Category Archives: Theatre

The Captains: acting, and work ethic

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James Tiberius Kirk.  Jean-Luc Picard.  Benjamin Sisko.  Kathryn Janeway.  Jonathan Archer.  James T. Kirk, again.  William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula, Chris Pine.  The captains of the Star Trek Enterprise, and the actors who played them.

I just watched William Shatner’s documentary The Captains.  Check it out on Netflix–it’s great.  The heart of the movie is interviews Shatner had with each of the actors, and they’re mostly terrific.  Shatner also intersperses footage of himself at a Star Trek convention.  It’s a movie for Star Trek fans, in other words, which I am, and which I expected and was looking forward to.

Not to pick nits, but Sisko never captained the Enterprise, and neither did Janeway.  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was set in a space station (captained by Sisko) at the mouth of a worm hole, and Star Trek: Voyager is about a different Star Fleet ship, Voyager, lost in the ‘Delta Quadrant,’ way the heck on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy, 75,000 light years from earth.  I always thought Voyager was a cheeky name for a star ship, given the fact that the first Star Trek movie, Star Trek 1, which came out in 1979, was about this big scary V-Ger thing heading towards Earth, destroying everything in its path, which turned out to be an artifact from some alien entity intent on returning our Voyager 6 probe.

Anyway, those are the captains, Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer, and then Kirk again, in the J.J. Abrams reboot of the series.  The men and woman who sat in the chair.  Hard-working professional actors, all of them, talking about the craft.  And the cost of it.

Two things surprised me about the movie.  The first is Shatner’s interview with Avery Brooks.  Brooks comes across as, well, eccentric.  He’s a fine jazz pianist and singer, and conducted the interview while sitting at his piano.  And often would answer perfectly straightforward actor-y questions with a piano riff.  Then he’d smile at Shatner like he’d just answered the question. After awhile, Shatner would go along, singing made-up lyrics to whatever tune Brooks was playing, and then Brooks would sing along too.  It was sort of cool, I guess, but it was a little discouraging too.  I loved Deep Space Nine.  Loved it.  It was my favorite of all the series, with a narrative sweep and complexity and political intrigue that was positively Shakespearean, all the Henry and Richard plays.  And Sisko gave that series such dignity and pathos and such a marvelous sense of command.  I wish Shatner had been able to interview Brooks on a day when he actually took his meds.

But the rest of the interviews were great.  Scott Bakula came across as this great guy, pleasant and charming, religious without being obnoxious about it, hard-working and bright and genuine.  Kate Mulgrew, the same–a disciplined and talented professional, a capable, strong woman. Chris Pine got the least screen time (appropriately, since he’s far and away the youngest of them, and the one who hasn’t done a TV series), and came across well, a bright young actor, a nice kid, likable.  And Patrick Stewart, well, what do you think?  It’s Patrick Stewart.  Meditative, thoughtful, deeply compassionate and humble and so immensely intelligent and articulate.

But here’s the thing. After some initial ‘how did you get into acting, how did you get the role, what did you think when you were cast’ fan-boy stuff, Shatner gets more meditative.  He talks about the cost of it, the human cost of being a professional actor on a sci-fi TV series.  What does it do to you when you’re working 12 hour days, every day, week after week?  What about those all-too-frequent days when something goes wrong, and a 12 hour day stretches to 14 or 16 or 18, and you told your spouse you’d be home by 6:30 and it’s past 10 and there isn’t time for you to even make a phone call?  What is the cost of that?  How does it effect your marriage, and your family relationships?  And how do you muster the sheer professionalism to just . . . grind it out,

It was at that point that the show got really interesting.  First of all, these are all highly trained actors.  When Stewart was cast as Picard, much was made of his background in Shakespeare, his years as a leading actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company.  And Stewart says, in The Captains, that his training was what he fell back on when he had to memorize pages of Trek-speak, the pseudo-technological gobbledegook that the Captain has to make sound plausible.  All that ‘reconfigure the warp coil conduits’ and ‘vent the plasma stream’ stuff.  You have to speak that language as clearly and make it as intelligible as ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’

But all these actors come out of the theatre, and all of them have training to fall back on.  Shatner’s background was at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Mulgrew’s at the Public Theatre in New York, Brooks has done Lear, Othello, Oberon, and taught (and still teaches) theatre at Rutgers.  Bakula came from musical theatre, and Pine’s from a theatre family, and his background is Berkeley, University of Leeds, and American Conservatory Theatre.

But none of them were really prepared for Star Trek, and what shocked and surprised them was the workload.  And more than anything else, the movie starts to focus on that, on the cost of being the leading actor on a popular, hour-long, tech-heavy TV show.  Kate Mulgrew was already divorced when she was cast as Janeway, but the show damaged her relationship with her children, who, she says, still resent Star Trek, still harbor anger over it.  Shatner says Star Trek cost him a marriage, and Stewart says his biggest regret is his two divorces.  Bakula says he was a little prepared for it–he’d been in Quantum Leap, a similar show, and it had destroyed his first marriage; that experience helped him keep his second marriage together despite Star Trek.

Have you ever wondered why the actors in incredibly popular TV series often don’t do anything else?  Think of MASH?  It kept losing actors, didn’t it: Wayne Rogers giving way to Mike Farrell, Larry Linville to David Ogden Stiers, McLean Stevenson to Harry Morgan.  And what did any of them do afterwards?  Occasional roles in movies and TV shows, but not another series, not another MASH.  Workload. The cost of it.  It wears on you, it corrodes marriages.  And if you’re on Star Trek, you know it’s going into syndication, and you’ll make enough money that you really don’t ever have to work again.  You can start a repertory theatre company or something.  You can teach. You can devote your live to jazz music. You can design and build airplanes (that’s what Larry Linville did). You’re free.

And for what?  That’s the ultimate question I think William Shatner went into the project asking himself.  Was it worth it?  He says, when he runs into people on the street, they think they’re being clever if they shout ‘beam me up, Scotty.’  It’s just a dumb TV show.  A space opera. Pop culture at its most trivial and escapist, perhaps.  And in the movie’s best interview, between Shatner and Stewart, he asks that question–was it worth it?  Was it worth being Kirk?

But then Patrick Stewart says, ‘when I die, I will be remembered for Star Trek. I will be remembered for Picard.  And I think that’s wonderful.’

And you think of Shatner at the Star Trek convention.  And we see a guy at the convention, a guy, in a wheelchair, suffering from what looks like Lou Gehrig’s disease, or something equally debilitating.  And his Mom is with this guy, and she’s obviously this great Mom, and she tells us how much her son loves Star Trek, how much it means to him, and how it was worth a grueling, for him, 12 hour drive to come to the convention. And Shatner sees this kid, in his wheelchair, and makes a point of going over to him, talking to him, hugging him, giving him the gift of time and personal attention.

When I think of the kids who I’ve worked with, talented, dedicated kids who desperately want to be professional actors, knowing how long the odds are against it happening, I wonder too.  Is it worth it?  And I know that the key to a successful career is much less talent than work ethic.  But you have the power to inspire people.  Not just to pass the time, but to genuinely impact peoples’ lives.   The Star Trek captains honored their profession, and blessed the world. It’s worth doing.  And it’s worth doing well.

Smash and I are through

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I gave it one full season, plus a good part of the second season.  But I can’t take it anymore.  It’s just gotten too stupid.

Oh, sorry, I’m talking about Smash.  Just can’t deal with it.

Smash is a TV series, on NBC, following a group of New York theatre artists as they write and produce a musical about Marilyn Monroe.  Main characters are Debra Messing as Julia, a writer, Christian Borle as Tom, a composer, and Jack Davenport as Derek, the show’s director.  Anjelica Huston is Eileen, the producer.  Katherine McPhee, of American Idol fame, plays Karen, one of the two actresses vying for the role of Marilyn; the other is Ivy, Megan Hilty.  These actors are not, BTW, the problem.  Borle’s terrific, Messing is fine, and Davenport does a nice job portraying a complete jerk.  Hilty’s brilliant, and McPhee sings well and looks great.  The acting is more or less fine.

The premise has tremendous promise.  The Karen/Ivy battle for the leading role could be dramatically exciting.  Two exceptionally talented young actresses fighting for a Broadway lead–that could be awesome.  Plus, the story of Marilyn has dramatic and musical possibilities.  And the fact that the Smash creative team soaped it up some didn’t bother me; I get that it’s television. So Julia, the writer, once cheated on her husband with Michael, an actor the producers all like for the role of Joe DiMaggio.  Well, that could be interesting, especially when he reignites the affair, destroying her marriage. Like I said, it’s a soap.

