The Unserious Chekhov

The rest of my "Deadly Assumptions" series is coming.  As it happens, I am in the midst of preparing Something Worth Seeing at present along with a wonderful group of actors and collaborators:

When you're in the trenches getting shit done, it tends to cut down on your pontification time.  Rest assured I'll find my evenings free soon enough, and will return to my normal cussed self.

In the meantime, check out this article by Josh M at Fine Arts LA: A Community of Cars  (At first I thought the title was "A Community of Cats," which would be a pretty fair description of the LA Theatre scene as well.)

Deadly Assumptions:
A Response to "Why Theatre Matters"
part two

This is part two of my response to Steven Leigh Morris' LA Weekly cover story, "Why Theatre Matters."  Part one may be found here.

 "The city of Berlin spends more on the arts than the entire federal government of the United States," writes Steven Leigh Morris, ramping into yet another canard:  The reason theatre in America suffers is because the government doesn't fund it.  We need a national theatre, we need more taxpayer dollars to support new works, etc. etc.  The problem with this belief in the benevolence of government is simply put:  He who pays the piper calls the tune.  Or as Thomas Jefferson is believed to have said, "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have."  It was probably Gerald Ford who said that.  Regardless, the truth of the statement is evident.  Just ask the NEA Four.  Sure, they got their grant money -- three years and a court case later.

I know JFK said the following, as quoted in my blog entry of February 5th, 2009, "A Secretary of the Arts?"

Art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment. The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.

-- JFK (emphasis added)

Keep in mind, just a few paragraphs above Morris was writing about the role the arts have played in goring "tyrannies of the past."  Is he serious in suggesting that the theatre can serve that role while cashing checks from Uncle Sam?  I'm not against government grants.  As soon as Theatre Unleashed receives its 501(c)(3) status, it's "game on" for any and all funding sources available.  The "lackaday" over an absence of massive government sponsorship of the arts is tiresome.  If in Los Angeles, "the incentives, the economics and the culture couldn't be more different" than New York, as Morris states a little later, surely he would concede that comparing Germany and America is an apples and oranges equation.

It's now been documented -- here I refer to the study called Outrageous Fortune, by Todd London, Ben Pesner and Zannie Giraud Voss, published by the Theater Development Fund -- that the network of midsize regional theaters across our nation has become too paralyzed by fear and the imperatives of institutional survival to move the art form forward, thereby consigning those theaters to a kind of creeping irrelevance.  The evidence for that lies in the aging demographics of their patrons, in a now-staggering system established 60 years ago to provide a viable alternative to the commercial fare of Broadway.

(He is wrong about why the regional theatre system was started -- really, Broadway?  But we'll let it pass for now.  Charles McNulty succinctly sums up the reason for regional theatres in his excellent piece, "Southern California's big theaters need fresh, dramatic thinking."  Read it.)

I would argue that those theatres are "paralyzed by fear" because of the aging demographics.  I submit that the evidence for the aging demographics is the creeping irrelevence.  At the very least, it's a dwindling spiral with each factor exacerbating the situation for the other.  It would be awesome if all our problems could be solved by:

1. Eliminating the need for ticket sales,
2. Which would free us from the need to please a particular audience,
3. Which would embolden us to put some fire back into the theatre's belly.

What's missing from this scenario?  I'll cover that in the next installment.

Deadly Assumptions:
A Response to "Why Theatre Matters"
part one

"And from all sides the same answer -- the risk is too great, too many disappointments. Here we see how the vicious circle is drawn. Steadily the Deadly Theatre digs its own grave." – Peter Brook, The Empty Space

In the March 25th edition of LA Weekly, theatre editor Steven Leigh Morris published a Jeremiad on the state of theatre in Los Angeles. Odds are if you haven’t read his article, the following won’t make much sense, so I do recommend reading it. I have a lot to say about this article, so I’m going to have to do this in parts.

The article kicks off with a lamentation over the lack of respect for one of Morris’ college professors. Morris comments on a press release that crossed his desk in January, listing in some detail the college professor’s screenwriting CV. Morris writes:

Next comes the sentence that stands out for me: “He also wrote some on- and off-Broadway plays.”

That’s it. Theater. Broadway theater! He also wrote some … plays. Might those plays have a title?

If only this were some West Coast aberration, but in fact it’s indicative of a far more pervasive, waning regard for theater in our culture.

Or perhaps it’s indicative of a publicist who knew the only way to net significant coverage would be to wet the beak of theatre journalism with TV credits. Indeed, perhaps this tells us more about the state of theatrical journalism than it does the prevailing attitudes and interests of our audiences.

