Writer – someone who cares too much.
Director – someone who also cares too much, but is prepared, for the sake of the play, to be the person who couldn’t care less.
Actor – Forced to reside between these opposing forces, both carefree and careful at the same time.
I’m still trying to answer the question of why I care about the chorus, which was asked of me by a 13 WAYS/TDIA audience member in Los Angeles. To this end, I’ve been trying to answer a larger question, of why I care about the many aesthetic sub-groups of things that I like. What connects our interests? What is the spider’s saliva on the web of belief, of practice, of obsession?
Yesterday. I meet with an actress. I ask her to graph herself, not in so many words, or maybe in many more. She does. She does so in relation to style, and picks these axes: mime, puppetry, physical theatre, children’s theatre, spectacle, awe-ful moments that make you lose your breath. What connects them, for her, is a sense of openness. Accessibility. She is interested in the branches of our profession that welcome rather than exclude.
The exercise makes me think about my own list: rhyme, the chorus, and so on. But I think what connects all of them for me is the sense of pattern. Connection through repetition. There was a moment when we were working on the verse structure for a chorus in 13Ways/TDIA and worked a mathematical pattern, one based on an additive triangle, into the poetry of it. I have rarely been happier.
One of the poem-things I picked up last evening at the Printer’s Ball was called “Verses Without Choruses” (collected within SAY IT WITH SILENCE, by Zebulun, published by Seven Ten Bishop) – which is all poetry since the Greeks, I suppose – but an interesting exercise, isolated sad verses, four lines on a page. So very individual. The verse, like the cheese in the nursery rhyme, stands alone. The chorus stands together.
Here is one of Zebulun‘s isolate verses::
McQ
How come everyone knows how
we
feel about each other except for
us
I love his work, but the solitary sadness in its form is exactly why I want to write choruses without verses. For the sake of the pattern.
It represents a pattern which our lives do not have, but which we seek. Hope for that pattern is what makes it beautiful, and also what makes it dangerous. My parents were watching the Olympic opening ceremonies, and they thought of choruses, but they also thought of the Nazi rallies. This is not the first time this comparison has been made to me. Chorus-mob.
Before I worked on 13/TDIA I think I would have been more sickened by that thought, and considered that perhaps, aesthetically, I yearn for totalitarianism on some level. But in the hands of the Greek playwrights the Chorus is the voice of something more than that. It is a voice of reason, of dissent, of logic – also of emotion and passion. It is not merely the tool of the political leaders. It is, of course, as fragmented, momentary, and complex as people are. It’s a group.
It is, I suppose, also my father’s field of study. “Sociology – the study of how people act in groups” – I’ve been rattling that off to friends since I could rattle.
People are all part of temporary, transient groups, formed from connection or for convenience. The chorus of Democrats or Republicans, for example. The chorus of the citizens of Athens. The chorus of women. The chorus of bloggers, if you like. And yet, we are all alone. We are born alone, we live (mostly) alone, and none of us dies with anyone else, either. We spend a lot of time trying to deny that fact, because the less alone we can be, the happier we are.
The chorus, like friendship, marriage, family, and other such forms of art, lets us believe that we are not alone. I think that loneliness is more terrible to me than death. I am less concerned with art making us immortal than I am with art bringing us together. The chorus is the formal representation of the idea that, simply, we are not alone.
Closer? My new thesis of the moment: the chorus is important to me because it means that we are not alone, and that there is a pattern to our lives. Neither of these things is true, but both are beautiful – and the more we believe and practice them, the more true they become. I think that I am also reacting against a pendulum swing in artistic taste towards things like three-character plays, one-person shows, and the theatrical celebration of the individual as opposed to the group.
Entropy is a fact. Chaos is a fact. Order is a lost cause. But we still find meaning and beauty when we learn that the structure of some biological or chemical thing has symmetry to it, or follows a mathematical sequence. It is the same meaning and beauty that we find in the chorus.
Oedipus’s sadness is from being alone. So is Medea’s. “Alone and without a city.” There is nothing more terrible. More, if you will, anti-social. Anti-society.
Riding home along Montrose Avenue with a bicycle basket full of poetry magazines, from last evening’s Printer’s Ball, I immediately think of the sentence, “Riding home along Montrose Avenue with a bicycle basket full of poetry magazines…” and notice that I am turning my experiences into words in the moment of experience, and noticing this makes me stumble and almost fall off the bike, making the words no longer true. But I manage to keep writing. (Riding.)
saving us from papercuts since 1991. (Too many editions of LYSISTRATA. Ouch.)
