Me & Orson Welles

The contemporary meaning of auteur is "someone who executive produces and associate produces." Back when he was a snob for the left, Dennis Miller ranted accurately that something was wrong with a culture in which the words "Tori Spelling" and "zeitgeist" could be found in the same sentence. Orson Welles suffered the full force of everything we hate about Hollywood: the favoritism, the nepotism, the studio politics and test audiences. His name is tossed around today as journalistic shorthand for people like Sam Mendes, the young writer-director who emerged from Broadway fame and followed up with a successful film debut, American Beauty. But Welles can also be code for a charismatic flash in the pan talent that spends itself too quickly and either dies young or lives to bloat as a has-been.

I always found Welles's excesses to be splendidly Falstaffian. I also think Walter Kerr made a good point when he said that the preponderance of Welles's misfortune came from his own inability to take himself out of the picture: his acting, carried over time, began to undermine the genius of his direction and design. I didn't want to believe that, but after listening to Welles's Hamlet and flipping through the reel in my head, I find that I probably would take The Trial over his Othello. But why hold one masterpiece hostage against the other? Especially when the real-life character of Orson Welles makes for such splendid storytelling on its own?

Me & Orson Welles follows a 17-year old actor as he ambitiously insinuates himself into the Mercury Theatre's inaugural production, Julius Caesar. True or not, the story mirrors an earlier moment in Welles's own career: when he was 17, he lied about his age to get into an acting company in Dublin. From thence, Broadway, the Federal Theatre Project, and beyond. I'm inclined to believe the story since everyone else in this movie's Mercury cast -- from Eddie Marsan as John Houseman, to James Tupper as Joseph Cotton, to Ben Chaplin as George Coulouris, to Leo Bill as Norman Lloyd -- has been eerily well-cast. One senses that a swap to black and white film stock would seal the illusion completely.

And what of that master illusionist, the narcissistic polymath Welles? Well, see for yourself:

What always struck me about Welles, the icon, was the dynamism of his genius. He had, as John Frankenheimer once said, a "total intellect" for every component of the art form. What always struck me about Welles, the man, was the dynamism of his character, something his later film appearances (especially the ones "as himself") don't quite show, but this candid interview might:

Or this moment of on-camera vulnerability from 1965:

Emotions criss-cross his brow with a dexterity reminiscent of Brando -- that other gluttonous icon of Broadway and Hollywood golden ages. As played by the British actor Christian McKay, we get more of the haggard, declamatory Welles of 1948 than the fresh-faced 22-year old who had already jolted Broadway twice before his 1937 Caesar. First, with an all-black production of Macbeth, set in Haiti, and then again with his scandalous production of the Marxist opera The Cradle Will Rock. An anti-fascist, pro-Brutus version of the Roman tragedy almost sounds like a come-down, though it set the standard for every ambitious recontextualization of Shakespeare since. So whenever you see Hedda Gabbler on Mars or ... I don't know ... Timon of Akron ... you have Welles to thank.

Two stories about that Caesar production that didn't make it into the film: He wanted the flash of a real knife blade on stage and so he used one and almost killed the actor playing Caeser. The film also glides over one major reversal in the story. The reinstatement of the Cinna the Poet scene converted the whole enterprise from a failure to a masterpiece in one stroke. An earlier preview concluded to no applause, causing Welles to spit in a fellow actor's face -- another famous instance of diva rage. But what a scene and what a change is here o'erlook'd! Early in Me and Orson Welles, Sonja Jones warns young Richard that acting with Welles is a gift but also the privilege of getting sprayed with his spit. So why not show this meltdown to sweeten the breakthrough success that followed? The film never shies from showing the duplicitous and childish side of Welles, so I'm more baffled than disappointed.

