Roosevelt Island by Peter Ksander, Designer
I put forward the southern-most tip of Roosevelt Island in the East River.  Past the decaying smallpox hospital the water surges and there is a sort of collection of tiered grass fields with low chain link fences. The forms have the look of some ancient agricultural scheme allowed to go fallow, or earthworks from some ghost army gone soft with age and erosion.  It’s an intense and desolate place — yet surrounded by the city and in plain open sight.  What’s odd is that I don’t usually like theater that takes place outside of architecture.  Plays are a human construct for me and I feel like the container that holds and surrounds a performance needs to have a level of architectural artifice/edifice to frame that construction.  Being out under the weather leaves one exposed.

13. The Scary

Mac Wellman has said that theater is so rarely scary anymore, that it is a terrible challenge now to write a scary play, a play that actually induces fear. Is this because of the rise of the cinematic imagination? What was scary about Hitchcock was what was just off screen. But in theater, what is just off stage is melodrama, which is not usually fearful. The Dreadful vs. the Fearful. And if Aristotle claimed that pity and fear are of primary importance (not that we have to believe Aristotle all the time or half of it) but if we are to agree with him about pity and fear, and fear is gone, then are we writing plays that only have pity—what are plays about now ? How to write a play that induces fear?

Why is it that Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is the longest running play? Because it induces fear? Do we like to be scared? Why do we like to be scared, and do we prefer now being scared at the movies because it is darker or because the blood looks so real? Or has being scared become so much its own genre—crime shows, detective novel, the procedural, the mystery, the thriller—that is there no place for it on the stage anymore partly because the stage is now suspicious of that literary genre as an art form?

14. The Lyric I and the American Musical

Why is the American musical not a Dionysian event? Is it because the “I”, the singing “I” in rock music creates the emotional event, the emotional logic? That is to say the singer is singing the song in rock music and appears to be singing their own life, their own words and passions, and the audience is swept into a frenzy by that complete identification between singer and song. Whereas the mimetic function in the American musical inherently prohibits a Dionysian event? We know someone is pretending to be a character who feels a certain way and so sings about it rather than being that character and having written the song themselves. And yet, and yet…the Dionysian event should go beyond identity into the mythic, into the notion that we all wrote the song or it doesn’t matter who wrote the song… What does the mimetic function do to the capacity for experience and event?

15. The place of rhyme in theater and is it banished forever?

The rise of prose in the theater and the banishment of rhyme…the theater is by and large now in the language of prose, deeply steeped in the language of prose. It would be folly to write an all-metered play now, or would it? Oh—the memory of rhyme and its populist primordial power…Shakespeare’s rhymes, his rhymes! Did the rise of the novel coincide with rhyme’s banishment from the stage? The leap of Ibsen from Peer Gynt to Hedda–and can we ever go back to Gynt, or only in musical theater? We like rhymes in our music, why not in our plays? Why has rhyme become an embarrassment? Homer used it to help remember his poetry. And so rhyme used to help actors remember their poetry, their parts. Do actors have better memories now? And what of audiences? We remember Shakespeare’s great couplets because they are rhymed. It is hard now to leave a play and remember great lines because they are all in prose. Hip-hop understands rhyme and memory and play. But it is an embarrassment now to rhyme in university poetry. But the meter of poetry used to be thought to have a curative effect—use certain meters to calm the breast and certain other meters to inflame them. Have we lost some of the medicinal power of language in the theater when we lost meter?

16. Gobos, Crickets, and False Exits–three hobgoblins of false mimesis

Why do gobos, the sound of crickets on stage, and false exits on stage make me sad? I think because they are borrowed from the repetitive memory of other mimetic plays. If the world might well be an illusion, and theater is definitely an illusion, then how sad or how strange are the sound of crickets on stage? (If they are representing crickets or the night.) A false exit means the body marks the refusal to relinquish repressed information. I say a thing, I turn, I leave to exit, and then I remember the real thing I want to say. The false exit is the received staging notation for denoting ambivalence. And the return to the room to speak the line underscores the line spoken before the exit, and as such, has an obligation to be profound. If one’s goal is to reveal what we think of as the world to be an illusion, then false exits, crickets and gobos won’t serve.

17. Being in a pure state vs. playing an action

Sometimes theater-makers in this country scoff at an actor who can be “in a state” and cannot or does not “perform an action.” I say bravo to the actor who can be stated, in a pure state of emotion, with no need of an action to justify the state. I find this interesting to watch on stage, a kind of ecstasy, a state of being, unqualified, unexplained. Anne Bogart thinks of it in terms of Ariane Mnouchkine and “l’etat”. That a player must begin in a state at the beginning and then the state transforms, but there is always a state on stage.

