Give 'Em Hell, Harry! (1975)

Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! is a filmed evening at the theatre (it's TheatroVision), watching James Whitmore in his celebrated role as Harry S. Truman in Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! and there’s nothing cinematic about it. It’s clearly filmed for television, in fact, with blackouts timed helpfully for commercial breaks. Whitmore is great, of course, and the play is filled with the kind of generic liberal political ideas that most people agree with across the board. The whole idea is a kind of no-nonsense politics that at least feels reasonable. The audience in the theatre loves the show and applauds throughout at various clever stories in Samuel Gallu’s play. It’s a one-man show, though, and that can make for tiring viewing. Once I realized the gist of the thing about 20 minutes in, I got rather bored. It’s a clever note, but there’s only one note.

I don't think you can watch this film anywhere...? I watched it on a bootleg DVD, and I'm sort of surprised to find it's not streaming and there is no DVD.

Caesar and Cleopatra (1945)

Caesar and Cleopatra is honestly terrible. It’s Shaw, so it’s talk talk talk and not much else. Obviously the costumes are gorgeous—it’s ancient Egypt in the Roman period—but there’s just nothing to this. It’s allegedly a kind of adventure-intrigue sort of thing about Caesar and Cleopatra but it’s not the least bit interesting.

My Little Sister (2020)

Schwesterlein (My Little Sister) is about ten minutes too long, but it’s an absorbing drama, and it stars Nina Hoss, so it’s obviously worth watching. She’s electric, as always, and the film is deeply invested in her every move. I also loved that this film starred Thomas Ostermeier basically as himself. It was such a fun, weird, cool choice and it made absolutely perfect sense.

Jellicles Can and Jellicles Do

I felt compelled to see Cats for reasons I can't quite explain. I've never actually seen the musical onstage, so I have no real emotional history with the show at all. When the trailer first dropped, everyone thought it was so weird, but (I thought) isn't the show weird? Like, there are dancing adult humans in catsuits and cat makeup singing about being cats. It's already strange.

But Tom Hooper's movie version of Cats is so much weirder than I imagined. This movie is really fuckin' unhinged. (Tom Hooper, in case you've forgotten, directed the all-close-ups-all-the-time movie version of Boublil & Schönberg's Les Misérables, the Best-Picture-winning The King's Speech, and the mostly-respectable The Danish Girl.) To treat the movie like an adult, of course, is to break the spell Cats itself is trying to cast – as I say, it's about playing dress-up in catsuits and dancing around like a feline, so you can't take it seriously, or, rather, if you do take it seriously you're just going to start laughing.

But Cats takes itself seriously. Cats thinks it's a very important movie.

And here is (one of the places) where the film's problems begin.

Ok. So, a cartoon car pulls into a cartoon alley and dumps a bag with a kitten in it into a trash heap. The alley cats all deal with the new cat in various ways, and they begin by introducing the idea of "jellicle cats". This is a very catchy tune, and indeed I also think it's kind of exciting, but I've always thought this song was strange because of the way Andrew Lloyd Webber's tune starts off by stressing the first syllable of the word – jellicles can and jellicles do – but then changes it up – jellicles do and jellicles can. Now, I am not sure what a jellicle cat is, and I want to say that this is also a problem. The song is about jellicle cats; it's designed as a song to introduce us to the concept and the world of the show, but it is just not very clear about who these cats are and why they're hanging out together. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, a jellicle cat is ... a cat.

Are they ghost-cats? Like, are they all dead? My impression is that these are dead cats.

Structurally, what happens next is that after the opening number about jellicles we get a second group number that tells us about cats' names – not specifically about the names of any of these cats, mind you, just about names in general. These numbers are led by an (unnamed-in-the-movie) cat named (apparently) Munkustrap, who is played by Robbie Fairchild. The movie tells us nothing about him, and he doesn't have a number of his own, but he is really the lead performer in this show.

Then what happens is that we get a series of numbers – maybe ten? – in which a new cat is introduced and sings about him- or herself. The first one is the weirdest one. Rebel Wilson plays a cat named Jennyanydots who is training singing mice and singing and dancing cockroaches and basically running around like a crazy person. This number is manic and bizarre and (honestly) sort of terrifying. There's an absolutely insane moment in which this cat unzips her own fur like she's Violet Chachki to reveal a dance costume and a new suit of rhinestoned fur. This happens really early in the film, and because I didn't understand the rules of this world, this began to confuse me seriously.

Do the cats have magical powers? Just this one? Do they each have some kind of talent? Can they all unzip?

Rum Tum Tugger can get it

The movie doesn't really have any dialogue at all. It just introduces one cat after another before abandoning it. We meet Rum Tum Tugger, the sexiest cat I've ever seen, and then he disappears. We meet Bustopher Jones, who is constantly eating, and then Bustopher immediately disappears. We meet the tap-dancing Skimbleshanks, the railway cat, and then he, too, disappears. That's four cats, but I'm not exaggerating. This just keeps happening. We meet Grizabella, Asparagus, Growltiger, Mr. Mistoffelees, Old Deuteronomy, Macavity, and Rumpleteazer. Each of them has its own song... and only its own song. And each of these cats only sings about itself. They join in with the other cats' songs occasionally, of course, but each cat sings about itself and then fades into the background. The cats that are around the whole time – to whom the camera returns repeatedly – are Cassandra, Munkustrap, Griddlebone, and Demeter, cats whose names I have had to look up because they have no song for themselves and no dialogue, really, even though they're the ones with whom we spend the most time. We keep meeting new cats, but we don't know the (jellicle?) cats with whom we spend all of our time, and every time we meet a new cat that cat immediately disappears.

The audience can connect with none of these cats.  They're not around long enough for that. Instead – and I think this is the film's biggest problem – Cats consistently assumes an emotional connection with these cats, but it never works at establishing it. The first cats we meet – Rebel Wilson, Jason Derulo, and James Corden – don't want us to connect; they do big numbers that ask for no emotional connection with the audience. And this sets up a pattern. We watch the cats critically from the outside, but we don't identify with the jellicles, and I didn't emotionally connect with any of them.

Wait. I haven't mentioned that they have these very strange CGI faces. This is actually the weirdest part of the movie. These cats are very clearly humans in CGI fur outfits. They have human hands and human feet and they mostly move balletically – except for the railway cat; he tap-dances – and so although they have cat ears and cat tails, they have distinctly human faces. This is so very strange that it never stops being strange, perhaps because we never spend quite enough time with any one cat and so we never really get accustomed to their faces. It looks so weird. Like the Sun Baby who shines down on the Teletubbies. The fur is creepy and attempting to be erotic (I think?) in a way that is troubling. At some point Idris Elba is dancing, and he's naked, and all we see is his (cat) fur suit and his bare (human) feet and hands and face, and it's just so fuckin' weird. Like, that is not how you should look naked, Idris Elba. You should not look like you're covered in sleek fur. That is not what I want to see when you take off your clothes. It's a really disturbing rip-off.

