This past Sunday, at William Paterson University’s Hunziker Black Box Theatre, I attended the last performance a sold-out three weekend-run of “Disenchanted: Bitches of the Kingdom.”  The tag line–a brand new, fun-loving, hilarious musical revue in which the original fairy tale princesses bemoan the exploitation they’ve suffered in the Disney theme parks and films! Happily-ever-after can be a royal pain in the ass!– is accurate, if a bit saccharine, and also suffers from unnecessary punctuation disorder, but more importantly, fails to fully convey the many varieties of laughter the cognitive dissonance–at seeing childhood crushes: Princess Jasmin, Ariel, Pocahontas, Belle, swear, sing, and sarcastically bitch about their “real lives” Disney left out–produces.

Despite recent dating habits, I’m not a musical theater guy.  ”Just when it’s getting good,” I may have once said.  ”Everyone starts singing and dancing around.”  For me, the play is the thing, that captures the imagination of my consciousness (and rhymes with “thing”).  At least once a month, I try to see off or off-off broadway shows, and always feel like a lucky thief, getting to see unbelievably talented actors and actresses preform live for me. (and 20-40 other people) Read more »

This is what professional actors do so well. Professional actors say when they are acting they literally become the character they are playing. So if an actor named Charlie Robertson is playing a military policeman Charlie Robertson becomes an MP on stage in front of the audience. There is no Charlie Robertson on stage during the performance is another way of saying it. A skilled actor can convince an audience of this every time and if the hypothetical Charlie Robertson is a skilled actor then we can assume the audience believes he is actually a military policeman on that stage during the performance. What happens to Charlie Robertson during this time we don’t know. We don’t know where he goes or what he does when he gets there.

In some ways it is like death it is like what happens to you when you die.

In this way you could call actors killers. You could say that acting is a kind of killing which it certainly is.

This is from Robert Lopez’s novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, which you should read. (You can read an excerpt here.)

You should also read his stories, like “Bleeders,” “Vaya con Huevos,” and “Mice Getting the Points.”

Diane wears this costume to remind us of the prisoners in Guantanamo. The heels are part of a reading/performance, which we were lucky enough to see.

On Friday, our MFA program here at Eastern Washington University was graced with the presence of Diane Lefer, a multi-genre author (fiction, nonfiction, drama) and political activist. I was particularly excited to meet her because our form and theory class had read one of her books of short stories, California Transit, in the fall, and after that, I was able to work with her a little through Willow Springs (watch for her work in issue 69!). Because I so admired her work, I was able to nab a spot in the workshop she held while she was here, and get her feedback on my story.

But the most exciting thing, for me, was how much Diane incorporated theater into her workshop and reading. She’s written several plays, and she told us that she used to go see all the Broadway shows when she was supposed to be in science class. Even so, I was surprised at how she incorporated theatrical exercises into the workshop. I’m so excited about it, I want to share it with you. Read more »

In fiction workshop, we talk a lot about avoiding the pitfall of too much exposition in stories – or, in layman’s terms, the pitfall of too much telling, not enough showing. The reason for this isn’t a particularly abstract one. Generally speaking, readers prefer to have things shown to them rather than told. Because telling is boring. That’s why TV is so popular and no one listens to the radio anymore. Well, that’s a gross overgeneralization, but you get what I mean.

This is all kind of a round about way for me to talk about Cats. You know, like the musical, Cats. Cats was in town last weekend and a friend and I went to the show for the purposes of both irony and cultural literacy.

I’m not usually a fan of musicals. A couple years ago in Seattle I saw the play The Little Dog Laughed, which is about a theater actor who falls in love with a New York callboy. (Did you know that “callboy” is a compound word? I just learned it.) When they are first getting together, the callboy worries that he doesn’t have much in common with the actor because he knows nothing about the theater. He adds something to the effect of “I can’t stand musicals. I get embarrassed whenever anyone anywhere starts to sing.” I heard that and thought, yes, that is indeed the problem with musicals. There’s something slightly embarrassing about the whole arrangement.

Read more »

I’m reading The Sound and the Fury, so naturally, I’m thinking about Macbeth. You know: Act 5, Scene 5:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

to the last syllable of recorded time;

and all our yesterdays have lighted fools

the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

and then is heard no more: it is a tale

told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

signifying nothing. Read more »

"When in doubt, find your light."

I recently helped finish shaping and editing an interview we (fellow Barkers Sam, Brendan, and I) did with Richard Russo at last year’s Get Lit! literary festival in Spokane (look for it in the next issue of Willow Springs!). For those of you who don’t know, Richard Russo is not only a Pulitzer-winning fiction writer, but he writes movies, as well. There’s a portion of the interview in which we discussed his experiences with film-making, and one segment in particular about the influence actors can have on the work. I won’t spoil the interview for you, but it sparked a trail of thought that I’ve been following for days.

Those of you who have read my other posts probably know by now that I used to be involved in the theater. I’ve acted, directed, stage managed, produced–the whole deal. And the interesting thing is that in the theater, nothing exists without collaboration. To quote the amazing Paul Gross in my favorite TV show of all time, Slings and Arrows:

Actors are entirely dependent on other people for what they do. They need a writer, they need a director, they need someone to make their costumes, sets, props, they need a theater. Worst of all they need other actors. That’s a lot of people. That’s not including the audience.

That dependency works all around. What is a prop master without a play? What is a director without actors? What is a set without a theater? Read more »

Where's your motorcycle now, Large? Where's your motorcycle now?

I’ve been meaning to write you for a long time, but I’ve been a little shy. I mean, it doesn’t seem like long ago I thought I was in love with you. But I guess it’s been years.

