Thursday, April 10, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Curtain
We closed the show last night. I am of the opinion that the whole cast did this final performance justice. Up until the very end, actors were finding new things and the exploration did not end until the lights went out. It was beautiful like that.
After the applause died down, it all ended quietly. Much of the cast and crew met for drinks, and talk, and cameraderie. There was no single goodbye. Everything drifted apart a bit at a time, organically, over the course of the entire evening and into this morning. We struck the set this morning and, even before we had finished, the next group for the next production was waiting expectantly in the house, watching us erase a world that we had created and that will never be seen again, awaiting their turn to build their world.
Maybe poetry on paper is superfluous when it exists all around us all of the time. Maybe there is something redundant to the point of vulgarity when it comes to art when, in everything, it lives. For hundreds of years in Japane, the preparation of tea has been held as almost divine. Chop wood, carry water. We built a world, that world ended, and we helped to dissipate the rest. The stage is empty, the props are gone, the lights are out, and the actors have left.
Even the giant ocean evaporates into the sky and falls to Earth in a million different pieces.
I have been very lucky to work on such an amazing show with such colourful people. The audiences were generally smaller than I might have liked and I am not sure if we ever received a standing ovation. I like to think that this was not the sort of show in which one should ever receive a standing ovation. I like the idea that people were too busy digesting things to stand up. I talked to a man last night who had seen 'The Tulip' weeks before and he exclaimed that he was still trying to figure it all out. A man came to the show and, two weeks later, he was still pondering it. To me, that is success. People saw it, and left, and took it with them. It has stayed with them in one fashion or another.
I have a strong dislike for listening to artists explain their works when they are not asked. One of the foremost examples in my mind was at a poetry reading where, before every poem, the poet explained to us, the audience, how she came up with the poem. She told us the story of the birth of every poem she read. It made me irritated. There seems to me to be something counterintuitive about a person explaining their art. Once you make something and the world sees it, then it becomes the world's and any meaning that you may have attached to it ceases to be. It belongs to the world and the world will makes its interpretations. The individual artist grows old and dies, and all of his mysteries and secrets eventually parish with him but, if he is lucky, his art remains. It remains without stories, without the handicap of explanation or defense by its creator. It simply is and develops its own history, its own legends: the Mona Lisa, La Guernica, the Venus de Milo, ad infinitum. Intent gives way to truth?
And so the world premiere of Kevin Lawler's 'The Tulip' at the Blue Barn in Omaha, Nebraska has ended. But, as grace allowed me to discover last night, it is going to stay around this city for a long time to come.
After the applause died down, it all ended quietly. Much of the cast and crew met for drinks, and talk, and cameraderie. There was no single goodbye. Everything drifted apart a bit at a time, organically, over the course of the entire evening and into this morning. We struck the set this morning and, even before we had finished, the next group for the next production was waiting expectantly in the house, watching us erase a world that we had created and that will never be seen again, awaiting their turn to build their world.
Maybe poetry on paper is superfluous when it exists all around us all of the time. Maybe there is something redundant to the point of vulgarity when it comes to art when, in everything, it lives. For hundreds of years in Japane, the preparation of tea has been held as almost divine. Chop wood, carry water. We built a world, that world ended, and we helped to dissipate the rest. The stage is empty, the props are gone, the lights are out, and the actors have left.
Even the giant ocean evaporates into the sky and falls to Earth in a million different pieces.
I have been very lucky to work on such an amazing show with such colourful people. The audiences were generally smaller than I might have liked and I am not sure if we ever received a standing ovation. I like to think that this was not the sort of show in which one should ever receive a standing ovation. I like the idea that people were too busy digesting things to stand up. I talked to a man last night who had seen 'The Tulip' weeks before and he exclaimed that he was still trying to figure it all out. A man came to the show and, two weeks later, he was still pondering it. To me, that is success. People saw it, and left, and took it with them. It has stayed with them in one fashion or another.
I have a strong dislike for listening to artists explain their works when they are not asked. One of the foremost examples in my mind was at a poetry reading where, before every poem, the poet explained to us, the audience, how she came up with the poem. She told us the story of the birth of every poem she read. It made me irritated. There seems to me to be something counterintuitive about a person explaining their art. Once you make something and the world sees it, then it becomes the world's and any meaning that you may have attached to it ceases to be. It belongs to the world and the world will makes its interpretations. The individual artist grows old and dies, and all of his mysteries and secrets eventually parish with him but, if he is lucky, his art remains. It remains without stories, without the handicap of explanation or defense by its creator. It simply is and develops its own history, its own legends: the Mona Lisa, La Guernica, the Venus de Milo, ad infinitum. Intent gives way to truth?
