New York City like the back of my hand,
New York City like a broken man.
Category Archives: writing
words to write a candle by
“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves, if he doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchiks… the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”
– Michael Chabon
And on Obama’s candidacy: “To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope…”
the commencement of the end
At Tillie’s on DeKalb with Marisa, working. Yesterday I did my first interview with my aunt for the Antioch College strike play project. We talked about her freshman year and her first co-op work experiences. Antioch is in session year-round, with students taking quarters to go work, either locally or out of town. Her first two co-ops were as a nursing assistant at a home for the severely mentally retarded and a surgical assistant at Mass General Hospital. She made it seem as if students were constantly bringing new influences back into the campus, from all their trips away – and that her experiences of college were much more real-world than bubble. It sounds like an educational method that I would have loved.
Saturday was the Yellow Springs campus’s last forseeable commencement, since the school is closing its doors.
She asked me how I thought this was going to become a play, and I had to say I didn’t have a definite idea – I just have a feeling the material will reveal itself.
In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.
“I knew what was about to happen, but I did not stop to think, except to think that I knew what was about to happen.”
-Michael Chabon, THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH
Coming home today from interviewing a series of candidates for a job-share arrangement whereby we can partage in an administrative position and still pursue theater, I took the wrong train to the wrong stop and had to walk from Spring Street Station to the identically named Spring Street Station. On the way, I passed by people speaking French, several groups of them, and two young men at a table full of paperback books. It was about to rain. This did not deter them. I looked over the table with the deliberation of someone who knows she is going to have to buy a book. I walked slowly down the table, very slowly, but didn’t pick anything up until I picked up this one.
I picked up this one and opened it to the page where I read ” I admit I have an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French.” I bought it immediately, read it on the C, read it on the G, read it on trains full of other young men from New York reading Michael Chabon, Kavalier and Clay in their hands with their arms wrapped around the striptease-surfboard poles, read it walking home and read it until it was over. It’s over but I’m still there. I am floating now, somewhere in Pittsburgh.
“No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.”
Jim, I’m a doctor, not a…
I was reviewing the brief bios of a group of us going on this trip in May, and they all had higher degrees (MDs, mostly) except for me. It made me realize that it’s been 4 years since I graduated from school- plenty of time to get some kind of additional credential, if that was what one wanted. I don’t have one. I have a resume stuffed with productions and a passport, at least within the US, busy with travel.
Still, I’m starting to feel like I might be able to give 2 or 3 years of my life to a graduate program, and enjoy it – like some of the wanderlust is out of my system. But I have a feeling that’s another 2-3 years off, too. And if I were to do it, it would be in writing, not directing, for the simple reason that writing is the field in which I’d want to teach.
I can really imagine myself teaching poetry, or playwriting, or some kind of combination director-playwright collaboration course. I was even thinking it might be fun to teach principles of drama in a performance art class for visual artists.
This is probably five years off, because it seems so settled to me. Sitting down in a classroom. Opening a book. Writing in a notebook. Wouldn’t that mean I couldn’t be in a different state every month? That’s a problem!
I was reading therapy workshop proposals for my day job yesterday, and one of them was about the subject of home as an appropriate subject for therapy – that locations have the same emotional resonance with us that people do. Well, of course they do. But to see it like that, popping out of my Windows-addled work computer, shook me up a bit.
I suppose in one sense, this year has been about redefining my relationship to the concepts of home and location.
SAGN – the final week
Previews are going well. My parents are in town, actually, to see the play tomorrow and to visit. They came from Seattle today.
The show opens Friday, and I go to Vancouver Saturday, to visit Krist3l and miQ. And then a whole week off, and then travels, ending in NYC. This will be the first time in more time than I care to think of that I haven’t known what my next show is, the first real vacation since graduating from college almost four years ago, and the first time in over ten years that I am letting directing rest for a bit to focus on writing. I am looking forward to all these things with the tangible anticipation of wanting to eat dinner, or drive fast.
