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Well, it’s been a long road for me and this play. It started as an exercise in Mike Geither’s English 612 class sometime in February or March of 2007. The exercise, toward the bottom of this entry: http://weebelly.com/04/working-theatrically/, led to Timothy and Spooky running around a campfire.

As nearly as I can remember the play started off like a normal one for me. Two characters in a rather bland exchange:

Timothy: Hey, Spooky, whachya up to?

Spooky: I don’t like being called ‘Spooky,’ thank you so goddam very much, I thank you.

Timothy: Okay, then Spooky, what is your name?

Spooky: I won’t tell you my name. A name’s power, there’s power in names; power in names over the named thing there is power. That I won’t give you.

Timothy: Spooky, how can I talk to you if I don’t know what to call you by?

Spooky: (Standing quickly and moving toward Timothy. Speaks in a loud voice and stands menacingly close) Ahhh, why doan you fuck off!

It had two male characters interacting and one was violent and domineering and the other somewhat passive and timid. At this point, the play could have gone the same route as an earlier play I wrote, Only Sing for Me. In fact, I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on this comparison and the two are eerily similar, one is simply less imaginative and has less of my “true” voice in it. Although it nearly went the same route as the earlier piece, one exchange popped out that changed things:

Timothy: (Shrinking visibly and stuttering) I…I…m sorry Spp… I’m sorry. Sorry. I didn’t mean to…

Spooky: (Just stands and breathes heavily into Timothy’s face.)

Timothy: (Raises his right hand and taps it on his chest) My, but you have got my heart racing. Simply racing. (He backs up a step and then turns, slowly, and begins circling Spooky) Simply a’goin’ pitter patter, my heart. (In the mock voice of Scarlet O’Hara or Blanche DuBois) Why, whatever is a girl to do with such a… brute as you?

That strategic choice by Timothy to switch to an openly effeminate persona, coupled with the sly strategy of a comedic mockery that challenges the openly violent hostility of the other fundamentally changed how the two would interact. This exchange was followed rapidly by the next exchange:

Spooky: (Sits on the ground again and crosses his legs; he draws idly with his index finger.)

Timothy: (In his normal voice) You know, I don’t often come to the woods anymore. Not like I used to. Not like I used to with Uncle Philly and Brother Gene and Sister Mary May and John the Butcher and Kim the Karate man from down the block. Not like that anymore. I used to come. With them. Used to come out here all the time and lay on my back in the clearing over there and gaze up at the night sky. Orion and Cassiopeia and the Pleiades and Sirius and Ursa Major and Ursa Minor and the Milky Way which was always my favorite way and the vast distance of the immensity that was the greatness that pressed down on my tiny chest and encompassed me fuller than any womb I was ever completely in but not completed in. I used to gaze at that.

This effusion by Timothy is remarkable, for me, in that the character of Timothy now has openly been freed up to allow his innermost thoughts to pour out, uninhibited. It is quite really that by allowing my character (myself) to put on an effeminate voice I freed myself (Timothy) to let an imaginative world pour forth. This is quite naturally followed later by this, not too much later:

Spooky: (Turning) Are you gonna get smart? (Stands) Are ya? (Walks menacingly toward Timothy) Are you gonna get smart. Are ya? Are you gonna get smart, now? (Smacking Timothy on the head) Where’s your dress? Where’s your dress, Timothy? Where is it? (Smacks Timothy on the head) Put it on. Put the dress on. (He turns and stomps back to the backpack and starts rummaging.)

And then…

… Timothy steps out of the tent in a pink dress and a blonde wig with braids. He has red lipstick all over his mouth.

So, the course of the play had been set in motion.

Originally, the Ranger was in on it. Later he became a foil against which the other two acted. This is very in keeping with Only Sing for Me, but I do have to speculate what the play would have been like had I kept the Ranger as a part of the other two’s activities.

For the most part the play developed in a natural course flowing out of me quite easily. Toward the end, though, the magic fizzled and my conscious mind started getting in the way. I’ve written about this on several occasions, but my entry on Wallace Shawn certainly foregrounds the problem: http://weebelly.com/02/on-writingand-on-writing-about-sex/

The unconscious mind is the realm of dreams. It is mythological and powerful, spontaneous and frightening. The conscious mind is dull and predictable. Beware you let your conscious mind write (or edit your unconscious material). Of course, you have to do this (allow it) so, as Shawn points out, this is where a talented writer shows up (the ability to edit). I have yet to fully acquire this talent. I read Christine Howey’s review of my play and admired her eye, as she directly caught the problem of my play of which I was acutely aware.

