill in; next was the same scenario with Shakespeare replacing ballet; finally, (my group) it was a square dance.

All of these aspects are on view in Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant at CPT, which ends next week. Wild characters, bursting with energy, are engaged in running a restaurant and in coordinating the cooking and live entertainment for Conni’s guests (i.e. you, the audience).

The workshop concludes tomorrow night with an advancement of the characters we created and a short stint into cooking and working together to create and serve dinner while working in characters. Should be fun!

For those of you who are interested, my character is Schnickel Fritz, a 41-year-old Ponderer from Middletown, Ohio, who talks like Tom Waits. He can’t remember his education only that he became totally enlightened after a rumspringa acid trip. During the trip he realized that certain core tenants of the Mennonite faith coincided with a mix of Japanese zen Buddhist thought as filtered through a Hippy-style smokendum. Fritz’s personal eccentricity includes making animal faces and expressions (as well as accompanying noises) with his beard–but this only happens during periods of great excitement. Fritz’s greatest fear is being forcibly shaved. This also happens to be his greatest dream. One of the more terrible moments in Fritz’s life was when his pet cow Beatrice, a Hereford-Friesian dairy cow, was given over for slaughter to Butcher Langer.

When interviewed Fritz admitted that his sole exceptional feature is Pondering. “I am especially good and noble when it comes to the art of pondering. I love to emponder others. I am in transition. In my youth I was sought out for my great pondering ability and exquisite pondering poses: for which I was featured as a centerfold in Thinker Magazine: the Journal of the Subsupercilious. (Known in certain circles as “the Bent Brow”.) More recently I have traded my stardom for seeking states of non-being in my pondering, concentrating less on the outward form of my poses and more on a deeper sense of nothingness. In this regard, I have taken to assisting others who seek out deep wonderment.”

I was drawn recently to the article by Naomi Wallace in this month’s American Theatre. I was drawn primarily because in one of my early MFA courses the class read One Flea Spare, which is still ranks as one of the most beautiful and haunting pieces of writing that I’ve encountered. My professor and mentor Mike Geither knows Naomi and he arranged to have her come to one of our classes and there was a reading of one of her works The Retreating World, which was also very lovely and moving. I had the chance to talk with her during some down time and I found that my method of writing was much like hers–perhaps my method is like many peoples… Naomi said that she researched a project for nearly two years before writing and that generally had a good idea of where she was going with it, and generally disliked writing itself. That’s pretty much how I feel every time I start a play. Although, since I embarked a different approach as described elsewhere, I’ve found this to be less the case; and I’ve always loved the research–I guess that’s why I’m a research librarian. I also purchased the movie she wrote: Lawn Dogs, which has many of the attributes of her plays–a strange magical mysticism, etc. And a heavy dose of class angst. But, I digress. The point is, I looked forward to the article. Then I read it.

Now I’m not sure what to think. I feel that most of my mixed feelings arise from inner turmoil rather than from something she stated; but I can touch on this in a while.

Mainly, I was fascinated that she would begin by stating that writing is at its “best an act of transgression.” Transgression is an interesting word. Or rather, comes from an interesting root of words. Every time I see the word “trans” I’m reminded of my attempts to teach myself Latin, where many word roots were unveiled to me: “trans” = “across”. Just like “peninsula” which comes from the Latin “paene” (almost) and “insula” (island). I find etymology fun. So you have “trans” (across) and “gressus” (step). So, then I thought “aggression,” hmmm. “ad” (to) and “gressus” (step)–but in this case, it obviously means to step toward in a threatening manner; while transgress is to violate or cross someone’s step, violate their space or motion or whatever–I’m trying to figure this out as I go. Regardless, transgress means to step across the line; break a rule or a taboo. That is, Naomi begins by immediately setting up writing as something that runs counter, that is subversive, etc., with which I don’t agree at all. Or, let me say, rather, that this does not solely have to be the purpose and I take issue with her assumption, both at the beginning and throughout her essay, that it must be. Often times she’ll try to pull away from such a hard line–stating that “I tend to generalize. I like to generalize.” pp100 column 3–but despite her attempts? to pull away, she goes right on displaying her unconscious assumptions that all writing need be transgressive and politically directed. She gives the nod to writing for entertainment, writing for money, and writing for politics, but never writing for self-discovery, growth, or the search for the universe through the local–or rather, should I say, her brush, light with paint, but doth touch the canvas once with such a thought.

Writing to transgress, that is, to cross the self, to open the self and discover the self, while important to her, is seen as a means to a political end. To cross the self to realize how insulated you are, how naive you are, how self-centered, how white, how WRONG you are.

