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A big thanks to Jeff Lewonczyk for editing these things for over at that blog, and all at The Brick for their assistance in making these shows happen.
On Harry in Love, part 1: Foreman & Me
(Yesterday I said I was going to write about some more influences on Everything Must Go and then get to Harry in Love, but it's worked out differently)
I wouldn't be directing theatre today if it weren't for Richard Foreman. I maybe should say, "the work of Richard Foreman," but Richard himself is somewhat responsible personally.
The big love of my life for the longest time was Film, and all I ever wanted to do was to make movies. At the same time, I loved to act, especially on stage. For most of my teens and twenties, if you'd asked me what I really wanted to do with myself, I would have told you that I wanted to make movies and act in theatre.
I went to NYU Film School at Tisch School of the Arts, and loved it, but by the time I graduated, having made a 10-minute Junior-year film, "How Did You Manage To Steal a Car from a Rolling Train?", and an hour-long Senior film, Deep Night, which mixed black-and-white and color live action, animation of various kinds (cel, clay, pixilation), musical numbers, crazed stylistic shifts, fake documentary sections, a hand-cranked silent movie scene, metacommentary through intertitles, and basically everything that I ever wanted to do or see in movies, I was a little worn out and empty in regard to the form. I had made a film - not a great one, but a substantial one - in which I burned through most of the ideas I had about what I wanted to do with the medium, whether they belonged in the film or not. And now my big calling card was a strange, uneven hour-long film, which is a useless length for a movie anyway (as Dan O'Bannon has pointed out, having learned that lesson with John Carpenter when they made the original student film version of Dark Star - below 45 minutes, good, above 80 minutes, fine, anything in-between, there is no use for it in the world - festivals won't take it, no one's interested in watching it), and which most people didn't get and a bare few thought some kind of masterpiece (a phrase I’ve had applied to my work more than a few times, “some kind of masterpiece” – what is that supposed to mean?).
So, Theatre.
I had been acting on stage more and more at NYU - I wasn't in an actual acting/drama program, so my options were limited, but by Senior year I was on various stages more and more, and increasingly outside of NYU in the Off-Off-Broadway world.
At the premiere screening of Deep Night, stage director Christopher Carter Sanderson, who had directed me a few times by then, asked me how familiar I was with the work of Richard Foreman. When I said I knew the name well enough, but not the work, he said that he would someday like to direct me in Foreman's play Egyptology, and that I would be a perfect actor for Foreman's world.
As I had no idea what that meant, I tried to see the next Foreman play that was up in NYC. I didn't get in - it was sold out - but at the box office I bought the book of Richard's plays - Reverberation Machines - that contained the play Chris had mentioned. I fell in love with Richard's writing immediately, and with that play in particular. And I started thinking about it as a director, as a Theatre Director - not a position I'd much craved in past (though I'd directed plays by Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Thornton Wilder at boarding school, which I regarded as practice in the long run for directing actors on film).
Also, my best friend David LM Mcintyre was directing a lot of theatre, with me often as actor and/or dramaturg-bounceboard for him, and this - including attending some of his classes with Anne Bogart at Playwrights Horizons when I would be acting in pieces there - began to make me start thinking of directing for the stage as well. But I didn’t do anything about it; I was content to sit back and act (and occasionally design, as my film school technical knowledge meant I would get tapped to do other things on shows I was acting in that needed tech people).
Eventually, I began to see Richard’s shows, and this also opened my head to the possibility of directing theatre – as Joyce and Nabokov had done to me years earlier with prose, and Lynch, Godard, and Roeg had with film, I needed an example to show me that all these ideas I had in my head about what could be done in an art form weren’t just crazy, that you could actually DO them and there WOULD be people who would want to share in them with you. You could create works about your personal visions/obsessions in these media, and while some people might call you self-indulgent, what the hell great was ever created in Art without an artist indulging themself?
Jump ahead a few years - I'm acting in Kirk Wood Bromley's Want's Unwished Work at NADA on Ludlow Street, and in some ways I think I've gone about as far with my acting, craftwise, in working for other people as I can. I've got a great part - actually written specifically for me by the playwright over 2 1/2 years of readings - that I'm having a wonderful time with, but I'm not using everything I want to as an actor. I'm having to hold back. I need new worlds to work in, and I'm going to have to create them myself, it would appear, if I'm going to act in them.
