Friday, February 26, 2010
hurting a kid, or the art of lazy (meta)playwriting
The first play in this set is one produced in the last few years by Berkeley Rep: Martin McDonagh's The Pillow Man. I didn't see the production, but I did see the later Berkeley Rep production of the same writer's The Lieutenant of Inishmore. My beef is with The Pillow Man. I ordered the script because I thought it might have potential as a new play to work on in class. I read much of it; not all, but enough to know I could put it aside. The difficulty with the play is that it depends, for much of its effect, on anecdotes told by the characters of harrowing, grizzly violence perpetrated on children, stories which may or may not turn out to have actually happened. Although I can understand someone objecting to this on moral grounds, my reservations are not moral, exactly, but rather aesthetic: a narrative that relies on this type of shocking victimization is, well, not much of a narrative anymore. This type of gesture snuffs out the atmosphere of possibility, competing priorities and painful choice that narrative art requires to operate successfully. As spectators, our reactions to horrific stuff done to children is, aesthetically speaking, utterly coerced: we are given no latitude, no room to doubt, to wonder what if, to imagine alternative ways of looking at the matter at hand. The great Richard Gilman: "Henry James once spoke of the public's inability to distinguish art from "sensation" in the theater, and in fact of it's preference for sensation." McDonagh's work, in this play at least, for all its "meta-narrative" reflectiveness, is totally preoccupied with the sensations of horror and outrage that violence against defenseless, innocent beings cannot but arouse.
Clicking through the blogosphere, at a blog called Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire, I read about the work of Tim Crouch, and then learned he was bringing his show An Oak Tree to Los Angeles. From reading the interview with him, I got very excited, and went so far as to enjoin my current acting students in Los Angeles to go and see the show. I went in to the experience prepared to truly enjoy myself. And I hadn't even learned about the different-guest-star-every-night gimmick yet.
Crouch finds some movie star or theater luminary to be in the show every night. The guest is given clipboards with scripts to read off of and has an earpiece through which he is fed instructions of some sort (Peter Gallagher was the guest on the night I saw it). Crouch and the guest star interact and enact various situations, and eventually a sort of narrative emerges, a back story if you will, that has something to do with a child being hit by a car. I can't really remember the details now, it's been six weeks since I saw it, but I left the theater thinking, "that was a bunch of meta theatrical tricks enfolding a story about someone running over a kid." It had the playfulness and headiness of a constantly shifting theatrical frame combined with the indisputably awful anecdote of the child being run over. The evening was unsatisfying for several reasons, but the reprehensible aspect of it is the exploitation of the spectator's visceral recoil from the idea of the arbitrary and senseless death of a child. My indignation is not on behalf of the fictional child but of the very real members of the audience who were coerced into shock, outrage and sadness at the death of this child about whom we really knew nothing.
Apparently, hurting fictional children is Crouch's usual schtick, because in the blog post I linked to above, he and the blogger who interviews him discuss another of his pieces in which a child is apparently, or at least possibly, molested, again as part of the back story. It is clear that the function of these anecdotes is to add some type of weight and gravitas to the otherwise mostly gimmicky metatheatrical antics that comprise the work.
Then, just this past week, I read Will Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing). The piece is a monologue of digression, rumination and banter on the performer, the audience, life, desire, pain, the good stuff. "Anyway. Now. I guess we begin. Do you like magic? I don't." The reviewer for the New York Times, in his review of the piece, famously characterized Eno as "a Samuel Beckett for the John Stewart generation."
The piece has only the slightest of narrative context, wisps of back story, that involve a boy's dog being electrocuted, with a graphic description of the wounds to the animal, and then the boy being brutalized by a hive of bees that "swarmed into his eyes and mouth, stung him on every skinny surface." Did I mention that the audience is instructed, when the boy is introduced, to "break his arm, give him an injury, some problem with his hip so that he stands funny, can't walk 'real good'."
Are we seeing a pattern yet?
Eno's piece shows enough promise that I want to read his full-length plays and other works. But I have to say, I concur with Peter Marks of the Washington Post who says about Thom Pain:
Yet the monologue stints on illumination; the light it sheds pours through nothing larger than a pinhole. In the end, it feels a rather ordinary, single-dimension exercise in navel-gazing.
Or this critic in Seattle:
Seattle has seen Eno's Thom Pain (based on nothing) at the Seattle Rep, and now TRAGEDY: a tragedy—getting cute with capitalization is always a bad sign—by new-to-Seattle company Satori Group. Not so much Beckett as bumptious, Eno writes loping, postmodern laments about the emptiness, alienation, and shit-slog that is modern living. Like an adolescent poet, Eno can't see past his own ennui.