Through most of the duration of this film I was saying (out loud, since I was the only person in the theatre) wait, what the fuck is happening? It's not the first time I've had that thought in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical – I still don't know what actually happens in Phantom. And when Cats ended – it ends with Judi Dench's Old Deuteronomy turning to the new (white, of course she's white) baby cat Victoria and telling her "you are a jellicle cat" – I said That's how it ends? We were supposed to be invested in whether or not this young baby cat becomes a jellicle cat? We don't even know what a jellicle cat is! We also didn't know that Dame Judi had the power to turn cats into jellicle cats. The point is I had no idea what the fuck was happening, and Tom Hooper had no idea how to direct my emotional investment toward the journey of any particular one of these human–feline hybrids.

I have one more very serious complaint (amid so many!) and that is that Jennifer Hudson, who has an incredible voice and who sings "Memory" in Cats, doesn't really sing the song. She spends the whole song acting. This is what I mean by the movie taking itself very, very seriously. What we needed from this musical was for the best song in Cats to blow us out of the fucking water by connecting emotionally, hitting all the right notes, and asking us to soar with it. "Memory" is a legitimately great song, and before I continue, let me just share this version, sung by Heather Headley:

Headley asks you to connect with her story emotionally. You hear everything you need to hear about this character, and you feel with her deeply. That is not what Hudson does. She cries and sobs and her voice croaks and she can't quite get there with the notes because of her very important feelings. (Her nose also runs the entire time in an apparent tribute to Viola Davis in Fences.) Of course Jennifer Hudson can hit the notes, and when she finally does as she gets to Touuuuuuuch meeeeeeeeee, my gay ass snapped in the air and was like yaaaaassssssssss, but this is because I was absolutely desperate for her to get there and when she finally did I was just so grateful. In fact, after she belts that one little section, Hudson goes back to acting instead of singing, and the song falls apart again. This was a fundamental mistake in the movie. And I know I complain about this all the fucking time with Hollywood musicals, but the acting is not the most important thing in a musical. The music is. "Memory" is a perfect example. The story is in the music. The music does the work. Hit the notes and you'll hit our emotional notes in the audience, and we will resonate with you. If you spend time attempting to communicate a bunch of feelings by emoting, it's not gonna work.

In other words, aside from Cats' very weird aesthetic problems, it also has some very serious emotional problems. It is, more than anything else, like watching a children's dance recital when you don't have any children in the performance.

Fences and Putting Theatre Onscreen

For me, Fences had two strikes against it before I got there. While I love many of Wilson's other plays (Two Trains, Seven Guitars, Piano Lesson) and obviously love the project of the Century Cycle itself, I've always found Fences a fairly clunky play (I don't care if it did win a Pulitzer). Fences, too, is one of Wilson's more realist dramas: his early plays like Fences, Ma Rainey and Jitney just don't have the bold theatricality of some of the later plays (Gem, Joe Turner, Hedley).

I was skeptical, too, of what I saw as Denzel Washington's leisurely, self-indulgent way of playing Fences' protagonist Troy Maxson. I've seen video of Washington onstage, and he took his time with that role. There was a YouTube video going around for awhile that compared the original Troy, James Earl Jones, with Washington scene for scene, and Jones's work is tighter, stronger, and more about the character than the actor; Washington played the part onstage like everyone was there to see him.

[Side note: I almost went to an early screening of this in Florida in early December, but I had stood in line for 90 minutes and then knew I was going to get stuck in the front row of the theatre, so I left without watching the movie. I figured my annoyance with the situation would disallow my enjoyment of the movie, and with the two strikes already against Fences in my head, I figured I shouldn't prejudice myself against this movie.]

But strikes or no strikes, Fences is superb. In fact, I surprised myself by loving it as much as I did. The film's central character, Troy Maxson, is not a likable man. He's difficult and frustrated and frequently ungenerous, and when he started in on his Wilsonian monologues, I felt my impatience rise in my chest, but almost immediately, Denzel Washington's brilliant performance won me over. His work is, honestly, masterful. He is impossible not to love. He is berating his son and causing his wife pain, but he's an extraordinary character. Lovable isn't the right word, but he is compelling, powerful, insistent on his own position in the world, and filled with grief – endless mourning, even – of having been forced to live during Jim Crow. The film takes place in Pittsburgh's Hill District, of course, where all but one of the plays in the Century Cycle are set, but Jim Crow was alive and well in the North, as well, and racist union practices, racist major league baseball restrictions, and racist policing practices have all restricted Troy's life in inexorable ways.

What is so genius about Wilson's work here – and this is on display perfectly in Washington's film – is that even though the play itself (and this is why he chooses realism as his form) is really about how racist circumstances and situations have shaped these men and women, his characters are beautiful, fully draw human beings who attempt to live out their dreams. What I mean to say is that Wilson is primarily interested in a kind of materialist analysis of the effects of racism on the lives of black people in the North, but his characterization is so superb that he also manages beautiful historical portraits of black folkways in the great tradition of Georgia Douglas Johnson and Sterling Brown.

Mr. Hornsby

Just a bit more to say. First off, this is the play made into a film. Washington keeps nearly everything from the stage version. It occasionally feels like a play, but mostly it doesn't. For the most part it feels dynamic and moves nicely. Fences looks less like a play than the most recent Woody Allen movie, for example. This is all due to Washington's directorial point of view, which is studied and smart and much much better than directorial efforts by actors that we have seen in the past (remember The Good Soldier?). Washington is a very good film director. He does not have a relaxed or direct gaze. The work is interesting and moves much more fluidly than films like Doubt and Proof and Into the Woods and that one where Michael Fassbender played Jung to Viggo Mortensen's Freud.

The acting is top notch all around. Washington is superb. Davis is excellent. Russell Hornsby is fantastic. Stephen McKinley Henderson is great. It's a very, very good cast. Expect Oscar nominations for Washington and Davis for sure. (Davis is committing category fraud by running as supporting in what is unquestionably a lead performance.) But this will also be nominated for Best Picture, and, if they're not out of their minds, Best Director, as well.

As a Latina...

A couple of years ago, I was at a conference and I was working on a committee to plan the following year's conference and when the committee asked for feedback on the current year's events, several people complained that the events were not as inclusive of people of color as they might have been, and made some very valid critiques. One of the planners at this point got rather indignant and said, Well as a Latina...