And so the world premiere of Kevin Lawler's 'The Tulip' at the Blue Barn in Omaha, Nebraska has ended. But, as grace allowed me to discover last night, it is going to stay around this city for a long time to come.
Monday, March 17, 2008
The Beauty of Community Theatre
Our last three performances of 'The Tulip' are coming up this week. I like to think that the cast and crew have really bonded. The mood, the good feelings, have been building as if to reach a climax before we all, to one degree or another, go on our separate ways. This show, whether by design or not, has brought together some very old friends and those reunions have had a ripple effect on the lives of those previously estranged individuals. For some of us, we have been granted community by way of new relationships but, for others, community has been granted by old ties. It has been a very beautiful thing to watch.
I do not know the minds of the others; I do not know their thoughts. At the get-togethers where we will have collected the majority of cast and crew, I often like to sit back briefly and process this collection of personalities. Sometimes-- and often during this show-- that is so very rewarding. We all take what we will from times like these. Very often, perhaps more often than we truly acknowledge, the radiance of these special times shines long after the event has passed to memory.
I do not know the minds of the others; I do not know their thoughts. At the get-togethers where we will have collected the majority of cast and crew, I often like to sit back briefly and process this collection of personalities. Sometimes-- and often during this show-- that is so very rewarding. We all take what we will from times like these. Very often, perhaps more often than we truly acknowledge, the radiance of these special times shines long after the event has passed to memory.
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Paradox of the Mortality of Theatre
Every night, the audience takes on a different character. The variations in response from one night to another must assuredly be one thing that makes this sort of work rewarding in ways that movie work could never be. That is, we have the luxury of witnessing that response. We also have the luxury of using that response to discover new things. How do you communicate with one audience in comparison to how you communicate with another? The variation exists. Recorded media have the distinct advantage of being passed down to posterity as, for over seventy years, Charlie Chaplain has been putting on the same exact act, night after night, week after week, for an amount of time that long ago surpassed the end of his life. These media are remarkable; however, every person who ever watches Charlie Chaplain eat his boiled shoe will be seeing Charlie Chaplain eat his shoe in exactly the same way.
In stage theatre, in live media, every performance offers its own particular quirks and, whereras there is beauty in the seventy year lifespan of Mr. Chaplain's work, the lifespan of each performance lasts only as long as the lights are up. The next night, the performance is a different animal. Every night, you are bearing witness to something that will never again happen just as you saw it. Despite their fidelity to the script, the cast and crew will never put on the same show twice: timing, timbre, movement, body language, cues, and even certain set dressings will always be ever so slightly different. Part of this is the result of trial and error-- of discovering small problems and adjusting to them. Another part of this is the human factor, be it mistake, or exploration, or even just the particular mood of the particular actor or crewmember at that time.
Most often, except in extreme and rare cases, the variations are not large and they might not even necessarily be noticeable to an audience but, still, each night, the play, the piece, comes alive in its own way, its own incarnation, and never again in exactly the same way. It is, in a sense, alive in a way that recorded media, by their very nature can not be. It is born, lives, and dies all in a single night, only to be reborn the next night. And, should a script thrive and be produced months, or decades, or even millenia later, it again takes on new life. Maybe it connects us all, actor and audience, crew and critic, in a way immeasurably human and, for now, potentially immortal.
Forty years ago, people were also watching the plays of Tennessee Williams.
Four hundred years ago, people were also watching the plays of William Shakespeare.
Two thousand five hundred years ago, people were also watching the works of Aeschylus.
People have died; cities, nations, and even entire civilizations have crumbled to dust in those two and a half millenia but you can still see actors-- live, breathing, feeling actors-- performing stories that have outlasted the Soviet Union, the Aztec civilization, and the Roman Empire. And, each night, each of those stories in each of those performances is told in a way that never, throughout all of time, will ever be told again.
In stage theatre, in live media, every performance offers its own particular quirks and, whereras there is beauty in the seventy year lifespan of Mr. Chaplain's work, the lifespan of each performance lasts only as long as the lights are up. The next night, the performance is a different animal. Every night, you are bearing witness to something that will never again happen just as you saw it. Despite their fidelity to the script, the cast and crew will never put on the same show twice: timing, timbre, movement, body language, cues, and even certain set dressings will always be ever so slightly different. Part of this is the result of trial and error-- of discovering small problems and adjusting to them. Another part of this is the human factor, be it mistake, or exploration, or even just the particular mood of the particular actor or crewmember at that time.
