kennynowell@gmail.com

My 6-year old son will sometimes play his piano songs on the wrong part of the keyboard on purpose.  He’ll just move his hands four inches that way then pound it out.  He does this with uninhibited aplomb.  The weight of musical tradition doesn’t oppress him:  “I’ll just see what ‘Ode to Joy’ sounds like … um … here!”  But he’s still really playing “Ode to Joy,” not just testing how the notes are different.  As he plays, you hear through these weird warps in the melody a spiritualization of “Ode to Joy.”

I kept thinking about this during an evening of artist showcases at Brooklyn Arts Exchange the other evening.  A shared approach in the performers was to take some familiar rhetorical mode and shift it over a few inches.

Karen Davis, appearing in Jesse Barbagallo’s “Without Me I’m Something,” delivered a surreal stand-up comedy set.  We heard the cadences of the edgier contemporary practitioners, but the thread of the joke was always hidden.  Which is a good joke.

“Who do I talk to about time?” she kvetched.  You’ve heard this rhetorical tone in a million comedy routines.  Comedians say something like, “Have you ever noticed how white people are so stupid?” then go into a funny story about stupid white people.  Davis struck that same tone but shifted us over a few keys to open a philosophical abyss where one feels a nauseating, visceral awareness of time as an arbitrary medium.

Walking back up stage after one of her cryptic punch lines, Davis patted herself all over and said, “Man!  I don’t even know where to slap myself!” as though this were the oldest Catskills cliché in the world, on par with “Try the veal!”

Max Steele staged an encouragement workshop where we heard the speech patterns of a self-help guru at a seminar you might go to in Aspen.  But the lessons always lay just beyond our reach.  “I offer myself as an example,” he said, “because I’m a really good example.”

After listing some of the many ways society tells us not to “get caught,” not to get caught with your pants down, not to get caught trying, he urged, “Well, I say:  GET CAUGHT!”  The whole sequence had the rhythm of wisdom without the punctuation of meaning.

At one point, he invited a volunteer onstage to discuss her cluster of keys.  Finally, Steele held the keys in his palm and sagely observed, “Ah … the weight of access.”  It felt meaningful, but, pardon the pun, the key had been lost.

Interestingly, Sartre describes Kafka’s work as parables for which the key has been lost.  According to some of the things you read, Kafka was just trying to write engaging tales like Dickens.  But his peculiar effect comes from how he shifts this intention over a few inches.  He bangs out Dickens on the wrong part of the piano.  This is part of what makes his stories so Kafkaesque.  It feels as though he’s telling us a kabalistic secret but we’ll never know what it is.

Of course, reading Kafka tends to make everything seem Kafkaesque, especially things like standing in line at the DMV or visiting your family.  Even Dickens starts seeming Kafkaesque.  Then the whole barrier between what is and is not Kafkaesque melts, and Kafka starts to look Dickensian.

For me, a similar sort of shift on the keyboard in these BAX pieces melted the barrier between performance and reality.  With Steele’s piece, for example, I was never completely sure that the deconstruction of the self-help guru was deliberate.  Maybe he meant for this guru to be more realistic, for his advice to be more concrete, but simply failed.  Not in the least, of course.  Steele’s performance instrument was surgically calibrated to create this cool effect.  At one point, he distributed name tag stickers and asked the audience to label themselves with their favorite color.  I couldn’t tell whether we, the audience, were supposed to be pretending that we were the workshop attendees who paid for this imaginary seminar in the same way you pretend that you’re a guest at Tony and Tina’s Wedding?  Or were we supposed to pretend that this particular theater event at BAX was a workshop?  Or did Steele genuinely intend for this to be an actual workshop?  Was this work-in-progress at BAX just Steele practicing on us how to run such a workshop when he goes out and markets it to paying customers?  Again, a cool effect.

As Davis mused upon temporal vertigo, she enacted a conversation between a child next to her June Cleaver-esque Mother in the front seat of a car.  Mommy Dearest explained that you simply have to accept temporality as though she were saying that young ladies must always mind their manners.  Again, it is a standard comic trope to explore an odd premise through a Norman Rockwell lens:  “No, Timmy, lots of people have sadomasochistic anal sex.  Now let’s say grace before eating.”

But then the mother in Davis’ joke violently crashes into someone and begins convulsing from severe injuries as the child watches.

In one of the early story sessions for The Simpsons, the writers laid out a scenario where Snake, the town criminal, wanted to get his impounded convertible back from Homer.  Snake stretches a wire across the street to decapitate Homer.  One of the writers explains, “The wire misses Homer, but his car is followed closely by another.  The driver of the second car is holding a sandwich at a ridiculous angle high over his head and saying, ‘I told that idiot to slice my sandwich.’”  You can see where the writers were going:  wire cuts sandwich.  But producer/writer Gary Meyer asked the staff, “What if the wire cuts off his arm?”