I’ve been reading YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN and voyeuristically drooling over descriptions of being a Writer in New York. I expect it to be every bit as awful and painstaking as the book describes, and fraught with just as many terrible problems, but I still want it like a bad metaphor.
Shiver Me Timbers
I walked into a church on Alder Street in Portland yesterday, to check out the architecture, and felt like I’d walked inside a beautiful, varnished, giant log, or a religious incarnation of the Colossus rollercoaster at 6 Flags. If there’s one thing this town has, it’s lots of lumber.
I also got introduced to the production folks at PCS yesterday, and am meeting with the costume designer today. Research is taking me to the public library, to the Oregon Historical Society, and, no doubt, to the trees.
Last night I went to the season announcement, too – a packed mainstage full of people heard the PCS artistic director announce his plans for 08-09. I was very happy to hear that they included Nancy Keystone’s next installment of APOLLO.
In other news, through a great effort of will, and after consulting every single member of my family who I could get on the phone, I decided not to turn in another application for a directing program which would have taken place this late spring / early summer. It was a hard decision to make, but the right one, I think, since I want to have time to work on these scripts in progress.
I’ve never before in my life had the luxury of two different composers excited to work on two different scripts, and it seems just wrong to disregard their free time by filling up every single second with directing jobs. I have to trust that working more in playwriting can only help my self and my career, and that these directing gigs will be there, to come back to, if writing doesn’t work out.
It’s hard to do, though, because I remember vividly that one year ago, I couldn’t even have been a candidate for these gigs. Now I’m in a position to turn them down, or to not consider them – to think that there are other things more important to do. My life changes so quickly.
After I had decided it, I talked to the composer for 13 WAYS, Chris F., and found out that the dates of this program were the exact ones in which both of our schedules left us free! He said to me, “If you can’t believe that you did something, it’s probably the right thing.”
Another sign came from the oracles later that evening. At the season announcement, the artistic director offhandedly joked: “The first play this season is a Greek tragedy…where everyone dies…Just kidding! No one would come!” He then announced that it was GUYS AND DOLLS.
I think that I and CF have a chance of bridging that perception gap between Greek plays as boring and full of death, and musicals.
Because the Greek plays are musicals – musical dramas with choruses in them – and if we could bring those two worlds together, maybe the Greek plays could be as popular as they once were, and as musicalized. If we can enliven the choruses, the plays will be irresistible again. It’s a huge undertaking of translation and adaptation, and of new composition, but I think that in CF I’ve found someone with as much hubris as myself. And we’re going to take it on.
The Marriage of Figaro, it’s not
Something else emerges from the Convergence. A composer from the Walker Center who I met here in Indianapolis is interested in working further on the Antioch College student strike project, perhaps even developing it into an opera that uses Sprechstimme and choruses. I’m excited. I feel like I’m finally becoming AboutLastNightworthy. Time to create a category for the project.
It also looks as if I’ll be in LA for a week longer than I’d originally thought. I think I’ll be in town June 9-25ish. And if I can get any of these scripts up to the point they should be at after the weeks in New York writing, then maybe I’ll try to do some readings. I want this libretto to be able to stand alone as a good play.
What is a Jewish writer?
Robert Cohen for the Guardian:
“This was how a number of Jewish-American writers of my own generation started out. We’d read enough of our forebears to see that we were coming in late, and would be only back-row singers in the diaspora chorus, fashioning our cunning little fugues of internal exile, turning Kafka’s lament – “What have I in common with the Jews? I have nothing in common even with myself” – into our own (anti-)national anthem.”
No one can help you in a novel…
Hemingway on playwriting, in a rediscovered letter:
“The making part of a play comes after the writing of it. Other people do all the great detail that you just indicate when you write. Right now I have been working steadily for a year and a month on a novel. In that no one can help you. But in a play the credit for all the really hard work goes to those who stage, direct, and act in it. I had all the fun. They had all the work. Well, that is a nice kind of an exchange for once.”
Dara Weinberg 