After Caesar, Welles stunned the nation with his War of the Worlds broadcast and was rewarded for this creative trauma with the most generous film contract ever offered a novice director. He used his authority as the ultimate Hyphenate writer-producer-director-actor to create Citizen Kane. So, in five lightning-quick years, Welles made history in theatre, radio, and film. Hopefully a future biopic will try to draw a tragic arc over that period and beyond to give us the man in the full rush and dynamism of his life. The tragedy of his story is that each of those revolutionary masterpieces -- Cradle, Caesar, War, Kane -- may live to be more famous for the drama surrounding them than the merits of the particular art work.

Cradle is rarely produced, but the story of its production bears re-telling. Battered by HUAAC on one side and union politics on the other, Welles and his cast decided to defy both by marching to another theatre and performing the show from the audience. It is the meta-drama of Welles's bravery and innovation that resonates, more than Blitzstein's music. Similarly, to listen to the War of the Worlds broadcast is to wonder how any so many people could have been fooled into believing it was real, given all the warnings before during and after the broadcast that it was fiction. We cite that show as an incident more than an entertainment, an example of verisimilitude run amok (that puts reality tv to shame). It is Welles the illusionist at play in War. Just as it is Welles the illusionist at war with Hearst in Kane.

He did things with the earth, wind, fire, and water of the art. Half the techniques now credited as Wellesian innovations were byproducts of his novice curiosity and Gregg Toland's exploratory spirit. Here's one last clip about what it means to work an audience:

They Tortured a Man They Knew to Be Innocent

I don't know how this works or if I'm allowed to claim credit, but ... in response to Andrew Sullivan's post on the case of Fouad al-Rabiah, I wrote this:

Can we now call torture what it is? It is not a tactic and it is not a post-conventional moral exception for ticking time-bombs. Torture is a punishment. When viewed as such, confessed as such, it loses the tedious layers of rationalization that have characterized both sides of the debate so far. Torture is not an anxious over-reaction to future threats that haven't materialized. It has nothing to do with the future; it comes from the past, from a wound we never constituted after 9/11. Not concern for the future, but still-born rage for a past that can never be undone.

Torture is revenge. It is the only expression we have found that goes beyond our fruitless wars, beyond cultural alienation and jingoism. For torture is an intimate punishment defined by the willful desecration of reason and subjectivity. This is why so many people cannot bring themselves to utter the word in press or public forums. Mere death cannot compete with torture for the succor of revenge we seek -- we needed to craft a living death. We needed to make an inhuman aesthetic (Abu Ghraib) to match the spectacle of impotence and vulnerability we suffered on 9/11.

Any utilitarian argument (e.g. better safe than sorry, ticking time-bomb, ends justify the means, etc.) misses the essential emotions at play. Indeed, we cling to new iterations of these arguments to hide the raw emotions beneath them.

When I working on Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play at Arena Stage in 2005, we had an elderly German woman come in to tell us what it was like to sit on Hitler's lap as a three year-old. He chose her out of a crowd for a photo-op kiss on the head. She remembers her parents beaming with pride and her grandfather, an old-school Socialist, angrily waving his cane in the air behind the admiring throng. This was a year after Abu Ghraib and some months before Cheney began the formal request for torture as a standard operating procedure. Then, as now, the Nazi comparison was shrill and distracting so I asked the elderly German woman, as politely as I could, if there was any use or merit to the comparison between the neocon nightmare and the Third Reich.

It's the sort of question you can't help feeling embarrassed for asking. Her answer?

"The fact that we're even having a debate about whether torture is okay ..."

And then she stopped speaking. We waited for the ellipses to rebound into some compact judgement or affirmation. But they didn't. The silence was its own argument. Because torture is designed to take us to the unspeakable, to a place where all argument and all rational or subjective coordinates have been bleached away, deracinated by a cruelty that knows no cause, no imperative except the will to inflict its inner death on anything that reminds it of its founding condition:

I used to laugh at that picture. Jesus perched on a mushroom cloud, blessing the death beneath him as one more route to his tender embrace. Or Jesus dealing a deck of cards, what have you. But the more I stare at it, the more it reminds me of the only other image to dominate the American consciousness since 9/11:

Falling from the clouds ... we'll cling to anything to root ourselves again. Torture is the best way to revenge Ground Zero. But like that original horror, it gives us zero ground to stand on.