Davis uses the same sort of twist.  The joke is to set a philosophical discussion about time in the front seat of a station wagon in 1962, but then the setting itself hijacks the joke.  Jokes rely on the same simplification of physical reality you find in fairy tales.  You don’t really think about whether Jack would have trouble breathing or get hypothermia as he’s up in the clouds, and you don’t wonder how a horse could fit through the door of a bar.  But in The Simpson’s joke, the physical possibilities of a wire stretched across a road suddenly apply.  The “funny part” has been shifted over a few inches.  And with Davis, the physical realities of driving in a car suddenly and tragically assert themselves.

Meyer merely cuts the guy’s arm off, but Davis has the guy stumble around the street spewing blood and begging for help before he dies in agony.  She continued her riff by switching from the mother gurgling in her own blood to the uncomprehending child crying, “Mommy?  Mommy?”  Back and forth, back and forth.  You figured out quickly enough that Davis was going to take us to the bitter end, that she was just playing out the scene as a horrific tragedy.  The joke was that it stopped being a joke.

You could also say that going too far is the joke and thus give Davis, as Barthes says, the alibi of art.  Take away this alibi, however, this image of the artist coolly crafting a high concept gag as a deconstruction of a deconstruction, take this away and we are confronted with an individual performer, an actual person there in front of us, who needed to take us to this terrible place, to put us behind the eyes of a child watching her mother choke on her own blood.  Without the alibi of art, I see the person who chose to perform this.  Going too far blurs the line between the performance and the person.

Perhaps what made Lenny Bruce so revolutionary were not his dirty jokes but how he made it impossible to know whether he was a comedian or just some guy up there saying what was on his mind.  The act was that there was no act.

Barbagallo inverted this formula.  With Davis I felt suspicious that the performance had turned into reality, that this was just Davis herself.  With Barbagallo I felt that reality had turned into performance.

After Davis left the stage, assistants brought out some chairs.  I had the impression that Barbagallo was going to interview Davis.  But then the assistants scurried back out and struck the furniture.

This made it seem that Barbagallo was making up her monologue on the spot.  The show must go on.

But the monologue was a ramble about her experience in the residency program at BAX.  There was never anything worth stealing out of the refrigerator.  The kids in the youth programs were annoying.  The Park Slope stroller-mom mafia was frightening.  Meanwhile Barbagallo was having romantic troubles with a girlfriend who told her, “You don’t make me wet.”  Then it struck me that she was reflecting in a kitchen-sinky style on her experience of developing the very monologue I was hearing!  The realism was pitch-perfect, but the circumstances were transparently artificial.

Super-realism in live theater is destabilizing.  Super-realism in painting is still confined to the canvas.  If you look at a Ralph Goings painting long enough, maybe the real world starts to look like a photorealist painting too.  But you don’t have trouble seeing where the canvas ends and the world begins.  With Barbagallo’s piece, when the illusion of live reality is so carefully crafted, how do you know where planned reality ends and real reality begins?

For me, this called everything grouped together under the title “Without Me I’m Something” into question.  Ostensibly, the piece was a curatorial presentation of Davis’ performance preceded by a lovely contemporary dance piece by STINE and then Barbagallo’s own monologue.  However, in a surreal way, the whole sequence functioned as a play in a relatively conventional sense, as a theatrical parody of a showcase by a resident artist sponsored by an organization like BAX.  The subtitle “Or, Twenty Minutes to Kill” was a tip-off.  The performance piece was performing itself.  The piece was acting the role of a piece.

Imagine going to a costume party without a costume.  Werewolves, Marilyn Monroes and Darth Vadars surround you and ask, “Where’s your costume.”  You say, “I’m disguised as myself!”  You explain that you are not actually being yourself but rather you are imitating your own way of talking, your own way of standing.  When you dressed for the party, you imitated the way you normally dress.  From this point on, whatever you do is both just you and an imitation of you simulataneously.  Barbagallo’s piece functioned the same way.  Whatever actually occurred in the space was part of the performance.

After my son has been banging around the keyboard for a while, my ears play tricks on me so that the original position for “Ode to Joy” doesn’t sound right.  The position is correct, but it SOUNDS shifted.  In a sense, this is a good way to think about the difference between solo performance art and acting, between what Marina Abramovic does and what Laura Linney does.  Performance says, “I’m disguised as myself.”  My hands are in the same place on the piano, but the song sounds different.  This idea is captured nicely in Barbagallo’s title “Without Me I’m Something.”