I hadn’t seen you as a goofy doctor then, though that was your original claim to fame. To me, you were Andrew Largeman, screaming into the abyss. You were a promising young director and screenwriter who I expected would bring us many more quirky pseudo-independent films that would come of age as you did. You’d be that actor who never dated actresses, but ended up in a super-long-term relationship with a sound tech who wore glasses and carried a lunch box instead of a purse. But were you? Or were you the guy who’d end up as the voice of water on national filtration ads? The guy who dated Mandy Moore? Read more »

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the evolution of theater and the difference between “serious” theater and musical theater. I’ve been longing for a good Shakespearean production. I’ve been wondering how long it will be before theater dies out all together, before it’s replaced entirely by movies and Justin Bieber. And while in this mood, I found myself in the INB theater, ready to watch the latest play in the Best of Broadway series: Legally Blonde.

Let me get this out of the way right now. This play was adapted from the movie, which was released in 2001 and starred Reese Witherspoon and Luke Wilson. The story is exactly the same. The characters vary little. There are variations within the script, of course—there have to be to accommodate the new musical numbers—but some of the more familiar lines remain (“Exercise produces endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. And happy people just don’t kill their husbands.”) The song lyrics are often painfully rhymey and repetitive and annoyingly catchy. I mean, really catchy. I mean, though I can’t remember most of the words, I still have the songs stuck in my head. The refrains, anyway. What I can remember.

The thing is, despite the part of my brain that cried out against some of the problems in the writing, I really enjoyed Legally Blonde. The actors were all spot-on, their singing and dancing impeccable. It gave me a great amount of faith in the longevity of the theater to see how well trained these young actors were (the oldest cast member might have been forty, and he was quite a bit older than anyone else on that stage). It was also encouraging to see how many young people were in the audience. It made me hope that shows like this, peppy and bright (and possibly vapid) might be like a theater gateway drug. Maybe once theater neophytes see this, they’ll be more likely to see other plays. It could lead them to Rent, which could lead them to La Boheme, and the opera might be revived, too. There will certainly be actors to fill the roles, actors who probably have immense amounts of fun playing roles like Elle Woods, but whose talents might also illuminate the roles like Cosette in Les Miserables or even Ophelia in Hamlet.

Maybe.

Theatre du Soleil's Le Dernier Caravanseráil

One of the truly great things I have seen was the Lincoln Center production of the Théatre du Soleil‘s Le Dernier Caravansérail– a two part, six hour performance that showed fragmented, interesecting stories of refugees fleeing, traveling, and sometimes arriving in destinations all over the world.

Because I studied theater for many years, Ariane Mnouchkine, the theater’s founder and director, had been a kind of hero for me since I was introduced to her work by an amazing professor named Shawn-Marie Garrett in an introductory theater class my first semester at Columbia. (Seriously, this Wikipedia page does nothing to give you an idea of  how inventive and prolific Mnouchkine is.)

And so the impact this performance had on me was undoubtably due to many elements. But what I remember now is that the actors were all speaking many different languages. Each family or group of people portrayed spoke their own language– Arabic or Serbo-Croatian or French– and then their words were translated on supertitles like they do at the opera. This was an undertaking that was both new and welcome for me. I had studied theater at the Moscow Art Theater two years previous and so had seen many productions that were purely in Russian whose impact were not lost. I already felt that well-done art could transcend logic/language.

But Mnouckine’s production seemed somehow emblematic of a kind of international mentality that I hadn’t yet experienced. It showed a fluidity between cultures, a certain kind of inclusiveness that at times I think we fool ourselves into thinking we have when we live in big metropolitan places like New York and have lived in Greenpoint where they sometimes greet you in Polish when you go in to buy some bread for breakfast. Read more »

In an undergraduate poetry class, I was assigned to write a sort of ars poetica, attempting to define poetry as I saw it and as I had learned it to be from doing the assigned readings.  But we had read so many contrasting and contradictory assessments of what poetry is that when I sat down to write, I started outlining why poetry cannot exist.  There was too much disagreement on the subject.  So I pitted a few authors against each other and drew up a draft that I thought was pretty clever.  We had to turn in our rough drafts mid-semester, and when we got them back, I was the only one who didn’t get a gold star.  In fact, thanks to my take on the assignment, the professor decided to redefine the paper.  Within the new, strict guidelines, my paper with its anti-poetry thesis would receive an F.  Thankfully, that was only the first draft.  I redid the whole thing sans sarcasm, and in the end I got my A.  And the poor professor didn’t have to ask me again why I hated poetry so much.

The thing is, I don’t hate poetry.  Maybe back then it ruffled me more than it does now.  My mind is wired more for sense than for sound, though I do find that my prose often comes out with a certain rhythm.  My favorite poetry comes in the form of blank verse, in Shakespeare’s plays, which I used to study in depth.  I enjoy a good narrative.  It’s often difficult for me to discern a lyric poem’s point.  And I know that’s reductive.  But ultimately, I do want to be able to say, “This is a poem about xyz” even if it is also about j, k, and h.  I like to be able to do that with stories, though I know it’s looked down upon.  And novels.  And plays.  If you ask me what Othello is about, I’ll say it’s about jealousy, even though I know there’s more to it than that.

I do think I’m getting better at reading and understanding poetry, though I have a hard time considering it a form of communication.  I suppose poetry is more often a form of expression, really, more akin to painting than to prose.  And those are the poems that I struggle with, and now that I’m in a poetry workshop, the poems I’m afraid to write.  My mind leans toward logic and away from beauty.  In school, my standardized test scores were always higher in math than in English.  I write things like anagram poems because I enjoy limits and boundaries.

My question is this: Can a person like me be a poet?  If I don’t see the world poetically, can my writing be considered poetry?  And when writers like me do have flashes of the poetic, how do we form them into something that we can understand?