are ( belong to) out of date. I spent hours on them about a month ago, and now I want them to change. The bio, the resume. It’s all wrong. Or, it’s all right, but it’s only half the picture.
she came in through the bathroom window
If I keep moving into other fields, I’m going to have to stop calling theater “the field.” I just got off the phone with another poet who entered poetry through the back door (side door, garden hedge, etc). In her case, she came from the world of music. We talked about the fear of leaving behind what you’ve worked so hard on. Unspoken between us, but louder than anything we spoke, was the truth that performance fields are so much more difficult to live in, and that the choice to move towards poetry was, in some part, a choice to move towards sanity.
I met someone at a party two nights ago who said “Wow. Poetry. That’s a hard life.” We’ll see if he’s right.
when, exactly, are we going to see a script?
In other grants/fundraising news, I have been conducting a delicate dance of hypotheticals, helping a client theater company determine whether or not they can apply for a grant which typically wants a full script – with a devised/new piece, where no script will exist for months.
This is one of the fundamental problems of the field. The work is so nebulous until it is made, and the longer you can go on postponing those artistic decisions, the better chance you have of making the right ones. But how can someone fund something they can’t see?
I think we’re going to go for it, but this will be a good challenge for me – trying to make process, in the grant, as tangible as a script.
put a naked person on stage
“This is a play about sex made by people who seem to have made it so that they can show it to their parents and grandparents without embarrassment.”
– UK blogger Andrew Haydon weighing in on that “sex choreography” question, in his review of UNBROKEN.
Andrew also pointed SOS to an interesting post by director Chris Goode. Scroll down to get to him talking, in great detail, about sex and staging sex.
My favorite line was this, “I think pretty much the most significant thing theatre can do is put a naked person on stage and let you look at them,” but it’s not fair to quote him out of context. His whole argument is worth looking at – he has a lot to say, and says it from a lot of experience.
As I said in my response to Andrew’s comment, all this talk of staging sex in UK theater makes me desperate to know more about the processes in which all these directors work.
Los Angeles theater sues Los Angeles county. (Really.)
“Los Angeles Shakespeare Company founder Geoffrey Forward went public Friday with an announcement that he has filed an $11.9-million negligence and inverse condemnation claim against Los Angeles County, claiming that 80 “outrageous acts” on the part of various county departments over the course of several years caused construction delays that led to the foreclosure sale of the company theater, the Globe, in Topanga.”
– Diane Haithman in the LAT, via AJ.
truly extreme productiveness
“Ultimately, we know that all writers do what they can and what they must. Truly extreme productiveness (like its opposite) is beyond the absolute control of the author. For the rest of us, the respectably rather than the manically productive, there are more practical explanations. Partly it’s the freelancer’s conundrum. Anthony Burgess (75 or so books in some 40 years) used to say he never turned down any reasonable offer of work, and very few unreasonable ones. This will be written on many of our graves.”
– Geoff Nicholson on “matters of literary quantity” – his phrase, I love it – “Can’t. Stop. Writing,” NYT
sink to the bottom
“JED: I just gave him a smile colder’n the Cumberland River and watched him sink to the bottom.”
– Robert Schenkkan, “God’s Great Supper,” THE KENTUCKY CYCLE
Schenkkan is a playwright who worked closely with a number of directors I know from my assisting days. I’d heard a lot about this work – nine short plays all set on and around the same contested plot of land in Eastern Kentucky – but never read it, until yesterday. It has enough murders in it for a television show, and so much sad history of the United States that, after reading it, I almost didn’t want to look outside. Smallpox-infested blankets. Civil War debts. Coal mining. Union strikes. Marriages and children and two families killing each other like Mark Twain.
some conceit
“You’ve got to feel that it’s not just some conceit. It’s got to be inside you. I’m very cautious about starting anything without letting time go, and feeling it’s got to come out. I’m quite good at not writing. Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I’m a hesitater.”
– Novelist Ian McEwan, on writing, in the 2/23 New Yorker. I can’t find the article online.
making things harder
Yesterday, I had one of those false revelations, distilled out of ignoring problems, that seems to clarify everything: the most important thing to do with your talents is not what is hardest for you, but what is easiest and most natural.
For a short time, this answered all my questions. A few hours later, it clarified nothing, but today, it still seems true.
Challenge is good, but to challenge yourself to the extent of consciously ignoring the work at which you’re most talented is perverse. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? It has never been, for me, and this formula is the opposite of how I’ve worked for a long time.
I frequently make a point of avoiding the easiest and most natural areas of art in which I can work, and have pursued other artistic objectives, not exclusively – but partially – because they are difficult to the point of being impossible.
I have other friends who work in this way, too – deliberately against their own strengths. Although we all spend a lot of time half miserable over it, I respect them. I have the same condition. I know it comes from a desire to have no shortcuts, no favors, no lucky breaks – but to win whatever artistic achievement you can through nothing but cutting through granite with a plastic spoon.
You know that line in the Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “Everything we got, we got the hard way…” ?
Sometimes I wonder if we will ever settle ourselves down to doing the things at which we are best. Trying to do so is the next step. We are all getting too old to keep working on the rock.
even though / I never have seen snow…
Chicago: the smell of burning hair in the hair dryer.
After our February respite of clear sidewalks, snow is falling outside like it’s making up for lost time, and the wind makes it look like smokestack currents from a snow-manufacturing plant.
I hear the foreman yelling, “More snow! We have to make more snow! We can’t keep up with the demand!” and his boss allowing him to go into overtime, to manufacture snow day and night, day and night, until Chicago’s inexhaustible appetite for snow is once again satiated.
Dara Weinberg 