The inspiration of festivals (Part 1)
Three bald men dance with three hot chicks, a.k.a., Great festivals make you wanna dance.
1986 Edinburgh Fringe Festival: The grand-daddy of theater festivals. The year I went, the two productions I was in accounted for 1/400th of the total number of productions. Three weeks of shows, six days a week. The entire city is taken over by the festival, with many residents taking a vacation away from the city, financed by rentals of their properties to the swarms that descend. My two shows were “Oedipuss ‘N’ Boots,” a half-improv/half-sketch show out of Northwestern University, and “Moonchildren,” a Michael Weller play produced by Studio Theater Productions, out of New York City. Being part of this festival meant doing little else other than being part of the festival. My shows were at 11:30 at night and 10:30 in the morning in two different theaters. Time between shows was spent either eating, sleeping, or doing street theater (“really bad juggling from the worst country in the world”) on the Mound between three museums. Time after the 11:30 shows was spent drinking. A lot. Great reviews for both shows, a summer I’ll never forget (I turned 20 on the plane to London, where the New York company rehearsed before the festival), and a case of walking pneumonia at the end. The standard against which I’ve judged other festivals for years.
1991 Seattle Fringe Festival: I produced and ran sound for “Blight,” an original adaptation of a Stuart Dybek short story, for Northwest Passage Theater, of which I was a founding member.
1992 Seattle Fringe Festival: I was one of four actors in John Godber’s “Bouncers,” which was one of the festival’s darlings, routinely overselling each show (typically about 50 folks in the audience in a theater zoned for 35). I was also on the board of SFF that year.
1993 Seattle Fringe Festival: Re-mount of “Bouncers” in a larger theater. Typically had 100+ audience in a space meant for about 80.
1994 Seattle Fringe Festival: With Stephanie Roberts, co-wrote and co-performed “Almost Home” (with music by Rob Wittmer, pre-Awesome days, and direction by Scott Zeller), really a mash-up of two solo shows around the theme of home, and where people find it.
1995 Seattle Fringe Festival: Wrote and performed “Speakeasy,” a one-man show about four generations of cops turned bar owners in Chicago, starting during Prohibition. Could’ve been a lot better. I finished the script two days before the show opened.
2011 Seattle Festival of Improvised Theater: With Interrobang, performed “Interrobang Anonymous,” an improvised addiction support group (with the addiction unwittingly provided by the audience). Also got to do a mash-up performance with an all-star line-up: Jill Bernard , Ethan Newberry , Chelsea Binta , Mark Bratton, Michael Ferstenfeld, and Jennifer Cargill. Then a workshop taught by Asaf Ronen and another mash-up, this one with Joe Bill, Shira Wilson, Kris Corbitt, Alfonso Lopez, and Chelsea Binta. And partying. Almost matched Edinburgh in terms of inspiration coming out of it. (Was also sick at the end, though not to the same degree as Edinburgh.)
Partying is a surprisingly important component of great festivals, not because partying is fun (it is), but because that’s the time during which you get to hang out with a lot of people who share your same passions. This cannot be overstated. (The same holds true for great writing conferences. AWP Chicago in ’09, in many ways, fits my experience with theater festivals: eating, living, breathing the writing life, among others who share that passion, pretty much 24/7 for about five days.) It is largely because of the communication outside of actual performances that these festivals are so inspiring. And, to me, that was the largest failure of Seattle’s fringe festivals–there weren’t central gathering spots at which participants in the festivals gathered, and the scheduling of the festivals was such that it was only a few hours each day of the festival when its participants were in its clutches.
Hmm. That wasn’t very brief. And it didn’t delve much at all into the best parts of the best festivals–the people met, conversations had, and inspiration received. But there’s the foundation for some of what I was thinking heading into 14/48 weekend. Since I’m already over 700 words, which is just silly for a blog post, and I know there are hundreds more to write about 14/48 itself, we’ll call this “Part 1,” and I’ll start working on “Part 2″ in a sec.
I’m a stymied stooge.
I got to play a stooge, brilliantly written by Eric Lane Barnes. Now it's time to stop.
