*Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen Breaking Bad, especially season 2*
Unavoidably Outdoors
Last weekend I went out to Central Park to watch my friend perform in one of I'm-sure scores of free Shakespeare productions, this one a fairly traditional Richard III. A couple summers ago I assistant directed a production of Much Ado About Nothing in a park in West Philly, so I've observed first hand many of the typical challenges associated with an outdoor production-- mainly that it's actually, unavoidably outdoors.
Nothing in outdoor spaces wants you to pay attention to Shakespeare. It's hot, it's dusty and dirty and grassy and buggy and sunburny and windy, it's noisy and distracting. It's very hard to drop into the language and world of the play as an actor, let alone an audience member, when a toddler is chasing a puppy in the far background of an important love scene, or an ice cream truck drives by cranking its creepy kiddie catch-song right as Beatrice is asking her finally-mutually-exposed lover Benedick to kill his best friend for her.
I was quick to notice the actors who understood how to play the language (and how to hold it in their bodies) in this particular New York City park, which, unlike West Philly, is quite huge and heavily populated. It's right in the middle of a metropolis, where the competition with 400 year old words includes traffic sounds from Central Park West, bicyclists and walkers from a main park path, and loud and probably-a-little-drunk wiffle ball players maybe half a dozen yards away, to name just a few. I was sitting on the ground in the dirt and it was heat-wave hot. I'm usually all about focusing on the 400 year old words. I love them. Especially Richard III. But as much as I sympathized with the red-faced bellowing thespians, my friend notwithstanding, this particular day was not really my day to watch or hear much Shakespeare.
Of course these park conditions get a little bit closer than most indoor productions to how it was when actors were first performing the text; Richard III was likely first performed in 1591. Most theatres had no roofs, most performers had to make themselves understood, had to throw their voices and shape their bodies large, far above the din of the crowd, who behaved much more like the rowdiest of sportsgoers than modern turn-off-your-cell-phones-and-unwrap-your-candies-before-we-dim-the-lights audiences. Doing Shakespeare in the park now becomes an act of reaching back in time, and when it does capture the attention and imagination of an audience, outside, in the world as it is, it can be absolutely magical. It can... when it works; like I said, though, nothing in the park wants it to.
Something I did notice, though, was the very fact of the effort it took; Richard III and many of the other men performing were really shouting to be heard. For this "stage," standing up on rocks and trodding through the grass, to carry any thoughts out to us, most of the men had to shout, had to gesture large, had to take as much space as possible to hold our attention, had to shake off psychological realism and enter the space of epic proportions, life and death, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones. It made me think about the psychological complexity/intimacy of the Richard III of the play, who, assuming (rightly, I suppose) that no one would understand or love him, undertakes these machinations that become a kind of shouting-to-be-heard above the din of the world. This man does horribly destructive things so that he can be seen, so he can be known. These actors, trying to rise above a world that does not want for you to be made intelligible, metatheatrically reenact that existential situation.
Difficult Men Shouting
A stray thought-- men shouting isn't exactly something I think most people want, or encourage, in the non-theatrical world. It's usually pretty trauma/flight-or-fight-triggering, especially for someone who's been through any kind of physical or emotional abuse. Men shouting are usually scary, or at least make everyone go tense. Any guy who's losing his shit tends to, in reality, off the stage, make the situation worse. His audience immediately stops listening, loses the ability to understand, and tends to react to what they see, not hear, which is a threat. His impotence is highlighted, not his strength. On stage or on screen, though, shouting can be highly glorified.
I've been rewatching Breaking Bad in preparation for the final half of season 5, as well as introducing my lady to the show. Something about seeing Walter White lie to and manipulate his wife, especially in Season 2, echoed backwards for me to Richard III. It reminded me that this particular genre of story, of watching a bad man do bad things so bad it's good, has a pretty long track record of success.
Right now, as it's been observed many many places, particularly in the recently-published novel Difficult Men, we're in a kind of golden age of television, and predominantly it's been of stories about anti-hero men who inspire provocation, ambivalence, pity, sympathy, and, ultimately, moral disgust or at least unease, as they fall from whatever high-ish ground they had to doing worse and worse things in more and more desperate ways, in many cases shouting, actually or metaphorically, to be heard or understood. Dick the Shit has a blood brother in Francis Underwood from House of Cards. He has a lot of cousins, too, in Walter White, Don Draper, Gregory House, Tony Soprano, to name a few. We love to watch these guys be bad.
A lot has been made of the rise of these shows and their antiheroes with the twin blows to the American psyche of 9/11 and the Great Recession, and that a shift in our culture and way of life, a toppling of men in positions of unquestioned dominance or perfect control, a loss of faith in our governments and financial institutions, in capitalism itself, all male-dominated enterprises to a disgusting degree, has lead to many people searching for that control, or yearning to see it crumble, in the stories we tell ourselves. Anti-heroes, then, work outside the systems of society, since those are untrustworthy and failing. They know better. They know what to do.
Richard III is all about having control, or the illusions he creates to make it look like, at least to the audience, that he has it. He addresses us constantly for the first part of the play, telling us his plans, how things are or are not going according to them, and how he'll exact his revenge. We don't get the direct address from Walter White or Don Draper, but we do see them jockey constantly for a sense of command of their world.
We tell ourselves the stories we wish we could see in our own lives, so the theory goes.
Everybody Cries
I don't deny that this smacks true to me in my own life. Throughout college, when I was feeling particularly out of control of my own life, especially my own feelings, I was pretty obsessed with House, even though it tended frequently to wobble into bad melodrama or recycle a lot of similar plot devices or even witty quips. But there was something about the cynical Machiavellian Dr. House, who always was one step ahead, who always could see what others couldn't, who always knew how to knock the right billiard balls together to sink 'em one after another, that I deeply envied. By identifying with him, I was almost able to, in this fantasy world, live his life, and, subsequently, feel in control. It felt cool to sometimes think as cynically, "Everybody lies," to remove myself from trusting humanity. Even as Dr. House did worse and worse things, as a drug addict and a hurt, angry person, I felt alongside him, and I saw the world he saw, because it let me be in control of it. I started to wonder if being wounded or broken was a prerequisite to being a genius, that maybe I needed my pain in order to be good at something. I think a lot of depressed people hold onto their depression for that reason, for that feeling of "at least I know this, at least I can control this."
I'm not sure if it was exactly that subway ride home after the play or another time soon after when I heard this, but I remember being on a train and listening to a baby start to cry, and I started thinking about how uncanny it was, to connect the two. The baby is really trying to make herself understood. She needs food or burping or whatever it is, and crying is the only way she knows how to signal to her parents that something's up.
I know I know absolutely nothing about children right now and I'm sure there are plenty of times when there's no reason at all for the crying (sometimes in life we get the same way as adults, I'd argue), but anyway, the thought stuck, and it made me feel like maybe all this shouting to be heard is really a call to be understood, that something that these men need is not being met, but they don't know how to get it. The world is too big, there's too much noise, too much competition, and the only way to get anyone's attention is to cry out.
"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
An Event Horizon
Then I watched a bunch of Breaking Bad, Dick the Shit still in my head.
I saw methed-out-of-his-mind drug dealer Tuko beat the shit out of his lackey in the final episode of season 1 of Breaking Bad/the first moment of season 2. Tuko, here, to me, is a kind of grotesquified signifier of masculine rage. He is, in some ways, the most manly a man could be, if all men were were shows of strength and viciousness. Tuko is high off Walter White's super-meth, and when he's remotely crossed, in any way, he goes apeshit. He kills a man with his fists over an off-handed comment. Walt & Jesse witness this, and Tuko says "You're done," before leaving them. They drive away, terrified, understandably, for their lives.
The first thing Walt when he gets home is turn on the TV. He drones out, doesn't even hear his wife calling for him repeatedly. She has to literally walk up to him to snap him out of it. It's a funny moment in a slew of episodes full of them, because it says a lot about how we use consuming things like TV to drown out our own horrors. Or, at least, I know I'm guilty of that. Friend hurt my feelings? Watch House. Feel justified that humanity is bullshit.
