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Headway and Footnotes
May. 3rd, 2006 08:49 amSo, more people have been reading me here and linking to me. Hi, thanks for looking in. I'll try to make your time here worthwhile. Sorry for the length I sometimes run on to -- I get on longwinded rolls from time to time, and I tend to jump around, but this is my place, just sit a spell . . .
Nothing much craft-wise the last few days, post the weekend and Caveman Robot performances.
Paper work for the show -- outlines and sketches -- and screen work for the show -- digital sound editing. Actually, whether on an actual page or a computer screen, I always think of it as "paper planning." Blueprints. Treatments. Studies. Outlines.
Getting things more arranged for Saturday's rehearsal. Oh, I just realized I'm rehearsing from 12 noon to 5 pm, then doing Caveman Robot in the evening, of course. Well, that's a tiring day ahead.
It looks like I'll be handling the various episodes of That's What We're Here For all out of sequence -- rehearsing them as "the muse" or "the mood" takes me for each individual section, and then putting them together later. Another rule for myself broken: Get the whole show blocked and set top to bottom and then concentrate on running the whole show in order, to get the proper rhythm of the overall performance in yours and the actors' heads.
Actually, after years of working very hard to make all my shows seem like seamless, unbroken start-to-finish experiences, as if the whole play is just one big scene, I seem in the last few years to have gotten more interested in an episodic quality, starts-and-stops, blackouts, individual performance modules hooked together to form a show. I used to think of my shows as slices out of an arc of time -- the world of the show existed before and after the performance, the audience is just being given a brief look into that world for the length of the work. Now I'm seeing shows as accumulations of elements, alphabet blocks being stacked to gradually form words and sentences, each block adding new letters/words, amplifying or changing the meaning of the previous blocks set down, until only at the end, as the last block is put into place, can the entire text be seen and understood. Everything falls into place. The assembly is complete. Joseph Cornell's boxes have always been in my head from a scenic design standpoint, now they're becoming part of the structural process . . .
I think the loss of my primary theatre space, Nada Classic at 167 Ludlow Street, in 2000 led to this in many ways. The theatre was small, but the advantage of that was that I could FILL the space, floor to ceiling to walls, with another world, someplace from the inside of my head, and set the audience within that world, a 15' by 20' stage with a 7' height. Things were more controllable. I like working larger in larger spaces, in terms of the possibilities of light and physical movement, but all of the other spaces I've worked in since Nada are large enough to make any world I create seem small, just a set, just temporary. I love The Brick dearly in many ways, and it's not exactly a HUGE space, but it's big enough that creation of a whole world isn't possible except under conditions I haven't been able to do in there myself yet -- Michael Gardner did it somewhat with Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by making the entire space pitch black except for tiny specials on each fragment, with no audience seating, so the viewers had to wander in a void, finding the scenes. Effective, but too sparse for myself and my tastes. Also, I think to do that at The Brick, you have to be one of the people who runs the place, like Michael. I can't make a whole world in the space, so I have to make fragments of one set in a larger void, and build the world up gradually out of these smaller fragments (I'm wondering if my recent disinterest in feature pictures as a narrative form in favor of episodic television is connected with this in any way, or just a coincidence).
What I dislike most about directing in The Brick is the HEIGHT. Air over actors is boring. Boring. And I haven't come up with any full solutions to excite that boring space in any way yet -- the giant hanging American flag and the black drapes that made up the "wing space" on Symphony of Rats helped a bit. The projections and use of the projection screen mitigated the spacial ennui factor on Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good and World Gone Wrong somewhat, too. I'm using lots of projections in That's What We're Here For, too, so again, a help. I'm also trying to put people on chairs and desks and ladders more -- moving things upward into the boring space. Should also help. Unfortunately, most good possibilities for fixing that space will interfere with the lighting, which is not acceptable.
Floors are boring too, but can be handled better. Crumple up paper and throw it around. Learned that from Richard Foreman. Purely a craft thing, really -- crumpled paper is a cheap and effective way to make a floor interesting and sexy. And it's usually easy enough to make the paper make "sense," too. Oriental rugs help, too, if you have them, but paper is more neutral (and easier to "justify"). You always need more than you think you will, though.