Gay Porn Makes You Straight ...

... or so goes the transitive operation implied in Michael Schwartz's recent comment on the psycho-sexual impact of pornography. That's not just a cheeky blog title; I intend to prove that gay porn does, indeed, make Michael Schwartz straight. Behold:

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Maybe I'm only alert to the subject because I'm buried in Angels in America rehearsals right now. After all, some closet case blurts a hilarious projection of his own cocklove onto an unsuspecting target every 32 seconds in this country ...

TOM: Hey man, can I borrow your pen?

JOE: Faggot.

So why harp on Schwartz? Well … the idea that sexuality lurks outside the self and threatens to pounce like a fabulous jaguar and then stroke us to death with its speckled mane, leaving us no choice but to grip its fuzzy junk betwixt the prone cheeks of our fragile, homo sapien asshole while thrusting helplessly against ...

Sorry. I got lost in my own metaphornication there. But you see where this is going. Homosexuality is "inflicted" on people, says Schwartz. The classic Freudian drama tracks this paranoia back to repressed desire. For the paranoiac, homosexuality floats invisible like an airborne toxin. It seeps through living room walls and leaves other cherished fortifications -- church, school, government -- porous and vulnerable. This paranoia craves a localizing Object (a pen, say) on which to vent and validate the governing hatred.

For the past five years, same-sex marriage legislation has given this psychodrama its political coordinates. But back in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic concretized the "airborne toxin" metaphor by converting private homophobia into public hypochondria. What was previously a floating, elastic concept (gay = "virus") became literal (gay = virus!). And just as the invention of Viagra allowed Jay Leno to make 14,926 dick jokes without losing his audience ... so did AIDS allow President Reagan to smirk away 20, 849 dead Americans without losing his job.

WHAT A TOOL

Let's blame the Internet, shall we? They say only three seconds elapsed between the invention of the photograph and its use as a pornographic medium. To date, only 9/11 and Barack Obama have punctured the high-water mark set by our prevailing search for sex online. Porn may not be the dominant activity in cyberspace, but it remains the dominant quest. So maybe Schwartz's homophobia fascinates me because it provides a live specimen of last century's "airborne toxin" mutating into today's Wi-Fi Trojan Horse.

Or maybe it fascinates me because Schwartz is half right. On balance, we experience the Internet as more of a convenience than a nuisance. But the medium does have an invasive nature that cannot be extracted from its benefits as a communication device. Not just the pop-up ads of yore, but also the fact that a cybernetic society cannot experience warrentless wiretapping as a violation when each of its inhabitants is already some kind of avatar or exhibitionist. I wouldn't have gone voluntarily to the Values Voters Summit where Schwartz was speaking; I needed the Internet to bring me there. To judge from the shaky-cam footage, it doesn't look like this event was being archived for distribution beyond the modest crowd in attendance. We now have a voyeuristic perspective on a man talking about the effects of a voyeuristic medium like pornography. To paraphrase the man himself, Schwartz is inflicted on people.

My artsy, leftest colleagues and I usually find it easy to dismiss people like Schwartz. When we've exhausted the Freudian formula above, we remind ourselves that pornography and art are different things (that nevertheless deserve similar protection under the First Amendment) and that anyone who doesn't know this is unworthy of consideration or sustained debate. End of discussion. But I submit that pornography is an art because it requires the suspension of disbelief to facilitate its particular ... ahem ... catharsis. A woman stares into a camera, presenting herself for undiminished reproduction as an Object. But the male viewer must pretend past his own disembodied presence in this exchange, for he secretly knows the woman was staring at an Object, too. Before the man can commodify the woman by fucking at her image, she has commodified him by fucking around his camera.

