Blogs

From the January Ceyx Series

See more performances from January's Ceyx Series here.

What Jenn looks like when I begin speaking. :)

From Monday's Ceyx Series. Photo by Rafael Franco

Following up on Jenn's blog about bread making and theatre, I thought I'd post the quote we were talking about from Caridad. (full text is here, subscription required)

Much has been written about the writer’s relationship to landscape (tangible, physical, specific, geographic) as well as the internal terrain of emotions, memories, erasures, sensations, etc. Both (and more) come into play when you are writing a text for performance. For example, there are some plays I have written directly inspired by a place or city or series of cities where I have been. Other plays have been created out of scraps of places encountered: an invented landscape. Whether drawing directly from a site or making a site out of others the places where your play lives (inside the world of the play) are always, in the end, invented/made up. It cannot help but be so because in the act of making a play you are  already involved in a process of transformation.

Some plays are governed more by landscape than others. For instance, in Landscape and Theatre, Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri speak eloquently about the way many of the “language playwrights” (Mac  Wellman, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ruth Margraff, Matthew Maguire, Len Jenkin, Erik Ehn) are truly “landscape playwrights.” Their use of language is topographical, expansive, physical, and demands embodiment in a different manner than say, the work of more “interior” playwrights like Christopher Shinn, Rebecca Gilman, Neil LaBute, and so forth. It is true that plays are always, ultimately, in the here of place. Whether we call it Illyria, Athens, or Chicago, the here is always the theatre space itself. Some writers use the theatre as their only space: a space without necessary referents. But even some of the  wiliest of self-referents will occasionally refer to another Here in the here, so that the theatre space is always doubled or tripled in perspective.

Maria Irene Fornes, Federico García Lorca, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, and other poets of the theatre have understood how to make the landscapes of their plays, which merge direct referents with personal identifications and disidentifications, resonate within them and at their best extend outside them. So, for instance, New Orleans will always contain A Streetcar Named Desire and the California desert will always contain the warrior brothers in True West.

What is the map we see inside the blank page? What are the maps we make when we write? What is their essential geography? And what new points do we make on the larger, global map when we write a play?

Thoughts?

photo courtesy of <a data-cke-saved-href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/artistica2004/" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/artistica2004/" "="" target="_blank">francesco sgroi

As I was cleaning up from baking my bread tonight, my thought process was like one of those cartoons where the fairies jump from one stone in the water to another. It started with bricks.

I read in my bread book, Bread Alone (a fantastic Christmas present from my man), that you can use red house bricks to create your bread oven. SO I went out in the yard, got some, washed em, seasoned em by baking em a few times, and cooked on em. It’s cool.

As I was cleaning up from baking my bread tonight, I smelled the bread baking, empowered by the smell of a brick hearth. And I thought “When we get our own house, I would love a brick kitchen.” I imagined myself baking in it, covered in flour, smelling like bread. Then I realized that the kitchen in my mind was my great-grandmother’s actual kitchen, in the house that I have always wanted to live in.

Just then Tony walked in, because he wanted to read to me from an article that he was reading.

As I was cleaning up from baking my bread tonight, I smelled the bread baking, empowered by the smell of a brick hearth, and Tony read to me thoughts from Caridad Svich about Landscape Playwrights vs. Inside Playwrights, and Kushner saying about Maria Irene Fornes, “Every time I listen to Fornes, or read or see one of her plays, I feel this: she breathes, has always breathed, a finer, purer, sharper air.”

As I was cleaning up from baking my bread tonight, I was covered with flour and smelling my great-grandmother’s kitchen, and listening to my life/art partner talk about theatre, and the way it moves through space and time the way that atoms and stars move through space and time. It felt like the way artists in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s would sit in coffee shops smoking and talking about art, politics, the taste of a good wine. Only cigarettes were replaced with bread. A good trade.

We talked a little more, and the talk of theatre and playwriting intermingled with talk of Chaos Theory and how if gravity had been 1 fraction of an iota less or more, there would be no universe. The ridged structure of the cosmos allows for infinite possibilities. Like bread. There is a rigid structure. There is even an equation for what temperature to make the water that mixes with the yeast. But every loaf is unique, every loaf is alive. Every loaf stands on the brink of greatness or disaster. And there are so many ways to influence the outcome.

There is a really cool moment that happens to me sometimes when I direct a play. It is a moment of, “Wow. This is going to be something special!” It doesn’t always happen with a show, and shows can be great without getting that feeling, but when it happens it is a moment of magic. It happens to me also when I am kneading the dough for my bread. I can feel in the dough when it is going to be something special. The bread can be good without feeling that moment, but it means a more methodical, patient, moment-to-moment process to make sure you keep that bread on the side of greatness and not disaster.

