Today, as I was showing up to my daily journal of creativity, I was struck by an amazing insight into why Maria Irene Fornes is my most favorite writer. As I was attending to a butternut squash I had fixed for dinner later today, as well as for several dinners during the week, I was thinking about this play that I’m writing. It’s a ten-minute piece, which is a format I’m not thrilled with. I have my suspicions about the reason these sorts of works exist, and mostly what I suspect is adminstrative laziness is the author of this detestable genre.
I say this partly because it really chafes my nucha to be so beyoked in terms of time. There are some people whose gifts are very well suited to this task, and in fact their ability to write longer works is the difficluty for them. I don’t begrudge others who have this talent, but when asked to write something like this, I kick, I scream, I try, and I fail, and hooray! I’m an apple trying to squeeze myself into a raisin sized outfit.
Well, don’t that sound familiar to a Compulsive Eater, eh?
Anyway, I was pondering how in this play I have some writing that is “on the nose.” In theater, subtext is a wonderful thing. Lines in a play that offer mystery or out-and-out contradiction are fabulous. The person who is talking about abstinence while noshing on a waffle. The mother who is upbraiding her son for hitting a girl by slapping him around. Astrov’s seduction of Yelena while talking about ecological devastation in a small Russian village. FAAAAABulous!
But on-the-nose writing usually signifies a failure of imagination, or more likely it’s the idea that the writer wishes to convey but hasn’t yet gotten to the oblique or contradictory way to do so. I was pondering though that on-the-nose writing as I’ve called it doesn’t always serve a playwright’s intentional failure function, but can actually be used in ways to further plot in a manner that is ingenuous and fresh. It takes a certain mastery and restraint however.
I’ve only seen one production of Fornes’s play Abingdon Square, and I have to say when I saw it in 1987 at the American Place Theater, I felt such an ambivalence about it. Because so much of the writing is x equals x. Yet the play has haunted me since that time. The images and the honesty, the innocence and the freshness, the true depiction of a child’s growth into being the full-fledged woman she is entitled to become. Set in World War I Greenwich Village it also has a timeless quality to it. The reasons I disliked the play turn out to also be the reasons that it haunts me so.
That got me thinking about Fornes’s delightful Enter THE NIGHT (yes, the words are all-capped). There is a brilliant use of what would be considered not only bad writing, but ATROCIOUS writing in the play. Jack shares this play that gleefully violates the theater commandment, “Thou shalt not write a play about the village of the kind and happy people!” The function of the play within the play however, is to offer a moment of delicacy and tenderness to their uptight, hectic and hard lives. Tessa the nurse deals with HIV patients day in day out. Paula is handling a cancer diagnosis. Jack himself may or may not be infected, and is a stage runner for The Ridiculous Theater. In the Seattle production, I remember a brilliantly hilarious monologue where Jack gives a speech that just enumerates all the stuff he has to do backstage to help Charles and Everett with their performance.
Well. Thinking about Enter THE NIGHT also got me thinking about her other play with the similar title What of the Night? which is a collection of 4 one-act plays that follow this group of vagrants in 1930s L.A., as they try to eke out an existence, then disperse on their own paths. Irene worked on this play way back in 1986 when I was a student in the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop. Her process kindled in me a desire to imitate her, and actually my play Timberline was written in one of her workshops. It’s my most favorite thing I’ve ever written.
I got to bypass so much of my intellect when I wrote that play. I see that there is a certain central core to my soul that comes out in my writing, even in my difficult attempts to finding ways to fuse my intellect with the heart. A worthy endeavor, to be sure. But I’z gotz ta pay da billz, ya know? I’d luvz to have a commoishal Pradauck.
In musing about Irene’s plays I pondered what conneected Abingdon Square, What of the Night?, Enter THE NIGHT and perhaps even her play about 2 English actresses who acquire a fragment of the first translation of Hedda Gabler (Summer in Gossensass), and realized in an electric frisson that that all of these plays depict tribal energies. In What of the Night? it’s quite blatant, but in Abingdon Square, it’s quite subtle. And it’s just part of the woodwork of Enter THE NIGHT, where these 3 characters have each other to get by, and are able through the course of the aciton of the play to be who they are, and to give the simple and necessary love they have for the other 2.