So what would Pirandellian porn look like? I don't care, really, my only point is that pornography doesn't offer sexual liberation for either party. If anything, it fulfills the capitalist ideal better than prostitution because it converts Desire into a purely abstract relation between Things: the image/woman and tool/man. Perhaps for this reason, online porn consumption is comparatively higher in the deep-red states of Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, where Schwartz might expect to find a sympathetic audience. Now, what happens when this fluid abstraction comes back into the world of bodily fluids?

MONEY SHOTS

Another recent survey of porn trends found that most kids today believe sex is supposed to end with the man ejaculating on the woman's face. Here the copulation of Image and Tool achieves its full performative expression after the solo dress rehearsal has ended. The climax is no longer an interior, inter-subjective moment shared (or at least offered) between partners. If you cum inside a woman, and there’s no camera to record it, did it really happen?! Now the orgasm is an exterior moment that allows the man to behold his own contempt as an image he quite literally inflicts on his partner from a distance. So Schwartz is half-right when he says that porn directs your sexual drive inward: not because it leads to masturbation, but because it requires you to re-cast yourself as an outside observer of yourself having sex.

Like most spectacularly offensive moral pronouncements, Schwartz’s comment accidentally taps into a genuine psychological phenomenon. But here the tragic reversal doesn't turn on the tidy binary of gender preference, as exemplified by Schwartz's "friend with a homosexual lifestyle." When we get lost in porn, we sacrifice the subjective self to the super-ego -- that component of the psyche that has always been watching you have sex. (Since before you knew you were alive, in fact, but Schwartz’s admiring nod to eleven-year-old boys makes the point just as well.) Our attempts to transgress the super-ego through porn are doomed to failure and repetition because they only ever place us at the foot of the bed, perched side by side with the voice and vantage of that same super-ego as it continues to judge or command a mutual desire unfolding spontaneously outside its grip.

So what offense could possibly match Schwartz’s prepubescent hatred of gay men? How to account for naked homophobia that wants to cover itself with half-baked psychology?

Simple: Schwartz fears porn because it threatens to replace the same-sex union he’s already forged … with his father. To paraphrase Ron Jeremy, Who’s your daddy, Schwartz?

Combat!

Check out Dan Brooks at Combat!

We want Bill Sparkman’s death to be proof that right-wing, anti-federal populism has gotten out of control. We want, on some sad level that transcends any conscious decency, for people like Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann to be real and dangerous demagogues, not just anything-for-a-buck blowhards chattering inconsequentially into space. This desire is, of course, completely wrong, and a world in which it is fulfilled is undeniably a worse one. Cross your fingers that nobody takes Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly seriously, and all our fretting over their supposedly pernicious influence is overwrought and misplaced. Ask yourself, though, if you really hope that’s true.

He can also dish out quotable snark with the best of them. For example, Michele Bachmann is "God's answer to a prayer Pat Robertson accidentally said backwards." But even when he's on a tear, he makes the effort to research his targets. What might ordinarily be a subjective screed with some angry coinages becomes, in his treatment, something informative and useful at the same time.

Bachmann is a product of the Minnesota public school system, so she probably remembers the meteoric rise to prominence of Joseph McCarthy, and the chain of unbroken successes that comprised his political career until he died peacefully in his sleep. Then again, maybe she just remembers God creating animals and light, plus a couple of things from Leviticus. In 1993, she helped found the New Heights Charter School, the first institution of its kind in Minnesota. Later that year, she resigned amid accusations that her proposals to teach creationism and introduce the “12 Christian Principles”—which sounds exactly 20% better than the Ten Commandments—amounted to the use of public funds for a religious school. Bachmann is a devout Christian, who recently called for a national day of prayer and fasting to stop health care reform. I think we can all agree that Jesus wants sick people to feel better and all, but ultimately his fiscal conservatism and commitment to free markets is going to win out.

Anywho. Add it to your RSS reader and you'll get a solid essay with nice mix of humor and conscience five days a week.

Brief Thought: Jerry's Subs

The only place where "sub sandwich" feels like "sub-sandwich." As in, something unworthy of the name sandwich. You have to be sub-human to subsist on Jerry's sub-sandwiches.