Then Walt proceeds, still in a state of shock, to go over to his pregnant wife in the kitchen who's about to fix him some chicken, and he hugs her from behind, and then starts to kiss her, and then starts to sexually assault her. Skyler goes from laughing off the weird mood he's in, to asking him to knock it off, to getting upset, to essentially shouting him off her, as she smacks her head on the refrigerator. What makes matters weirdly worse is she has some kind of green goop on her face, like for a facial or something, and it adds an extra layer of strange humour/discomfort to an already odd, tense, vague, but also very not vague moment.
The first time I saw this episode I honestly don't remember feeling horrified about Walt. For a show that is all about moral ambiguity and Walt's downfall, this moment for me was a line that felt returnable-from, not the event horizon of morality that Walt seems to constantly toe. I can intellectualize his desperate grab for some kind of sexual/life control after a moment of witnessing sheer out of control terror.
Skyler follows Walt post-assault out to the pool where he wanders off to and tells him, bewildered, exasperated, but sympathetic, too, "I know you're confused and frustrated and terrified" (she's talking about him having cancer) "but you cannot take it out on me." Walt, silently, seems to agree.
In the Trunk
Rewatching it after a few years of knowing some very dear and close women who have had experiences with sexual or physical abuse, I look at the episode, and Walt, differently. The moral ambiguity that I think the show crafts very wisely feels a little thinner here, to me. Not that I think the show should/could've done anything differently, and as we go into the final half of the season I expect Walter White to get every bit of comeuppance for the evils he's done, the bad he's become.
But violence has a rhythm, abuse has repercussions, in the literal sense of the word, reverberations. You can watch it dramatized in Breaking Bad: Tuko beats up his guy, Walt has to process that, has to put that somewhere. Violence breeds violence. Men shouting, needing to be heard. Walt can't tell Skyler the horrors of what he's seen, he couldn't bear the shame at this point in the series, but somehow he still needs to be understood. What pain we could all excise by just saying what needs to be said.
I wrote down notes about this as I was watching these episodes, thinking about this post, and then I kept watching. An episode or two later, Tuko kidnaps Walt, and one of the weirdest, most out-of-character-classic-psychological-gestures happened. Walt is locked in the trunk, dizzy and sick out of his mind, ostensibly because his cancer is getting worse. Walt has a kind of dream/hallucination in the trunk for a few moments before it opens. And what, oh what, could it be he dreams of, in his moment of life-threatening crisis?
A heavenly vision of Skyler, smiling, beaming down on him with love and forgiveness, repeating, again and again, "I understand."
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Homo homini lupus?
It's never lupus, Dr. House always says.
I first discovered the phrase used for my title "Man is a wolf to man" by watching this video about monkeys and other animals and their senses of fairness, found via the incredible Pig Iron Theatre Co.'s 2013 production of Pay Up tumblr. It jives very much with this hour and forty five minute long talk I listened to before the holiday by Richard Wolffe called Capitalism Hits the Fan, which I'll link via New Paradise Laboratories' FRAME post, where I found it. I might've been involved with getting it there, and I'm sure I found that link via a much-more-informed-than-me Facebook friend or Tumblr follower. I don't remember exactly how, but you can see it on the hyperlink above.
I think I'm sourcing these materials very much out of a sense of fairness to the organizations that are drawing my eye to inspiring content. As someone who's in sales, and very much wants to learn not only how to live an awake, aware life about the consumer choices I make, I also want to locate myself in a net of interdependent thinkers and coagulaters of information that I rely on to make whatever kinds of conclusions I make. Sourcing material becomes a kind of currency, in a way, a good faith to give you all the chance to see what it is I've seen, and make your own conclusions on it.
I should also note that I'm interested in practicing a fair amount of transparency in terms of my process. Not quite sure where it's heading. It's having an impact on my play, which I'm happy to say has actually started to want itself to be written, and so I'm taking the opportunity to lean into as much candor as possible, fully aware that that is still a performance, and me talking about it, and talking about talking about it, is still angling myself to be seen in a certain light, perhaps to cast shadow against things I don't want to be seen, or talked about. Not sure, at this juncture, if I can offer much in terms of clarity or coherent thoughts on that. I guess we hide what we hide, whether we want to or not. I'm starting to recognize in myself a certain lack of interest or awareness in really hiding a lot, though. I am stronger when I'm vulnerable, which I learned from Pig Iron's Summer Session clown training. It might be part of why I'm returning to this blog project, and letting my voice hang out there in the wind.
One free radical thought before I get going, though. I've made a timer for myself today. I'm seeing World War Z at 8:10pm tonight, likely solo, and I have a feeling the whole issue of man being wolf to man may come up. So this blog post is sort of like a repository for thoughts swirling in my head prior to seeing it. I've not read the book the movie is based on, though likely will after seeing the movie. I'm excited to be getting back more into reading.
But anyway, the point, about transparency and fairness, is that the assumption the TED talk on animal instances of fairness & caring for the wellbeing of others, working together, altruism, is that animals DON'T do that, that men are at their most bestial when they only seek out for themselves, and at their most human when they help others. Acknowledge others. Me wanting to share where I'm getting my thoughts from, so you can watch/read them and can make your own decisions, is a way of gesturing to you that I think you're as smart as I am (or, at least, I hope you feel that way) and I care about you not perceiving me as claiming this knowledge for myself, as coming from myself, somehow making my status above yours, intellectually. I hope the knowledge helps, in whatever way it can, because I do think a lot of the knowledge is helpful.
To surmise and distill hopefully not too reductively the argument of the TED animal talk, animals aren't all selfish bastards. Capuchin monkeys don't like it when one gets fed grapes (a superior food) and one cucumbers. They have an innate sense of fairness, or at least of when things are NOT fair. Chimps work together to bring food in for the both of them. Elephants, too. And while humans are obviously not animals, in many ways, our caring about fairness, about equality, justice, is perhaps more engrained and emotional, and less rational and idealistic, than we thought.
The TED animal talk, an anti-venom to the notion that man is a wolf to man, though, is being counteracted in my mind by the Capitalism Hits the Fan video, which tore down some very important ignorances I've had as to what the state of the United States and its economy is in. Definitely worth the full hour and forty five minute listen/watch, especially if you care about the Great Recession and the plight of the American worker beyond the political rhetoric. Richard Wolffe has an annoying voice, I will admit that, but he clarifies for me a lot I only had a hazy understanding of, about the US' history in terms of work-force and wages and the flawed nature of capitalism.
Basically, until the 1970's, America had been in a hundred and fifty year growth period in terms of both worker productivity and worker wages. Working Americans enjoyed a rising standard of living as they also became more productive at their work. It's an entirely unique situation in the history of the world, and it makes a lot of sense as to why we have the sense of American exceptionalism that we have. Before the 70's, you truly could come to the States and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, at least in terms of being paid better wages as you worked. China, too, had a revolution in the 70's, though, and with the new power of American distribution brought by the advent of Walmart, it became a cheap-goods producing powerhouse. I'm not exactly clear why this happened, but America stopped paying its workers more for more productivity, they instead were paid the same, even as Americans worked more and more hours, they were essentially paid the same wages, they didn't rise with costs of living, etc. etc. America became a huge debtor nation, because capitalist corporations figured out how to take the money they would've spent paying people more, and sold it to them as credit, which they could earn huge amounts of interest on, further bankrupting and burdening Americans with more work to do, for more hours, for no more pay.
A key moment for me, emotionally, was when Wolffe talked about the American worker having this kind of private reaction to the hard times, of blaming himself. He didn't get into the right school or get the right job, he isn't working hard enough. It really struck me how rigged the game was, getting us as a population to become overstressed, overworked, using the one thing that was sure to soothe us when we weren't working: by buying stuff, cheap crappy stuff, sold to us by the people who own our debt. For the first time, I felt like maybe my own senses of being overworked, underpaid, in over my head in debt, and just now starting to crawl an infinitesimal bit out of it, weren't my own fault, like I'd truly been lead to believe. Maybe my enjoyment of Apple products and Starbucks coffee and Hollywood movies and Netflix and the internet weren't solely because I'm a lazy, worthless consumer, wasting away at jobs that don't use my skill sets and underpay me for my time *(Definitely way less the case now, and I have to say, this doesn't apply to teaching when I was doing that, because I absolutely did not have that kind of soul-draining experience then-- rather a soul-enriching one.), that my values of hard work and excelling at everything that have been engrained in me since birth, are actually a response to a growing desperation in the system of capitalism itself. And we're living in a time where all that shit is hitting the fan, and maybe it's not MY fault, but ALL our faults, and actually more accurately mostly the decisions of the top tenth of a tenth of a percent of us, who profit most from the way everything is as it currently is.