I realized today that people on the Chicago trains let their thoughts pass over their faces much more freely than on the New York subway. You don’t need a prop to distract and protect you, because you can silently interact with your fellow riders. The shared thoughts on the train are public property. You can people-watch. Everyone else is doing it.
Headphones are rare, as are sunglasses. The eyes of the riders wander like flies around the car. Everyone looks at everyone, and acknowledges that they are looking. They don’t turn off the Commander Data emotion chip in their brain for the duration of the commute. They are on the train, together.
And you’re surrounded by sky. You’re not staring at the wrong side of the earth’s crust, thinking about analogies beginning with bowels and bellies and Grendel’s mother’s digestive system – the train is flying through the air, eye to eye with birds and skyscrapers, making a loop above the rivers.
In New York, all I could see on people’s faces on the subway was “Don’t look at me,” and I had to have an elaborate equipage to survive an hour of it. Sunglasses, book, headphones, outfit, all armed and ready from the moment I got onto the train. On the daily commute from not-so-Prospect-Park-adjacent to 23rd and 6th, you were judged by the strength of your defenses against the other inhabitants of the subway cars. It was not okay to put your headphones on in the train. That made you look stupid. They had to be on already. You had to enter the train looking as if you slept with your headphones in your ears. (I think many of the people there did. In fact, I’ve just remembered, unpleasantly, that when I was in New York, I started sleeping with my headphones in, too. I started feeling naked and unprotected without them.)
Due to something being wrong with my skull, I couldn’t ever make the little Ipod buds stay in, so I was stumbling around the G and C and A trains cramming them back into my ears and looking like I didn’t know Brooklyn from a hole in the ground (which was true – I spent more time in a hole in the ground than I ever did in Brooklyn).
I finally caved in and went out bought white wraparound headphones with ear clips to make them stay on, but with the white cord so I could still be an Ipod poser hipster. Thus fully disguised, I sat there writing poetry through the battlements of my sunglasses, all over the yellowed pages of a chemistry notebook, staring around the train like the country mouse from Planet California that I was. I knew better – I knew you weren’t supposed to look – but no one has yet explained to me how to spend an hour trapped in a car with a hundred other people and not look at their faces.
But here, in what Rush calls “The Middle West,” everyone is so comfortable with themselves, their city, and their trains that you could recite poetry, I think, without incident, on a Brown Line car from Montrose to Merchandise Mart. Someone is probably doing so right now.
I told my father that after New York, Boston felt like Yosemite National Park, for its nature. Likewise, after New York, Chicago feels like the Emerald City of Oz, for the friendliness of its inhabitants. Or perhaps Munchkinland. Everybody wishes to welcome you. Chicago is the Miss Congeniality of cities.
New York is a one-night stand. Chicago is the city you go home with. (That is, if the train is running late enough.)
Robert brought the boxes with my books in them up from Indianapolis today. (That line feels like some kind of very-long-winded meter, but I can’t match it. Less peripatetic, more ptero-dactylic.)
This was a surprise. I didn’t expect them until later on. But all of my books are here in the same city, in the same place, with me. If I wanted to, I could ride my bike a mile east, lakeward right now, break open the black Isuzu Trooper, and read every one of them. Right now. I could sit on the bumper, in the light of the open door, with Tom Stoppard and Flaubert and Brian Teare spread all around me and read until morning. They will wait there like eggs in their box-shells, waiting to hatch, until Ee and I move into our new apartment, on Sept. 1st. So soon!
I haven’t seen them from April 2007 on. For the whole year of assistant directing, they lived in Menlo Park, and I lived everywhere but there.
Existing without them hurt very much at first, and I have to write something more on that subject. But it was ultimately a powerful choice to let them all go. Helped me to understand their role in my life. I will write more on this.
He awoke punctually at oh-four-hundred hours, as he always did “in the field” (and that was what he called the maneuvers) His valet was already standing in the room. And the equerries, he knew, were already waiting outside the door. Yes, he had to start his day. He would have scarcely a moment to himself all day long. To make up for it, he had outwitted all of them that night by standing at the open window for a good quarter hour.
– from THE RADETSKY MARCH by Joseph Roth.
Kaiser Franz Joseph’s interior monologue. And Roth makes me see more clearly that the phrase “interior monologue” refers to the dramatic – to the monologue – and that when it is practiced well, as it is here, brilliantly, you can feel the point-of-view of the character as if it’s spoken.
The idea is taken from drama, of course. Or it takes from the same thing from which drama takes. From spoken language. Almost all Roth’s narration is one form of interior monologue or another. It’s like people are always speaking, even when silent. Saying things like “Yes, he had to start his day.” It’s the I-voice without the monotony and selfcenteredness of the I.