There were several story threads the show followed, some of them more compelling than others.  One involved Eileen’s relationship with her ex-husband (and former producing partner) Jerry (Michael Cristofer). Cristofer is a wonderful writer (I still love The Shadow Box), and I suppose he was okay in this moustache-twirling soap villain part.  I just couldn’t care, though.  Part of it was the bangs.  Poor Anjelica Huston was given the single most hideous hairstyle I’ve ever seen on a middle-aged woman, with these awful bangs.  It was distracting, how horrible she looked. Let me put it this way: every scene involving Eileen and Jerry, I wanted to fast-forward.  Nothing happened of dramatic interest in any of them, and if you skipped ahead, you didn’t have to see that hairstyle.  Probably a wig. I hope it’s a wig.  I hate the thought of Anjelica Huston looking like that all the time.

But the one thing that should have been interesting, the Ivy/Karen duel for Marilyn, turned out to be peculiarly uninteresting.  In part, it’s because it was such an acting mismatch.  Katherine McPhee is a lovely young woman, with a beautiful voice.  But she just didn’t have the acting chops to compete with Megan Hilty.  So when Derek, the director, threw a fit and got Karen for his lead, I lost a lot of my interest in the show.

But the second season got so much worse than the first season, it finally defeated me.  I love the theatre, love this art form.  I wanted desperately to like the show.  But its multiple crass stupidities finally wore me down.

In the second season, for example, it was decided that the show was close to ready for a Broadway opening, but the book was the weak link.  Julia was going to have to re-write, and Eileen hired a dramaturg to assist her.  And she gets this really great, first class, super famous and accomplished dramaturg–not just a dramaturg, but a Dramaturg.  Peter, played by Daniel Sunjata.

Dramaturgs, apparently, are sort of a combination life coach, S/M torturer and play-whisperer.  At first Julia resists his blandishments, but eventually Stockholm syndrome sets in, and she re-writes to his specifications.  So let me describe to you the scenario that transpires next:

Julia writes this brilliant script.  They have a reading; everyone agrees, it’s superb.  Wonderful.  We don’t get a lot of details, but here’s what we’re told: it tells the story of Marilyn Monroe through the eyes of the main men in her life–DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, JFK.  A series of vignettes, each narrated by a different guy.

But Jerry The Evil Producer doesn’t like it.  In fact, he wants to go back to the earliest draft of the script, about Marilyn, and her fight to succeed in a world dominated by men. The show has to choose between these two scripts; version A: Marilyn’s battle to succeed, and version B: the Dramaturg-inspired one in which we see Marilyn through the eyes of these powerful men.  Julia wants B.  Tom wants A.  Anjelica Huston’s bangs will decide.  They even turned it into a mini-cliff-hanger, dragged it over two episodes.  Which will she choose?

Do you see the problem? Have you gotten the difficulty here?  Do you see why this episode is one of the main reasons I refuse to watch the show anymore?

You have two versions of the Marilyn story.  And one of them is about a strong, volitional protagonist making choices.  And the other one is about  . . . a woman who is the creation of men.

A is better. In fact, A is so much better, it’s hard to imagine why absolutely everyone can’t see it.  B is rubbish.  B is non-volitional.  B is bad playwriting.

Which Julia was forced into by her Svengali-like dramaturg.

I’m a playwright and I’ve worked as a dramaturg, and this is just rubbish. Insulting, idiotic nonsense. A good dramaturg CAN be helpful, immensely helpful, if a good collaborative working relationship can be established between dramaturg and playwright. This is NOT HOW IT WORKS. And plays require dramatic action, which means characters making choices and decisions and then dealing with the consequences of those choices.  A script in which none of that happens is not, by definition, great.

Also, Jerry the Evil Producer is, without question, evil.  We’re told that many many times, usually by Anjelica Huston’s bangs.  But what exactly is the nature of his perfidy?  He likes the dramatically stronger, probably more commercial version of a script he’s planning to produce.  He wants to produce a financially and artistically viable show.  He also wants to protect his ex-wife from producing a show funded by highly questionable and probably criminal money sources.  In other words, he’s not actually evil at all.

It got worse.  In the second season, we meet a young composer/lyricist, and his book writing friend, Jimmy (Jeremy Jordan) and Kyle (Andy Mientus).  They’re collaborating on Rent a musical of their own, called The Hit List, and we’re consistently told that Jimmy’s music is the shiz and Kyle’s book, not so much.  And, I’m totally not kidding, Karen quits Bombshell (the Marilyn musical, which is a couple of weeks from opening on Broadway), so she can do this little workshop production of Hit List, because she Believes In Jimmy.  (Hit List gets compared to Rent so many times, I lost count, which come to think of it, is kind of bad news for Jimmy, considering what happened to Jonathan Larson!). (If you don’t know what happened to Jonathan Larson, look it up.)

(But, okay, one specific:  Derek gives Jimmy a note: the show needs an opening number establishing the show thematically.  Jimmy’s response is his go-to, default mode response to any note, by anyone–he throws a whiny little hissy fit.  Then he goes ahead and writes the song.  Which everyone compares to Rent. Now, in Rent, that opening number is “Seasons of Love.”  “Seasons of love”, one of the greatest songs in the history of musical theatre.  Now here’s Jimmy’s song, meant to be the “Seasons of Love” equivalent:  “Caught in the storm.”  Generic, mediocre pop song.  But nobody on the show thinks so–they think it’s, typically, brilliant.)

Anyway, yeah.  An actress cast in the leading role of a Broadway musical quits three weeks before opening night because she’d rather do a workshop show.  This is presented to us as a completely plausible and even admirable decision.  It enables Ivy (stuck in a horrendous production of a musical based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses) to take over Marilyn, the role she was anyway born to play.  I threw a shoe at my television set.

But worst of all is the character of Jonathan Larson Jimmy, the Genius.  His show has a slot in the New York Fringe Festival.  They’ve got a tiny space, and 10 hours to load in their show, tech, and open.  They walk in the space, and Jimmy sits down at the piano, and plays one of the songs from the show.  And cast and crew join him singing, and dancing.

I would punch him in the face.  I seriously would punch the little dweeb.  We have ten hours, people!  We have work to do!  We have X number of tasks to perform, Y number of hours to do it in, and Z number of people to do it.  You just changed the equation, unilaterally reducing the value of Y and the value of Z. Seriously, you little jerk. Get to work.  Now!

Have none of you ever actually done live theatre?

And the answer is obviously yes.  I have no doubt that the talented actors in the cast of Smash have all done some theatre. The show-runner, Theresa Rebeck, is a produced playwright.  They all know better.

But they think the television audience is, oh I don’t know, obsessed with the Tony awards. So all these characters are, like, preposterously obsessed with Tonys.  And rehearsals are boring, obviously, unless they’re excuses for working out people’s personal neuroses.  And of course it’s not remotely a problem, say, to turn a book musical into a sung-through musical in two weeks (while also rehearsing it).  And every note composed by a show’s composer is brilliant, while those playwright types are The Problem, what with their dissolving marriages and multiple affairs and various insecurities.

It just got too stupid.  I couldn’t watch it anymore.  It just astounds me that people who have worked in theatre, who love theatre as an art form, could possibly produce a TV show about theatre that gets absolutely everything wrong about how theatre works and what it is and how shows are created. I want them all to die.

 

 

Keynes revisited: a review

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A couple of years ago, I made the fateful decision to write a play about John Maynard Keynes and a night he spent on a college chapel roof with F. A. Hayek.  Two of the greatest economists in history in a small, limited, theatre-friendly setting; sounded fun. The problem: I didn’t know anything about economics. Plus, economics is about math.  Yikes.  Words are your friends; numbers are the enemy–I found the prospect of research, uh, daunting. I did have a son who majored in economics, and he lent me his macro-economics textbook–that was a good place to start. And I read a whole bunch of books. Really, a boat-load of books.  And I think now, finally, I’ve kind of gotten my head around the subject.  Some.  A bit.

One of the books I had to/got to read was Robert Skidelsky’s monumental 3 volume biography of Keynes.  Each volume was some 700 pages, which means the three books together had to add up to, uh, (shoot, uh, 3 X 700, carry the 4) 3600 1278 a whole bunch of pages. But it was worth it–a great read about a great subject. So imagine my feelings when, couple days ago, my wife went to the library, and found a new Keynes biography, just published.  Only way shorter, and tons more readable.  Keynes, by Peter Clarke, Professor Emeritus of Modern British History at Cambridge.  It’s quite splendid. It clocks in at a brisk 180 pages, and took a day, instead of the weeks it took me to wade through Skidelsky.  Don’t get me wrong–I don’t in any sense resent the time I spent with Skidelsky’s 5478 many pages.  But man, do I wish I’d read this first.