As a producer, you can sometimes feel like the ugly stepchild of the Off Off Bway world.  No one wants to be that person.  Well, not enough people. I remember reading with delight about three directors choosing to produce the work of another fellow director and a playwright.  These three women met at Looking Glass and decided that their next move would not be to find directing vehicles, but rather to produce.

In an interview in nytheatre.com back in ’09, these powerhouse women said, “The idea of legitimate management is something so foreign to indie theatre.  Equity showcases don’t have management, usually. They have the artists that conceived the show not sleeping at all for a month and running around in a haphazard fashion to get it done.”  They are so right.  Here’s the full interview (http://www.nytheatre.com/Content/Interview/haydon)

Look at this blog post by Alex Barron (http://journalism.howlround.com/13p-easy-to-revere-tough-to-recreate/) about playwrights wanting to self-produce. So many have the same idea. So many are stumped by the need for leadership, the need to find their own Rob Handel (a playwright who can raise money!) and Maria Goyanes. How do you solve a problem like needing “Maria?” She is a shining star. Someone who wanted to produce and gave of herself and her energy and look where it got her. She well deserves her success.  We need more of her.

When I am choosing someone to work with, I always look to see if this person is willing and capable of partnering on some of the producing.  Directors who will help with publicity, playwrights who will do research on grant proposals, actors who help market the play and actors who, at minimum, push the shows on Facebook pages and twitter feeds. These are the gems that I return to again and again.

I love to produce. I do. There’s a special joy in seeing work that you made happen. As an artist, I didn’t know that I would feel this way until it happened. Back in 1995 Looking Glass was producing an all female “As You Like It.”  It was one of the first things I was not directly involved in as an artist.  I had a job at the NY Renaissance Festival at the time and couldn’t both produce the show and act or direct in it. When I got back from the Festival, I would sneak into the theatre, sit in the hallway listening to Shakespeare and the laughter of the audience and think “I made that happen.” It’s a major reason why Looking Glass has existed for 20 years. That feeling.

But I also need help to achieve that feeling. Theatre is an uphill struggle in many ways. There isn’t enough funding, there isn’t enough audience, there isn’t enough freedom to create without commercial pressure. So we wear multiple hats and consider ourselves lucky to be working. If you take pride in your work, then you’ll take pride in every aspect right down to how clean the lobby is. When I work with an artist who picks up a broom and sweeps up someone’s cracker crumbs instead of saying to the SM, “someone needs to clean that up,” I know I’ve found a winner.

Justine Lambert
Artistic Director
lookingglass.justine@gmail.com

kennynowell:

Reading THIS blog by a playwright named Mariah MacCarthy triggered some uncomfortable nostalgia for me. Among other things, she talks about how weird it is that most big theaters say that they want to attract young audiences but continue to produce plays by and for old people. And it is…

I saw an adaptation of the famous robot play R.U.R. the other night.  This production by Resonance Ensemble was set in the not-too-distant year of 2030.  A private firm is manufacturing lifelike robots to perform menial labor all over the planet.  We know from the start that it can’t end well for us humans.

One of my favorite moments was the housekeeper Nana’s outburst over the whole robot craze.  Oh, look, that one is folding my clothes.  Oh, look, that one is washing my dishes.  She’s just sick of all the fuss!  Charlotte Hampden’s technique in this role struck me as Meisner-esque.  Not that I really know what that means.  But she was just doing what I hear people call “Meisner.”

This Meisner quality, for me, is like the sound of one hand clapping.  If you Google the meaning of this Zen riddle, the top answers are all about hearing the silence.  One hand trying to clap is like a yin without a yang, which is to say that without both, there is nothing.  I am more simplistic.  If I see you clapping with one hand, I still hear a clap in my head.  It’s like telling someone, “Whatever you do, don’t think of elephants.”

Any mime knows that there are ways of clapping with one hand that can make louder silence.  You stop your flat hand in the air just so.  And whatever it is that I’m calling Meisner is a form of acting that pops an invisible situation into existence. Ms. Hampden was clapping a 2030 situation where robots are so ubiquitous and everyone is so gaga about them that it’s really, really annoying.

And I got the sense that in this invisible reality things were different than what I was seeing on the stage.  I got the sense that Nana sees less impressive robots.  I see a human actor with rusty hair and skin that blushes under the stage lights playing a robot named Radius.  But maybe Nana sees a store window dummy with a bright red wig.  Perhaps poor Nana is at her wit’s end from coping with everybody acting as though these walking dishwashers are practically human and treating each new model as so much more lifelike than that last.

