here’s a clip by martin scorcese from his my voyage to italy.  i have been thinking about l’eclisse a lot lately thanks to working on marea.

in the play, people talk about films they love, folklore they revere, nightmare visions they’ve had or personal experiences that have taken on the weight of myth.  in rehearsal tonight, i said this is a play about how people see (or fail to see).  watching this clip, i am struck by scorcese’s language.  i always love hearing him talk about film because it is very important to him.  the images become saturated with someone’s feelings about them.  perhaps this appeals to me because my father and i often conversed in the language of art.  our reverence for opera or films were the way we bonded.  when i go to someone’s home for the first time i want to see what’s on their shelves.  i feel i can learn about someone based on what art they like and why.

i fell in love with antonioni as i fell in love with my ex.  these movies meant something to him and they in turn meant something to me because i felt he shared an important piece of himself by sharing them with me.  when i watched them with my ex i was taken by their veneer, their chic style, the beautiful composition, and monica vitti–fair enough when you’re in love and everything sparkles.  but like maria in my play, i see now what really drew me in (but i couldn’t articulate it at the time) were the enigmatic images, the missed connections, and i see monica vitti isn’t just a chic italian cinematic siren . . . she’s often a sad searcher for meaning in a world that flickers around her mysteriously, coldly.

or at least that’s my take.  that’s the lens i view these films through now.

marea is me revealing myself by reveling in these descriptions of pictures, of movies.  and i realize i spend so much time discussing books, music, theater i love because it’s the way i know how to open myself up.  i had never thought about that until rehearsal tonight.

so there’s a dead mommy in marea.  she’s not the first dead person i’ve had in my plays.  ghosts, phantoms, visions of former selves and even zombie vampires (in the case of my still unproduced castle of blood, everyone dies by the end) populate the worlds i choose to write about.

i’ve been thinking a lot about these characters and how they somehow buck a stanislavski way of thinking of a character arc.  during expat/inferno, i had trouble explaining the dead person in that play to an actor and ever since then i have tried and tried to make sure these characters add up in stanislavski fashion.  but sometimes i want a flashback or a vision or brief eerie interlude that may not necessarily add to the character arc and it’s very hard balancing creating a tapestry of language and images with making sure the actors can play everything.

beyond the way dead characters work in my plays, i also work with language in a way that is musical.  i always hear dialogue in rhythmic terms.  and i work with linguistic motifs to weave a very tight web of imagery that gives the writing cohesiveness and integrity.  working with trying to get through a draft of four last songs (i have a february 20 deadline!), i feel that i am very afraid to take big crazy leaps like that for fear of tying these big knots i have to undo and solve for actors.  but the thing is, i often need those knots to find the very thing that excites me and other people about my work.

i think as i write more, my sense of craft gets stronger and stronger  . . . and i fear it is overtaking my fanciful side.  the imaginative part in me that wonders “what if?” and “why not?”

watching marea in rehearsal, i think of how much of this play was written during the onset of a depression and how unconscious i was of what i was tapping into during the conception of the play (i wrote the first draft while in rehearsals for expat/inferno).  the more scott and i discuss this play with the actors, the more i feel that much of what makes this play is those unconscious twists or the ancient black fluid that claudia describes while watching black sunday.  i feel i can’t lose that as i embark on the next play.

i’m reading a book by esther newton about the history of cherry grove as research for four last songs and i am reminded of why i wanted to set a play on fire island in the first place.  i saw poetry out there.  i can’t forget to put that in my play.

kevin sessums gave me a shoutout on towleroad today. i’m very happy that it came in the context of me recommending the lily’s revenge and the brother sister plays–two large, ambitious theatrical events that have really inspired me.

today we broke regla’s statue and it made me feel so strange.  like someone destroyed my protector.  i threw five pennies into the boat with the juanes and held the statue in my lap when no one was using it.

i made my last set of rewrites for this version and they cracked open the play a whole lot.  i started hyperventilating and crying in rehearsal.  which isn’t so bad considering i survived a depression, two bouts of pink eye and pneumonia while working on this play over the years.

this presentation promises to be quite lovely.  and i can’t wait to see it a week from thursday!  here are two teaser images i snapped on my phone during our video shoot for the multimedia projections we are using:

all i can say is what the fuck (pardon my french)?