So this goes back to the question of subtext, for if one is playing subtext, in a classical sense, one is saying one thing and feeling another thing, so one is playing a sense of inner contradiction, or tension, or even of subterfuge. This makes one pure state impossible. Why do we want to watch people playing a sense of inner tension for two hours on stage, there is already enough tension in every day life. I prefer to watch people in rhapsodic states of pure emotion, which is possible only when the subtext comes to the surface.

Is it possible that the rise of the 19th century director corresponded with the rise of subtext because it gave the director a job, to help the actor find the hidden secret in the text, rather than have the actor merge with the text?

18. Should characters have first names and last names or only initials? And how do props departments conspire to create mimesis?

In some countries they do not have last names and they come to this country and have to pretend that their first name contains a last name too, as in the case of Tibet. The state of having a first name and last name is a cultural practice closely aligned to patriarchy, land rights, and the individuation of the self, one might say the illusion of the self. So before giving one’s character a first name and a last name one must consider whether the world one is creating on stage is a world of first and last names. I do not judge anyone for creating a character with a first and last name, sometimes the character emerges whole and with first and last name in tact. Are you writing a world of selves or a communal world? One should not cede automatically to the imposition to name one’s character with two or three names. The act of naming a character is sacred, and mysterious. One should not have to know the last name of a character for example because the props department wants to know the name of the character, as has happened to me many times when prop departments want to make hospital badges for the characters of Lane and Charles in The Clean House and I say you can’t because they don’t have last names. And they say, can’t you make up a last name for them? And I say no because they don’t have last names. Maybe initials are best.

19. And what of gut-roiling aesthetic hatred?

When I go to see a play I really hate, or end up hating, what is the nature of aesthetic hatred and is it at all useful? Is it possible that the people who truly hate my work the most, experience the most bile rising in their throats, are the most disgusted at others’ pleasure taken in the piece—are these people in fact my greatest treasures? On the one hand, how is it possible to get angry at an object—it is an animate object, but it is an object all the same, an object of illusion, and it was not created for your displeasure but instead for your pleasure. If it does not give pleasure, is that not a neutral fact rather than a cause for bilious, gut-wrenching hatred, the kind of hatred that makes you roll this way and that in your seat and come home and be unsatisfied until one has purged one’s hatred through language, that is senseless gossip, with a friend who might agree? And if the friend does not similarly roil with hatred, one has no relief from this demon? Is this useful? Does this advance the art form? Does this mean there are practicioners for whom the object, which is itself an illusion, does not seem to be an illusion at all but is a very thing-like thing which appears to be destroying them, does this enhance the there-ness, the actuality of the object, that it produces these passions? I went to the Dalai Lama this weekend and he inveighed against senseless gossip and I thought I am doomed in my profession, I am doomed, how will I ever live up to this advice. But what is the difference between senseless gossip and true dialogue about an object, an object that meant to please but gives no pleasure? Are we to believe with William Hazlitt that there is a pleasure in hating, otherwise why would we go to the theater, knowing that we will hate with as much frequency as we will love? And yet if we rise to that level of aesthetic hope and identification, and are disappointed, does that not fan the gut-roiling passion even higher? I would like to know what to do about this.

20. Chimpanzees and audiences

There was an experiment with chimpanzees and humans recently. Humans were asked to make absolutely no facial expressions as they watched the chimpanzees. The chimpanzees, without a facial response in their audience, would go crazy. It is proof that when the audience offers no affective response, it is well within the actors right and their DNA to go ape-shit. The audience actually creates the aesthetic object through a process of biofeedback. When the loop is disrupted, there is no art being made. This is why there needs to be a revolution in the concept of subscriber audiences.

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7. Hungry Ghosts, Gardens, and Doing Plays in New York

The ideal audience is either wise or innocent; the know-it-alls are not the ideal audience. This makes New York a tricky place for a new play. Another thing that makes New York tricky is the hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts in Buddhist thought can never fill themselves up. It is not: we will put up the play for 4 weeks and see who comes. It is: what of the reviews? Will it extend? Will it move? Will it run forever? Feed me! Says the hungry ghost. And if a play were to run forever, could it properly be called theater anymore? Instead it would be an ossified strange thing, dangling half-way between live theater, a parade, and an amusement park ride. Think of the longest running plays…what happens to them…what do they become….restaurants and plays should not be open for longer than the half-life of a chef, because they are about living consumable items.