So I'm living in NADA during the extension of Want's, as I've lost my NYC apartment and have decamped to my Mom's place in Maine for the most part, and I've come back to do the show and help out the other shows going on there, including Edward Einhorn's production of Foreman's My Head Was a Sledgehammer.
Seeing Edward's production (done at a time when the majority of people would say, "I think Foreman's plays can only be done by Foreman" if you mentioned someone else doing one) and rereading Richard's collections gave me an idea, and I said to Aaron Beall of NADA one day, "I think NADA should do a festival of other directors doing Foreman's plays." He nodded thoughtfully and walked away.
Two days later he came back to me and said, "That idea? A festival of Foreman plays? Do it. Next June, it's yours. Get it together."
And so I did.
The reason Richard is directly responsible for me being where I am today is that he said “Yes” to the idea and encouraged and helped me a bit in getting this together (he’d say he didn’t do anything, but just agreeing to it and giving some written advice to the directors was enough to give the festival a certain amount of cachet).
We did three years of the No Strings Attached festivals (named, appropriately on many levels, by Edward Einhorn) at NADA, doing somewhere around 35 plays by Richard, including several world or USA premieres. Richard saw a performance of each show. During year two, having seen me act in several of the shows, he mentioned that he had written a play called Harry in Love many years earlier, and he thought I’d be good for the part of Harry, which was quite flattering, and even more so when I saw the play – not that it’s a flattering character (it ain’t), but it was flattering as an actor to think a playwright would think you capable of this demanding role.
Interestingly, with Harry, though, I was back to doing the kind of theatre I had mostly walked away from when I started to direct, and it started me considering even more possibilities as a director – that I could alternate my personal, idiosyncratic pieces with other pieces that were just there to make people laugh, which I enjoy doing anyway. So now I knew I could do a wider range of plays, and I have ever since.
Richard is the man all of this comes back to then, for me. Why I do what I do, in so many ways. Even down to – as with some other people I know who started out as Foreman devotees – not bothering to see his work for the last several years, not out of disinterest, but because I have other work of my own to do, and have to get to it, and I’ve probably gotten most of what I can out of Richard by now (though I’m still thinking of directing the USA premiere of his play George Bataille’s Bathrobe next year).
In the end, what I’ve learned from Richard is to be myself, and be true to myself, as an artist, whatever that may mean. Which is why I am doing, HAVE to do, Spell AND Everything Must Go AND Harry in Love all at the same time right now. Not to do so wouldn’t be right, at least for me.
On Harry in Love, part 2: A Big Man, Yelling (aka Influences)
Harry in Love is a comedy. A loud, broad, raucous comedy. The subtitle is A Manic Vaudeville and this is to be taken seriously. The people in it are nuts, the play itself is nuts. Wonderful.
The performance style is manic and stagy in the best way. The one-liners have to explode with a classic style of timing that goes back over a hundred years and isn’t often seen so much anymore. It’s a specific kind of humor, that traveled the country and eventually entered the movies and early TV, but started as something very much of vaudeville, of New York, of the comedians there, and very specifically the New York Jewish comedians there.
Now, here we are doing Harry with a cast of mostly Gentiles playing Jews and doing this stuff (except of course Ken Simon, who calls himself “God’s Tummler” and who probably belongs in the Borscht Belt of several decades ago), but while the style began that way, there are plenty of fine Gentile examples of comedians who took on this style, including a couple of nice boys who started out in vaudeville and worked this schtick to the ends of their lives, in films and TV, and whose timing I find myself directly aping quite a bit in this show:
The A&C connection with Harry became particularly clear when I realized there was no way I could yell the line, “I’m not ASKING him to get involved!” without directly copying Lou Costello’s cadences on “I’m not ASKING you who is on second!”
Years ago, when doing this show for the first time, Michael Bruno, who was then playing Paul, mentioned looking at Gene Wilder’s performance in The Producers for inspiration. I didn’t mention this to Walter Brandes, who’s now playing the part, as he’s a very different Paul, and I’m not sure that reference would work for him.
