Marissabidilla

"God's Plot" at Shotgun Players: Backstage drama, back in the day

2012-01-18T23:38:00.000-08:00

God's Plot, Mark Jackson's new play at Shotgun Players, features several elements that, in recalling some of my favorite plays, are guaranteed to appeal to me. There's the backstage-drama storyline about the first English settlers of a vast continent, producing the first piece of theater ever performed there (shades of Our Country's Good). There's an intelligent and strong-willed teenage girl with a crush on her handsome tutor (shades of Arcadia). There's a Colonial American story that intentionally resonates with present-day concerns (shades of The Crucible). There's a scene where several aspiring theater-makers persuade a tapster to let them perform rent-free in his tavern, because "you'll sell a lot of beer" (shades of San Francisco Theater Pub).

Add in a beautifully designed set, live banjo- and-bass music, and dynamic and inventive staging (also by Jackson), and you have a production that I enjoyed very much.

According to the historical record, the first play to be performed in America was an original satire, Ye Bare and Ye Cubb, written by one William Darby, depicting England as a greedy mother bear refusing to share honey with America, her cub. The script has not survived, and it seems that the main reason we know of this play is due to court records: the playwright and actors were tried for sedition and blasphemy. This all took place in 1665, in a small, conservative village in Virginia.

God's Plot has fun imagining what Ye Bare and Ye Cubb might have looked like (complete with a funny/gruesome bear-baiting finale) and with making theater in-jokes. But it also explores deeper themes that began in the colonial era and have continued to shape our country: our simultaneous desire for and fear of liberty; debates about the role of God and religion in public life; the contrast between the noble ideals we espouse in public and the petty self-interest that motivates us in private.

One can assume that, in the historical record, most of the people mentioned in connection with Ye Bare and Ye Cubb are men: the playwright, the actors, the tavern owner, the sheriff, the person who brought the suit to court, the local judge who presided over the trial, the Jamestown official who came to observe. But Jackson has decided to tell this story from the perspective of a young woman: Tryal Pore, the judge's daughter. "I have an eye on this town / Got my ear to the ground," Tryal sings (she narrates the show through song, the only character to address the audience in this way). She observes the controversy aroused by the production of Darby's play and will do anything she can to be part of it.

I read one review that criticized the portrayal of Tryal for her anachronistically modern/feminist attitudes. Usually this sort of anachronism bothers me, too, but it didn't here. I thought the play provided a convincing-enough explanation for where Tryal gets her freethinking ways: she's been influenced by Darby, her tutor. Moreover, she's not espousing women's liberation or any kind of organized political viewpoint, which I would find hard to believe. Instead, she's criticizing her parents' hypocrisy and hoping for a roll in the hay (literally) with a hot guy -- in other words, she's acting like a hormonal teenager. And maybe it's anachronistic to claim that teenagers 350 years ago had the same drives as teenagers today. But I am inclined to believe that fundamentally, human nature remains the same from century to century. The religious leaders of the 1600s wouldn't have fretted so much about "sin" and "fornication" if they weren't deeply afraid that the young people of their community secretly wanted to sex each other up. (And of course, when you demonize fornication as much as the Puritans did, you only make it seem more alluring.) Plus, America, especially colonial and frontier America, has often been thought of as an adolescent territory -- brash and restless and rebellious. In that regard, it makes excellent sense that the central character of God's Plot possesses all those traits.

God's Plot continues at Shotgun Players through January 29. Tickets here.

Photo by Pak Han. L-R: Kevin Clarke (Judge Pore), Fontana Butterfield (Mrs. Pore), Juliana Lustenader (Tryal Pore), Josh Pollock (Banjo).

One-Minute Play Festival Video

2012-01-10T22:53:00.000-08:00

One more bit of housekeeping from 2011: I always meant to post the video of the San Francisco One-Minute Play Festival on New Play TV. Here you go!

Watch live streaming video from newplay at livestream.com

My plays are "Forgiven," which starts at 1:06:30 on the video, and "Excuse Me," at 1:35:20. "Excuse Me" was the third-from-last (or antepenultimate) play of the whole evening, followed by Lauren Gunderson's hilarious "One-Minute Musical" and Philip Kan Gotanda's capstone "Perfect Imperfect." I was honored to be in their company.

I really wish the show's program was available online so that you could follow along with it while watching, but if you have a question about who wrote or acted in some of the other plays, feel free to ask in my comments section and I will try to assist you.

Theatergoing 2011

2012-01-08T20:47:00.000-08:00

Today, I went to the theater for the first time in 2012 (saw The Wild Bride at Berkeley Rep) so it is high time I post my 2011 theatergoing list and put the old year to rest!

(My 2010 list, for comparison)

FULL PRODUCTIONS

Short Attention Span Shorts, by John Ashworth at San Francisco Theater Pub
Bone to Pick & Diadem, by Eugenie Chan at Cutting Ball
The Matter of Things by Christine Bonansea and Wake-up Call by Leigh Shaw at the Women on the Way Festival
Clybourne Park, by Bruce Norris at ACT
What We're Up Against, by Theresa Rebeck at Magic Theatre
Hermes by Bennett Fisher, produced by No Nude Men
Bay One-Acts, Program Two, by various local writers
Lady Grey (in ever lower light) and Other Plays, by Will Eno, at Cutting Ball
Bay One-Acts, Program One, by various local writers
Ruined, by Lynn Nottage, at Berkeley Rep
Beardo, by Jason Craig and Dave Malloy, at Shotgun Players
M. Butterfly, by David Henry Hwang, at Custom Made Theatre
The Lily's Revenge, by Taylor Mac, at Magic Theatre (seen twice-- follow-up post here)
The Cripple of Inishmaan, by Martin McDonagh, produced by the Druid Theater at Cal Performances
The Boar's Head, adapted from Shakespeare, at San Francisco Theater Pub
Edenites, by Stuart Bousel, produced by No Nude Men
Juno en Victoria, by Stuart Bousel, produced by Wily West
Tales of the City: A New Musical by Jeff Whitty and Jake Shears, at ACT
Act One, Scene Two: Machine of Death, by Ryan North, David Malki! and Un-Scripted Theater
Salty Towers, by Bryce Alleman, Dana Constance, and Kathy Hicks, produced by Thunderbird Theatre
Act One, Scene Two: Kids and Dolls, by Diana Di Costanzo and Un-Scripted Theater
Act One, Scene Two: Manifestation, by Marissa Skudlarek and Un-Scripted Theater
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Lost My Virginity, by Aileen Clark with John Caldon, produced by Ann Marie Productions
Twelfth Night, by Shakespeare, produced by AtmosTheatre
Peaches en Regalia, by Steve Lyons, produced by Wily West
Pint-Sized Plays 2011, by various local writers, at San Francisco Theater Pub
The Nature Line, by J. C. Lee, produced by Sleepwalkers Theatre
2012: The Musical, by San Francisco Mime Troupe
Exit Pursued by a Bear, by Lauren Gunderson, produced by Crowded Fire
Why We Have a Body, by Claire Chafee, at Magic Theatre
Phaedra, by Adam Bock, at Shotgun Players
Devil of a Time, by Bennett Fisher, Kai Morrison and Sara Briendel, at San Francisco Theater Pub
Annapurna, by Sharr White, at Magic Theatre
Pelleas and Melisande, by Maurice Maeterlinck, at Cutting Ball
How to Love, by Megan Cohen, produced by Performers Under Stress
Ladies in Waiting, by Claire Rice, Alison Luterman and Hilde Susan Jaegtnes, produced by No Nude Men
San Francisco One-Minute Plays Festival, by various local writers
Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, by Tony Kushner, at Portland Playhouse

STAGED READINGS

The Braggart Soldier, by Plautus, at Cutting Ball's Hidden Classics
Personal Politics, readings of historical speeches, at San Francisco Theater Pub
The Dragon, by Evgeny Shvarts, at Theater Pub
The False Suitor, by Marivaux, at Cutting Ball's Hidden Classics
Congresswomen, by Aristophanes, at Theater Pub
Madame Ho, by Eugenie Chan, at Cutting Ball's Risk is This
Ozma of Oz, by Rob Melrose and ZONK, at Cutting Ball's Risk is This
The Insect Play, by Karl and Josef Capek, at Cutting Ball's Hidden Classics
Joyce's Voice, adapted from James Joyce by Megan Cohen, at San Francisco Theater Pub
The Hanging Odes, adapted by Kate Jopson, at San Francisco Theater Pub
Remaking Pussycat, by William Bivins, at SF Playhouse
Ludlow Fair and Home Free, by Lanford Wilson, at Theater Pub
Heracles and the Things He's Killed, by Bryce Alleman, Dana Constance, Kathy Hicks, Sang Kim and Kai Morrison, at the San Francisco Olympians Festival
Joe Ryan by Megan Cohen, Dog Days by Claire Rice, and Scorpio by Seanan Palmero, at the Olympians Festival
Perseus by Bryce Duzan, Pegasus by Daniel Heath, Andromeda Bound by Helen Noakes, Cassiopeia by Christian Simonson, and Cepheus by Kirk Shimano, at the Olympians Festival
Walking the Starry Path, by Evelyn Jean Pine, at the Olympians Festival
Chronus, by Bennett Fisher, at the Olympians Festival
Hyperion to a Satyr by Stuart Bousel, Eos by Kendra Arimoto, and Nyx by David Duman, at the Olympians Festival
October 2011 PlayGround (topic: "Icon"), by various local writers
Gemini, or Jim and I, or the Comedy of Veras, by Tom Darter, at the Olympians Festival
Hesperus is Phosphorus by Claire Rice, Eosphorus by Sean Kelly, Too Near the Sun by Jeremy Cole, Hard Pack by Lise Catherine Miller, Zephyrus by Neil Higgins, and Phaethon by Ashley Cowan, at the Olympians Festival
Pleiades, by Marissa Skudlarek, at the Olympians Festival
Selene, or Someone Like the Moon, by Nirmala Nataraj, at the Olympians Festival
Elara and Himalia by Alison Luterman, Leda by Kirk Shimano, Io by Christian Simonson, Europa by Claire Rice, Callisto by Seanan Palmero, Ganymede by Neil Higgins, and Metis by Maria Leigh, at the Olympians Festival
You're Going to Bleed, by M. R. Fall, at the Olympians Festival
Customs, by Brian Markley, at Theater Pub
A Super Special Theater Pub Christmas, at Theater Pub

In addition, I saw a few things that don't fit in these categories: L'etoile, a French opera performed by the Opera Academy of California; Roughin' It, a combination of picnic, oyster feast, and theater performances produced by PianoFight Productions; and Left Coast Leaning at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a showcase for West Coast dance and theater artists.

My own name appeared on several of the above programs: I acted in Congresswomen; wrote Manifestation, Pleiades, and two One-Minute Plays; served as associate producer for the Olympians Festival; and provided some script assistance on Customs.

I'm not creating a top-ten list this year, but if I did, The Lily's Revenge would be at the top. Is it ungrateful of me to put that as my #1 theater experience of 2011, and not the Olympians Festival? Well, my participation in Olympians taught me a lot, and in terms of the time and energy I devoted to it, it dominated my year. But the lessons I learned from Olympians were practical lessons about being a better playwright and theater-maker. The Festival kept me busy sometimes late into the night, but it did not haunt my dreams. The Lily's Revenge, though, hit me on a subconscious level, leaving me "humbled, confused, awed, moved, and inspired." At odd moments, still, I will find myself recalling and contemplating it, so that the blossom does not wilt, so that the seeds it planted within me may have a chance to germinate and flower.

2011 in Books

2012-01-02T23:33:00.000-08:00

I feel like I read less in 2011 than in other years. I certainly wrote fewer blog posts about books. And I've owned a copy of Sondheim's Look I Made a Hat for six weeks now but still haven't finished it, which is why it's not on this list. Oh, and I seem to have read only books by white men during the latter part of 2011.

Enough guilt and self-flagellation. Moving on. I tried a new way of counting books this year, with one list for "Longer Works" (primarily novels and nonfiction) and a separate list for individual plays. I averaged 2 "longer works" and 2 plays per month -- 23 Longer Works and 28 plays total. Please also note that I counted only plays that have been published and that you could purchase and read for yourself if you wished. I read several new/unpublished plays this year (either written by my playwriting friends, or submitted to a playwriting contest that I was helping to judge), but it's not fair to list them on my blog.

LONGER WORKS:

1. Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith. Highly recommended.

2. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, by Lydia Davis. Or should I count this as four books, as it is four volumes of short stories now being compiled into one? Seven hundred pages of minimalist short fiction is a lot, despite the critical acclaim, and perhaps one would be better served reading it as four separate volumes.

3. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill. I don't feel like getting involved in the literary-aesthetic battle that Zadie Smith started after writing a critical piece on this novel,

4. Prague, by Arthur Phillips (2nd read). I read this book when I was in high school, due to the good reviews and my fascination with Eastern European history, but I enjoy it even more now, when I, like the characters, am a confused twenty-something. It is written with verve, has a lot of memorable set-piece passages, and inspired a game of Sincerity between me and some friends in a bar one night. Oh, and I just found a review that calls Prague "the literary equivalent of a Whit Stillman movie" -- so, naturally, I love it. Highly recommended.

5. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte (3rd read). Highly recommended.

6. Just Kids, by Patti Smith. While I probably would not have gone so far as to award this the National Book Award, I enjoyed it. Recommended.

7. The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian. Recommended.

8. The Egyptologist, by Arthur Phillips. This is how I like my "light" reading to be: cleverly constructed, laugh-out-loud funny, full of unreliable narrators, and with an unexpected emotional kick at the end. Recommended.

9. The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Recommended.

10. The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, by George Howe Colt. Recommended.

11. Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France, by Lucy Moore. This was a good read. I had never read a detailed history of the French Revolution and Moore provides a clear explanation of all of its major events: the storming of the Bastille, the Terror, and beyond. At the same time, her decision to view the Revolution from the perspective of six women from various social classes made it interesting for a feminist like me. Recommended.

12. Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor, by Tad Friend. More research into the lives and times of the American upper-crust! Not as good as The Big House, because it's less focused and written less lyrically. You can probably give this one a pass.

13. Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong (3rd read). This was one of my guilty-pleasure reads in high school and because I was writing a play set in the 1970s, that was enough of an excuse to reread it. While very dated in some ways, it still feels radical in the way that it portrays a woman who is highly sexual and enjoys intellectual pursuits and maintains a wry sense of humor about the absurdities of life. When I was a teenager, Fear of Flying reassured me that women who crack jokes about Chaucer and Sylvia Plath can still be sexy and get laid. And because of that, it was invaluable.

14. The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer. Read as part of my Pleiades research, and only valuable as a historical curiosity -- I don't remember much about it now.

15. Machine of Death, by Various. I attended the "Machine of Death"-themed performance by the Un-Scripted Theater Company in July and got a signed copy of the bestselling anthology of stories about what might happen if a machine was invented that could tell you how you are going to die. (I also received my own Machine of Death prediction: "Under Collapsing Shelf." Considering that I live in an earthquake zone and have too many books, this is depressingly likely.) The anthology was a decent read, but I'd had enough of it by the end (I won't be buying Machine of Death II) and the stories haven't really stayed with me.

16. Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays, by David Ball (re-read). There comes a moment, when I'm writing a full-length play, that I have to spend an evening and re-read this little book. Recommended for all theater-makers -- it is brief but full of wisdom.

17. Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, by John Crowley. I quite enjoyed this novel -- no surprise, as it is in the vein of Arcadia and Possession and I'm a huge fan of both those works. The frame story about the modern-day researchers is a bit predictable, but the pastiche of Byron's writing style is deftly done and very amusing. Recommended.

18. An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke. This comic novel got great reviews but I didn't find it funny or interesting at all. Not recommended.

19. The Extra Man, by Jonathan Ames. Mixed feelings: I get what Ames was trying to do, in updating the "New York bildungsroman" to fit our seedy and sexually confused times, and smuggling uncomfortable moments into a book that initially seems like it will be innocuous. But the result is episodic and didn't make me laugh. Or maybe I'm just annoyed that Ames invents a major character who is a failed playwright (Henry Harrison, the protagonist's eccentric roommate) but then has nothing interesting to say about the theater.

20. The Basic Eight, by Daniel Handler. Mixed feelings: this book was advertised as in the vein of The Secret History and Special Topics in Calamity Physics but I enjoyed it the least out of the three. The writing was flat in parts (there's a party scene that drags on way too long) and I wish the San Francisco setting had been better evoked.

21. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas père, translated by Richard Pevear. Fun! Recommended.

22. Papers for the Suppression of Reality, by Matt Werner. In one of those "only in San Francisco" moments, a few months ago I met one of the guys who was responsible for the Borges Google Doodle, and he gave me a copy of his self-published chapbook of Borges-inspired short fiction. The book is filled out with lots of McSweeney's-inspired literary high jinks. Geeky good fun, and inspired me to go back and reread some of the Borges stories referenced.

23. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris. Recommended. Harris writes with wit and insight about the demise of the studio system and Production Code, the beginnings of "New Hollywood," and the effects of the upheavals of the 1960s on moviemaking (for instance, several passages deal with Sidney Poitier's sensitive position as the only famous black actor in America). The book also offers valuable insights to anyone involved in a creative field, as we see just how much hard work is required and how many setbacks may occur before the work of art is completed. Even talented artists don't always get to make the movies they wish to make.

PLAYS:

1. Mirrors in Every Corner, by Chinaka Hodge. I loved this play when I saw it at Intersection for the Arts and was happy that Theatre Bay Area published it in their magazine.

2. Playboy of the Western World, by J. M. Synge. Related blog post here, about reading it aloud with theater friends. It is hilarious!

3. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, by Stephen Adly Guirguis. I enjoyed reading this but it felt like quite a long play -- perhaps too long to be staged effectively.

4. Congresswomen, by Aristophanes. Read in preparation for acting in Theater Pub's staged reading of this play in April 2011. We rocked the house in our togas and the audience had a great time laughing at jokes that are over 2000 years old.

5. Swanwhite, by August Strindberg. This lesser-known Strindberg play, with him in a gentle, symbolist, fairy-tale mode (probably influenced by Maeterlinck) was another play that we read aloud at the No Nude Men Salon.

6. Acharnians, by Aristophanes. I decided to work my way through my "Complete Plays of Aristophanes" volume and got about halfway through before determining that I had reached Aristophanes overload. I was reading the Paul Roche translations, and, while modern, they are kind of difficult to read. Roche has striven to reproduce the rhythms of Aristophanes' Greek and often needs to use odd vocabulary words in order to fit the rhythm. Thus, I feel like some punch-lines probably fall flat.

7. Knights, by Aristophanes

8. Clouds, by Aristophanes

9. Wasps, by Aristophanes

10. Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov (re-read). Another play read out loud with theater friends. I played Irina and gave an unexpectedly impassioned rendition of her Act III monologue where she laments being "almost twenty-four, I've been working all this time, and my brain has shriveled up... time passes and you realize you'll never have the beautiful life you dreamed of." I quickly understood that it was a bad sign that I identified so deeply with Irina, and resolved to try to turn my life around. Oh Chekhov, you are the best.

11. Uncommon Women and Others, by Wendy Wasserstein (re-read). Wasserstein blog post here.

12. Isn't It Romantic, by Wendy Wasserstein (re-read)

13. The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein (re-read)

14. Gruesome Playground Injuries, by Rajiv Joseph

15. The Habit of Art, by Alan Bennett. I read this because I love W.H. Auden (a character in this play) and really enjoyed Bennett's The History Boys, but I'm not sure that the framing backstage-drama elements are that interesting or enjoyable. It all comes off as rather self-congratulatory ("Isn't the National Theatre great? We produce literate plays!"). Then again, The History Boys does not read very well as a script, but it works in performance.

16. Oedipus el Rey, by Luis Alfaro. Another excellent play that premiered in San Francisco in 2010 and was published by Theatre Bay Area. It won the Glickman Award -- this spring I volunteered to help out at the award ceremony.

17. The Sisters Rosensweig, by Wendy Wasserstein

18. A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams (re-read). This is one of those plays that haunts my memory and, because I wrote a parody of it earlier this year, I had to reread it.

19. 5th of July, by Lanford Wilson (re-read). While revising Pleiades to take place over Fourth of July weekend, 1971, I had to reread 5th of July -- which takes place over Fourth of July weekend, 1977!

20. Over Martinis, Driving Somewhere, by Romulus Linney. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but while this was clearly a very personal play for Linney, I found it almost too personal to be really compelling.

21. True West, by Sam Shepard. This is such an archetypal play about brotherhood and masculinity that, after reading it, I'm amazed that I ever saw it in a gender-reversed version (oh, Vassar College student theater...)

22. Buried Child, by Sam Shepard

23. Curse of the Starving Class, by Sam Shepard. Related blog post here. I think I enjoyed this one even more than Buried Child, though it seems to be less well regarded by critics.

24. Tongues, by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin

25. Ring Round the Moon, by Jean Anouilh, translated by Christopher Fry. Related blog post here.

26. The Tooth of Crime, by Sam Shepard. What a strange play. The person who wrote the introduction to my book of Shepard plays considers this his masterpiece, but the 1970s rock-and-roll attitudes seem very dated, almost to the point of parody. I also feel like the second act (the duel between Hoss and Crow) is where the real meat of the play is, so much that the first act might be unnecessary. Could this work in the 21st century?

27. La Turista, by Sam Shepard

28. Savage/Love, by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin. With that, I finished Shepard's Seven Plays. I should note that I took a playwriting master class this fall and the teacher made a remark about "that Sam Shepard collection that we all have on our bookshelves" -- I knew just which one he meant!

Previous years' reading lists: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007

What I Liked and What I Didn't about Martin Scorsese's "Hugo"

2011-12-31T17:33:00.000-08:00

THINGS I LIKED

The opening shot took my breath away and the first scene is the best example of over-the-top cinematic Francophilia since Moulin Rouge. I wasn't even paying attention to the plot or characters at first -- I was just luxuriating in the art direction and the 1930s atmosphere. That train station! That café!

As far as I could tell, every bit of printed text in the movie (signs, books, posters) was in French. Amazing attention to detail and I appreciate that they resisted the temptation to make things easier for an English-speaking audience.

Two of my favorite time periods, in terms of art and aesthetics (and I think this is true for a lot of people) are the Art Nouveau fin-de-siècle and the Art Deco 1920s-30s. Hugo has a plot that accommodates both periods, and is set in Paris, the epicenter of both of these movements, to boot.

Hugo is the second 3-D movie I've ever seen (Avatar was the first) and IMO it used the medium very, very well. By the end of Avatar, I was kind of over the 3-D, but Hugo kept surprising me with innovative ways of employing it. At the same time, it knew when to hold back and revert to a flatter picture plane, e.g. for the more intimate scenes in Papa Georges' house.

Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths as two late-middle-aged folks striking up a tentative romance in the train station. This plot has no purpose other than to be charming and delightful, and it delivers. It's even more charming if you saw and admired these talented character actors in The History Boys -- I was so happy to see them working together again.

My friend Stuart saw Hugo last week and posted on Facebook that it made him "think a lot about Marissa Skudlarek as there is essentially a character who is her (tall, big vocabulary, wears a beret)." Ha! He was referring to Isabelle (played by Chloë Grace Moretz), a young girl who befriends Hugo. She's a type of character we've seen in other movies -- spunky, bookish, romantic, precocious. In the scene in the bookshop she reminded me so much of Disney's Belle. And when Hugo asks Isabelle why she's helping him, I could predict Isabelle's response before she said it: "Because this is an adventure!" So she's not the most original character, but she's an archetype that I enjoy. And even if she is a 13-year-old girl, she's one of Scorsese's few female characters that it's OK to be compared with. I may have just found my Halloween costume for next year (and if I do dress up as Isabelle, I will carry the vintage 1930s edition of Les Miserables that Stuart gave me for Christmas).

Early on, I was convinced that I caught a glimpse of someone costumed and made up to look like James Joyce. Sure enough, "James Joyce" is listed in the credits. So is "Salvador Dalí" but I guess I missed him. (It could not have been as memorable as Adrien Brody's portrayal of Dalí in Midnight in Paris!)

I also enjoyed playing "spot the cinema reference" throughout the movie. E.g., I'm pretty sure that an allusion to Vertigo was intended during the final scene with Hugo in the clock tower. Making Hugo the second 2011 film that owes a debt to Vertigo, after The Artist swiped Bernard Herrmann's music for the climactic sequence.

Another similarity to The Artist: the fake-out dream sequence in Hugo is very well done.

Innuendo that would only be mildly amusing in an adult movie is somehow made funnier by being in a kids' movie, where you know it will go over the heads of the children in the audience.

Throughout the whole movie, I was convinced that Olivia Williams was playing Mama Jeanne, Georges' wife. Turns out that the role is played by Helen McCrory, an actress I was not familiar with before. She gives a lovely performance.

I had a teenage crush on Jude Law and he is still an incredibly good-looking man. (He appears in a flashback as Hugo's father.) Hey, this movie is all about cinephilia, and one reason we love the movies is that they let us stare into the faces of beautiful people whom we would never have met otherwise.

THINGS I WAS LESS KEEN ON

I'm not sure it was a good idea to have the character of the Station Inspector, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, function both as the movie's principal villain (chasing Hugo through the station and threatening to send him to an orphanage) and as its principal comic relief (in his amusingly awkward flirtation with a pretty florist played by Emily Mortimer). While I appreciate the desire to depict the Inspector as a real person with some complexity and some heart, as opposed to an incarnation of evil, we can't take the Inspector seriously as a threat to Hugo if he is also a harmless buffoon.

The first part of the movie hinges on an Idiot Plot. When Papa Georges discovers Hugo's notebook, accuses him of stealing it, and demands to know who drew the pictures in the notebook, why does Hugo remain silent instead of saying "My father did those sketches"? I know that Hugo is a cautious, scared little boy who is still mourning his father, but he never promised to keep the notebook secret, and would it have hurt anyone if he admitted that it was his father's?

Much is made of how Hugo likes to "fix things" and how his repairing the broken automaton parallels his healing the broken and depressed Papa Georges. Yet I never got a sense that Hugo genuinely loves fixing things and playing with clockwork and gizmos. He repairs the automaton because it is his last connection to his dead father, he fixes the train station clocks because he sees it as his duty... but I never felt that he took sheer delight in mechanical things for their own sake. The character of Isabelle is on hand to supply plenty of wide-eyed wonder, but I could have used some of that from Hugo as well.

When Hugo uses the word "panache," the script missed an opportunity for Isabelle to respond "Panache! Just like Cyrano de Bergerac!" I may have been the only person in the theater who would have appreciated this joke, but I would have loved it SO MUCH.

The little boy next to me was very bored by the movie and began sucking noisily on the dregs of his soda until I had to tell him to knock it off. In fairness, his parents shouldn't have taken him to the 8:30 show and they shouldn't have bought him the industrial-size Coca-Cola. Nonetheless, if this is a "family film," it should not bore children. Even I thought that the movie moved too slowly in parts and contained a few too many scenes of Hugo being chased through the train station and Hugo fiddling with clockwork.