Most often, except in extreme and rare cases, the variations are not large and they might not even necessarily be noticeable to an audience but, still, each night, the play, the piece, comes alive in its own way, its own incarnation, and never again in exactly the same way. It is, in a sense, alive in a way that recorded media, by their very nature can not be. It is born, lives, and dies all in a single night, only to be reborn the next night. And, should a script thrive and be produced months, or decades, or even millenia later, it again takes on new life. Maybe it connects us all, actor and audience, crew and critic, in a way immeasurably human and, for now, potentially immortal.
Forty years ago, people were also watching the plays of Tennessee Williams.
Four hundred years ago, people were also watching the plays of William Shakespeare.
Two thousand five hundred years ago, people were also watching the works of Aeschylus.
People have died; cities, nations, and even entire civilizations have crumbled to dust in those two and a half millenia but you can still see actors-- live, breathing, feeling actors-- performing stories that have outlasted the Soviet Union, the Aztec civilization, and the Roman Empire. And, each night, each of those stories in each of those performances is told in a way that never, throughout all of time, will ever be told again.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Harder Better Faster Stronger
Our run is half-way over. Kevin's talk with us is still strong in my head: there are only a few more times that we will be performing this play. The cast and crew know it. With each performance, everyone is discovering something new. Without deviating from the director's intent and direction, we have hit upon a moment when, having to decide to settle into what is comfortable or to attempt to push ourselves beyond where we were the night before, we mostly decided to push. New discoveries are made nightly.
'The Tulip' lends itself well to this sort of exploration. The arching messages are abstract, almost Campbellian in their nature, and to convey them in two hours is a challenge. Without a more conventional, linear flow, each scene-- and maybe even monologues within scenes-- is its own island of message, all of which make up an archipelago of meaning.
'The Tulip' lends itself well to this sort of exploration. The arching messages are abstract, almost Campbellian in their nature, and to convey them in two hours is a challenge. Without a more conventional, linear flow, each scene-- and maybe even monologues within scenes-- is its own island of message, all of which make up an archipelago of meaning.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Late Night Ramble
I've spent a good deal of time these last several weeks discussing 'The Tulip' with different people. They all ask me what it is about. I tell them loss but then I am quick to expound. It is important to me, you see, because we, as a culture, take loss to be something negative. In a play in which the main character loses two or, ostensibly, three people, then the amount of negativity seems pretty great, prejudicially speaking. But, to me, it is more than that. I infer a lot, I think. The ending of the play, and several monologues, as well, all reinforce, in my opinion, that loss simply happens.
But maybe that is not a fair word to use: loss. It is, I think, the most succinct. It might be difficult, without writing, say, a long-winded blog entry, to articulate my perceptions of the play without using 'loss'. The wrench in the gears is the implied cycle, perhaps. If we see despair as being the result of personal loss, then, before loss, there must be happiness. So, to have is to be happy, to lose is to be sorrowful, and to have again is a return to happiness? Linearity seems, to me, to better fit with the physical. When it comes to the... abstract, say, then, often, a cycle seems a more appropriate condition.
Perhaps that is simply me being the optimist. I was the same way with 'Pan's Labyrinth'. I will insist to this day, regardless what the director may or may not say, that that little girl was, in fact, a fairy princess trapped in a human body. The death of the body allowed her essence to return to the kingdom and, whereas on Earth, we are left feeling decimated by death, cruelty, and the worries of a cause being lost to the facists of Franco, in the underworld, we have the return of the pure and radiant princess. Maybe that is why we apply 'happily ever after' to fairy tales and not to, well, mortal tales-- because they can be happy.
Everything mortal, it seems, ends one way or the other in loss: loss of life, loss of love, loss of energy, loss of this, loss of that. And what of it? In the grand scheme of things (and not withstanding an argument regarding reincarnation), we spend most of eternity quite dead or, for the sake of somantics, prior to birth, quite not-alive. If the universe has, indeed, been around for billions of years, then, up until now, we have spent billions of years very much not alive and, arguably within the next one hundred years, most everyone who is alive on Earth right now will again be not alive. So, if we spend most of existence not alive, then this, right now, is the cosmic aberration. It makes one feel sort of guilty, this existential and universal rebellion.
Of course, if certain Christian creationists are correct, then the Earth is only in the order of six thousand years old and there has always been life (because I am sure they would say that God counts as life). I find that comforting. It is nice to consider that, maybe, this is the correct order to things and that, upon death, we all head off to someplace infinitely nicer and fluffier. But, even then, speaking pragmatically of the living, we have each spent, up until the moment of our births, not alive and, upon death, from a strict Judeo-Christian point of view, you die and stay dead. The soul goes somewhere else.
