art, politics, theater

Bart Sher to direct August Wilson? Really?

I am very surprised to have to report that Bartlett Sher, artistic director of the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, will be the first white director to ever direct a Broadway production of one of August Wilson’s plays – JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE at Lincoln Center next spring.

All previous Broadway productions of Wilson’s work have been directed by black directors. The NYT and Playbill reports of this news failed to note this fact, focusing instead on Sher’s recent Tony for South Pacific. I got this news from ArtsJournal, who got it from the Pioneer Press, out of Minneapolis.

Some responses:

This is another way of saying that the dominant culture knows more about us than we know about ourselves.
– Actor James Williams

I’m still a little troubled by the decision. Racial representation in theater (at least in New York) has not improved much since the Wilson-Brustein debates. Other than LaMaMa’s Ellen Stewart, there is not a single artistic director of color at a major New York theater, 80 percent of plays produced in New York are by white men despite the fact that white men account for roughly 15 percent of New York City’s population, casts remain segregated, and black directors rarely get tapped to direct plays by white writers.
– from critic Isaac Butler’s comments in the Time Out New York blog.

The issue, of course, is access — if Lincoln Center won’t hire a black director to direct an August Wilson play, what will they hire a black director to do? I get that Sher is the resident director, he’s on staff, he’s done big things for them before, and I get (and kind of think it’s great) that he’d want to direct a Great American Play to follow up his Great American Musical (South Pacific) — and it’s wonderful that Wilson’s work is considered to fill that role. But if the door doesn’t open for directors here, where does it open?
– playwright & blogger Kristoffer Diaz

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chicago

the brotherhood of the bus stop

Today, snow, and lots of it.

I was standing this evening, freezing in my knitted garments, at the bus stop on Division. Three intellectual boys with bright-colored sneakers were clowning in the cold, blowing breath onto the glass of the shelter and drawing hearts in the frost of their breath, smoking and blowing smoke into the air. They were talking about some ridiculously dressed woman they had seen earlier today. They said, “She looked like the Renaissance.” They were so smartsy and college about it, I had to laugh, we all laughed. I told them they were high on the temperature. They just moved here, too. We all just moved here.

Something is happening here. I don’t get on the Division bus without meeting another young person, another artist, who’s just relocated to Chicago, snow and all. The word is out that the scene here is as hot as the weather is cold, and the housing prices are half of what they are in LA, NYC, or SF. Everybody is moving here. And everybody who isn’t, should be.

I don’t ride the Chicago street bus without hearing people talking about vintage amplifiers. I don’t buy an EggMcMuffin at Adams and Wabash without hearing women talking about Stratford Shakes and the Goodman and ChiShakes and going back every year. There is a real audience here. For all the arts. I don’t even have to think about it. It’s all around me.

And now that Chicago is the city of Barack Obama, too, it’s the place to be for the politics as well. And the pride. I think the Grant Park energy is still ebullient in everyone’s faces. I saw a woman today wearing a T-shirt with the date of Obama’s first day in office on it.

This is the place to be, and I feel that even more strongly now that I’ve spilled myself on the ice for the first time, walking home on Rockwell.

It’s like, Welcome to Chicago. – SMACK! –

I can’t wonder, and I don’t, if my life would have been different if I had come here sooner. I only know I’m here now.

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music, quotes, Uncategorized

i don’t like repetition. i don’t like it at all.

…when my second quartet was played here at Harvard, my old teacher Walter Piston said to me, “you know, if I knew what it sounded like, I would have put the four players in separate rooms and shut the doors.”

-composer Elliott Carter, still avant-garde at 100 years old, interviewed by the Boston Herald. Via ArtsJournal. There’s also a great anecdote about my favorite composer, Charles Ives:

I [Carter] remember vividly this Sunday afternoon. I was taken to his [Ives’s] house by some friends, and we sat down and talked about music. I told him I liked Stravinsky. He sat at the piano, and I don’t think he had ever seen the score, he started playing the “Firebird.” And he said you can not repeat the way Stravinsky does. He was very angry about it, he said that’s just wrong. He thought repetition was a danger.

He didn’t really teach me anything, because I didn’t know much about music and I was just writing lousy little pieces. But I knew I had to study and I did at Harvard and such. But I admired his music. He had given up composing before I knew him. There were all these copies of his scores in the American Music Center which I went through and they were messy, and I tried to do something that I couldn’t follow up, tried to clean them up, they were awful. Like I think it was the fourth symphony, for two measures there would be six trombones playing and that’s all. I though maybe it’s all right, but it bothered me. I wanted to clean them up while he was alive, but it was too much and I couldn’t finish it. Finally Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell took over.

And Ives was against my going to Paris and studying with Boulanger. He thought I should stay home and be American. I one time went to visit him in Redding, and he played the “Concord Sonata” for me. He had a big vein in his neck and he held it like that, and his wife said, “Charlie you better quit now.” And she gave him a glass of milk. He was not well for years when he stopped composing.