That “waning regard for theater” that Morris laments has been waning since the dawn of "something else to do on a play night". It’s pretty waned out by now. He goes on with the boilerplate for this type of article (the NEA says arts attendance is dropping and arts programs are being eliminated in our schools; I’m surprised there are any arts programs left to cut at this point) stating along the way, “But the larger point is the divide between the commonly held low regard for theater and it’s actual relevance ….”  I would say that there is no divide between the two, but that would involve taking resonsibility as a theatre professional for my role in "waning regard."  And we can't have that.

We come to this:

This apathy toward the arts, and toward artists, is nothing new in America, but with text-messaging, tweeting, cell-photo–taking and social-networking technologies all tied into the escalating global-corporate control of almost all our affairs — now including unlimited corporate spending in political campaigns under the guise of "free speech," thanks to our Supreme Court — we appear to be surfing on a slow-moving wave toward a kind of globally engineered beachhead. On this beachhead, the sort of independence of thought and language that gets expressed through the arts in general, and in great theater in particular, gets dashed on the rocks.

First, to quote the great Richard Linklater, “Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.” Morris seems genuinely concerned about the lack of “relevance” for theatre, but not once does he mention the obvious: If theatre lacks “relevance”, it is because the audience has been a secondary concern too often, and they are simply spending their entertainment dollar elsewhere. This isn’t rocket science. If I have Netflix streaming through my Xbox to my HD flatscreen, I can sit at home and watch Laurence Olivier play Henry V. What would motivate me to sit in traffic, search for parking and plop down $15 to see a live production?

The remainder of the quoted passage, and the following several paragraphs veer into the heart of “woo-woo” territory. He starts by impugning Twitter and social networking as part of the “escalating global-corporate control of almost all of our affairs ….” This is simply delusional. The fact that Iranian protesters were able to tweet news updates to millions of users on a moment to moment basis; the fact that citizen journalists break stories faster and with greater reach on YouTube than the old, grey Fourth Estate can affect in print; and the fact that we are more connected to each other now than at any point in our history is a complete and utter refutation of his premise. Theatre is story-telling. Social networking and lightning-fast communication is a boon, not a threat. (Although It may be a threat to traditional journalism.)

Morris asks, “Do the people who belittle the arts do so because they’re too expensive, irrelevant, or because the arts have the capacity to say unpredictable and unpleasant things?” I would ask, “Who are ‘the people’ you speak of?” The most onerous belittling of the arts I’ve seen may be found in professional and amateur reviews of plays.

“History shows us that the tip of the spear that gored tyrannies of the past was laced with the arts,” writes Morris, who then attempts to draw a comparison between America, circa 2010 to Soviet Russia, Communist Czechoslovakia, and South Africa during Apartheid. Steven, what Los Angeles are you living in? Sure, we have our share of problems, but people were vanished in the Soviet Union, killed or imprisoned in some gulag. Vaclav Havel was banned from the theatre in Czechoslovakia and spent time in prison. By comparison, we live in a country where “Bush is Bad: The Musical” opens to rave reviews and packed houses and no one gets arrested or shot.

But Morris has to draw these comparisons and make the melodramatic statements he makes because that’s the only way to support his a priori conclusion. So why does theatre matter? “Because fighting for the arts is fighting for our humanity, and fighting for our humanity is fighting for our lives. I can’t think of a more trenchant reason to be producing theater in the 21st century.” Oh, I can think of a few other reasons. But I’ll get to that in due time.

Dark Night of the Soul

"In the Christian tradition, one who has developed a strong prayer life and consistent devotion to God suddenly finds traditional prayer extremely difficult and unrewarding for an extended period of time during this 'dark night.' The individual may feel as though God has suddenly abandoned them or that his or her prayer life has collapsed. In the most pronounced cases, belief is lost in the very existence of God and/or validity of religion, rendering the individual an atheist, even if they continue with the outward expressions of faith; compare crisis of faith."

-- "Dark Night of the Soul," Wikipedia Entry

"The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."

-- The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, by Douglas Adams

There is a stage of the writing process where I know what must be done, yet I cannot seem to push through and do it. Unfortunately, this phase comes at the beginning.

cartoon by Hugh MacLeod: www.gapingvoid.com

I've hit the wall with Lang. How to put this in words? It's as if I have assembled all the elements called for in a recipe -- let's say I'm making lasagne. I have the noodles, the tomato paste, the ricotta cheese, etc. and they refuse to put themselves together. Worse, all those ingredients are frozen in a huge blob of gelatin, hovering out of reach.