Eat Me or What You Will

I can be a real jerk to new playwrights.

Whenever the development hell meme comes round the wheel of Theatre Blogger Topics, I usually side against the playwright. A couple years ago, I watched a panel of speakers at Theatre Row discuss play development and how hellish it is. The panel included a New York critic, a Yale professor, and two theatre administrators and they all agreed that the limp ritual of the staged reading was cruel and pointless and only generated invasive comments that were harmful to the playwright's self-esteem.

And all I could think was,"Yeah, but ... most new plays really do suck."

To be sure, some plays are born sucky, some achieve suckiness, and some have suck thrust upon them. But the panel's lament only covers to the last of those three. It occurred to me too late to ask at the time: how can a critic and a professor claim that development was bad when their professions require an endless stream of ball-busting commentary? A critic applies standards to a play when he reviews it and a professor applies standards to a play when he grades it. But when individual theatres want to hear something out loud and then provide a list of things that do or don't work ... well, that's just unfair.

I'm an actor, so I know about rejection and criticism and the living death that is the audition process. I experience development hell from the other side of the music stand. After Bacchus-knows-how-many staged readings, I'm starting to think all bad plays were written by the same two playwrights. With that possibility in mind, I offer this list of things that make it hard to respect the writer and his or her self-esteem during a development reading ...

Ping pong dialog. Conflict is the essence of drama, yes, but some young writers are stuck on a binary dialog rhythm that sounds something like this:

A: Stop chewing your food that way.

B: This is how I always chew my food.

A: Not since you started eating meat again.

B: I thought you loved meat.

A: You and I both know I'm a vegetarian.

B: It's news to me.

A: Everything's news to you.

And so on. So two characters are fighting about everything and nothing and all we learn is that one character will oppose what the other character just said. It's astonishing how long some people try to sustain this rhythm ... like a really boring version of the Question Game, or a really pointless improv activity. It's undeniably dramatic, but it bars any possibility of dramatic development since no statement can escape the self-canceling pull of the succeeding statement. And it's definitely emotional, but anger is the only emotion that can sustain this stuff for a whole scene.

The Vocative Tense. A glitch that occurs most often in book adaptations. The vocative should be used sparingly:

A: How's it going, John?

B: Oh, great, Sally, great.

A: John, is something wrong?

B: Sally, stop asking me that!

A: I can't help it, John, I love you!

B: We're not going to discuss that, Sally.

Most people don't use the vocative in real life. We know the person to whom we are speaking; there's no need to whip out the proper name, except for emphasis. Book adaptations sometimes import the vocative as a replacement for "he said" and "she said." But I think the over-reliance on the vocative comes from a failure to touch the character, or to distance oneself from the character. Some intimacy or chemistry is missing and the writer makes up for it by clutching to the names. It's an easy enough diagnostic to run: go through the script and find them all. Ask yourself if they're really necessary or natural-sounding, and then find the connection the character really wants to make.

A brief note. "This play benefits from an accelerated pace. The characters are fast-talking, the action is hyperkinetic, the emotions are volatile. A ponderous interpretation is anathema to the spirit of the play." I've seen some version of that caveat in front of so many scripts that I now deliberately force myself to read at half-pace just to see what the author wants to cover up. This forced gloss on the composition means the writer has failed in two ways. First, a fast, hyper-kinetic, volatile play shouldn't need a note to be understood as such. Playwrights can suffer from mangled tone, genre-tweaking, or bad design, but the rhythm of a play should be self-evident. How many Mamet imitators do we have today? This is not to say that a director or actor can't betray the rhythm of a script; many do. But if this betrayal is so chronic as to merit a note in the script, the playwright should seriously ask themselves why they keep falling in love with the same asshole. Second, the desire for speed usually means there are other weaknesses in the story that the writer would not like to confront. The dialog is chaffy and impersonal. There is no theme or thrust to the story, so one must be imposed after the fact.