I can't actually remember what she said after that. This, to me, was the worst kind of positioning. This woman was attempting to use her own subject position as a woman of color to excuse the way that the conference she had helped to organize had been insensitive to women of color. I have identity with other women of color and therefore I should be excused from being considered insensitive to women of color even though many people here actually feel slighted by my behavior. Um, no.

I've used that phrase As a Latina to make fun of this kind of positioning ever since. And since then I've noticed the phrase As a... also crops up when people do not want to take the time to justify their own credentials. As a person who researches x / As a historian of x, here is my opinion about x... Or you could just make an argument that makes your point clear and demonstrates why your theory is workable or interesting. As a person who thinks about x / As a person who is a longtime fan of x... These are somehow even worse. Wait, wait, you think about this topic? That's the way you're going to describe your subject position here? Or you're a fan? And that is supposed to give credence to your argument in some way?

In a way, I think this kind of strange positioning, the active claiming of a specific position in the world before making an argument, is descended from Pierre Bourdieu and the idea that we ought to analyze our own subject positions as a part of the analysis we are doing. I am totally on board with this, but the As a Latina formation actually occludes analysis. Instead of interrogating how this position might color or otherwise affect the argument being made, the position almost always is intended to make the argument seem more accurate – as a person like the person I am, my argument is going to be more sound than someone who does not have this position – or it is intended to excuse behavior that ought not to be excused – as a Latina, I ought not to be considered at fault for whatever anti-Latina sentiments you perceive.

I haven't thought about this phenomenon seriously in a while, but I've been thinking of it again lately because I am revisiting some scholarship on manhood and masculinity. And I am noticing this weird "guys like us", "for us men", "feminist critiques have often misunderstood what we as men actually understand about ourselves because we've lived it" kind of thing. In other words, the theorist I'm reading at the moment (who shall remain nameless) keeps beginning sentences by saying, sometimes obliquely, sometimes literally: As a man.

The reason I am thinking about this positioning seriously is that although I write about masculinity, I cannot actually imagine ever writing anything equivalent to the phrase As a man. In fact, I don't think I would ever use that phrase even in conversation.

As a man...

It just looks weird to me.

First of all, one's position as a man does not give one any particular access to understanding masculinity writ large. And secondly, to be a man is specifically to claim not to be so many other things. Why would one want to do that? I have often felt the need to quote one of José Muñoz's critiques of masculinity, the one that notes that “masculinity is, among other things, a cultural imperative to enact a mode of ‘manliness’ that is calibrated to shut down queer possibilities and energies. The social construct of masculinity is experienced by far too many men as a regime of power that labors to invalidate, exclude, and extinguish faggotry, effeminacy, and queerly coated butchness.”

But also, I don't actually understand myself as a man, at least not as a man without qualifiers attached. I refer to myself as a gay man often enough, I guess, but never as simply a man, never as a man undiminished by faggotry, weakness, sensitivity, pacificism, shame, or bookishness. In fact, I like the idea of whatever manhood I might possibly claim being somehow always diminished.

In any case, I have no intention of beginning any arguments by saying as a gay man or as a person who is often racialized as white or as a person who listens to a lot of Philip Glass, but I often think it is interesting when other people do. Why are we positioning ourselves and what advantages do we feel that these positions offer us? I am not arguing that who we are ought somehow to be absent from our scholarship or that we ought to try to excise our own subject positions from our scholarship. Not at all! But wouldn't it be best if it were the argument itself that made this position clear? If I have argued well, my argument ought to state my position quite clearly, at least whatever one (or several) of my identity positions that is relevant to the current argument.

As a Spanish-speaking Packers fan invested in the anarchist movement in France in the late nineteenth century and also captivated by queer issues and also interested in the political history of black America and also fascinated by the work of Seneca, my argument today will be that the original reception of Bernard-Marie Koltès's play Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton (1985), with its too-intent focus on issues related to AIDS, overshadowed Koltès's own focus on economics, much to the detriment of the play itself.

Sometimes one's subject position just isn't relevant.

Our Town

The show I am co-directing this summer is an outdoor production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that will be performed in two separate location in Lynchburg's Old City Cemetery. This commercial will be running in local Central Virginia markets:

Much of my own thinking about the show has been informed by the letters of Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, and Alice Toklas. Reading about the history of their friendship has changed much about how I've thought about the relationships in Our Town. I've also been reading Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods and, of course, Seneca. It is hard, now that I've read almost all of Proust's À la Recherche to avoid relating things to Proust or through Proust. So much of this has informed my ideas about the show. It seems sort of obvious that I also spend a lot of time thinking about Wilder's other work, particularly his short plays The Wreck on the Five-twenty-five, The Long Christmas Dinner, And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead, and The Angel that Troubled the Waters.


I wanted to share some of my thoughts about the show here, since it is so much in my thoughts.

At one point, the stage manager refers to the fact that the only thing we still have from ancient Babylon are wheat contracts and contracts for the sale of slaves. Every time I hear it, this mention of wheat contracts makes me think of a poem by Jack Gilbert called “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”:

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,

God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words

Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according

to which nation. French has no word for home,

and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people

in northern India is dying out because their ancient

tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost

vocabularies that might express some of what

we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would

finally explain why the couples on their tombs

are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands

of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,

they seemed to be business records. But what if they

are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve

Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.

O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,

as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.

Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts

of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred

pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what

my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this

desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script

is not a language but a map. What we feel most has

no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

And stars. Stars come up so much in Our Town. At the cemetery, certainly, the stage manager and many of the dead speak about the stars, but all through the play the stars are singled out for mention by Wilder. I told the cast during a meeting that because the stars are our ancestors perhaps we are all just little pieces of star, and that maybe this gets mentioned so often as a way for Wilder to link us all to a larger history that exists before humanity itself. In the Consolation to Helvia 8.6, Seneca offers us the following thought in relation to his exile from Rome to the island of Corsica:  

So long as I may observe so many stars gleaming through the night – some fixed, others not voyaging forth over a great distance but circling around their own given area, some suddenly bursting forth, others dazzling our eyes with spreading fire as if they were falling, or flying by with a long trail of brilliant light; so long as I may commune with these and, so far as a human can, mingle with things divine, and so long as I may keep my mind always striving to contemplate the kindred objects on high – what difference does it make to me what ground I tread.

I love this thought, And here is an additional one, from a poem by Mary Oliver called "Stars":

Here in my head, language

keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends

with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech

but pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends

with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever, is spoken?

Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,

and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?

What amiable peace?

Then it was over, the wind

roused up in the oak trees behind me

and I fell back, easily.

Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos—

even the distant night bird

as it talks threat, as it talks love

over the cold, black fields.

Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear

and it was utterly silent—

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,

and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do

but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and willing, and in our places?