And, for the most part, I don’t mind my writing sucking great big donkey balls. From time to time. It’s necessary. To get to the teeny-tiny percentage of writing that I genuinely like, I have to write a fair amount of equine-fellating shit (why does my auto-correct not like fellating? Fellate me, auto-correct; it doesn’t recognize fellate, either, but fellatio? it’s all good… wtf? Side note to that as well: best usenet post ever: “What the fuck is WTF?!” Whee. I’m off on tangents).
Almost a couple decades ago, when I was writing a lot without any thought toward getting published, I took a bit of advice from one of Natalie Goldberg’s books about letting one’s internal editor have his say on the page: if your internal editor is telling you that you suck, write that down. My internal editor’s voice, when transferred to the page, happened to sound a lot like Ross Perot. Cracked me the hell up every time I wrote down his “What the hell, son? Dad gum it, you can’t write that,” etc. It made it a hell of a lot easier to dismiss this voice, since it was so insanely moronic. Maybe I need to invite that little sumbitch back in again. Just write his idiocy and let that particular bit of writing be part of the necessary shit pile.
So… good. Okay. I’m just writing down a bunch of words as they occur to me. Good. “Law & Order: Los Angeles” starts in about seven minutes, though (if we remember our teevee schedules correctly), so we’re going to go in and watch that. So. I won’t be getting to “real” writing tonight. Hell, this isn’t even of much value as a blog post.
But here’s what I was thinking of when I sat down to start writing in this here WordPress window: that whole question of how improv affects my writing. I still don’t know. I’m not writing anything other than a blog post. In theory, it should be helping me to slash away, and toss away the inevitable detritus. But here’s what I did this weekend just past (on night one, I played Curly Howard; on night two, I played a weasel, an old goat, and a German Shepard mix). And I was thinking: maybe because I got to perform two god-damned AMAZING scripts this weekend, both of which were written overnight… maybe because of that, I’m letting myself be intimidated by other people’s really, really, really good writing. (I plan to write more about 14/48 soon.)
But as I sit here typing this out, I know that’s bullshit. Not bullshit that they were amazing—they were. Holy shit, they were. Bullshit that I’m intimidated. Truth is, I’m totally inspired in just about every working neuron. Bullshit, because I’m allowing myself to be a) lazy, and b) intimidated by my own internal editor. The first pisses me off because: fuck you, Dave, stop being lazy. The second pisses me off because: fuck you, Dave, you know that little Ross Perot inside is an idiot.
So… yeah. I need to strap myself back in again. I know I have a lot of bad writing to get out. I always do. But I’d like to think that I have some good writing to get out, too, and that’s not going to happen unless I allow myself to do the bad writing, and move the fuck on.
Tell the truth.
I had that mustache, too, Eric. I know how hard it can be.
Bullet points!
- Back in June 2004, we at SmokeLong published The Evening of the Dock by Steve Almond. What’s stuck with me over the years is not so much the story (which is excellent) as some things Steve said in his interview. Here are the specific bits:
You treat the alpha-husband quite tenderly here. Do you think it’s important for a writer to have some affection for all of his characters?
Absolutely. The attitude an author should have with his characters is along the lines of Christ: unconditional love and forgiveness. In fact, we should love our characters not for their nobility and strength, but for their iniquity and weakness (as Christ did). You have to love them enough to expose them fully and forgive them. That’s sort of preachy, but it’s also true. Think of any great book—it’s an act of transmission of love, from the author to the characters to the reader.If you could give a novice writer one piece of advice, what would it be?
Fuck style. Tell the truth.Preach it, brother.
- Speaking of writing, you should really go check out the latest issue of FRiGG Magazine. Lots of great stuff, including new work by old favorites Randall Brown and Alicia Gifford.