Now is the time to mention that the international terminal at the San Francisco airport currently has an exhibit of vintage French automata on display (was it timed to the release of this movie?) and if you're there you should check it out. I stumbled upon it last week on my way to Portland and even got to talk with the exhibition's "registrar" (its caretaker) who happened to be unlocking the glass cases and inspecting the automata at the time. It was super cool, but it also made me realize that the automaton depicted in Hugo is a bit of an exaggeration. The automata in the museum display can do nifty things, but nothing nearly as elaborate or complex as the automaton in Hugo. And, all right, it's a movie, we can't expect it to be 100% accurate, but it annoys me that the filmmakers felt that the automaton had to be even better than it would be in real life, when real automata are plenty amazing on their own. In fact, the same goes for the portrayal of silent cinema in Hugo -- Scorsese makes it look even more exciting than it actually was by using brief snippets, concentrating on Meliès' special effects, showing several films that were hand-tinted rather than black-and-white, and 3-D converting some of the Meliès films. Will a child who wants to see a silent movie after watching Hugo be bored by the real thing?

Vaclav Havel's Ethical Politics

2011-12-26T17:57:00.000-08:00

In the wee hours of December 18, 2003, I was finishing up a research paper on Vaclav Havel for my high-school English class. Eight years later, in the wee hours of December 18, 2011, I came home from an evening of theater- and party-going to read the breaking news headline that Mr. Havel had passed away. For obvious reasons, Havel was one of my heroes, and I am working on a new blog post in response to his death. In the meantime, though, I'm posting my old research paper. I went back and reread it this week and, considering that I wrote it as a teenager, I still think it's a pretty good piece of work. The last paragraph, especially, stands as a fitting memorial to Havel's legacy. But because it's long and because it's from my high school days, I've put most of it after the jump.

Differing Reactions To Václav Havel’s Ethical Politics

by Marissa Skudlarek, 2003

Inaddition to his role as the first post-Communist president of bothCzechoslovakia (from 1989-1992) and the Czech Republic (1993-2003), VáclavHavel has been an award-winning absurdist playwright, a dissident activist, apolitical prisoner, and an instrumental figure in Czechoslovakia’s “VelvetRevolution.” Indeed, his help in winningCzechoslovakia’s independence from the Soviet satellite system launched him tothe presidency. A further factor wasthat he had become much admired—by both his compatriots and the Westernintellectual community—for the many essays he had written summarizing histhoughts on the ideal role of politics. Seeing the post-totalitarian Communistgovernment as full of lies and lacking legitimacy, he encouraged theCzechoslovak people to “live in the truth,” performing morally obligated actsof civil disobedience. This ethicalperspective on politics led the Czechoslovaks to believe that Havel would betheir ideal first president. Yet whileleading Western figures continued to admire Havel’s morally-based policies,these same principles caused him to lose popularity in his native land.

As a dissident in the 1970s, Havel began developing theethical perspective that would have such a bearing on his future career. In his famous essay “The Power of thePowerless,” Havel introduced his phrase “living in truth” (55), by which hemeant rejecting hollow Communist ideology and instead following one’sconscience despite the consequences. According to Havel, if everyone, even the supposedly “powerless,” livesin the truth, society will improve for the better. In fact, he perceived a “deep moral crisis insociety,” which could only be remedied by this “attempt to regain one’s ownsense of responsibility” (“Power of the Powerless” 62). After sweeping away the false Communistregime and becoming president of Czechoslovakia, Havel continued to emphasizethe idea that acting morally and responsibly is the best way to create aliberal democracy.

Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moralvalues and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor eventhe market economy will function properly. They are all marvelous products of the human spirit […]—assuming thehuman spirit wants these mechanisms to serve it, respects them, believes inthem, guarantees them, and is willing, if necessary, to fight for them or makesacrifices to them. (Summer Meditations 19)

Havel believes that this widespread moral foundation willcause “civil society,” that is, public cultural organizations (Stroehlein) toflourish, cementing the ties between government and the individual.

In Havel’s view, the politician must assume the samevalues, such as “living in the truth,” that have been set for the averagecitizen. Applying these principles tothe political world involves what Havel calls “anti-political politics,”described as “politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, ofcybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one ofthe ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives […], as practical morality,as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for ourfellow humans” (“Politics and Conscience” 155). A large part of anti-political politics (also called non-politicalpolitics) involves rationally considering issues, rather than blindly followingpolitical parties or factions. WhenCzechoslovakia was a one-party Communist state, Havel realized that “[shedding]the burden of traditional political categories and habits and [opening] oneselfup fully to the world of human existence and then [drawing] politicalconclusions only after having analyzed it […] is not only politically morerealistic but […] from the point of view of an ‘ideal state of affairs,’politically more promising as well” (“The Power of the Powerless” 70). Havel carried this belief with him when hebecame president, promoting anti-political politics after becoming disgustedwith the partisanship of post-Communist Czechoslovakia (Summer Meditations2-3). Furthermore, Havel seespoliticians as having an awesome responsibility: not solely to serve theirconstituencies, or even their countries, but the whole world. “Through intrigue one may become primeminister,” Havel acknowledges, “but that will be the extent of one’s success;one can hardly improve the world that way” (Summer Meditations 6). Indeed, Havel agreed to be president ofCzechoslovakia only after realizing that he had the responsibility to live upto his ideals by putting his political theories into practice (SummerMeditations xvi). He resolved anewto “live in the truth,” ignored advice to be more manipulative or stern orpartisan (Summer Meditations 7), and held to his ideals of ethical,non-political, politics.

Intellectualsfrom many Western countries have admired Havel’s views, lauding his politicaltheory or expressing solidarity with his dissident activities. The late German writer Heinrich Böll, winnerof the 1972 Nobel Prize, wrote an essay demonstrating a near worship of Havel,even claiming that “a Christ is speaking in [Letters to Olga, Havel’s letters from prison]” (211). In some respects, Böll appears so captivatedby Havel that he cannot even explain why he admires him so: “If an objection israised against Havel to the effect that ‘this’—resistance, endurance, andhope—‘serves no purpose,’ then my reply will be quite simply that it does infact have a purpose” (211). Böll’sreaction, though, accurately reflects the adulation that Havel has receivedfrom the international intellectual community. For example, Swedish literary figure Harry Järv has positively comparedHavel’s civil disobedience to Antigone and Thoreau (Järv 234-235); andplaywrights as varied as the American Arthur Miller, the Irish-French SamuelBeckett, and the Czech-British Tom Stoppard have all written works dedicated toHavel, as a gesture of support during his difficult dissident years (Miller 263;Beckett 199; Stoppard 278). Westernpoliticians, also, have found much to esteem in Havel. The American presidents Bill Clinton andGeorge W. Bush have even been described as “tongue-tiedand awe-struck in the presence of someone who actually fought communism andlived to tell about it” (Welch). At ajoint press conference with Havel, Bush gushed to the Czech President, “Yourlife has shown that a person who dedicates himself to freedom can change thecourse of a nation and change the course of history […] I’m proud to call youfriend” (“Press Conference”).

MainstreamAmerican publications, while acknowledging Havel’s flaws, also maintain thisadmiring tone. In an article originallypublished in Vanity Fair, writer Stephen Schiff describes Havel as “sortof European Gandhi: shy and selfless, yet insuperably stubborn; seeminglyegoless, yet devoid of moral doubt; cunning and even manipulative, but nevertoward his own personal ends; conscience-driven, but never condemnatory ofthose who aren’t” (78). Although Schiffgently prods Havel for concentrating on improving foreign policy as he letdomestic problems flourish (76), he often gives the impression of beingfascinated by Havel. The New YorkTimes has also joined in the appreciation, publishing a glowing editorialin support of Havel’s ethical politics when he left office in February2003. It called Havel “an exceptionalindividual moral authority […] [who] showed us that speaking honestly anddeeply when you are expected merely to express platitudes brings its ownpolitical authority. Czechs and the restof us are better off because of him” (“Vaclav Havel Takes His Leave”). The editorial noted that under Havel’sethical rule, the Czech Republic has achieved such positive things as amultiparty democratic system, a free press, and an invitation to join theEuropean Union. Yet it also admittedthat Havel had problems maintaining his popularity among Czechs, “in partbecause he continued to remind his compatriots that their newfound democracydepended on their everyday moral vigilance” (“Vaclav Havel Takes HisLeave”). The editorial thus makes clearthat both the warm non-Czech view of Havel and the more ambivalent reaction hefaces from his compatriots are due to his moral perspective on politics.

Not every Westernintellectual admires Havel’s ethical standpoint, though. Noam Chomsky, “arguably the most importantintellectual alive,” according to The New York Times (quoted in “NoamChomsky – Wikipedia”), has made comments demonstrating a vehement dislike forHavel’s ideas. Havel’s 1990 address tothe United States Congress, in which he praised the United States for itsdemocratic tradition, called it “a defender of freedom” and exhorted it tofulfill its role as the world’s one superpower in an ethical and responsiblefashion (The Art of the Impossible 10-20), won a very positive reactionfrom both Congress and the media. Yet inone of his letters, Chomsky takes a completely opposing stance, calling this“awed response” “one of the most illuminating examples of the total andcomplete intellectual and moral corruption of Western culture” (Chomsky). Not only does he think that the idea ofmorality and responsibility in politics is trite, but also he finds Havel areprehensible, hypocritical flatterer. In Chomsky’s worldview, American imperialism has caused more sufferingthan Soviet totalitarianism ever did; he calls the Soviet satellite states“practically a paradise” by comparison. He notes that the United States would not punish Havel if he told the“truth” (that is, Chomsky’s view that America is a threat to world peace),wondering why Havel thus feels compelled to “lie.” Havel’s “flattery” of the United States thuscauses Chomsky to conclude that “by every conceivable standard, the performanceof Havel, Congress, the media, and […] the Western intellectual community atlarge are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of ThirdWorld peasants and Stalinist hacks—not an unusual discovery” (Chomsky). While Chomsky’s hatred of Havel’s ideas is aharsh perspective from an important figure, it has done little, if anything, tosway the favorable opinion of Havel held by the Western intellectual community.

However, the Czech peoplegenerally seem to have a more ambivalent impression of Havel for one of tworeasons, both relating to his ethical politics. Either they hold him to such high moral standards that they becomedisillusioned when he becomes involved in less pure political or personal business;or they believe Havel is too “non-political” to be an effective leader. Havel himself has acknowledged the firstcriticism: in typically self-deprecating fashion, he titled a collection of hispresidential speeches and writings The Art of the Impossible: Politics asMorality in Practice, and many of the texts in this volume deal with the“impossible” task of applying his ethical politics to everyday politicalreality. In one especially illuminatingspeech, which he delivered at New York University in 1991, Havel admits,

For years I criticized practical politicsas no more than a technique in the struggle for power […] Destiny […] played a strange joke on me,as if it were telling me […]: Since you think you’re so smart, now is yourchance to show everyone you have ever criticized the right way to do things […]And so, not surprisingly, I am now in a rather unenviable position. All my political activities, and perhaps allthe domestic and foreign policies pursued by Czechoslovakia as well, are beingexamined under a microscope I once constructed myself without knowing where itwould lead. (82-83)

Atthe time Havel spoke these words, he had already weathered a few politicalscandals, but had not lost massive amounts of his early popularity. Yet this speech well predicted what was tohappen: upon learning that their idealistic president was not perfect, theCzechs would delight in turning against him.

Forexample, on the personal front, Havel was widely criticized for remarrying lessthan a year after his first wife, Olga, died of cancer. Olga Havlová was (and remains) a highlyrespected figure among Czechs for her own dissident past, steadfast support ofHavel, charitable work, and no-nonsense attitude (“Olga Havlova” and “CzechsRemember Olga Havlova”). Furthermore,Havel’s second wife, Dagmar, was a leggy blonde actress who had once played atopless vampire in a hit movie (Greene). When Havel was in the hospital for an emergency tracheotomy, Dagmarnoticed he was asphyxiating and saved his life by calling a doctor—thenpromptly ruined her reputation again by summoning a faith healer. People found crass not only that Havelmarried Dagmar so soon after both Olga’s death and his own near-deathexperience, but also that he justified it by claiming that Olga wanted him toremarry (Keane 481). Dagmar was widelybelieved to have ill effects on Havel’s presidency, not only because he actedembarrassingly “besotted” (Keane 482), but because as First Lady she acted likea diva, making unreasonable, ambitious demands and diverting his attention. Havel’s steadfast defense of her only madehim more unpopular among Czechs (Keane 480-484).

Havel had struggled through oneof his most major political scandals during his first term as president—one ofthe only times he ever came near being called “unethical.” Havel had appointed Richard Sacher theMinister of the Interior, hoping that he would stop the Ministry’s widespreaddestruction of important secret police files. Instead, Sacher collaborated with former Communists by refusing toreform the Ministry, making a private collection of files, and going throughthe files in the hopes of finding scandalous information about Parliamentmembers. Czechoslovaks knew that theseactivities could lead to blackmail, and worried that Havel might be takingfiles from Sacher so that information contained therein would not damage hisregime. It is still not known to whatextent, if any, Havel was complicit in what came to be known as “Sachergate.” According to Keane, “the only reason[Sachergate] did not bring down the President of the country was because, at the time, Havel’spotential critics around the Castle [the Czech President’s official residence]held fast to the view that ‘solidarity’ with the Castle was vital if the ancien régime was to be defeated” (429). Havel found a solution by asking allParliament members with names contained in the files to resign. Unfortunately, that led to an even moreethically questionable practice: lustration (Keane 428-431).

Lustration, a word deriving fromthe Latin for “to purify” (Keane 431), stems from a more general issue faced bythe Czechoslovaks: what to do about the Communist party and its formermembers. After the Velvet Revolution of1989, the Party was not officially banned, and in fact, retained much of its hugeassets (Whipple 61). Havel and histolerant, ethical perspective played a large part in this: he did not believethat the Communist party should be treated like scapegoats. Although he made many speeches lambasting theformer Communist regime for what it did to Czechoslovakia, he also implied thatevery Czechoslovak was partially responsible for Communism’s effects. “Wehad all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as anunalterable fact of life, and thus we helped to perpetuate it” (“New Year’sAddress to the Nation” 4), was a typical comment, once again deriving fromHavel’s belief that society as a whole must “live in the truth” if any changeis to occur. He insisted that “[TheParty] ought to have the good conscience to dissolve itself and startafresh—something it has yet to do. Therevolution is to proceed by absolutely legal means” (quoted in Whipple 42), butsix months after the revolution, the government confiscated all Party property(Whipple 61). However, the Communist Partystill had the largest membership of any Czech political party, and won secondplace in the June 1990 elections (Whipple 62). It gradually lost influence—entirely through Havel’s “legal means”—andis no longer a social force today.

However,a more difficult issue still faced Czechoslovaks: how to deal with formerhigh-ranking members of the Party itself, especially bureaucrats andsecret-police informers. Therewas a large popular push to exclude them altogether from public life, althoughthe government was reluctant to do this because Communists were the onlycitizens experienced at administration (Wilson 25). Havel continued to take the ethical “highroad,” but instead of admiring his policies, the Czechoslovaks saw them asweak. This provided an opening for rabidanti-Communists, such as Václav Klaus, Havel’s Finance Minister, to push theLustration Act through the legislature (Keane 432; Wilson 26). Since the act did pass by only a slim margin(Keane 432), Havel’s views were not completely ignored by the legislature. Still, he did not retain enough influence tostop this “most ethically dubious and politically controversial purginglegislation in all of central and eastern Europe” (Keane 431), which targetedover a million Czechoslovak citizens. (Atthis time, the nation only contained about 15 million people.) It went after Communists who held politicalpower at district level or above, former secret-police officers, and thoseaccused of collaborating with them; forbidding members of these groups to holdhigh-level administrative jobs in the government, military, education, or largecompanies. All people who sought one ofthese jobs, in fact, needed “clearance” from Minister of the Interior beforethey could be hired. (Keane 432).

As soon as the law was passed,there was an instant outcry. Many peopledid agree with Havel that the Communists should not be made scapegoats. Others accused Václav Klaus and other architectsof the law of using to further their own political ambitions. The most stinging criticism was that althoughthe Lustration Act attempted to prosecute the secret police, it only ended upgiving them more power. It would use thesecret police’s records to determine guilt, even though everybody knew that theunscrupulous Communist police would extort false confessions or fabricateevidence (Keane 432-433). Havel wasdistraught by the atmosphere of guilt, fear, and suspicion that the LustrationAct caused in Czechoslovakia, and vehemently denounced it to foreigners(“Speech at New York University” 85). Yet domestically, he was less vocal: he conceded that definite criminalsought to be punished, and refused to hear individual cases. According to Keane, this signified that Havelno longer believed in the ideal of absolute truth, but had finally learned thepolitically expedient “value of tact” (436). Indeed, Havel had chosen the non-dissident option. He confessed to a moral opposition to theLustration Act, yet chose to sign it so as not to enter into open conflict withParliament. To appease his conscience,he did recommend that Parliament amend the bill, yet still knew that Parliamentmight not make any of the changes that he suggested (“Speech at New YorkUniversity” 86). He concluded the speechby saying that he had finally learned that “the way of a truly moral politicsis neither simple nor easy” (86).

Havel’s ethical perspective onpolitics would be further tested by his conflict with Václav Klaus, who atvarious times during Havel’s presidency served as Finance Minister and PrimeMinister. Like Havel, Klaus was a formerintellectual and writer, and a leading figure of the Czechoslovakian revolution(Ash 58). Interestingly, over twentyyears before they would come to represent the two sides of Czech politics,these men shared similar political views. Klaus revealed, in aninterview with Reason magazine, “[Havel and I]served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was alsointerested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and becamefriends” (“No Third Way Out”). Furthermore, Havel and Klaus initially had the same goals for the CzechRepublic: a well-orchestrated transition to democracy and a free-marketeconomy. But while Havel interpreted“well-orchestrated” to mean “smooth,” Klaus interpreted it to mean “quick,”even if dishonesty and corruption resulted (Ash 69). Some of Klaus’s now-legendary statements,such as “There is no dirty money” (quoted by Stroehlein) reflected hisattitude. These hardnosed sentiments fitthe mood of the country, which rapidly followed Klaus’s vision and became afree-market economy “more unregulated than anything in the West”(Stroehlein). Rejecting Havel’s ideas ofcollective ethical responsibility, the Czechs sided with the “other Václav” andrushed headlong into market reform.

Another major Havel-Klaus dispute dealt with the role ofpolitical parties. Colored by theirexperiences with the one-party Communist system, Havel and many other Czechintellectuals were deeply suspicious of organized political parties(Stroehlein). They had formed anorganization called “Civic Forum” to help achieve independence from the Sovietsystem, and Havel hoped that this coalition would remain a social force, asopposed to becoming a narrow faction. Klaus, on the other hand, wanted to develop an agenda for Civic Forum,especially so that it could achieve its economic goals (Stroehlein). Eventually, Klaus’s branch of Civic Forumbecame a strong new political party, while Havel’s supporters were leftstranded, unable to compete with Klaus’s organized movement. Even Westerners have criticized Havel forsuch strong opposition to political parties. Timothy Garton Ash, for example, suggests that had Havel spearheadedanother movement, regardless of its partisan nature, he would have built up apower base, rather than seeing his influence wane. Although he remained sufficiently popular toserve as Czech president for two terms, this meant little in the long runbecause the office has such limited powers (66). Havel and Klaus continued to duel, whichended up “[underlying] almost every crisis and every major policy decision madesince 1989” (Wilson 29). Eventually, itseemed to Czechs that these men were irrevocably opposed, always making thinlyveiled jabs at each other in the press. There appeared to be no issue on which they could agree, and Czechs cameto see their country’s politics as solely a clash between these two figures(Ash 68). Klaus was eventually forced toresign because of a scandal (Wilson 29), yet he gained power once again and, tomany people’s surprise, became Czech president when Havel’s term ended. More importantly, Havel’s refusal tocollaborate with his own Prime Minister—a refusal that impeded domestic politics—showedthat he had fallen prey to the factionalism that he had once so vehementlyopposed.

Furthermore, Czechs continued to have difficulty withHavel’s ethical politics, which they found “impractical, overly intellectual,and out of touch” (Stroehlein). EvenCzechs who saw Havel’s good points acknowledged that his ethical politics didnot always function as they would like. Perhaps the best expression of this attitude comes from Lubos Beniak, anewspaper editor. He has called Havel“exceptional” and “a very honest man,” yet also admitted,

The support [for Havel] is not ecstatic like it wasbefore […], but it’s still there. Youknow, sometimes, as a politician, he has made mistakes. But his mistakes all come from the samething: he sometimes doesn’t respect the realities of life. And it’s very difficult to say that this isbad, because […] if he respected the realities of life, he wouldn’t bepresident today. (Quoted by Schiff, 79)

The ambivalence of Beniak’s statement—the way it mixesrespect of Havel’s ideas and resignation to their impracticality—characterizesthe Czech attitude toward their former president. Despite Havel’s flaws, scandals, and fightswith Klaus, there were still long lines at Prague bookstores in 1994, when hepublished a volume of his speeches (Critical Essays 90). At the very least, these lines signify thatCzech citizens were curious about the ethical politics that Havel presents inmany of these speeches. Unlike Westernintellectuals and politicians, who admire Havel in sometimes lofty terms,Czechs do judge Havel according to higher moral standards, or see his ideals asunachievable dreams. However, theyretain an essential admiration for their president and his ethical politics—politicsthat, at the very least, were able to defeat the lies of the Communists.

Works Consulted

Ash, Timothy Garton. “Prague: Intellectuals and Politicians.” The New York Review 42, no. 1 (January12, 1995): 34-40. Rpt. in CriticalEssays on Václav Havel. Ed. MarketaGoetz-Stankiewicz and Phyllis Carey. NewYork: G.K. Hall and Co., 1999. 57-71.

Beckett, Samuel. “Catastrophe.” Contained in Václav Havel: Living inTruth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of the ErasmusPrize to Václav Havel. Ed. JanVladislav. London: Faber and Faber,1990. 199-203

Böll, Heinrich. “Courtesy Towards God.” Contained in VáclavHavel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of theAward of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber andFaber, 1990. 204-212

Carey, Nick. “Olga Havlova.” Radio Prague, February 2, 2000. Accessed athttp://www.radio.cz/en/article/37454, November 30, 2003.

Chomsky, Noam. “Letter to Alexander Cockburn,” March 30,1990. Contained in The Golden Age IsIn Us. Alexander Cockburn. Verso, 1995. 149-151. Accessed athttp://monkeyfist.com/ChomskyArchive/essays/havel_html, December 1, 2003.

Furlong, Ray. “Havel Decries Czech Politics.” BBC News Online, June 4, 2002. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2025798.stm,November 30, 2003.

Greene, Richard Allen. “Vaclav Havel: End of an Era.” BBC News Online, October 9, 2003. Accessed athttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2710977.stm, November 30, 2003.

Havel, Václav. “New Year’s Address to the Nation, Prague,January 1, 1990.” Contained in TheArt of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice. Václav Havel, trans. Paul Wilson et al. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 3-9.

Havel, Václav. Speech at New York University, October 27,1991. Contained in The Art of theImpossible: Politics as Morality in Practice. Václav Havel, trans. Paul Wilson et al. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 82-86.

Havel, Václav, trans. E.Kohák and R. Scruton. “Politics andConscience.” Contained in VáclavHavel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of theAward of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faberand Faber, 1990. 136-157

Havel,Václav, trans. Paul Wilson. SummerMeditations. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1992.

Havel, Václav, trans. PaulWilson. “The Power of thePowerless.” Contained in VáclavHavel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of theAward of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faberand Faber, 1990. 36-122

Järv, Harry. “Citizen VersusState.” Contained in Václav Havel:Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award ofthe Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faberand Faber, 1990. 232-244

Keane,John. Václav Havel: A PoliticalTragedy in Six Acts. London:Bloomsbury, 1999.

Miller, Arthur. “I Think About You a Great Deal.” Containedin Václav Havel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on theOccasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. 263-265

“Noam Chomsky – Wikipedia.”Accessed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky, December 1, 2003.

“No Third Way Out: Creating aCapitalist Czechoslovakia: Vaclav Klaus interviewed by John H. Fund.” Reason Online. Accessed at http://reason.com/klausint.shtml,November 30, 2003.

Pehe, Jiri. “Vaclav Havel: The Dissident in Power.”Published in Kiev’s The Day. Accessed at http://www.day.kiev.ua/DIGEST/2003/06/den-ukr/du9.htm,November 30, 2003.

“Press Conference by USPresident George Bush and Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic.” November 20, 2002. Transcript accessed athttp://www.expandnato.org/prexp2.html, December 2, 2002.

Schiff, Stephen. “Havel’s Choice.” Vanity Fair, August 1991, 124 ff. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Václav Havel. Ed. Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz and PhyllisCarey. New York: G.K. Hall and Co.,1999. 75-89

Solic, Mirna. “CzechsRemember Olga Havlova; ‘A Girl from Zizkov.’” Radio Prague, July 14,2003. Accessed athttp://www.radio.cz/en/article/42944, November 30, 2003.

Stoppard, Tom. “Introduction (toThe Memorandum).” Contained in VáclavHavel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of theAward of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faberand Faber, 1990. 278-280

Stroehlein, Andrew. “ThreeVaclavs.” Central Europe Review,August 30, 1999. Accessed athttp://www.ce-review.org/99/10/stroehlein10.html, November 30, 2003.

“Vaclav Havel Takes HisLeave.” The New York Times,February 3, 2003. Accessed athttp://www.expandnato.org/haveleave.html, November 30, 2003.

Welch, Matt. “Velvet President: Why Vaclav Havel is OurEra’s George Orwell and More.” Reason,May 2003. Accessed athttp://reason.com/0305/fe.mw.velvet.shtml, December 2, 2003.

Whipple, Tim D., ed. After the Velvet Revolution: Václav Haveland the New Leaders of Czechoslovakia Speak Out. New York: Freedom House, 1991.

Wilson, Paul. “Václav Havel in Word and Deed.” CriticalEssays on Václav Havel. Ed. MarketaGoetz-Stankiewicz and Phyllis Carey. NewYork: G.K. Hall and Co., 1999. 21-30

Yurkovsky, Andrew. “After the Flood.” World Press Review Online, September4, 2002. Accessed athttp://www.worldpress.org/Europe/701.cfm, November 30, 2003.

OMPF on New Play TV

2011-12-17T16:22:00.000-08:00

I'm about to head over to Potrero Hill to see my play in the One-Minute Play Festival.

This is just a quick note to say that there may still be a few tickets available for tomorrow, or, if you prefer to watch these plays from the comfort of your own home, tomorrow's 2 PM matinee will be streaming on New Play TV!

That's 2 PM Pacific / 5 PM Eastern. It's pretty cool to be a theater-maker in the 21st century, n'est-ce pas?

Rapunzel's Existential Crisis

2011-12-16T08:08:00.000-08:00

I know I have been blogging infrequently. I've been busy. I've also been confused -- undergoing some of that "I'm three and a half years out of college; now what?" angst. In some ways I feel remarkably tied down: I have a job that keeps me busy, plenty of extracurricular stuff going on, there's always something hanging over my head. But in other ways, I feel "the unbearable lightness of being": I am single and childless, I am not really beholden to anyone, if I chose to abandon some of my responsibilities and do something else (or even do nothing), would it really matter? I suppose that this truly is an "existential crisis"-- in the sense that existentialism is a philosophy that starts from the idea "I'm free; now what?"