I was talking to a group of theater donors in a city other than New York and they spoke at length about their gardens. Where the bamboo grew. Where not to plant bamboo, and where to plant it. This particular theater audience seemed to come to the theater to have fun. I thought: oh my, they get what they need from their gardens at home in their gardens. And they get other pleasures from the theater. In New York because we do not most of us have gardens, we come to the theater for what we might properly get from our gardens. And because you cannot get exactly from theater what you can get from a garden, we come to the theater anxious, vengeful, cranky, and with blood on our teeth. In a perfect world the virtues of theater are similar to those of cultivating a garden—something living, something patient, something always growing. Perhaps it is in those cities where people learn these virtues that they come to a theater hoping to nurture the lifespan of a theatrical company, rather than wanting to devour or spit out one show at a time.

Again, I am no innocent, nor do I exempt myself. I speak only of virtues that I myself might imitate. Where do I live? New York. Why? Because I love it here. Why? Because I love the people here. Do I have a garden? No. Would I be good at gardening if I had a garden? I don’t know.

8. Subtext Is to the Left of the Work Not Underneath the Work

If you are acting in play of mine, and I say this full of love for you, please, if you will, don’t think one thing and then say another thing. Think the thing you are saying. Do not think of the language of the play as a cover or deception for your actual true hidden feelings which you’ve invented yourself as a backstory. Don’t create a bridge between you and the impulse for the language—erase the boundary between the two. Think of subtext as to the left of the language and not underneath it. There is no deception or ulterior motive or “cover” about the language. There are, instead, vast gulfs of silence and the unsayable to the left or to the right or even above the language. The unsayable transcendent in an ideal world hovers above the language. The word hover over and above the word cover.

9. On Theater as an Inaccessible Art Form

I was speaking to a young playwright the other day, he was seventeen, and he asked me how I felt about writing in such an inaccessible art form, in an art form that no longer meant much to most people. I thought this was true, and also untrue, and sad. Because there is no art form that is more accessible than theater at its roots. Nothing is required but people and space. Theater is the child’s first art form, when the child first imitates. A child clearly knows that all that is required for a play is some people to watch, and some people to do, and a place in which to do it. Perhaps we now live in a world in which real people and real space is at an odd premium. It is objects that seem accessible, because they are consumable.

I felt the non-objectness of theater keenly when trying to “move” a play of mine that had been in two different cities and now was in a third city. Because you cannot actually “move” the invisible. You cannot load the invisible onto a truck. You cannot goad it. You cannot control or demand the invisible. This is why we are superstitious in the theater. This non-materiality of a material medium—something you cannot hold, cannot buy, cannot move…it is vexing, but I would argue, it is deeply accessible, precisely because its conditions are so simple and direct. Some might argue: how is it that you can say the invisible world is more accessible than the visible world? And if I can see a play, how then, is it invisible? I do not know, I do not know…I cannot say…

Film is bigger than us—it flickers, like Plato’s cave, always out of reach. Do we like a thing that seems out of reach but we can actually buy?  Celebrities seem out of reach but it seems almost as if we can buy them. As opposed to the thing—a stage—with real actors–that is almost within reach—one can almost touch it, can almost touch them–but we can never never buy it, never buy them? In fact theater is the most radically accessible art form we have, and if we could forget about the rent on 42nd street and forget about ticket prices and forget about subscriber audiences…could we? Could we forget? Could we? Could we forget and could we go down into the basement with a flashlight and a bucket of water and a pulley made of string and could we slip into the garage with a broken old hat and our grandmother’s wedding dress and could we forget and could we…

10. Don’t Send Your Characters to Reform School

American dramaturgy is not actually based on Aristotle’s Poetics, it is based subliminally on Pilgrim’s Progress…that is to say: what has your character learned, how has she changed, what is her journey? Which is all a subset of a morality play. But I love morality plays because they are undisguised. It is instead realism in the grips of a morality play that is a strange genre to me—a morality play disguised as realism that I find to be untrue.

And as we know, the pilgrims who founded our country hated the theater, because they hated sex and the irrational. (Have you ever wondered why Boston is not a theater town?)

Try applying the generic question: “how complete is his or her journey?” to Beckett, to Shakespeare, and watch the question fall way short of the mark of what is illuminating about the play. It is not enough to know only one question and apply it to all plays.

And so I say: don’t make your play into a reform school to send your characters to.

11. Is There an Ethics of Comedy? In the Way That There Is an Ethics of Tragedy?

I had a dream last night in which I was giving a radio address on the ethics of comedy. What did I say? I cannot remember.