Put another way, it's like a science experiment where you take all the elements necessary for life, the proteins and amino acids, and you put them together in a petri dish ... and wait. And wait. LIVE, DAMN YOU, LIVE!!!

It's very much a "dark night of the soul." The muse is out to lunch, and I'm sitting at my desk surrounded by note cards and books and journals and miscellaneous research material. I need that spark of life, that l'essence de la vie that will animate the piled up components. I know these pieces go together -- I've seen the end product in my mind.

Fortunately, I'm not alone in my frustration. Writers far greater than I have stood at this moment and pushed through. So I return to my "text book," a compendium of words of wisdom I keep in a notebook for just such an occasion.

Here's Philip K. Dick, and a speech he delivered in 1978, "How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later":

However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Hmm. Nazi Germany was incredibly structured and ordered. Frightfully so. Lang was at the height of his powers as a filmmaker, and the events of 1933 certainly contributed much chaos to the filmmaker's life. Lang had the choice of becoming entrenched in the merciless order or throwing his entire life into chaos. My play centers on Lang's "High Noon" moment, the Faustian bargain, his dark night of the soul. I think I can work with this.

Wherein I Admit to Reading and Using Syd Field

I'm sort of "shepherding" a writer's lab at Theatre Unleashed. Not leading -- oh no. I may be an ADA NOMINATED WRITER (cue orchestra hit) but I'm still learning. I do recognize that I may have some knowledge that others could find useful, so I try to share what I know when I can. Today I'd like to show you the section of my bookshelf devoted to books on writing.

These are the basic resources I use when I write something like my ADA NOMINATED BEST ORIGINAL SCRIPT TRACING SONNY (cue orchestra hit) as well as some of the more philosophical works that inspire my forays into dramatic literature.

I'm always on the look out for helpful texts, so if you see a gaping void that needs to be filled in the list below, please comment me. Thank you.

BASIC FORMATTING

Professional Playscript Format Guidelines by Mollie Ann Meserve

This is the most useful book in my arsenal. "But I have FinalDraft," you say. "I don't need to know what the correct margin settings are for a playscript!" Au contraire ... I've seen enough "playscripts" presented in the screenplay format so as to completely disabuse me of the notion that automation is better than knowledge. There is a reason unique and important to theatre that dialogue runs from margin to margin and stage directions are indented -- the exact opposite of the formatting for screenplays. (Hint: In film, the rule is "show, don't tell." By comparison, there are not many helicopter tracking shots in theatre.)

DRAMATIC STUCTURE (i.e. "Plot")

Backwards and Forwards by David Ball

It's really a play analysis book, but insofar as it deals with dramatic structure on a practical level, Ball's Backwards and Forwards is a must read. (It's also fun to refer to as "Ball's Backwards and Forwards.") Ball's breakdown of Hamlet is inspired and inspiring.

I'm not saying I'm perfect. I still have my moments where I let self-indulgence stop a story dead. But this book has helped me eliminate some of those unnecessary story beats from my writing. I'm also getting pretty artful at working the better moments of self-indulgence into the "trigger" and "heap" cycle that Ball defines.

Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field

Here's the thing: Three act structure works. In chatting with other writers, I have found that I am not alone in going back over something I have written and discovering that "plot point number one" and "plot point number two" fall almost precisely where Field says they should. It's uncanny. Some folks bad mouth Field and the "paradigm," as he calls it. It's too limiting, it stifles creativity, blah blah blah. The paradigm is just a tool.

It's like an architect's square. If you use it to just draw rectangles, well that's pretty uninspired and boring. But if you're a Frank Gehry, you may use the tool to facilitate all sorts of whimsical ideas and flights of fancy.

This is a screenwriting book, but dramatic structure is dramatic structure. Someone may have extrapolated this out to theatre, but I like the way Field writes.

The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler

The Hero's Journey, the archetypes ... Vogler breaks down the work of Joseph Campbell in simple, practical terms. Like the three act paradigm Field provides, this is another worthwhile tool.

Also like the three act paradigm, it would seem to some that the hero's journey is another artificial approach that stifles creativity, blah blah blah. Again, it depends on what you bring to the table. Yes, if you apply Vogler's advice in a hackneyed way, you'll get a hackneyed script. Just as if you were to move a paintbrush in a hackneyed way, you'd be miles from VanGogh or Monet or Picasso. It's not the tool that makes the art suck. It's the artist.