In such moments, I convince myself that maybe I'd be happier if I gave up some of my freedom and followed "the rules." Not that rules exist these days the way they did fifty or a hundred years ago (especially in an anything-goes town like San Francisco), but if I went looking for rules and order, I'm sure I could find them. Settle down. Marry a nice man. Build your character. Stop whining so much. Volunteer to help the unfortunate. Stop wasting time on the Internet. Listen to classical music. Read great literature. Stand up straight. Make your bed. Stop questioning things, stop brooding. Stop insisting on freedom; it's only making you unhappy. You spoiled, selfish Millennial girl, who are you to think that you can live so heedlessly?

So I feel confused a lot, and guilty a lot, in that existential way.

I feel guilty that I haven't written about Ladies in Waiting, the latest No Nude Men show, which is closing this weekend -- as many of my friends are involved in it and I really do have things to say about it.

Ladies in Waiting is an evening of three short plays by women: "Woman Come Down" by Claire Rice, "Night in Jail" by Alison Luterman, and "Oily Replies" by Hilde Susan Jaegtnes. Specifically, I wanted to talk about "Woman Come Down," which really gets at all the issues I was discussing above: the existential terror of freedom; the tension between wanting to play by the rules and wanting to break them; the need for every young woman to negotiate her own way of being in the world.

All that, in the form of a fractured fairy tale.

In Claire's play, Little Red Riding Hood, rather than being a child, is a somewhat aimless young woman. She's dating the woodsman, Henry, but feels ambivalent about the relationship; she may not want to settle down and get married, but she finds it hard to articulate what she actually wants. Then, as in the original tale, Red goes to visit her grandmother, encounters a wolf (here portrayed as a rather sleazy traveling salesman with secrets of his own), and ends up taking a different path from the one she planned. Specifically, the wolf tells her about a nearby tower which imprisons a beautiful maiden -- Rapunzel!

Rapunzel has been indoctrinated to hate and fear anyone who isn't her "mother," the witch. She has never questioned her imprisonment. So it takes Red a while to break through to Rapunzel, but eventually the two women have what amounts to a philosophical debate about security and freedom, imprisonment and choice. And Red helps free Rapunzel. And later, at Grandmother's house, Rapunzel helps free Red.

It is a beautiful play, telling me what, deep down, I know to be true: I don't want to follow rules I don't believe in just for the sake of an easier life. "Down is complicated," says Rapunzel, but isn't it better than being isolated in a tower? The play acknowledges that imprisonment can be seductive and that achieving freedom can require pain and sacrifice. (Rapunzel has to cut off all her hair -- her most salient feature -- in order to make the rope ladder to free herself.) But doing only what society tells you to do, and not what you know you must do, is a recipe for a life of quiet desperation. While I must develop a set of rules for living in this world (because I do not want my present state of confusion to last forever!), I need not conform to some externally imposed list of rules.

"Woman Come Down" is directed by Stuart Bousel, with Kirsten Broadbear as the hip, bike-riding Red and Theresa Miller as the daffy, stubborn Rapunzel.

As for the other Ladies in Waiting plays, "Night in Jail" features a flamboyant performance by Broadbear as Marie Antoinette, but this character tends to overshadow the other two characters in the piece: a modern-day "celebutante" who has been arrested for drunk-driving, and the prison guard assigned to her cell. "Oily Replies" is an experimental play, a twisted ontological detective story that takes place on an oil rig. (I find it hilarious that Jaegtnes, a Norwegian playwright, wrote a play about an oil rig.) Fortunately, it's an experimental play that has a sense of humor about it, including a narrator who keeps losing control of the story, body parts that mysteriously go missing, and three virgins who may or may not have dandruff. Special mention to Karen Offereins for enacting a drowning-by-proxy on dry land (this will make more sense, albeit not total sense, if you see the show).

But mostly, it's "Woman Come Down," and its feminist interpretation of Red and Rapunzel, that will stick with me. It's funny, speaking of revisionist fairy tales, I love Sondheim's Into the Woods. But that show has a conservative, community-oriented message: "No one is alone." "Woman Come Down," on the other hand, proposes that everyone is alone, individual, free -- so now what?

Ladies in Waiting plays through tomorrow night (December 17) at the Exit Theater, San Francisco. Photo of Red (Broadbear) and Rapunzel (Miller) by Claire Rice.

Creative Cancerian

2011-12-12T21:55:00.000-08:00

Free Will Astrology is a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine. Always erudite, positive and well-written, and sometimes uncannily accurate. Of course, that could all just be confirmation bias. Nonetheless, when I read this as my horoscope the week that I begin writing a play that takes place in the WWII era, I can't help but take it as a good sign:

CANCER: "Dear Rob: Is there any way to access your horoscope archives going back to 1943? I'm writing a novel about World War II and need to see your astrological writings from back then. - Creative Cancerian." Dear Creative: To be honest, I wasn't writing horoscopes back in 1943, since I wasn't anywhere near being born yet. On the other hand, I give you permission to make stuff up for your novel and say I wrote it back in 1943. Most of you Cancerians have good imaginations about the past, and you're currently going through a phase when that talent is amplified. While you're tinkering with my history, have fun with yours, too. This is an excellent time for members of your tribe to breathe new life and fresh spin into a whole slew of your own personal memories.

Bonjour "Adieu"

2011-12-09T22:02:00.001-08:00

A while back I posted a music video from French-Canadian singer-songwriter Coeur de Pirate, whose album of piano-driven chansons quickly became one of my favorites. I just learned that she has a new album out, Blonde. Here is the the first single, "Adieu":

Judging by this, it sounds like her sound on the new album is a little less folk and a little more '60s pop -- and who doesn't love '60s pop? And the music video casts her as a sassy, tattooed version of Samantha from Bewitched.

Even better, the actor who plays her cheating boyfriend in the music video also plays the cute guy at the center of the love triangle in Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats), which I think is my favorite movie I've seen in a theater all year. (Not that I've ended up seeing a lot of movies this year, but still.) I keep meaning to blog about Les Amours Imaginaires. Maybe all it does is prove that Québecois hipsters aren't much different from American hipsters, but the film has really stuck with me.

According to her website, Coeur de Pirate also sings on a new Christmas album, Noël! Noël!! Noël!!!, from legendary French composer Michel Legrand. Looks like her track is only available on the French edition of the album, though; the English edition has Rufus Wainwright singing "White Christmas" instead of Coeur de Pirate singing "Noël blanc". Other than that, the album seems to have the potential to become a Christmas kitsch classic, what with the lush orchestral arrangements, the First Lady of France crooning about Christmas trees, and Iggy Pop singing "The Little Drummer Boy." If there are any campy Francophones on your Christmas list, get them this album and a DVD of Les Amours Imaginaires and they will love you forever.

Announcing Aphrodite

2011-12-07T21:38:00.001-08:00

Guess what's happening exactly one year from tonight?

The San Francisco Olympians Festival will present a staged reading of a new one-act play about the goddess Aphrodite... written by me!

The theme for the 2012 Festival is Titans vs. Olympians. Each evening will pair two one-acts (45-60 minutes), one based on an Olympian god and the other based on a thematically related Titan. At the end of the evening, the audience will vote on its favorite play. Aphrodite will be paired with Phoebe and Theia, by my friend Amy Clare Tasker.

It's a great lineup of writers next year, a good mix of fresh faces and Olympians favorites, and we're already getting into the competitive spirit -- there's been a lot of incredibly geeky trash-talking between Team Titans and Team Olympians.

I don't want to give too much away, but the general idea for this yet-to-be-written play (working title: The Love Goddess) is that it will depict Aphrodite as a 1940s Hollywood starlet and retell the story of the Aphrodite-Ares-Hephaestus love triangle.

Yes, it's another "historical" play for me. As you know, my research often spills onto my blog (there were lots of posts about the 1930s while I was writing The Rose of Youth and about the 1960s-70s when I was writing Pleiades), so I expect there will be some blog posts about the 1940s in the coming months. I'm already putting together a list of movies I need to see (Rita Hayworth figures heavily) and books to read.

And I find it appropriate that the staged reading will take place on December 7, since that date is indelibly associated with the 1940s.

Mark your calendars, and wish me luck as I begin this new play!

Image: The Rokeby Venus by Velázquez, one of my favorite paintings of Venus/Aphrodite.

One-Minute Plays for the Holidays

2011-12-03T16:49:00.001-08:00

Can you believe it's December already? Three weeks to Christmas... and two weeks to the San Francisco One-Minute Plays Festival!

I will have two plays in the festival (to be directed by Evren Odcikin and Christine Young), and several of my playwright friends are also participating, including Tim Bauer, Megan Cohen, Bennett Fisher, Marisela Treviño Orta and Ignacio Zulueta.

I love the mix of writers that are involved this year and it is an honor to be in the same festival as some much better-known Bay Area playwrights like Eugenie Chan and Philip Kan Gotanda.

Saturday December 17 at 8 PM and Sunday December 18 at 2 PM and 7 PM, at the Thick House on Potrero Hill. Tickets here. As Ignacio pointed out, it's a 99-seat house and only 3 performances, so get your tickets now!

That's really all the information you need -- I can't tell you what my plays are about, because it's really easy to spoil a one-minute play!

Also check out the One-Minute Play Blog.

A Sondheim Weekend

2011-11-27T14:39:00.001-08:00

Listening to: NPR's stream of the new Follies CD (Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, et al). I've only ever heard the truncated 1971 recording, so this is a revelation for me! Reading the Follies chapter in Finishing the Hat, one can come away with the impression that this is the strongest set of lyrics that have ever been written for an American musical, due to Sondheim's dead-on pastiche of all of the lyric writers who came before him, plus his own inimitable genius.

Reading: Look, I Made a Hat, volume 2 of Sondheim's collected lyrics, which came out on Tuesday. It is just as full of odd, interesting insights as Volume 1 and is going to have an equally prized place on my bookshelf. I brought it to a Thanksgiving party of theater people on Thursday, where it was a big hit. As a friend of mine says, "The only thing better than having these books by Sondheim is if we also had a book by Shakespeare titled How I Wrote My Plays."

and

Ring Round the Moon, the Jean Anouilh/Christopher Fry play that Sondheim and Hal Prince wished to adapt into a musical. When they were unable to obtain the rights, they adapted Smiles of a Summer Night instead -- it has a similar theme of romantic entanglements at a European country house.

I found Ring Round the Moon completely delightful. Its witty aphorisms made me laugh out loud several times, and I love the idea of having one actor play the identical twins Hugo and Frederic. (You'll recall that the one-actor-playing-twins was my favorite part of my experience working with Un-Scripted Theatre last summer!)

My copy, above, is an adorable 1950 edition, I believe the first American edition, which I found at Readers Café and Bookstore. Why do I never hear anyone talk about this used bookstore? It has some amazing items (I once saw a 1910 edition of Playboy of the Western World there!) and the proceeds go to a good cause.

Speaking of supporting a good cause: In 1981, Stephen Sondheim founded Young Playwrights Inc., to foster the work of American playwrights 18 and under. In 2006, I won their National Competition with my first play, Deus ex Machina. And last week, the Young Playwrights office, on Fifth Avenue in New York City (right across from Lord & Taylor) was gutted by a fire.

This news is very sad, especially because Young Playwrights, like many arts nonprofits, always seemed to be a bit of a shoestring organization and, I know, was having difficulties in our current economic climate. (Young Playwrights used to present full productions of the plays that won the contest, but they have not been able to do that for several years.) As they rebuild, they are taking donations through PayPal.

In order to thank them for the amazing two weeks that they gave me five years ago (a workshop of my play in New York, tickets to 10 shows, a downtown hotel room with a balcony...) and to support them in their rebuilding efforts, I'm going to give Young Playwrights some money this holiday season. Would you consider doing the same?

The secret miracle of Charlotte Salomon

2011-11-17T21:33:00.000-08:00

Last month I attended an extraordinary art exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, on loan from the Netherlands Jewish Historical Museum: some 200 gouache illustrations by Charlotte Salomon from her Leben? oder Theater? (Life? Or Theater?) magnum opus.

Salomon was a playwright without a stage. A graphic novelist before such a thing existed. A young woman struggling to find and claim her voice, to affirm herself and her existence. It is no surprise that her work -- with its themes of theater, creativity, love, feminism, identity, and history -- should resonate with me; these are things that I think about a lot.

Salomon was born into an upper-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1917, part of that wonderful cultured Mitteleuropean milieu of the early 20th century. Her father was a surgeon; her stepmother was an opera singer; and Charlotte attended art school. But, needless to say, by the 1930s, Berlin was a very bad place to be a Jew. Salomon's father lost his medical license, Charlotte had a school prize taken away from her on account of her religion, and shortly before she turned 21, her family sent her to the south of France for safety.

What makes Salomon's story really interesting, though, is its more personal details. Not only did she live in a dangerous and tumultuous era, but her family had its own tragedy: virtually all of the women on her mother's side of the family killed themselves. This information was concealed from young Charlotte until she was an adult (she had always been told that her mother died of influenza). When she learned the truth, she wondered if she too was destined to commit suicide. In a state of shock and crisis, she decided that she had only two options: either to kill herself, or to "undertake something eccentric and mad." She chose the latter option. She holed herself up in a hotel on the French Riviera and spent several months creating the hundreds of illustrations of Leben? oder Theater?

The narrative starts with Salomon's family history (the suicide of her mother's sister; her parents' meeting) and continues through her childhood and young womanhood, up until the moment she undertakes the Leben? oder Theater? project. Much of the narrative concerns Salomon's love for her stepmother's voice teacher, Alfred Wolfson, or "Amadeus Daberlohn" as he is called in the paintings (all of the Leben? oder Theater? characters have thinly disguised pseudonyms). Wolfson/Daberlohn was a World War I veteran whose philosophies about art, creativity, and finding one's voice had a great influence on Salomon. She paints his face obsessively, but also seems able to view him with a certain objectivity and humor -- you get the impression that he was a brilliant but also a pompous man. There's a memorable series of gouaches where Daberlohn is stretched out on a couch, pontificating on art and life:

"It is part of my nature as a man among men to remind them of suffering, which in our day we like to pretend does not exist. Yet I have never forgotten to emphasize that I love life and affirm it threefold. In order to love life completely, one must also embrace and comprehend its other side, death, including suffering. This is how my oft-repeated words must be understood those whom I love to undergo bitter experiences so that they will be forced to follow the path into their own depths."

These ideas would come back to Charlotte Salomon when she was at her lowest point and influence the creation of Leben? oder Theater? For, in the end, she followed the path into her own depths, learned about the death and suffering that haunted her family, and rather than being swallowed up by the darkness, made the choice to love and affirm life. The final panels of Leben? oder Theater? remind me of the closing scenes of a Chekhov play, where the young woman (Nina in The Seagull, Sonia in Uncle Vanya) clings to optimism and hope despite all the suffering that has befallen her.

Charlotte urges her grandmother: "Look at the flowers in the meadow. So much beauty, so much joy. Look at the mountains up there, so much sun, so much light."

As with Chekhov's plays, Salomon's paintings gain an extra bittersweetness because we know that their creator ultimately died far too young. After Salomon had completed Leben? oder Theater? and entrusted it to a friend, the Vichy France authorities discovered her. She was transported to Auschwitz, and killed at the age of 26.

Charlotte Salomon's story is a tragedy, but also, somehow, weirdly inspiring. They killed her. She didn't kill herself. Despite her family history of suicide, despite the grave dangers that she faced, she chose to self-create rather than self-destruct. She attempted to understand and redeem her family history, to break the cycle rather than perpetuate it.

The thought of Salomon, hiding out in the Riviera hotel, obsessively painting her gouaches, knowing that her life was in danger and time was perhaps running out (you can see the brushstrokes get wilder and more frantic as the series progresses) reminds me of a real-life version of Borges' story "The Secret Miracle." In that tale, a Czech-Jewish playwright is condemned to die before a Nazi firing squad, and his only regret is that he never finished the verse drama that he was writing. At the moment the bullets are fired, God grants the playwright's wish: he stops time and allows the playwright to take as long as he needs to compose the play in his head. So, too, by some miracle, Salomon was granted the time and the resources and the energy she needed to make Leben? oder Theater? (She already had the artistic skill.) It is also miraculous that the work survived, and that it holds interest from so many points of view -- artistic, narrative, historical, feminist. I confess I was less interested in the portions of the work that focus on Hitler's rise to power and the persecution of Jews, and more interested in the parts of it that reveal Salomon creating art, finding her voice, falling in love. A lot of art, up to the present day, deals with the Holocaust and the historical events surrounding it. It seems far rarer to view a museum exhibition about a young woman's coming of age.

Clearly, my blog post can't do justice to the full richness of Salomon's achievement. I'd tell you to see it for yourself, but the San Francisco exhibition closed two days after I saw it. However, the Dutch museum that owns it has scanned and posted every page online, and even included English translations of the text -- an amazing resource and well worth your time to browse.

Images from the website of the Joods Historisch Museum.

Soixante petites secondes

2011-11-06T12:41:00.000-08:00

Spending today working on my submissions for the San Francisco One-Minute Play Festival. We are encouraged to think about what can happen in a minute -- how short it can feel, how long it can feel.

Here is a song that lasts only 60 seconds -- Carla Bruni's "La dernière minute":

Sam Shepard and the 99%

2011-11-04T19:28:00.000-07:00

WESTON: I remember now. I was in hock. I was in hock up to my elbows. See, I always figured on the future. I banked on it. I was banking on it getting better. It couldn't get worse, so I figured it'd just get better. I figured that's why everyone wants you to buy things. Buy refrigerators. Buy cars, houses, lots, invest. They wouldn't be so generous if they didn't figure you had it comin' in. At some point it had to be comin' in. So I went along with it. Why not borrow if you know it's coming in. Why not make a touch here and there. They all want you to borrow anyhow. Banks, car lots, investors. The whole thing's geared to invisible money. You never hear the sound of change anymore. It's all plastic shuffling back and forth. It's all in everybody's heads. So I figured if that's the case, why not take advantage of it? Why not go in debt for a few grand if all it is is numbers? If it's all an idea and nothing's really there, why not take advantage? So I just went along with it, that's all. I just played ball.

-- from Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard (1976)

edited to note: I read Curse of the Starving Class for the first time this week and this monologue really struck me as appropriate to our current era. As it happens, Charles Isherwood also quoted this speech in his review of the 2008 revival of the play at ACT, but I didn't read Isherwood's piece until after writing this blog post.

My Olympians Festival Post on 2AMTheatre

2011-11-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

I know I've been AWOL from my blog for too long, but you can check out 2AMTheatre today to see a post I wrote about the Olympians Festival (which is what kept me so busy in October)

Greeks and Geeks: The San Francisco Olympians Festival

Many thanks to Tim Bauer for suggesting that I write this post and to David Loehr for his stewardship of 2AMTheatre.

The Third Quarter

2011-10-13T17:56:00.000-07:00

One of the many eccentricities of my high school education was the emphasis it placed on memorizing and reciting poems and other classic texts. Just about the first thing we did in freshman English was to memorize the school's official Bible chapter, I Corinthians 13, in the King James translation. (Adding to the eccentricity: it was a secular school in every other respect.) I have always had a good memory and I had been acting in plays since I was 6 years old, so I did not have much trouble with the memorization, but many other students struggled. At that point, my teacher offered us a tip. "The hardest part of anything to memorize," she said, "is the third quarter of it, the part between 50 and 75 percent. So start memorizing halfway through and then work your way around to the beginning."

This has stuck with me, not as my preferred trick to use when memorizing something, but because I've discovered that this rule, this "the third quarter is the most difficult part" principle, holds true for other situations. In particular, for playwriting. With all of my full-length plays, the most difficult part to write has been the third quarter -- the beginning of Act Two. If you aren't a playwright, you might assume that the most difficult scenes to write are the most emotionally intense ones, at the end. But those are relatively easy to write (especially if, like me, you have a streak of melodrama in you). And of course, the exposition scenes at the beginning of Act One present their own challenges. But, in general, once you've gotten past the hurdle of laying out your exposition without being boring or inane, you can quite easily finish the rest of Act One.

And then you get to the beginning of Act Two, and you think you'll never manage to finish it. It's tricky, delicate work, like being a demolitions expert on a secret mission. You have to set up all of the elements of your play (the characters and their motivations) so that they explode just right at the climax. You are dealing with volatile material and you have to be careful that it doesn't explode too soon, or fizzle out anticlimactically and too late. You have to set all of the bombs in place without it being obvious that that's what you're doing, or else no one will be surprised when they go off. But at the same time, you want to offer little hints of foreshadowing, to flatter the audience's intelligence and get them on your side. The audience should want the bombs to detonate, should want the building to explode in a fireball, when the climax occurs. You shouldn't lure the audience into a trap and then give them a load of shrapnel to the face. You should make them your accomplices on your mission.

(The above may be the most violent metaphor I have ever constructed and I hope it doesn't get me in trouble with the authorities. But playwriting is dangerous work, folks.)

"Second-act problems" are a proverbial part of playwriting, but I propose that we could also call them "third-quarter problems." When people say "second-act problems," they don't mean that the very end of the second act sucked (when that happens, they just say "the ending sucked") -- they mean that the playwright had trouble getting through the second act, managing the climax without bungling it. Maybe the playwright meandered for a good portion of Act II and then the climax came out of nowhere -- that's one of the most common second-act, third-quarter problems.

I was talking to my roommate about my theory of "third-quarter problems" and she told me that she ran track in high school, the 400-meter dash, and always found the third quarter of the race (meters 200 to 300) the hardest part. I think that it is human nature to plateau during the third quarter of anything. You've been running hard and you know you've accomplished something sizable. (If you were competing in the 200 meters -- or if you were writing a one-act play -- you'd be done by now!) The finish line is in sight, but still far off, and you feel like you deserve to slow down and catch your breath and marshal your strength for the finale. But that doesn't work if you want to be an all-star sprinter, and it doesn't work if you want to be an all-star playwright. Plays can't plateau during their third quarter. The action has to keep rising up, up, up until the end.

A few weeks ago, my Pleiades script had some major third-quarter problems that I felt like I would never resolve. But as October began and the third quarter of 2011 drew to an end, I managed to work hard, push through the problems, and come up with a draft of the script that I am satisfied to hear aloud in public. I invite you to join us for our reading on October 22 -- which, I note, is on the third weekend of our four-weekend festival.

Playwrights have been having second-act or third-quarter problems since our profession existed -- frankly, you could even make the case that Hamlet has third-quarter problems, what with Hamlet being sent to England, captured by offstage pirates, etc. And human beings, too, have always had third-quarter problems; indeed, isn't a "midlife crisis" the archetypal "third-quarter problem"? Third-quarter problems -- the plateau, the struggle, the eventual breakthrough -- are common to most people and most narratives. So, despite everything, they bring us together. So, despite everything, they're problems I love to have.

Olympians are Omnipresent!

2011-10-11T23:46:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Olympians Festival is well under way and it feels like it has been taking the city by storm! You can check us out at the following locations...

On your iPhone: Thanks to playwright/programmer Kirk Shimano, we are the world's only mythology-inspired theater festival with its own (free) app! It features schedules, cast lists, and festival artwork. Search for "olympians" at the App Store.

In Bay Stages: There's a 1-page feature on us in the October issue of this new-ish local performing arts magazine. Also free! Pick up your copy here.

In 7x7: this San Francisco publication did an online feature on the Festival today. We're all getting a kick out of being called "hipsters." Togas are the new skinny jeans, let me tell you.

In American Theatre Magazine: We made it into a national publication! The article isn't available online, but pick up a hard copy of the October issue and turn to pages 14-15 for a few nice paragraphs on the Olympians Festival.

At the Cafe Royale (800 Post Street): We had our opening party here, and all month long the cafe gallery is hosting a show of the original Festival artwork. It is just stunning to see in person, particularly Molly Benson's Perseus glass mosaics and Emily C. Martin's original Pleiades drawing, featuring real gold leaf!

All month long at the Exit Theatre (156 Eddy St): the Festival readings continue every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8 PM for the next three weeks. My play, Pleiades, is on October 22; I'd love to see you there!

Photo by Claire Rice. That's me kneeling at front, with some of my fellow Olympians playwrights: (l-r) Maria Leigh, Christian Simonsen, Neil Higgins, Bryce Duzan.

Possible preview of my day tomorrow

2011-09-25T22:13:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a vacation day tomorrow, with starry-eyed visions of working on my play and not having to fight for a seat at the coffee shop. But this funny video, from local sketch comedy troupe Killing My Lobster, tells me I oughtn't get my hopes up.

Seriously, when you work a traditional 9 to 5 job in San Francisco, you can feel like an anomaly, and, instead of feeling lucky to have a "real" job, you can feel like you went wrong somewhere. (Because everyone else in the city seems to have so much lovely free time to hang around the Mission and drink coffee!) My co-workers think of me as the weird artsy one who does theater after work, and my theater friends think of me as the weird corporate one who spends all day in an office. On a good day, I feel like a superhero with a secret identity. On a bad day, I feel like I have no identity at all.

But tomorrow, I get to live in my superhero playwright identity for the whole day, so, crowded coffee shops or no, I think it'll be a good day.

Links: Playwriting, "Pleiades," Personals, Paris...

2011-09-22T23:29:00.000-07:00

Links to tide you over as I ignore my blog in favor of revising my play. The staged reading is happening one month from tonight!

So, self-promotion alert: check out the Facebook event for my reading and the Olympians Festival website, which has been updated with a full schedule and all of the artwork.

Pleiades is set in 1971 and I've been getting my daily dose of visual inspiration from the Sighs and Whispers blog, which posts scans of old fashion magazines, with a heavy focus on the late-'60s early-'70s era. Because my play is about seven sisters, I especially liked "Seven Faces of Beauty," an ad campaign from 1972.

Far more contemporary: N+1 Personals. I love these people. I hate these people. I want to slap these people. I want to date these people. I have more in common with these people than I would like to admit. Is this a ruthless "Stuff White People Like"-style examination of the preoccupations of young, overeducated, underpaid Americans? A collection of desperate lonelyhearts who name-drop Derrida and Pynchon in order to conceal their fear that they're dull and empty inside? An assortment of vibrant individuals who would be my new best friends if we ever met in person? And before you ask, no, I am not the "latter-day Aphra Behn seeking straight Kit Marlowe." I wish I were clever enough to describe myself that way!

I'm jealous of playwright E.M. Lewis' trip to Paris, as chronicled on her blog!

Thought-provoking HowlRound post by the brilliant Taylor Mac. Quote: "I would go one step further and suggest not to read plays until after they’ve committed to producing them. Instead get to know artists and their body of work. Give them a date on the calendar for when their new play will be produced and… trust. If you’ve liked plays they’ve written in the past, chances are they’ll write something you’ll be interested in again, and if not, the production will be over in a couple months but the relationship with the artist may last decades." You know, this is kind of how the Olympians Festival works -- we were given a year to write our plays and, come hell or high water, they'll have staged readings in October. And I am immensely grateful for, yes, the trust and faith that our Festival producer has placed in me throughout the process.

All the same, on a near-constant basis these days, I find myself thinking of this other Taylor Mac quote: "The job of a play, before it reaches an audience, is to beat the playwright's ego into submission." So, with that, I'm off to go submit my ego to some more abuse...

Psychedelic "Pleiades" Poster

2011-09-06T23:09:00.000-07:00

I love, love, love Emily C. Martin's poster art for Pleiades! (Click for a bigger version.) And how amazing is it that the Olympians Festival creates such stunning artwork for what is, in essence, a one-night-only staged reading?