Listen, listen, I'm forever saying,

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,

to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit—

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.

Even as now.

Even as the darkness has remained the pure, deep darkness.

Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,

one hot sentence after another.

And lastly, in the play itself Wilder refers to Edgar Lee Masters' poem "Lucinda Matlock" from the Spoon River Anthology. His poem is also worth reading because it seems to me to encompass the whole play:

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,

And played snap-out at Winchester.

One time we changed partners,

Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,

And then I found Davis.

We were married and lived together for seventy years,

Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,

Eight of whom we lost

Ere I had reached the age of sixty.

I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,

I made the garden, and for holiday

Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,

And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,

And many a flower and medicinal weed—

Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.

At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,

And passed to a sweet repose.

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,

Life is too strong for you—

It takes life to love Life.

Bad Grandparents: August Osage County and Jackass

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa and August: Osage County have three Oscar nominations between them. In addition to both being nominated for the United States' most prestigious film award, these films also have other things in common:

Bizarre Titles with Strangely Placed Colons. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa is how everyone is referring to this film. I think Bad Grandpa is good enough, actually, plus that's how Johnny Knoxville always refers to it on Twitter. My bet is that people who loved the television show Jackass want the Jackass in the title in order to remind people about the hilarity in which they are about to partake; people who thought Jackass was stupid want the Jackass in there to remind people that the movie they're about to watch is somehow not a real narrative film.

But, look: August: Osage County is also a ridiculous title. I mean, that colon should probably be a comma, right? But worse than that, what on earth does this title describe? Where and when we are, you might answer. And you'd be right. And that's all good and well for a play that is about life on the plains, a giant house that eats up people's lives and vitriolically spits them out. But it isn't such a great title for a film that categorized itself as a "comedy" for the purposes of the Golden Globe Awards and whose trailer simply contained the most hilarious parts of a rather funny film.
Let's be honest, August: Osage County is a terrible title for a comedy.

Evil Grandparents and Old-Age Makeup. Johnny Knoxville's misbehaving grandpa, Irving Zisman is horrible. He drinks with his grandson, he pulls down his pants at male strip clubs, he dumps his dead wife's corpse into the trunk of his car. He hits on every woman he meets. All of this is a bit in Bad Grandpa. The cameras are watching real people interact with the antics of a grandson and grandfather who do hilariously shocking things and then wait for passersby to be surprised. Would you help a man move his wife's dead body into the trunk? Would you stop a grandfather who is drinking beers with his grandson at the park?  

Ms. Nicholson, Ms. Streep & Ms. Martindale

August: Osage County's evil matriarch Vi is just as horrible in the film as she was in the play, and Meryl Streep plays her beautifully (contrary to what the awful trailers might have you believe). Actually, I thought the acting in August was great across the board, particularly by the women – Julianne Nicholson, Julia Roberts, and Margo Martindale are all excellent. Martindale is more sensitive and beautiful than I've ever seen her: it is a deeply sad performance. The same goes for Roberts: she is strong and terrifying and completely messed up. It is really awesome (lead) work.

The makeup for these two old people is not really comparable, however. Bad Grandpa's is so fantastically good that it doesn't need film lighting or a camera to fool people. This is makeup that is fooling regular people on a sunny day in Tennessee. It is excellent work.

Mr. Knoxville and Mr. Nicoll

Terrible Direction. While Bad Grandpa mostly works – the film is a serious of pranks played on unsuspecting regular people who don't know they're about to be in a movie – these bits are connected by sequences in which the grandpa (Knoxville) and the grandson (Jackson Nicoll) ride in a car together and sort of pretend that they are in a real movie about a grandad and his grandson. This makes no sense, of course, because we know that they are both in on the joke. We don't believe that either one of them believes in this grandpa/grandson fiction. I was hoping for something a little more meta connecting the bits: perhaps a series of sequences where Knoxville explained to the young actor what normally happens in these kind of buddy-road movies. Or something. Anything but pretense.

Like Grandpa's director Jeff Tremaine, August's director John Wells (who also directed the terrible adaptation of Tracy Letts' Killer Joe) is mostly a television director. And it shows. August: Osage County was a play about a house and a family. The play is filled with simultaneous scenes and a big family-style mise en scène, like the portions at Buca Di Beppo. But the film doesn't embrace this idea at all. Not only does Wells not focus on the house as an important plot-point or character motivation (no shots of empty rooms or childhood bedrooms or kitchens or even many of the outside of the house), the film can't find focus. Whose story is this? August is fundamentally confused about this question. This is not a question in the play: it's a play about a house. But Wells doesn't make this a movie about a house, and instead insists on following someone's story. But whose? He never decides.

In fact, while August: Osage County is not as bad as the poster to the right would have us believe, it is still a mess of a movie. This is a stagey script elevated by excellent acting. All of the highlights of Tracy Letts's play (a hybrid of Sam Shepard's Buried Child and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night) are still there, but they don't pack the punch they do in the play. They seem diffused by having too many celebrities in a single room. And Letts (who made his own play into a screenplay) hasn't cut the play enough. The play's theatrically intriguing prologue sequence, which involves the patriarch of the family, is inexplicably retained for the film, a decision which my companions who hadn't read the play found very confusing. The plot still works, of course – incest, betrayal, lots of furious family drama – particularly when the acting is this good, but the direction is noticeably terrible, and the film is frustrating throughout for its misplaced perspectives, and almost total lack of a point of view.

Bad Grandpa s also a big ol' nasty mess, and it will probably give you exactly what you expect. In truth, it gave me much more than I was expecting. This movie is hilarious. I did the movie up right and went with three straight guys. You should probably also have a beer or two before going. But if you're ready to laugh, Bad Grandpa will not disappoint. The bits are hilarious – even the tired ones. And my companions and I found ourselves anticipating with relish the ridiculous stuff they were going to do. Oh no, oh my lord, no way, we would say to one another, and then slap each other and laugh hysterically. At more than one point the laughter actually took over and we were all a little out of control. This is totally unbridled absurdity at its most shameless.

Blogging Elsewhere

I have done / am doing a set of interviews of my colleagues over at Endstation Theatre for their website. So far the interviews of Aaron Farr and Krista Franco have been posted and many more are to come.

The interviews are not really about art as such or theatre, either, but more about how we work together and why we are all spending so much time working for this company. They are pretty great, though, and I am proud of them.

On Dramaturgy

Recently, a student of a friend and colleague of mine emailed me to ask me (in my role as a working dramaturge) some questions about dramaturgy. I know this will not be to all of my readers' tastes, but I thought her questions were interesting, and we all know how difficult it is to explain what exactly a dramaturge does. When ever anyone talks to me about dramaturgy, I find myself invariably asking but what is dramaturgy? Here are my answers. Take them for what you will.