There have been three Keynes biographies that I know of, plus Nicholas Wapshot’s book on Keynes and Hayek, which is the one that got me started on the project.  The first Keynes bio was by Roy Harrod, who was a friend of Keynes and wrote not long after his death.  I found it pretty hagiographic, plus it chose to ignore Keynes’ homosexuality–gentlemen didn’t talk about that sort of thing when Harrod was writing.  Skidelsky’s brilliant, but he presumes a readership with a basic knowledge of the period and history.  I found I had to read it with my computer open to Wikipedia–spent a lot of time going ‘okay, who was Lord Halifax again?’  That’s one reason I like Clarke–he takes the time to give you a few sentences orienting you on major figures.  Love that.

But the main reason I love Clarke is this: he’s not so much interested in writing a biography of Maynard Keynes, as in Keynes’ economics.

‘Cause here’s the thing; we’re in a Keynesian moment right now.  Our economy remains struggling, not quite in full recession, but stagnating and with completely unacceptable levels of unemployment.  Exactly the situation Keynes faced in the ’30s in the US and Britain.  But the idea of a Keynesian stimulus has also been politicized.  There are tremendous misconceptions about who Keynes was, what he taught and believed, and how relevant those ideas are to us, today.  Those are the issues Clarke takes on.  He’s primarily interested in the relevance of the Keynes legacy on public policy in the early 21st century.

So, some myths.  The first is, that Keynes was ideologically inconsistent; the second, paradoxically, that he insisted on a rigid doctrinaire program to be followed without deviation.  The reality is that Keynes was the very antithesis of the unworldly ivory tower academic.  He managed to arrange his teaching schedule at Cambridge so he could spend most of his time dealing with huge responsibilities at the Ministry of the Treasury.  He had a wide correspondence in the US, and frequently traveled there to meet with government officials.  He may not have been architect of the New Deal, but he was consulted by the people who were its architects. He was also a director of the Bank of England.  And a trustee of both Cambridge and Eton.  And director of the Cambridge Art Theatre, a trustee of the National Gallery, a ballet impresario.  And an astute and successful investor.  And so on.

In other words, Keynes did not just write about economics, he practiced both economics and politics at a very high level.  And he did so during the Great Depression and the two World Wars. Although his ideas were radical, he had to make them practically achievable. And Clarke shows exactly how he did it, how he would work within a committee and ministry structure to influence policy.  He knew how to trim his sails to the wind.  So if you accuse him of inconsistency, he also understood that any economic theory is worthless unless it can be actively implemented as policy.

So to apply Clarke’s insights to current events.  President Obama’s response to massive unemployment was a Keynesian stimulus.  And it’s axiomatic on the right that the Obama stimulus didn’t work, that it did not pull the US out of recession.  So stimulus is a failed policy. So Keynes was wrong, and Obama wrong to believe in Keynesian economics.

But the stimulus did work.  There’s just not a valid case that can be made for it not working. It slowed unemployment to a halt, and it reversed the job-loss trend.  It just wasn’t large enough to do the job completely. Every major neo-Keynesian economist–Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Greg Mankiw–all called for a much larger stimulus.  But Keynes would have appreciated the fact that a larger stimulus was simply not politically possible.  President Obama had to do what he could with the money Congress would agree to authorize.  Half-measures, sure.  But Keynes knew all about half-measures.  He spent the Great Depression urging the Roosevelt administration to triple what it was spending on New Deal programs. It was tricky though–Roosevelt had won election by accusing Republicans of fiscal profligacy.  A larger New Deal wasn’t politically feasible.  And Keynes knew that as well.

That’s the thing about Keynes–he was the ultimate realist. But my gosh, it’s interesting to see the parallels between his work in the 30s and today.

I think one of the objections to Keynes is, essentially, moral. We’ve all been raised to consider ‘thrift’ a virtue.  Keynes thought thrift was destructive. Budget deficits are often described in moral terms, as ‘piling debt on the next generation.’  Keynes did not actually favor budget deficits, but he didn’t mind them, in national emergencies.  Keynes even described himself as an ‘immoralist.’  So conservatives didn’t like him then and don’t like him today.

But above all, Keynes was an optimist.  He believed in the positive power of good government, and he believed in it as an insider, as someone who spent most of his life working closely with government ministers.  He believed in the creativity of common, ordinary people. He liked Roosevelt, in part because he too believed that the only thing we had to fear was, in fact, fear.

Here’s the Keynes I love:

The Conservative philosophy says, you must not try to employ everyone, because that will cause inflation.  You must not invest, because how will you know if it will pay?  You must not do anything, because this will only mean that you cannot do something else.

But we are not tottering to our graves.  We are healthy children.  We need the breath of life.  There is nothing to be afraid of.  On the contrary.  The future holds in store for us far more wealth and economic freedom and possibilities of personal life than the past has ever offered.”

I love Hayek too, for other reasons.  But right now is not the time for pessimism.  I voted for a man who promised hope and change.  Keynes would have liked him, I think.

Hail the cell phone smasher!

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A friend of mine sent this link to Facebook. And I had a new hero.  Kevin Williamson, smasher of cell phones, kudos!  Very well done indeed sir!  I genuflect in your general direction!

And yet.  Why do we (okay, I) celebrate this guy?  For committing, what?  Theft.  Destruction of property.  I went shopping last night, was having a bad leg day and so brought my cane.  Well, what if that had offended someone? What if some fellow shopper had seen me limping around Shopko with my cane, become outraged, ripped the cane from my quivering hands, broken it over his knee?  ‘Walk, you frickin’ gimp!  Be a man!’ I imagine him shouting.  Wouldn’t I find his behavior outrageous.  Heck, wouldn’t I call the cops on the jerk?

But in a theater, stealing a phone (an expensive one, I imagine), and flinging it against a wall (certainly a disruptive act) is something we applaud.  I applaud. I think it’s awesome.  I think they should give the dude a medal.  I think he should get theatre tickets for free, for life, everywhere.  His is a brand of vigilantism I applaud.  While generally wagging a disapproving finger at essentially every other kind of vigilantism there is.

‘Cause you just don’t do that.  The word theatre comes from the latin, theatrum, which means, theatre.  So you can see how holy it is.  I mean, come on, latin.  A theatre is a sacred place, and the performances that take place there are sacraments and talking on a cell phone during a performance is really just like farting in Church.  Loudly, on purpose.  And then giggling and saying to your friend something like “dude, light a match, I just cut a good one.”  Or your friend goes, “dude, did you just fart?” and you respond, “hey, you know the rule, whoever smelt it, dealt it.”  And then he does a choking thing, and says something like “it’s not so much the smell, it’s the burning in my eyes!”  And then you both fall down giggling on the bench there. In Church.  During services.  Both of you.  That’s what talking on a cell phone in a theater is like.  Just like that. And maybe it’s cute and little okay when you’re five.  But at twenty-five, or fifty-five?  Unforgiveable.

Little kids get a dispensation.  In fact, the great joy of doing children’s theatre is the audience interaction.  Kids are amazing audiences.  Completely honest. A kid, in a theater during a boring performance won’t just shift in his chair or rustle a program.  He’ll say, very loudly, “I’m bored!”  Sometimes in a grown-up play, an actor may get away with a weak transition or a moment that’s less than totally honest.  Audiences are polite, after all.  Boy, not in a theatre with kids. They’re brutal.  Wonderfully, magnificently, brutal.

I wrote a play a few years ago, called Coughlaugh.  It was an experiment in audience/actor interaction.  The premise of the play is that the actors did absolutely nothing unless prompted by an involuntary sound from the audience.  If someone coughed, the actors performed one action, if someone rustled a program, they did another action.  And after the fifth repetition of the ‘cough’ action, they did a different one.  The idea was to implicate the audience in the performance.  It actually got kind of Pavlovian.  And the actor actions got more and more violent, so audiences became implicated in violence; that was also part of it.  We did it a couple of times. Some audiences dug it; others really were bothered by it.  The point, of course, is very John Cage–whatever happens in a theater is part of the performance.  Which is why cell phones are so obnoxious and jarring.

Part of my loathing of audience misconduct is history.  For years, the only movie theater in Provo that my wife and I could afford to go to was Movies 8, a second-run dollar theater. (Though my son, who worked there, likes to point out that tickets were actually $1.50.)