Split Scenes. Tony Kushner has inspired more imitators than David Mamet and Tom Stoppard combined and just as Mamet's disciples have their brief notes and ping-pong dialog, Kushner's fans have gone wild with split scenes. Act Two, Scene Nine of Millennium Approaches shows a man dumping his AIDS-ravaged lover in a hospital room while a Mormon confesses his homosexuality to his horrified, drug-addled housewife. The scene is only "split" because it takes place in two rooms. The larger actions of abandonment, confession, judgment, and revelation all blend in a heartbreaking simulcast fight between four very different people facing two equally agon-izing dilemmas.

In admiring reflection of that feat, a generation of playwrights have copied the structure and written backwards from an echo without first generating any sound of their own:

A: We need to talk.

1: Talk to me, Tom.

B: About what?

2: What do you want me to say?

A: This can't go on any longer.

1: I want you to look me in the face.

B: Face it, Susan, it's your fault.

2: The fault-lines of our marriage are emerging.

It's hard on the eyes. But it's written to be easy on the ears so that nothing can emerge except a shiny peal of raw Confluence.

Intermission Anxiety. Intermissions should be more than an opportunity to sell Kendall Jackson Merlot at $5 a cup. They should challenge the playwright to trust the audience to come back. They also allow the playwright to experiment with elliptical structures (and traditional ones, for that matter). If I had to boil down the art of dramaturgy to one catchall maxim, it would be: "People change. Then they change again." Some plays have interesting people that don't change. Some plays have interesting people that change. But we should be offering compound fractures of the heart for the ticket prices we demand. An intermission is a great way to test if this has happened.

As Sara Cormeny pointed out at Parabasis a few weeks ago, many new playwrights like to place bewildering flights of zaniness right before or right after intermission. In her reading, this feels like a lack of confidence in the original premise. The inciting incident has spent itself. The play sports a saggy mid-section. It reclines in a hammock, propped up by an Act One Novelty and an Act Three Twist. And like a hammock-dweller, the writer swings lazily in the middle, looking for distractions (dream sequences, usually) to kill time before it's over. Suddenly, intermission looks more dramatic than anything happening on stage.

The other cure for Intermission Anxiety is, of course, the 90-minute one-act play. No exits.

Stage direction: She cries. There's a scene in the movie Juno where the talented Ellen Page is seen crying in a car. Her pain is presented as an extant moment, asserted by the script and captured by the camera. There is a scene in the movie Truly Madly Deeply in which Juliette Stevenson loses her shit in front of her therapist. She bawls so heavily her breathing does that little-kid undertow inhale thing. Between spasms of distress, she shouts out everything that still torments her about her husband's death. When she's done, her sinus is filled with snot and the therapist hands her Kleenex with a disgustingly proud look on her face, as if to say "Well done, my client. I have helped you achieve something emotional today." The therapist is impressed. We are impressed. Stevenson's depth of feeling for the story would be betrayed by a hard cut to wordless, unmotivated tears.

So whenever I see a stage direction that says "she cries" I think ... No she doesn't. If she does, it's because the action or the dialog demands tears, not you. Male playwrights, in particular, often assert a moment of emotion for their female characters instead of building one from the inside out. I did a reading a month ago and was surprised to discover, after a week developing the script, that there was an entire emotional event hidden in a paragraph of stage direction. It went something like "she stands, she waits, she thinks, she cries, she gathers herself." None of us caught it or talked about at the table and no wonder. It's a scene built entirely in tech rehearsal: five cues from the light booth et voila!