Our Festival art coordinator, Cody Rishell, asked us if we had any guidance for the artist, and I responded with an email about the early 1970s, psychedelic rock posters from that era, Alphonse Mucha, Art Nouveau, maxi dresses, and long-haired girls. (My decision to set Pleiades in 1971 was inspired by a photograph of my mother's six beautiful female cousins wearing long dresses in the early '70s.) I worried that I was demanding too much... but you can see that Emily Martin was able to capture all of that and more! I especially like the swirling mandala-like design.

The first show of the Olympians Festival is in exactly one month and Pleiades is taking place on October 22. Come to my show and have a chance to win a copy of this poster in a raffle!

The final reel at the Red Vic Movie House

2011-09-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

Vivre sa vie
Sita Sings the Blues
Let the Right One In
Inglourious Basterds
The City of Lost Children
The Fall
Small Change
Tiny Furniture
Vertigo
Harold and Maude

It looks paltry when I just write down the titles, but I believe that that's the complete list of all the movies I saw at the Red Vic Movie House, from the time I moved to the Inner Sunset in January 2009 until the cinema (sadly) closed at the end of July. Consider this a belated obituary.

I feel like there were dozens more movies that I could have or should have seen there (and then maybe, my magical thinking goes, the cinema wouldn't have closed), but this list represents some amazing movies and some indelible memories. I remember seeing Vivre sa vie on a lonely winter Saturday when I was still quite new to San Francisco and finding my way. The heroine is an elusive, mysterious character, and not a role model -- except that I could relate to how she finds solace or catharsis by sitting in a cinema and watching movies. After all, that was what I was doing myself.

Looking at the list I am struck by how many of the movies I saw at the Red Vic have to do with cinephilia or at least have scenes set in movie theaters. Vivre sa vie: the unforgettable scene of Anna Karina watching The Passion of Joan of Arc. Inglourious Basterds: a cinephile's fever dream, with an elaborate climax taking place inside of a movie theater. The Fall: another cinephilic fever dream, a movie that became a cult classic at the Red Vic, its breathtaking images demanding to be seen on the big screen. Small Change: the movie theater provides the backdrop for many of the children's everyday adventures. Inglourious Basterds and The Fall also have strong messages about the power of cinema for good or for ill, how stories capture our imagination and can hurt us or heal us. As does the backstory of Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film made by a woman struggling to get over a bad breakup, transforming her pain into cinematic art.

Holidays were another running theme of my Red Vic moviegoing experience. Let the Right One In as a just-before-Halloween scary treat. The Fall on New Year's Day 2010, the cinema filled with lonely souls. My birthday this year, celebrated with classic cocktails at the Alembic followed by a screening of Vertigo at the Red Vic -- my "HitchCocktail Party." The next day, the Bay Guardian interviewed one of the Red Vic's owners about the cinema's upcoming closure. She said "It's been a long, slow, steady decline. Then again, I worked last night and it was pretty busy for Vertigo." Can I and my party take credit for that?

I wasn't too impressed by The City of Lost Children (amazing set design and visual sense, but I found the story lacking), and Small Change is fairly minor Truffaut, but other than that, I will gladly recommend all of the above movies. And just look at the range of movies that the Red Vic showed! While many of its screenings were of recent-ish indie-ish films, it always made time for the classics. How could I not love a movie theater where I first experienced both a French New Wave classic and a film (Tiny Furniture) made by a young woman who graduated from college the same year I did?

I was there on the final weekend to see Harold and Maude, the cultiest of the Red Vic's cult classics, and I miss the Red Vic Movie House already. So, with Anna Karina, let's shed a tear for what we witnessed on the silver screen:

and with Harold and Maude, watch the sun go down on this piece of San Francisco history.

"Suddenly, Greek gods can be just as interesting and relevant as real people"

2011-08-29T23:12:00.000-07:00

A Metafilter thread today led me to this passage from the novel Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, that deals with the continuing relevance and power of Greek mythology to the modern world. An extract:

"Okay. So the Athena that you honor on your medallion isn't a supernatural being--"

"--who lives on a mountain in Greece, et cetera, but rather whatever entity, pattern, trend, what-have-you that, when perceived by ancient Greek people, and filtered through their perceptual machinery and their pagan worldview, produced the internal mental representation that they dubbed Athena. The distinction being important because Athena-the supernatural-chick-with-the-helmet is of course nonexistent, but 'Athena' the external-generator-of-the-internal-representation-dubbed-Athena-by-the-ancient-Greeks must have existed back then, or if she existed back then, the chances are excellent that she exists now, and if all that is the case, then whatever ideas the ancient Greeks (who, though utter shitheads in many ways, were terrifyingly intelligent people) had about her are probably quite valid."

It goes on from there and is thought-provoking. A nice thing to read as the San Francisco Olympians Festival draws nearer.

Feliz Cumpleaños Borges

2011-08-24T22:44:00.000-07:00

Today's Google Doodle doesn't look the way I think a "Borges" illustration ought to look -- somehow it's too sci-fi. Yes, Borges wrote speculative fiction, but he was steeped in erudition, enthralled by the thinkers who had come before him, and fascinated by dreams and mysticism and conspiracies... The image above is too bright, too orderly, too futuristic.

Nonetheless I am happy that Google chose to honor him on this day. "The Aleph" might just be my favorite short story of all time -- I think it is absolutely perfect. And, as a playwright, I find myself thinking about "The Secret Miracle" an awful lot, sometimes praying for a secret miracle of my own!

I read the complete short stories of Borges the summer I was 17 and keep meaning to do a lengthier post on him. But I can't afford to do so at the moment: there are no secret miracles, and time marches on apace. And besides, you'd be better served by reading the actual JLB than by reading my opinions of his work. I encourage you to check out the above two stories -- and feel free to come back and tell me your thoughts on him. Or let me know your personal favorite Borges story.

Other great writers born on August 24: Jean Rhys (someday, too, I'll write about why I think Wide Sargasso Sea is overrated and Voyage in the Dark is underrated) and A.S. Byatt (a favorite of mine; see all my Byatt posts here).

The Radiant Sisters

2011-08-18T21:59:00.000-07:00

Clearly, my blog has gone into abeyance while I work on Pleiades, but to tide you over, here's a poem, "On the Beach at Night" by Walt Whitman, that I found while doing research for mentions of the Pleiades in literature.

On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

Of note: my play is about Jupiter (Zeus) and the Pleiades, and long before I read this poem, I had planned for my play to take place in a summer house on Walt Whitman's native Long Island, with some key scenes occurring "on the beach at night."

Also of note: I found two different versions of this poem online, the one above, and a version where the Pleiades are referred to as "delicate brothers" and "radiant brothers." I had heard that Whitman compulsively revised his poems, but never seen such a clear-cut example! It seems that when the poem was originally published in Leaves of Grass in 1871, it was "brothers," but twenty years later, it had changed to "sisters." Did he revise it to make it less shocking/controversial? After all, if the Pleiades are always referred to as the Seven Sisters, it's a gender reversal to portray them as brothers, and a phrase like "delicate brothers" would have served as a big sign-post pointing to Whitman's homosexuality.

Then again, according to another website I found, the Pleiades have always had an association with homosexuality -- I suppose because they are seen as such a strong feminine influence that, when they appear in a man's astrological chart, they signify effeminacy or homosexuality? But I enjoyed this astrologer's positive re-interpretation of the Pleiades (seeing them not as victims, but "divine sisters on a voyage to true individuality and rebellion against social expectations... a reminder to those who would follow in their steps of revolution, promising that all burdens endured would lead to a greater brightness that would withstand the darkness of man's own ignorance") and his discovery of an ancient text that assigned a virtue and a color to each of the seven sisters. One of my challenges while writing Pleiades has been to develop each sister as an individual character -- when the myths don't give them much in the way of individual personality. And I get a kick out of this esoteric astrological stuff.

The Manifestation of a Script

2011-08-07T15:03:00.000-07:00

So! Last week my script was featured in Un-Scripted Theater's "Act One, Scene Two" project. It was an unusual, surprising, fun, and very valuable evening. I'm so pleased with how it all turned out.

The Un-Scripted Theater Company specializes in long-form improv: improvising a full-length, 2-act play in a specified genre or style. "Act One, Scene Two" is a new thing for them:

Each performance features a different guest playwright with Act One, Scene One of an unfinished play. The Un-Scripted Theater Company interviews the playwright onstage, performs their scene while reading it for the first time, and then goes on to finish the play -- now without a script -- starting from Act One, Scene Two. It's a blend of scripted and un-scripted that exposes the electric heart of live theater.

Writing my scene for "Act One, Scene Two" was actually a really good playwriting exercise. I had to devise a premise interesting enough that it could self-evidently sustain a full-length play, even though I had no idea what the remainder of the play would be. My scene -- required to be under 8 pages -- would have to establish characters, setting, style, and tone, provide some kind of action, and drop hints or dangle plot-threads that the improvisers could pick up. I quickly realized that the opening scenes of my existing full-length plays wouldn't work: they were too slow-moving or didn't have a clear enough "hook." So I wrote a new scene, titled "Manifestation."

The scene begins with two female friends, Annie and Elise. Annie believes in "manifestation," understood to be some kind of New Agey, The Secret-type philosophy where "the universe exists in order to manifest our deepest desires" and if you want something enough, you'll get it. For this reason, Annie asks Elise to envision and describe her "ideal man." But Elise doesn't believe in Manifestation, and thinks it's wrong to spend your time dreaming about an ideal that will never come true. Finally, she says:

ELISE: OK, if this is my ideal man we’re talking about, he is a good cook. He is also the heir to a billion-dollar fortune, owns a flying carpet, and gives me an orgasm every time he touches me. But I have to be practical. It makes no sense to daydream about a man like that. So, sticking to the realm of the possible, and being careful not to set myself up for disappointment… it’s nice if he can cook. But it’s not necessary.

And then, wouldn't you know, a good-looking man (Jake) shows up on a flying carpet, and he's the heir to a billion-dollar fortune, and when he shakes Elise's hand... yowza! Jake and Elise ride off on the flying carpet, and Annie is left feeling confused and resentful.

It's kind of silly, and I'm sure that this same basic premise has been used before. And I don't usually write plays that violate the laws of physics, with things like flying carpets. But at the same time, this felt like a "Marissa" play. It has female protagonists, and suggests that female friendship can be complex and involve emotions like envy or competitiveness. It has a heterosexual-romance element to it, and somewhat cynical or dissatisfied characters. The "Manifestation" theme is there to give it a bit more philosophic depth than just "two girls talking about their love lives," as well as to provide a sort-of explanation for why Flying-Carpet Jake shows up.

The Un-Scripted actors received my script about an hour and a half before curtain time. The show itself began with me being called to the stage and interviewed about my writing. I said that I enjoy playwriting for the characters it allows me to create, and that I particularly like telling women's stories, and exploring "flawed" or "unlikable" characters. Thus, I told the Un-Scripted troupe not to be afraid of acting unlikable: "Don't have the audience love you because you're so wonderful, but because you are interesting and messed-up."

"That's a pretty good philosophy for life in general," said one of the actors.

I was also able to drop a few hints as to how I envisioned the arc of the play. For instance, I said that I thought either Annie or Elise could be a compelling protagonist, and I wanted to see how this incident affected their friendship.

Then I returned to my seat, and the show began. There were five cast members that night: Mandy Khoshnevisan as Elise, Stacy Mayer as Annie, Aaron Saenz as Jake, and Joy Carletti and Merrill Gruver in a variety of smaller roles. Mandy had a wonderful array of incredulous grimaces that she used to convey Elise's amazement at her "ideal man"'s sudden appearance. Aaron did a very funny parody of a smooth-talking romantic hero, pointing up the absurdity of this stereotype. Stacy managed to be sweet and likable (okay, maybe I do want the audience to like my characters?) even when playing a sad-sack who felt like she'd gotten a bum deal.

As you can see, there were four women and one man in the cast that night. I knew this going in, so I figured that Aaron might have to play multiple roles. What I could not have guessed is that Aaron would decide that his character, Jake, had an evil identical twin who matched Annie's description of her ideal man! Utterly brilliant. The revelation that Jake had a twin brother came right before intermission, and I couldn't wait for Act II to begin and allow us to meet the evil twin. Un-Scripted knows how to use the tricks of dramatic structure to hook an audience.

Not everything about the show was necessarily "the way I would have written it." The last scene felt tacked-on, though this is probably an occupational hazard of long-form improv and the need to wrap things up. And the play ended with Elise happily married to Jake and the mother of twins, whereas, cynic that I am, I would probably have broken the characters up -- Elise would realize that she and Jake are incompatible and that it is indeed ridiculous to daydream about "ideal men." But I really appreciated that the troupe decided to follow both Annie and Elise's stories. You couldn't say that one woman was the protagonist and the other was the sidekick; they were both protagonists, and I loved that the show had two women at its core.

One of the most interesting things about Un-Scripted's shows is that they often end up becoming meta-theatrical -- somehow commenting on the act of live performance and improvisation. Seeing the show, I made a connection that hadn't consciously occurred to me when I wrote my scene. "Manifestation" is the act of creating something just by saying that it exists. Well, isn't that what theater is -- particularly improvised theater?

(There were a couple of funny, coincidental "manifestations" surrounding the show, too. Without knowing the subject of my play, Stacy had brought the New Age book A New Earth to read on the bus that day, and she ended up using it as a prop -- it's exactly the kind of thing Annie would read! Another odd manifestation: the entire cast decided to dress in purple shirts. How could they know that purple is my favorite color?)

Long-form improv is a high-wire act, full of risks. But the folks at Un-Scripted are so talented and quick-witted that they can make amazing things manifest.

Image, from left to right: me, Aaron Saenz, Joy Carletti, Mandy Khoshnevisan, Merrill Gruver, and Stacey Mayer, after the show. Photo by Scott Keck.

David Foster Wallace, Romantic Hero

2011-07-25T23:12:00.000-07:00

From NYMag.com, 7/20/11:

There's a David Foster Wallace character in Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel. Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, his long-awaited follow-up to 2002's Middlesex, arrives in bookstores in October [...] The protagonist, Madeleine Hanna, is a graduating senior at Brown who loves nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and her scientist boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead. She is loved in return by the religiously minded Mitchell Grammaticus. Grammaticus shares some qualities with the author himself. Like Eugenides, Mitchell's a smarty-pants of Greek descent who attended Brown and grew up in Detroit [...] But the Bankhead character is more recognizable still, as David Foster Wallace. Leonard Bankhead is a philosophy double major who chews tobacco, wears a bandanna, disdains ironic detachment, and has a history of mental illness that has led to multiple hospitalizations — just like David Foster Wallace. [...] Certainly, Leonard is distinct from DFW in a number of ways as well — the particularities of his family situation, his being a total stud, that he's a manic-depressive, not just a depressive, that he's not a writer, and all the vagaries of the plot — but the similarities are so iconically David Foster Wallace (a bandanna and chew are not common accoutrements) that Eugenides, who did not have a well-known or documented friendship with Foster Wallace, must intentionally be calling him to mind.

Well, isn't this what I said when an excerpt of The Marriage Plot appeared in The New Yorker a year ago? ("Did the character of Leonard in this story (Madeleine's love interest) make anyone else think of David Foster Wallace? I mean, he's an overachieving, somewhat obsessive, double-majoring, tall guy who chews tobacco--sound familiar?") Score one for me!

Eugenides' novel will add to the Wallace mystique, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Last month I was talking with a friend about David Foster Wallace and his lasting influence on our generation (the Millennials), even intruding into Millennial mating rituals. That is, my friend and I have both had memorable experiences involving cute boys and David Foster Wallace (cute boys telling us to read DFW, us telling other cute boys to read DFW, becoming closer to a romantic partner by reading DFW with him, etc). And we feel that other women like us have had similar experiences, that this is becoming a "thing" or even a cliché. Prediction: Within the next five years, there will be an indie romantic comedy that features a scene of characters reading Wallace.

On the surface of it, there's no reason why David Foster Wallace should become associated with young lovers. (This is not Goethe and The Sorrows of Young Werther.) In his New Yorker essay on Wallace, Jonathan Franzen pointed out "the near-perfect absence, in [Wallace]'s fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe. [...] David's fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates." Yet Franzen goes on to say, "The curious thing about David's fiction [...] is how recognized and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading it. [...] This very cataloguing of despair about his own authentic goodness is received by the reader as a gift of authentic goodness: we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it."

And thus it does make sense that we Millennials, in love or hoping to be, would make Wallace a part of our romances. In sharing our love for Wallace with a potential lover, we signal what kind of person we are: "I love David Foster Wallace" has become shorthand for "I am impressively smart, but also achingly vulnerable, deeply caring, and worth getting to know, despite the difficulty." Plus, reading Wallace and finding an understanding boyfriend or girlfriend have the same end result -- of making us feel less alone in the world. So Wallace and romance and our sense of self all get mixed up together.

And then, maybe the logical next step is for David Foster Wallace himself to be depicted as a young lover and a romantic hero -- as he is, it seems, in Eugenides' novel.

Well, it might have taken Jeffrey Eugenides to make Wallace a small-r romantic hero, but society already treats him like a capital-R Romantic hero. That is, every generation needs someone whose life plays into the Romantic myth of the artist as a tormented individual who sees more clearly than his fellow man, but suffers greatly for it. David Foster Wallace has become that figure for my generation. The myth goes, "Wallace understood and wrote about The Modern Condition better than anyone else, and because he perceived the truth too profoundly, he was doomed to die. He stared into the sun and went blind from what he saw."

Adding to Wallace's mystique and myth are his notable eccentricities -- not just his stylistic quirks as a writer, but external stuff like the bandannas and the chewing tobacco. (After all, it was the mere mention of chewing tobacco in Eugenides' story that got me wondering, "Was this character based on Wallace?") And so I'm beginning to wonder if there will come a time when Wallace's mythos will overshadow his actual work.

Last week I was considering Ernest Hemingway -- another American author with a highly recognizable prose style and several personal eccentricities, who died by his own hand -- and the way that Hemingway's persona now overshadows his work. Hemingway is no longer A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, he is Bullfights-Mojitos-Safaris-Masculinity-Monosyllables. Will there come a time when David Foster Wallace is no longer Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster, but merely Bandannas-Tobacco-Tennis-Depression-Footnotes? And does making him into a romantic hero and a Romantic hero just hasten the onset of that?

And Now the Final Frame

2011-07-23T22:51:00.000-07:00

Tributes to Amy Winehouse are tending to center around two things: The Voice (raspy, smoky, sexy, old-school, a big bluesy voice in a tiny little body, capable of holding you spellbound without resorting to show-off diva tricks) and The Problems (drugs, addictions, fights, self-destruction, a knack for being her own worst enemy). What has not been mentioned as often as it should, I think, is that she was an amazingly talented songwriter. "Rehab" is that rarity: an extremely catchy pop song that isn't annoying when it, inevitably, gets stuck in your head. (In summer 2007, it got stuck in my head so often that I wrote a parody of it.) And in her ballads she found memorable turns of phrase to sing about that oldest of subjects, the pain of love. I particularly liked her use of alliteration: "I tread a troubled track" from "Back to Black," or "Memories mar my mind," from "Love Is a Losing Game."

"Love Is a Losing Game" just might be my favorite of her songs -- there is something almost classically beautiful about it, in the purity of its sadness and its hard-won wisdom. The lyrics sit perfectly on the music. Not a word is wasted.

Here is her demo recording of the song:

And here she sings unplugged versions of her four biggest hits: "Back to Black," "Love Is a Losing Game," "You Know I'm No Good," and "Rehab":

In performances like the ones in the video above, she was so present -- clearly connecting deeply with the songs as she sang them, she varies the phrasing and the melody from the album version. Seeing this, it's all too easy to lament the times she took the stage and wasn't fully present, due to drinking or drugs -- and also lament that we won't get any more Amy Winehouse performances, sober or not. We ask, how could she write songs that were so beautifully crafted and displayed such wit and insight -- then live a life that was so out-of-control and such an inevitable downward spiral?

She lived fast and died young, and while I find it ghoulish to speculate upon the appearance of her corpse, she did leave behind a beautiful body of work. And it's the work of an old soul.

As I read elsewhere on the Internet earlier today, Back to Black has just become the saddest album of the '00s.

Under the Sea: "Salty Towers" at Thunderbird Theatre

2011-07-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

Pity poor Poseidon. After he and his two brothers defeated Cronus and divided the world between them, Zeus gained dominion over the heavens and was crowned king of the gods. Hades gained dominion over the underworld and an everlasting bad-ass reputation. And Poseidon gained dominion over -- the ocean? Well, maybe some gods would have made the best of it, but Poseidon doesn't seem to have been too happy. Most of the myths about him depict him as an angry and resentful god, unleashing mighty storms upon unlucky mortals (Odysseus, Hippolytus, Idomeneo). And in perhaps the most famous myth featuring Poseidon, he loses the contest to become patron god of Athens when he gives the city a spring of salt water (whereas Athena provides an olive tree). Not very impressive, to be sure.

For their play Poseidon in the San Francisco Olympians Festival last summer, authors Bryce Alleman, Dana Constance and Kathy Hicks decided to accept that Poseidon is an underdog among gods, and mine that for comedy. As they see it, Poseidon is the beleaguered proprietor of a shabby undersea hotel. He hopes to win the right to host the Olympics and thus get revenge on Athena, but complications arrive in the form of his venomous wife Medusa, his mischievous hotel staff of sea creatures, and several troublesome guests.

Twelve months later, Thunderbird Theatre is giving this play a full production, having hilariously re-christened it Salty Towers in the meantime. Yes, it's a parody of Fawlty Towers, with Poseidon in the John Cleese role. I should note, though, that I've never seen an episode of Fawlty Towers but didn't feel lost or confused during the play. (And yes, this also means that the plays of last summer's Olympians Festival are now batting 3 for 12 when it comes to full productions!)

Salty Towers authors Bryce, Dana, and Kathy are all company members of Thunderbird, which was founded over 10 years ago with the goal of producing original comedic plays. Not black comedies or drawing-room comedies, but unabashed broad humor, farce, and parody. As such, Salty Towers was written in "Thunderbird style," featuring a large cast and a story that is more a succession of incidents than a complex narrative. New characters and sub-plots are constantly introduced throughout the play, and then everything gets resolved by a deus ex machina: Poseidon accidentally gets knocked out for two days, has a dream sequence, and when he comes to, everything is OK. You could argue that the Greeks invented the deus ex machina and thus it is brilliantly clever for a Greek-inspired play to employ this technique, but I feel like that would be overthinking things. Though it would be more challenging, I did wish to see the characters work their conflicts out organically.

The large cast of characters parading across the stage, though, provides a great showcase for Sara Briendel's witty costumes. The gods wear 1970s styles on top and togas on the bottom, while papier-mache and puppetry allows actors to portray sea creatures. As for the characterizations of the gods -- always one of my favorite parts of an Olympians Festival play -- I liked the comic depictions of Dionysus as a Jim Morrison-quoting stoned hippie and Hestia as a giggling, frumpy nerd. But I'm not sure I understood the decision to portray Hermes as a snooty closeted homosexual (usually he's more of a trickster jock), and while it was briefly amusing to hear fire-stealing Prometheus talk like a 1930s Chicago gangster, the portrayal was overly broad. Meanwhile, Poseidon himself is sympathetic, but not the most memorable or compelling character in the play. Throughout it, he's essentially reacting to the crazy hi-jinks of his customers and staff, not making decisions of his own.

One of Poseidon's employees at the undersea hotel is a Portuguese man o' war. In the real world, this jelly-like creature has long venomous tentacles, but in Salty Towers, it's portrayed more like an electric eel, with tentacles that light up and deliver electric shocks. And maybe that's a good metaphor for Salty Towers as a whole. It has the capacity to deliver jolts of wit, laughter, and electricity. But the play also lacks an internal structure that would give it a more solid shape.

Salty Towers is playing through July 23 at the Exit Theater. See thunderbirdtheatre.com for more info.

A Script for Un-Scripted

2011-07-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

The Un-Scripted Theater Company is producing my script.

It sounds like an oxymoron, but it's real, and coming up soon: July 28 at 8 PM.

The Un-Scripted Theater, San Francisco's premiere improv theater group, is collaborating with playwrights for the first time ever. For their Act One, Scene Two project, they asked local playwrights to submit the beginning scene of a play. On the night of the performance, the Un-Scripted actors will do a cold reading of that scene and then improvise the remainder of the play -- 90 to 120 minutes, including intermission!

Moreover, the goal is to improvise a play the style of that evening's playwright, so at the very beginning of the show, I'll have to get onstage and answer questions about my writing style, common themes in my work, etc.

I saw opening night of Act One, Scene Two on July 9 and can attest that the Un-Scripted improvisers are super talented, amazingly quick-witted, and sure to provide a memorable evening of theater.

The scene I wrote for this project is titled "Manifestation" and while I can't reveal too much about it (it's supposed to be a secret until the night of the performance), I can say it's a little sillier than what I usually write, but also has some of my favorite themes/motifs. Oh, and don't bring small children or your easily offended grandma :-)

I can't wait to see the play that results from my little scene and the Un-Scripted actors' boundless imaginations -- and if you're in San Francisco, feel free to join me for what is one of the weirdest, but most exciting, opportunities I have ever had as a playwright.

As I said, this is a one-night-only deal, Thursday July 28, at 8 PM. (If you can't make it, I urge you to check out another Act One, Scene Two show -- it's playing well into August and there are lots of great playwrights in the lineup.)

The Un-Scripted Theater Company performs at the SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

One Constant, If I May

2011-07-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

A few New Yorker-ish things:

* The short story "Homage to Hemingway" by Julian Barnes from the July 4 issue was very thought-provoking. A combination of fiction, literary criticism, playful meta-textuality... good stuff, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death. And I loved this little passage:

He told them his theory of writers and cooking. Novelists, who were in it for the long haul, were temperamentally equipped for stewing and braising, for the slow mixing together of many ingredients, whereas poets ought to be good at stir-fry. And short story writers? someone asked. Steak and chips. Dramatists? Ah, dramatists – they, the lucky sods, were basically mere orchestrators of the talents of others, and would be satisfied to shake a leisurely cocktail while the kitchen staff rustled up the grub.

Bonus link: Julian Barnes reads Hemingway's "Homage to Switzerland," which inspired "Homage to Hemingway."

* Paul Muldoon, the magazine's Poetry Editor, gave the commencement speech for the Bennington College writers' program -- in terza rima. Actually, this poem is a meta-textual homage too, to W. H. Auden's poem for the 1946 Harvard commencement, "Under Which Lyre". I'm not sure Muldoon's poem will endure as long as Auden's (there might be too many snarky pop-culture references in it), but I enjoyed several passages from it, especially this one:

The challenge is how to kick-start
ourselves and name some grand ambition shining there
at which we may, albeit briefly, set our caps
before throwing those same caps in the capricious air.

and the concluding advice:

think outside the frame
unless you’re a photographer; be frugal
in everything but praise; never jump a small claim;
always write “some pig” of the least porker
in the barnyard; remember those who fly far look like fair game;

refuse to pay corkage; make every line a corker;
let your main tactic be tact
and—one constant, if I may—read The New Yorker.

"Tales of the City: A New Musical" - San Francisco in Song

2011-07-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

Shortly after moving to San Francisco in 2008, I read Armistead Maupin's first Tales of the City book and then learned that it was being adapted into a musical -- which I thought was a great idea. So I was very excited to see the world premiere, at the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) here in town through the end of the month.