Movies 8 was the epicenter for audience rudeness in the Western hemisphere.  Because movies there were cheap, folks didn’t seem to feel any constraints whatever.  I remember a couple who brought children aged 3 and 5 to see Jurassic Park.   Two terrified youngsters howling in terror, while Mum and Dad placated them with honey-nut cheerios, and . . . stayed.  Enjoying a movie they’d ruined for everyone else.

Let’s play guess the movie!  From two rows behind us, an elderly and hard-of-hearing gentleman provided this commentary:  “That kid’s a what?  A robot?  How do you know he’s a robot?  He don’t look like a robot?  You sure he’s a robot?  What about that other guy?  He’s a robot too?  Are you sure?  Why they hell would they make a movie about a kid who’s a robot?”  50 points to first correct guess.

But, see, at Movies 8, this kind of outrageous movie commentary was de rigueur.  Cell phones, man, they were the least of the distractions you had to negotiate.  For one thing, for every movie, regarding of subject matter, approach or rating, the audience had a significant kiddie contingent.  Newlyweds (and newlybreds) are poor, and for entertainment found a buck and a half ticket price congenial.  So kids got dragged to everything.  And sacrament meeting rules applied–some folks were pretty conscientious about taking crying kids out, and some folks seriously weren’t.

And even beyond the children at inappropriate movies, Movies 8 audiences were generally rude.  Talking, chatting, commenting on the movie.  Popcorn fights.  Loud random noises, and then adolescent laughter at the fact that they’d made a loud random noise in a theater. Running around during the show.  Climbing over you in repeated trips to concessions/bathrooms.  And cell phones.  Always, always, with the phones.

And that’s at movies.  Distractions seem fifty times more egregious at live theatre performances.  Part of it, of course, has to do with live-ness.  Those are real people up there, performing their hearts out.  To disrupt their performance feels rude.  Ruder.  Every theater I know has a protocol for cell phones, a pre-show announcement of some kind, and most theaters try to word it cleverly or engagingly.  So when someone puts their own momentary need to interact electronically over the needs of the many folks gathered together in a theater, that’s rudeness compounded.  And I start to feel okay with audience members taking the law into their own hands.

Confession time: I’ve been guilty too.  Of cell phone malfeasance.  I mean, when I was a little kid, and saw my father sing the role of Scarpia in Tosca, and shrieked inopportunely ‘that lady just stabbed my Daddy!” I was what, five?  Forgiveable, even, apparently, a little cute (though my Mom was mortified).  But for a grown-up to interrupt a live theatre performance, that’s a totally different thing.  And I did it.  Just once, but the memory still scars.

I was attending a play (a really good one) in Salt Lake.  And I’d just gotten a new phone, and didn’t know how it worked.  But it had a music function–I could play tunes on it.  And pushing one particular button was how you accessed that function.  Which, five minutes into the show, I scooched around in my chair and accidentally did.  And couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.  For four whole minutes.

So to anyone else in that house that night, know that I still burn with shame, and feel terrible about ruining your evening, and know I did a bad thing and promise it will never happen again.  Ever.  And if Mr. Kevin Williamson wants to destroy my phone, I’ll let him. He can even come to my home, and I will hand it over.

And I promise. Never, ever, again.

 

 

season of, well, me

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Saturday night, Plan B Theatre Company in Salt Lake announced their next season; the 2013/14 season.  It’s a season of plays by, well, me.  Here’s a link to their website for details about season tickets and stuff.

It’s insane, humbling.  There it is, right there on the website, ‘a season dedicated to works by Eric Samuelsen.’  It’s a tremendous honor, and a monumental trust, for Jerry Rapier and Cheryl Cluff to take a chance on me like this.

So okay: what are the plays?  This is shameless self-promotion, obviously, but I am hoping we sell some tickets and I’m hoping friends, at least, will come see the shows.  So, very briefly, the plays:

First up: Nothing Personal (Oct. 24-Nov.3).  During the dark hours of Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation, Susan McDougal, wife of Jim McDougal (who ran the S&L at the heart of the controversy), refused to testify before Starr’s grand jury.  The main Clinton accuser, David Hales, had testified that she’d had an affair with Clinton.  She hadn’t, but was afraid of being charged with perjury if she said that under oath.  And so she was imprisoned for eighteen months for contempt of court.  Put in solitary confinement, in fact, on death row.

I started there, with the Susan McDougal case.  But when I wrote the play, the various Bush administration violations of civil liberties and human rights were in the news.  I felt the play should expand its scope, talk about larger issues: the war on Terror, torture, detention.  So the characters are simply called ‘Susan’ and Kenneth,’ no last names; it’s more a play about the nightmarish atmosphere of our recent history than specific politic events of the late ’90s.  We’ll see how it works.

Next: Fairyana (Dec. 3). A radio show, which will be performed live while also being broadcast on KUER.  It’s a play about a children’s television program, and the hardened, alcoholic, violent, cynics who write it.  The radio show is very noire-ish in style. There’s a murder at one point.  I’m going for the funny here; the cast is terrific.

Clearing Bombs (Feb. 20-March 4) is a play that just got a lot more topical this week, with British historian Niall Ferguson’s recent comments suggesting that the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes should be discounted because he was gay.  In fact, my play is about Keynes, and Friedrich Hayek, and the night, in 1942, the two economists spent on the roof of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, tasked with clearing away German incendiary bombs.

So what did they talk about?  No one knows.  But I thought it probable that they talked about their academic discipline.  I added a third character, Mr. Bowles, a fire warden, basically so the conversation wouldn’t turn so hopelessly technical audiences wouldn’t be able to follow it. So, yeah, it’s a play about economic theory.  As a playwright, you have to give audiences what they want, and what theatre audiences are clamoring for today is hard-core macro-economics. Clamoring, I say.  An amazing cast will help: Mark Fossen as Keynes, Jay Perry as Hayek, and Kirt Bateman as Mr. Bowles.

So, yeah, the risk is that it’ll be dull. Ninety minutes of economists arguing economics–shoot me now.  I get that.  But you can’t say it’s not relevant today; what with the US and international economies all struggling.  My biggest fear is that this rap video will end up having said everything I want the play to, only shorter and funnier.

Finally, 3 (March 27-April 6).  That’s 3; that’s the title.  Three short plays, each with a cast of three women, in which Mormon women confront their own culture.  The three plays: Bar and Kell, in which an abused young woman becomes the ‘ward project.’  Community Standard, in which a jury tries to determine the community standard for obscenity, and one of the jury members confronts the dark secret at the heart of her marriage.  And Duets, in which a decision by a straight young woman to marry her gay best friend has tragic consequences. I’m sort of hoping my friends at Mormon Feminist Housewives will try to catch it.

Plan B will also do a script-in-hand reading of my play Miasma, which they premiered a few years ago, but which they want to take another look at.  In addition, they’re doing another script-in-hand reading of my translation of Henrik Ibsen’s masterpiece, Ghosts.

So, if you live in Salt Lake County (or close enough to drive up), come see some plays.  We’ll hang out.  This is seriously a tremendous honor.  Plan B Theatre company is, IMHO, the best theatre company in Utah, and of the best in the West.  An entire theatre company almost entirely devoted to new plays by local playwrights.  Astonishing.  Foolhardy.  Brave.  It’s going to be an exciting year.

 

The Shakespeare authorship (non) controversy

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There isn’t a Shakespeare authorship controversy.  No such controversy exists.  Shakespeare’s plays were written by William Shakespeare, glover’s son from Stratford-on-Avon and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s men.  They were not written by the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth, or Christopher Marlowe, or anyone else. There does not exist any evidence whatsoever to support any other conclusion. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.  Period.

I hate doing this.  First, I hate just stating something dogmatically like that; it goes against my deepest instincts. I’m not that guy.  And I hate debunking conspiracy theories.  It doesn’t do any good. People who believe that the CIA/Cubans/Mafiosi killed Kennedy, or that Obama was born in Kenya, or that George W. Bush blew up the Twin Towers, will NOT be persuaded otherwise; they are, in my experience, completely impervious to evidence.

And the Shakespeare authorship conspiracists are, in my experience, an agreeable bunch of people.  First one I ever met was many years ago, when I was acting in a summer stock company in southern Indiana.  One of my co-actors was a committed Oxfordian, and he challenged me to read The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Man and the Myth, by Charlton Ogburn Jr.  I thought, why not?  I read it, and had two reactions–a violent dislike for the writing style of Charlton Ogburn Jr., and an utter conviction that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays. But I stayed friends with my co-actor. He was a nice guy, and a good actor.