PHILOSOPHY

Three Uses of the Knife by David Mamet

This book really spans the gap between structure and philosophy. A quick read, full of practical observations and advice. For short play writers, the eponymous third section is of great use.

The section on "problem plays" is worth the price of the book alone. Also, this is the book that contributed the term "Dead Kitten Speech" to my vocabulary.

The Empty Space by Peter Brook

A book I've read and re-read more times than I recall. It's my foundational document as a theatre artist. Creating theatre, writes Brook, "is not just a question of wooing an audience. It is an even harder matter of creating works that evoke in audiences an undeniable hunger and thirst." Brook was my jumping off point for studying Brecht, Beckett, Artaud and Grotwoski. If you work in the theatre and haven't asked yourself, "Why theatre?" lately, you need to crack this one open and dig in.

True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor by David Mamet

I hesitate to add this to the list, as it is primarily a text for actors. I feel that it defines the relationship between actor and writer better than just about anything else I've read, and although I have issues with some of what Mamet proposes (and opines on) he's dead right about the more practical matters.

Writes Mamet: "The play is a fantasy, it is not a history. The playwright is not withholding information, he is supplying all the information he knows, which is to say, all the information that is germaine." (Emphasis his.) The point is, for an actor to do his or her job the playwright damn well better do his or her job, too. You can't just throw words on a page and say, "Done!" and expect the actors to save the piece. That's not playwriting, that's douchebaggery.

Not-So-Quiet Desperation:

TU's production of Jacob Smith's

"Landscaping the Den of Saints"

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."

-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Bruce Hill, the eccentric drug addict at the heart of Jacob Smith's new play, strikes a confident façade. I've lived in Hollywood long enough, I've seen this sort of thing dozens of time. It's a poker-faced magnanimity, a false-front friendliness. You assume this guy (or gal) holds all the cards, and get a certain thrill of accomplishment despite the fact that all the backhanded flattery and promises of fame and fortune amount to a handful of nothing. Maybe it's because I'm working my way through Deadwood, but it occurs to me that the "wild west" has been prone to attract con-men and charlatans since the first one of them bastards caught the twinkle of gold in his eye. It always seems to be lucre for the bastard, and iron pyrite for the rest of us† -- and I seem to have digressed before I have even started.

That's the effect Jacob Smith's play has on me. The relevance of the production makes it almost painful to take in -- I've lived this story, too. Oh, not the exact chain of events. Rather, it is the promise of something wonderful that, in a moment of euphoric abandon, sweeps one away with thoughts of "How am I going to spend all the money?" This mirage of career fulfillment evaporates, and you wonder what you can salvage from the work you did. (Kudos to Smith for salvaging something, BTW.) His characters are real -- often real in their unreality. Hey -- that's Hollywood.

Fesa Salillas is convincing as Jennifer, the actress too young and dumb to not succeed in Hollywood. Josh Green, as Bobby Beverly, serves up the quintessence of a poseur so committed to his act that he has come out the other side to some measure of authenticity. Pamela Moore brings a wry subtlety to Kaitlyn, the laissez faire restaurant manager who undoubtedly had big plans of her own before settling into the comforting routine of steady work and a steady paycheck. Erin Frisbee brings an earnest honesty to Christine, a gold-digger pursuing her life in the shadow of an increasingly inconvenient marriage of convenience. Liesl Jackson as Susan remains touchingly tethered to her boyfriend while unapologetically pursuing her goals.

The ensemble is just terrific, but they serve as narrative counterpoints and grace notes to the main event, the heart of the play, the confrontation between Jim Martyka's Jason Jones and Sean Fitzgerald's Bruce Hill. This is where the play really seems to click, in the Mamet-esque cat and mouse between desperate men. And make no mistake: They're both damned desperate. Martyka exudes a nervous confidence. His Jason is comfortable in his own skin, yet self-conscious. It's like one of those optical illusions: is it a vase or is it two faces? The experience of living on the knife's edge between success and failure is revealed through the wonderful contradiction to which Martyka commits.
Sean Fitzgerald nails the physicality of Bruce Hill, both the age of the character and the effects of varying degrees of intoxication throughout the piece. What Martyka does in the macro -- the living contradiction of confidence and self-doubt -- Fitzgerald accomplishes in the micro. His is a less overt, more brooding vacillation. He seems resigned to his inevitable end, but as Thoreau said, that resignation is just desperation under a different label. These two characters are different sides of the same coin. One may see the frustrated young man that Bruce Hill once was, or the duplicitous fool that Jason Jones could very well become. It's a riveting exchange.

