Last night, I attended the New York City Protest of California’s Prop. 8 — a piece of legislation that rescinded the rights of same sex couples to marry. It was an exceptionally inspiring event that began outside of the LDS Church on 65th and Columbus and escalated into a march down Broadway to Columbus Circle. There were thousands of us, chanting things like “Hey, hey, Ho, ho! Homophobia’s got to go!” and “Gay, Straight, Black, White, Marriage is a civil right!” and so on.

I went because it’s about love. It’s about every man and woman being able to look at a fellow human being and saying, “I choose you,” and giving them the ability to cement that choice in any way they want. In all likelihood, I will not want to marry a woman, and so my rights are protected and that seems so egregiously unfair that I feel comfortable pointing at any culprit who has implicated itself in the passage of Proposition 8 and saying, “Shame on you, what you propogate is wrong.”

I don’t care about the churches — let them deny ceremonies to whomever they choose, I don’t want to govern that. There will be places of worhship available to everyone if gay couples get the legal, government-sanctioned right to join together the same way straight couples do. I have had extensive conversations on the subject with people very close to me who believe that gay marriage shouldn’t be allowed and the fact of the matter is, I simply don’t understand the point of view. A very wise friend of mine said this to met last night:  It redefines gender roles in one of the last bastions of institutionalized masculine and feminine role designation — “Which one is the wife!?”People say: If you do that [allow gay marriage], we don’t know what marriage is anymore! And then you’ve “redefined” marriage. And our marriage is less…valuable…less defining. Think of how many people in this country DEFINE themselves by marriage?“Some day she’ll make a “man” out of you.” “Well son, it’s time you become a “man” and marry that girl.”When marriage isn’t about accomplishing the masculine ideal of courting, wooing, and “winning” the hand of a woman…when MEN can WIN MEN! Or WOMEN…WOMEN woo! But you know one thing that Gay marriage will encourage in this country? MARRIAGE! which was on the decline in this country! You want to talk about preserving the sanctity of marriage? Then give all of the citizens of the US a stake in it!

And of course, the conclusion we came to is that things need to be constantly redefined. As Keith Olbermann so eloquently put it, we had to redefine marriage so that an African American would marry a White Person, and even so that blacks could marry amongst themselves and have it be legally recognized. Change is brewing, I believe, and for the better.

(The best sign I saw said: “I didn’t ask her to ‘Civil Union’ me!”)

Understand, I’ll slip quietly
Away from the noisy crowd
When I see the pale
Stars rising, blooming over the oaks.
I’ll pursue solitary pathways
Through the pale twilit meadows,
With only this one dream:
You come too.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Please take a moment to watch this video, wherein Keith Olbermann — for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration — details why the passing of Proposition 8 in California is something of which this country ought to be ashamed. As he says, it’s not about shouting and it’s not about politics, it’s about love and the desire that everyone has to be a little less alone in the world.

So I’m sitting in theater history on Thursday, and we’re discussing Beckett and Albee, when all of a sudden there is a knock on the door. Probably just a late-comer, right? We’re only 20-minutes into the three-hour class, so that’s a fair assumption. But I didn’t notice the glimmer in my professor’s eye when she went to the door, though my jaw did drop along with everyone else in the class when in walked Edward Albee, arguably the greatest living American playwright. So we all chilled with Albee for the remaining two-and-a-half hours of class, and he talked about his work and we asked him questions and came to know his good-natured irreverence and that he didn’t hide the fact that he thought the writer was far and away the most important part of… anything ever. I, for one, very much enjoyed this attitude.

I took the best notes I could, though I spent a lot of time staring at him with wide-eyed admiration (Come on, Virginia Woolf and The Goat are two of my favorite plays of all time!) but I have typed up what I managed to get down on paper and am posting everything here for your enjoyment.

* * *

“A draft? I don’t do drafts.”

“Theater is a collaboration with the self… When you write a play you write it alone. When someone wants to produce it, thats where the problems start.”