Jaron Lanier talks about how we are always eager to give credit to the computer.  We say that Deep Blue rather than a team of brilliant scientists beat Kasparov.  We say that the GPS told me which exit to take, not the programmers, designers and cartologists.  For Lanier, this is symptomatic of a troubling trend in our culture.  We want to see ourselves as machines because we devalue our own humanity.

Maybe Nana sees the same trend.  Where there is a machine, we all see a redheaded young man.  Because we can’t see ourselves.

Later in Lee Eric Shackleford’s adaptation, the rebelling robots spare a human from slaughter because, since they themselves are perfect, they need his capacity to make mistakes.  Indeed, throughout the play, director Valentina Fratti and the cast foreground psychology and behavior that could or would never be mimicked by a machine.

As the robots surround the company headquarters, Busman the accountant, played by James Ware, goes over the books while everyone agonizes over what to do.  Finally, it dawns on Busman, duh, that he can just pay off the threatening robots.  The company assets are so massive!  The idea is insane, of course.  Busman’s mind has snapped.  But Ware doesn’t play it crazy.  He’s utterly convinced.  He’s the best accountant in town, and he’s just found the irrefutable loophole that will save the audit.  He’s a quick afternoon meeting away from a celebratory dinner at The Four Seasons.  He bolts off with his satchel, and we know we’ll never see him again.

When we are introduced to a pair of new, advanced model robots, Sean Phillips and Meg Heus break into disturbingly beautiful smiles.  Beaming smiles, not grimaces like The Terminator’s attempt to comply with John Connor’s order to smile.  Before you know the truth about the construction of these robots, the smiles tell you that they are not machines.  These are living, sentient creatures strolling about in the pure sunlight of being.

Robot stories are all about the escalation of design until someone declares with great dramatic weight, “We can no longer tell the difference between us and them.”  After seeing this narrative so many times, you’d think we’d finally say, “So what?”  I mean, it’s usually bad for the people in the story, but is it really such a horrifying idea? Once an android is smiling, it’s one step away from wearing old sweaters and keeping a house full of cats or worrying about the size of its phallus.  Does the difference matter?

Maybe it will seem a little creepy if we ever do create “artificial intelligence.”  But really we’ve been creating intelligence for millions of years.  We can combine DNA in a test tube or in that other location preferred by so many others.

If the end result still produces hairy, overweight middle-aged men who wear a Speedo on crowded beaches, does the difference really matter?  If the end result is Blanche DuBois, does it really matter?  If the end result is a PERSON, does it matter?

So it makes great sense to approach R.U.R. as an acting vehicle as this production does.  Acting inverts the trend that worries Lanier so much.  When we say, “Oh, my phone told me where to go” or when we say “A computer beat the chess master,” we’re looking away from our humanity, from the fact that I’m the one driving to IKEA because secretly I just want the meatballs, from the fact that it takes an armada of the world’s top scientists to beat one guy who’s really good at a particular game.  In contrast, acting makes us look exclusively at the human element.  Acting makes us look at us.

  kennynowell@db.com

justinelambert:

I went on a field trip with my first grader’s class this week. It was amazing. We entered a superhero supply shop and were ushered into a secret hideout behind a door that looked like one of the shelves in the store. We were told that the young man who let us in worked here for a meanie of a…

I love this blog post and have been working hard on how we define success for YEARS now. We’ve been defining our success for a long time, in part at least, by how much we help others. Developing early career artists has been a central part of our programming for ages. We mentor our artists in their creative growth. We encourage networking and know that making connections is absolutely central for theatre artists to grow in NYC. Many creative partnerships have come out of our Forums and Internships. I’m always excited when I see these young artists finding each other. Truly compatible collaborators are rare!

But on the point of helping others succeed (#2 toward the bottom of the post) we are going through a transition. We no longer maintain a full time space. In the past, much of our support for our nearest and dearest and for new artists trying to find their way was in the form of a physical space. We gave space to play, have readings, do productions, develop work and develop as artists. We loved being enablers able to say “Go. Make art.  Don’t worry if it’s commercial and don’t worry if it’s a finished project.  Just make sure you follow your inspiration into the deepest, farthest corners of your mind and don’t compromise on trying EVERYTHING you want to!” We will still do this. We will have readings and develop work and produce plays, but there will be fewer of them. We don’t have a space to fill 365 days a year (whew!), so how do we continue to support all of our brilliant alumni and fellow artists, the playwrights, actors, directors, and designers that we love so much and don’t want to miss out on even for one season? 

Here’s how … and you can do it too!