1. I know that dramaturgs often help in script-selection, clarifying confusion amongst the cast, and sometimes even writing plays.  That said, when a production is in progress, what do you do from day to day? When sitting in on a rehearsal, what jobs are you expected to perform?

The answer to this question depends on what I am working on.

Answer A: when I'm working on a new play, I am constantly making suggestions about ways a scene would work better, different orders for scenes, and structural issues like that. I often am in constant communication with the playwright, telling her what I think a certain scene does for her play dramaturgically. It often happens that a playwright needs to cut time from a show; in those cases I can usually advise what can easily be cut or combined in order to trim the running time.

Answer B: when I'm working on a very old play like one from the 17th or 18th century, I often do just as much (and very similar) work, except that my primary communication is with the director instead of the playwright. Often a director has cut the text very heavily and so it is my job to make sure that the play still makes sense, to offer alternative cuts, sometimes rewrite entire scenes. I once did a production of She Stoops to Conquer where the director had cut the entire explanation for a character's arrival. We rehearsed this way for weeks and then a week before the show opened he decided it didn't make any sense. But he didn't want to add back in the entire sequence we needed. I took the original sequence, trimmed it so that included just enough lines to explain the character's entrance, and then tacked it on to a different scene. A dramaturge can be really useful for these kinds of things.

Answer C: When I am working on a relatively recent but not new show (say Rent or Big River) often I am only asked to do research as the cast or director or costumer need it. To me this work is really tedious and only rarely fun. I often have to work really hard to make these projects enjoyable for myself, but I usually do! Most of the time, I feel like these shows need very little work from a dramaturge. I usually don't visit rehearsals for these very often after the read-through. What they tend to need the most is pronunciation help or explaining particularly difficult lines or references. For Rent I made a long glossary of the words in the show. For Big River I re-read Huckleberry Finn so that I'd get all the references in the musical. I ended up being helpful on both shows, but much less helpful than I would be with a much older or much newer show.

2. Conversely, what sort of non-daily duties are you expected to complete? Do you create programs? Display cases? Little paper hats for the cast to wear at fancy dress parties?

With all of the shows I work on, I am generally designated as "the smart person in the room" about the show. This means that I write program notes, collaborate with marketing on advertising copy, go to public interviews about the show, proof-read the program, attend production meetings so that I can answer costume/prop questions, etc. If I ever had to make a display case I would probably ask why a designer wasn't doing it, since I have few design abilities. For me, though, all of this outside work is really fun. I love giving interviews or blogging. I see this as creating an atmosphere in which more people can understand and enjoy more things about the show. An example: here's a blog post that explains to audience members why a production of Macbeth on which I recently worked was so heavily adapted, and here's a kind of promotional item related to Big River. These kinds of things are designed simply to enhance the experience of the show for those who read this kind of stuff (more people than you'd think – mostly older audience members). They can give more access to more people about the nuances and fabulous hidden gems in a production.

3. I have read that sometimes there is contention between directors, designers, and dramaturgs, sometimes coming from resentment over the chain of command and people’s ideas being ignored because of it. Is this true? How do you handle it?

Any dramaturge who is having tension or feeling resentment is not doing her job correctly. There are not right ways of looking at a text or right ways of performing a text. Directors and designers are trying things and it is a dramaturge's job to make those attempts smarter, better, and clearer. But fundamentally a dramaturge is working for those people and their artistic (not academic) visions. I have never felt tension like this on a piece on which I've worked. The show is not the dramaturge's show. The dramaturge works for the company, primarily the director. It is not my job to be irritated that the director didn't take my suggestion (however intelligent they might be). My advice to anyone feeling annoyed or ignored is that a dramaturge ought to know her place. The hierarchy is set. This can be freeing and wonderful – at least it is for me.

4. I have also read that sometimes dramaturgs get into the field expecting to transition away from it at some point and move into directing or writing. Did you get into dramaturgy with the expectation of doing it for the rest of your life? Do you find it to be fulfilling?

Well, I am not primarily a dramaturge, although it is my primary artistic outlet at this point. I can't imagine that dramaturgy is anyone's primary work at this point in United States theatre history. Most dramaturges are academics or critics, as well, and many are directors and playwrights. I work mainly as an academic and do dramaturgy work as I want to – when projects arise in which I am interested or when playwrights ask me to work with them on a new production. One cannot really have a career in dramaturgy, though. Very few theatres are paying full-time dramaturges. You have to do other things, as well. (Most actors do other work in addition to their theatre work, too. As do directors, designers, and stage managers just beginning their careers.)

5. As part of my project, I am serving as dramaturg for my college’s production of Lysistrata. Unfortunately, I have not felt needed by the production team. Do you have any tips on what I can do to be useful?

I do have some tips. Go to rehearsals. Go to all of them. And listen carefully. See what the actors need help with. Many of them will not know specific Greek references. Look them up for them and pass them to them quietly. My advice is to try to help as quietly as possible, drawing as little attention to yourself as possible. Can you see that the director is struggling with interpreting a specific section? Find a different translation for him or her and see if that makes it any easier.
Often when I am not needed or don't feel needed I check out. This is okay too. But remember that often directors and designers don't know how to use a dramaturge. You have to demonstrate your own usefulness: not by telling them you are useful, but by being useful and getting them information that they need.

6. I am interested in studying dramaturgy in the future, but am planning on taking some time off before applying to graduate school. Do you have any tips on what types of programs I should apply to in this time? Any specific groups you want to name drop?

Others will disagree with me, but I say: do not get an MFA in dramaturgy. Don't do it. Instead, intern as a literary manager or a dramaturge in as many places as possible. I would also recommend choosing to get an MA in theatre instead of getting an MFA in dramaturgy. As I noted, there are no full-time dramaturgy jobs out there. They simply don't exist. So that means that schools that are producing MFAs in dramaturgy are producing people who actually cannot get jobs. Almost every MFA in dramaturgy I know has gone on to get a PhD, but if you're gonna do that, then an MFA in dramaturgy is not the best prep for a PhD: an MA is the best prep for a PhD. I hope this doesn't sound too dour, but instead of going to school, if you want to work in dramaturgy, start working for theatres.

7. A recurring theme that I come across in my research is that there seems to be some contention over what exactly a dramaturg does or what dramaturgy is. Dramaturgs working with different companies may perform different tasks and may have differing philosophies on the job. To you, what is dramaturgy?