Adapted from Armistead Maupin's columns and novels, the musical has a libretto by Jeff Whitty and a score by Jake Shears and John Garden, of the 1970s-influenced band Scissor Sisters. (After writing this and Avenue Q, Whitty has cornered the market on musicals about young urbanites exploring their identities while living in a crazy apartment house presided over by a gender-ambiguous proprietor.) Shears and Garden draw on a mix of musical styles for the score, not limiting themselves to Scissor Sisters' glam-rock/disco sound. In an interview in the playbill, they make the point that the 1970s were a diverse era in music and that '70s Broadway composers (Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, John Kander) wrote music influenced by pop, rock, folk, jazz, traditional Broadway, etc. Thus, the score includes such items as a thumping disco number for the famous scene where Michael "Mouse" Tolliver participates in a jockey shorts dance contest, Janis Joplin-style blues-rock for Mona Ramsey's songs, and an outrageously campy Broadway-gospel song called "Homosexual Convalescent Center." Lyrics are more functional than brilliant, though I liked the rhyme of "marijuana / co-ed sauna" in a song where Mary Ann Singleton's friends enumerate the good things about San Francisco.

The Tales of the City characters are so beloved that it must be intimidating for actors to portray them, but this new musical is perfectly cast in its central roles. Betsy Wolfe is a sunny Mary Ann and her clear, pure voice suits her character's innocence. Wesley Taylor is an adorable Mouse, making his character's romantic woes instantly sympathetic. Judy Kaye is warm and dignified as Mrs. Anna Madrigal. At first, for all her kindness, she seems somehow distant from the other characters, but when Mrs. Madrigal's big secret is revealed at the end of Act 1, everything makes sense. Mary Birdsong captures Mona Ramsey's cynical, self-destructive side and delivers the funniest lines in the show.

The smaller roles sometimes suffer for not giving the performers enough to do or otherwise being underwritten. The character of DeDe Halcyon-Day gets two broadly comic songs and Kathleen Elizabeth Monteleone plays them to the hilt, but she functions more as comic relief than as an integral part of the show. DeDe's husband Beauchamp (Andrew Samonsky) duly performs his plot function of seducing Mary Ann, then basically disappears from the show. A brief scene in Act II shows Jon Fielding (Josh Breckinridge) and Beauchamp hooking up at a gay bathhouse, but this should probably be cut because it raises more questions than it answers. One of the key features of the Tales of the City stories is their blend of high-society characters with marginalized, outsider characters. But the musical often seems to wish that the upper-crust characters didn't exist, in order to go back to having more fun with those crazy and wild folks on Barbary Lane.

Indeed, that's the pitfall of adapting Tales of the City into a musical. Yes, the '70s atmosphere is fun, yes, the characters are lovable and relatable, yes, the big events of the plot give them something to sing about. But there's just too much plot and the creators still haven't found the best way to shape and balance it.

For instance, most of the reviews have mentioned as an emotional high point Mouse's "Dear Mama," where he sings his coming-out letter in the form of a simple folk ballad, unrhymed and all the more affecting because of it. I could hear grown men in the audience crying during this song. But the trouble, from a storytelling perspective, is that we never find out Mouse's mother's reaction to the letter. Does she accept her gay son, or spurn him? It's a good song, but a weak choice to have Mouse sing it to Mary Ann and Mrs. Madrigal (he wants them to hear the letter before he sends it). Much better for him to sing it as a soliloquy, or else directly to his mom.

Then there's the question of whose story this really is: Mary Ann's, Mouse's, or Mrs. Madrigal's? The musical starts off seeming like it will be Mary Ann's story (the "wide-eyed girl in the big city" opening number that I predicted back in 2008) but by Act II, the other characters' stories have become more compelling. The different storylines also present conflicting messages. Mouse and Mrs. Madrigal gain the courage to stop hiding who they really are; they tell the truth and are rewarded for it. Meanwhile, Mary Ann learns that she needs to hide who she is, to tone down her innate good cheer and stop being so trusting. In most of Tales of the City, San Francisco is portrayed as a hippie paradise of love and acceptance, but in Mary Ann's story, it's full of horrible people who try to take advantage of her. Does this make the musical intriguingly complex -- or thematically muddled?

A friend of mine says that she thinks the treatment of Mary Ann, vis-a-vis Mouse, is unfair. By the end of the musical, Mouse has acquired a handsome, successful, loving boyfriend, while Mary Ann has had relationships with two complete scumbags. I can see my friend's point -- as a straight woman, I too identify with Mary Ann and want her to be happy. However, I also appreciate seeing an ingenue heroine whose character arc is not "move to the big city and find Mr. Right." In San Francisco, Mary Ann learns to stand up for herself and acquires wonderful new friends, but she also becomes increasingly hardened and cynical. In her eleven-o-clock number, "Paper Faces," she laments how we all put on masks and personae in order to survive. "Paper Faces" also makes use of one of my favorite musical-theater tricks: the chorus joins in, the orchestra drops out, and everyone keeps singing in soaring harmonies. It gets me every time.

I talked about the characters' arcs, and while that's a good thing to have in a conventional play or musical, maybe that's wrong for Tales of the City -- which after all is based on a loose, rambling, episodic narrative, the first serialized story in a daily newspaper since the 19th century. Though Tales of the City sounded like a slam-bang idea for a musical, it really did take a lot of work to squeeze it into a conventional musical-comedy shape, with character arcs, a happy ending, and a 3-hour running time. To their credit, the creators have obviously worked hard, and not just coasted on the nostalgia that some San Franciscans feel for this era and these characters. (Even though Tales of the City is not a great musical, it could be far worse than it is and still make money in this town, due to the nostalgia factor.) But just as Mary Ann Singleton learns that a 5-day vacation in San Francisco cannot compare with actually living here, a 3-hour musical of Tales of the City, by definition, cannot really be Tales of the City.

Photos by Kevin Berne. Top: Judy Kaye as Anna Madrigal and Mary Birdsong as Mona Ramsey. Bottom: Patrick Lane as Brian Hawkins, Betsy Wolfe as Mary Ann Singleton, Wesley Taylor as Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and Josh Breckinridge as Jon Fielding.

Domestic Goddess: "Juno en Victoria" by Stuart Bousel

2011-06-29T21:33:00.000-07:00

Juno en Victoria, currently playing at Stage Werx in a production by Wily West Productions, is doubly distinguished: the second Stuart Bousel play to premiere in June (the first was Edenites) and the second Olympians Festival play to receive a full production (after Hermes, in March). Fortunately, it lives up to its pedigree!

One of my favorite aspects of the Olympians Festival is how the writers re-contextualize ancient myths, setting them in other historical eras where they will resonate better. Thus, Juno en Victoria re-imagines the story of Hera, goddess of marriage, as a Victorian comedy of manners -- a perfect match of theme and time period. When Hera says at one point, "I am my marriage," it doesn't sound like hyperbole, but the simple truth. Stuart is also a literature nerd who gets a kick out of mashing up Greek mythology with Victorian fiction and history, and the play is rife with fanservice allusions.

(Geeky playwriting tangent: I am also impressed by the way Edenites and Juno display Stuart's command of two very different dramatic structures. Edenites is a series of short scenes modeled after a talky '90s indie movie, while Juno is an old-fashioned three-act, one-set, drawing-room comedy. Interestingly, though, both plays deviate from the norm by including several direct-address monologues. I felt that the monologues worked a little better in Edenites than in Juno, although the penultimate monologue in Juno is one of the play's best jokes, and Hera's concluding speech is a knockout.)

The play takes place during an English summer in the High Victorian era, at Zeus and Hera's country house. They seem like a happy couple, and their youngest daughter Hebe is about to make an excellent marriage to Heracles (amusingly portrayed as a Bertie Wooster-ish twit). The main action of the play, though, focuses on Hera and her spinster sister, Hestia. Hestia suspects that Zeus is philandering again, and is determined to find out the identity of Zeus's new paramour. Hera, meanwhile, appears unconcerned by her husband's dalliances; thus we (and Hestia) wonder whether Hera is just putting on a front. Adding some Cockney attitude to the cast of characters are the family's servants, Iris and Ganymede.

With Edenites, I felt like the male and female roles were equally well written and performed, but, for personal reasons, I connected to the women's stories more. Juno en Victoria, though, is unquestionably the women's play. The men are supporting characters, Zeus never appears onstage (though his presence looms large), and the women in the cast also seem to inhabit their roles more fully. Kalinda Wang, as Iris, is no glittering rainbow-goddess, but an embittered young woman who gives full voice to her working-class resentment. Kat Bushnell is a vivacious Hebe, making a memorable entrance where she trips, breaks a tea-set, and curses like a sailor.

The play's innovative characterizations -- Heracles as a likable idiot rather than a hero; Hebe as a Victorian girl who clearly won't just lie back and think of England on her wedding night -- show that Stuart's love for Greek mythology and the Victorian era never crosses the line into slavish reverence. Nowhere is this more evident than in his treatment of Hera and Hestia, the central characters. In myth, Hestia is the modest and self-effacing virgin goddess who gives up her throne to Dionysus. In Juno en Victoria, Hestia is a meddling busybody with a sharp tongue. At the staged reading of Juno en Victoria (then called Hera) last summer, I was seated behind a pillar and couldn't see any of Celeste Russi's performance as Hestia. Nonetheless, her dry line readings and impeccable comic timing had me in stitches. Fortunately, Russi is reprising the role of Hestia in this production, and she's even better when you can see her as well as hear her.

Most importantly, of course, there is Hera. In myth, Hera is often portrayed as a nagging shrew, but the Hera of this play is complex and sympathetic. As Hera, the lovely Michelle Jasso perfectly embodies the Victorian ideal of "the angel in the house" (perhaps we should say "the goddess in the house"?). Her characterization reminded me of Elizabeth McGovern on Downton Abbey -- warm, understanding, irresistibly cozy, and surprisingly open-minded. She is dignified and gracious, the perfect hostess, but possesses a secret, steely strength.

In the Victorian era, A Doll's House shocked audiences by showing a charming wife and mother who left her marriage when she realized it was built on a lie. In our own time, Juno en Victoria is surprising because it investigates the psychology of a wife and mother who chooses not to leave her marriage, though she knows it is based on a lie. But could you really expect the goddess of marriage to behave differently?

Juno en Victoria plays at Stage Werx through July 2. Tickets here.

Disclosure: this play was written by my friend Stuart Bousel, directed by my friend Claire Rice, and is associated with the Olympians Festival, for which I am a co-producer...

Top image: Celeste Russi as Hestia, Michelle Jasso as Hera. Bottom image: Michelle Jasso as Hera, Kat Bushnell as Hebe.

"Pleiades" Reading, Part 1: "The Virgin Suicides," "The Big House," and Wendy Wasserstein

2011-06-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

As I work on Pleiades, my latest full-length play, here are some brief thoughts about the books I've been reading as informal research, to educate me about the world of the play or just to get me in the mood to write it.

First up, Jeffrey Eugenides' acclaimed debut novel, The Virgin Suicides. (I also re-watched the film version, which I had last seen when I was in high school.) Reason: The Virgin Suicides is a novel about five beautiful sisters in a wealthy community in the 1970s, and Pleiades is a play about seven beautiful sisters in a wealthy community in the 1970s.

I admired the novel, but I don't think that it will have much influence on the play that I'm writing. The Virgin Suicides is noted for its first-person-plural narration -- it's told from the perspective of the men who were once the Lisbon sisters' neighbors and schoolmates, and still mourn their deaths twenty years later. As such, one of the novel's main themes is how men romanticize beautiful women and see them as unfathomable mysteries. Because of the unusual narration, the novel cannot present the Lisbon sisters' actual thoughts; everything is filtered through the narrators' haze of memory and longing and conjecture and tragedy. Again, this is very effective. But it's the opposite of what I want to do with Pleiades -- I want my female characters to have subjectivity, to speak for themselves.

The film version is remarkably faithful to the novel -- it has a male narrator who speaks in the first-person-plural and everything -- and yet the tone is somehow different. It captures the girls more intimately, sometimes showing their perspective in close-up, while the novel presents the girls as shadowy and elusive. Maybe that's just because the teen boys' voyeuristic fascination with the Lisbon sisters can't be effectively reproduced on film. Or maybe it's because Sofia Coppola brought a young woman's perspective to the material. The book is about what it's like to observe adolescent girls and wonder at their mystery; the film is more about what it's like to be an adolescent girl. As such, the movie has become a touchstone for a generation of romantic, dreamy girls who admire its aesthetics -- which is maybe the most disturbing thing about this disturbing story, when you think about it.

I read about The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home on some blog a couple of months ago, and immediately added it to my reading list. I had decided to set Pleiades at a summer home in the Hamptons, only to realize that I didn't actually know much about summer houses, the Hamptons, WASP culture, etc. So it was quite serendipitous that I stumbled across The Big House, a National Book Award finalist in 2003. The author is George Howe Colt, a poet, journalist, and descendant of Boston Brahmins. Colt, like the girls in Pleiades, is also a Baby Boomer; I think that a minor theme of Pleiades will be the decline of WASP culture in the '60s-'70s, and that's also a theme of The Big House.

The Big House is a combination of memoir, family history, and investigation of/paean to Boston Brahmin summer rituals. Colt's great-grandfather Ned Atkinson built a shingled summer mansion at Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod in 1902, and through the entire 20th century, it served as the heart of the family. The last chapters of the book deal with the need to sell the house as it became a "white elephant" burden to them in the 1990s, but I found these narrative sections less compelling than the earlier parts of the book, where Colt merely attempts to create a sense of place. He has a marvelous eye for detail, and lovingly describes both the objects and the people that filled the Big House.

Colt is nostalgic and proud of his heritage, but realizes that not everything about his house or his family were perfect. His tales of hidden WASP dysfunction almost make me want to write a whole series of plays about the Greek gods as upper-class Americans in the Gilded Age and beyond. (This is kind of similar to Francesca Zambello's production of the Ring cycle, currently at the San Francisco Opera. It is called the "American Ring" and portrays the Norse gods as a dysfunctional, wealthy family in Great Gatsby-style costumes. I haven't seen it, but a friend of mine is really enjoying it.) Reading The Big House also taught me that the American old-money upper class isn't as monolithic as it first appears. Colt's family were frugal, practical Boston Brahmins who summered on rugged Cape Cod, but I want my Pleiades to be a little more relaxed and pleasure-seeking. Their family is based in the New York area, rather than Boston. They live in Connecticut and summer in the Hamptons.

I was obsessed with Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others my senior year of high school -- and if you love a play as a teenager, chances are that it will stick with you for the rest of your life. So when I realized that I would be writing a play about a group of young women in the early 1970s, I started referring to it as "my Uncommon Women and Others play" and decided that I needed to reread some Wasserstein. After all, what other playwright did as much as her to chronicle the second-wave feminist movement? I'm even including a "consciousness-raising party" scene in Pleiades as a tribute to the consciousness-raising scene in The Heidi Chronicles.

Uncommon Women serves as a fascinating time capsule of the social and sexual mores of its era. For instance, in 1971: being a female college student who masturbates = weird. Being a female college student who hangs out on the quads of men's colleges with the explicit goal of picking up guys and sleeping with them = normal. In 2011, it's the other way around. (Progress!)

But rereading these plays, I am also struck by how sad they are, how their humor masks anger, confusion, and unfulfilled longings. In high school, I think I loved Uncommon Women for its portrayal of funny, gutsy young women with strong friendships. But now, the final line of the play, Rita's "When we're... forty-five, we can be really fucking amazing" just breaks my heart.

Or, take the ending of The Heidi Chronicles, where Heidi proclaims that her newly adopted baby, Judy, will be "a heroine for the twenty-first!" I'm sure that when the play premiered in 1989, Baby Boomer women found this sentiment inspirational: "maybe life has been difficult for us, but it will be so much better for our daughters!" But I am basically the same age as Judy, and it is the twenty-first century, and I don't feel much like a heroine, and life still feels difficult and full of glass ceilings and boys' clubs and politicians who want to set back women's rights. Did you see the survey yesterday showing that young American men overwhelmingly would prefer a son to a daughter -- and even worse, a women in the comments section saying "I am a woman in my twenties, and I would much prefer to have a male child rather than a female child. ... It continues to be (and may always be) easier for a man to succeed along many of the metrics by which society defines success: income, title, athletic prowess, sexual satisfaction. It's not that I don't want women to fight the good fight to equalize opportunities for both genders. I do, and I think of myself as fighting this fight. At the same time, I want to afford my children every advantage possible, and one major advantage is being male." God, that pisses me off. To live in a world where a woman can argue that internalized self-loathing is a rational reaction.

Here's a link to a blog post I wrote about Wendy Wasserstein three years ago. Because I identify as a feminist and a playwright (and am very aware that playwriting is still a male-dominated profession) I think that I will be wrestling with Wasserstein's legacy, and the work that she left behind, for a long time to come...

I'm not yet done with my Pleiades script or with reading books that I hope will inspire me. Next up: Cheerful Money by Tad Friend (another WASP memoir) and The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (early '70s feminist classic, which I first learned about via a mention in Uncommon Women and Others)!

Those Hedonistic "Edenites": Stuart Bousel's New Play at the Exit Theatre

2011-06-09T21:13:00.000-07:00

There's a stereotype that most plays by young (and even not-so-young) writers will be autobiographical in nature, attempts to transform their own life experiences into theater and maybe get revenge on a few ex-lovers while they're at it. But, in my experience, that hasn't really been the case. My playwright friends are writing about the Greek financial crisis or zombies invading small-town Texas -- not about everyday life in San Francisco at the beginning of the 2010s. And I can't remember the last time I saw a play that made no bones about being autobiographical. Thus, there is something oddly refreshing about my friend Stuart Bousel's Edenites: A Play About San Francisco, described in its self-mocking press release as "a stylish piece of theatrical fluff, pretty much an exercise in drama as therapy, in which actual experiences are being thrown up on stage by the writer in a flagrant attempt to make sense of his own life." Edenites is honest about the way we live now (e.g. it admits that many 30-somethings still live with roommates), without trying too hard to be trendy or hip (no name-dropping and just the right amount of San Francisco in-jokes). You may find that the play invites you to make sense of your own life too.

Edenites is an ensemble comedy-drama about a group of people in their mid-30s, centered around Hugo (Kai Morrison), a San Francisco gay man in an open relationship. Normally, Hugo is content to live off his trust fund, date the pop-culture buff Xavier (Brian Martin) and have flings with other men, such as the seductive Aurillio (John Caldon). But during the week Edenites takes place, two things happen to shake Hugo out of his aimlessness and complacency. First, his old friend Chester (Ryan Hebert) comes from Tucson for a visit. Then, for the first time, Hugo sleeps with a woman -- the outspoken bisexual Lisa (Kristin Broadbear).

Hugo's other friends aren't much more successful at personal relationships. Chester is still hung up on his ex-girlfriend Imogen (Xanadu Bruggers), a successful novelist who happens to be in San Francisco on a book tour. The married couple Trent and Jenny (Ben Kruer and Megan Briggs) are stressed out with a new baby in the house. Rounding out the cast are Kira Shaw as Hugo's hipster roommate and Chris Struett as a queeny bookstore owner.

I mention all of the actors by name because one of the strengths of Edenites is its cast, largely made up of what we might call the Stuart Bousel Stock Company. (Three of the actors were in Stuart's recent production of M. Butterfly at Custom Made, and others of them have also been in Bouselian projects.) I was struck by how well they all lived in their characters' skins, not only acting as they spoke their own lines, but reacting to their fellow performers and Stuart's funny and bittersweet scenarios. Perhaps it helps that some of the actors, notably Brian Martin, are modeling their characters after real people whom we and Stuart know.

And a strong cast is key to the success of Edenites, because the play is all about exploring the depths of its characters -- showing how they surprise one another and even surprise themselves. Imogen may be successful and stylish (as played by the redheaded Bruggers in white blouse and pencil skirt, she looks like a 21st-century Joan Holloway), but her story proves that "it's a comfort to know that even famous people don't have their shit together" -- one of the lines that really resonated with me. Lisa may at first seem like a spoiled, sex-crazed barfly, but she earns a round of applause when she stands up for herself, chews out an old friend, and triumphantly proclaims "I am a flower!" Jenny chafes under the role of "new mom" and becomes neurotic, angry, and self-loathing; I love these kinds of female characters and Briggs gives an excellent portrayal.

All right, I probably related to the women's stories more than I did to the theme of gay men in open relationships, which forms another major part of Edenites. But this has to do more with my own experiences and expectations, than with Stuart's writing or direction. Speaking of direction, I love how he re-configured the Exit Stage Left into a theater-in-the-round format.

The relationships and situations in Edenites are universal enough that it could probably be re-written to take place in Seattle or Chicago or other liberal/ gay-friendly U.S. cities. Still, it doesn't lie when it bills itself as "A Play About San Francisco." It captures the way that, in this city, you will never stop running into people from your past. It captures our hedonism, our snootiness, our greed -- the defense mechanisms we use to hide our sentimentality, which is what really defines us. In Edenites, there's a leitmotif of characters moving to New York, a sense that New York is where all the really ambitious and predatory people go, leaving the San Franciscans frolicking in the Garden of Eden. I'm reminded of the eternal wisdom of "Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen": "Live in New York once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in California once, but leave before it makes you soft." Over the course of the play, Hugo learns that he's far less jaded, and far more easily hurt, than he thought he was. I talked to Stuart about this theme afterwards. "Yes, exactly," he said. "The characters all think they're so tough -- but we can see that they're bleeding all over the stage."

Edenites plays at the Exit Stage Left through June 25.

Disclosure (if it weren't obvious): Stuart is clearly a friend of mine, and he comped me my ticket to Edenites.

Image: Edenites poster designed by Cody Rishell.

Dinner Parties with the Ray Bryant Trio

2011-06-05T15:48:00.000-07:00

"Angel Eyes," recorded by Ray Bryant in 1957

When I was growing up, my parents would always play the classic Ray Bryant Trio album whenever we had guests over for dinner. To this day, it strikes me as the epitome of what adults ought to play at dinner parties -- sophisticated jazz piano, a mix of ballads and uptempo numbers, the harmonies tangy but never atonal. Midcentury modern music, Bryant playing the piano like a virtuoso but still seeming to hold something in reserve, like the cool cat he was. (The album seemed all the more mysterious and sophisticated because, for some bizarre reason, we owned a Japanese import edition and I therefore couldn't learn the song titles or read the liner notes.)

I always assumed that Bryant was long dead, perhaps because his music speaks of such a far-off time, but it turns out that he died this week at the age of 79. It's weird, I feel both surprised that he was alive up till now, as well as sadness at his passing. I suppose I hadn't realized just how young he was (age 25) when he recorded the Ray Bryant Trio album, which makes his achievement all the more amazing! (Did people just look older in the 1950s? That photo of him on the album cover looks like no 25-year-old I know these days.) Also, I learned from his obituary that "Ray" was a nickname and his full name was Raphael Homer Bryant -- how cool is that? May he rest in peace.

A Bouquet of Additional Thoughts on "The Lily's Revenge"

2011-05-31T20:29:00.001-07:00

Unquestionably, the major event of May 2011 for me was The Lily's Revenge. First, as I said in my earlier blog post, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and it led me to ask myself many questions about what I want to do with my art, what theater can and should accomplish, why I tend to write realistic narrative plays if that's not necessarily the kind of theater that moves me the most, etc. In short, Lily's twined itself around my insides and gave me what I call, partly but not really in jest, "an artistic crisis." Which, I figure, is only healthy; at my age, I ought to have artistic crises. Though I feel humbled and confused, I also feel awed, moved, and inspired. It's funny, I think of myself as a sensitive aesthete, but rarely am I ever so in thrall to a work of art that I see. It happened more often when I was still in school.

Meanwhile, the Lily's cast and crew discovered my blog post and passed it around, and Taylor Mac himself linked to it on Twitter, which completely made my day, and the Magic Theatre invited me to the cast party! So I ended up seeing the show again, at its closing matinée, and dining and drinking and dancing with the cast afterward. I am so grateful to the good and generous Magic staff and Lily's cast. At the party I did not feel like a poser or an interloper, even though I am just an enthusiastic audience member and they had been collaborating on this massive project for 2 months. But then, The Lily's Revenge is the kind of show where you can get randomly hugged by a cast member before you take your seat, where the audience shouldn't feel like they are "just" spectators, where it's all about building connections and spreading the love. The closing-day audience was so supportive -- the show ran about 15 minutes over because we kept interrupting it to applaud -- and the party was so warm and loving. It expanded my faith in humanity.

And I'm glad, too, that I got over my petty fears of "will people think I'm weird if I see the show a second time? Is my having gone nuts for this show a sign of weakness?" Loving something, being enthusiastic, is so often seen as uncool. It is so easy to be jaded. Thus, one of the many points of The Lily's Revenge is that love and commitment are acts of courage, not of weakness. It is an un-jaded piece of theater, and the least we can do is to be un-jaded in return.

OK, by this point you probably think that I have joined some hippie cult, and I admit that The Lily's Revenge is the very definition of cult theater. (if that's not a tautology -- didn't theater evolve out of religious rites and cult ceremonies?) It's something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it, and it resonated very deeply with themes that are preoccupying me.

My blog post about Lily's, therefore, led to some amazing things for me. But I do wonder if it helped to sell any tickets. In contrast to its New York production, The Lily's Revenge wasn't a sellout success here in San Francisco; when I bought my ticket for the closing performance, there were still plenty of seats left. Well, in New York the show got rave reviews in the New York Times, Time Out New York, etc; here, the show got a polite, but hardly enthusiastic review in the Chron and a very snarky headline ("Five-Hour Play Is Five Hours Too Long") in SF Weekly.

Even more strange, to my mind, was the fact that the theater community wasn't as excited about The Lily's Revenge as I expected. Several friends told me that the only reason they wanted to see it is that they knew some of the performers. OK, thanks to that 35-person cast, every theater person in San Francisco knew someone in Lily's (let's praise the Magic, again, for staging the show with local actors and directors) and it's laudable to support your friends' endeavors. But still -- I was amazed that that was the only reason people wanted to see it. If you love theater, why wouldn't you want to see a big, ambitious, wacky and entertaining 4+ hour epic that roared into town in a cloud of literal and figurative glitter? Why wasn't that enough of a selling point?

I can speak only for myself, but I was excited about The Lily's Revenge from the day the Magic Theatre announced it -- long before I knew that friends of mine would be acting in/directing/hanging lights for the show. In fact, my first thought was "SUCK IT, NEW YORK" (my internal monologue can be surprisingly vulgar). I had read the New York reviews and also heard that many New Yorkers who wanted to see this play had been unable to get tickets. But now it was coming to San Francisco, and I'd get to see it! And probably without having to stand in a line! Sometimes there are advantages to living in a smaller, less theater-crazed town. But then, somehow, it went from "Yay, I can get a ticket" to "Hell, I could buy twenty tickets to closing day if I could afford them! What's the matter with San Francisco?"

Is it that we resent the Magic for devoting its resources to a New York-based artist, in a season where they did not produce any Bay Area playwrights? There seem to be two competing schools of thought on this matter: one says "theater should be local, support local artists and stories, don't let New York City dominate the national theatrical conversation, don't be in thrall to the latest New York hit." The other school of thought says, "Isn't it awful that most new plays get only one production and have a very hard time getting produced again? Stop the premiere-itis!" On the one hand, we're supposed to condemn the Magic for producing a "New York hit"; on the other hand, we're supposed to praise it for giving a second production to a challenging and complex play! This kind of thinking can really tie you up in knots -- and take your attention away from the value of the work itself.