1. See their plays! Now that we’re not producing 365 days/year, we can see more theatre. What better way is there to support a theatre artist?  See their work. 
2. Talk about that play you saw.  There is no more powerful marketing tool than word-of-mouth, so we will talk, write (see recent blogs), tweet and update our friends about the work that inspires us. 
3. Help them fundraise. Everyone needs money. It’s hard to get. So I will give to as many as I can (small amounts perhaps, but we all know that if everyone who saw your campaign gave just $5 we’d all be rolling in the dough, right?) AND we will spread the word about your project in hopes that our friends will help you too. 
4. Of course, no one can see everything, but even when we can’t see your play we will tweet it, FB it and basically try and help you get the word out. 
5. These ideas aren’t as creative as I might wish, but I hope they are a starting point. If you have any to add please do let us know!

I think we just might define success for 2013 as being seen as a company of artists who will support each other and be there for our fellow artists. We will be your champion. As long as you are making something you love, we love that you’re doing it.

Justine Lambert
Artistic Director 

Plastics.  I was watching a fascinating production of “Antigone” adapted by Per Chance to Dream Theatre, and the word “plastics” kept popping into my head.  As in what the man repeats to Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate to hint at a job offer.  One word, Ben:  Plastics.

After King Creon has warned that anyone who dares to bury the corpse of the traitor Polyneices, Antigone rushes right out and does it.  The guards bring her straight to Creon.  In PCDT’s adaptation, the scene between Antigone and her uncle is a perfect distillation of all the parental “we gave you everything and this is how you repay us” speeches ever made.  After all of those ballet lessons and four years at Smith, you go and transgress a royal edict?

But like any other parent, Creon quickly switches to damage-control mode.  How can we fix this?  And it’s all about keeping up appearances and not so much about affection for the child.

The production is too skillful for this impression to be accidental, but it does make the true severity of Antigone’s transgression ambiguous.  Creon knows that his decree against giving Polyneices a funeral is a bit random.  He paces the stage over the dead brothers and improvises this policy to deal with the political fallout, but he’s also clearly leveraging an opportunity to define his administration.  And Antigone knows that her act of defiance has turned Creon’s spin machine against him.  It’s a game of chicken.

In the original Sophocles, things are a little more blunt.  His Creon is appalled by Polyneices’ unnatural act of marching an army against his own nation.  Polyneices is Timothy McVeigh.  Antigone knows that she is committing an unpardonable act of treason in burying her brother.  Creon’s basic reaction is “WTF?  Kill her!”

It’s more complicated in the PCDT’s version.  This is where “plastics” comes in.  By creating this gray area, I felt the production was urging me to see Antigone less as a symbol of tribal outrage and more as a real young woman striking back against paralyzing authority.  In this respect, she made me think of Ben in The Graduate feeling himself being squeezed into Middle Class Hell, into Plastics.

Like Ben, by the time Antigone realizes that she has to react, that she must react, that she can’t stop herself from reacting, all she can do is blow everything up.  When Ben is up there in the back of the church screaming “Elaine!” he’s not acting but reacting.  Ultimately, he’s not hoping to accomplish anything other than busting up the wedding.  Superficially, he is winning back his girl, but really his horror at the hypocrisy has finally erupted.  Ben can’t stop himself from screaming, and Antigone can’t stop herself from burying her brother, from calling bullshit on Creon’s propaganda.

In the bar across the street after the show, I wondered about this company of young artists who developed this production.  What made them appropriate Antigone to express this particular cri de coeur?  Do they find themselves in Ben’s shoes now in 2013?

The possibility surprises me.  I’m in my forties, but spend an unconscionable amount of time surfing Reddit and other sites that give me a peek into youth culture.  I avidly follow my nephews on Facebook.  I’m fascinated, probably because my 8-year old daughter is already acting like a tween!

My impression is that there has never been a youth culture this sure that it has everything figured out.  I know that every nephew thinks he’s smarter than his uncle, but, more specifically, my impression is that the current youth culture seems to identify itself as the first generation of a mystery-free, techno-utopia.  A collective sense of sharing a historical bump-up in enlightenment is to this generation what disco beads were to young people in the seventies.

Maybe that’s cool if you are twenty-five.  Maybe it’s cool if you’re part of the scene.  As an “outsider,” it looks stressful, mainly because it’s not true.  We don’t know everything.  So techno-utopian enlightenment is a just spin like Creon’s decree.  I’d find it pretty oppressive if I felt that the world was telling me, “After all we’ve done for you, don’t you dare be unhappy.  Don’t you dare be confused.”  Because I was confused when I was twenty-five.  And I’m more confused now.  But at least it’s OKAY for me to be confused.