[to an actor] “Do whatever you want, so long as you end up where I intended… There is a difference between interpretation and distortion.”

“Perhaps a critic should have to read a play before he sees it. The criticism is based on the production, not the play.”

“The creative act is what the writer does.”

“I write plays because it’s the only kind of writing I do with any competence… The short story and I have different ideas about its nature, and the short story was usually right.”

[on directing] “I wrote the fucking thing [the zoo story], I wanted to direct it, and since I wrote it, they couldn’t stop me.”

-Punctuation: Learn by studying music to notate the rhythm of your plays. Learn choreography, sculpture, and painting.
-Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett — but don;t read only great plays, you’ll stop writing. Read rotten plays. They’re very encouraging.

“Some actors have trouble motivating ‘hello’.”

“You can’t teach anybody how to write. You can simply tell them how other people did it. No one can teach you how to write like you.”

“Most people start writing plays much too soon. Spend time with the characters, but try not to think too conceptually. Wait a while before writing it down.”

“[The movie of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?] is in black and white, but I wrote the play in color.”

“The playwright is more important than the director.”

“Ibsen had no sense of humor.”

“Write the first play you’ve ever written, then write the first play that has ever been written.”

“Try to fail! If you only do what you know you can do, you’ll do less and less each time.”

Synecdoche, in essence, is referring to a whole by one of its parts. Or vice versa. So if I don’t know you, you may be nothing to me but a set of thick lips or a pair of gunmetal gray eyes, or a crooked nose. In any event, synecdoche is a commonly, though unconsciously, used method of identification, a way for our big bubbling brains to make sense out of something as complex as another person. I think this is a great thing. I think, sometimes, it’s better for you to just be a pair of gray eyes.

But I bring this up because Trystan and I went to see Synecdoche, New York, the ambitious new film by writer cum director, Charlie Kaufman. We emerged feeling as though we’d been dunked in a vat of thick, black tar and that everything nearby stuck to us. Our initial thoughts and criticisms were brief, fragmented, and we parted ways without saying much of anything.

But, all right, I have to say now: I am sick of being punished for being an audience member. Give me some clue as to what I’m actually getting myself into before I take my seat, and don’t be so certain that if you do, I’ll bail on you. I might not. Give me the benefit of the doubt from time to time. Like the production of Baal that I was working on, the trend has seemed to be to confound the audience, to offend and to practically force the cathartic effect through intense violence or unyielding melancholy. Well, sure, Mr. Kaufman. If you make me watch someone torture themselves for three hours, I’ll come out feeling sad, too.

There really is no comparing Baal to Synecdoche, except where my general aversion to the type is concerned. And since it’s early, and since I’m not feeling well, I’ll draw any comparisons I like: In Baal, it was a veritable theater of cruelty, the bombardment of the senses. I was at once over-stimulated and repulsed by the action that took place on stage. The design, the lights, the music, everything led to the overall feeling that the artists involved were “in” on a ploy to abuse the audience. I had much the same feeling when I emerged from Synecdoche; equally as emotionally manipulated, but it drew out a different emotion.

Not to mention that they both threw narrative structure to the wind. “Are you smart enough to keep up?” they asked. No, Mr. Kaufman. I’m apparently not smart enough to keep up. You had a character live in a burning house for decade after decade and ultimately die of smoke inhalation, precisely at the point where we, as an audience, could predict that someone else was going to die. You abandoned the second daughter, which I thought was a glaringly inconsistent character choice. Gah, I can’t even write about what I thought of the movie because it was all too jumbled.

Well acted, well-shot, and confused beyond comprehension. Teeming with pretension, you asked too much of me, Charlie. And I came in on your side. Even your loveliest moments were stripped of their potency by the maze of a “story” you were trying to create.