And when it comes to the work itself, did The Lily's Revenge affect me so deeply because I was already favorably disposed to it, because I'd looked forward to it for a year? I realize that's a possibility; but it doesn't make my reaction any less true or valid.

Besides, I went to Lily's expecting to have a good time at a crazy and ambitious piece of theater; I was not expecting to have an artistic crisis! And I wrote my earlier blog post about the show in the hopes of encouraging others to go see it, not in the hopes of getting invited to the cast party and meeting Taylor Mac! I really could not have predicted any of this. And I feel very lucky.

With Apologies to Rodgers & Hammerstein

2011-05-25T22:10:00.001-07:00

Earlier this month, I was hanging out at everyone's favorite dive bar with one of my fellow Olympians Festival playwrights. I asked her how the writing was going.

"Well, I'd like to have a first draft finished by mid-July."

"Wait! Isn't your birthday in mid-July?" I said.

"Yes -- I kind of thought it would be my birthday present to myself."

I thought this was a fantastic idea -- and it just so happens that my birthday is also in July, one week before my friend's. So we clinked glasses and made a pact to finish the first drafts of our plays by our respective birthdays.

July is coming up fast, though! We have just six or seven weeks to get this done. And when I realized that, I felt a song parody coming on.

I sent this to my friend last night, but I hope she won't mind if I post it here. By announcing this pact in public, it means that if you read my blog and know me in real life, I want you to pester me about my writing and hold me to my promise. Plus, this may serve as an explanation/excuse for why I'm blogging less these days. Also, I'm damn proud of myself for finding a rhyme for "Pleiades." So, here goes -- to the tune of "Sixteen Going On Seventeen":

We stare, dearest friend,
At an empty page
Which we know that we must write on

Lest we stare, dearest friend,
At an empty stage
When the Festival turns its lights on

So...
I’ve got six weeks, you’ve got seven weeks
To write our Olympians plays
A month and a half
To write a first draft
And finish by our birthdays

I’ve got six weeks, you’ve got seven weeks
I think your idea is wise
We'll write in a hurry
A frenzy, a fury
And then have time to revise!

Six weeks to finish Pleiades
(I hope it will be fun)
In seven weeks you'll be at ease
Joe Ryan will be done!

Here's our deadline
Coming up quickly
And so we mustn't shirk
You've got seven weeks, I've got six weeks
Let's get down to work!

Flower Power: "The Lily's Revenge" at Magic Theatre

2011-05-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

First things first: Don't be scared, it's not really five hours. It's four hours and fifteen minutes, and Magic Theatre has just slashed ticket prices for the final dozen performances, so what are you waiting for? Don't read my blog post on The Lily's Revenge -- run out and experience it for yourself!
Seriously, there are so many things I want to say about this amazing piece of theater, but I also realize that one reason I loved it so much is that I had almost no idea what to expect and was thus continually surprised. You don't even get a playbill until after the show is over; additionally, the playbill doesn't have a lot of extraneous material in it -- no interview with Taylor Mac or essay(s) about elements of the play. I've seen many plays that aren't very challenging or hard to understand, but whose playbills are nonetheless filled with explanatory essays. Whereas The Lily's Revenge is a five-act, four-hour allegorical fantasia about marriage, environmentalism, community, narrative, meta-theatre, and more -- and the creators have faith that the play can speak for itself. This feels almost radical.

But then, nearly everything about The Lily's Revenge is radical and nervy and surprising and filled with an insane amount of faith and trust. It is a massive undertaking: it has something for everyone, but, because it's so overwhelming/overstuffed, it's also guaranteed to include elements that put you off. Nonetheless, the result is incredibly inspiring on multiple levels. When was the last time you saw a play that began with the gutsy pronouncement "This play could very well last for the rest of your life!" and then actually lived up to that promise? At least, it's been three days since I saw The Lily's Revenge, and I still can't stop thinking about it, and I know it will reverberate for me for a long time to come.

But what's it about, anyway? A stripped-down plot description would be something like: "A walking, talking Lily seeks to become a human so that he can marry the Bride, and gets caught up in a war between the God of Nostalgia and the God of the Here-and-Now." New York theater artist Taylor Mac is the show's creator, writer, and star performer. He acts, mugs, sings, plays the ukulele, exudes charisma, looks good in a tuxedo and even better in his green-glitter-lipped, flower-collared Lily drag. The Lily, as written, is kind of a diva, and Mac is good at grabbing the spotlight, but also good at stepping back and letting his 30+ collaborators have their time to shine.

All of the actors perform with impressive commitment, energy, and passion at every moment; I don't know how they keep it up over the course of 255 minutes, six shows a week. You get the sense that all of the performers and, indeed, all of the artistic collaborators truly believe in what they're doing -- if anyone was even slightly skeptical, this show would topple like a house of cards. But everyone has willingly put all their eggs in Taylor Mac's basket (big kudos to the Magic Theatre for taking this risk!) and they know that this gamble will pay off.

For The Lily's Revenge isn't "just" a play -- it's an exercise in building community between artists and audience. There are moments of audience participation throughout the play and during all three intermissions. The first intermission is a communal dinner, the second is a cast-and-audience dance party. I spent most of the third intermission in line for the restroom, but nonetheless got serenaded by a Lilac as I waited! The intermissions are delightful palate-cleansers; plus, they make you more involved in the show and thus, more receptive to what it has to say.

And The Lily's Revenge has got a lot on its mind. It's a play about marriage, and it has a very queer sensibility, but it's not explicitly about gay marriage. It's a plea for love but also for thoughtfulness -- for deeply caring, in every sense of the word. There's also the big theme about Nostalgia vs. the Here-and-Now; how nostalgia, in the form of outmoded cultural narratives, can be used as a tool of stasis or oppression.

The play is so dense that I am still realizing things about its craftsmanship and structure. For instance, in Act I, the characters frequently name-drop Hegel. In the car on the way home, I realized the reason for this: Hegel's big idea was thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and that's the way The Lily's Revenge is structured. I also got a lot out of reading what critics have said about the play's New York and San Francisco productions. I love this quote from Backstage: "A surprising but suddenly obvious connection lands just right: Both theater and marriage are essentially pure, intimate relationships that have only been corrupted into institutions."

The structure of the play even mirrors the central conflict between nostalgia and the here-and-now. The Lily's Revenge comes down pretty clearly on the side of living in the present (that's probably another reason for the audience participation and community-building), but Taylor Mac also calls himself a "pastiche artist." And a love of pastiche means a love of old-fashioned or passé artistic genres -- that is, a love of nostalgia. A play about anthropomorphic flowers is automatically nostalgic; reminiscent of children's theater, and of works of art from the Victorian era -- think of the talking flowers in Alice in Wonderland.

For a pastiche artist, there are two challenges: to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts, and to create something that speaks to the present moment rather than being mired in the past. The Lily's Revenge, in its beautiful and crazy way, overcomes both these hurdles. Like a flower, it has its roots sunk deep into the earth, and a spirit that blossoms toward the light.

Image 1: Lily (Taylor Mac) has his diva moment, surrounded by the Flower Girls; photo by Jennifer Reiley.
Image 2: The Great Longing (Mollena Williams) tries to shut Lily up; photo by Daniel Nicolletta.

Passing the Hat for the Olympians Festival

2011-05-05T21:54:00.000-07:00

Okay. Let's do this.

The San Francisco Olympians Festival has two weeks left to go on our Kickstarter campaign, and we're about three-quarters of the way toward our goal. The video above provides a great introduction to our goals for the Festival, the success we had last year and our plans to make this year's festival bigger and better.

In more concrete terms, your donation will help provide for upfront Festival costs such as theatre rental and photocopying scripts. Believe it or not, photocopying represents a huge chunk of a new-play festival's expenses. My play has nine characters in it. And 9 scripts * 100 or so pages each * 11 cents per page = about $100 for photocopies. Multiply that by 12 nights of the festival, and you can see why we'd like to have rent and photocopies taken care of upfront, so that our nightly ticket sales can go toward compensating the writers, actors, and artists.

We're very grateful to all of our donors and we have several ways of showing you our gratitude with a little something extra. Our "Eos" option (if you donate $48 or more) is a really good deal -- in addition to a thankful Facebook post and your name in all of our dozen playbills, you get a full-color, full-size Olympians show poster of your choice. And our posters are amazing.

And I'll throw in something of my own -- if you donate but are unable to make it to my show on October 22, I'll email you a copy of the finished script. Out-of-town friends, this is for you! Even if you just donate $10, that covers the photocopying of one full-length script. $10 is also the price for a ticket to an Olympians Festival show -- if you like, you can think of your $10 donation as your way of buying a ticket to my play, even if you live across the country.

Many thanks, and may Zeus smile upon you!

"The Most Human Human" and the Most Human Playwright

2011-05-02T21:52:00.000-07:00

For my dad's birthday last month, I gave him a copy of the new book The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, by Brian Christian. When Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, called the book "terrific" and "one of the rare successful literary offspring of Gödel Escher Bach," I knew that this would be a perfect gift for my computer-geek, philosophically inclined Dad. Upon further research, I liked how the author, Brian Christian, has degrees in computer science, philosophy and poetry, and was born in 1984. He's an overachieving Millennial, in short, and it makes me proud that my generation has reached the point where we are writing erudite books that get rave reviews in The New Yorker and can be given to our baby-boomer parents.

So I purchased the book, read the introduction for kicks, and was sufficiently intrigued that I ended up reading the whole thing before giving it to Dad (I knew he wouldn't mind).

As the New Yorker comparison to Gödel Escher Bach would imply, The Most Human Human is a difficult book to sum up and covers a wide range of topics. Fundamentally, it is an investigation into what intellectual processes humans can still do better than computers, and how that can help us to understand our place in the world and get the most out of being alive. If our humanity does not lie purely in our intellectual capacity, where does it lie?

I should note, for those of you who are put off (rather than encouraged) by the comparison to Gödel Escher Bach, that The Most Human Human is much shorter than Gödel Escher Bach and probably more accessible -- it will make you think, but does not require you to understand symbolic logic. In addition, The Most Human Human has a moral-philosophical-humanistic component that I don't remember being present in Gödel Escher Bach. (Some indication of Brian Christian's tone can be discerned from the fact that one of the book's epigraphs comes from David Foster Wallace and Wallace is quoted several times in the text. How Millennial of Christian!) It's a warmer and more inviting book, I think.

The Most Human Human covers a lot of ground, so people with a wide variety of interests and concerns are likely to get something out of it. Clearly, one of the big themes of the book is human verbal and non-verbal communication -- and clearly, that's something I also think about a lot, because I write plays. Christian even cites the work of playwrights in his text -- discussing David Mamet, for instance, in a section on how human dialogue tends to be far more circuitous and discursive and filled with interruptions than computers are capable of. I love the fusion of art and science!

The Most Human Human, therefore, has given me some ideas on how to be a better playwright -- not just a better human being. In one fascinating section, Christian explains that chatbots these days excel at "stateless conversation," that is, conversation where their response depends only on the last thing that you said. But they're not so good at taking into account the overall arc of the conversation, and even worse at taking into account the conversation they had with you yesterday.

One of the earliest chatbots (late 1980s) was MGonz, which was designed to be verbally abusive, belligerent, and argumentative -- and succeeded in fooling a lot of people into thinking it was a human being.

"As becomes painfully clear from reading the MGonz transcripts, argument is stateless," Christian notes. "I've seen it happen between friends: 'Once again, you've neglected to do what you've promised.' 'Oh, there you go right in with that tone of yours!' 'Great, let's just dodge the issue and talk about my tone instead! You're so defensive!' 'You're the one being defensive! This is just like the time you x!' 'For the millionth time, I did not even remotely x! You're the one who...' And on and on. A close reading of this dialogue, with MGonz in mind, turns up something interesting, and very telling: each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. The friends' conversation has become stateless, unanchored from all context. [... Thus] there's a sense in which verbal abuse is simply less complex than other forms of conversation."

When I read Christian's invented sample of "stateless argument," I realized that if I read this same dialogue in a play, I would consider it terrible playwriting. I know this sort of thing happens in real life, but it seems to happen even more often in the work of bad or inexperienced playwrights. Being taught that "drama is conflict," some newbie playwrights confuse endless argument or bickering with genuine dramatic conflict. Their plays tend to consist of two relatively generic characters quibbling with and criticizing and insulting one another in generic -- in stateless -- ways.

But if you know exactly who these characters are, their relationship to one another and their prior history, the deeper reasons why they are arguing, you can write a good dialogue scene that doesn't degenerate into mindless bickering.

Good playwriting (and good chatbots) take prior conversation and prior history into account, the way that human beings do, unconsciously, in real life; bad playwriting (and bad chatbots) is stateless.

And that's just one of the many things that The Most Human Human made me think about.

Zephyrus

2011-04-28T21:46:00.000-07:00

Even before I became involved with the San Francisco Olympians Festival, my family and I were naming our computers after Greek mythology (with one detour into the Hindu pantheon).

My first computer was Athena -- goddess of wisdom.

Then I had Sarasvati -- named after the Hindu goddess of art and literature, whose symbol is the swan.

Next came Orphée -- yes, you read that right, Orphée, not Orpheus. I used the French version of the name because I got the computer when I was in France (Sarasvati having sung her swan song) and was feeling inspired by Cocteau's quasi-mystical belief in the Orpheus legend.

But two weeks ago, Orphée descended into the Underworld and didn't come back, and rather than trying to resuscitate him, I decided it might be time for a new machine. Say hello to Zephyrus.

Zephyrus is a MacBook Air, and I think I'm in love. Who was it that said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?" (I remember being an imaginative little girl, wanting to believe that fairy tales were true, and asking my father "Daddy, do you believe in magic?" And, ever the computer geek, he would reply "Well, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic...") With Zephyrus, it's easy to feel the magic. It's amazing that everything I need or want in a computer can now fit into a machine that weighs less than three pounds. I have visions of myself toting it everywhere, writing in every coffee shop in town.

And as for the name? There are several reasons behind it:

The computer is a MacBook Air, and Zephyrus is one of the four winds in Greek Mythology.

Zephyrus is the gentle and propitious West Wind, and I live in a city where the wind predominantly comes from the West (and is rarely gentle and often chilling, but oh well).

One of our upcoming Olympians plays is about Zephyrus. It falls on the weekend I'm producing, and I'm super excited about it: it's Brideshead Revisited crossed with Greek mythology!

It just so happens that I got this new computer in April, and as Chaucer teaches us, there is a link between April and Zephyrus:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes...

Technical difficulties

2011-04-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

I came home on Wednesday night to find that my laptop had died. I'll be getting a new computer to replace it, but not for another week or so. Don't expect any new posts until Monday, April 25 at the earliest.

Happy Easter and Passover!

I Like/Love Theater/re

2011-04-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

According to [David Orr, author of the new book Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry], poetry differs from music and stamp collecting in that people’s love for poetry is measurably greater than their love for any other activity. Poetry fans don’t just love poetry a little; they really love it.

To test that hypothesis, Orr went to Google and conducted two different searches, one for “I like X” and one for “I love X,” with X being represented by baseball, cooking, gardening and half a dozen other activities, including movies and poetry. Admittedly, the science behind this research is slightly less complicated than that required to make a lemon meringue pie, but the results are noteworthy. In every instance except two, more people “like” an activity than “love” it; for example, readers of romance novels like that art form 3.36 times more than they love it. The exceptions are poker, which splits 50-50, and — of course — poetry, whose partisans “love” it twice as much as they “like” it.

--David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review

Google hits for "I like theater" = 846,000
Google hits for "I love theater" = 1,320,000
Google hits for "I like theatre" = 867,000
Google hits for "I love theatre" = 424,000

So, like poker, theater/theatre splits 50-50: the "likes" have 1,713,000 hits and the "loves" have 1,744,000 hits. Not a surprise, really; people who enjoy theater tend to be passionate about it, and the casual theatergoer (the person who "likes" rather than "loves" theater) sometimes seems like a dying breed.

We theater artists constantly ask "How can we make other people more excited to see theater?" but it's hard for us to answer that question, because we have trouble putting ourselves in the mindset of someone who isn't excited by theater.

But maybe an analogy between theater and poetry will prove helpful. I confess to not really "getting" or liking most contemporary poetry that I see, and being intimidated by poetry lovers. They all seem to be in some kind of club with arcane rituals and secret codes, and they're not giving me the key -- that is, I feel like I don't have the tools to enjoy or understand these poems.

And, I realize, that's probably how a lot of people feel about theater -- it's a secret club, it's too hard to understand, it's a closed circle full of weirdly passionate people.

So in order to come up with good answers to the question "How can theater lovers make other people more excited to see theater?", maybe I should start by thinking honestly about the question, "What would a poetry lover have to do to make me more excited to read poetry?"

Highly-Anticipated Movie Reviews: "Jane Eyre"

2011-04-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

The latest in an occasional series comparing my pre-viewing excitement with post-viewing reality...

Title of movie: Jane Eyre

Reasons for anticipation: Charlotte Brontë's novel is one of my most cherished books. I have a celebrity crush on Michael Fassbender. I love most of what Focus Features puts out. Win-win-win!

Possible reason for trepidation: Film adaptations of classic novels have their own pitfalls.

Verdict: It's undoubtedly a well-made film, but (as I feared) I seem incapable of really enjoying adaptations of my favorite books.

Elaboration: Well, maybe I shouldn't have reread Jane Eyre and had it fresh in my mind before seeing the movie. When you're familiar with the original novel, any change that the movie makes -- even if it was a good change -- will take you out of the film.

For instance, the hardest element of the story for a 21st-century audience to accept is the astounding coincidence that the Rivers siblings are Jane's long-lost cousins. So it is probably wise that the film eliminates this; Jane shares her inheritance with the Riverses because she is grateful for their kindness, not because they are related. All the same, this took me out of the film, as I started analyzing the implications of the filmmakers' choice ("Oh, so they're not cousins? Good, that's probably for the best"), rather than staying absorbed in the work of art.

Or, at the end of the film, Rochester loses his eyesight, but not his arm. Objectively speaking, there's no real reason to get outraged about this change -- but when Rochester appeared onscreen in the final scene, all I could think was "What? He's got both hands?!"

Some of the problems I had with the narrative of the Jane Eyre movie can be attributed to the challenges of adapting a long Victorian novel to a feature-length film. For instance, it eliminates the "Grace Poole" subplot (where Jane is misled into thinking that the mysterious goings-on at Thornfield Hall have something to do with the middle-aged servant Grace). A viewer who is unfamiliar with the original novel might be somewhat confused by this elision.

But what surprised me the most about this movie version is how understated it felt. I read an interview where the screenwriter, Moira Buffini, talks about how she sees the story as a "gothic thriller" -- well, then, why get rid of the scene where Bertha Rochester breaks into Jane's room, on the eve of her wedding, and rips her bridal veil in two? Think how cinematic that would be!

Sometimes the understatement was good -- the dark, candlelit cinematography gives you some idea of how it would really feel to live in 1830s England. But very often, the movie is so restrained that it undercuts the drama. Toward the end of the story, St. John pressures Jane to marry him and go to India, and she is on the point of accepting when she (supernaturally) hears Rochester's voice calling her. In the novel, this is a powerful scene, taking place in a dim room, just before sunrise; you feel Jane's anguish, followed by a sense of relief when the disembodied voice rescues her in the nick of time. In the movie, this scene takes place outdoors on a sunny afternoon, and Jane never seems to be in any real danger of succumbing to St. John. And the final scene is surprisingly low-key; Jane and Rochester reunite, but it's muted, tentative. The film doesn't find an analogue for the book's triumphant "Reader, I married him."

Indeed, one further difficulty with Jane Eyre is that the novel is narrated in the first person by a strong, assertive voice. Everyone knows that a movie adaptation of Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye would be terrible because it could never capture Huck's or Holden's voice, and I honestly think that Jane Eyre should be put in that category of novels. The movie doesn't use any voice-over narration, which, again, is probably a good choice -- but it means that the Jane of the movie can never be the Jane of the book.

Despite the fact that this adaptation does not allow us to live inside of Jane's head, I liked Mia Wasikowska's performance in the title role. Perhaps there are moments, by firelight, where she looks too beautiful for the part -- but then, firelight is universally flattering, and very few truly plain women are famous actresses by the time they are 20 years old. And I developed an admiration for Wasikowska when I learned that she read Jane Eyre without knowing that a film was in development, realized that Jane would be a great role for her, and lobbied to play it. I feel like many other young actresses cultivate a sexy, glamorous image and would be reluctant to play a plain heroine like Jane. Wasikowska is serious about her craft, which maybe explains her affinity with her serious, observant character.

I think the parts of the novel that people tend to recall most fondly are the scenes between Jane and Mr. Rochester at Thornfield Hall. This relationship is the heart of the new movie adaptation, too, and come off well in it. Michael Fassbender is an attractive (everyone in the movie theater laughed at the "Jane, do you think me handsome?" "No, sir" exchange), intelligent, and mercurial Rochester. So there are interesting and well-acted scenes here, but I wish the movie had been advertised as what it is -- a character-based romantic drama -- and not as a gothic thriller. Overall, it's a respectable, respectful, low-key attempt to make a movie out of an overstuffed, uncategorizable, fiery book.

Nerdy people who love the book and make similar arguments to me:
"Jane Eyre: Does It Totally Suck? An Argument," Dan Kois and Claire Jarvis, The Awl
"Jane Eyre's Failure to Adapt to the Screen," Chloe Schama and Hillary Kelly, the New Republic
"Tame Jane," Robert Gottlieb, the New York Review of Books blog
"On taking too many liberties with Jane Eyre (and too few with Michael Fassbender)," Sheila O'Malley, Capital New York

Additions to the Blogroll - April

2011-04-01T23:38:00.000-07:00

Under the category "Friends' Blogs & Sites": San Francisco Olympians Festival. We've updated the website with information on the plays and playwrights in this year's festival, with even more good things to come as October approaches!

Under the category "Other Blogs I Enjoy": Samantha Ellis. In February, I wrote a blog post highlighting a series of theater history articles that Ms. Ellis wrote for The Guardian in the mid-2000s. Then Ms. Ellis discovered and commented on my post, which led me to check out her blog. Turns out that she is primarily a playwright, not a journalist (no wonder she wrote so well about theater history!) and I love her blog, where she discusses the projects she's working on, the life of a U.K. female playwright, quotes that've caught her attention, etc. Yay, I love the Internet!

Will Eno's Mesmerizing Meta-Theater

2011-03-27T22:01:00.000-07:00

I loved Will Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing) when Cutting Ball produced it two years ago, so I was excited to see the theater company's latest offering, Lady Grey (in ever lower light) and Other Plays by Will Eno. Even better, the playwright was there in person and did a "talk-forward" (i.e., a pre-show talk) with director Rob Melrose on opening night.

At the talk-forward, Eno said that he wrote Lady Grey, the evening's flagship play, at around the same time he wrote Thom Pain, because he wanted to explore similar motifs and themes, but with "feminine energy." I have said before that Thom Pain is really hard to describe to someone who's never seen it, but Lady Grey is really easy to describe -- it truly is the female version of Thom Pain. Both are one-person shows where the performer tells deadpan jokes, reminisces about lost love, and tells a disjointed story about a child who may or may not be a younger version of themself. He/she seems to enjoy the audience's discomfort, but also to detest it -- to seek the audience's approval even as he/she scorns it.

At times I wondered whether the differences between Thom Pain and Lady Grey -- between "masculine energy" and "feminine energy" -- just reinforce gender stereotypes. For instance, even though Lady Grey has an ambivalent relationship with the audience and at one point even curses everyone in the theater, she seems much more insecure, much more concerned than Thom Pain about whether the audience likes her or not. Furthermore, Thom's story has to do with the endurance of pain (he tells the story of a little boy getting stung by a swarm of bees), while Lady Grey's story is more about sexuality (she tells the story of a little girl who strips naked for Show and Tell).

But, you know, maybe these gender differences are realistic. In a society where female bodies are more sexualized than male bodies, perhaps a woman would be likelier to say "maybe you'd like me better if I took my clothes off" when in front of an audience. And in general, women are more concerned with whether other people like them. Didn't I just say the other day that male artists tend to be Bad Boys and female artists tend to be Dutiful Daughters? That's certainly an apt description of Thom Pain versus Lady Grey. Moreover, in Lady Grey, Eno draws effective parallels between physical nudity and emotional nudity/vulnerability. It's not cheap or meretricious.

After Lady Grey, there's an intermission -- and then you come back and take your seat for Intermission, a four-character play about 15 minutes long. All of the reviews have singled this play out as the highlight of Cutting Ball's production, and I have to agree -- it's a gem of a script and earns a slot on my Favorite Short Plays of All Time list. Perhaps it doesn't sound like much on paper: a younger couple and an older couple, dressed up to see a show at an ACT-type theater, spend intermission discussing the play that they're watching, and other topics such as sorrow and loss. Eno has great fun lampooning bad playwriting in the snatches of dialogue we get to hear from the play-within-the-play, a melodrama about assisted suicide (this is all the funnier because ACT actually produced a melodrama about assisted suicide, The Quality of Life, two years ago). The jokes zing, but there is also pain and wisdom and questioning here. Eno certainly doubts the value of mediocre, manipulative plays like the one seen by the characters of Intermission -- and one of the characters even seems to doubt the value of all theater, all fiction and artifice. Intermission itself, though, proves a rebuttal to Eno's doubts. It is valuable theater.

The final play of the evening, Mr. Theatre Comes Home Different, is another one-man show, worthwhile because it lets the great David Sinaiko rant, rave, be sardonic, knock over furniture, play a love scene, a mad scene, and a death scene within a 10-minute span, and greedily eat a carnation (which is one of the funniest things I've seen all year). There is more philosophizing here about the nature of theater and life, but I most enjoyed this play as an entertainment/vaudeville, and I think there's value in that, too.

Lady Grey (in ever lower light) and Other Plays is at the Cutting Ball Theater through April 10.

Image: Actors David Sinaiko, Gwyneth Richards, Galen Murphy-Hoffman, and Danielle O'Hare in Intermission.

The Importance of Hype in an Ephemeral Industry

2011-03-26T22:12:00.000-07:00

I was talking with a friend last night about some of the ethical quandaries I feel as a blogger who regularly writes about plays she attends.

As I get increasingly involved in the San Francisco theater, I am increasingly reluctant to write negative reviews. It just seems cowardly to congratulate someone to their face and then lambaste them online. And I don't think the solution is necessarily to lambaste them to their faces, either.

So my general policy is that if I disliked a show or felt "meh" about it, I won't blog about it. But then, in and of itself, doesn't the fact of my not-blogging imply that I disliked the show? Couldn't an astute reader of my blog read between the lines of my unwritten posts and figure out my implied criticism?

As for the plays that I like and recommend and blog about: If I have a generally positive/enthusiastic opinion of a play, I'll gladly write a blog post to praise it. And yet, maybe there were still some elements of the play or production that I disliked -- but I am not willing to discuss them in print, for the above-mentioned reasons. So I gloss over those elements in my review. The result is a blog post that doesn't tell the full story.

And then, I feel like that is a problem because theater is such an ephemeral art form. When a production is over, the only evidence that remains is the script, the production photos, the reviews and articles that people have written about it, and people's memories of the show (which are notoriously unreliable).