Jim Bennett is a Facebook friend of mine, and another agreeable guy.  Also an Oxfordian.  He recently published an an article in the Deseret News, arguing that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

Now, I think there are lots of very good reasons to summarily reject this theory.  First, there exists absolutely no evidence to support it.  We know Oxford wrote and published poems, and he was praised for his plays, though none have survived.  And he liked the theatre, sponsoring a boy’s company.  But none of that constitutes evidence.

Jim Bennett’s article says that a guy in Oxford’s position couldn’t write plays openly, and so used a pen name.  But that’s silly.  Oxford wrote plays publicly, was known to do so, and was praised for it.  His plays haven’t survived, but that’s not remotely unusual; most plays that were produced in the Elizabethan/Jacobean period, at least 90%, weren’t published.  Plays were owned by acting companies, in the sense that the manuscripts were physically owned and controlled by someone, in that pre-copyright era. Publishing them worked to the company’s disadvantage.  You might sell a play that wasn’t in your performance repertoire anymore to a publisher for a little extra cash, and publishers were known to steal manuscripts, or hire folks to sit in the theater and write down as many lines as they could and publish that–it was an unscrupulous and deeply competitive publishing environment.  But mostly plays weren’t published.

There were two kinds of publications in the Elizabethan/Jacobean period; quartos and folios.  Think of them as ‘paperbacks’ and ‘hardbacks.’  Quartos were smaller and cheaper, folios larger and more expensive.  The reason we have the Shakespeare canon today is because after his death, two actor friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published them in the First Folio.  Only one other playwright from that period had his plays published in a Folio edition–Ben Jonson, who self-published a Folio, basically a vanity project. Anyway, the First Folio has thirty-six plays, and is the only reliable source for twenty of them.  It’s missing two: Pericles, and Two Noble Kinsmen: we have those plays in quarto form.  But without the Folio, well, our world would be terribly impoverished.  We owe Heminges and Condell a great debt.

So, okay, Heminges and Condell had profited their entire lives from those plays. Literally profited–they were shareholders in the most popular theatre company in England, their popularity derived mostly from the plays for which they held more or less exclusive performance access. They published the plays, partly, because they weren’t as popular anymore, but also, as an act of friendship, as their preface makes clear.  They wanted to correct old errors: previous publications were, in their words, “maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious imposters.”  The First Folio came out in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, and nearly twenty after Oxford’s death.  If Shakespeare, the actor, didn’t write them, wouldn’t his claimed authorship be a perfect example of a ‘fraud’ by an ‘injurious imposter?’  Perfect opportunity for two guys in the know to set the record straight.  If in fact Oxford used Shakespeare as a pen name because it was politically dangerous of him to claim authorship while he lived, well what possible harm could come from coming clean twenty years after his death?

But Heminges and Condell continued to assert that their old actor friend, William Shakespeare, had written them.  Why would they do that?  Well, best answer is because he did write them.

Now, you can say that ‘William Shakespeare’ was simply a pen name for a different author, who for reasons of his/her own chose to remain Anonymous.  So who was the real author?  Well, presumably a female writer might have wanted to use a pseudonym. We don’t know how many ladies-in-waiting Elizabeth had–we have names for twelve.  Could have been any of them.  What about Elizabeth’s Privy Council?  Cecil, Bacon, Walsingham, Raleigh, Dudley, Essex, Devereaux?  Coulda been any of them too.  I mean, Oxford’s not a terrible choice, but he’s by no means the only possible choice.  His girlfriend, Anne Vavasour–also a lady-in-waiting, and boy did Oxford get in trouble when he knocked her up–is every bit as likely.  In the sense that there’s no evidence for her either.

Jim makes a big deal of the Sonnets, arguing that they have a biographical component that works for Oxford and doesn’t work for Shakespeare.  Sorry to say, but parsing the Sonnets for biographical info is a pretty fruitless exercise; there’s just nothing in the Sonnets that rises to the level of evidence for authorship.  It can be legitimately ‘proved’ that whoever wrote the Sonnets was straight, gay, male, female, old, young, ugly and gorgeous.  They’re poems.  They’re works of fiction.  They’re also really good.  A few of Oxford’s poems have survived, and they’re not half bad. They’re also not Shakespeare.

And there is a biographical problem that eliminates Oxford entirely. We know when he died, in 1604.  Macbeth was first performed in 1606, and makes specific repeated reference to the Gunpowder plot of 1605.  Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, and Oxford couldn’t have.  So there’s that.

You’ll hear stuff like “the plays are full of politics–they had to have been written by a politician.” Piffle. The Inns of Court was where government types hung out, and it was across the river from Southwark. How much could an enterprising playwright learn just hanging out in pubs?  Plus, most of the politics he just got from Holinshed’s Chronicles.  The first big book of British history, and a huge bestseller–it was Shakespeare’s favorite source.

Ultimately, though, I find the notion that Oxford had to have written the plays because a half-educated hick from Stratford couldn’t have repugnant.  There’s a class thing going on there, an assumption that of course the author of those magnificent plays had to have been an aristocrat.  To me, though, if we read the plays and have to conclude any single thing about their authorship, it would have to be this: they were written by an actor.  They were, first and foremost, written by a man who spent his life working professionally in the theatre.  They were not the product of an amateur, a dabbler, a dilettante playboy like our pal Eddie de Vere.  They were constructed by a master craftsman, a man who knew how to build a character and sustain dramatic action, how to keep a story moving on-stage.  They were written, in short, by William Shakespeare, professional actor, and also a glover’s son from Stratford.

Conspiracy theorists are ultimately unpersuadable. If you’re on the fence, though, remember this.  Nobody, absolutely nobody has been studied more thoroughly than Shakespeare.  The numbers of scholars who earned tenure by writing about Shakespeare has to number in the thousands. And the percentage of people who have spent their life studying Shakespeare and who believe Oxford wrote the plays is effectively zero.  This isn’t just professional jealousy and prejudice. They believe the Stratford Shakespeare wrote the plays  because that’s what all the evidence says.  All of it.

 

SLAM: a personal history

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A few days to SLAM.  I’m already getting nervous.

I wrote another version of this post for the SLAM blog, but wanted to expand on it here.  I love SLAM, and hate it, and am terrified by it, and wouldn’t miss it for anything.  Here’s how it works.

SLAM is this event sponsored by Plan B Theatre Company in Salt Lake, my favorite company in the world.  It’s a 24 hour theatre experience.  On Friday, two weeks from now, I’ll drive to Salt Lake and meet with the Plan B torturer in chief artistic director, Jerry Rapier.  We’ll get a title, see the set, be handed the names and headshots/resumes of 3-5 actors.  Our task; to write a 10-minute play that night, overnight, and deliver it the next morning.  The actors and directors will then rehearse all day, and they’ll perform the play, off-book, Saturday night. Here’s a link for info and tickets. If you’re in SLC this weekend, come see it!  You’ll be blown away, I promise.

That means that on Saturday, May 4, an audience will see a play in full production that did not exist twenty-four hours earlier.  My task, after delivering the script, will be to catch up on my sleep, then come back to the theater and writhe in my seat.  Watching the plays is terrifying.  The playwrights are all friends, and we’ve talked about it, how we all say the same prayer, sitting there in the theater.  “Please let mine not suck the worst.”

I live in Provo.  When I write for SLAM, I drive to Salt Lake, get my info, and then drive back to Provo to write.  That forty-five minute drive is immensely important.  I like driving, and I use that time to think about the play.  Usually, by the time I make it home, I’ve got at least an idea to work with, and sometimes, I have the whole play mapped out in my head; at least a rough draft of it.  Of course, over the course of the night, I’ll usually put the play through two or three more drafts, (length is a real challenge–my first draft is always too long), but generally, the drive south is crucial.

My first year, I had no idea what to expect.  My title was The Butcher, the Beggar and the Bed-time Buddy, and driving home, the only thing I could come up with was this:  three actors to work with; three possible characters in the title.  So I came up with a ‘butcher,’ an elderly wealthy rancher; a daughter who kept ‘begging’ him for money for her siblings; and a ‘bed-time buddy,’ his mistress.  The play had monologues, was very repetitive—I was told it was a memorization nightmare.  Tony Larimer, a wonderful older actor, had the line “fill your lungs!” referring to the stench of a feedlot, a smell he likes, because it’s money in his pocket.  In performance, I had the strong impression I was hearing that line a lot, more times than what I’d written.  Tony told me later, he used ‘fill your lungs’ as filler, to give himself time to remember what he was supposed to say next.  He patted me on the arm and said “that line was my default mode, dear boy!”  One of the great memories.