Not so in Baal, at least. “Love is like biting into an orange, so that the juice squirts between your teeth… Love is also like a coconut, once the juice is gone then only the rotted flesh remains.” The language, at least, was enough. Sometimes, it was enough. Sometimes it got in the way because the interpretation was unclear, and so we had a pair of giggling lovers in a phone booth when they should have been on a hill top, under a willow tree. I got the feeling that, more often than not, many of the people working with these words did not completely understand what they meant. And that is the fastest way to kill a play.

On top of which was a gratuitous rape scene that made me feel physically ill. If I had not been working on the play, I would have gotten up and left the theater. As it was I considered very seriously asking to be excused, given my own history with the subject. But I was passive, as I typically am, and I said nothing. There is a way to do those things tastefully, tactfully, and in a way that can be brutal without being cruel on the part of the director. This failed utterly in maintaining any level of tact or sensitivity, and I felt betrayed by a theater-maker that I had been putting my trust into. I do not want to make theater that hurts people.

I do, however, want to make theater that entices people to confront certain… we’ll say… uncomfortable feelings they might have. Which is precisely why I have resurrected Esme. I was instantly drawn in, re-reading the 40-some pages I have this old, thought-dead play. “You’re beautiful,” is the first line. The second is, “show me your cunt”. A harsh opening? Sure, but it sucks you into the tone of the play immediately. It is going to be an exploration of love and lust and desire. It’s going to be about what people do to stay together, what happens when they’re ripped apart. It’s going to be about trying to be good and failing and trying again. It’s going to be about first love, first fuck and the perverse nature of human beings. I think it’s going to be great, if it ever sees the light of day. It’s much racier than my usual work. MUCH.

I don’t need to smack my audience around to get their attention. I think a bombardment of the senses is a far inferior tactic to whispering quietly, enticing the audience to lean forward in their chairs, their elbows on their knees, longing to hear what’s being said.

I feel like a ghost in this town.
It’s good that I never fell in with the wrong people, for I have this insatiable desire to scratch the dark underbelly of a city of sin. It would be easier, it seems to me, to cease upon the midnight with no pain, form of: white powder, small pills, fuck him and become a heap of flesh without a face. But all these people in my life, they are a coating of weeds and fallen leaves on the meniscus of the pond I would otherwise drown myself in. They are too thick to let me sink through.

i. I have been a negligent blogger, primarily due to my participation in the tech for Baal at Columbia Stages. I was taught how to run a light board and program a show and have subsequently done both of these things for hours and hours over the weekend and after class and/or work. It’s a rather exhausting schedule, and I can’t wait for it to be over, but they have very quickly taught me how to program a light board and run it during a show. Ok, so the running it part just means pressing “GO” when the Stage Manager says so, but the programming takes a little more know-how. I actually feel like I have a much better idea of what a tech is all about, and certainly some interesting insight into lighting design. That said, I reiterate, I want it to be over.

ii. I have, during this time of great stress and small amounts of free time, wanted to do nothing but play video games. I got my character to 70. Somehow. And now all I feel like doing is zoning out and PvPing and making my little red-headed hunter look cooler. Her gear is pretty weak and — oh my good God in heaven, am I blogging about World of Warcraft? Truly I ought to be sacrificed for the greater good. Moving on…

iii. How do I find a composer? I have all these ideas bubbling in my head, and I really want to write a musical, but until I have consistent access to a piano, I don’t think I can write one all by myself. If you know a composer, ask him or her if he or she wants to write a musical with a lyric/book writer who is also a musician and also enjoys writing melody lines, but who wants the process to be entirely collaborative. Someone who thinks it would be cool to send tracks of music via e-mail and meet once every couple of weeks for brainstorming. Someone who doesn’t want to do what everyone else has done, but who wants to be on the forefront of figuring out where musical theater is going to go next. Someone who loves all different kinds of music, and who enjoys character-driven stories. Someone kind of weird. Someone in their mid to late 20’s or early 30’s. Someone who doesn’t mind that I have a crazy schedule, and doesn’t necessarily want to work on a deadline. Do you know this person? If so, please feel free to point them in my direction.

