Listening: Nine Inch Nails, And All That Could Have Been
Mentally Replaying: Lots and lots of Tori
I'd rather be warm
Considering: the entry below
Desiring: hot chocolate
Physical Aches and Complaints: I'm Cold!

I forgot my jacket this morning }:< }:< it was nice and warm outside all day and the windows taunted me with it. But inside it's the same air conditioned frost that's been settling on my skin and making typing really annoying. arg.

So anyway, last week Jenn asked me a question that started all the wheels in my head rolling in a place that I (sadly) don't visit often. Over three years ago I got my BA in Theatre at USC (well ok, in some technical sense I don't have it but that's due to the loans I'm still working on, but that's a triviality not really worth my attention: I pay the loans, I'm employed and I'm not giving back the knowledge) and have barely watched any live theatre worthy of the name. That thought alone makes me so annoyed/scared that I've nearly worked myself into an anxiety attack a few times.

But maybe, just maybe with a little luck, some celestial intervention and buckets of sweat and tears I might just be able to put something on a stage in the coming months. (Please God, PLEASE)

but anyway, I promised I'd expound on my own tastes and I always try to keep my promises. So over a couple of days I've written out the following personal exposition. It covers only some of the aspects that I like about theatre, and I've probably forgotten considerably more than I remembered to put down. but hopefully it will be helpful.

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I’ve always loved a good story and I think I’ve always liked getting someone to tell me a story better than having to read it. That’s not to say I avoid reading - I adore books and my parents used to tease me about devouring books when I was a kid. But there was something about riding the pitch and cadence in someone’s voice that always grabbed my attention and made me forget everything else. I blame my dad. He loves to tell stories – he was a history teacher after all – and usually his stories were firmly rooted in something that either was or was related to fact. (That’s my way of saying that if he was telling me fiction I didn’t know it.) He told me the stories of everything from his father in Mexico all the way to his acceptance to USC through President Kennedy’s Teacher Corps. (He left the story of meeting my mom for her to tell.)

I continued to read as much as I could and even plundered my mother’s college textbooks when she returned to school when I was in junior high. One of the general courses she took was an Introduction to Theatre-type class. She had a textbook for it that I read cover to cover when I was in the eighth grade. At that point I had pretty much had no experience with a theatre. Acting and all that stuff were saved for TV and movies. I was aware of performing arts but my vague conception of it hardly encompassed some ideal of musicals and/or opera. My parents told me when I was a baby the first play I ever saw was a (very cleaned-up) version of Romeo & Juliet. But I have no recollection of it. The first play I remember seeing my mom was assigned to go see for this Intro class and she took me with her. The junior college was putting on a production of Peter Barnes’ Red Noses. It was fun, raucous and well…alive. It was intriguing the way they used the space and being aware of the technical space and all the “effects” that were in play. Somewhere between watching my first play and getting into a Drama class in the eighth grade I started to pay attention to the play between an audience and all the ingredients in a live performance.

This became highlighted in high school when I was assigned to study Absurdist theatre in my Drama class while reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in English. While Tom Stoppard easily became my favorite playwright and I learned to love the open contradiction in plays like The Real Inspector Hound, I was working on getting my head around the abject emptiness of the world that the Absurdists put forth. I know in high school I didn’t get the real depth of Absurdism or even the concept of telling a story and letting its shape and rhythm lead the audience to the conclusions of one’s philosophy. I was intrigued by the cornerstones of the movement such as Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and Killing Game by Eugene Ionesco. But I was also taken by playing with the relationship between fiction and reality and just how much you can warp the distinction.

Through high school, and of course in college I kept up my study, even though the usual discipline is to study the modernists. I, being contrary, like the post-modernists. But we also studied history within Theatre and so I learned about a lot of the political efforts that were pushed through the medium of the stage, and that kind of power also fascinates me.

I guess what really catches my attention (and why I prefer to direct rather than write and find acting a bit limiting) is the creation that possess the ability to infect on-lookers with a fleeting vision of the creator’s ideas of a given subject. It’s an expressionistic work that doesn’t just make someone think, “Gee, I wonder….” But, “Oh! I get it!” at least just for a second. I love the ability that Teatro Campesino had of going out into the field on the backs of trucks or in abandoned barns and proving Peter Brook right when he wrote all that is necessary is an empty space. They instructed oppressed, uneducated and scared people how to fight for what was fairly theirs and win. I love that Luis Valdez took from that movement the gumption to write with a clear and unforgiving eye such beauties as Zoot Suit and Los Vendidos. There are lots of writers that are determined to write about their people and culture, and it’s very important that they do from David Henry Hwang to Lorraine Hansberry, but I have to say I haven’t noticed as much of an effort to both call down the members of the dominant culture for persisting in buying into a mostly fictional stereotype as well as holding members of one’s own culture responsible for perpetuating such a myth.

Of course the stuff about culture and progressivism is a natural conceit I’ve come to because of my background and a life spent being inundated by the media has led me to think that if I just find the right place to stand and shout just loud enough maybe, just maybe I‘ll get someone, somewhere to understand …something about me.

Idealistic enough for ya?

My senior year I finally found sex politics in the stage and immediately fell in love with Caryl Churchill. Maybe it’s my own lack of imagination but I don’t know if there is any more clear way of highlighting social and personal inequities between genders, and yes, races, than in Cloud Nine. But what I noticed, after mounting one production of it and watching another, is that a lot of people who weren’t properly expecting what to see on the stage were bewildered by what they saw and quickly began dismissing the casting as “tricks” when in fact those “tricks” were meant to expose the story as one of horrible imbalance. Having a man play a feminine wife loses a lot of people who aren’t aware that they’re supposed to pay attention to their gut reactions at seeing him play at being meek while the husband lavishes praise on his perfect wife before running off to continue his affair with another woman (these last two roles are meant to be cast traditionally). It’s a series of intense questions asked of an audience that should undermine their belief in an equal society. The story doesn’t hold the answers, and though the characters (most of them) come to some sense of understanding for themselves, they make it clear that each audience member should have much to explore in himself, his relationships and his own approach to and understanding of sex.

Basically anywhere I feel like society isn’t asking itself enough questions is somewhere I feel like I need to investigate. Sometimes it’s because we’ve gotten complacent and sometimes because we stopped short of some potentially great new sphere of understanding of ourselves.

I think it’s the job of doctors to figure out our physical innards, how they work and interact. It’s the job of psychs to figure out our minds – impulses, behaviors and attitudes. And it’s up to artists to explore the soul.

As for what I’ve studied, the usual courses will have you study modern stuff for acting – Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, Wendy Wasserstein – while the “structural” courses will demand study of classics: Everyman, Shakespeare, Greek tragedians, most famously being Aeschylus and Sophocles. I don’t have anything against these guys. They’re just not my thing. Or maybe it would be better to say that nothing leaps to mind to say in the course of a production of their plays that wouldn’t being a boring repetition of their words/works. I’ll leave it to Summer Stock and light operas to do the stand-byes.

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So... anymore questions? I like knowing what people's experiences are with the theatre, what they think when they've seen plays (even if the last one was a Christmas pageant in the third grade), what they've loved about it and what they found lacking. And from those of you especially who diligently gave up free time to create something one the stage, I just want to know why? What about it worked for you? Would you ever do it again? Maybe I should turn this around: Jenn, What kept you in it for four years?