Anyway, the play turned out okay:I was eventually able to expand it to full-length, with a new title: Miasma, which Plan B later produced. 

The next year, my title was Spoiled Cheese. Driving home, I thought, ‘well, what would spoil cheese?  The end of the world!  That’d be tough on cheese!’  That led to a post-apocalyptic scenario, with an Adam and Eve, now ejected from the Garden (Central Park), ruefully remembering various cheeses they recall having eaten. In performance, I thought it was intriguing but incoherent.  Re-reading it today, it’s still intriguing but incoherent.  Not a great play, but also not terrible; my actors were good enough to make it watchable. 

We sometimes draw SLAM titles from a hat, so I have no one to blame but myself for another food related title the next year: Blood Pudding.  With a cast of three women. two younger, one older.  Hmmm.  Driving home, I wondered it might be intriguing to explore the aftermath of a robbery.  I thought of three employees at a restaurant, locked in the meat locker; two tough girls, blase and cynical, and their older, ineffectual manager.  The girls have been robbed many times before, and are mostly concerned that they’ll get paid for this one—one of them, turns out, used to date the robber.  One of my actors was Colleen Lewis, a wonderful actor, but a thin, stylish, lovely young woman, hardly anyone’s idea of a mean, ornery tough chick.  But she played the role beautifully.

I finally got away from food-related titles when I drew Behind the Blue Door the following year.  Driving home, I wondered if I could do something Iraq-war related, perhaps something metaphorical. I vaguely remembered that a lot of homes in Iraq had blue doors. Safely home, on the internet, I learned that blue is considered good luck: blue=sky=paradise. The set looked like it would support something fantasy-related, and so I ended up writing a knight in shining armor, his fair maiden, and Jesper the Self-Loathing Jester.  That was one thing that came to me driving home, that character name.  One of my actors, Jason Tatom, is an old friend, and I will never forget the big grin on his face when I told him he would be playing Jesper the Self-Loathing Jester.

The play then shifted back and forth from fantasy to nightmare—knights and dragons, to Iraq, and then back again. Every time the knight killed the dragon, three more dragons took its place–the central conundrum of the War on Terror.  Daisy Blake and Paul Mulder were terrific, as was Jason, who, as Jesper, also got to tell a number of exceptionally tasteless jokes I found on a website that night.  No-arms-no-legs jokes?  IEDs?  Works.  Blue Door remains one of my favorite SLAM pieces.  

The next season, a major SLAM change—we went from three actors to five.  I liked it, personally—liked the opportunity to tell more complex stories.  I’m sure it was also easier on the actors; memorization is always a challenge.  Anyway, my title was Burning Desire, and we had a set to work with that I also found provocative; really mysterious and gothic.  I had a great cast too, Jayne Luke, who I’ve always admired from afar but had never worked with, plus Jay Perry, Tracie Merrill, Nancy McAffee and Nick O’Donnell. Driving home, I thought maybe I could start with Jayne dying, her family waiting for her on the other side.  I started there, and Tracie played the same woman forty years earlier, in the pivotal moment of her life, when she rejected and kicked out her son, played by Jay Perry.  Jay and his father, now dead, wait in an anteroom of the afterlife, a kind of waiting area with vending machines–Jay wonders if he should have gotten a Danish to greet his Mom with.  Nancy, meanwhile, played an Angel of Death.  We were able to move back and forth in time, in a story about regret and loss and forgiveness.  I’ve been working on expanding it–I like the play a lot.  

I then got sick, had to take a year off.  When I came back, we were back to three actors, and the playwrights had been thrown another curve—we all got the same title.  Alt Control Delete.  I had been reading Moby Duck, a book about bath toys that washed off a cargo ship and were floating all over the world.  I thought of environmentalism, about the possibility of going  Alt Control Delete and basically starting over with our poor beleaguered planet.  I liked everything about the play that resulted except the ending, which just sort of fizzled out. But Christie Summerhays was magnificent, playing an arctic environmentalist dealing with the destruction of an ecosystem.  

The next year, we got the biggest curveball yet: no title at all.  I would have thought that this would be freeing, but it turned out to be anything but.  Drove me crazy, not having a direction. But the set—just some benches—gave me something to work with, and, on my drive, I finally thought it might be fun to just do a comedy, set it in a DMV.  Called it Gaming the DMV.   I liked the play, but afterwards, I realized it wasn’t as funny as it could have been.  Opening night, I kept thinking up jokes I wished I could have thought of in time to put in the play. My cast saved me, though, with Jason Tatom, Kalyn West and Claire Wilson, a teenaged actress who was astonishingly funny and great.

So, we’re doing it again.  Couple weeks, back on the bicycle, climb on the horse again, back in the cockpit.  The creative folks have promised us lots of curveballs this time.  I have no idea what that’s going to be about.  I keep telling myself that I really love SLAM.  And I do.  It’s terrifying, exhilarating, uncomfortable, exciting.  It gets my adrenaline flowing like nothing else.  Theatre without a safety net.  Fill your lungs!  Please let mine not suck the worst. 

Jason Collins

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Yesterday, Jason Collins of the Washington Wizards came out.  He therefore becomes the first active male professional American major team sports athlete out as openly gay.

All those modifiers are necessary, because there have certainly been other prominent gay athletes.  Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King in tennis.  Greg Louganis, the Olympic diver.  Sheryl Swoopes in women’s professional basketball.  John Amaechi, in the NBA, and Dave Kopay and Kwame Harris, of the NFL, all came out after they retired, as did Billy Bean in baseball and, most recently, Robbie Rogers, an English premiere league soccer player.

What makes Jason Collins unique, therefore, is that he’s still an active player, a current male team sport athlete who still has to deal with whatever issues a pro locker room brings. All that icky showering and so on.  So, another milestone passed, another bridge crossed. And pretty uneventfully, in this case.  Since his coming-out article came out yesterday in Sports Illustrated, he’s received overwhelming Twitter support, including heartfelt and enthusiastic congratulations from Kobe Bryant and Magic Johnson, from Steve Nash (“Maximum support!), from NBA commissioner David Stern (“proud you assumed the leadership mantle on this very important issue”, from Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama, from fellow player (irony alert) Rudy Gay, and from RuPaul (“I’m still gayer than you!”).

All his former coaches weighed in positively.  Kevin Love and Metta World Peace (the NBA needs a guy named Understanding), tweeted their support.  Current players with Collins’ back; basically a Who’s Who of stars: Dwayne Wade and Al Horford, Paul Pierce and Baron Davis, dozens more.  There have been, so far that I know, zero negative responses from NBA players, past or present.  Collins says that if anyone says anything privately, he’ll deliver an elbow and a hard pick and then let it go.  There are basketball ways to deal with homophobia.

To me, it’s interesting that it’s Jason Collins.  Richard Greenberg wrote a terrific play ten years ago about this scenario. Take Me Out is about a baseball player coming out.  Saw it on Broadway and liked it immensely, while still quibbling over plot points.  In Greenberg’s play, the ballplayer, Darren Lemming, is a superstar; he was thought to have been based on Derek Jeter.  (Uh, after Minka Kelly, Hannah Davis, Jessica Biel et. al., no, I don’t think Derek Jeter’s gay.) Take Me Out opened on Broadway at a time when there were rumors about Mike Piazza, who probably isn’t either.  Point is, Jeter and Piazza are both first ballot Hall-of-Famers. Greenberg’s point is that to do something like come out, a player would need the protection of genuine athletic greatness.  No one’s going to hassle Derek Jeter.

That was then, this is now.  Jason Collins is hardly a star.  He’s a journeyman career backup center.