In revising the play, which I had named A Howl in the Woods, I comment elsewhere about the change in name http://weebelly.com/25/play-to-be-produced/ which I admit is much more interesting than my original. The original name, however, reflects the direction I went with the play: there is something in the unconscious tangle that transforms the main character—empowers him to slough off his mutable identity and become the self-defined person he was meant to be.

There was a fundamental failure on my part to instantiate this vision for this play and that left it open to many interpretations. And truth be told, the direction that it went was too much a conscious decision and left it open to the failures I mention above. I think very much that Clyde revived the comedic heart of the play as it was originated—the playful spontaneity that made it special—and helped it to come to something worthwhile. I know that I am fortunate to have him as the director.

Ultimately, there were mistakes made in the writing of this play and I have learned valuable lessons from them—so, I will go on to new mistakes. Hopefully my plays will get better as I move forward, too—the mistakes less obvious and bumbling. In reflection, I had opportunities; including the aftermath of the staged reading at CPT.

Lord of the Burgeoning Lumber is going well and has been very well received (see Tony Brown’s review). I admit that I’m somewhat surprised, but I guess that is because I know its warts and focus on what could have been rather than what is, making it difficult to see that there is good in it yet. Certainly, I have no regrets about placing the play in the hands of convergence-continuum. I cannot say enough about all who have given so much of their time to it: Clyde Simon, Lucy Bredeson-Smith (tireless and omnipotent wielder of the immortal stage manager lash), Geoffrey Hoffman (whose talent as an actor and director shows in his acute perception of and critical inquiry about the flaws in this play), Tom Kondilas, Tyson Rand, Mark K (who should have two more arms to manage the musical gymnastics he accomplishes for this performance), Megan DePetro as the Butterfly Queen, and Sarah Kunchik as Helga. Then there is Terrii Zernechel who put in long evenings working on lights and lighting effects, Tom Kondilas (again) who stop-motioned the video and brought the shadows to life, and Sade Wolfkitten who is always present to make the sound go off without a hitch.

I am grateful to convergence for making this play a success; to Mike Geither for his guidance, and for the input of the 612 class who helped shape it. The play has yet to reach its final resting place, perhaps, as it has been entered in the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival (ACTF) and will be reviewed by a judge from Wooster very soon. Some recommendation will be made at that point.

I’ve just finished reading the article in American Theatre this month regarding [amazon_link id=”1598530038″ target=”_blank” ]Thorton Wilder’s)[/amazon_link] famous play.

The author of the article, Lori Ann Laster, begins the journey in her pre-teens inside her middle school gymnasium, with the broad statement: “Like many Americans…” I guess, I’m not in that group. I don’t know whether to feel gypped or not. I also don’t know why my all-American hometown, which it was—Fredericktown, Ohio—home of the FFA Jacket—failed to deliver on this one. I think I do feel gypped. Regardless, I digress into another small instance of my all-too-familiar penchant for simmering injustice. That is to say, I didn’t see the play in my pre-teens. In fact, I had no encounter with the play at all until 2007 at Cleveland Public Theatre—actually, that isn’t wholly true—my teacher and mentor, Mike Geither, virtually insisted to one class that we watch Spalding Gray in the video version, which I now have (but haven’t watched—maybe I’ll do that tonight)—but that really doesn’t count as that’s only hearing about the play, not experiencing it.

In reviewing my blog, I find that I did no review of that 2007 performance, which really shocks me. The performance was rated the “most lyrical staging” of 2007 by Scene and was, in fact, really stark and terrific for a host of reasons. Chris Seibert played the part of Emily Webb with a deep earnestness that I’ll not soon forget—and which sent me spiraling back to those terrible days of urgent adolescent yearning that were emotionally and, in certain places, physically painful. George Gibbs, played by Len Lieber, did an equally fantastic job in his earnest portrayal.