If this is what PCDT is feeling too, it’s no surprise that the production continually emphasizes the role of Fate.  And it’s a godless Fate.  Warring deities are not pulling the strings.  Rather blind trends that evoke Foucault’s “headless force” cause the play’s events.  And the cultural oppression I imagine that I would feel if I were in my twenties is just such a headless force.  There is no one person you can blame if you find that society is forcing you to think a certain way and make certain life choices.

On the subway ride to the show, I was reading Dave Hickey talking about rock-and-roll.  Classic jazz reflects the 1950’s struggle for freedom.  Look at me breaking away from the melody to blow all this wild stuff on my horn!  But if the other guys aren’t committed to holding things together, it becomes chaos.  This crazy stab at liberation just winds up reinforcing the rules.  Antigone burying her brother is like one of those wild sax solos.  But she can’t escape the prison of the song.

In contrast, rock-and-roll, says Hickey, is the unsuccessful attempt to perform a simple task.  Aesthetically, rock is the sound of a group of people trying to get through the easiest song in the world and failing.  But in that failure, in our ignorance and incompetence, we find our freedom … or at least our illusion of freedom.

At about this point my glass was empty, and the whole cast and crew came piling into the bar.  Looking at their crowded table, I thought, “Am I right?  Is this how it is for you?  Maybe you need your own rock and roll.  It might not even be music.  Just the magic trap door to your own right to fail, your own right to make a mess of things, your own right to play out of tune and out of time.”

I went out onto 54^th Street and dialed up “Let it Bleed.”  As I strolled down 8^th Avenue, I was flooded with relief to have grown up with this song on the radio  triggering my own illusion of freedom, and with melancholy and a touch of envy for what these young artists will have to work out.  The Stones made it so much easier for me.

Kenneth Nowell

kennynowell@gmail.com

It’s rare that I’ve experienced the name of a theatre company as a core element of a performance.  I’ve been to Gorilla Rep productions of Shakespeare in the park.  The actors hustled us from lawn to lawn with a lot of kinetic energy.  We watched in the drizzle while Puck enchanted the Fairy Queen. So I suppose, yes, in a kind of transliteration, we felt as though we were all theater “guerillas” attacking the conventional idea of sitting in a chair under a roof.

But I personally experience most theater company names as being relatively unrelated to my experience of the play.  The same goes for the mission statements printed there in the playbill.  “We want to explore changing social roles in America by bringing exciting new plays to a new audience” pretty much means to me:  “We wanted to put on a show, but you have to have a mission statement to build a board of directors.”

A recent reading of short plays by Rachilde at New Perspectives Theatre was a big exception.  In her introduction, Artistic Director Melody Brooks told us that she wanted us to experience a new perspective in a full cultural sense, beyond just listening to a play.  This included champagne and quiche in a salon setting to put us in a Parisian mood.  Later, riding home on the subway, it hit me that she had succeeded in a way that made me start rethinking the curatorial role and power of an arts organization.  The event itself, simply as a program, was an aesthetic experience that triggered a psychological shift.  Which was cool.

The French writer Rachilde was … well, what’s the point?  You’ve never heard of her.  She’s an all but utterly forgotten French playwright who wrote from the end of the 19^th century through the decade after the Great War.

I’m geeky enough to have read her plays before.  But, while Rachilde is an intriguing character, her plays, on the page, seem a bit flat.  But the New Perspectives reading and discussion left me convinced that Rachilde had fully realized a revolutionary idea of theater as early as 1890.

When you sit down to create a play, you can approach it as writing literature or as scripting a Gestalt experience.

For the literary approach, you have Jack and Jill on stage.  They say interesting things to each other in an interesting way.  When staging the play, a director might put a vase of red roses on a table nearby that unlocks deep layers in the text.  But it doesn’t occur to anyone to say, “Let’s rewrite the play now that we see how these roses affect the lines.”

As you shift toward the Gestalt approach, you plan from the beginning for the impact of the roses.  You let this impact influence how Jack and Jill speak to each other.

You can then take this a step further.  You start with the roses.  Or rather you create Jack and Jill from scratch in relation to the roses.  The roses generate the dialogue.  Or instead of roses maybe you start with a ringing telephone, a stuffed bear or soldiers marching in place.  The key thing is that you are planning a live event that anticipates a psychological impact.  You are scripting an experience.

Before this Rachilde reading, my assumption, if I had thought about it, would’ve been that this Gestalt approach could only emerge after certain key developments in modern art.  Ibsen, Stravinsky, Duchamp, Picasso, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Stein, and Schoenberg had to come first before anyone like Brecht or Beckett could even think to try it.  Mabou Mines, Richard Foreman and Marina Abramovic certainly come at the end of a complex cultural process.