Here’s his profile: graduated from Stanford, with his identical twin, Jarron Collins. Both brothers are seven feet tall; neither would have a career if they weren’t.  Basketball is a sport that rewards height, and a seven-footer can play professionally without being particularly athletic.  Jarron Collins played for the Jazz, and both Collins brothers fit the same profile–they’re not very quick or fast or strong, and aren’t great jumpers.  So take a guy who is very tall, but not much of an athlete, a disciplined and intelligent man.  Well, he can learn how to shoot–shooting’s just muscle memory, just takes practice.  Both Collinses can hit a fifteen foot jumper.  Jason Collins can get good rebounding position, and he can set a pick or screen.  He can’t block shots, despite his size (he can’t jump), but he can hold his position and take a charging foul.  He’s not a good one-on-one defender (not quick enough), but will battle the other team’s center, using his size. He plays, in other words, an inelegant style of basketball, not pretty, but in a limited role, effective.  Make Jason Collins your starting center, and you’re not likely a good team, but bring him off the bench and play him 12-15 minutes a night, and he can help you.  My point is, that’s not really the profile I would have suspected for the first out ballplayer.  And yet, it really is exactly the same profile John Amaechi had–and Amaechi came out within a couple of years of retiring from basketball.  Don’t know what to make of that, probably nothing.  Just this: so far, at least, superstars haven’t been the ones to out themselves.  Maybe they feel like they have too much to lose.

I assume Collins likes basketball.  But as an intelligent, articulate, disciplined guy, with a degree from Stanford, he could have pursued a number of careers. Pro basketball pays the best. Ten years in the NBA will allow him the financial independence to do literally anything he wants to do with his life.  And he’s only 34 years old, a young man, with a bright future.

His announcement is interesting in other respects.  He’s an identical twin, and very close to his brother, Jarron, but Jarron’s straight and was apparently completely taken by surprise by Jason’s announcement.  Their Mom, though, wasn’t surprised by it; said she’d always known.

For those arguing that being gay is or isn’t biologically determined, the Collins brothers would seem to complicate the issue or confirm biases, depending.  I don’t think it matters.  Sexuality and sexual orientation are complicated matters, and for me, this happens to be one instance where the best evidence is actually anecdotal.  Jason Collins says he’s known he was gay for years, that it dates from when Jarron was dating a girl seriously and he wondered why he didn’t seem to feel the same way about girls that his brother did.  Why is that story not enough?  The dude’s gay.  Power to him.

And see, that’s where this gets fun. Jason Collins is a black basketball player, a center, and gay.  That’s how he put it in the SI article.  So count the exploded stereotypes; Jason Collins is not, I don’t know, swishy.  He’s a blue collar dude, a tough, hard-nosed player who plays a very physical style of ball.  He’s a pick setter, a screener, a rebounder.  He takes on the meanest, toughest players in the league, and he battles ‘em to a standstill.  None of that impacts, or is impacted by, his sexuality.

Why did he come out?  He says it’s because his roommate at Stanford, a straight guy, also a Kennedy and currrently a Congressman (Joe Kennedy) told him about marching in a gay rights parade, and he thought, ‘dude, he’s straight and he’s marching for my rights?  Why wasn’t I there?”

One wonders what effect this will have on Collins’ career.  I think it’s quite possible that his career may have ended were it not for this announcement.  This last season, he was a back-up center for the Washington Wizards, a terrible team. A bad, older player on a bad team, in other words. His contract is over, and he’s now a free agent, able to sign with anyone.  I wonder who wants him.  He’s not actually all that good–never was.  Maybe New Orleans, backing up Anthony Davis.  He could be a mentor for a talented young center, as much a coach as teammate.  And New Orleans would certainly welcome him, one would think.

But my gosh, the reaction is interesting, isn’t it?  No negative responses, none?  Nothing but support, from teammates, coaches, league officials, politicians?  Everyone happy for him, everyone saying ‘good for you!’  It’s not like homophobia has disappeared, but isn’t driving it underground a victory?  Have we really come this far, that fast?

One last detail: players can choose their uniform numbers. Last year, Collins changed his number to 98.  Yesterday he explained why.  It was in honor of Matthew Shepherd.  Poor Matthew Shepherd, of Wyoming.  Beaten to death by homophobic psychopaths.  In 1998.  So Jason Collins is out.  So, here’s one more voice, added to the chorus: Good for you, big guy.  Hoop it up, dude, and we all got next.

 

 

 

Suffrage: A review

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Jenifer Nii’s beautiful new play, Suffrage, is playing at Plan B Theatre in Salt Lake.  Before I get to the rest of the review, let me say this: you want to see this.  It’s terrific.  Tickets at 801-355-ARTS.

Frances (April Fossen) and Ruth (Sarah Young) are two of the five wives of Benjamin, an otherwise anonymous Mormon patriarch ca. 1880s.  That’s the time and setting of the play.  Frances and Ruth are, in a sense, Mary and Martha, in a play in which the issue of women’s suffrage is the cause to which they both adhere–Mary/Ruth, passionately engaged in that cause, Martha/Frances, more concerned with daily tasks and responsibilities.  Benjamin has been jailed, and as the play begins, is waiting trail, for the crime of plural marriage.  As the play progresses, he is, apparently sentenced to further jail time.  With no male breadwinner, the women (and especially Frances) is worried about paying the mortgage.

It’s a deeply political play, on every level.  The national political debate over the passage of the Edmunds/Tucker Act is alluded to.  It terrifies both women, and energizes Ruth, who is sure that by organizing Utah women and gathering signatures on suffrage petitions, she can influence the national political debate.  She is, in short, hopelessly naive, and Young plays that naivete superbly–Ruth is as appealing a character as a passionate and engaged young person can be.  The play also explores local politics, as Frances, who is superbly qualified to work as a bookkeeper for a local businessman (a job that would save the family home), loses the job, in part due to her prospective employers’ knee-jerk sexism, but also due in large measure to local perceptions of Ruth’s activism.  Frances, it turns out, is perfectly capable of defending Ruth to others, though in person, she constantly urges Ruth to tone things down.

But for me, the most interesting political element in the play is the inter-personal politics of a polygamous family.  This is a play about wives number 2 and 4, in a 5-wife family.  We never meet wives 1, 3 or 5, but they’re alluded to, and we get a very strong sense of them–the senior wife, sick and exhausted and dying, the youngest wife, illiterate and beautiful and (as Ruth puts it), ‘dumb as a houseplant.’  Wife 3, a drudge, waiting to be told what to do.

Obviously, I’ve never lived in a polygamous family, nor have any desire, ever, to do so. But in any family, things have to get decided, tasks need to be finished–stuff has to get done.  Working out who does what and on what schedule and with what priorities is the task of any family leadership council, whether that council has two members or six. We talk of marriage as a ‘partnership of equals,’ and the Church has certainly toned down patriarchalist rhetoric, and that’s all well and good and valuable, but in the meantime, there are meals to prepare and laundry to wash and families have to work it all out.  And who decides?  Well, you talk about it, you make decisions, you negotiate.  Its politics at its most straight-forward and simple.  And the play shows those negotiations, complicated by the fact that Frances, as wife 2, doesn’t enjoy what you might call a presumption of authority from the other women.  She has to lead, and she knows full well she may be resented for it.  But there’s no one else to do it.  That was what I loved best about the play, the interpersonal stuff, involving five women, only two of whom were ever on-stage.  What a lovely dissection of inter-family dynamics.

But of course the play is also about larger concerns, specifically polygamy and its connection to feminism and the issue of women’s suffrage.  And the play ends with a call for all of us in the audience, enlightened 21st century folks that we are, not to forget the struggle for suffrage.  And yes, sure, we should remember and honor that struggle.  Of course we should (Gayle Ruzieka and Ann Coulter notwithstanding).  But honestly suffrage, as it appears in the play, is just ‘the thing Ruth’s into.’  It’s not really central to the concerns of the play, which were, to me, much more about polygamy, and its role in our community.

And it’s great.  If anything, it’s a little embarrassing, as a Mormon playwright, that the finest play describing polygamy from the point of view of plural wives was written by someone not of our culture or faith.  That shouldn’t matter, of course–Jen Nii is a wonderful writer, a deep and responsible researcher, and everything in the play rings true, from the language to the characters to their attitudes and testimonies.  In fact, she may have had an advantage over a Mormon playwright, in that she went into the project knowing what she didn’t know.  An LDS writer might have seen his/her LDSness as a shortcut.  “Their attitudes reflect mine–I don’t need to research their testimonies, for heck’s sake.”

But it’s a play I have to approach from a decidedly mixed point of view.  I think polygamy is loathsome.  I think it’s frickin’ weird, even wanting it.  I can’t think about it in our history without embarrassment.  I wish it wasn’t in our history.  I don’t get it, not at any level.

But Frances and Ruth, I do get. They’re my people; that’s my heritage.  I have polygamous ancestors, and I honor that history.  I think back to my polygamous ancestor, Mary Curtis Markham.  Grim lookin’ lady, but heck, she had a tough life.  And an amazing one.  I’m tremendously honored to have her in my family history.