I take issue most with her on the politics of it. This is something that I have struggled with. In fact, I wrote a play, described or touched on elsewhere, entitled The Empiric, about at 14th century healer named Jacoba Felicie, or Jacqueline Felicia de Almania, who was forced out of the healing business by the violence of law in Paris, France. And yes, of course, I realize fully that “law” is a form of violence whose sole intent is to “force” a person to do something he doesn’t want to do, usually with the thin veil of physical violence lying in wait. But my question tended more toward the effect on the art itself that I was trying to create. Doesn’t the act of politicizing an art make it more like journalism? And no matter how pretty the prose or verse, or how human and empathetic the angle, there is some flavor left in the mouth that tangs metallic. It’s almost as if you must reach the truth by slight of hand–fooling even yourself. Sort of like Douglas Adams’ take on flying: that you must trip and fall and the split second before impacting be distracted by something such that you forget you’re falling and start to fly instead. And that you must not ever think of the act of flying or you will immediately fall from the sky, but must instead maintain the posture of distractedness. Such is how you must come to truth. For if you say it yourself it is your truth and if you force a character to speak it, it is degraded.

Politics overwhelms this article. The end of it invokes even global warming, for Christ’s sake. I want to state, openly and honestly, that I am not, nor have I ever been–well, except in a moment of youthful hubris at the outset of my undergraduate career–a member of the right-wing conservative establishment. And I do not want to be taken this way (I am a Libertarian today). But Wallace’s second paragraph smack so hard of Marxist overtones that it’s almost unbearable to read: “means of production,” “ownership,” “writing merely an exercise in accumulating…private property.” Give me a fucking break. And then has the audacity to posit that each of us should ask the question, when we write, “to what ends am I working.” What a load of shit. As if the act of writing is solely to polish a turd before launching it at some [thing, one, idea, group]. She begs us ask the purpose for our writing–positing the blatant assertions that there must be political motives behind when/what choices are made to a political end–one way or another, and then quickly steps behind the Brechtian shield that “all theatre is political.” As if that is an answer or ends all discussion on the matter. She states that the roll of theatre is to “speak truth to power” echoing Augusto Boal in his toppling reversal of Aristotelean logic.

But in much the way she casually dismisses “mainstream” theatre as being “mediocre” or entertainment to “keep the peace,” I defiantly state that theatre exclusively to the end of highlighting class politics, or race politics, is equally mediocre and certainly not original. She steps back from her take on Brecht by remarking that “all theatre is political” in the “human and social” sense, but immediately puts her foot back on the gas pedal of theatre as power struggle.

I am intrigued by her questions in this regard, that:

All theatre deals with questions of power. Who has it? Who doesn’t? Who wants to get it and how? Who lost it and why? Who has killed for it? Who has died for it?

And I tend to agree with Wallace’s “sizing up” of mainstream theatre’s–and it’s audience’s–penchant for congratulating itself on exploring the deep and meaningful issues of humanity, when its epic plow has only touched the surface tissue; a theatre that doesn’t think or even provide an experience of being alive, but instead provides a passable evening’s entertainment and a refreshing alternative to the evening news to while away the digestion of food: by spoon-feeding them the drama, exposition, and meaning as though it were pudding.

On page 100, Wallace defines “transgressive writing” by “calling for a teaching of theatre that encourages students to write against their ‘taught’ selves and to engage…in the kind of ‘self-transgression’ and ‘critical awareness of self’ that will enable them to become ‘citizens of the world.’

Hear, fucking, hear. I absolutely agree with this. To crack that self and unleash the torrent that is the unconscious. The become a citizen of the world by becoming one with all humankind. Nothing could be better. But the motive. My god. The motive should be the act itself; not, as Joseph Campbell would say, to move all the pieces around in the vain attempt to recreate the world–which seems to be Wallace’s explicit goal: writing to wrongs. As if the immense and powerful act of self-discovery should lead to nothing more than a new market economy in an African village. Throughout the essay Wallace waivers between stating greatness and suggesting ways to it, and then cutting it with transient political concerns of the day.

Wallace finishes this section by stating that, “Transgression is, among other things, a dissection of one’s self and a discovery of larger worlds.” A statement with which I whole-heartedly agree.

But again, to do it, Wallace states that one must be involved in “questioning entitlement and empathy.” A statement that seems to, again, take away from the main realization–to debase it. Entitlement and empathy are lesser points to the main act of self-discovery and larger world exploration. And, in fact, that new discoveries of self and larger worlds should, in and of themselves, lead to empathy and a questioning of entitlement, and not be in any way predicated on it. In fact, to listen to Nietzsche, one can make such realizations and discoveries and not give one mote of shit for other human beings at all–to elevate oneself to the status of a god: thus rejecting any empathy or questioning of entitlement; though, I admit I see Wallace’s point and don’t mean to dismiss it. The Holy Grail, or recognizing the pain of others an that in your own self (empathy) is core to the Western ideal of Christian love and understanding…and I think questions of entitlement fall immediately on the heels of such a realization. I am yet amazed that Wallace can make such bold statements regarding transgression and self-discovery and yet immediately lessen them by connecting their main importance with simple political thoughts regarding racism, sexism, etc.

Wallace ends her main introductory section by expressing her desire to see more writers “who envision theatre as a space for social and imaginative transformation.” Another desire that I share with her.

I’ll pick up this discussion again tomorrow, when my mind is clearer and my eyelids less inclined to fall over my eyes…