And I realize that this is also what attracts me to Charles Ludlam’s work too, though that was more about his operation than about his plays themselves. I have to say that putting on one of his works creates a tribe out of the actors who come together however, having directed Camille myself. And I’ve always wanted to direct all 3 of these Fornes works, as well as Mud and the amazingly beautiful and harsh The Conduct of Life.
I feel on some level John Patrick Shanley must be doing the same thing too, for I’m very much attracted to his work and have been since the first time I saw it. That shamanic element of myself recognizes itself in only a smattering of writers. For example, I don’t feel it in Kushner or Mamet, as brilliant as they are. I wonder if it doesn’t have to do with the Catholic element, at least in Fornes and Shanley’s cases. I feel it a little in Jon Robin Baitz and Richard Greenberg’s work, though not as strong. It’s more a part of the loom, whereas with Fornes, Shanley, Ludlam and I would also venture Fassbinder, it IS the loom. (Could Chekhov and Beckett also have that element, I wonder?)
I feel called to follow the thread into my tricksterish side, and I am seeking to write some new pieces that emerge from a shamanic primordium. Irene had an interesting exercise for actors where she had them consider their liver in a meditative state. I sat in on this and went through the exercise myself, and at the time, I had the oddest visualization: As I considered my liver, I “saw” it hooked up to a formica countertop. A plastic sort of feeding device was nourishing it, and it seemed quite happy and wet and deeply burgundy too. Then I was to clear the image and let the first thing come to mind, and for some reason Dustin Hoffman’s face flashed across my consciousness for just a second to be replaced by a mammoth box of Rice Krispies. I mean, I was floating next to a 3 story sized box of Snap! Crackle! and Pop! And Pop! started talking to me about how he was getting gypped by “the man.”
(She has lots of exercises that get a person into the silly zone, which I do admit I love.)
Padua Hills was a sort of month-long tribal excursion, and I wish I’d have been able to do it more than the one time. Things have quite changed in these two plus decades though. I see that I’ve been quietly delving deeper, and it can get quite difficult because I have some impatience to deal with. Now seems to be a good time to start the limiting of the coffee intake, needless to say.
But I see that the stories that are coming through me need to be constantly bathed in that spirittual stream, and that is how they will become the gold that I know they are. My Easing Godsoul Out (EGO) aspect will of course try and have a crack at things, but it’s the return of the Fetch and Godsoul to the page that will keep the piece on the track.
May the blessings emerge, and may Cerridwen guide me toward whichever plot on the Sacred Playwriting Mountain I’m to furrow and seed next.
Alongside the understanding of the shamanic calling to writing that I’ve been feeling all these years, a startling revelation rocked my world today when I realized that I have been stuffing a feeling of devastating grief for decades. Way back when, I had the idea to take the short play “Timberline” and expand it to a full-length play and I felt intuitively that it had to be like “Betrayal” and start at the end and work its way backward to the beginning. In my idea the play would end with all the characters returning to the Cosmic Womb of Creation – how shamanic can you get?
Today I realized that I wasn’t able to surround myself with “my tribe” at the time. I see that there was a bit of hostility in the air around my attempts, and I didn’t really understand why. I have a deeper understanding of the denial and the third-rails that this project was touching now, 25 years later. And all those feelings just came out in a torrent of healing tears.
The weapons that attacked the idea were those of people who were needing to tamp down what I was expressing in no uncertain terms, and I understand that I too was caught up in my own fantasies that made me prey to the violent words that were done. I did not understand at that time, that every art work has a right to exist. I did violence to myself when I eventually shelved the play and found I didn’t have the reserves to stick up for it, that I didn’t really understand what it was that I was desiring to write. But looking back, I am dumbfounded at my lack of awareness of a pattern I’ve been putting together. I have been for some reason writing about a gay Hispanic-Caucasian relationship in several of my works. And I’ve done it again, both in the television program idea and in “3 Storm Into 4 Sun.”
Goodness. I guess I keep trying to go back and get it right. More things change, indeed.