These thoughts are very preliminarily sketched. I mostly took away that emotional relief, that I wasn't the only one feeling like I was overstressed and underpaid (though, again, now I'm doing much better, magically, in a very unique situation for someone my age in the field I'm in), and how surprised I am that I'm not surprised our system is actually rigged to do that. I thought it was just a theatre person reality, that the capitalist realities of play producing meant that our idealism and passion and love for what we do was going to take the place of actual payment and ability to focus on ONLY doing what we want to do, that we NEED a focus-splitting day job because theatre is about art, but needs commerce to survive, so you will not be paid much and will need to focus-split, but you'll still get to be a part of ART, which needs all of you to be done the best it can. So feel bad about not doing it your best, while you're scraping away at your crappy day job. But don't complain, because that's weak, and your fault for not being hard-working enough.
I actually do believe very strongly in the value of hard work, and I can take long hours and little resources like the rest of us. And I'm sure there are plenty of times where I am definitely being lazy and defeatist, instead of hunkering down and powering through. Not to diminish my human weaknesses at all. But maybe, just maybe, the story is a little more complicated than that, and I'm being set up, like we all are, to fail a little bit more than we would if we were given the right management, the right incentives to work, the right kind of job that gave us the right sense of ourselves. Maybe the mission is as important as the pay day, when you get down to it. Maybe believers make better workers.
There's a lot more to unpack in all this, but that's surmiseably what has been going on in my head. We've got an animal sense of fairness built in, actually, we aren't all wolves to each other, but we're also not living in the pack we thought we were living in, and we're very slow to realize just how rigged the game now is. I don't think it's the America we want to have, or want our children to be in. But the big question, of course, is how to change it, when it's keeping us just sated or distracted enough to keep itself alive. For now.
There's obviously much more to say about everything, but that's it for me for right now.
I first discovered the phrase used for my title "Man is a wolf to man" by watching this video about monkeys and other animals and their senses of fairness, found via the incredible Pig Iron Theatre Co.'s 2013 production of Pay Up tumblr. It jives very much with this hour and forty five minute long talk I listened to before the holiday by Richard Wolffe called Capitalism Hits the Fan, which I'll link via New Paradise Laboratories' FRAME post, where I found it. I might've been involved with getting it there, and I'm sure I found that link via a much-more-informed-than-me Facebook friend or Tumblr follower. I don't remember exactly how, but you can see it on the hyperlink above.
I think I'm sourcing these materials very much out of a sense of fairness to the organizations that are drawing my eye to inspiring content. As someone who's in sales, and very much wants to learn not only how to live an awake, aware life about the consumer choices I make, I also want to locate myself in a net of interdependent thinkers and coagulaters of information that I rely on to make whatever kinds of conclusions I make. Sourcing material becomes a kind of currency, in a way, a good faith to give you all the chance to see what it is I've seen, and make your own conclusions on it.
I should also note that I'm interested in practicing a fair amount of transparency in terms of my process. Not quite sure where it's heading. It's having an impact on my play, which I'm happy to say has actually started to want itself to be written, and so I'm taking the opportunity to lean into as much candor as possible, fully aware that that is still a performance, and me talking about it, and talking about talking about it, is still angling myself to be seen in a certain light, perhaps to cast shadow against things I don't want to be seen, or talked about. Not sure, at this juncture, if I can offer much in terms of clarity or coherent thoughts on that. I guess we hide what we hide, whether we want to or not. I'm starting to recognize in myself a certain lack of interest or awareness in really hiding a lot, though. I am stronger when I'm vulnerable, which I learned from Pig Iron's Summer Session clown training. It might be part of why I'm returning to this blog project, and letting my voice hang out there in the wind.
One free radical thought before I get going, though. I've made a timer for myself today. I'm seeing World War Z at 8:10pm tonight, likely solo, and I have a feeling the whole issue of man being wolf to man may come up. So this blog post is sort of like a repository for thoughts swirling in my head prior to seeing it. I've not read the book the movie is based on, though likely will after seeing the movie. I'm excited to be getting back more into reading.
But anyway, the point, about transparency and fairness, is that the assumption the TED talk on animal instances of fairness & caring for the wellbeing of others, working together, altruism, is that animals DON'T do that, that men are at their most bestial when they only seek out for themselves, and at their most human when they help others. Acknowledge others. Me wanting to share where I'm getting my thoughts from, so you can watch/read them and can make your own decisions, is a way of gesturing to you that I think you're as smart as I am (or, at least, I hope you feel that way) and I care about you not perceiving me as claiming this knowledge for myself, as coming from myself, somehow making my status above yours, intellectually. I hope the knowledge helps, in whatever way it can, because I do think a lot of the knowledge is helpful.
To surmise and distill hopefully not too reductively the argument of the TED animal talk, animals aren't all selfish bastards. Capuchin monkeys don't like it when one gets fed grapes (a superior food) and one cucumbers. They have an innate sense of fairness, or at least of when things are NOT fair. Chimps work together to bring food in for the both of them. Elephants, too. And while humans are obviously not animals, in many ways, our caring about fairness, about equality, justice, is perhaps more engrained and emotional, and less rational and idealistic, than we thought.
The TED animal talk, an anti-venom to the notion that man is a wolf to man, though, is being counteracted in my mind by the Capitalism Hits the Fan video, which tore down some very important ignorances I've had as to what the state of the United States and its economy is in. Definitely worth the full hour and forty five minute listen/watch, especially if you care about the Great Recession and the plight of the American worker beyond the political rhetoric. Richard Wolffe has an annoying voice, I will admit that, but he clarifies for me a lot I only had a hazy understanding of, about the US' history in terms of work-force and wages and the flawed nature of capitalism.
Basically, until the 1970's, America had been in a hundred and fifty year growth period in terms of both worker productivity and worker wages. Working Americans enjoyed a rising standard of living as they also became more productive at their work. It's an entirely unique situation in the history of the world, and it makes a lot of sense as to why we have the sense of American exceptionalism that we have. Before the 70's, you truly could come to the States and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, at least in terms of being paid better wages as you worked. China, too, had a revolution in the 70's, though, and with the new power of American distribution brought by the advent of Walmart, it became a cheap-goods producing powerhouse. I'm not exactly clear why this happened, but America stopped paying its workers more for more productivity, they instead were paid the same, even as Americans worked more and more hours, they were essentially paid the same wages, they didn't rise with costs of living, etc. etc. America became a huge debtor nation, because capitalist corporations figured out how to take the money they would've spent paying people more, and sold it to them as credit, which they could earn huge amounts of interest on, further bankrupting and burdening Americans with more work to do, for more hours, for no more pay.
A key moment for me, emotionally, was when Wolffe talked about the American worker having this kind of private reaction to the hard times, of blaming himself. He didn't get into the right school or get the right job, he isn't working hard enough. It really struck me how rigged the game was, getting us as a population to become overstressed, overworked, using the one thing that was sure to soothe us when we weren't working: by buying stuff, cheap crappy stuff, sold to us by the people who own our debt. For the first time, I felt like maybe my own senses of being overworked, underpaid, in over my head in debt, and just now starting to crawl an infinitesimal bit out of it, weren't my own fault, like I'd truly been lead to believe. Maybe my enjoyment of Apple products and Starbucks coffee and Hollywood movies and Netflix and the internet weren't solely because I'm a lazy, worthless consumer, wasting away at jobs that don't use my skill sets and underpay me for my time *(Definitely way less the case now, and I have to say, this doesn't apply to teaching when I was doing that, because I absolutely did not have that kind of soul-draining experience then-- rather a soul-enriching one.), that my values of hard work and excelling at everything that have been engrained in me since birth, are actually a response to a growing desperation in the system of capitalism itself. And we're living in a time where all that shit is hitting the fan, and maybe it's not MY fault, but ALL our faults, and actually more accurately mostly the decisions of the top tenth of a tenth of a percent of us, who profit most from the way everything is as it currently is.