As I was cleaning up from baking my bread tonight, I realized that like the yeast that ignites differently the moment it hits the cold-hot-tepid-spring-tap water, a story can be sparked from a picture, a smell, a town, a glance. Like the rigid idea we have of what a play is, so many of us think only of Wonder Bread when we think of a sandwich- mass-produced, always the same taste, stuck in the era of Donna Reed and Leave it to Beaver... But there are thousands of kinds of bread, with different flourishes, additions, flavors, histories. And even so, at the end of the day, all you really need is flour, water, yeast, and the ability to listen and be patient.

Barb Anderson in Bounty of Lace.

I was rereading Provoking Theatre: Kama Ginkas Directs, and I happened to read a section of it that talks of Mamet, just around the time I was watching Race. Ginkas points his finger on a lot of what I don't like about Mamet's work. I wanted to share it and get your thoughts. (This section of the book is in the form of interview between John Freedman and Ginkas)

(John Freedman) I would like to quote from True and False, David Mamet's book on acting. It is a clear, straightforward polemic with Stanislavsky that is as easy to take issue with as it is to agree with it. In one place he writes, "The only reason to rehearse is to learn to perform the play. It is not to 'explore the meaning of the play' -- the play, for the actor, has no meaning beyond its performance." He follows that up by stating that rehearsal "is not to 'investigate the life of the character.' There is no character. There are just lines on the page."

This, it seems to me, is diametrically opposed to Russian theatre in general, and to your theatre in specific.

(Kama Ginkas) Well, Mamet may be an actor, too, but it is obvious a playwright wrote those sentences. That is a sore spot of an author who wrote words that are never spoken as he wrote them. Not because the actors are falsifying him, but because he wrote a specific intonation into his play. A bad writer will do this. You can always hear in their characters the specific intonation the author is trying to give them. But the surest way to a lousy production is to perform in the intonation the author wants. That is guaranteed failure.

Mamet's utterance reveals the painful complexities of an author who is never satisfied with the intonations his text is gives. When he says "play the text," he means, "I have given you the intonation, now just reproduce it."

When he says there is no character, that is a comment on the level of his plays. This is, of course, a case of arrogance on my part because I do not know all of his plays and I am taking it upon myself to pass judgment. But the works of his that I do know are "well-made plays." Neatly built texts in which there are no characters, no living people. There are lines and punchlines that must be spoken as written and then you wait for the audience to laugh or fall silent. He wants the spectator to heed the text.

That, in his opinion, is the key strength of his plays. In my opinion, the key strength of a play, his included, lies in the extent to which the author taps into a living person. Mamet is a talented writer. As such, from time to time, he scratches the surface of humans, of lifelike situations, captures the living language in which people speak. When he does, his characters are, to a proper extent, alive. They are not as alive as Shakespeare's characters, or Chekhov's. But they are alive enough for the American public, which does not like stylizations, to see in them a reflection of themselves. They are written for a public that wishes to see its own reflection. (76-77)

Thoughts?

I have been so nervous all week. I didn’t realize it at the time- I was also sick, so I think that acted as a scapegoat for my feelings- but before yesterday, I don’t know if I had made eye contact with Tony Sr. in the last 7 days! Yesterday was our first get-together with our new Artists-in-Residence, following our first session of The Compass Lab. PLUS, Tony decided that for the first session of the lab we should present a monologue from “Cymbeline” just to show where each of us is at. It was a morning that could have Rocked or Fizzled in my mind, and I was nervous.

It Rocked. Not in that “OhmyGodthatwasalifechangingpivotalmoment” kind-of way, but in a “Icanreallyseethebeginningsofanamazingyearandfuture” kind-of way.

The Lab was a great beginning. Everyone was on the same page, it felt like, in terms of being nervous but excited. The... very COLD...air was filled with openness and anticipation of what was going to happen. There were Company Members, Artists-in-Residence, and Guest Artists. There were people who had a lot of experience with Shakespeare, and people who have never done a Shakespearean monologue before but were ready to go balls out to show where they were at. I learned so much.

Then we had lunch at our house for Halcyon Company and A-I-R’s. I got to serve my homemade bread, which is my new passion, and everyone shared food and thoughts and laughed at how many cupcakes Charlotte and Tony Jr. ate... and then we re-introduced ourselves since there were new people there, and I asked everyone to talk about where they want to go, what they love about theatre in the world, and why Halcyon is the place they felt drawn to to do it. I was nervous that the last part of the question was going to sound self-serving, but that wasn’t my intention. Not everyone was at the same interview session, and my hope was that the people who hadn’t met before today would get to know about each other what we had learned at their interviews. It was invigorating and exciting and made me feel even more humble and passionate about the way I hope Halcyon can change the world.

You may not see it for a bit- a lot of it will be internal while we get to know each other and learn and grow- but this is going to be an amazing year for Halcyon, and for me personally. I hope you will read about it through the Company Member and Artist-in-Residence blogs, and through coming to Ceyx Series events. And when we are ready... I think these artists, who I am so excited to be getting to know, are gonna knock your socks off!

From The Other Shore.

Photo by Tom McGrath