12. William Hazlitt and the Function of Theater Criticism in an Age of Digital Reproduction

William Hazlitt used to write theater criticism that made you feel as though you were actually there, to experience Bernhardt or whoever it was on stage, who would only be on stage for that moment only. Now theater criticism has (in general) become more of a thumbs up/thumbs down affair. But in the age of mechanical reproduction, when theater is one of the few unreproducable mediums, it becomes even more important for critics to be able to write that old kind of criticism, the kind of criticism that says, I WAS THERE, I was a thinking feeling I full of my perceptions in that moment and that moment alone. Because a camera really cannot capture theater’s essence but sometimes a pen can if the pen wants to. And then audiences could go to the theater and think, I am having the same experience as that highly sensitive critic or I am not—but the short and long of it is not merely that they were banished from the theater or encouraged to come. Instead there is a dialogue of souls about the invisible, and the critic becomes a bridge between one century and the next—so that when the next century wants to know—what was it actually like to see Vanessa Redgrave on stage live, someone can tell them, because a camera isn’t able to capture the atmospheric pipeline that runs between the stage and the audience.

[To be continued. Up next: The Scary, Musicals, Gobos, and Audiences.]

2. On the Loss of Sword Fights

We lost sword fights somewhere in the 20th century and it has meant a new accepted standard of dramaturgy: drama is conflict, conflict is drama. Because our primal bloodlust requires a good fight on stage. But it is one thing to fight with our bodies and swords (it requires skill and virtuosity) and another to merely bicker with words. The gun-fight on stage will not do, it will not do (because it has no virtuosity and because we all know guns are fake on stage so there is no real fear with a gun on stage) but swords have a reality on stage even if they are fake. Fake swords make a better sound than fake guns for one thing—they come from the object itself rather than being dissociated from the object with a sound cue and no real bullet. And so Shakespearean sword fights became in the 20th century Hedda having to bicker with her husband and then shooting herself off stage. (But that brings up the question of suicide with a gun or with poison or with a knife which is another question entirely—the protagonist’s monologue before the death can be better heard on stage with poison than off-stage with a gun-shot, which means the primacy of language itself fades with death by gun.) But going back to the duel…fake swords are mano a mano whereas fake guns are merely: did you remember to bring your gun or didn’t you? If you remembered your gun, you win the battle—if you forgot your gun, you die. Of course there is the matter of the quickness of the draw, but that is better captured on film than on the stage.

Which brings me to: perhaps people have gone to the movies instead of the theaters at this point because their bloodlust is more accurately satisfied at the movies because there gun fights really do inspire fear and anxiety—as do car chases. Because gun fights and car chases are really no good on stage. Which leads us to think that technology itself is really no good on stage. (Should actors be trained in karate or some other fighting art? Should they be trained in a physical fighting art rather than in the art of the verbal duel—i.e. I have an obstacle?)

3. On the Loss of the Curtain

Speaking of technology on stage. We have lost the curtain going up and down and so we have scene changes marked by lights and sound. Scene change: lights sound! Go. Rehearse, rehearse, then bring in the technicians and forget about the acting for a week and then bring back the actors. What has this done to our process? Is the contemporary theatrical transition, with all of our seamless technology, in fact a hypnotic state? A non-Brechtian state? We are so used to our scenic transitions that we forget that what we are watching is actually a failed attempt at the cinematic on stage. We are so used to “tech week” that we forgot to inquire about what it does to a process to spend a week on technology before opening a play before a live audience.

What if we brought back the heavy curtains? Or some other form or device? Why not lights and no sound? Or sound and no lights? Or a monkey on a pole flipping a flip book with the titles of each scene? Why always the same? Well, it is always the same because the designers are paid only for a week in the process. They are only there for the week so the event cannot be sculpted in an individual way by the company. What is the answer? Fire the dramaturgs and pay the designers more? Use more paper and more found objects and pay the designers more? Have one’s own company and rehearse longer and do fewer plays a year? Plays with no tech? Plays outdoors? Plays with lighted candles? Or moving forward with more complex technology that is more integrated into the artistic process from the first day of rehearsal?