Yet I walked away from the reading at New Perspectives convinced that Rachilde fully realized this Gestalt approach in her 1890 play “Voice of Blood.”  I’m not a theater historian, but in this respect the play stands in stark contrast to any other play I know about from that period.  Rachilde is clearly planning for the total impact of the staging.  She anticipates and manipulates the specific psychology of watching a play in a startling and utterly contemporary manner.

And the potential implications of this are huge, if you think about it.  Is Rachilde a prescient genius?  Or have I simply projected a fixed narrative about when and how artists thought certain things?  Have I been tuning into the wrong qualities in all those artists working since 1890?  For example, is the surrealism of Dada itself noteworthy or rather the strategy and purposes of the surrealism?  In short, have I been locked into historicism?

But, as I said, what brought me to this conviction was the simple programming of an event, the combination of the reading itself, with the discussion, with the opportunity to socialize and with the reading of a second piece.  What interests me from an organizational perspective is, as I started out saying, the role of company branding here.  I was invited into a room with the clear invitation to experience a new perspective.  This is exactly what happened by very direct means.  And, for me, this effect itself constitutes a Gestalt performance that parallels the very breakthroughs we discovered in Rachilde.  Assembling a concert reading with a discussion under the umbrella of a mission statement can add up to a genuine theatrical happening.

 kennynowell@gmail.com

KEN’S THOUGHTS ON TURNING TWENTY

It’s easy to measure the last twenty years in gadgets.  When we started Looking Glass in 1993, no one had a cell phone.  Our good friend Troy had a beeper clipped to his belt.  We would be sitting out under the thick vines of the Cloister Café solving all the great problems of theatre, his beeper would beep, and he’d bolt off in search of a functioning pay phone.  Some rich people I knew had computers, but I only had a Brother wordprocessor that was hardly more than an enhanced typewriter.  A few years later, we acquired a brand new computer and started logging into AOL with a telephone modem.  You’d hear that same squawking sequence of fax machine sounds every time.  After waiting an eternity, the AOL guy would say: “You have mail!”

Who knew how these gadgets would change everything!  We chose the name “Looking Glass” because we loved theatricality.  We loved how theatre offered hyper-reality, a strange zone between the black box and the imagination.  However, in these last twenty years, gadgets have made it hard to say what is real anymore.

The world is now like one big Yankee Stadium.  I’ve sat right behind home plate a few times.  I was only a few feet from the living giants of baseball in flesh and blood.  Yet I still spent the whole time looking at the huge TV.  You start feeling that the puny humans running around on the field are just an excuse to show the game to a million other people.

If you’ve ever been to a Letterman taping, you get the same feeling.  Millions of people at home experience the illusion of tuning into a live event the same way families in the old days gathered around a radio for a concert broadcast from Carnegie Hall.  But if you’re actually in the Ed Sullivan theatre, you realize that you and the rest of the audience are just set dressing for the camera.

Reality is now a TV studio.  The world is the stage set for virtual reality.  Instagram doesn’t exist to share loops of chocolate drizzle around the tart.  The loops of chocolate drizzle around the tart provide an excuse to use Instagram.  And Instagram is an excuse to play with a gadget.  The purpose of our lives, our jobs, our families, our hobbies, is to provide material for status updates.

In his book “You Are Not a Gadget,” Jaron Lanier talks about how our toys are now so cool that we all want to be computers too.  We don’t just want to possess the new iPhone, we want to BE the new iPhone.  20 years ago, the idea that you could plug your brain into a computer was still creepy.  Now if the Apple store offered to perform surgical implants, we’d line up around the block.

It says something that implants don’t sound all that outlandish.  Everything sounds reasonable now.  Any minute we’ll invent a warp drive.  Any minute we’ll discover life on other planets.  Any minute we’ll learn to teleport and time travel.  Any minute we’ll figure out how to download our brains and live forever.  Any minute we’ll create robots that laugh and cry.  Hyper-reality has swallowed reality.

And the past is now a frontier.  I went to The Strand Bookstore one recent Friday night.  Twenty years ago, as I remember it, The Strand was always interesting but never futuristic.  Back then, with bespectacled bibliophiles wandering the aisles browsing out-of-print hardbacks on the Spanish Civil war, it felt nostalgic.  But this night I thought I’d entered a glamorous flagship store for an exotic new product.  The aisles were so crowded I could hardly worm my way to the poetry section, crowded not with old lefties in moth-eaten sweaters but with hip urbanites out on the town.  It felt like a happening scene, the place to be, and the reason is obvious.  With fewer bookstores around, visiting one is a grand adventure.  This is why it felt like being in the Apple store.  It was as though some other Steve Jobs had only just invented this strange and clever gadget called a book.  Hey, they have Camus in this cool new 3-D format!