Maybe all the bad monologues I keep writing belong as fiction narration. Maybe this is how I get into fiction, by thinking of all narration as monologue. Because if I don’t know who’s speaking, I don’t know how to write. My short stories all turn into plays. That’s fine. Some day a play will turn into prose.
So, I watched the Budweiser commercial with the dog and horse high-fiving each other, and I think we are at a period in society, for whatever reason (and by “we” I mean my narrow class-subset of young highly educated people who watch too much imagery) where “we” are highly entertained by the idea of talking animals again. A history of this subject would be great, but more than writing the article, I really just want to make a very simple Youtube video with a dog and a cat in “conversation.” No attempt would be made to have them move their mouths or anything. We’d just show the camera on the two of them there, and have actors speak. They could read “Talk To Me Like the Rain And Let Me Listen.” They could have an ordinary conversation. Found text, staged written text, anything. Much like how LIFE IN HELL has the still images. I think, and I don’t quite know why I think this, but I think it would be superbly entertaining and would also tell us something about our selves in this particular moment in time.
Part of the trip I’ve done on myself the past four years is to de-academicize myself. I was brought up in the academy, by which I mean that education is the cardinal virtue of my family. And I’ve had to learn, in order to make theater, to – when I have impulses like this – to resist analyzing them until I have staged them. The staging of them is the analysis. Going in with too much of a theory about how it is supposed to work will make them not work as well as they could.
I have been tempted to veer back towards theory a bit this year. But I know that I won’t really understand why it is things ought to work until I make them work. This blog ought to be called Practice Makes Theory instead of Style Over Substance. Maybe I will rename it.
1:23 am, the day before something new: time for a State of the Blog post. I’ve been running this site for over a year now, and I thought it was time to finally cave in and look at my traffic statistics. I was inspired to do this by stumbling onto Steve Pavlina’s website, hearing him talk about his mammoth stats, and wondering how I measured up. It feels a little bit wrong – like looking at your Amazon sales rank, or your grades as compared to the rest of the class. Pulling that narrow green ScanTron sheet out from under the manila folder on your teacher’s desk.
I’ll just say that there are more people reading this than I expected, so thank you, if you’re one of them, and I will try to keep keeping it interesting.
I have been going on job interviews all this weekend, and many employers have looked at this blog (which I post on my resume and in all my emails) as a way of learning who I am.
Q: What exactly is it that you do?
A: Whatever it takes.
Usually, I say some variation on “I work in theater” and “There are many different paths within our field, and I’m still exploring many of them.” But that’s the truth. Whatever it takes, whatever it wants, whatever he (or she) suggests – he being poetry, she being theater, some of the time. And it’s often less of a suggestion, more of a command. I have told several people about hearing a repetition of WRITE RIGHT NOW, WRITE RIGHT NOW, for the past few months – and sure enough, I’ve been doing a lot more writing.
Here’s one path, one answer to that persistent question: I’ve been experimenting with writing poetry where I write to the poem, addressing him (he has been masculine a number of times) and this personification of the poem has helped me deal with my own issues about motivation and inspiration. It’s powerful. I’ve written lots of stuff lately coming just out of the opening “Poem, I say…” and saying something to him. It’s definitely a rip-off of “Sing in me, Muse.” But it works so well. It opens dialogue. When I get really frustrated with the way my life is because of the career I’ve chosen (unsettled, broke, etc.) I speak directly to the poem. Or to theater. And I let them speak back.
Poem, I say,
how do you feel about being on my blog?
Weird, he says. If you must know.
Fair enough, I say.
And he sticks out his tongue at the camera.
Tonight, I was telling a friend of mine that I felt like I had made some poor choices for the sake of theater – for the sake of one play in particular. I phrased it badly, something like “The play made me do X.” I felt out of control, as if I was at the mercy of theater. He looked me in the eye and said “No, you made the play do X. You are in control. That was your choice.”
It’s important to remember that although it often feels like we are at the mercy of these childlike beings we bring into the world – plays, poems – they are, fundamentally, our children.
We make them what they are.
And on that note, having this blog has helped me have more perspective on them.
This sign is all over Ravenswood: “No Parking If More Than 2 Inches Of Snow.”
I find it amusing, because today the weather is mild and sunny, with a light wind moving through the air. The trains are full of girls in flip-flops and sundresses on their way to the “beach.” I can’t really imagine what more than 2 inches of snow looks like: Denver’s winter, at least the one I went through, rarely exceeded that.
This summer wind is so gentle, before and between the storms. Deceptively gentle. My parents, last night, told me that a family friend of ours spent a year in Chicago and, one day, was blown into the middle of oncoming traffic by the force of the winter winds. It sounds positively comic-book violent.
Dara Weinberg 