In fact, outside of school settings, how does anyone find collaborators of any kind. Thoughts?

iv. I feel that my education is pointing me in a certain direction, like there is this grand gestalt of the bits of information that my brain has latched onto, and I’m not quite there yet, not quite to the point where I’m putting it all together in a coherent manner, but it is coming together somehow. I can feel it, much more than i can think it. Something to do with my study of the Avant-Garde and the American musical or… something… I don’t know yet…

Chuck Mee invited his daughter into class on Monday to do a lecture on Sanskrit drama which was really interesting. A classmate from China also talked about Yuan drama, and these two dramaturgies are so vastly different from the western world that I’m not even sure what to do with them. Our assignment is to write something using these types of dramaturgical tricks but — all right, so Sanskrit drama, or traditional kutiyattma, utilized texts that were about 5 or 10 pages long, and yet the performances could go on anywhere from five to 41 nights, as the actors (who had trained for seven years to learn very strictly codified gestures) were expected to take the text and riff off of the lines on the page. Indian drama is about savoring moments, as opposed to western drama which tends to sit in judgment of the characters it watches. I have no idea how to give an audience something to savor, as the beautifully flawed voices in my head, I think, ought to be judged, though not by me. It’s fascinating stuff, but I’m completely stuck.

The over-sleepy from tech certainly isn’t helping.

v. I’m going to start trying to use this blog for yet another purpose: things that I think are interested. I tend to stumble across some great stuff on ye olde interwebs, and then I forget to document it and >poof< it vanishes from my brain. Today, in conversation, I returned to my roots in the study of the Avant-garde, and want to remember the situationists. I had forgotten about the situationists.

Look, we’re all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house—in the bedroom he’s asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he’s rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he’s paying his taxes, in the yard he’s raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he’s making a bomb to blow it all up.

The above quotation is by Arthur Miller, from The Ride Down Mount Morgan, I believe. And the reason it is appearing here is because it has inspired my latest idea. It is my intention to take Mr. Miller quite literally. More on this story as it develops.

The busy has been ramped up considerably, and will only get worse through the end of this month. Typically, I am a big fan of the fall, but this autumn has been eaten. Starting this weekend I’m being forced to do tech work at Columbia — I fucking hate doing tech work. I hate it. I loathe it. I have a great deal of love and respect for technical theater professionals, but as you may have noticed, I am not a technical theater professional, and the reason for that is that I fucking hate doing tech work. It’s torturous. I am forced to sit through a play, in the dark, over and over, and I’m not allowed to say anything about it. It’s the worst thing ever in the world for me. Not to mention I have a ton of homework to do, and this assignment comes at a very bad time for me. I have, admittedly, a terrible attitude about the whole thing and have been trying to come up with some way to weasel out of it all week.

All of us first-years have to do it, so I may as well suck it up. I hate, I hate so much. Saturday to Saturday. It’s one week — fuck it, I can do it.

/bitch&moan

I have been thinking of getting a fish.

You know, a living creature at whom I can point my outward ramblings and feel ever so slightly less insane. Then I remembered that we have a fish who lives in a cup on top of our microwave. He lives in a cup because he gets lost in a bowl any bigger and can’t find his way to his food. He’s likely to die in a proper fish tank. I don’t think I’ll get another fish.

I have settled on being a Panda for Halloween. Aside from being bored of a) the expense and b) the veritable skank parade, I decided to settle on something inexpensive (the panda-ear hat cost me $13) and cute. Black pants, white shirt, black arm-warmers, hat. Black eyes, maybe a nose. A little stuffed panda cub. A stalk of bamboo, perhaps, if it occurs to me. Easy.

I had meant to spend most of the afternoon getting homework done, catching up, maybe even getting ahead. Instead, I put on a movie — which WAS homework — and proceeded to fall asleep in the middle of it. It is now 4PM, and I have half a movie and a tumultuous nap with oddly vivid dreams to show for it.