These thoughts are very preliminarily sketched. I mostly took away that emotional relief, that I wasn't the only one feeling like I was overstressed and underpaid (though, again, now I'm doing much better, magically, in a very unique situation for someone my age in the field I'm in), and how surprised I am that I'm not surprised our system is actually rigged to do that. I thought it was just a theatre person reality, that the capitalist realities of play producing meant that our idealism and passion and love for what we do was going to take the place of actual payment and ability to focus on ONLY doing what we want to do, that we NEED a focus-splitting day job because theatre is about art, but needs commerce to survive, so you will not be paid much and will need to focus-split, but you'll still get to be a part of ART, which needs all of you to be done the best it can. So feel bad about not doing it your best, while you're scraping away at your crappy day job. But don't complain, because that's weak, and your fault for not being hard-working enough.
I actually do believe very strongly in the value of hard work, and I can take long hours and little resources like the rest of us. And I'm sure there are plenty of times where I am definitely being lazy and defeatist, instead of hunkering down and powering through. Not to diminish my human weaknesses at all. But maybe, just maybe, the story is a little more complicated than that, and I'm being set up, like we all are, to fail a little bit more than we would if we were given the right management, the right incentives to work, the right kind of job that gave us the right sense of ourselves. Maybe the mission is as important as the pay day, when you get down to it. Maybe believers make better workers.
There's a lot more to unpack in all this, but that's surmiseably what has been going on in my head. We've got an animal sense of fairness built in, actually, we aren't all wolves to each other, but we're also not living in the pack we thought we were living in, and we're very slow to realize just how rigged the game now is. I don't think it's the America we want to have, or want our children to be in. But the big question, of course, is how to change it, when it's keeping us just sated or distracted enough to keep itself alive. For now.
There's obviously much more to say about everything, but that's it for me for right now.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
A Move to New York, or, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
Hey.
It's been a while.
I'm at this again, a little bit.
They say when you want to start a diet you should never tell people, because then your brain will experience the reward of getting the approval of others for dieting, which'll short circuit your motivation to actually diet and lose weight. As long as you feel the short-term reward of approval, you'll feel, subconsciously or consciously, that you've already won, which, tragically, shoots you in the foot in terms of actually winning. You actually lose, which reinforces the negative thinking that might've gotten you in that state-of-needing-to-diet-which-you-'re-just-now-climbing-back-out-of-by-deciding-to-diet, and you're back at the beginning of the whole torrid self-hate affair.
So, basically, the whole counting chickens before they hatch thing bears phenomenal, actual subconscious weight.
Beware.
//
It's a rare gift to notice when you're being changed.
Not a gift as in a talent, like, "look at me I've noticed I've changed," but more that it actually is a literal gift, a present, to be present enough to notice your quality of daily life is different, and in my case, is graciously improved.
From over here, now, New York Mark can look back at Philly Mark, and even further back at Walla Walla Mark, and see just how far he's come. In terms of my day-to-day wellness, it's quite far, though there's a lot still to do.
As there always is, I imagine.
So let me start my saying that there were basically two powerful and interconnected forces that allowed me to recognize that I was no longer over there in the worse place,
that let me see where I'd been, and where I am.
The first, of course, is the physical move to New York.
And that move came about very suddenly, though I'd been looking to move and preparing to move for a while, working like a dog really to be able to afford it, but I didn't really need to move until the end of June, when I was done at my Philly apartment. Jess, my girlfriend, was moving at the beginning of June, and I was going to help her, but if we needed to be in two separate cities for one more month, that would be okay.
Instead, on an off-chance job app, a response to a Playbill ad for a telesales assistant manager, on a day after I was already in New York watching Jess act in a reading of a friend's new play, I went and interviewed before jumping on a bus back to NYC after what felt like my 15th rejection just the week before.
I was in a state of supreme "fuck it"ness.
I had built up the last three big interviews I'd gotten, which were all directly involving artistic fields I aspired to be in, directing, literary, dramaturgy, in a way that I now see as incredibly insecure. I went in to these interviews quivering, terribly desperate to be approved.
I should throw a quick bone to those of us (all of us, I'd say, at some point) who have the need to be approved. It is a deeply human thing, especially when you're younger. Especially when you don't quite have the "fuck it" sense you might need to achieve, in spite of people not caring, or not connecting, or just not hearing what you need them to hear, or care, or connect to. And I will say that giving your approval and receiving someone else's approval is a wonderfully loving thing to do, and when you can, I implore you to do it. We're all quite busy privately tearing ourselves down, and building each other up is perhaps more important than we're comfortable with culturally.
Anyway, for some reason, I banished the usually overactive part of my personality that doubts everything I do, and I interviewed, and I was hired on the spot. I sold him, my boss would later say. It was an incredible and accidental event of self-confidence, but it triggered my boss holding me to that sense of self-confidence, which, after a painful first week of work, I began to learn I could summon quite regularly, and I've been improving on that point ever since.
Moving to New York and working in sales, in this particular way of doing sales which is both more effective and more difficult than the way I was doing sales in Philly, has woken up a part of me I'd desperately needed to wake up -- the desire to work, and work hard. I'd gotten shamefully lazy, focusing my energy only on my relationship, and spending most of the time I was apart from her bored and unmotivated at work, or anxious and depressed over not creating anything, but doing very little to create.
The second thing I did to kickstart this internal shift was actually just read a book. A biography of David Foster Wallace called Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max. I picked it up as a hunch, following finishing David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, which I read a few months after finishing Infinite Jest after an actor friend of mine in Theresa Rebeck's Seminar told me Wallace put himself metafictionally in Pale King. Wallace never finished Pale King, he killed himself after working on it for ten years, and still being nowhere close to finishing it. He arranged what he had of the novel very carefully in his garage, chapters in neat piles, disks and computer harddrives beside them, along with notebooks of notes, etc., before hanging himself on the back porch. He did this only maybe 2-3 years after his incredible 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, fan-titled This Is Water, which is still a huge source of inspiration for me whenever I'm succumbing to the negative thought-spirals of depression. Wallace had gone off his medication, and never quite found his balance again. He fought with depression and addiction his whole life. All of his works and his life story speak so deeply and keenly to me, and I think he has a lot to say on stage, which I want to craft for him.
The description of his college years, particularly where he first began to really struggle with his anxiety and depression, put me back into my own college days, in a very personal, horrible way. Being in a much healthier, happier place now, it was almost overwhelming to recognize how tortured I'd been, all four years really, not just senior year, and I only was now able to do that by hearing about how someone else handled his own disease in his own way.
To be completely clear and fair, I was never suicidal, and while I had some dark moments, I didn't suffer to the same degree that he did. For anyone who reads the book, I am definitely identifying by proxy, not by specifically what he went through. I'm not claiming I'm a genius writer, either.
But recognizing the pain I was in was a function of me not being in that pain now. Recognizing now how bad it had been then was only possible because I wasn't there anymore. Perhaps I am quite a bit happier and healthier than I realized.
But the major thing the book did for me was reawaken an awareness of a part of my identity I think I've long kept hidden, embarrassed, insecure, unsure of how to claim, desperate to discount. I tell people all the time that I'm a director, a performer, a self-producer, a theatre-maker, and then I sneak in at the end a little bit that I'm a writer. Like, you know, when it calls for it. And even then I'm not terribly assertive about it.
The book reminded me that actually, fully, truly, I am a writer. I love to write, I love to create worlds, I love to create language, I love to be in charge of crafting moments, and while I've had a love for directing that grew out of college (I recently reminded my college roommate Graham about the moment we were walking home from a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was so furious at the time about how the production was done, on a dramaturgical level, and he, frustrated with my fury, in a moment of now-self-historic import, asked "WHY do you CARE so much?!?!" and I answered before thinking "I JUST DO!!!") I have also had a love of writing, a love I only furtively engaged with in college, never to the serious extent of study I needed to in order to really grow.