I have nothing against meta. I love me some Miranda July, Wooster Group, Brecht, Peter Handke. But it only goes so far by itself, and cheap narrative gambits involving damaging children doesn't do anything to imbue the work with significance. Rather, they betray the writers' insecurity at their own ability to purvey characters and situations that will invite our aesthetic and imaginative capacities to unfurl, be challenged, and find the deeper varieties of satisfaction.
Urban Outfitters will carry Shoplifting from American Apparel, so...
...the author of Shoplifting from American Apparel is already imagining a sequel to Shoplifting from American Apparel entitled Shoplifting Shoplifting from American Apparel from Urban Outfitters, which won't just be meta , it will be very.
Howard Fine's book
Superstar acting teacher and Uta Hagen protege Howard Fine has a book out, called, Fine on Acting A Vision of the Craft. I have to say, there's a lot to like about it. He writes with real sensitivity and thoughtfulness about many of the challenges that actors face and the sandtraps they can fall into. I am going to pay it the highest of compliments and start assigning sections of it in my course curriculum. I am going to list off some of the money quotes below, but I will say first (with some relief, I confess, because that gives me at least one thing that differentiates me from him) that there is one important place where Fine's book falls short. That is in his discussion of objective, or what he calls the "why" question. Let's look at what he says:
...I use the term super objective as smaller and confined within the boundaries of the scene, so that the immediate objectives correspond to the super objective. Think of the overall objective as the spine, throughline or mainline of intent in the scene. Here's an example: You're an actor reading for a producer who is casting a part. But before that, you have to give a great reading, you want to handle the interview well and make a personal connection. Those are smaller objectives that lead you to the overall objective. The overall objective is the thing that really drives us. It can change within the course of the scene, depending on the information you learn, For example, that same producer calls you back and says "By the way, this project is non-union, there is no pay, and there is nudity." Your overall objective may have changed very quickly. So, depending on what happens in the script, your objective can change.
This is a primitive way of looking at objective. My teachers at the Drama School found a way of looking at objective that is much more supple and penetrating than this. In fact it was the problems with the view that Fine describes that motivated the creation of this new way of looking at objective (they say necessity is the mother of the invention ;)) I have written about it previously, and it is a bit involved. You really need a classroom context to make the power of it clear, but I will say a bit about it here.
Look at what Fine says above: when the producer tells you about the conditions attached to the project, he says your objective may change. What he neglects to discuss is WHY it might change. He creates a situation in which the reasons for the change are fairly intuitive, but there are many script situations where the change may not be that obvious. Moreover, when the objective changes, its power as a unifying principle, something that the actor can grab onto and RIDE, is vastly diminished. Consider Strindberg's Miss Julie. The two principal characters play long scenes in which they change frequently from being powerfully drawn to each other to being repulsed by each other. Simply marking these changes is not enough. The actor needs to get in touch with that which REQUIRES her to change what she is pursuing.
So my teachers created a distinction between plot objectives and the underlying objective. Plot objectives are outcomes that you might pursue in the world, like getting the role or extricating yourself from the encounter with the sleazy producer. The underlying objective is the the thing that you will GET FROM achieving either of these outcomes. It must be articulated compellingly and concisely, and is an expression of our universal deep-seated need to situate ourselves in relationships to others of various kinds. Another LA acting teacher, Ivana Chubbuck, attempts to write about this in her book, although her treatment of it is mostly facile and superficial.
What is also immensely important and valuable about this way of working is that the underlying objective is something that the character gets through realizing plot objectives but also at each moment INDEPENDENTLY of the long term plot objectives.
I don't doubt that Fine understands this distinction intuitively; there is much in his book that says he understands that acting has everything to do with getting in touch with the ways in which we CARE for others. But the approach to objective in his technique that he articulates is dated and limited.
Here are some thing he says that I really like:
- "Your central responsibility as actors is to affect and to be affected by, that is your job. You must affect someone else, and you must be affected by them. Any choices you make that disallow that exchange have taken you down a dead-end."
- "You must have a body that is responsive to you, that is flexible, and you must start to develop yourself physically to be a great actor. All forms of dance training, martial arts, yoga and especially the Alexander Teachnique are excellent."
- "The first common mistake that will lead you down a very bad path is judging the character."
- "Writers are not writing about someone's mundane life. They're writing about the important moments. When you look at a scene and you don't see the crisis that character is in, you have taken out what is actable in the scene."
- "So much is made of the differences between stage acting and television and film acting. I like to say to my students, "Would you study the violin for film? Would you learn how to play football for television?" Of course not, that would be ludicrous. You learn how to play the violin. You learn how to play football. You learn how to act. You learn the craft itself.
- "The goal of preparation is spontaneous life."
- "A developed mind is part of what will become your range as an actor, which means you have to develop your intellect formally through education, or you have to find a way to do it on your own. How will you understand what's going on in a scene, if you have not developed your ability to think?"
bewitching shadow puppets
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