Altered consciousness. Some people can only communicate when they're drunk or high. These people have a problem. Some playwrights think eloquence and insight can only emerge from a drunk or high character. This is a problem, too, because it condescends to that character. No one could be as naturally clever or verbose as the playwright, so a convention must be introduced to make the line/moment/insight more believable. This isn't always a bad thing -- Dionysus was the god of wine, after all -- but a good writer shouldn't need a circumstantial excuse to be poetic. Theatre is a Dionysian event because it produces altered consciousness, not because it represents altered consciousness. Like the brief note above, the drunk scene can be used to glide over lines that wouldn't sound meaningful or poetic in the first place. And if anything falls flat in a drunk scene ... well ... that's what drunks do. So now even the bad lines can be excused as altered consciousness. Unless that consciousness is itself and invention (i.e. some new form of inebriation) there needs to be a really good reason to send your characters on a bender. Drunk scenes can be great exploratory scenes, as long as the writer cleans his characters up for the real event.

Empty Spaces. The modern American theatre is an expensive Rube Goldberg machine for powering a ghost light. So much effort, exploitation, and charity just to light an empty room for 21-hours a day. Schrodinger is laughing in his coffin.*

We all knowingly rag on Kitchen Sink Plays, but at least Kitchen Sink Plays have a reason for being set in a room for a couple hours. Now playwrights throw everything but the kitchen sink at the audience in a flurry of agitated, orally-fixated dialog that rarely connects with the physical, the corporeal, the actual space inherent in this space-bound medium. That's just a crabby broad-swipe, I know. But for me, it's the ultimate test.

EAT ME or WHAT YOU WILL

So I just finished doing a reading at the Kennedy Center's annual Page to Stage festival. The play was called Eat Me or What You Will and it featured, among other crimes, a very long drunk scene, a zany flight into guided meditation fantasy, some ping-pong dialog, a crying old woman, and a jarring rhythm that I'm sure could be fixed with a brief note in the script. I don't think the play suffers from Intermission Anxiety, but we only did the first act, so who knows? The complete play is over 160 pages, so some split scenes might be necessary.

Problem is ... I wrote it.

I'd like to think the drunk scene goes hand in hand with the bachelor party that contains it. And the drunk character misses out on important information while drunk -- he doesn't reveal important information this way. The guided meditation moment happens halfway through the act, not as some bizarre closer to bring people back. But I fear the moment is really just my feeble way into a female character I don't completely understand yet. It was gratifying to hear people catch the jokes and sit up for the tension build near the end of the act. But I was a sweating, toe-tapping mess the rest of the time and had to hold myself back from screaming TALK FASTER! LET'S GO!!

I stick to my list above. Writers are lucky because a good play will ultimately survive an under-rehearsed performance. Writers may not be as essential to the act of theatre as actors, but they have a harder job because they are not allowed to lie. Actors can lie all they want -- the effort to conceal emotion reads just as authentically as the emotion itself. But Jose Rivera was right when he said writer's block comes from an inhibiting lie in the composition.

Right now, I don't feel blocked, just over-stimulated. This is my first jump into a reading of my own words since college. In the intervening eight years, I've devoted my creative energy to acting, blog essays, and film editing. Each of those crafts lets the craft-maker repeat and behold his work again and again, making changes directly to the art-piece. I can play with different voices for my character, I can polish a sentence in an old essay, I can re-edit an effect or cut or that doesn't work. But I don't know when I'll get to hear my play out loud again. All I know is: the performance was the real site of discovery for me. I've learned enough from the other side of the music stand to know that the actors are a gift to that process. I pity the idealistic playwright who hates actors yet masochistically signs himself up for a very painful game of Telephone every time his work is performed.

So what have I learned from all this? Well, in the words of one of my characters: you have to aim past the board. The play isn't in the words or in my head, it's in the playing. The real story sits somewhere inside a thicket of exploratory scenes, surrogate interrogatory characters, lies, evasions, distractions, dream sequences and rewrites. I didn't go to grad school for this, so I'm happy to pick up any hellish development readings no one wants. Before I get furious at an actor for making a hammy choice I have to ask what it is about the story that permits it. And before I shoot my mouth off to new playwrights -- demanding to know why their assertions don't match their stories -- I will remember what a gift it can be to hear the words at all.

*or IS he?!

Season 9 Tracking Shot

I just finished putting this together. Enjoy!