The back and forth in the process discussion has been a good read, but I'm not sure how much more I have to say on the matter now, except to add a thought to something Isaac writes about (I've often felt like Gore Vidal in this: "I have nothing to say, only to add."). He writes on the relationship between cast and audience, and I think he's really on the ball, except that maybe, maybe, he takes the audience off the hook a bit too much. Yes, there are far too many casts/actors concentrating on what they're "getting" from an audience rather than what they are "giving" to that audience, but at the same time, the relationship isn't more reliant on one side or the other for me, or even simply about a trade, but about sharing, and the audience has to keep up its part in the share for the relationship to work, as with any living relationship.
I've always seen the relationship between performance and audience as a straight line with an arrow at both ends -- both sides must put into the work to complete it. As much as there are actors who only want to "get" from a performance, there are audiences who only want to sit there and "get" as well, and will even create tension by resisting any attempt to enter the work (I once read a quote from actor to director at the end of a show that I've often thought of, "We were bad tonight, but they started it!").
At the same time, whether or not an audience is putting into the work or not, it is still the job of the company to keep up their end of the deal, no matter what (and that actor's comment is less forgivable, really -- they may have "started" it, but like on the playground, it's not fine to keep it going). It's part of the job, the craft, to keep up trying to share even with an audience that's being selfish. If for nothing else, then just because the company might be wrong in what they think they're feeling from the house, which certainly happens.
I was in the original production of Kirk Wood Bromley's verse comedy Want's Unwished Work at Nada, and it was a huge success, with every performance a lovefest of cast and audience, the cast always on their game, the audience rolling with laughter the whole way through the show. Except one night. That night, the audience sat in stony silence through the entire performance (a chuckle here and there, maybe). The cast was horrified. At intermission, the wonderful actress Lisa Adair Colbert, with whom I shared most of my scenes, announced to the cast "I think Ian has the right idea, say your lines as fast as you can and get the hell off the stage." I wasn't aware I was doing this, and if I was it was bad form, but there was an element of panic from the cast at this point, used as we were to constant audible positive reactions from the house (and anyway, the show was supposed to be played at top speed, though we did cut 10 minutes off the run time that night). Still, we did the show very well -- that was an extremely talented cast top to bottom, and there was no way, even if discouraged, that it could possibly mark through a show -- and at the end, suddenly, our one and only (and obviously sincere) standing ovation of the run! The audience kept clapping and calling us back for more curtain calls, they wouldn't stop applauding, it was embarrassing, and [cue the sappy music] we had all learned a valuable lesson about giving and receiving from audiences.
(It was a different kind of sharing though -- like loaning a neighbor all of your power tools over many many years without getting any of them back, and growing to resent it, and then turning around to discover he's used them to build you a great big new house. You're glad for the house, but there were times when you coulda used those tools back.)
I guess I prefer the idea of "sharing" with the audience rather than "giving" to them all around. I think of my plays not as "Here, have this," but as
"Hey, this is part of my mind up here, and I'd really like it if you came in and knocked around in here for a little while and looked at all of this stuff I've gathered for my whole lifetime, and which I've put into a certain order for you, because, well, I guess I kinda love you, and I think we'll both get something valuable out of it, and I don't think I'll waste your time. Some of these things in here are pretty, and some are confusing and inexplicable (at least to me, I need you to explain them to me) but I know they belong here, and some aren't very nice, really unpleasant in fact, even terrifying, but I really think you need to see them, okay? Sometimes I'm going to yell at you and call you names, and I'll mean it, and sometimes I'll whisper very sweet things to you and mean that, too. Just join me in here for a bit and let me know what you think, and I'm sure we'll both get something valuable out of it. Next time, I'll have all this same stuff and some new stuff to show you, and I'll put it in a different arrangement, but I think you'll like that one too."