So now that I'm in a new city, with a whole new schedule that affords me quite a bit of down time, at least for now, and I have a chance to rebrand myself a bit, I'm going to take back a part of myself I've long felt too insecure to hold onto. I regret not thinking of myself more actively, more fully, a WRITER while I was in Philly, of course because I did actually write and create. And many of my friends might be looking at me like WHY IS THIS A SURPRISE TO YOU? OF COURSE YOU WRITE but I have to say, I honestly just never allowed myself to admit it fully. Those of you who do, I love and respect you. And I acknowledge I've been more than a little silly.
So those are some of the things that've been going on within me recently, that I'm just now able to process, a little bit. I've internally made some decisions to help me explore, expand, and work fucking hard, on this new acceptance of what I truly want to do, as a creator. But like the whole admitting-the-diet-to-get-the-approval thing, I'm going to keep the specifics to myself. I do want to share my happiness over this self-realization, though, and I welcome your well-wishes as I extend my own to you. I hope you are peeking over the edge at something new within yourself, too.
It's been a while.
I'm at this again, a little bit.
They say when you want to start a diet you should never tell people, because then your brain will experience the reward of getting the approval of others for dieting, which'll short circuit your motivation to actually diet and lose weight. As long as you feel the short-term reward of approval, you'll feel, subconsciously or consciously, that you've already won, which, tragically, shoots you in the foot in terms of actually winning. You actually lose, which reinforces the negative thinking that might've gotten you in that state-of-needing-to-diet-which-you-'re-just-now-climbing-back-out-of-by-deciding-to-diet, and you're back at the beginning of the whole torrid self-hate affair.
So, basically, the whole counting chickens before they hatch thing bears phenomenal, actual subconscious weight.
Beware.
//
It's a rare gift to notice when you're being changed.
Not a gift as in a talent, like, "look at me I've noticed I've changed," but more that it actually is a literal gift, a present, to be present enough to notice your quality of daily life is different, and in my case, is graciously improved.
From over here, now, New York Mark can look back at Philly Mark, and even further back at Walla Walla Mark, and see just how far he's come. In terms of my day-to-day wellness, it's quite far, though there's a lot still to do.
As there always is, I imagine.
So let me start my saying that there were basically two powerful and interconnected forces that allowed me to recognize that I was no longer over there in the worse place,
that let me see where I'd been, and where I am.
The first, of course, is the physical move to New York.
And that move came about very suddenly, though I'd been looking to move and preparing to move for a while, working like a dog really to be able to afford it, but I didn't really need to move until the end of June, when I was done at my Philly apartment. Jess, my girlfriend, was moving at the beginning of June, and I was going to help her, but if we needed to be in two separate cities for one more month, that would be okay.
Instead, on an off-chance job app, a response to a Playbill ad for a telesales assistant manager, on a day after I was already in New York watching Jess act in a reading of a friend's new play, I went and interviewed before jumping on a bus back to NYC after what felt like my 15th rejection just the week before.
I was in a state of supreme "fuck it"ness.
I had built up the last three big interviews I'd gotten, which were all directly involving artistic fields I aspired to be in, directing, literary, dramaturgy, in a way that I now see as incredibly insecure. I went in to these interviews quivering, terribly desperate to be approved.
I should throw a quick bone to those of us (all of us, I'd say, at some point) who have the need to be approved. It is a deeply human thing, especially when you're younger. Especially when you don't quite have the "fuck it" sense you might need to achieve, in spite of people not caring, or not connecting, or just not hearing what you need them to hear, or care, or connect to. And I will say that giving your approval and receiving someone else's approval is a wonderfully loving thing to do, and when you can, I implore you to do it. We're all quite busy privately tearing ourselves down, and building each other up is perhaps more important than we're comfortable with culturally.
Anyway, for some reason, I banished the usually overactive part of my personality that doubts everything I do, and I interviewed, and I was hired on the spot. I sold him, my boss would later say. It was an incredible and accidental event of self-confidence, but it triggered my boss holding me to that sense of self-confidence, which, after a painful first week of work, I began to learn I could summon quite regularly, and I've been improving on that point ever since.
Moving to New York and working in sales, in this particular way of doing sales which is both more effective and more difficult than the way I was doing sales in Philly, has woken up a part of me I'd desperately needed to wake up -- the desire to work, and work hard. I'd gotten shamefully lazy, focusing my energy only on my relationship, and spending most of the time I was apart from her bored and unmotivated at work, or anxious and depressed over not creating anything, but doing very little to create.
The second thing I did to kickstart this internal shift was actually just read a book. A biography of David Foster Wallace called Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max. I picked it up as a hunch, following finishing David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, which I read a few months after finishing Infinite Jest after an actor friend of mine in Theresa Rebeck's Seminar told me Wallace put himself metafictionally in Pale King. Wallace never finished Pale King, he killed himself after working on it for ten years, and still being nowhere close to finishing it. He arranged what he had of the novel very carefully in his garage, chapters in neat piles, disks and computer harddrives beside them, along with notebooks of notes, etc., before hanging himself on the back porch. He did this only maybe 2-3 years after his incredible 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, fan-titled This Is Water, which is still a huge source of inspiration for me whenever I'm succumbing to the negative thought-spirals of depression. Wallace had gone off his medication, and never quite found his balance again. He fought with depression and addiction his whole life. All of his works and his life story speak so deeply and keenly to me, and I think he has a lot to say on stage, which I want to craft for him.
The description of his college years, particularly where he first began to really struggle with his anxiety and depression, put me back into my own college days, in a very personal, horrible way. Being in a much healthier, happier place now, it was almost overwhelming to recognize how tortured I'd been, all four years really, not just senior year, and I only was now able to do that by hearing about how someone else handled his own disease in his own way.
To be completely clear and fair, I was never suicidal, and while I had some dark moments, I didn't suffer to the same degree that he did. For anyone who reads the book, I am definitely identifying by proxy, not by specifically what he went through. I'm not claiming I'm a genius writer, either.
But recognizing the pain I was in was a function of me not being in that pain now. Recognizing now how bad it had been then was only possible because I wasn't there anymore. Perhaps I am quite a bit happier and healthier than I realized.
But the major thing the book did for me was reawaken an awareness of a part of my identity I think I've long kept hidden, embarrassed, insecure, unsure of how to claim, desperate to discount. I tell people all the time that I'm a director, a performer, a self-producer, a theatre-maker, and then I sneak in at the end a little bit that I'm a writer. Like, you know, when it calls for it. And even then I'm not terribly assertive about it.
The book reminded me that actually, fully, truly, I am a writer. I love to write, I love to create worlds, I love to create language, I love to be in charge of crafting moments, and while I've had a love for directing that grew out of college (I recently reminded my college roommate Graham about the moment we were walking home from a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was so furious at the time about how the production was done, on a dramaturgical level, and he, frustrated with my fury, in a moment of now-self-historic import, asked "WHY do you CARE so much?!?!" and I answered before thinking "I JUST DO!!!") I have also had a love of writing, a love I only furtively engaged with in college, never to the serious extent of study I needed to in order to really grow.
So now that I'm in a new city, with a whole new schedule that affords me quite a bit of down time, at least for now, and I have a chance to rebrand myself a bit, I'm going to take back a part of myself I've long felt too insecure to hold onto. I regret not thinking of myself more actively, more fully, a WRITER while I was in Philly, of course because I did actually write and create. And many of my friends might be looking at me like WHY IS THIS A SURPRISE TO YOU? OF COURSE YOU WRITE but I have to say, I honestly just never allowed myself to admit it fully. Those of you who do, I love and respect you. And I acknowledge I've been more than a little silly.
So those are some of the things that've been going on within me recently, that I'm just now able to process, a little bit. I've internally made some decisions to help me explore, expand, and work fucking hard, on this new acceptance of what I truly want to do, as a creator. But like the whole admitting-the-diet-to-get-the-approval thing, I'm going to keep the specifics to myself. I do want to share my happiness over this self-realization, though, and I welcome your well-wishes as I extend my own to you. I hope you are peeking over the edge at something new within yourself, too.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Goddamnit David Foster Wallace
When I finished reading Infinite Jest I have to admit I was disappointed.
Are you kidding? I invested myself into a 1000 pages for that to be the ending?
I remember distinctly feeling the urge to go back to the beginning,
To start again, and read the whole thing,
To see if I could figure it out.
Then I stopped myself.
My rational brain took over.