Either way, it seems like we each and all spend most of eternity quite not alive. I think the religious types have a point up when it comes to the reassurance of a deity of one form or another, a sort of cosmic safety net, a patronly (or matronly) force to reassure us from the fears that, yes, the universe really is that damn big and that, if you stare long enough at it on a clear, summer night, you will gradually understand that, yes, you are falling into that and that we all are. I had that happen once. I stared at the night sky so long that I felt compelled to grab onto something, lest I fall forever into the night sky.
But I've digressed for paragraphs. This play, it is about loss. But it is also, in many ways, about the opposite of that loss. Something I wrote a while back and with which I am quite in love is this: the world loves you; the world is not kind. Maybe that love is everywhere but that does not mean that things do not hurt and that there are not good reasons to feel sad, or angry, or scared. It is one realization of Hamlet's dilemna and that is, I think okay. I have had some slendid dreams.
But maybe that is not a fair word to use: loss. It is, I think, the most succinct. It might be difficult, without writing, say, a long-winded blog entry, to articulate my perceptions of the play without using 'loss'. The wrench in the gears is the implied cycle, perhaps. If we see despair as being the result of personal loss, then, before loss, there must be happiness. So, to have is to be happy, to lose is to be sorrowful, and to have again is a return to happiness? Linearity seems, to me, to better fit with the physical. When it comes to the... abstract, say, then, often, a cycle seems a more appropriate condition.
Perhaps that is simply me being the optimist. I was the same way with 'Pan's Labyrinth'. I will insist to this day, regardless what the director may or may not say, that that little girl was, in fact, a fairy princess trapped in a human body. The death of the body allowed her essence to return to the kingdom and, whereas on Earth, we are left feeling decimated by death, cruelty, and the worries of a cause being lost to the facists of Franco, in the underworld, we have the return of the pure and radiant princess. Maybe that is why we apply 'happily ever after' to fairy tales and not to, well, mortal tales-- because they can be happy.
Everything mortal, it seems, ends one way or the other in loss: loss of life, loss of love, loss of energy, loss of this, loss of that. And what of it? In the grand scheme of things (and not withstanding an argument regarding reincarnation), we spend most of eternity quite dead or, for the sake of somantics, prior to birth, quite not-alive. If the universe has, indeed, been around for billions of years, then, up until now, we have spent billions of years very much not alive and, arguably within the next one hundred years, most everyone who is alive on Earth right now will again be not alive. So, if we spend most of existence not alive, then this, right now, is the cosmic aberration. It makes one feel sort of guilty, this existential and universal rebellion.
Of course, if certain Christian creationists are correct, then the Earth is only in the order of six thousand years old and there has always been life (because I am sure they would say that God counts as life). I find that comforting. It is nice to consider that, maybe, this is the correct order to things and that, upon death, we all head off to someplace infinitely nicer and fluffier. But, even then, speaking pragmatically of the living, we have each spent, up until the moment of our births, not alive and, upon death, from a strict Judeo-Christian point of view, you die and stay dead. The soul goes somewhere else.
Either way, it seems like we each and all spend most of eternity quite not alive. I think the religious types have a point up when it comes to the reassurance of a deity of one form or another, a sort of cosmic safety net, a patronly (or matronly) force to reassure us from the fears that, yes, the universe really is that damn big and that, if you stare long enough at it on a clear, summer night, you will gradually understand that, yes, you are falling into that and that we all are. I had that happen once. I stared at the night sky so long that I felt compelled to grab onto something, lest I fall forever into the night sky.
But I've digressed for paragraphs. This play, it is about loss. But it is also, in many ways, about the opposite of that loss. Something I wrote a while back and with which I am quite in love is this: the world loves you; the world is not kind. Maybe that love is everywhere but that does not mean that things do not hurt and that there are not good reasons to feel sad, or angry, or scared. It is one realization of Hamlet's dilemna and that is, I think okay. I have had some slendid dreams.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
We're open!
trying to put all the details in place. It is everything that I had hoped for
in a production of the script. The material is very difficult to bring to life
properly and his cast and crew has done the hard work to pull it off
beautifully. A friend mentioned to me how exciting it would be to
have "The Tulip" done in New York. It would be exciting, but I am so
happy to have had it premier here in Omaha and at the Blue Barn.
Nothing will top that. I would not have it any other way. Here's why:
Last night at the cast party, Pearl came up to me and said, "I want to
show you my bathroom." Being an admirer of fine decor, I agreed.
When I looked in the bathroom I was amazed to see large plastic sheets
hung on all the shower walls. Her lines were written in colored markers
across the shower walls so she could study them before she went to work.
Every cast and crew member made a similar effort.
That's why I love making theatre here.
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