First off, dramaturgy is a word I most commonly use to describe how a play works: the play's dramaturgy – its structure, its genre, its formal elements, etc. These are the way the play is made. I also use the word to describe how certain writers make plays: I might say Euripides's dramaturgy, for example, or Ibsen's dramaturgy. I note this because I think dramaturgy describes how people make plays. (The word dramaturge in French means playwright.) So when I think of what I do as a dramaturge, I think of myself as the person who understands how the play works. When I work on a show, I make sure that I know how the thing ticks. Many of my directors have described me as the "defender of the text", and I like this description, as well. If we think of dramaturgy in this fashion, it means something like the person who knows the most about the text of the play and can help it be as clear as possible. Often, of course, I change a lot of words. I did a production of Hamlet set in the American Civil War: we changed all sorts of words so that the play fit in our new setting. Truthfully, this is not defending the text, though, right? This is more like helping the director make the text make more sense for his vision.

When I work on a show I want to be the smartest person in the room so that I can be the most helpful to the largest number of people. This means that I want to know all the answers. The way I do this is by making sure I've asked all the questions. When I go through a play like Macbeth I highlight every line I don't understand and make sure I do understand it before we rehearse it. When I go through a play like Rent I try to imagine every single question an actor could possibly ask. (When was AZT on the market? What is Bustelo? How far is Santa Fe from the Lower East Side of Manhattan? What on earth is a yellow rental truck packed with fertilizer and fuel oil??)

When I work on a new play, I try to get into the playwright's head. What does his/her play have to say? What are the questions his/her play might provoke in an audience? What kinds of feelings does it provoke in me? Most importantly: what other plays does this new play remind me of?

8. Would you eat green eggs and ham?

As a treat, my dad often added food coloring to our scrambled eggs on Saturdays. Green was a favorite option of me and my siblings. Green eggs and ham are delicious!

Pinkface?

Speaking of Tony Kushner, the school that currently employs me as a visiting lecturer recently did a production of Kushner's epic Pulitzer prize-winning 1992 play Angels in America: a Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Part 1 - Millennium Approaches. This was a couple of weeks ago and I've been trying to think for a while about how to talk about my experience while watching this production.

The production was beautifully designed, but (to be frank about things) it didn't work. I was watching these lovely kids up there laboring with difficulty to make the play make sense, but... it was clear that they didn't get it.

And the director probably didn't either.

It was also really clear just how straight the audience was when I found myself the only one laughing as Prior said Come back, little Sheba!

But I had an even stronger reaction to this as the play continued. This isn't theirs, I thought. There is something actually wrong about watching these kids do this play. They don't understand it because it isn't for them, or rather, it isn't about them. This is not theirs.

The implication here is, of course, that Angels in America is somehow mine, and that I have more entrée into the play than undergraduates who will be taking their degrees between 2013 and 2016. And the more I think about it, the more true I think that is – as laughable as that sounds.

It is because these kids aren't gay. They're up there on the stage playing gay characters, which is (I am sure they think) very admirable and brave and all, but the more I watched the more wrong the whole thing felt. A friend of mine said to me after the show that she imagined it must've been like watching actors in brownface or blackface, and I think she's right. It did feel like that.

The thing is, this happens all of the time on television and in the movies. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger play gay and Philip Seymour Hoffman plays gay and I don't give it a second thought. But most of the films and television programs where gay characters are played by straight actors are written by straight writers and helmed by straight directors. These representations don't feel as though they belong to my culture in any serious way. (Brokeback Mountain isn't a gay film in my mind. It's a film for straight people made by straight people. I would call Noah's Arc or Gayby or Elephant or Weekend gay cultural productions: representations made by gay people for gay people.) And so it doesn't usually offend me to see a straight actor playing a gay character on Will & Grace or The Wire or whatever. We have our own images; it doesn't matter much if they also want to create images of us. (Transamerica is a notable, offensive, exception.)

But Angels in America is different. This was the great gay epic of the early 1990s. The play's characters are gay, their humor is gay – even the straight female character's humor is campily queer – and it is about the actual history of gay men, including legendary homophobe and homophile Roy Marcus Cohn. And I understand this is an androcentric post; it is so necessarily. And I am sure that I am not taking many other important things into consideration here. I am equally sure that I have no interest in articulating a program for some kind of "correct" representation of gay men.

All I am saying is that watching these straight boys up on stage going through their gay paces felt sacrilegious to me. I've never felt this way before, but I expect that this will not be the last time.

Introduction to "A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness"

On Monday, I got to introduce a talk given by one of my heroes, Cherríe Moraga, at Dartmouth College. The most satisfying thing about something like this, is being able to tell someone whose work I truly admire, just how much I admire it. Getting to say it in front of a lot of people is just a bonus:

The first piece of writing I read by Cherríe Moraga was a play called Watsonville: Some Place Not Here. It is a theatre piece about a group of people fighting to survive in Central California, a workers’ strike in a cannery, and a vision, perhaps of the Virgen de Guadalupe, who appears to the protagonist in the trees. I was assigned the play for a course on documentary theatre and after I finished it, I immediately read another one: this entitled A Circle in the Dirt: el Pueblo de East Palo Alto. As a theatre artist, my connection to the work was immediate: here was a writer who took the forms of U.S. American theatrical realism and pushed them out the window. This theatre took the notion of the Epic that theatre-people call “Brechtian” and told stories about California, about the people who work and make their homes there; this theatre represented these Chicano lives in an epic fashion, the main characters in a history of a land on which great struggles have taken place. Moraga’s plays, which also include Shadow of a Man, Giving Up the Ghost, Heroes and Saints, and the widely anthologized The Hungry Woman: a Mexican Medea, have consistently and relentlessly pushed the limits of the U.S. American theatre: toward ritual, toward pedagogy, toward an acknowledgement of its own colonizing history. But if my excitement for the formal novelty of these dramas was intellectual, their spiritual resonance for me was primarily linguistic. Because I grew up a gringo, I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish at home, but I also grew up in Los Angeles, so I grew up hearing Spanish, or to be more accurate, I grew up hearing Spanish and English fluidly spoken together – as though they were one language whose words were interchangeable. In other words, Cherríe Moraga’s plays felt like home to me, like I was hearing the story of the land where I was grown in the language I knew it spoke.

Moraga insists upon the importance of speaking in her own tongue. “Spanish words,” as she notes in an introduction to her new book, “are neither translated nor italicized” in her writing “in order to reflect a bilingual Xicana sensibility.” This is an insistence on the materiality of presence, a demand for the recognition of a person on her own terms. It is an artistic, as well as a political, strategy – one that fights what Gloria Anzaldúa described as linguistic terrorism. “If a person” she says in Borderlands/La Frontera, “has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a low estimation of me.” Moraga’s writings are openly defiant of this linguistic terrorism, combating it with a mouth she once called “too big to close.”