1000 pages is long enough to read a book, that is over the appropriate length as is.
You shouldn't reread it,
The point must be you'll never figure it out.
He must be saying life is cruelly nonsensical in how it ends.
He killed himself eventually.
It makes sense.
A few months later (now) I am working on a show about writers
And one of the characters admits to writing a couple thousand pages
All on this one novel he's been working on.
All on one novel. A double David Foster Wallace.
Indeed he is treated like a genius.
So on a break in the green room,
I get to talking with the actor playing the DDFW
And mention this fact
(Sort of a tricky assistant director way to give a non-note,
To express passion about a fact that may not have come to light quite the same way before,
In hopes of inspiring the sense you wish was there with what you see--)
Anyway,
He starts to talk about Infinite Jest, which he's also read,
And mentions how after HE finished reading the book he ALSO was let down,
And went online.
I went online, too, but half-heartedly. Like, it felt like cheating,
To read what other people thought.
I wanted to keep my experience with it to myself.
I think I was a little afraid I was too dumb to have really read it.
Well, so, but apparently I am a little dumb
Because I should've followed my instincts.
The last scene of IJ isn't the end at all--
It seems DFW wanted you to go back to the beginning
Where cleverly hid within the first few chapters
was the so called "final" scene
Where Hal and Gately dig the antidote "entertainment" out from Hal's dad's skull
A very Hamletian image
Which, when you first read,
& that's made reference, you don't remember
Because you didn't know what you were reading.
So the sick joke is that Infinite Jest IS a kind of infinite jest,
You're supposed to read it start to finish to start to finish,
And perhaps do so infinitely--
But no one ever will, because the book is famous for being given up on
Too difficult, too dense, too complex, too sick, too silly, too giving-legitimacy-to-the-inner-turmoil-of-the-privileged--
I remember randomly bumping into a friend at the airport
Waiting to fly home to California for Christmas
And we got to talking,
And I mentioned I was reading the book,
Sort of surreptitiously showing off to him about how smart & intellectual & hipster & cool I was,
To read such a difficult literary book,
And I remember him being like "Aw man, I hate that book,
I hate how it coolifies that way of thinking, you know?
It makes depressive and sad thoughts really cool,
When they're not, you know?
I feel like it's no wonder he killed himself.
The book was just too unnecessarily complicated, I stopped after about halfway."
And I know I felt the same way at times,
Though I also know I felt rewarded for taking on the challenge,
Like, he wanted to test readers, to see if they'd follow even if they didn't quite understand,
Or read even when they were sort of being pushed NOT to read,
DFW said in an interview that he felt like he set out to write a really sad novel,
And was surprised everyone thought it was so funny.
A hyper-aware hyper-aware guy.
Someone who wants to control how he is seen.
Someone who plays a part.
An actor.
There's a part in Infinite Jest where Hal postulates
that Hamlet is only pretending to pretend he's mad--
That he uses the excuse of performance to really let himself be crazy
He (David, Hal, Hamlet, my airport friend, my actor friend, myself)
Doth protest too much, methinks--
Are you kidding? I invested myself into a 1000 pages for that to be the ending?
I remember distinctly feeling the urge to go back to the beginning,
To start again, and read the whole thing,
To see if I could figure it out.
Then I stopped myself.
My rational brain took over.
1000 pages is long enough to read a book, that is over the appropriate length as is.
You shouldn't reread it,
The point must be you'll never figure it out.
He must be saying life is cruelly nonsensical in how it ends.
He killed himself eventually.
It makes sense.
A few months later (now) I am working on a show about writers
And one of the characters admits to writing a couple thousand pages
All on this one novel he's been working on.
All on one novel. A double David Foster Wallace.
Indeed he is treated like a genius.
So on a break in the green room,
I get to talking with the actor playing the DDFW
And mention this fact
(Sort of a tricky assistant director way to give a non-note,
To express passion about a fact that may not have come to light quite the same way before,
In hopes of inspiring the sense you wish was there with what you see--)
Anyway,
He starts to talk about Infinite Jest, which he's also read,
And mentions how after HE finished reading the book he ALSO was let down,
And went online.
I went online, too, but half-heartedly. Like, it felt like cheating,
To read what other people thought.
I wanted to keep my experience with it to myself.
I think I was a little afraid I was too dumb to have really read it.
Well, so, but apparently I am a little dumb
Because I should've followed my instincts.
The last scene of IJ isn't the end at all--
It seems DFW wanted you to go back to the beginning
Where cleverly hid within the first few chapters
was the so called "final" scene
Where Hal and Gately dig the antidote "entertainment" out from Hal's dad's skull
A very Hamletian image
Which, when you first read,
& that's made reference, you don't remember
Because you didn't know what you were reading.
So the sick joke is that Infinite Jest IS a kind of infinite jest,
You're supposed to read it start to finish to start to finish,
And perhaps do so infinitely--
But no one ever will, because the book is famous for being given up on
Too difficult, too dense, too complex, too sick, too silly, too giving-legitimacy-to-the-inner-turmoil-of-the-privileged--
I remember randomly bumping into a friend at the airport
Waiting to fly home to California for Christmas
And we got to talking,
And I mentioned I was reading the book,
Sort of surreptitiously showing off to him about how smart & intellectual & hipster & cool I was,
To read such a difficult literary book,
And I remember him being like "Aw man, I hate that book,
I hate how it coolifies that way of thinking, you know?
It makes depressive and sad thoughts really cool,
When they're not, you know?
I feel like it's no wonder he killed himself.
The book was just too unnecessarily complicated, I stopped after about halfway."
And I know I felt the same way at times,
Though I also know I felt rewarded for taking on the challenge,
Like, he wanted to test readers, to see if they'd follow even if they didn't quite understand,
Or read even when they were sort of being pushed NOT to read,
DFW said in an interview that he felt like he set out to write a really sad novel,
And was surprised everyone thought it was so funny.
A hyper-aware hyper-aware guy.
Someone who wants to control how he is seen.
Someone who plays a part.
An actor.
There's a part in Infinite Jest where Hal postulates
that Hamlet is only pretending to pretend he's mad--
That he uses the excuse of performance to really let himself be crazy
He (David, Hal, Hamlet, my airport friend, my actor friend, myself)
Doth protest too much, methinks--
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Sometimes you need a mirror
Stand in front of an audience.
There's a full length mirror standing among them.
Maybe a few.
Maybe for you.
There are times when
I am really fucking angry.
Is that what it means to be a man?
REVENGE THIS FOUL
AND MOST UNNATURAL
MURDER
I know it's not acceptable for men to show any emotion
At least that's what I've understood to be the case
Growing up
Even for my father
Who's by no means a meathead or testostertank
or war hero or anything like that
Even for an accomplished doctor
An intellectual
A goofy nerdy musician
To feel is to fail
So don't "do" it
Don't perform it
Keep it inside
You keep it to yourself
You stay strong for the ones who are relying on you
No one wants to see their leader overwhelmed
No one wants to watch tears fall, snot clot,
pain tourniquet out of your chest
But
I'd like to suggest
Or
Rather
I believe it is the case
That one emotion men are culturally forgiven for displaying
Openly and in front of other men
and women particularly
Is rage
TOO HOT, TOO HOT
Take any king, take any leader, any tyrant, anyone in charge
Yelling, commanding, swelling chest and pulsing veins
This
Gets
Things
DONE
Isn't impotent rage like the standard for men?
It's what we have access to
The "I'm not gonna take this shit anymore"
The "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"
The "This. IS. SPARTAAAA!!!!"
"FREEDOM!!!"
"YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!"
In the fantasies we watch these men then get shit done.
"GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!!!!!!"
Battle cries.
Rebel yells.
Exhale all the breath you've got, batter it against your vocal cords,
Send the enemy running
Because you are full of might and terror
And you must be obeyed.
To be a man do you need to be obeyed?
What happens when you're not?
What happens when you don't get what you want?
When no one will listen?
When no one understands?
When you're a cypher, even to yourself?
When your uncle's killed your dad in the most shameful, underhanded way,
And is fucking your mom, married your mom, and wants you to play nice?
To stop being sad? To stop FEELING?
To feel is to fail.
What do you do? What do you do?