it still boggles my mind that minority rights are put up for a vote in this country.  that is not constitutional.  if it is, i’d like to vote to strip rights away from lots of people who annoy me and piss me off.

look, i don’t give a toss that chrissy christian or connie conservative don’t like the gays.  but the fact of the matter is they don’t get to vote on my life just like i don’t get to vote on theirs.  and the thing is, after a recent skirmish on a message board over the gay marriage issue, i have discovered many of these people are operating under completely ignorant fallacies.  for example, i heard “i don’t approve of homosexuality because people are harming their rectums.”  yes.  i heard this.  i should have shot back that i don’t approve of childbirth because women can hurt their vaginas.

ultimately, it just astonishes me people get their panties in a twist over how two adults choose to solidify their love and commitment.  shouldn’t we get our collective panties in a twist over murder, rape, child abuse, the environment, war, genocide, health care, bigotry, cancer, aids, lack of funding for public schools and american idol (ok, i’m the only one who thinks idol is a canker sore on the lower lip of popular culture)?  love and commitment?  those are good things, people!  remember burt bacharach?  what the world needs now is love, sweet love.  it’s the only think that there’s just too little of.

maine did not express love last night.  nor did they when this was put on the ballot, which it never should have been.

there’s a great post on my inflammatory writ that explains this a little better than i can.

over the last week i was privileged to see two long form theater events happening off and off-off broadway.  it was interesting to have just seen these and then read a giant discussion about why the neil simon revivals flopped so badly on broadway and what audiences expect for their money in the theater (a big star . . . and big for broadway usually means someone who had a sitcom about 10+ years ago.  let’s bring jackee to broadway…in mame!).  however, away from broadway are two new works that are bold, imaginative, ambitious, moving and need no former sitcom stars.

i had missed the brothers size at the public when it opened there in 2007.  after seeing tarell alvin mccraney’s followup wig out! at the vineyard, i felt sorry i had missed out on the earlier play.  i was happy to see the public bring it back along with two other plays that make up a trilogy.  the three plays loosely follow a group of related characters named after orishas of the yoruba religion (something i feel very close to since i maintain yoruba is the national religion of cuba where it is known as santeria).  mccraney doesn’t adhere to the relationships between the orishas that i am familiar with–his version of oshun isn’t ogun’s beloved, for example … and elegba and eleggua are two different characters.  the first part in the red and brown water felt like a retelling of lorca’s yerma with oya searching for some meaning inside her relationships and community after the death of her mother and her inability to bear a child.  the brothers size is about the relationship between ogun and ochoosi size, two very different brothers whose relationship is about to sever.  the final play marcus or the secret of sweet is about elegba’s gay son marcus and his prophetic dreams of katrina striking the bayou.  mccraney plays with camp, mythology, brechtian alienation effects (the characters often announce their stage directions before performing them), dance and singing.  the borrowed elements sometimes felt overwhelming and somethings surprising–ogun and ochoosi’s lovely duet on “try a little tenderness” was a great example and a lot of the slapstick teethkissing shenanigans in marcus resulted in some wonderfully kinetic fireworks between the actors that would suddenly shift to poignancy with little effort.  i found in the red and brown water a bit more challenging as oya’s story felt a little private to me, but the final moment was incredibly powerful.  in a sense, oya gives birth to the succession of severed relations that follow: between ogun and ochoosi; between ochoosi and elegba; between elegba and marcus; between marcus and oba . . . these characters are constantly searching for a mirror, an affirmation of self within another person.  they are haunted by dreams that often remain puzzles to them.  in marcus, the eymology of the euphemism “sweet” (for “gay”) is explained.  during the slave trade, if two male slaves were found having sex, they were whipped and sugar was poured in their wounds, which would get sticky in the heat and attract flies.  these characters have all been lacerated by their desires and their wounds prevented from closing.  yet, as marcus discovers his “sweet” is also his sight . . . and it may not provide him with answers for himself, but he creates connections for others–particularly for ogun.