Therefore, if you are dishonest in a theater review, you are basically rewriting history. Let's say you didn't really like one of the actors in a show, but you're unwilling to single that person out and critique their performance on your blog, so you write "All of the actors are great!" Months or years from now, someone will read your review and believe what you said, because there is no other evidence to contradict it. What was a lie (a white lie, told for the sake of saving face) becomes the truth.

So, this is my ethical quandary: because the theater is an ephemeral art form, I believe that people who write about it are obliged to be as honest as possible. Hell, I even feel guilty when I write a review that doesn't include every single thought I had about the production, because I think it's unfair for those thoughts to be lost to history. And yet, because I am a theater practitioner, I am also obliged to be polite and politic -- frankly, I don't want to become known as a critic with a waspish wit and a poison pen. I want to be a booster for the theater and my friends' contributions to it, and I'd like them to do the same for me, should they ever be in a position to do so! And I feel these two ethical obligations clashing with each other all the time.

I explained this to my friend, and she said "Now I know why you theater people are so big on hype."

"Oh?"

"Because no one is able to see every show -- so, as you said, when it's over, all that's left are things like reviews and photos -- and hype. And you have to believe the hype, because you have nothing to compare it with; the show is over and you can't see it for yourself."

It's so true. People say that Hollywood is built on hype, but sooner or later, a movie gets made, it premieres, and it stays in that form for decades to come. Film critics who were not even born at the time the movie came out can watch it, form their own opinions, add to the critical conversation/consensus, evaluate and reevaluate the movie. The same goes for literature and recorded music.

People who write about theater do not have that luxury. That's why I feel it is so important to write about theater, and also why it throws me into ethical dilemmas.

Playwriting, Failure, and the Fear of Failure

2011-03-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

I've been:

following the discussion taking place on blogs and among my Facebook friends in response to "The Real Reasons Playwrights Fail" by Mat Smart
thinking about a conversation I had with a Female Playwriting Friend (FPF) Monday night about writing and the fear of writing and the perils of making excuses or comparing yourself to other people
reading a New Yorker article on a Hollywood therapist who specializes in treating creatively blocked screenwriters and other artistic types

A lot of the commentary on Smart's post focus on how he is an inherently privileged dude -- straight, white, male, writing linear plays -- and therefore his experience cannot mirror that of other writers, who belong to minority groups or write less marketable plays. There might be something to this, but I think it's more complicated than just "shut up, straight white dude, you can never understand me."

FPF and I both reject the idea that there is something inherently different about men and women. And yet, there's an attitude that we see more often in men than in women -- the "If you just did what I do, you'd be successful too" attitude, which can morph into "I know the right way to go about things and you're doing it wrong."

FPF and I have been on the receiving end of this attitude before. A few weeks ago, a male playwriting friend (MPF) said to us, "What I don't get is writers who don't like to write, to sit down and put pen to paper." And we both felt personally indicted by this, even though it's not clear whether it was meant as an indictment of our work habits. This is, of course, very similar to Mat Smart's stuff about "you have to love" working on your play for six hours every day after working your 9 to 5 temp job, or else you're not serious about playwriting and are obviously a worthless weakling.

And unfortunately, I am easily persuaded by this. I see my friends working hard, working damn hard, sacrificing other aspects of their lives in pursuit of artistic success, and being rewarded for it. I do feel guilty about how little I write. Because I am prone to melodrama and overstatement, I am perversely drawn to pronouncements like "you must have an inner fire that compels you to write six hours a day, no matter what, or you will NEVER be a playwright!" Every year, I tell myself that this is the year I am really going to be a playwright, the year I hunker down and churn out the sentences, the year I read more than I ever have read before and write more than I read. And every year, I falter.

I'm afraid of failure, is what it comes down to. Afraid of spending all that time cooped up at my desk only to produce a mediocre product. But someone who says "If you just worked as hard as me, you'd be as successful as me" is also the kind of person who tends to be unafraid -- the kind of writer who is extremely prolific and will fail often and learn from those failures.

Neither males nor females have a monopoly on failing and learning from failure. But, I think, because males often start out from a privileged/advantaged position, they get the sense that they have more chances in life and it's OK to fail. Coming from a more precarious or disadvantaged group, you don't have that same comfort with error and uncertainty. I have never felt that it would be OK for me to fail; failure would shame me. To make a totally reductive generalization, male artists tend to be Bad Boys and female artists tend to be Dutiful Daughters.

So I'm trying to take some lessons from the New Yorker article, use some of therapist Barry Michels' tricks without having to pay $300 an hour to hear them from him. Some insights:

" '[Writers] procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write... Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he's answerable to, but it's not human. It's Time itself that's passing inexorably. That's why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you're defying this authority figure.' Procrastination, he says, is a 'spurious form of immortality,' the ego's way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. 'You say, "I'm surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos," ' he says. ' "I'm surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me."'"

Michels' patients often "[vacillate] between thinking [they] are God's gift to mankind and thinking [they] are garbage." This is activated by a mixture of "petulance, rage, arrogance, hypersensitivity, a sense of victimization, and, above all, a resistance to process."

Another technique is "Reversal of Desire," which "helps a patient face something he's avoiding and involves another silent scream--'Bring it on!'--addressed to an imaginary cloud of pain. while pushing into the center of the cloud, the patient says, 'I love pain,' and then, 'Pain sets me free.'"

I guess it's really all about acceptance and submission to a larger discipline -- accepting that time is passing, accepting the process, accepting the pain. And I love the idea that "procrastination is a spurious form of immortality" -- it makes you feel immortal while you're doing it, but when you die and leave no work behind, you're dead. Whereas writing may be a "form of death," but if you do it well, and leave a legacy of the written word behind, it actually can make you immortal.

And some of this is similar to the advice offered in this classic column about writing and womanhood and the fear of writing, which I think I basically ought to memorize: Write Like A Motherfucker

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a play to write. About sisterhood.

How "Jane Eyre" Saved My Life

2011-03-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

Four years ago, I was studying abroad in France. While I hoped to make friends with my host family and other French people, I also knew that my study-abroad experience would be significantly enhanced if I became friends with the other American college students in my program, giving me a ready-made group of companions with whom to visit museums and eat baguettes and live the expat life.

So, as soon as I touched down on French soil, I tried to find myself a group of friends. I fell in with some people who I liked a lot -- they were smart and curious and spoke French to each other even when the teachers weren't listening. We had some fun times together, first in Bordeaux, then in Paris.

And then, after about a month, I found myself being ostracized -- subtly, but methodically. I don't even know what I had done to offend the others, unless it all started the time I knocked over a bottle of red wine and stained an expensive tablecloth when we cooked dinner at one girl's apartment -- but come on, a true friend will forgive you for that. And I had thought that this kind of ostracism was a vestige of junior high, but here we were juniors in college and I was being shunned.

The worst part was, before I got kicked out of the group, I had seen them ostracize another girl who wanted to be part of it. This should have been my first hint that these were not good people. But I was so desperate to belong that I went along with it, helping to snub this other girl. And then they turned around and did the same thing to me -- I could see it happening, but was powerless to stop it.

Having lost my group of friends, I felt rudderless. I went to see way too many classic American movies (Hitchcock, Audrey Hepburn, etc.) at the cheap three-euro theater on the Left Bank. I went on a date with a sketchy guy who hit on me in the Métro. And I did a whole lot of solitary museum-going.

I also tried to find consolation in books. The stereotypical thing would have been to "dress in black and read Camus" (to steal a line from the Magnetic Fields), and there's a part of me that wishes I had spent more time in France sitting in cafes and reading French-language literature. But I already had a lot of school assignments in French; doing my pleasure reading in French would have been too much of a chore.

Miraculously, the one book I had brought with me was The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt, which is now one of my favorites. Its heroine, 17-year-old Frederica Potter, is unpopular with her schoolmates and sometimes hard for the reader to like, but also bold and indomitable. I identified with her, and I adored her.

Then, it came time to choose a new English-language book. Though Parisian bookstores obviously carry a limited selection of English books, several of them had a good stock of Penguin Classics. And I have a thing for Penguin Classics; I try to buy as many of them as I can, and I love the way their black spines look on my shelf. At the time, I was also trying to reread classic books that I had disliked when I was younger, in order to see if I got more out of them this time.

All of these factors are what led me to consider rereading Jane Eyre when I was in Paris. I had read this before when I was about 12 years old, and had not liked it very much. My mother, a fan of Wuthering Heights but not Jane Eyre, finds Jane an insipid heroine, and I think her attitude had rubbed off on me. Also, at the age of 12, I was reading a lot of fantasy books with kickass heroines, so I found it hard to appreciate Jane's quieter virtues. Moreover, I was turned off by the constant references to Christian morality, and sentimental scenes like the death of Helen Burns failed to move me.

So I took the latest Penguin Classics edition of Jane Eyre off the shelf, and perused the back cover. And there, in Penguin-orange type, contrasting with the elegant black background, was a quote from the novel:

You probably can't quite read that, but it says, "The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

That was when I knew that I had to reread this book. I knew that it would become a lifeline for me.

So I made my way around Paris, solitary, friendless, but sustained by reading Jane Eyre -- reading it voraciously, living in its pages. I burned with Jane's passions and marveled at the fact that I had ever found her insipid. The Penguin Classics introduction takes pains to point out that Jane Eyre is a very angry book, which primed me to focus on the restless, independent side of Jane's character, not the self-effacing Christian.

I think there's a popular misconception that Jane Eyre is nothing but a love story, but there's far more to it than that. Perhaps, if you read it at a time when romantic concerns are foremost in your mind, you will focus on the relationship between Jane and Rochester. But if you aren't preoccupied with romance, if what you seek is a sense of strength and self-worth despite misfortune -- and especially if you are a woman -- the novel has so much to offer in that vein. I am therefore grateful that Penguin Classics chose to promote the book with the quotation about self-respect, and not one of the more romantic or gothic passages of the novel. As I said, I'd probably never have reread it otherwise, and it would not now have a place in my heart.

Jane's voice is infectious; when I recently reread the novel again in preparation for the movie, its vocabulary got inside my head and caused me to start talking/writing like I was a Victorian. For instance, I found myself saying that I was "in low spirits" instead of "in a funk" or "depressed."

More and more, too, I find myself marveling at Charlotte Brontë's achievement -- writing this long novel by hand, inventing this incredibly powerful and resonant story, sprinkling the text with rich patterns of imagery and themes. Now, not only do I try to be inspired by Jane's strengths and virtues, I also try to be inspired by Brontë's example. If she could write this novel by hand in less than a year, at a time when her sisters had already had their first books accepted for publication while her own was rejected -- then there is no reason why I should complain about the difficulty of being a writer, or not be as prolific as I wish to be.

The Brontës read extensively, and wrote stories and poems, to get through a harsh childhood and adolescence. The plot of Jane Eyre kicks into motion when young Jane slips away to read a book and is punished for it; and throughout the novel, she quotes and alludes to dozens of works of literature. Perhaps I will never have Charlotte Brontë's extraordinary writing talent, or Jane Eyre's sense of self and comfort with being alone (because I was lonely in France, though I tried my hardest to survive it). But one thing that these women and I will always have in common is that we take comfort from literature. Perhaps the pious Jane would take issue with my saying this, but for me, four years ago, her story was a secular, feminist scripture.

The OTHER Catholic European Country That Begins with an "I"

2011-03-17T22:35:00.001-07:00

It may be Saint Patrick's Day, but an Italian friend of mine posted on Facebook that it is also the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy! I know they say that everyone is part Irish on Saint Patrick's Day... but the rest of the year, I am 0% Irish and 25% Italian.

In honor of my heritage, and so that this significant anniversary does not pass by overlooked, here is "Va, pensiero" (The Hebrew Slaves' Chorus) from Verdi's Nabucco, which became an anthem for the Risorgimento patriots.

Sentimental Irish songs like "Danny Boy" don't make me cry, but when I hear Verdi's big crescendo on the line "O mia patria, si bella e perduta!" (O my country, so lovely and so lost), it gets me every time.

Performed by the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, 2002. I remember watching this production on TV when I was in high school!

"Hermes," an Olympians Festival Success Story

2011-03-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

It's been eight months since I devoted my weekends to working the box office at the San Francisco Olympians Festival -- and it's seven months until Olympians Festival II: Heavenly Bodies, for which I am a writer and associate producer. Don't mistake this for a lull or a fallow period, though! I'm hard at work on my play -- and feeling inspired by seeing Bennett Fisher's Hermes, a script from last summer's Olympians Festival, in a full production this month.

Hermes was one of my favorite plays last summer, and I'm happy that so many more people now have the chance to see it. It's a fast-moving drama about four American derivatives traders devising shady ways to profit from the Greek financial crisis. When they cross one ethical line too many, they attract the attention of Hermes -- god of business, money, liars and thieves. While Hermes is a very angry play, enraged at the manipulation of the financial markets by amoral and rapacious actors, it is also very funny. Hermes comes back to earth in the form of a fratty bro who enjoys giving people stupid nicknames and punching them in the balls.

Stuart Bousel, founder and producer of No Nude Men and the Olympians Festival, says Hermes merits a full production because it embodies the original goal of the festival: to prove the continuing relevance and power of Greek mythology. Ben Fisher doesn't just retell a myth about Hermes, he invents a new one, and explores an aspect of Hermes' personality that often goes unremarked upon. (We tend to think of Hermes as a cheerful trickster, not an amoral bully.) The Greek gods were very human gods, each representing a different aspect of human nature or human life. Because the themes that they embodied are still with us today, so, too, are the gods themselves.

Not only is Hermes a great example of the relevance of Greek mythology, but it is also a great example of the relevance and power of theater itself. As I said, this play centers on the Greek financial crisis -- a real event that happened just one year ago. This kind of rapid response to world events is something that theater (especially small, non-commercial theater) can do but other narrative art forms, such as fiction and film, have more trouble achieving. In Act II of Hermes, the god causes the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, to erupt, stranding the human characters in Europe. When I saw this scene in the July reading of Hermes -- just three months after the volcano had erupted in real life -- I was amazed at the audacity and cleverness of it. When was the last time you saw a play that even referenced an event that happened so recently? And Ben does more than reference the event -- he works it into the plot and mythological framework of the play.

The craftsmanship of Hermes therefore fascinates me: it was written almost in real time, reacting to events in the outside world. When you've got a commission to write a play about Hermes, and various factors conspire to cause a debt crisis in Greece -- Greece, of all places! -- you'd damn well better take advantage of that. And yet, despite the immediacy of the piece, it also has a reflective side, finding interesting things to say about greed, power, and the similarity between gods and debt: "both are substitutes for more tangible assets."

Helping to make the intangible words on a page into a tangible full production are director Tore Ingersoll-Thorpe and six talented actors, all of whom are skilled at delivering the tangy dialogue. Juliana Egley, Geoffrey Nolan, Carl Lucania and Brian Markley play the derivatives traders, Lauren Spencer plays the goddess Hestia (a bartender and waitress), and Brian Trybom plays Hermes. You'll never look at this god the same way again -- and that's the point of the Olympians Festival, isn't it?

Hermes plays at the Exit Stage Left through March 26 -- details and tickets here.

Photo by Claire Ann Rice. Brian Trybom as Hermes, Geoffrey Nolan as Jack.

More on adaptation, and the heart versus the head

2011-03-14T21:28:00.000-07:00

A couple more thoughts that are rolling around in my head after I wrote my last post:

I'm amazed that, in my discussion of adapting classic works of literature and whether you can really enjoy a dramatic adaptation of a novel you've read, I didn't expand this to discuss theater --how this might apply to producing/directing classic plays. I think most theatergoers have experienced the phenomenon of going to see a production of a Shakespeare play (or other classic) where the director is so keen to put his own spin on the material that it prevents you from engaging with the play. You know, flash and dazzle productions where you can admire the artists' cleverness, but not connect on an emotional level. I'm not saying that all "concept" productions of Shakespeare are like this, and still less that no modern production of Shakespeare can succeed on an emotional level. But I do have a marked preference for productions whose goal is to "engage deeply with the text" rather than "go by the Rule of Cool."

In an email, my dad called me out on the following claim, "I tend to believe that art that taps into your emotional, subconscious brain is more valuable than art that welcomes cool, distanced consideration." Do I really believe that? (Or maybe I believe it more strongly than my dad does.) I think this is one reason why I have trouble appreciating contemporary conceptual art. I'm not one of those people who says that art (visual art) must be beautiful, but I do think it must be visceral -- touching you at a level beyond language. Just as with conceptual productions of classic plays, some conceptual art pieces do succeed on a visceral level as well as an intellectual one, and some don't... which is why I consider the visceral pieces to be more fully successful.

There's a quasi-spiritual aspect to all of this. We have a godlike omniscience when we watch an adaptation of a classic novel and know in advance what will happen, which can also lead to a godlike sense of superiority and boredom. When we watch an unfamiliar story, living and suffering along with the characters, we are not gods -- or perhaps we are like Jesus, making the characters' suffering our own.

On "Masterpiece Theatre" and adapting the classics

2011-03-12T10:52:00.000-08:00

After Downton Abbey ended, I wanted more Masterpiece Theatre in my life (my job has been stressful and I need to escape into British costume dramas), so I watched the rerun of the 2009 miniseries of Emma. And I just finished rereading Jane Eyre in anticipation of the new movie version. This has got me thinking about the challenges of adapting classic literature and how we watch and judge adaptations differently from original stories.

Roughly speaking, the more movies or plays you see, the better you get at predicting where the plot is going or what the writer will do next. This tendency becomes even more pronounced if you have formally studied dramatic writing. I distinctly remember realizing that I had started to watch plays "like a playwright," attuned to their construction and the tricks the writer uses, rather than just enjoying the drama as it unfolds.

When you're watching an adaptation of a familiar novel, rather than an original or unfamiliar story, it is even easier to recognize what the screenwriter is doing. What point of view does she take? What does she choose to emphasize that other adaptations leave out? Has she created any new scenes? All these are examples of the writer trying to put a new spin on old material -- but they are also writers' tricks that can easily lead to predictability.

For instance, the writer of the Emma miniseries chose to emphasize the narrowness of Emma's world. Though Emma is in her early twenties, she has hardly left the village of Highbury -- never visited London or the seaside. I can't remember Jane Austen particularly emphasizing this theme, because in her era it was not so unusual for a young lady to live a circumscribed life. But it is a valid reading of the novel, suggesting that Emma plays matchmaker because she desperately needs some excitement. And I can understand a 21st-century screenwriter wishing to highlight this theme, and thereby contrast Emma's era and our own.

So, during the first episodes of the miniseries, Emma kept commenting that she had never seen the sea. After the second or third time this happened, I turned to my roommate and said "What do you want to bet that the last shot of this is going to be Emma and Mr. Knightley walking on the beach?"

OK, so I was wrong. They're not on the beach -- they're on the cliffs of Dover.

But really, this wasn't hard to predict. All I did was pay attention to what the screenwriter had expanded and emphasized (Emma's desire to finally see the ocean), and added that to my knowledge of what a Masterpiece Theatre audience would appreciate (a picturesque, romantic final image) and my knowledge of Austen's story (Emma and Mr. Knightley get married). Craftsmanship, writers' tricks, that's all.

Moments like this, though, are why I find it hard to really absorb myself into movie adaptations. Because the plot cannot surprise me, I pay far more attention to the mechanics of the film, the choices made by the writer, actors, director, even the costumer! So I process it with my rational, judgmental, distanced brain, rather than my subconscious, emotional, immediate brain. However, I tend to believe that art that taps into your emotional, subconscious brain is more valuable than art that welcomes cool, distanced consideration.

Watching a movie adaptation of a novel I've read, I judge the actors harder than I judge actors in an original story, forcing them to compete with my memories of the book and my own ideas about what Emma Woodhouse or Mr. Darcy or Jane Eyre is "really" like. I get very attached to my preconceived notions. I think Michael Fassbender is very talented and very attractive, but when I heard he was cast in the new Jane Eyre movie, my first thought was "But isn't Rochester supposed to have black hair and eyes?"

Even when I haven't read the source novel, watching a movie adaptation can be problematic. For instance, you may still have picked up some preconceived notions about the characters or plot floating in the pop-culture ether. (I would wager that many people who have never read Jane Eyre are well aware that Jane is plain-looking and Mr. Rochester has a mad wife in the attic.) Or, if you truly know nothing about the story of Emma, but the first episode hooks you and you can't wait another week for the continuation, you can always just run out and buy the book. Or, you can watch the movie adaptation, and then feel guilty that you haven't actually read the novel, and think that you ought to read it, but you probably won't read it, because you already know the story!

I think maybe it's for all of these reasons that Downton Abbey was such a big success upon its premiere. People want the pleasures of a literary costume drama -- lots of characters, beautiful clothing and decor, a chance to escape to another era, touches of melodrama in the plotting -- without the literary pedigree. You can enjoy Maggie Smith's hilarious performance unfettered instead of saying "but the Dowager Countess wasn't like that in the book..." Even though some of the plot elements are familiar or predictable, there are also several surprises that keep the series lively. I found it much easier to really care about the characters of Downton Abbey because I, like them, had no idea what would happen next. Whereas, even though Emma was a well-done miniseries and Emma's gradual gaining of self-awareness is a good story, I knew all along where it would end up -- her and Mr. Knightley and a stroll on the beach.

Images from Emma (2009) with Romola Garai as Emma and Jonny Lee Miller as Mr. Knightley. For the record, I enjoyed their performances, even if I thought the age difference between them should have been more evident!

The Girl in the Boys' Club: "What We're Up Against" by Theresa Rebeck

2011-03-02T20:40:00.001-08:00

A good friend of mine, knowing that playwriting can be a bit of a boys' club, recently forwarded me Molly Lambert's article In Which We Teach You How To Be a Woman in Any Boys' Club from thisrecording.com (also seen on Jezebel). Good essay; I enjoyed it. And, more than anything, I wished that I could forward it to Eliza, a young woman I met last week -- a smart and driven architect working at a firm that's a poisonous, hostile boys' club.

But I can't actually forward it to Eliza, because she is a fictitious character: the heroine of Theresa Rebeck's play What We're Up Against, currently in its world premiere at the Magic Theatre. Still, it's funny how much Rebeck's play comes across as a dramatization of the situations brought up in Lambert's article. Lambert talks a lot about what you should do if there are two women in the boys' club -- you and someone else -- and the same situation arises in What We're Up Against. There is another woman at the architecture firm besides Eliza: Janice, a mediocre architect who is happy to be the token woman in the boys' club. I liked how Theresa Rebeck is willing to show that not all women are feminists devoted to shaking up the status quo. But I thought that sometimes Janice was portrayed as unbelievably stupid (it is one thing to be a mediocre architect; it is another thing to say "Why can't we just rip all those air ducts out, anyway?"). And the play would have been more complex if there were a clearer sense that Janice was sometimes playing a role, emphasizing her femininity and helplessness so that her co-workers would continue to like her. As it is, she really did seem just that naive.

Eliza, on the other hand, is a tough cookie who is sick of being passed over -- especially when Weber, a man who has not been at the firm for as long as she has, is the new golden boy. Her co-workers tell her that, in architecture, no one does anything interesting their first ten years, but Eliza can't help feeling that gender plays a part. And she hasn't even heard how her co-workers Stu and Ben talk about her behind her back: the first scene of the play features the men saying that Eliza is a "bitch" and a "cunt" after she pulls a stunt to get their attention. "This is what we're up against," one of them says; I love how Rebeck's title can cut both ways. The men feel threatened by their female colleague, but "what we're up against" also refers to the sexism that we, as women, are up against.

I also liked how Rebeck is willing to make Eliza unlikable at times. Even though Eliza's cause is just, she sometimes goes about things the wrong way. She can be abrasive, she can be too unaware of what other people think of her, she can miscalculate and overreach. I couldn't help comparing her to Amanda, the heroine of Sarah Treem's A Feminine Ending, another recent-ish play about a young woman in a boys' club (Amanda is an oboist and aspiring classical-music composer). Amanda has her flaws -- she's insecure, and she can act impulsively -- but those flaws are a lot more endearing than Eliza's flaws. And I think that a play is stronger when its main character is not wholly admirable. At the very least, it helps redeem Rebeck from the charge that she is being one-sided and polemical.

Rebeck has a good grasp of the way that workplace sexism manifests itself in the 21st century. Unlike in the Mad Men era, none of the men make lewd remarks about Eliza, even though she is an attractive young woman. The oldest man, Stu, has the most reductive view of gender. The youngest man, Weber, definitely feels threatened by Eliza, but less because of her gender than because she's simply better than him. He's happy to join the old boys' club because it works to his benefit, but he is less inherently sexist than Stu.

I don't want to oversell What We're Up Against. It realistically portrays an important part of modern life that is not often shown onstage: office politics crossed with gender politics. But it is sometimes hard to care about the architects' project of redesigning a shopping mall, and the supporting characters could use more complexity. The first scene (in which the theme of sexism is the most prominent) is funny but a bit heavy-handed, and the subsequent scenes take too long to deepen the themes.

But I enjoy seeing feminist themes in mainstream theater, and I appreciate that Rebeck has written the role of Eliza, which allows an actress to portray emotions and qualities that are uncommon in roles written for young women, but which are very easy to relate to.

What We're Up Against is at San Francisco's Magic Theatre through March 6.

Photo from Magic Theatre. Sarah Nealis as Eliza; Rod Knapp as Ben.

Starstruck and Starry-Eyed

2011-02-25T20:54:00.000-08:00

Image: Jacket designed by Yves Saint Laurent in 1980 as a homage to Jean Cocteau.

I've been in a good mood all day ever since I woke up to an email informing me that the Comité Jean Cocteau has granted me the rights to do an English translation of Orphée!

The head of the Comité Jean Cocteau and the keeper of the moral rights to his work is Pierre Bergé, who was a friend of Cocteau's in the '50s and is best known as the personal and professional partner of Yves Saint Laurent. The email this morning mentioned him by name, saying that he is "tout à fait d'accord" (entirely in agreement) with my plans. I am very grateful and more than a little starstruck!

Starstruck... I guess that's an appropriate word, considering that Jean Cocteau loved star imagery and incorporated it into his signature.

Riling Up a Modern Audience, part 2 - "Clybourne Park" at ACT

2011-02-20T21:21:00.000-08:00

As I said in my earlier post, I was very curious to see Bruce Norris' play Clybourne Park at ACT, because I wanted to see how the San Francisco audience would react to this intentionally provocative play, which explicitly takes race and gentrification as its themes.

Act I of Clybourne Park takes place in 1959. A black family is about to move into a white middle-class Chicago neighborhood, and the neighbors are "concerned," in that patronizing 1950s way. (The black family happens to be the Youngers from A Raisin in the Sun, but I'm not going to go into that aspect of the play here.) The racial dynamics of this act will be familiar to fans of Mad Men and other contemporary works that take place in the 1950s and 1960s. It allows the audience to feel superior to the white characters, who are so paternalistic, and sympathize with the black maid and her husband, who clearly can't stand being around these people.

Norris lulls us into a false sense of security in Act I ("wow, haven't things gotten so much better since 1959?" we say) in order to play the provocateur in Act II, which takes place 50 years later. After the Younger family moved into Clybourne Park, more and more black families followed them. In the 1970s and 1980s, the neighborhood was seriously troubled with poverty and violence. Since that time, it has slowly gentrified, to the point where white families are starting to move back into what is now a "historical" black neighborhood. Act II depicts a young white couple who have just bought a house in Clybourne Park (the same house as in Act I), and want to expand it. A black couple from the neighborhood has engaged a lawyer to try to stop them from renovating the house and disrupting the historic character of the neighborhood. But obviously, there is more to this dispute than just architecture.