I was involved with a music festival at Columbia, and I proposed that they do “The Unanswered Question” and “Central Park After Dark,” and I wrote to Mrs. Ives asking if they had been performed before. She said yes, some men in a New Haven vaudeville show had done it, and it would be unfair to call it a first performance.

I got this in a letter I got from her, and she said he was too sick to write back. But then I found out that he had written it, and she had copied it and added stuff. I have a whole article about things that she changed.

That last bit there relates quite pointedly to the previous post about who gets to relate whose experience. Yep.

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art, ethics, writing

il me semble que

For a writer not to write about the things she has experienced is like a painter not painting the things she sees.

I have been taking this, lately, to the level of including my own name, Dara, and the names of my friends and acquaintances in my work. I really like it.

I know I’m stealing Elizabeth Bishop’s “you are an Elizabeth” line, and certainly many someones’ lines before her, but the theft seems most particularly taken from the Bishop cabinet for me, right now, if that makes sense. It’s been a productive device.

It feels honest, because poets use “I” with great freedom. When I use my own name as well as the “I,” I am being particularly particular.

But I was taken aback, the other day, to wonder – how would I feel if someone wrote something about me, and used my own name in it? I don’t think I would like that at all. I suppose I would have to be ready to accept this, given that I’ve done the same thing to others. But the idea freaked me out.

It felt like a violation, like an exposure. It felt doubly so because I am an artist myself. What if someone first writes the story, about me, with my name in it, and I wanted to do my own version of it? What if they get there first?

My friend M had this happen to her once, telling a story of her life to a writer (she intended to write the story herself) only to have him “use it,” disguised, in his work.

Perhaps there is some dignity in using real names because then you have to be truthful and seek permission, and this writer didn’t do that.

Chris Krauss writes something very like that in her novel/memoir, I LOVE DICK – the use of real names is, to her, significant. She distinguished between men’s and women’s writing by the use of “fictional” and real names. I will look up the quote tomorrow, I’m too tired now, but just to finish, one more thought:

My friend M (different from the previous M), speaking of names, has advised me once before on a question of poetic ethics. I told her about something I had written, which mentioned no names but which concerned, largely, one particular person. Although no one would recognize it but that person, they would. I asked her if I could ever publish it. She said, “If you read it to them first.” I should ask her what she thinks about real-name-dropping.

Another thought: if two people experience something, it can hardly be said that either one possesses priority in the struggle for the relating-it rights.

But what if one person tells another a story – and the Another makes it into their own little Story, Screenplay, So On?

What if the Another steals their journal entries, as I read about someone doing (a man plaigarizing from a woman’s journals, again, I don’t have the reference)?

What, indeed?

Created an “Ethics” category with this post.

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the chorus, writing

derevision

There is no use in continuing to pretend that I am, in any way, still actively revising the script of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS, TO DIE IN ATHENS, or whatever on earth you want to call one chorus from every Greek playwright plus a few extra mashed up into an Oedipus v. Medea plot. I’m not. Or, rather, it’s not – and we’re not. The only word for that project is “not” right now. Every time I log onto this site and see, under “Ongoing Projects,” something about revising that script, I become discouraged. So I’m taking it down. The reading we had in Los Angeles was so successful that it seems a shame to not be able to work on it any more. But, for whatever reason, it’s not happening. I am only interested in writing more poetry these days. A lot of first drafts.

A revision is, I think, like a first draft – an impetus for it has to come to you. Barring that, there ought to be some kind of incentive to revise, like public opinion, an impending rehearsal, someone’s reading of it, or, (ha!) money. Or a sense that you know where you’re going. Or a sense that there is somewhere to be gone. Direction. Without that, you’re just messing around with the parts that already work, often making them worse.

There have been flickerings of interest in the script since the reading. People check in with me about it. One of the audience members even recommended me to a literary manager at a theater. But it’s simply not where my heart is at this moment.

I listen to it often, the recording. When I first had it, I listened to it daily, sometimes twice a day. These days I only play through it when my Ipod shuffles it to the top. I’m very proud of what we did. I don’t yet know how to do more. Worse yet, I don’t know why. What more is there to do? I proved the point I wanted to prove to myself, which was that the project was Possible. Whether or not it can, or should, be Produced, is a different kettle of P’s and R’s altogether.

I have less and less interest these days in bringing theater to a full realization, to staging, and more in simply writing. If there was some other collaborator on this project, someone who wanted to see it move forward, I think I would work on it day and night until it was perfect. But for both the composer and I, we have achieved what we set out to do. In the absence of a director, or something, there is no more to be done.

That’s kind of sad.

I’m sure I will work on it again one day, though I don’t know how. This, in a way, is a goodbye letter. Almost a breakup.

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