What if you don't know what to do?
When you yell at your audience
Aren't you really watching yourself?
SEEing yourself be powerful
Be mighty
Be strong
Be a man
Performing
Does anger allow us to DO something
Does anger allow us to see
our fragmented reflection in the faces of those who fear us
That we are perceivable?
That we are seen?
That we could be understood?
And how often does that really work?
That we really feel understood?
How often does yelling and anger and rage lead to destruction and pain and no going back
That is of course a simple question.
Sure, the rest is silence,
But the conversation ends.
Everybody, men and women, of course, we all need to get mad sometimes
Hawks and handsaws
We all need to act out, to wave our arms, raise our voices, feel ourselves being seen, being heard
We need to let the feelings out we can't express
Because sometimes we can't express the horrible things we never thought we'd feel
Until they need to just express themselves
Sometimes we can't know what we think until we see what we say,
to borrow an expression that's not mine.
But.
But.
But.
Hold on there, cowboys.
If we were able to express even battered shards of how we feel as we go
To people outside ourselves
If we felt we were heard more regularly
If men were allowed, expected, even, to be intelligible outside of themselves
Would we really need to kill everyone and end the play
Only the last to fall?
To feel is to fail,
But since when is failure worse than death?
Does Hamlet really speak to anyone but himself?
Is he not perhaps holding that mirror up, not to nature, but only to himself?
There's a full length mirror standing among them.
Maybe a few.
Maybe for you.
There are times when
I am really fucking angry.
Is that what it means to be a man?
REVENGE THIS FOUL
AND MOST UNNATURAL
MURDER
I know it's not acceptable for men to show any emotion
At least that's what I've understood to be the case
Growing up
Even for my father
Who's by no means a meathead or testostertank
or war hero or anything like that
Even for an accomplished doctor
An intellectual
A goofy nerdy musician
To feel is to fail
So don't "do" it
Don't perform it
Keep it inside
You keep it to yourself
You stay strong for the ones who are relying on you
No one wants to see their leader overwhelmed
No one wants to watch tears fall, snot clot,
pain tourniquet out of your chest
But
I'd like to suggest
Or
Rather
I believe it is the case
That one emotion men are culturally forgiven for displaying
Openly and in front of other men
and women particularly
Is rage
TOO HOT, TOO HOT
Take any king, take any leader, any tyrant, anyone in charge
Yelling, commanding, swelling chest and pulsing veins
This
Gets
Things
DONE
Isn't impotent rage like the standard for men?
It's what we have access to
The "I'm not gonna take this shit anymore"
The "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"
The "This. IS. SPARTAAAA!!!!"
"FREEDOM!!!"
"YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!"
In the fantasies we watch these men then get shit done.
"GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!!!!!!"
Battle cries.
Rebel yells.
Exhale all the breath you've got, batter it against your vocal cords,
Send the enemy running
Because you are full of might and terror
And you must be obeyed.
To be a man do you need to be obeyed?
What happens when you're not?
What happens when you don't get what you want?
When no one will listen?
When no one understands?
When you're a cypher, even to yourself?
When your uncle's killed your dad in the most shameful, underhanded way,
And is fucking your mom, married your mom, and wants you to play nice?
To stop being sad? To stop FEELING?
To feel is to fail.
What do you do? What do you do?
What if you don't know what to do?
When you yell at your audience
Aren't you really watching yourself?
SEEing yourself be powerful
Be mighty
Be strong
Be a man
Performing
Does anger allow us to DO something
Does anger allow us to see
our fragmented reflection in the faces of those who fear us
That we are perceivable?
That we are seen?
That we could be understood?
And how often does that really work?
That we really feel understood?
How often does yelling and anger and rage lead to destruction and pain and no going back
That is of course a simple question.
Sure, the rest is silence,
But the conversation ends.
Everybody, men and women, of course, we all need to get mad sometimes
Hawks and handsaws
We all need to act out, to wave our arms, raise our voices, feel ourselves being seen, being heard
We need to let the feelings out we can't express
Because sometimes we can't express the horrible things we never thought we'd feel
Until they need to just express themselves
Sometimes we can't know what we think until we see what we say,
to borrow an expression that's not mine.
But.
But.
But.
Hold on there, cowboys.
If we were able to express even battered shards of how we feel as we go
To people outside ourselves
If we felt we were heard more regularly
If men were allowed, expected, even, to be intelligible outside of themselves
Would we really need to kill everyone and end the play
Only the last to fall?
To feel is to fail,
But since when is failure worse than death?
Does Hamlet really speak to anyone but himself?
Is he not perhaps holding that mirror up, not to nature, but only to himself?
Friday, February 22, 2013
Play, meet audience
I've been scurrying from teaching and telemarketing to PTC these past few days, working as a literary assistant and general helper for the PTC@Play new works festival. We're about halfway through.
Being a "literary assistant" for this means basically being the stage directions reader for the readings you've been assigned to, as well as the person who picks up out of town artists, gets them their W9s and their checks, and generally helps out with whatever needs to get done, ushering, table lifting, etc. It's the kind of role I know well, especially having worked with Play Penn as an artistic intern a few summers ago and as an Arden Apprentice back in the 2009-2010 season.
Being able to be a literary assistant now is a huge gift. I can actually read stage directions with clarity and breath now. I have confidence I didn't have. I know what to worry about and what not to. I worked on Bruce Graham's reading of Stello & Lou, the opening for the festival, and I just had a blast. It was easy! Since when is anything in the theatre easy??! But Bruce really had done all the work.
I don't think we knew quite how special the reading would be until we were up there in front of the audience. The actors of course turned up the juice. And the first joke gets thrown, and boom! The audience just erupts in laughter. ERUPTS. And that energy just kept perpetuating itself.
It was like the play and the audience were on a first date, and everything was just CRACKLING. It was hot, it was easy, it was fast, it was incredibly fun. What a great night.
It's one of those plays that's just a coupla guys and a lady talkin', but you can't help but be drawn into their rich emotional worlds hidden just beneath the acerbic one-liners and South Philly parables. You laugh and cry, each almost as easily. I certainly did up there on stage.
It was damned fun to read, and all I was doing was helping along. Stage directions are just there to help the audience imagine the visual action. They're there to make the process easy, and there to keep the energy afloat in between dialogue.
And you could FEEL that energy rushing back and forth between actors & audience, easily, again and again, the build up to the next joke, the next observation, the next argument in someone's logic, and then there'd be the release, the laugh, the sigh, the knowing snicker. It was incredible to be up there, sitting right beside these actors as they do their thing, and to feel so acutely the audience responding. And I'd just cut in every now and then to help the story along.
It felt good to feel so good about something like this, actually. Because I think this play and this audience knew what mattered. It was all about connections, between the characters, between us.
In a way, it became a great way for me to have a brief audience of myself. Seeing how far I'd come since I first started assisting in staged readings, etc. Seeing my confidence and ease, my focus on what I feel matters, it was a nice date with myself, too.
I'm glad I get to be along for the ride.
More on more with regards to this soon, I'm sure.
Being a "literary assistant" for this means basically being the stage directions reader for the readings you've been assigned to, as well as the person who picks up out of town artists, gets them their W9s and their checks, and generally helps out with whatever needs to get done, ushering, table lifting, etc. It's the kind of role I know well, especially having worked with Play Penn as an artistic intern a few summers ago and as an Arden Apprentice back in the 2009-2010 season.
Being able to be a literary assistant now is a huge gift. I can actually read stage directions with clarity and breath now. I have confidence I didn't have. I know what to worry about and what not to. I worked on Bruce Graham's reading of Stello & Lou, the opening for the festival, and I just had a blast. It was easy! Since when is anything in the theatre easy??! But Bruce really had done all the work.
I don't think we knew quite how special the reading would be until we were up there in front of the audience. The actors of course turned up the juice. And the first joke gets thrown, and boom! The audience just erupts in laughter. ERUPTS. And that energy just kept perpetuating itself.
It was like the play and the audience were on a first date, and everything was just CRACKLING. It was hot, it was easy, it was fast, it was incredibly fun. What a great night.
It's one of those plays that's just a coupla guys and a lady talkin', but you can't help but be drawn into their rich emotional worlds hidden just beneath the acerbic one-liners and South Philly parables. You laugh and cry, each almost as easily. I certainly did up there on stage.