A friend of mine recently wrote a blog post that got me thinking about the nature of ambition, which is apropos as I kill my two-hour break between class and the infamous Collaboration Weekend here at Columbia (read: I am vanished for 4 days). I remember reading somewhere, and I can’t recall where exactly, a theory that stated you are only a writer if you have written today. Have you written today? No? Then today, you are not a writer. I tend to ascribe, loosely, to this theory. I don’t understand the writer who does not want to sit down to do his work. I don’t understand the writer who can never see a project through to completion. When I say “loosely”, I mean only that there is more work that goes into my projects than simply sitting at a computer and hammering out vaguely connected bits of dialogue. I am a writer who is heavy on the research, who is heavy on the notebook-scribbling, and so these things also make me a writer.

Today, I am not a writer yet, but I will be before the day is out. And I’ll be a writer again tomorrow. In fact, I’ve been a writer 6 days a week since I started Graduate school, and this is because I want to be a writer from 9 to 5, 5 days a week, afterwards. Ideally. (Lets not parse words — I’ll teach, or be a literary manager, or write for television, or whatever — shut up, they’re my dreams.)

Anyway, the post mentioned above also made me start to think about the personal crisis of faith — for truly, that is what it was — that led me to the path I am currently on. During my senior year of college, frustrated and frightened, I looked toward the future at my Bachelors Degree in Pretty Much Nothing and turned pale in my anxiety. Sure, SLC gave me a fantastic education that tought me creative thinking and the art of bullshit (which sounds snarky, but is actually the only marketable skill I got there aside from how to hang and focus lights) but what could I do that would actually earn me a living wage? “Will Think For Food”, said my proverbial cardboard sign. I considered taking the LSATs, like every good, lost Sarah Lawrence kid. I even bought a book and enrolled in a class. Yes. Me. Not many people know this, as it was not my finest moment.

After graduation, I went home to Michigan and got a job waiting tables, which was pride-painful more than anything else. Career waitresses looked at me with disdain because I couldn’t mix a very good drink, and I looked back at them because they’d never been taught the difference between Dadaism and Surrealism. Yes, I was the useless one. I was not a very good waitress. As a mediocre artist, I thought I had only more jobs like that one to look forward to. I took a job at Juilliard just to be close to what I loved, while I began to peck away at my keyboard, finishing up that headache of a play that I so love, that I will always love. But I thought that awful, awful job was as close as I’d ever get.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I was rejected from two of the graduate programs to which I applied that I began to figure it all out. I went out to dinner with Stuart Spencer and told him about the awful application process for the New School, and he looked at me across two plates of Pad Thai and said: “Well, that doesn’t really sound like a place you want to be anyway.”

I began to reform my plan. I was still waiting to hear from Columbia and BC, but I decided that the outcome of those applications wouldn’t change anything except my daily schedule and my finances. I began to do some freelance writing. I picked up an old draft of a new(er) play and rewrote it. I started a new play. I wrote several short stories and sent them to competitions. I began sketching out a treatment for a novel. I created this blog. And I believe, truly believe in my heart of hearts, that putting that energy out into the world, actually demonstrating the kind of devotion that my application essays had claimed that I had, was part of why I ended up where I am, working my ass off at a really fantastic school.

I’m not sure why I’m writing all this. Maybe I’m feeling a little introspective because I’m exceedingly nervous about the events to take place tonight and this weekend. Maybe I’m hungry, or a little tired, or maybe I think it’ll help to inspire someone to quit talking and do their work. Doing the work is the hard part. The other things have a way of falling into place.

This needs no introduction.

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet
By MAUREEN DOWD

Now that he’s finally fired up on the soup-line economy, Barack Obama knows he can’t fade out again. He was eager to talk privately to a Democratic ex-president who could offer more fatherly wisdom — not to mention a surreptitious smoke — and less fraternal rivalry. I called the “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin (yes, truly) to get a read-out of the meeting. This is what he wrote:

BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

BARTLET leads OBAMA into his study. Continue Reading »