At the same time, I’m noticing a lot more Zero Mostel in my own performance as Harry – I don’t know if I didn’t see it nine years ago because I couldn’t see myself and Zero in the same category. Now, being a bit older (and, admittedly, a bit heavier), I find myself taking on a bit more Zero in the part.
This scene from The Producers especially gets the feel of what I’m trying to do as Harry down – sorry for the quality; it appears someone decided to videotape the film of a TV monitor, recording the sound off the speaker with the camera mic, and then post it to YouTube, but it’s what there is available:
During rehearsals for this round of Harry, a name came up that I hadn’t thought of before, but which now seemed extremely a propos: Jackie Gleason.
Maybe I hadn’t thought of Gleason before because . . . well, to be frank, while I’ve always admired his technical skill, I’ve never at all been a fan of The Great One. He gets on my nerves, and I really, REALLY dislike Ralph Kramden and The Honeymooners
However, once he came up, I couldn’t help but see the similarities, and once I could see them, I could use them.
This performance style continues down into theatre of the 60s with plays by Murray Schisgal and Bruce Jay Friedman and Jules Feiffer and even Neil Simon, but with a darker edge. Plays of a category that Richard once put Harry in, something like “big sweaty neurotic New York Jewish men yelling at other people.” Unfortunately, the beautiful, fun broadness of this style seems to have vanished in the last couple of decades. It’s my pleasure to bring it back for a few more times in Harry in Love, which, if it’s even half as much fun to watch as to perform, must be quite a show out there in the house. Wish I could see it from there.
Postscript: Final Thoughts/Influences (on Playing Ball)
One last little piece about influences . . .
In making Everything Must Go and its predecessor in the Invisible Republic series, That's What We're Here For (an american pageant), it occurred to me that they were a sum total of a line of thought that has been growing in me since childhood. A way of looking at the world that comes about from having entertainment that I loved - just 'cause it was entertaining to me - that on some level also encouraged a way of looking at the world through questioning eyes, and expressing that questioning in funny and satiric but still sometimes cutting and dark ways.
It's shown up most in EMG and TWWHF, but it's kinda there in everything I do, and now that it's become clearer to me, it's something to be focused on with more intent in future.
The Invisible Republic shows are dedicated to Harvey Kurtzman, Frank Zappa, and Ernie Kovacs, but beyond those shows, I've realized their influence more and more infects everything I do.
Kurtzman and Bill Gaines of the Mad comic book and magazine tended to downplay any notion that there was any true satiric or political content in what they did, but if pressed, they would say that if they had a message, it was basically, "Kids, don't believe what you're being told, because everyone's trying to sell you something." Which is maybe something kids should be hearing more of today.
Zappa's message was pretty much the same, though he was also a proud capitalist who enjoyed the "proper" use of advertising.
But he disliked the fakery that everyone is always told is "just part of the business, so just go along with it," resulting in things like what happens when The Mothers of Invention are told to "lip-sync" their new single on some 60s TV show:
And occasionally he could bring some of that influence to a pop culture arena:
Ernie Kovacs instilled in me a love for the inexplicably funny at a very young age (PBS ran a series of collections of his work around 1974-1975 or so), but besides things like the perfection of the Nairobi Trio . . .
He had an entire attitude that, even when selling something, made you aware of the process in an honest way while trying to entertain:
And his beautifully "off" metacommentary extended to his own credits:
I guess in the end, what I learned from these people is how to respond to the question, "Why don't you just play ball?" Which is with raised hackles and a determination to do what is right for the work, not for anybody else (which doesn't preclude selling the work, but just selling it honestly), and to focus on the little dark scurrying things that are going on behind the scenes of the big smiley faces al around us every day (but at the same time, to understand the enjoyment you can get from those big smiley faces).
Which brings me to three last videos, from the band Negativland, a group that's also been influential on me in a few ways, in terms of collage and commentary, the last few years. Here, they take on some aspects of pop culture and advertising and language in ways I've also been trying to use, in a stage context (and I quote liberally from a quote they use in the last piece in EMG).
Enjoy. But don't necessarily believe.