"There are two standout performances in Landscaping, Mr. Martyka as Jason and Mr. Fitzgerald as Bruce, the lawyer... Their exchange is powerful, and when it finally comes to it's climax, because of the two actors, it was riveting." - LATheatreReview.com

"Landscaping the Den of Saints is a rather earthy look on how getting into “show biz” can turn its ugly head. Witnessing this kind of theatre in a smaller playhouse proves to itself that big things do come in small packages!" - Accessibility Live
Landscaping the Den of Saints
Written by Jacob Smith
Directed by Jacob Smith and Erin Scott
Produced by Theatre Unleashed

SYNOPSIS:
Landscaping the Den of Saints explores the hysterically destructive relationship between a floundering Hollywood writer and an eccentric millionaire with a rampant desire to indulge in his many addictions. Real and audacious, this multi-leveled dark comedy digs into the artist’s desire to do (and deal with) anything to reach creative and financial success, capturing those increasingly uneasy moments that happen along the way.

DATES AND TIMES:
Oct. 24-Nov. 22
Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.
Sundays, 7 p.m.

*Meet and greet with artists after each show
**Tales of an Unsettled City…Exodus will Follow Friday night performances
***Special 24-hour theatre event The Artist’s Nightmare will follow the Oct. 24 performance next door at The Sherry

LOCATION:
The Avery Schreiber Theatre
11050 Magnolia Blvd.
North Hollywood, CA 91601

TICKET PRICES:
General Admission: $20
*$25 for both Landscaping the Den of Saints and Tales of an Unsettled City: Exodus on Friday nights
**Sunday night performances are “pay-what-you-can”

INFORMATION & RESERVATIONS:
For further information, please call: (818) 849-4039
Or check out our website at: www.theatreunleashed.com

† "seems to be" is an operable term. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I'm still a firm believer in "The Ant and the Grasshopper."

Burying the Infinite: TU's production of 4.48 Psychosis

[Disclosure: I am president of Theatre Unleashed, Inc., the company that produced this show.]

"Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite."

- Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

Theatre Unleashed's production of 4.48 Psychosis, directed by Phillip Kelly, is revelatory. It reminded me of reading Thomas Carlyle's masterpiece, Sartor Resartus for the first time: Humanity at its rawest ebb; pain and anger made tangible.

Kelly's staging is simply incredible. He has created a cavernous fun-house, a music box smashed to bits and pasted back together, a stream of consciousness that manages to engage rather than simply wash over the audience. He accomplishes on stage and in real time what cinema can only hope to accomplish through mechanical trickery.

Supple and eloquent performances from Fesa Silillas and Kimberly Niccole enthrall. This piece demands a sustained energy from the performers, an emotional and physical stamina that never lags throughout the play's tidy, seventy-five minute run. Silillas and Niccole are unflinching and fully engaged in their bifurcated role. Their separate energies create a fearful and wonderful synergy. (And there's your free Bible reference for the day.*)

Matt Ryan reflects the lone outside voice, and is in some small way a proxy for us in the audience. His helpless frustration at times mirrors our own. This ballast keeps the play from sinking into an irredeemable puddle of despair. He anchors the piece, giving a much needed counterpoint to the dwindling sprial that plays out before us. This provides us the only context for the events to which we bear witness.

Kelly Musson, through her dance, provides what may be described as a descant. In choral music, a descant is a counter melody, in a higher pitch than the main melody. Her work sets off and comments upon the performances of the actors, yet remains its own voice in the arrangement. Likewise, the cello work of Peter Walden provides another face to the fractured prism of our protagonist's descent.

The production design never overstates itself and integrates seamlessly with the intent of the director and work of the actors. Yelena Babinskaya's set design makes tremendous use of the Sherry's deep, shoebox-like playing space.

My only complaint is reserved for the playwright herself. Granted, this was her last work before committing suicide, but whereas Carlyle passes from the Everlasting No through the Center of Indifference and on to the Everlasting Yea, Sarah Kane takes us from bad to worse. Aside from the fleeting scenes with the psychiatrist, we have no context for what transpires. It is on the strength of the actresses alone that we have any sympathy whatsoever for the subject of the play ("protagonist" seems a woefully inadequate handle.) I can see how this play could become a drudgery, an exercise in scenery chewing and audience bludgeoning, if handled by less skilled hands.

Fortunately for all of us, this production has been handled by a director with keen aesthetic judgment and an ensemble that fully commits to every inch of the abyss.


[* Psalms 139:14 "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well." Artists have godlike creative powers when they are on their game, which this ensemble most assuredly is.]