- Interrobang auditions were awesome. I’ll be blogging about that more very, very soon. But not here. Because one of the things that’s kept me busy the past couple weeks is creating our new web site. Woo! Check it out, because it’s lovely: http://interrobangimprov.com/. That’s where I’ll be posting about the auditions. I’ll quickly say here, though, that we cast Becky Bartlein, Jillian Boshart, Phoebe Richards, and Bryan Sullivan. And they’re all awesome. And we had to pass on a number of amazing people as well. Which was brutally hard. Anyway… more about that process in a couple days over on our new site.
- I heard a couple people at UP say that “CIU” was their most successful long-form show yet (I’m guessing in terms of audience?), and they’re hoping to re-mount it at some point. Cool. Dunno when or where, but as soon as I know, I’ll post here. Will be interesting to see how many of us are actually available to do another run.
- “Quiz Show” may have a complimentary performance some time soon so that we can record it with really good sound equipment. More about that if/when it happens, because hey! Free show!
- I’m a Seattle Mariners fan. As of right this second, the Mariners have lost 16 games in a row. The day before the losing streak, they had exactly a .500 record, and were actually sort of still in the playoff hunt. If the season ended now, though, they’d be in line for one of the top draft picks. What’s amazing to me, though, is that the first few losses were disheartening, but the last few have been kind of hilarious. Which reminds me, in a roundabout way, of a quote from Ian Schempp during his long-form essentials class (this may be paraphrased): “I’d rather do a horrible show than a mediocre one.” Yup.
Probably won’t post again til next week(ish). Gotta get the auditions post done for Interrobang, and then I go right into the insanity of 14/48. Which will be amazing, exhilarating, terrifying, and if you’re in Seattle, you should damned well come.
One Step Beyond (Madness)
Good skank
So… how about another dip into 80s music? One of my Nerd Fight categories was 80s Ska, and I asked who the band was behind “One Step Beyond.” Mandy figured out the answer, but only a split-second after it had been turned over to the audience.
Bad skank
When midnight rolled around in the office, I would crank up this song on my Napster (remember Napster?!), run to the common area, bellow the lyrics, and then skank through the office as the horns blared. The first time I did this, everyone looked at me like I was borderline-insane. The next couple times I did it, the looks of disbelief turned to laughter. Every time following that, more and more people joined in a skank line that left us all sweaty, out of breath, and with a second wind for a couple more hours of work. I still remember one night when I was particularly deep in code with my headphones on, I didn’t notice the time. I looked up to find several faces peering in my door, wondering why “One Step Beyond” wasn’t being blasted.
So, here you go: “One Step Beyond.” Crank it, skank it.
Love Is the Law (The Suburbs)
Dead matadors are an oft-seen blight on the landscapes of the suburbs.
I love one-hit wonders from the 80s, and this is among my very favorite (although calling it a “hit” might be generous; its Wikipedia page only mentions that it was a single, and has no reference to any chart rankings). I owned this LP on vinyl and played it a lot. But except for a very vague memory of the song, “Rattle Them Bones,” I’m hard pressed to even hum a snippet of anything else on the album.
Here’s something silly I used to do: every time I played an album, I tallied it on a sheet near the stereo. Each week, I would print out my own “Top 50″ chart on our Apple II+. Seems to me that “Love Is the Law” (which was both the title of the album and the single) hit the Top 10 more than a few times. This would have been either during the summer of ’83, when I had my first girlfriend of longer than a week (hi, Nany!) and was doing an original musical titled “Musical!” as a benefit for a center working with people with autism, or the summer of ’84, when I was working at Santa’s Village in Dundee, Illinois, and getting ready for my freshman year at Northwestern. While I listened to albums, I was typically on the computer, either playing rip-offs of popular arcade games (i.e., Gobbler instead of Pac-Man) or programming choose-your-own-adventure games originally published by Flying Buffalo (I remember spending a lot of time programming Goblin Lake, in particular) in Apple Basic. We still used line numbers in those days. I used GOTO and GOSUB a lot. Good times.
Anyway… “Love Is the Law.” I hope you enjoy it. You’re encouraged to get up and dance. Warning: matadors ahead.
Yeah. This reminds me of when I had hair.
Murder your darlings.