So thanks for your attention, sorry to run on. I'm discovering what I need to be telling myself right now in the act of typing it out, hope it pushes a button or pulls a lever for you that needed to be pushed or pulled. Maybe next time I'll finally get to the realism/ambiguity issue. Breakfast time now.
Nothing much craft-wise the last few days, post the weekend and Caveman Robot performances.
Paper work for the show -- outlines and sketches -- and screen work for the show -- digital sound editing. Actually, whether on an actual page or a computer screen, I always think of it as "paper planning." Blueprints. Treatments. Studies. Outlines.
Getting things more arranged for Saturday's rehearsal. Oh, I just realized I'm rehearsing from 12 noon to 5 pm, then doing Caveman Robot in the evening, of course. Well, that's a tiring day ahead.
It looks like I'll be handling the various episodes of That's What We're Here For all out of sequence -- rehearsing them as "the muse" or "the mood" takes me for each individual section, and then putting them together later. Another rule for myself broken: Get the whole show blocked and set top to bottom and then concentrate on running the whole show in order, to get the proper rhythm of the overall performance in yours and the actors' heads.
Actually, after years of working very hard to make all my shows seem like seamless, unbroken start-to-finish experiences, as if the whole play is just one big scene, I seem in the last few years to have gotten more interested in an episodic quality, starts-and-stops, blackouts, individual performance modules hooked together to form a show. I used to think of my shows as slices out of an arc of time -- the world of the show existed before and after the performance, the audience is just being given a brief look into that world for the length of the work. Now I'm seeing shows as accumulations of elements, alphabet blocks being stacked to gradually form words and sentences, each block adding new letters/words, amplifying or changing the meaning of the previous blocks set down, until only at the end, as the last block is put into place, can the entire text be seen and understood. Everything falls into place. The assembly is complete. Joseph Cornell's boxes have always been in my head from a scenic design standpoint, now they're becoming part of the structural process . . .
I think the loss of my primary theatre space, Nada Classic at 167 Ludlow Street, in 2000 led to this in many ways. The theatre was small, but the advantage of that was that I could FILL the space, floor to ceiling to walls, with another world, someplace from the inside of my head, and set the audience within that world, a 15' by 20' stage with a 7' height. Things were more controllable. I like working larger in larger spaces, in terms of the possibilities of light and physical movement, but all of the other spaces I've worked in since Nada are large enough to make any world I create seem small, just a set, just temporary. I love The Brick dearly in many ways, and it's not exactly a HUGE space, but it's big enough that creation of a whole world isn't possible except under conditions I haven't been able to do in there myself yet -- Michael Gardner did it somewhat with Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by making the entire space pitch black except for tiny specials on each fragment, with no audience seating, so the viewers had to wander in a void, finding the scenes. Effective, but too sparse for myself and my tastes. Also, I think to do that at The Brick, you have to be one of the people who runs the place, like Michael. I can't make a whole world in the space, so I have to make fragments of one set in a larger void, and build the world up gradually out of these smaller fragments (I'm wondering if my recent disinterest in feature pictures as a narrative form in favor of episodic television is connected with this in any way, or just a coincidence).
What I dislike most about directing in The Brick is the HEIGHT. Air over actors is boring. Boring. And I haven't come up with any full solutions to excite that boring space in any way yet -- the giant hanging American flag and the black drapes that made up the "wing space" on Symphony of Rats helped a bit. The projections and use of the projection screen mitigated the spacial ennui factor on Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good and World Gone Wrong somewhat, too. I'm using lots of projections in That's What We're Here For, too, so again, a help. I'm also trying to put people on chairs and desks and ladders more -- moving things upward into the boring space. Should also help. Unfortunately, most good possibilities for fixing that space will interfere with the lighting, which is not acceptable.
Floors are boring too, but can be handled better. Crumple up paper and throw it around. Learned that from Richard Foreman. Purely a craft thing, really -- crumpled paper is a cheap and effective way to make a floor interesting and sexy. And it's usually easy enough to make the paper make "sense," too. Oriental rugs help, too, if you have them, but paper is more neutral (and easier to "justify"). You always need more than you think you will, though.