And, like books, non-virtual reality (i.e., “reality”) is now exotic.  Twenty years ago, if I left the house for any reason, a trip to the D’Agostino’s or brunch at Yaffa, I was off the grid.  Off the grid just because I wasn’t near the phone on my desk.  And it was totally normal.  I didn’t think about it.  I didn’t KNOW to think about it.

Now, of course, before every show we ask the audience, “Please turn off your cell phones.”  That’s usually what I hear, which is funny because “cell” is quaint.  It harks back to the when “mobile phones” were a luxury item.  Back then, we were not saying, “ALL of you, please turn off your cell phones.”  Rather we were saying, “Could one or two of you self-satisfied jerks who want us all to think you are so important please turn off your electrical thingies.”

These days we mean “smart phone.”  Practically speaking, we just want people to silence any device that could beep or buzz.  But ARTISTICALLY, we mean much, much more.  We are asking the audience to turn off their inner cell phones, to disable their implants.  We mean, “Severe your link to the Mothership.”  Please cut off your arm.  It’s an outrageous and outlandish request.

But, really, we’re only asking the audience to enter a reality that was normal for most of us twenty years ago.  Now a play is a looking glass portal to a surreal wonderland we used to call “life.”

As we continue to digitize “life,” people find themselves outside of something like the moody angels in the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desires.”  These stylish angels in long overcoats loiter around an expressionist Berlin listening to human thoughts and wondering what it’s like here in the realm of time and sense.  Peter Falk plays an angel who has entered this world.  After demonstrating to one of the invisible angels the pleasures of coffee and cigarettes, he thrusts out a hand and says, “I’m a friend.”

Looking ahead at our next twenty years, this is the role of theater.  We are ambassadors of reality.  We say, “It’s good to touch something.”  We reach out a hand and say, “I’m a friend.”

2013 is a HUGE year. It’s our 20th Anniversary!

Looking back at 2012 … WOW! What a fantastic year! We have much to brag about. In our mainstage work The Angel Play was as beautiful, original and exciting as we expected. East of the Sun West of the Moon was truly charming, with its Bear in the audience and Heroine saving the Prince. We also had a fantastic Forum of original work with some promising artists taking chances and taking names!

Then came the decision to leave our long-term home. Talk about a big change. While we are pretty sentimental about leaving, we are loving the freedom we now have to focus on the art (you know; writing, directing, acting) and NOT to worry about running a facility or the limitations of being a non-union house. Our reading on December 11 of “The Goddess” at the Richmond Shepard Theatre was an excellent experience of feeling at home in someone else’s home. It was a fantastic night with such wonderful performances and dream feedback! We heard everything we needed to hear. We can’t thank our audience and artists enough!!!

We need your help to celebrate this anniversary right, so please DONATE.  Even $5 can buy a costume piece, and $5000 could pay our rent in a beautiful theatre for up to two weeks!

OUR ANNIVERSARY SEASON:

THE GODDESS. Our anniversary celebration will be a full production of the play that rocked the house in a staged reading last month! Challenging conventional beliefs about love, marriage, and sex, the Goddess Venus appears to Mike and Emma to shake things up. Venus accuses Emma of having become boring and bourgeois in her conventional marriage and challenges her to let her husband have an affair. The couple explores a new kind of relationship with extreme freedoms on both sides. But can this work in the long run? Between hot trysts and exotic travel will they have time for more? How can they return to the emotional slavery and sexual prison of monogamy? Is Venus keeping them together or ripping them apart? 

Developmental Readings: Brand new work by old friends!

ANOTHER SPRING by Yasmine Rana: This piece about a university student in the Middle East who takes a risk and ends up imprisoned is sharp and relevant. The student made a bad choice, but was it really her choice to be photographed that way? Awaiting judgment and punishment, her only visitors are a reporter and her memories of love and betrayal. Will she survive, and, even if she does, will her spirit survive? She was inspired, now is she defeated?

ART OF NECESSITY by Karin Diann Williams is about Lea, her three sons and their inheritance. It’s about a hoarder who is forced to give up her stuff. It’s about a youngest son made homeless by his older brothers. It’s about Glory and her daughters Emily and Ember — one sings, one models. And maybe it’s about the truth there is to be found in a Magic Eight Ball.

TBA One more new work by a fabulous artist as yet to be determined!

Do you have other ways to help? We’d love to have you involved. Drop us a line anytime!

Have a most wonderful, theatrical New Year,

Justine Lambert
Founding Artistic Director