In 1981, the first edition of the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color appeared. This 250-page volume, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, has become the formative text for countless feminists, queers, and people who wanted radically to reconsider their own nation. I, like many of my friends and colleagues, return to this volume often. And I always find in its pages a set of extraordinary challenges: a call to fight the racism inside myself, inside each of us; a call for me to acknowledge the unearned privilege conferred on me by whiteness; a call for the recognition of the desiring and desired lesbian body; a call for me actively to identify as woman, as queer, as feminist. Moraga’s poetry and prose are filled with challenges such as these: provocations, ruminations, and identifications that declare a fierce lesbian positionality that is bonded to a powerful Chicana spirit, and that, in her more recent writings, have turned toward the recognition of the brevity of life, the difficulties of teaching revolution to a child, and a profound re-vision of earthbound temporalities and chronologies. Her collections Loving in the War Years and The Last Generation are intensely personal: to read them is to feel as though one knows Cherríe Moraga intimately, so bare does she lay her own fears and desires to her readers, so honestly does she report her own pettinesses, her quickness to anger, the silences she wishes she had managed to defeat.

For over a decade, Moraga has served as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Drama at Stanford University, currently sharing a joint appointment with Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, where she teaches courses in creative writing, Xicana-Indigenous performance, Latino/queer performance, Indigenous identity in Diaspora in the arts, and playwriting. Her pedagogy, as well as her extraordinary body of artistic work, puts into practice the collectivity and community that it espouses politically. Moraga’s essays are liberally peppered with the names of friends, comadres, artists, and students, whom she cites as inspirations or teachers, fellow travelers who were able to give her an outlook or perspective that she hadn’t before seen. In Moraga’s work, these are not academic citations, they are practical acknowledgements that anything that we might call “success” – in activism, art, familia, and even academia – does not happen in a vacuum. Her work makes clear the responsibility that together we share for the world.

And the work of Cherríe Moraga has literally changed the field: of women and gender studies, of critical race theory, of gay and lesbian studies, of queer theory, and of the American theatre. Today’s talk is co-sponsored and made possible with funding and collaboration from: the Leslie Center for the Humanities; the Women & Gender Studies Program; Interdisciplinary Studies; Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies; the Office of the Dean of Humanities; The Department of Theater; the Comparative Literature Program; the Native American Studies Program; the Department of English; the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center: and the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost as part of Dartmouth's Year of the Arts initiative, in collaboration with the Dean of the Faculty.

The range and number of institutions who sponsored today’s event is a testament to the remarkable, lasting, and continuing impact her work has had in all of our disciplines, and I am now both honored and humbled to welcome to the lectern: Cherríe Moraga.

Furniture Music

I've been thinking about furniture music.

A dear friend of mine and I were having a conversation about his artistic work over at the American Laboratory. I had this vision of their new installation happening and the artistic director running around telling people not to listen to the words, but to keep on drinking their alcoholic beverages.

That is what furniture music is.

It's kind of an important moment in theatre history and in modernist art. I mentioned it to a colleague at work today, however, and he just looked at me blankly, so I thought I would share the story, though many of you probably have heard it before. It's an excellent one, told in Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years:

In March, 1920, the actor Pierre Bertin organized at Paul Poiret's fashionable Barbazange gallery a concert of music by les Six, songs by Stravinsky, and a play by Max Jacob. The walls were covered by a show of children's paintings entitled "Les Belles Promesses". At the start of the first intermission in the play, Bertin presented Satie's and Milhaud's new discovery: "musique d'ameublement" or furniture music.

We urgently beg you not to attach any importance to it and to act during intermission as if the music did not exist. Specially written for Max Jacob's play (always the ruffian; never a bum), it hopes to contribute to life the way a casual conversation does, or a picture in the gallery, or a chair in which one is or is not seated.

When the audiences began to get up for the break, a piano and three clarinets, placed in the four corners of the room, plus a trombone on the mezzanine, struck up what sounded like popular ditties played over and over again in close rhythmical patterns. The audience began to take seats again. Satie rushed around the gallery exhorting them to appropriate behavior. "Talk, keep on talking. And move around. Whatever you do, don't listen!"

What's so funny about this story is that, of course, this is how we listen to music now. We listen to it as background at the gym, in the elevator, during intermissions, of course, but also at the grocery, in our cars, at the bar, while we do the vacuuming. In 1920 this was not the case and Satie, as usual, was far ahead of his time. It is the extraordinary achievement of artists like Satie (I don't dare call him a dada, but couldn't I?) to make art into something to which we don't pay attention. To elevate the quotidian to the level of art by demanding that music not be listened to, by asserting, in fact, that art itself was just as important as a conversation with a friend.

The Lady of the Camellias

To me, the play to begin with when teaching the representation of sex and sexuality in the theatre is La Dame aux Camélias or Camille by Alexandre Dumas fils. The reasons for this are many.

First, Camille's plot is the basis of all hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold plots. To name only the most famous: La Traviata, Moulin Rouge, Pretty Woman, and Rent all owe their plots to Camille's narrative.

Second, Camille's attitude toward sex is a complicated one. The play loves its heroine, Marguerite Gautier. She is a big ol' whore and the play has a great time sharing with the audience the pleasure of being a whore. And then, of course, the heroine must die. She is punished for her sexuality at the same time as the play itself cashes in on that sexuality. It's an extraordinary dramaturgical move that, frankly, I am not even sure Dumas fils knows he is making.

What I really love about the play, though, is Dumas fils's absolutely sparkling dialogue and wit. Take for example, the play's first scene. Marguerite enters to find the Baron de Varville (who is, basically, a whiner) waiting for her to come home, as he always does. As she enters, the Baron complains:

Varville: Is it not my fate to be always waiting for you?
Marguerite: Is it my fate never to come in without finding you here?
Varville: Is it my fault that I love you?
Marguerite: My dear friend, if I were to listen to all the people who are in love with me, I should have no time for dinner. I allow you to come here at any hour when I am at home and to wait for me whenever I am out, but if you will persist in talking of nothing but your love, I must withdraw my friendship.
Varville: And yet, Marguerite, last year at Bagnères, you did give me a little hope.
Marguerite: My dear, that was at Bagnères, when I was ill and bored; this is Paris—I am much better and not at all bored.

Later in the scene, Marguerite is told that a new character, Armand Duval – whom she has just met – visited her every day for a year when she was ill but never left his name. She calls to him across the room and uses this occasion to further beat down the Baron de Varville:

Marguerite: M. Duval, do you know what I have just been hearing? That you called to enquire after me every day when I was ill.
Armand: It is quite true.
Marguerite: Then the least I can do is thank you. Did you hear that, Varville? You never did that for me, did you?
Varville: I've only known you for a year.
Marguerite: Don't be silly. This young gentleman has only known me five minutes.