The back and forth in the process discussion has been a good read, but I'm not sure how much more I have to say on the matter now, except to add a thought to something Isaac writes about (I've often felt like Gore Vidal in this: "I have nothing to say, only to add."). He writes on the relationship between cast and audience, and I think he's really on the ball, except that maybe, maybe, he takes the audience off the hook a bit too much. Yes, there are far too many casts/actors concentrating on what they're "getting" from an audience rather than what they are "giving" to that audience, but at the same time, the relationship isn't more reliant on one side or the other for me, or even simply about a trade, but about sharing, and the audience has to keep up its part in the share for the relationship to work, as with any living relationship.
I've always seen the relationship between performance and audience as a straight line with an arrow at both ends -- both sides must put into the work to complete it. As much as there are actors who only want to "get" from a performance, there are audiences who only want to sit there and "get" as well, and will even create tension by resisting any attempt to enter the work (I once read a quote from actor to director at the end of a show that I've often thought of, "We were bad tonight, but they started it!").
At the same time, whether or not an audience is putting into the work or not, it is still the job of the company to keep up their end of the deal, no matter what (and that actor's comment is less forgivable, really -- they may have "started" it, but like on the playground, it's not fine to keep it going). It's part of the job, the craft, to keep up trying to share even with an audience that's being selfish. If for nothing else, then just because the company might be wrong in what they think they're feeling from the house, which certainly happens.
I was in the original production of Kirk Wood Bromley's verse comedy Want's Unwished Work at Nada, and it was a huge success, with every performance a lovefest of cast and audience, the cast always on their game, the audience rolling with laughter the whole way through the show. Except one night. That night, the audience sat in stony silence through the entire performance (a chuckle here and there, maybe). The cast was horrified. At intermission, the wonderful actress Lisa Adair Colbert, with whom I shared most of my scenes, announced to the cast "I think Ian has the right idea, say your lines as fast as you can and get the hell off the stage." I wasn't aware I was doing this, and if I was it was bad form, but there was an element of panic from the cast at this point, used as we were to constant audible positive reactions from the house (and anyway, the show was supposed to be played at top speed, though we did cut 10 minutes off the run time that night). Still, we did the show very well -- that was an extremely talented cast top to bottom, and there was no way, even if discouraged, that it could possibly mark through a show -- and at the end, suddenly, our one and only (and obviously sincere) standing ovation of the run! The audience kept clapping and calling us back for more curtain calls, they wouldn't stop applauding, it was embarrassing, and [cue the sappy music] we had all learned a valuable lesson about giving and receiving from audiences.
(It was a different kind of sharing though -- like loaning a neighbor all of your power tools over many many years without getting any of them back, and growing to resent it, and then turning around to discover he's used them to build you a great big new house. You're glad for the house, but there were times when you coulda used those tools back.)
I guess I prefer the idea of "sharing" with the audience rather than "giving" to them all around. I think of my plays not as "Here, have this," but as
"Hey, this is part of my mind up here, and I'd really like it if you came in and knocked around in here for a little while and looked at all of this stuff I've gathered for my whole lifetime, and which I've put into a certain order for you, because, well, I guess I kinda love you, and I think we'll both get something valuable out of it, and I don't think I'll waste your time. Some of these things in here are pretty, and some are confusing and inexplicable (at least to me, I need you to explain them to me) but I know they belong here, and some aren't very nice, really unpleasant in fact, even terrifying, but I really think you need to see them, okay? Sometimes I'm going to yell at you and call you names, and I'll mean it, and sometimes I'll whisper very sweet things to you and mean that, too. Just join me in here for a bit and let me know what you think, and I'm sure we'll both get something valuable out of it. Next time, I'll have all this same stuff and some new stuff to show you, and I'll put it in a different arrangement, but I think you'll like that one too."
So thanks for your attention, sorry to run on. I'm discovering what I need to be telling myself right now in the act of typing it out, hope it pushes a button or pulls a lever for you that needed to be pushed or pulled. Maybe next time I'll finally get to the realism/ambiguity issue. Breakfast time now.