It was damned fun to read, and all I was doing was helping along. Stage directions are just there to help the audience imagine the visual action. They're there to make the process easy, and there to keep the energy afloat in between dialogue.
And you could FEEL that energy rushing back and forth between actors & audience, easily, again and again, the build up to the next joke, the next observation, the next argument in someone's logic, and then there'd be the release, the laugh, the sigh, the knowing snicker. It was incredible to be up there, sitting right beside these actors as they do their thing, and to feel so acutely the audience responding. And I'd just cut in every now and then to help the story along.
It felt good to feel so good about something like this, actually. Because I think this play and this audience knew what mattered. It was all about connections, between the characters, between us.
In a way, it became a great way for me to have a brief audience of myself. Seeing how far I'd come since I first started assisting in staged readings, etc. Seeing my confidence and ease, my focus on what I feel matters, it was a nice date with myself, too.
I'm glad I get to be along for the ride.
More on more with regards to this soon, I'm sure.
Decisions, decisions (1/?)
Why do we decide to do the things we do?
How do we arrive at those decisions?
God do I agonize over that all the time.
As a director (and artist, really), decisions are kind of everything. From the moment you commit yourself to a project, you're making countless decisions. Who to work with. How to frame the production. What you care about. What you can afford to care about. What you can't afford not to.
Sometimes these decisions aren't really decisions. Like, not actively. You don't debate back and forth between separate & distinct options and come to a rational conclusion about which option is best. A lot of a production, or a life, really, can feel inevitable. There wasn't a choice between apples and oranges. There were only, always pears. I feel that way about love, too. A lot of times you say yes before you even know why. And always you are forced to defend decisions you never even knew you made.
I've been thinking a bit about making firm decisions as a culturally-masculine trait. It's at least something that I feel expected of as a man. Being a Decider. Being confident in my decisions. Sticking by what you do, not wallowing in possibilities, being firm and strong and, well, decisive.
Hiding in there is the notion that I have to make rational decisions, too. Men & emotions aren't really supposed to coexist, in this Culture of Masculinity World, except in the case of anger and frustration as a natural result of testing a man. So feeling bad about decisions, being unsure, feeling lost, feeling afraid, these don't really mesh with an understanding of men as mountains. Mountains don't feel. They stand.
Now the work I like to do can function quite against making decisions this way, sort of unilaterally, in a top-down hierarchical fashion. Knowing in advance sort of defeats the purpose of experimental theatre -- then where's the experiment? Even the most traditional play I start by trying to locate the places where I don't know how to solve the problems it presents. Decide as I may in advance, it's really the process of doing the thing that unlocks what these potentially infinite moments are.
Certainly setting framework and limits on creativity fosters clarity, fosters specificity, and can foster quite a lot of creative growth. You have to kill the notion of ALL ideas to find which of THE ideas your piece is actually working with.
The actual has to kill the potential. Sad, I know, but true.
So, to kill a few potentials.
I am moving to New York City this summer.
It's a decision I made over several months, not knowing what would happen with grad school, not knowing what will happen with the other opportunities I've applied for, nor really knowing if I was ready to go when I decided.
I made the decision as emotionally and intuitively as I did rationally. The woman I love is moving there, and I want to be closer than a 2 hour 2 train ($33 roundtrip) ride away. I want to start building my life with her. We both want that.
And I think there's a lot of stigma and cynicism against that? Like, it's sort of a role reversal, in a way, for a man to move for a woman & her career. I mean, it's not to say I'm not also moving for my career, which is at such an indeterminate state at the moment it really could go anywhere.
So, I'm moving because of that state of indeterminacy.
I'm moving for the new jungle gym.
I am moving to be challenged by the sheer size and scale of New York.
I'm moving to be challenged by the competitiveness,
the cutthroatness, the danger, the madness, the stress.
I'm moving for the opportunity and moving for the change.
I'm moving for the move, in a way.
Which I think is okay.
Which isn't to say I'll be leaving Philly behind.
Cue that half-measured indeterminacy.
I'll still be back.
Particularly for opportunities that keep pushing me forward.
I think that's okay, too.
In all ways, I'd prefer to define my own limits.
I recognize fully that I've very little control over a lot of things.
So, rather than jump to the anger and frustration mode when I am being tested,
I'd like to sit
In this state of not-knowing
And feel along the walls for what I can.
I'm going to write a lot more about decision-making and masculinity and moving and art and everything, but I definitely want to put something up on this blog as it's been far too long since I last decided to post. If there's a firmness to my decision-making I want to bring out for the future, it's in getting out from under my covers and keeping writing.
A daily decision-making challenge.
How do we arrive at those decisions?
God do I agonize over that all the time.
As a director (and artist, really), decisions are kind of everything. From the moment you commit yourself to a project, you're making countless decisions. Who to work with. How to frame the production. What you care about. What you can afford to care about. What you can't afford not to.
Sometimes these decisions aren't really decisions. Like, not actively. You don't debate back and forth between separate & distinct options and come to a rational conclusion about which option is best. A lot of a production, or a life, really, can feel inevitable. There wasn't a choice between apples and oranges. There were only, always pears. I feel that way about love, too. A lot of times you say yes before you even know why. And always you are forced to defend decisions you never even knew you made.
I've been thinking a bit about making firm decisions as a culturally-masculine trait. It's at least something that I feel expected of as a man. Being a Decider. Being confident in my decisions. Sticking by what you do, not wallowing in possibilities, being firm and strong and, well, decisive.
Hiding in there is the notion that I have to make rational decisions, too. Men & emotions aren't really supposed to coexist, in this Culture of Masculinity World, except in the case of anger and frustration as a natural result of testing a man. So feeling bad about decisions, being unsure, feeling lost, feeling afraid, these don't really mesh with an understanding of men as mountains. Mountains don't feel. They stand.
Now the work I like to do can function quite against making decisions this way, sort of unilaterally, in a top-down hierarchical fashion. Knowing in advance sort of defeats the purpose of experimental theatre -- then where's the experiment? Even the most traditional play I start by trying to locate the places where I don't know how to solve the problems it presents. Decide as I may in advance, it's really the process of doing the thing that unlocks what these potentially infinite moments are.
Certainly setting framework and limits on creativity fosters clarity, fosters specificity, and can foster quite a lot of creative growth. You have to kill the notion of ALL ideas to find which of THE ideas your piece is actually working with.
The actual has to kill the potential. Sad, I know, but true.
So, to kill a few potentials.
I am moving to New York City this summer.
It's a decision I made over several months, not knowing what would happen with grad school, not knowing what will happen with the other opportunities I've applied for, nor really knowing if I was ready to go when I decided.
I made the decision as emotionally and intuitively as I did rationally. The woman I love is moving there, and I want to be closer than a 2 hour 2 train ($33 roundtrip) ride away. I want to start building my life with her. We both want that.
And I think there's a lot of stigma and cynicism against that? Like, it's sort of a role reversal, in a way, for a man to move for a woman & her career. I mean, it's not to say I'm not also moving for my career, which is at such an indeterminate state at the moment it really could go anywhere.
So, I'm moving because of that state of indeterminacy.
I'm moving for the new jungle gym.
I am moving to be challenged by the sheer size and scale of New York.
I'm moving to be challenged by the competitiveness,
the cutthroatness, the danger, the madness, the stress.
I'm moving for the opportunity and moving for the change.
I'm moving for the move, in a way.
Which I think is okay.
Which isn't to say I'll be leaving Philly behind.
Cue that half-measured indeterminacy.
I'll still be back.
Particularly for opportunities that keep pushing me forward.
I think that's okay, too.
In all ways, I'd prefer to define my own limits.
I recognize fully that I've very little control over a lot of things.
So, rather than jump to the anger and frustration mode when I am being tested,
I'd like to sit
In this state of not-knowing
And feel along the walls for what I can.
I'm going to write a lot more about decision-making and masculinity and moving and art and everything, but I definitely want to put something up on this blog as it's been far too long since I last decided to post. If there's a firmness to my decision-making I want to bring out for the future, it's in getting out from under my covers and keeping writing.
A daily decision-making challenge.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)