At any rate, I adore her and find the play delightful.

A Prayer, Perhaps

As flippant as I occasionally am about violence, it is a huge part of my life. I spend my days reading about violence and thinking about violence, and (increasingly) my nights dreaming about it. Currently, I am teaching a course on Violence, Ethics & Representation at FSU. I have assigned theatre pieces to my students that I think approach violence in interesting ways, and we have spent so far – and will spend in the weeks to come – many hours discussing the ways violence is represented and how the theatre can ethically represent violence, genocide, torture, atrocity.

This week was designed to be part of a module about ritualistic drama for our contemporary moment. Without really thinking about this other connection, I assigned two plays about genocide: Cecilia Parkert's play Witness about the genocide during the 1990s in Srebrenica, and Erik Ehn's play Maria Kizito about the Rwandan genocide (also in the 1990s).

Today we spoke in class about Maria Kizito and I asked my students to talk about the end of the play. Near the play's close, Maria Kizito, a nun who was responsible for the deaths of seven thousand people, speaks the following prayer/elegy:

I have done what I was told. I have been told wrong things.

I have imagined terrible things.

I have behaved as if the world and my imagination were real, as real as each other.

I have straddled wealth; walked over the dead.

I have failed to envy the dead.

I have treated the past as if it were real, instead of the past.

I have hidden in fear instead of hiding in God.

This century is a few centuries long.

This century is an account of holes.

This century is a hill, no matter which way you walk: downhill.

This century is an abdominal wall too weak to hold up the intestines.

This century is skin carved instead of stone,

stone carved instead of soil,

soil carved instead of soul,

soul butchered instead of sacrifice,

sacrifice offered rather than known,

knowledge rather than heaven,

heaven rather than God,

God idolized rather than God,

God rather than God.

I was glad I had asked one of the students to read it, because I couldn't get through it without crying.

I said in class that this piece of the play seems to me to be a kind of vision of the ways in which we fall short of what we ought to do, a series of images that depict our inability to make the world into the kind of place it could be. And I see it, too, as a kind of apology, a mourning but also a repentance for what we have made of our humanity. This century is a few centuries long. I am sorry if this is a little bleak for a Thursday, but I have been spending a lot of time with the worst of human behavior and it is weighing very heavily on me these days.

Tales from Teaching

Teaching Aristotle's Poetics today in my text analysis class, my students and I had the following exchange:

Aaron: So Aristotle says that tragedy is an imitation of an action. That is, a mīmēsis of a praxis. From praxis we get our words practice, of course, and practical. And from mīmēsis we get our word...?

Luis: Mimosa.

Aaron: ...

The Plague

I do not often think about what I want the theatre to do. At least anymore. The last full-length play I directed was over two years ago and it accomplished exactly what I wanted it to do, but I am not a director at our School of Theatre (nor would I wish to be). At any rate, I am usually busy thinking about how the theatre works, what it is trying to do, and I only rarely think about what I would want it to do were I in charge in some way.

And yet... I assigned sections from Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its Double to the students on Tuesday and I find reading Artaud so exciting! I assigned him to them because of his theories about how watching violence can impact the spectator, but it is his theories about the theatre itself and its capabilities which I find the most invigorating.

In his discussion of the plague, 
for instance, Artaud says:
The state of the victim who dies without material destruction, with all the stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease upon him, is identical with the state of an actor entirely penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition. Everything in the physical aspect of the actor, as in that of the victim of the plague, shows that life has reacted to the paroxysm, and yet nothing has happened.

The theater, like the plague, is a delirium and it is communicative.

The theater restores us all our dormant conflicts and all their powers.

If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are localized.

Like the plague the theater is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction.

And he has the audacity to conclude that:

All the great Myths are dark, so that one cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation.
The theater, like the plague, is in the image of this carnage and this essential separation. It releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theater but of life.

 
And if Artaud is fond of what he calls cruelty, it is because, like the theatre itself, cruelty is excessive, unnecessary, gratuitous.

Thomas Richards

Thomas Richards and the Grotowski Workcenter are visiting my school right now and I have been really excited by their work, though most of my colleagues seem skeptical (and some of the younger, more arrogant ones downright hostile). I attended a series of workshops last weekend, where observers were able to watch some of the work Richards and his company are doing, and in which some students participated. This morning I attended a talk of sorts where Richards answered audience questions. I asked one about the significance of the feet to his work.

I found his answers to my question exciting. The work they are doing in Pontedera holds my interest in a way that fascinates me. It is as though the work they do asks me to remember my own body, an activity I do not often practice, or at least one I have practiced a lot less since about 2004/05.

There has been a lot of skepticism on the part of my colleagues about the preciousness of the work, the way that its practitioners hold it in this almost mystical regard. And it doesn't help that Grotowski himself speaks about (and I quote) the ancient Mysteries with a capital M.

But for me the Workcenter's practices have meant something else. Richards answered my question about the significance of feet in the work by speaking about a certain way of walking where the body bends forward and as I raise my leg up I bring it into my body and I make my body smaller. Then he began to describe this making smaller as a kind of giving up or giving in. I think he means a surrender, an abdication of the significance of individual subjectivity. But the walk that Richards described also involved getting back up, right? Because in order to walk, I have to raise my leg (give up) but then I also must make myself erect again so that I can raise the other leg. Richards described it this way:

I give up. And I stand.

As you probably know if you read my writing in this space with any frequency, this task of making myself smaller, trying to make my own individual subjecthood less important to myself, is something I think about often. So Richards' work really resonates with me on this level. So much of it is about communal sharing and responding instead of leading.

He also said this really cool thing about working with a company: It's hard to work without anybody watching you.

He grinned, and then he elaborated in this way:
Because there is no enemy (the audience) the enemy is in the team. And the group must constantly work to neutralize that. An external force like an audience absorbs the negative energy between the group members, and then we can get back to working as a group.

I've never heard this put so intelligently. But he is obviously correct. A glance at any documentation of a group that works together for a long time makes that abundantly clear.
(André Gregory's Alice in Wonderland, for example)

In a way, writing is the same. It is easy to criticize myself in my work, to get frustrated with the same old sentences and ideas, but once I send it out to another reader, get a little feedback, a response, a note or two, the negative energy dissipates and I am able to return to my writing again. I had no idea it was going to, but ATHE did this for me this summer... and I came back to Tallahassee and wrote 50 pages!

All of this Grotowski work, however, makes me really re-think my life-path, I have to confess. I'm not quitting the PhD or anything, but physical practice was such a huge part of my life for so many years, and watching these folks at work makes me definitely miss my own immersion in these practices.