In reflecting on the piece I’ve had to dig about on he web. I found the one positive review above and then one negative review in the Free Times by James Damico, who must have some personal dislike of Bobgan as his review is so sharply hysterical. There must be some deep impulse to love [amazon_link id=”1598530038″ target=”_blank” ]Thorton Wilder’s)[/amazon_link] purely and some desire to be touched on his quivering breast by Wilder’s “superior intellect.” I, for one, was able to see beyond such shallowness as the casting and into the emotion of the piece and production; else Damico just likes create a certain high-pitched hysteria, as he clearly likes boasting and ego flashing: demonstrated by his cheap sarcasm obnoxiously brought to the fore by his unnecessary recitation of musical fodder regarding a hypothetical staging by Cleveland Orchestra of Pomp and Circumstance. As well, it’s clear; he couldn’t resist the inappropriateness of stirring in disgusting suggestions of pedophilia. In fact, it’s amazing how much sexual repression I’ve picked up on in so short a review as that by Mr. Damico; perhaps this observation points to the source of the high-pitched hysteria? It’s also nice and lovely to get Mr. Damico’s authentic praxis on how [amazon_link id=”0060535253″ target=”_blank” ]Our Town[/amazon_link] should be staged, complete with a recitation of pages 24-25 of his Our Town Staging Guide, 2nd Edition, on the “specific gravity” of the Stage Manager: because, God-knows both the “genuine and would-be” theater critic is the true knower of all things playwriting, play-building, and play-producing—(as demonstrated, no doubt, by the number of directing awards on his desk).

I since have found another negative review, though less prurient.

There was much physical movement in the production at CPT that included the use of chairs and ladders and a bare set. The movement of chairs, to my mind, was exceptional in that the movement very nearly effected what I would suggest as “camera angles” on the stage: one moment Emily was at stage right and George was at stage left, a quick few movements and all was reversed. For a “theater in the round” as was sort of instantiated at CPT for this play, I thought the “camera angles” were extraordinary and the movement gave a vitality to the piece. It also, for me, was in keeping with Bobgan and Seibert’s use of stools in their production of Caucasian Chalk Circle for STEP. I later learned, of course, that the starkness of the set, the chairs, and even the ladders were a part of Wilder’s directions. And, of course, learned that this was perhaps the crowning achievement of the piece—or one of them, certainly at the time it was written.

As the American Theatre article discusses, the stage in mid- to late-Thirties was “stuck” in trenchant “realism”—massive sets, the well-made play. As Laster writes:

A bare stage, no props, the use of mime, breaking the fourth wall, dismantling the unities of time and place—these were radically innovative devices that astounded audiences at the time when kitchen-sink realism dominated the serious stage, and boulevard comedies and melodrama proliferated…It was by removing the diversion of realistic clutter and tapping into the imagination of audiences that Wilder strove to make what was on the stage reflect the verities of life: “Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind—not in things, not in scenery.” 25

The CPT production shocked and stunned me, but more to the point perhaps, I was stunned by Wilder. I am still amazed at the effect of all the component parts put together in three acts led to that transcendence. The New York Times in 1938 wrote, “under the leisurely monotone of the production there is a fragment of immortal truth,” which still came through in 2007, demonstrating the power that Wilder cast up through his piece.

The article in American Theatre goes on to discuss the productions of Our Town at four theatres in the U.S. this year, and some in the past, including the variety of methods being used in the staging to re-create the production for modern audiences—all of which, of course, would be repellant to Mr. Damico, violating pages 1-5 of his Our Town Staging Guide, 2nd Edition, on the “purity of production values” and “reverence for superior intellects.” Of course, the use of bunraku-style puppets at Two River Theater Company would send Damico stark-raving mad and he’d no doubt rush the stage in a frothy-mouthed ecstasy screaming something about the trauma done to the “timeless nature of small-town existence” by the use of puppetry.

Laster ends her discussion of [amazon_link id=”0060535253″ target=”_blank” ]Our Town[/amazon_link] by drawing our attention to when it was written and what was happening in the world, and notes that a certain resurgence of the piece may be due to a similar impulse in our own time—a yearning for a simpler, more pure time in our American past—that small Grover’s Corners in our idyllic dream of America. Although the great grandson of Wilder is quoted speculating that [amazon_link id=”0060535253″ target=”_blank” ]Our Town[/amazon_link] is staged every night somewhere in America. How accurate that speculation is difficult to gauge.

An interesting commentary by Mike Harden in the Metro section of the Columbus Dispatch which I saw this weekend while visiting my parents drew another possibility, as one message of [amazon_link id=”0060535253″ target=”_blank” ]Our Town[/amazon_link], certainly one drawn from Emily Webb’s visitation of her family after she had shuffled off her mortal coil, is to live life in the present, to not allow pettiness and selfish focus to cause you to overlook the wonderful life you have in front of you right now. A certain, strong, Buddhist metaphysics indeed.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, at least in passing, the similarity between Our Town and [amazon_link id=”1602837422″ target=”_blank” ]Under Milk Wood[/amazon_link] by Dylan Thomas, both plays that draw as their subject the life of a town and its inhabitants. Perhaps sometime I’ll discuss this one a bit more as Geither turned me on to it and I found Thomas’ piece equally as compelling as Wilder’s.