In Act I, three of the characters were straight, white, middle-class men -- the archetypes of privilege. In Act II, just one of them is: Steve, the yuppie who bought the house. Everyone else is an "Other": two white women, a black woman, a working-class white man, a gay man, and a black man. We are used to being asked to sympathize with characters like Steve, because, as we know, pop culture teaches us that the default human being is straight, white, male, and bourgeois, and anything else is a deviation from the norm.

And at first, Steve is not hard to sympathize with. He is the first person in the room to say "Look, isn't this really about race?", and when he does that, the audience thinks "Finally!" Clearly, the conversation we have been witnessing is all about race and class, but no one wants to admit that. (Some of the characters, hilariously, are blinded by their own political correctness. Steve's wife Lindsey is shocked, shocked, that anyone would even think this was about race.) Wasn't it good of Steve to get that out in the open!

But it soon becomes clear that, while Steve was right that there are racial tensions underlying the conversation, it was incredibly stupid of him to mention them. Because, once he brings them out into the open, the gloves come off, and Act II culminates in an exchange of offensive racist jokes. And the more Steve talks, the more he keeps putting his foot in his mouth. He's the first character to tell a racist joke, which manages to offend the women and the gay man in addition to the black couple. Obviously, Norris does not intend for us to sympathize with Steve's point of view -- this, despite the fact that Norris himself is a straight, white, middle-class man. I'm not sure who we are supposed to sympathize with, but it's not Steve.

After the exchange of racist jokes, Steve puffs himself up, in all of his privilege, and basically says that it's impossible for him to get offended by such jokes, because he is a straight white man. In fact, Steve says, what really offends him are those assholes who drive around in their S.U.V.s with yellow ribbon magnets saying "Support the Troops," when what they really mean is "Support George Bush's phony war and the right-wing Republican agenda"...

And the San Francisco audience applauded. Applauded.

Despite the fact that by this point, Steve has shown himself to be an idiot. Despite the fact that Bush has been out of office for two years. (Indeed, if this scene takes place in 2009, in the happy early days of the Obama administration, Steve's continued obsession with the Iraq War just adds to the impression that he is an idiot.) But somehow, any time a character says something "liberal" onstage -- even if the playwright is trying to critique that attitude -- a San Franciscan feels compelled to applaud. Never play a game of "more liberal than thou," with a San Franciscan, for you will surely lose. This is what I mean when I say that the smugness of this city can be a wonder to behold.

Of course, Norris immediately has the black character, Kevin, take Steve to task for his statement -- asking him why he considers people "assholes" if they have a Support the Troops magnet, and revealing that his own car has three such magnets, for the three members of his family who are serving in Iraq.

There was a smattering of applause after Kevin's response -- from me and people like me who were uncomfortable with all the applause that Steve got -- but it was far more subdued. I'd like to think that the people who applauded Steve felt chagrined, but did they really? And I also wish that the actor who played Kevin had held the moment a beat longer, encouraged more applause, made it even more uncomfortable. It was the most interesting moment of an interesting and provocative play. It was a moment that, with a little more encouragement, might have started a riot in the theater.

Image: Act II of Clybourne Park at ACT. Left to right: Emily Kitchens as Lindsey, Richard Thieriot as Steve, Manoel Felciano as Tom, Gregory Wallace as Kevin, and Omozé Idehenre as Lena.

Theater History from The Guardian

2011-02-16T23:34:00.001-08:00

OK, so I'm not going to get around to writing the second part of my "what could make an audience riot?" post tonight. In the meantime, how about something I discovered when I was writing the first part of the post?

Looking for information about the first production of Playboy of the Western World, I found and linked to an article from The Guardian. Turns out, it was part of a fascinating series of articles. In the mid-2000s, journalist Samantha Ellis had a column called "Curtain Up," describing the opening nights of memorable theatrical productions, drawing upon reviews and eyewitness accounts.

There doesn't seem to be an index for this series on the Guardian website, so I've taken the liberty of making my own, using the Guardian's index of every article that Samantha Ellis has written for them. Here are all the productions that you can read about in the "Curtain Up" column:

Hamlet, London, 1963 - opening night of the National Theatre
Votes for Women!, London, 1907 - "the first suffragette play"
Salomé, London, 1931 - censored for 40 years and finally produced
The Birthday Party, London, 1958 - Pinter's debut was a major flop
Richard of Bordeaux, London, 1933 - "the night John Gielgud became a star"
The Playboy of the Western World, Dublin, 1907 - riots!
Saved, London, 1965 - getting around the censors
Hedda Gabler, London, 1970 - Ingmar Bergman's production starring Maggie Smith
An Inspector Calls, London, 1946 - mixed reviews for a modern morality play
The Revenger's Tragedy, London, 1966 - rediscovery of a Jacobean tragedy
Look Back in Anger, London, 1956 - seminal kitchen-sink drama
The Lady's Not For Burning, London, 1949 - surprise-hit verse drama
A Wife Without a Smile, London, 1904 - farce "banned on account of a dancing doll"
Oliver!, London, 1960 - one of the most successful British musicals
Titus Andronicus, London, 1955 - Peter Brook's acclaimed production
Black Chiffon, London, 1949 - the '40s fad for Freudianism in theater
The Importance of Being Earnest, London, 1939 - starring Edith Evans
A View from the Bridge, London, 1956 - Miller and Marilyn
A Man For All Seasons, London, 1960 - "a quiet distinction"
French Without Tears, London, 1936 - Terrence Rattigan's first hit
Water Hen, Edinburgh, 1972 - experimental Polish fringe-festival hit
The Royal Hunt of the Sun, London, 1964 - "the first new British play produced at the National"
Othello, London, 1930 - starring Paul Robeson
A Taste of Honey, London, 1960 - Angry Young Woman
Private Lives, London, 1930 - Noel Coward at his most soigné
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, London, 1973 - a camp classic
Ben-Hur, London, 1902 - how do you stage a chariot race?
The Entertainer, London, 1974 - revival starring Max Wall
The Living Room, London, 1953 - Graham Greene's debut play
Macbeth, London, 1969 - staged by a New York experimental-theater provocateur
The Merchant of Venice, London, 1879 - with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry
Moby-Dick, London, 1955 - verse drama by Orson Welles
A Bill of Divorcement, London, 1921 - topical and popular
Pygmalion, London, 1914 - this popular comedy had a difficult first production
Play, London, 1964 - Billie Whitelaw's first Beckett role

Of course it is exciting to read about plays that have gone on to become classics, like Pygmalion or Look Back in Anger, but I also find it interesting to read about plays that are probably too minor and too dated to ever be produced again, but epitomize something about the theater and culture of their era -- like Black Chiffon or Ben-Hur.

I also think it's fascinating how many now-classic plays were flops in their first productions!

Riling Up A Modern Audience, part 1

2011-02-15T21:37:00.000-08:00

My friends and I, being nerds, like to sit around, drink wine, and read classic plays out loud. (Our group, the No Nude Men salon, got a nice shout-out on the Bay Guardian blog last week!) A few weeks ago, the play we read was J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. After we had stumbled through the play in our horrible mock-Irish accents -- and our Irish friend, who read the role of Pegeen, tried not to make fun of us -- we discussed the play, and in particular the "Playboy Riots," that occurred after its premiere in 1907.

Then someone asked if we could ever imagine theatergoers in 2011, in San Francisco, rioting in response to a play. What kind of play would it have to be, to get them so riled up?

It was hard to imagine a play that could provoke a genuine riot in the theater. A sufficiently violent, disgusting, or disturbing play might provoke an audience to walk out en masse, but is unlikely to start a riot.

San Francisco audiences are notoriously left-wing, so would we riot if a conservative play was produced here in town? (I mean a play that explicitly promoted right-wing talking points. Of course many "classic" plays are conservative in their outlook in a more general sense.) Well, I can easily picture San Franciscans getting all huffy and protesting outside the theater where the conservative play was being performed. But that is still somewhat different than spontaneously rising up in the theater and starting a riot. We would be offended that someone was trying to produce a conservative play in San Francisco, but we would not feel personally indicted by the play.

After all, for an audience to riot, it must be touchy. Insecure. On the defensive. Whereas San Franciscans are a largely contented (some would say "smug") bunch of people.

Again, consider the example of The Playboy of the Western World. In 1907, the Irish were extremely touchy and insecure. After hundreds of years of subjugation, they were finally beginning to take pride in their cultural heritage, and to see it as a fit subject for playwrights and artists. But rather than glorifying Ireland and its people, Synge wrote a hilarious black comedy that portrays the rural Irish as gossipy, libidinous, and completely amoral. Coming from an English author, such insults would have been tolerated. Coming from an Irish author at the Abbey Theatre, it was seen as high treason. Synge was becoming famous, and the good citizens of Dublin worried that his play would present a skewed idea of Ireland to the rest of the world. So, they rioted.

Therefore, I think that in order to riot in the theater, the audience must feel that the play has personally insulted them as a group, and must be an insult that they cannot easily dismiss. For instance, if a right-wing play were produced in San Francisco that told us we were a bunch of sodomizing, fornicating coastal-elitist heathens who would go straight to hell, we wouldn't take it seriously. We know that that is how half of the country thinks of us, and we accept that -- we even take pride in it. In order to cause us to riot, a playwright would have to discover a way to truly get under our skin and make us feel uncomfortable -- to condemn us in subtle ways, to damn us with the truth, rather than with caricature.

In light of this, I was extremely curious to see how the S.F. audience reacted to Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park, currently being staged at A.C.T. Norris has a reputation as a provocateur who enjoys making fun of the hypocrisies, the coded language, the white privilege and white guilt of city-dwelling liberals. If any play could get a San Francisco audience to riot, I thought, it would be something like that -- an insult lobbed at us by one who knows our kind too well, produced by the city's most prominent theater company.

Tomorrow: my experience seeing Clybourne Park, and proof that the smugness of San Franciscans is really a wonder to behold.

Theater, the Gender Imbalance, and Economics

2011-02-10T23:07:00.000-08:00

If you go to opening-night parties at mid-sized theater companies, certain things are bound to happen. The show's director, or the theater's artistic director (often these are one and the same person) will make a toast. The members of the board of directors will schmooze with one another and make you feel like a bit of an interloper. A bevy of earnest young women in black cocktail dresses will serve the drinks, set up and break down the folding tables, and generally make sure that everything runs smoothly.

I say this affectionately, because sometimes I am one of those earnest young women. Several of my friends are on staff at the Cutting Ball Theater and because of this, when I attend their opening night galas, I feel somewhat like an honorary "Cutting Ball Girl." (Well, I am on their literary committee.) At the end of the Bone to Pick/Diadem party a few weeks ago, I ended up taking a photo of the cast and crew, because I was the only person there who didn't work on the show.

Here's the picture--I love how well it came out, with the deep rich colors. But, note the preponderance of females. All women, except for Rob there in the middle!

Similarly, last night, a friend of mine hooked me up with a gig volunteering at the opening night party of What We're Up Against, the latest play at the Magic Theatre. There were probably ten or twelve people working to make this party come off, and only two were male -- the rest were young women, volunteers or interns or staffers at the Magic.

In short, there is a heavy gender imbalance in the staff of nonprofit theater companies. You can also see this gender imbalance among actors: more women compete for fewer female roles.

Probably the most common explanation for this is that boys don't think it's cool to enjoy theater. Theater is "gay"; creative pursuits are not manly -- you've heard all of that before.

But today I found myself wondering if there is another explanation. It's still rooted in the different cultural expectations that our society has for different genders, but this time with an economic component. Namely, that women are more willing to work for low pay than men are, or that it is more socially acceptible for women to work for low pay.

The data bear this out. On OKCupid's fascinating statistics-based blog, they prove that a man who says he earns less than $40,000 a year gets next to no messages. Unfortunately, OKCupid didn't provide a similar chart for women, but they implied that women are much more reluctant to contact a low-earning man than men are to contact a low-earning woman.

Even though we live in a society where women are often more educated than men, and are encouraged to seek out interesting and well-paid careers, I feel that there is still a sense that it's OK for a woman's career to be less remunerative than a man's. After all, a woman who "marries well" still has the option of quitting work forever and pursuing those things that non-working women have always pursued -- art, volunteering, philanthropy. Last night I met one of the Magic Theater interns, and her husband who works in finance. I must admit I was rather jealous that she could pursue the arts full-time because she had a husband who could support her.

A man's career, though -- that's got to be lucrative. For him, money is a way of displaying status -- proving to the world just how much of a hard-working man he is -- in a way that it is not a status symbol for women.

One could also say that the arts are often thought of as frivolous, and society finds frivolity more acceptible in women than in men. A woman who, in order to pursue her artistic ambitions, scrapes together odd jobs and is always close to being broke, is an artistic free spirit. A man who does the same thing, in order to pursue his artistic ambitions, is a lazy slacker.

(This, despite the fact that it might actually be more expensive to be a woman than to be a man -- we're expected to have bigger wardrobes, to buy a wider range of cosmetics and beauty supplies, to pay for birth control pills each month...)

And, face it, we all know that nobody gets rich working as an entry-level staffer at a nonprofit theater -- and that's what really drives the men away. Even if a boy has managed to avoid falling for the "theater is gay" message, even if he loves the theater and was the star of his high school or college drama club, he will not consider theater as a viable career. He knows -- society has told him -- that he must "man up and get a real job."

And sometimes I wonder if the men were right. (Indeed, if you've noticed, I'm not doing internships or odd jobs in the theater -- I've had a regular nine-to-five office job ever since I left school.) I mean, yes, we want to work in the theater, but why should we be willing to accept such low pay?

Despite living in an era of feminism, we women are still trained to be polite, compliant, and service-oriented. We do make great staffers at opening-night parties -- we're smart, we work hard, we're capable of discussing Brecht or pouring a bottle of wine with equal aplomb. We put up with the low pay because we want to work in theater, and because our well-meaning liberal parents told us that we should follow our bliss and not let our gender hold us back. Well, that's what we're doing. Except that as other careers become more diverse and egalitarian and gender-balanced, theater is becoming less gender-balanced.

You see that these thoughts about gender inequality were provoked by my volunteering at the opening night party of What We're Up Against -- a world premiere play by Theresa Rebeck about sexism in the American workplace. I will be seeing the play in a few weeks, using the free ticket I received for helping out last night. The irony of all of this is not lost on me.

My Favorite Moment from "Downton Abbey"

2011-02-03T22:12:00.000-08:00

I definitely became a fan of Masterpiece Theater's broadcasts of Downton Abbey over the past four Sundays. While the beginning of the first episode drew me in with its amazing tracking shot through the rooms of Downton, the moment that really hooked me was a scene early in the second episode, after the characters and their relationships had been set up. As a writer, I must say that once you've gotten the exposition out of the way, everything becomes so much more fun!

This isn't one of the big, dramatic (sometimes melodramatic) moments of Downton Abbey, but it is a great example of one of my favorite things about period dramas: people finding clever ways to insult one another in polite company.

So, the set-up: Matthew Crawley, a young lawyer from Manchester, has recently learned that (for reasons too complicated to get into here), he will inherit the estate of Downton Abbey and the title of Earl of Grantham from a distant relative. The present Earl, a middle-aged man with three daughters, welcomes Matthew to Downton. However, other members of the family wish to alter the law so that the Earl's eldest daughter, Lady Mary, can inherit the estate.

If Mary cannot inherit, some people think that the next best thing would be for her to marry Matthew. But Mary is an aristocratic snob who has taken an instant dislike to this middle-class interloper. At a family dinner, she strikes up the following conversation:

MARY: I've been studying the story of Andromeda; do you know it?

MATTHEW: (suspiciously) Why?

MARY: Her father was King Cepheus, whose country was being ravaged by storms. And, in the end, he decided the only way to appease the gods was to sacrifice his eldest daughter to a hideous sea monster. So they chained her, naked, to a rock--

DOWAGER COUNTESS: (nervously laughs) Really! Mary! We'll all need our smelling salts in a minute!

MATTHEW: But the sea monster didn't get her, did he?

MARY: No. Just when it seemed he was the only solution to her father's problems, she was rescued.

MATTHEW: By Perseus.

MARY: That's right. Perseus. Son of a god. Rather more fitting, wouldn't you say?

MATTHEW: That depends. I'd have to know more about the princess and the sea monster in question.

As the scene ended and I laughed with delight, I knew I'd be telling several of my friends about it. All right, so I hang out with people who are inordinately fond of British period pieces, people being bitchy to each other in polite company, and allusions to Greek mythology. This kind of thing is catnip to us. (As a bonus, the Dowager Countess is played by Maggie Smith, and she is awesome.)

You can watch Downton Abbey for free on the Masterpiece Theatre website until February 22, which is how I re-watched and transcribed the above scene. If you're like me and my friends, and this excerpt has piqued your interest, go check it out.

Image: Publicity shot of Matthew (Dan Stevens) and Mary (Michelle Dockery).

Introducing... "Pleiades"!

2011-02-02T19:47:00.000-08:00

We are already in the thick of preparations for the 2011 S.F. Olympians Festival (coming in October) and the website is getting better every day, with a page devoted to each play and playwright in the upcoming festival.

Including my very own Pleiades!

Click on over for some background information on the myth of the seven sisters, some ideas about about how my play will reinterpret their story, plus my author bio and photo. And mark your calendars for October 22!

Two From The Millions

2011-01-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

The Millions is one of my favorite websites. (Can't believe it wasn't on my blogroll, an egregious omission that I have now rectified.) Here are two recent posts of theirs that I found particularly worthwhile:

The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia's Novel Crisis by Cathy Day. This article is about how America's MFA writing programs focus on crafting short stories and offer no guidance on crafting novels, and the problems that this causes both for aspiring writers and for the reading public. As I read it, I couldn't help thinking of the blog post I recently wrote about playwriting books, and the conversation that Tim struck up with me at Theater Pub after seeing my post. There is something similar in the deficiencies that exist in the teaching (in MFA programs) of fiction writing and the teaching (in how-to books) of playwriting. These methods do not necessarily produce the kind of writing that audiences/readers most want. They define things too narrowly (you must write a minimalist, realistic story of 8 to 16 pages! you must write a realistic play about a single protagonist struggling to achieve a single goal!) and force some writers into a box where they don't belong.

Beverly Cleary's Dispatches from the Golden West, by Lydia Kiesling. Kiesling's experience of reading Beverly Cleary's two memoirs--A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet--basically mirrors my own. These are great books to give a girl who has outgrown "Ramona Quimby" and wonders what life was like for an American girl/young woman in the 1920s and 1930s (these are real-life "American Girl" books, yo). I wrote about them briefly here. Like Cleary, I am a proud Oregon girl who moved to California as a young woman, and this article has me thinking that I should reread My Own Two Feet now that I am living in the Bay Area.

Midwinter Music Mania

2011-01-19T22:21:00.000-08:00

Coming to an iPod near me in the very near future:

The King is Dead, by the Decemberists (downloading it as I type this). As I wrote at the time the last Decemberists album came out, "I am a pretentious theater-nerd from Portland, so I am contractually obliged to love the Decemberists." And I am on record as preferring the Decemberists in literate pop-song mode to the Decemberists in heavy rock-opera mode. The King is Dead -- ten folk-inspired songs in forty minutes -- is exactly the kind of music I was hoping the band would make after the excesses of The Hazards of Love, and I look forward to listening to it tomorrow.

Cleopatra: Arias from Giulio Cesare, by Natalie Dessay (to be released February 8). Man, I was looking forward to this as far back as two and a half years ago, when the word first surfaced that Dessay would add the role of Cleopatra to her repertoire. She's my favorite opera singer, and Cleopatra's "V'adoro, pupille" is perhaps my favorite Handel aria. And now she's recorded it!

Giulio Cesare

I'm so excited about both of these albums! I feel as though I'm back in college! -- the era when I discovered both of these artists. Blissful afternoons of sitting on my dorm-room quilt and listening to the Decemberists and Dessay -- I really don't do that often enough, these days.

The Shavian Teacup

2011-01-18T20:27:00.000-08:00

I bought this teacup the other week at a massive garage sale on Castro Street. I'd been wanting a vintage teacup or two for my mantelpiece, because I am just that kind of cutesy-boho girl, and teacups are very useful for storing loose change or other random items.

There were lots of teacups at the garage sale, but I found myself drawn to this one, almost feeling sorry for it. No one would buy it unless their initials happened to be G.B.S., and what were the chances of someone with those initials showing up at the rummage sale? The poor teacup would get smashed and thrown on the rubbish heap, probably. O teacup, in your youth how proud you must have been of your gilded monogram, and now that monogram would be your downfall!

Then I realized that the monogram matched that of a writer I admire very much!

"So... there's no chance that this actually belonged to George Bernard Shaw, is there?" I asked the British man who was overseeing the garage sale, as I handed over my four dollars and bought the teacup.

"Suite Française": The Alpha & the Omega

2011-01-16T20:29:00.001-08:00

I have seen Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky, referred to as "the first great novel of World War II," because Némirovsky wrote it just a year or two after the events it describes. Its two parts deal with the invasion of France in June 1940, and the occupation of a small French village in spring 1941, and Némirovsky had written it all by summer 1942, when she was taken to Auschwitz. I have also seen it referred to as "the last great novel of World War II," because the manuscript was not published until 2004. And really, after reading an such an authentic novel of World War II, what modern fiction writer (likely born long after World War II ended) would have the hubris to write a novel dealing with that war?

Though I am a Francophile, I resisted reading Suite Française because I was almost suspicious of its backstory, which tended to overshadow the writing -- the rediscovered manuscript, Némirovsky's tragic murder at the hands of the Nazis. In such circumstances, the novel itself wouldn't have to be any good in order to become a bestseller. But finally, I picked up a cheap used copy, and I'm so glad I did. Because Suite Française is indeed a good novel; it is valuable not only as a historical document, but as art.

Némirovsky displays a masterful command of the techniques of fiction writing -- controlling the narrative flow, writing in different voices and from different perspectives. For instance, there is a chapter told from the point of view of a Parisian housecat encountering the countryside for the first time as his owners flee the Nazis. A scene that could easily turn melodramatic (it involves a German officer telling a Frenchwoman that he loves her and will never forget her) is saved from melodrama by being told from the perspective of a little girl who observes the two adults, but is too young to understand what's going on.

One of the blurbs in the front matter of my copy compares Suite Française to Flaubert in its "indictment of French manners and morals," and I'd have to agree with that. Like Flaubert, Némirovsky is snarky and ruthless, though not without moments of beauty. The first part of Suite Française, "Storm in June," demonstrates how, in the face of the German invasion, the French people occasionally behave in noble and self-sacrificing ways, but more often are unscrupulous, selfish, and snobbish. The middle- and upper-class characters work all of their connections in order to stay well-fed and sheltered, and when they can't work their connections, they steal from those less fortunate. A young priest attempting to lead a group of orphaned juvenile delinquents to safety ends up murdered by his young charges. (Even the name of the orphanage, the Penitent Children of the 16th Arrondissement, is a snarky joke. The 16th is the wealthiest arrondissement in Paris; it is like saying "The Penitent Children of the Upper East Side" or "The Penitent Children of Pacific Heights.")

As suggested by its title, "Dolce," the second part of Suite Française, is gentler and more reflective. In its depiction of a German officer quartered in the house of a young French woman, it reminded me of another wartime classic, Le Silence de la mer by Vercors. Interestingly, both works use a trope that has now become a cliche -- that of the Nazi who is redeemed through his sensitivity to art and music.

Némirovsky planned a further three parts of Suite Française, which would have linked the Parisian characters of "Storm in June" to the provincial characters of "Dolce," and it is a pity that she was murdered before she had the chance to write them. Still -- believe the hype, and the too-good-to-be-true backstory of the manuscript of Suite Française. We are very lucky that this accomplished writer was able to transform her experiences of World War II into artful fiction, before she herself perished.

$10,090 from 44 Donors

2011-01-13T20:24:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I blogged about The Sunset Challenge, the Magic Theatre's campaign to raise $10,000 from donors to go toward the writing and production of a new play by Octavio Solis. I donated $20.

I was just digging through some papers and discovered the letter acknowledging the receipt of my contribution and the success of the campaign. It said "Magic Theatre was able to raise $10,090.60 from 44 donors."

And that took me by surprise: the number of donors is so much lower than I had expected. If every donor had given the same amount, the mean contribution would be $230. And because I, and likely others, had given much less than $230, that means that most of the money had come from just a few people. (Did the 80-20 rule came into effect: 80% of the money coming from 20% of the donors?)

I know that $230 or $250 is not an insane amount of money -- you don't have to be a millionaire fat cat in order to donate $250 to a charity or an arts organization. All the same, it is hard for me to imagine having $250 (or more) lying around and giving it to a theater company and feeling 100% sure that I had made the right choice. Maybe it would have been better for me to buy something useful with it? Or bank it, put it towards a longer-term savings goal? Or donate it to help the denizens of the Haiti refugee camps, or to protect the environment, or...?

But $20, I can spend without guilt. And I was truly excited that the Magic Theatre seemed to want my $20 for the Sunset Challenge. It solicited my donation on Facebook, it made the project sound like a community effort... a collaboration between a San Francisco writer and two San Francisco theater companies to write a play that takes place in a not-so-well-known neighborhood of our city. And so, after all that, I must confess to being really disappointed that only 44 people donated, and that many of them had to have given substantial sums in order for the math to work out.

I know it's churlish of me to complain about this; the Sunset Challenge achieved its goal, and I'm just looking a gift horse in the mouth. But, when I gave my $20, I thought I would be one of many proud first-time donors to the Magic Theater. And yet there weren't so many of us, after all...

Dei ex Machinae

2011-01-06T19:37:00.000-08:00

So, the first full-length play I ever wrote bore the title Deus ex Machina. My one-sentence description of it was, "A satire about the influence of the media on teenagers." In it, an average American teenage boy gets picked to host a tawdry television show (some unholy mash-up of American Bandstand, Total Request Live, and a softcore porno), causes sexual awakenings in millions of girls across the country, dumps his innocent hometown girlfriend for a scheming temptress, becomes as greedy and venal as the producers of the TV show, and does nothing to stop the airwaves from filling up with more and more lubricious junk.

OK, I was an angry, elitist teenager who thought that pop culture was exclusively for idiots, and despite being a liberal Democrat, I wrote a play that might win approval from social conservatives (for its "pop culture is a cesspool of sex and violence! hookups will be the ruination of America!" message). But it was, at least, a fast-moving and darkly funny play, maybe even a good one -- it won a national contest. I say all of this as preamble, mainly because I'm really surprised I've never mentioned it on this blog before.

Anyway, the (somewhat pretentious) title came about because the literal meaning of "deus ex machina" is "god from the machine," and I thought that my peers were treating their TVs (machines) like gods. False gods, greedy gods, gods who demanded human sacrifices -- but gods nonetheless.

And now, I just learned that a new novel about reality television, by Andrew Foster Altschul, is about to be published -- and it's titled Deus Ex Machina. The Rumpus is promoting it right now as their book club pick (Foster Altschul is their books editor) -- go check out their interview with him and other coverage. Also mentioned favorably on Bookslut, it sounds dark and existential and cynical -- I mean genuinely so, whereas my play was sentimental with a veneer of modish cynicism.

Perhaps this speaks more to my own solipsism than anything else, but due to the good press and weird title-connection, I'm putting Deus Ex Machina on my list of books to read...