And then you look at the history, and that same mixed-and-confused feeling reasserts itself.  So the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which ended polygamy in Utah, infuriates me.  It was blatantly unconstitutional, clearly violating the First Amendment. (And both Edmunds and Tucker were renowned constitutional scholars too. Infuriating).  It wreaked havoc in Mormon families, leaving woman like Frances and Ruth utterly rootless and bereft.  Passing it was a contemptible act of moralistic self-satisfied hypocrisy.  And part of me also agrees with it, and in retrospect, it did lead to President Woodruff’s Manifesto, which was important and needed and about time. I don’t think Utah’s current polygamists should be persecuted, but I also think it’s great Warren Jeffs is in jail.

I’m conflicted, is what I’m saying.  And this play does something wonderful; it rubs my face in my own conflictedness.  I belong to a faith that has, in its history, polygamous doctrine and practice, vestiges of which remain in our holy books.  How do I deal with that?  How do I reconcile those contraries?

It does what a terrific play should do, and it does so while moving us deeply.  April Fossen, as Frances, gives an extraordinary performance, so focused and in-the-moment.  Sarah Young’s character is less complex, which doesn’t make her performance any less remarkable.  Cheryl Cluff directed, with her usual directness and economy, even making great auditory and visual use of costume changes.  As always, when she directs, I loved the sound design in the show, including this amazing pro-suffrage version of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance.

Anyway, a wonderful play, given a great production. And if I left the theater wallowing in my own conflictedness, well, that’s a good thing for theatre to accomplish.

Tombs

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Tonight, I was asked to introduce a staged reading of my dear friend Scott Bronson’s play,Tombs.  I ended up thinking about the plays of Corpus Christi, and transubstantiation and stuff.  Anyway, this is what I ended up saying.

“I stand before you, on this Good Friday, to talk about a play.  A play, as it happens, written by one of my dearest friends.  I’ve seen the play in production; I regret that I will not be able to stay to see it tonight.  But I want to begin in a place a long time ago, and a long way off.  The towns of York and Wakefield and Chester in the North of England, sometime in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  It’s June, and spring harvests are in. Nights still a bit chilly, days crisp and clear and warmed by the sun.  A parade has begun, and the priest carries before him a holy wafer and a vial of wine.  Perhaps we hear a song in Latin “Oh, salutaris hostia,” sung in perfect, four-part harmony. Tonight, there will be a feast; today, a parade, and performances.

The feast of Corpus Christi begins on the Thursday six weeks following Easter; six weeks, that is, after Maundy Thursday.  Corpus Christi is Latin for the “Body of Christ.” The Feast day celebrates the eucharist, the real presence of Christ in the elements of the host—the body and blood of Christ.  Holy wafers and wine, in the Catholic tradition.  Tap water and Wonder Bread, in the Mormon faith.  Served by twelve year olds, their shirts too big for their necks, clip-on ties askew.  Every Sunday, at mass, back then, we’d take the sacrament; as Catholics still do.  But in addition, an annual holiday celebrated the host itself.  Corpus Christi is primarily a Catholic feast day, though some denominations in the Anglican tradition also celebrate it. We Mormons don’t bother with it.  About the only Holiday we worry about in June is also about Fathers: when we get our Dads a tie or some cologne.   But for Catholics, 13th through 16th centuries, Corpus Christi was a major holiday, and a fun one.

The idea for Corpus Christi came from a woman, Juliana of Liege, an orphaned child-turned nun, who had a vision of the moon, darkened by a spot, signifying, in her mind, a deficiency in the liturgical calendar.  She suggested that in addition to the weekly Eucharistic service, that a special feast day be established just to celebrate that Sacrament, and the miracle of transubstantiation.  Pope Urban IV eventually established Corpus Christi as a feast day in 1264.

One of the main ways in which the Feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated was through the performance of plays.  That may seem a little strange at first, until we interrogate the practice.  Although we Mormons don’t share with Catholics their belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is at the heart of Corpus Christi, we also practice it, do we not?  In this miraculous art form we call theatre? In transubstantiation, the substance of sacramental bread literally becomes flesh, and wine becomes blood.  Well, what do actors do, but take upon themselves, with the aid of some greasepaint and a costume piece, literally flesh out, provide flesh to, an idea, an abstraction, a series of constructions of language.  Dramatic characters, living human souls, enacting a story, for our edification and enjoyment.

Initially, Corpus Christi started with a parade honoring the elements of the host, but in time, plays were written and performed by the guilds of the community—the solid backbone of Christian society, the tailors and bakers and nailmakers and cobblers and wheelwrights.  The plays they wrote have survived, especially in England.  We call them Mystery Plays, perhaps to celebrate the twin mysteries of Incarnation and Atonement, in which God became Man, and later died for our sins.

Joseph of Galilee was a favorite character in the plays of Corpus Christi. The unidentified and anonymous authors of the these plays understood something fundamental about drama; that comedy and tragedy are not competing, but complementing masks and styles.  Noah is a doddering old buffoon, his dottiness juxtaposed against the shrieks of drowning neighbors.  Herod’s soldiers are drunks.  And even the soldiers crucifying our Lord are comedically bad at their jobs.  We’re allowed to laugh, just before we’re invited to weep. Astonishingly, shockingly, the plays still work in production.  And are still frequently produced.

Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father, is a comic figure as well.  He’s old, a senile and feeble cuckold.  The ‘foolish old man, married to a younger woman’ would become a staple of Moliere, of Cervantes, of commedia dell arte and TV sitcoms.  And in the York version of Corpus Christi, the play of the Annunciation, performed by the pewterers and metal-workers guild, Joseph contemplates suicide.

The purpose of the Corpus Christi plays was to humanize the characters of the Bible, to make them accessible.  Since the liturgy was in Latin, most congregants likely went through Sunday services in a bit of a daze.  Stained glass windows served as a nice aid to communication.  So did acting; and some priests became as adept at chewing the scenery as in administering the wafer and wine.  But so did these annual exercises in community theatre, which were not in Latin, but in the vernacular, in the robust and blunt Middle English of Northern Britain.  The point was to point up the shared values of the entire town, to celebrate together the hard-won spirituality of the late Middle Ages.  When we read about medieval Christianity, what strikes us are its heresies; the mortification of the flesh, the violent sexism and anti-Semitism. The violence: period. Products, perhaps, of a culture too close to death, too used to instant, sudden, inexplicable annihilation.

But we can relate to the plays.  The plays and the music and the cathedrals—the products of genuine devotion—we can look there, and feel the same kinship and wonder we feel in holy places today; the caves of Lescaux, and the temples of India, and Tenochtitlan and Machu Picchu, or in concert halls, listening to Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony or Barber’s Adagio for Strings.  That sense of shared humanity and reverential adoration.

And here, tonight, at UVU.  In Tombs, Scott Bronson shows us a very different Joseph, the kind and caring father to whom our Heavenly Father entrusted his Only Begotten.  Joseph has just died, in fact–though we flash back to catch a glimpse of his parenting style–and Mary and Jesus mourn together outside his tomb.

But in many respects, Tombs reflects the same impulse that drove the plays of Corpus Christi.  It tells us the story of our faith.  It reorients us towards our theology, towards the beliefs that center us and define us.  It reminds us of what we hold most dear.

It’s a deceptively simple play, really.  A mother and son mourn together, and she presses him to tell her his plans.  They share memories.  He has an upcoming task that he dreads—she presses him to let her share his burden.

As I re-read the play once again this morning, that word came back to me—burden. In a very real sense, Scott has written a play about unburdening.  Through confession and conversation, through memories and recollections.  Through atonement.  These characters, so familiar, and yet also doctrinally distanced from us, unburden themselves to each other. As we literally unburden, pass on our burdens, of sin and pain and regret and error, to our Savior, who then chooses to bear them himself, for us, out of love.  And the play ends with two words, the two words above all others, all Christians wish we could speak. Thank you.

Juliana of Liege saw a flawed and incomplete moon, and sought to fill it with a celebration.  And communities and towns across the medieval Catholic world enhanced that celebration by writing and rehearsing and designing and directing and building and performing deceptively simple plays, reflecting the profoundest stories and beliefs at the heart of their culture.  Scott Bronson has done the same here.  He reminds us what must never be forgotten; he speaks for and to our culture of our most central and enduring shared faith.  He makes The Word flesh, he theatrically transubstantiates.  He places us outside a tomb, and reminds us of a tomb found empty, and how that emptiness fills our hearts.  He nourishes us with the bread of mimesis.  From the Guild of Scribblers and Thespians, we bring you our fondest story.  We share with you: Tombs.