the lily’s revenge is an experience i am not sure i can be incredibly articulate about as i am still reeling from it.  it is a five hour event.  on one hand it is the story of a lily who strives to become a man and marry the bride and defeat the great longing, deity of nostalgia.  on the other hand it is about how we experience performance–the play is enormous, there are rules and structured activities and audience participation during the shows and intermissions, each act takes place in a reconfigured playing space and utilizes a combination of playing styles (comedy, verse, dance theater, video and a slapstick chaos that ends the evening).  for me it was impossible not to find myself interfacing with the material in very personal ways.  as i mentioned two posts down, i read these emily dickenson poems in an offstage area called “the context corner” where taylor shares his source materials.  i opened this book at random at each intermission and the next act had everything to do with the poem i had just read.  i responded to the struggle between nostalgia and being in the here and now.  the lily’s desire to be a man and defeat the great longing seemed to be at odds with each other and along the way he gains wisdom but loses his glittery lily self.  i was very moved by the small video where a white rose longs to be “the perfect specimen” and is deformed as a result.  i wondered about the great longing’s 2nd curtain being made up of the red napkins audience members were asked to write down things they longed for . . . it seemed to me longing was a trap that divorced one from real experience and joy and beauty.  the bride and groom’s longing for a perfect wedding had nothing to do with love and everything to do with their asserting their desire to live up to some proscribed gender role they felt they needed to live up to (and there was a meta narrative running parallel to this about traditional theater models being the death of the medium itself).   by the end i was an emotional, teary, sweaty and giddy mess.  all i wanted to was make art and make out.

i am not doing these two works justice in this blog post.  i suspect these will be works that i will have to think about for a long time and probably continue to learn about them as i speak to others who’ve seen them, read the reviews, read the texts (when published).  these plays made me think about what it means to be a creative person and what it means to be a part of this world with creativity.  sometimes when i long to be “the perfect specimen,” i feel i am longing for something that doesn’t exist and i am not seeing, really seeing what is inside of me and around me.  both tarell mccraney and taylor mac have presented a vision of the world that is their own–idiosyncratic, contradictory, paradoxical, magical, poetic and incredibly generous.  i felt they reached out to me and every audience member in the room and created a sense of community.

which is ultimately why we go to the theater right?  oh, and the hope that someone somewhere does cast jackee in mame.

thinking about the new play this weekend it occurred to me to name the evening the golden vanity (william bell/four last songs).  revisited some strauss to slowly get back into what is now called four last songs.  there are more secrets in the strauss, the music adrian hears in his head music that makes no sounds for me just yet.  four men who remain a mystery to me.  they aren’t giving themselves up too easily.  baxter’s voice is becoming clearer to me.  zed told me i had misunderstood him.  theo is too afraid to reveal the chink in his armor.  and adrian scares me (and i am sure he is scared of himself).

plays are such strange things.

the way an intimacy is developed between me and this entity, this file on my computer, that is a very real thing to me.  a play is an abstract force that allows itself to be seen and felt a short while in a certain form.  sometimes that force will choose various writers and various plays to be seen.  sometimes it’s seen once and never again.  sometimes it changes its mind and obscures itself again.

this particular one is sly.  no trickery here.  it won’t stand for it.  no bag of tricks.

to make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
one clover, and a bee,
and revery.
the revery alone will do
if bees are few.

a powerful week at the theater.  taylor mac’s the lily’s revenge and terell alvin mccraney’s the brother sister plays. i don’t know how to wrap my head around these plays.  the themes of longing that ran through both these giant and ambitious creations spoke to me with intimate telepathy.

more later.

get her doris day tribute album now!  i just found out about this and it’s just delicious.  the arrangements are just smart, smart, smart (on a par with her genius obligatory visitors album).  i can think of a few people who have tried to do this sort of sound or album who can take lessons from nellie.

and look how cute she is!

thank you, rob brezny

when i did a performance in santa fe a few years ago, a woman in the audience came up to me after the show and made a sardonic proposal: would i like to join her twelve-step program for writers who are overly fond of vivid adjectives and adverbs? with all the uppity mock politeness i could summon, i told her that i was preposterously happy with my scintillating addiction to brazen language, and didn’t regard it as a raggedy problem that needed invasive correcting. now i’m advising you to be like me and follow your heart when it tells you to be bigger, bolder, and brasher than ever before. right now, shiny intensity is your sacred duty! halloween costume suggestion: the sun.