4. On Titles with Participles

Many titles of plays, movies and novels these days are participles and gerunds. For example: Leaving Las Vegas, Remembering Ernest Hemingway. It would be crass for me merely to say that I hate these participle titles, even though it would be true. It is perhaps more interesting to think about why we are in a land of the perpetual present, with no action having happened, or about to happen, it is happening, unfolding, all the time, with no subject! What of these alternative titles: “I Left Las Vegas” or “I Remember Ernest Hemingway” or quite simply “Las Vegas”. I Remember Mama would now be called “Remembering Mama”. Was Beckett the first with Waiting for Godot? But Beckett was specifically looking at the act of the participle, it was not incidental, or in vogue, plus in French it is En Attendant Godot and does not the En make all the difference? More nouns and fewer participles! More event and more nouns, more nouns, and less becoming out of time.

5. The First Day of Rehearsal and Bewitched

The first day of rehearsal at most theaters in this country puts me in mind of the television show Bewitched at an advertising presentation by Darren, the ad man. The money is in the room, respectfully, the Board, and the designers and directors must present the play to the room. On the first day of rehearsal I often find myself thinking: what is being sold to me? Oh, yes, the play is being sold. But the play already has been sold! It is already going up! Why then are we selling our process too? Process is dark, it is smudgy and murky, do not shine too much light upon it the first day.

How can we tell the Board what we plan to do in each scene with the design before the actors have arrived? Why do not the actors influence the design and the design influence the actors? Why is half the organic process already accomplished before the actors enter the room? If we think the actors are artists then they should affect the art instead of being moving parts being put to use in service of the directorial vision that has already been conceived.

More witchery please and less ad agency. Why have the great minds of our generation gone into advertising rather than into the theater? Because they get paid more to make ads on TV than to make ads in a rehearsal room. No need to sell the play on the first day. Have someone else sell the play later.

6. The Language of Clear Steps

When did the language of clear steps become an aesthetic vocabulary for the minstrels, bohemians, jugglers, puppet-masters, flying machinists, divas, clowns, burlesque dancers, and theater artists who are meant to channel the inexplicable? In other words “I just want to make sure that the steps the character is taking on his or her journey are absolutely clear.” When did “clear steps” make for a good story? Here is Hamlet taking clear steps. “I’m going to kill him. Now I am about to kill him. Now I have killed him.” Characters take a step and then a back-step and then a leap and then a strange bedeviled jump and then they fall over. Clear steps? They are for a manual on how to put together furniture from another country.

What I mean to say is: whatever happened to the Dionysian. (See Nietzsche on The Birth of Tragedy.) Our theater is now almost entirely made up of Apollos. Whatever happened to the irrational—to the notion that brilliant practicioners of an art form have pipelines to the irrational, are accused of being madmen by Plato, are almost banished from the city, because they are jealous of the irrational, hold it close to their breast—they do not need to justify every intuition to artistic accountants. They do not need their pencils sharpened. If you are one of those people who played school in the summertime (raise your hands, I was one of them) perhaps it would be good to learn a theatrical skill like sword-fighting before coming into the theater and inflicting the role of schoolmarm onto what used to be the life of the passionate vagabond.

Words like “liminal” and words like “unpack” should go in essays about theater and get banished from rehearsal rooms…where are the jugglers? The fire-eaters? Do we all need a masters degree to put up a play? Whatever happened to the garage, the basement? Someone, send in the clowns. And free us from pedigree. Actors used to be akin to prostitutes in the public mind. Now we are akin to professors. I blame this on the Germans. With the rise of the director and the dramaturg, alongside the rise of Heidegger and the deconstructionists. And let us not forget Heidegger’s allegiances during the war…

I do not exempt myself. I went to a university, more than one, I played school in the summertime, and I cannot juggle, hula hoop with flames, belly-dance or even sing very well. But were I to choose a course of study for future playwrights, it would include juggling and it would not include literary theory. Why do young people not go to the theater? Young people do not enjoy seeing things that read like grant proposals…they would rather go to a rock concert…really, do you blame them?

[To be continued.]

The plays (right-click to download):

• Deathbox by Molly Rice
• punkplay by Gregory Moss
• The Kindermann Depiction by Steve Moore and Carlos Treviño

-Sally & Jordan

1. On Titles — Comedy and Tragedy
Tragedy is most often named for the tragic person; whereas the comedy appears to be named with nouns or phrases from the world at large. For example: Romeo and Juliet. As opposed to: As you Like it. Or take: Titus Andronicus  versus A Midsummer’s Night Dream. (In my own work Eurydice for a tragedy and The Clean House for something more absurd.). Nouns signify the world and the structure of the world over and above the individual. Is this because tragedies are about the loss of one individual soul? The tragic perspective privileges one person over the continuity of the system, the structure, the life force, whereas comedies (which often end in marriages) are named with phrases, linguistic structures, which signify the description of a life structure, going on, on and on, after the play.