In the few instances that I’ve been in literary situations (interviews, readings) since getting back into improv again, a question I’ve been asked in each case is, “How does improv impact your writing?” I’m not sure I can answer that question well, because I haven’t done much writing at all since jumping back on stage. I can, however, speak to one huge way in which a “rule” of writing has carried over into my improv. It comes from a passage about writing (often misattributed) by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
When I started this blog (a whopping five days ago), there were certain topics that I knew I wanted to tackle, and this was at the top of the list. But I’ve been pretty good about following this advice myself recently, and I didn’t want to call out other improvisers whom I’ve seen forcing their darlings onstage. Fortunately, last night’s performance of “CIU” was a) our best show yet, and b) one in which I murdered a lot of darlings. So I’ll come at this from an angle of something done well, rather than something fucked up (and it is, if not the most common fuck-up I see (and do) in improv, right up there at the top).
So what is the application to improv? When one is out of scene, whether in short-form or long-form, one is still highly engaged with the action onstage. It’s a keen state of observation, of listening, of finding what support a game or more narrative show needs. And when one picks up on a piece of support that would advance the scene in a particularly great way… that is a darling. If the scene allows for it right at that moment, a darling can do amazing things. If, however, something in the scene changes before the darling can be introduced—changes in a way that makes the darling a distraction—murder that darling post-haste. And forget about it. Realize that one of an improviser’s strengths is the capacity to generate new darlings almost constantly.
In the past, when referring to my writing, I often said that 90% of what I wrote was shit. But the 10% that was good couldn’t have existed without having generated the much larger shit pile. That equally applies to improv ideas. To get to the best ideas—or at least best for the specific scene—there has to be a pretty huge shit pile of ideas discarded. For whatever reason, that didn’t occur to me at all when I first jumped back in. As soon as I had an idea, I felt the need to put it into action. And I had a lot of shitty ideas. Or rather, a lot of them probably weren’t bad on first thought, but by the time they were brought into the scenes, they were already obsolete, and took the scenes sideways (if I was lucky) or (more likely) backwards.
So, last night’s show. The cast did stellar work last night, across the board. Dan, as the lead detective, and Tony, as the renegade import cop from Texas, had a great antagonistic relationship. Stephanie and Joel, as the married detectives Dr. Phillips and Dr. Phillips, were awesome. Christina was so amazing in two roles: one as the lab tech Beverly (or was it Everly?), and one as a medical marijuana smoking club manager. Tamara was freaking hilarious as the lab tech Everly (or was it Beverly?) who used yoga techniques to examine corpses in the morgue. Jay… holy crap, Jay… stood our usual format on its head from the very beginning of the show when he deviated from opening the show with a victim scene and instead played a serial killer who was flushing a victim’s body parts down a toilet until he was interrupted by Tiffany, whom he then killed. Stakes? Damn’ straight, stakes. His serial killer, who didn’t speak until he was caught, was brilliantly played, creepy, and funny as hell. Tiffany (who is HILARIOUS) and I were swing players. As it turned out, Tiffany barely spoke at all through the course of the show, instead turning up in various bathrooms as yet more victims for Jay to kill. Which, while not highlighting her own brilliance, were exactly the supports to scenes needed in each instance.
For myself, I played one character, a homeless guy who found Jay’s bloody shirt and tie in a dumpster and started wearing them, and then wound up in the back seat of Dan’s and Tony’s cruiser (offstage) for the rest of the show. My darling murders took place offstage all night. A couple examples: I was in costume as a postal worker, ready to go onstage to be questioned as one of the patrons of the bar where the first murder took place. While in that costume, Jay ditched the bloody shirt and tie. Well, that’s evidence that’s probably more important to follow than someone in a bar who probably didn’t see anything, so darling poster worker got murdered before seeing the stage. The two Dr. Phillipses talked about the profile of the killer, and how he had mommy issues. So I donned a muumuu, glasses, and a wig to play a crazy, old woman. Shortly after, it was revealed that the killer had been abandoned by his mother at an early age. Off went the muumuu, wig, and glasses, as another darling got murdered.
Had I forced the old lady onstage (and I was really enamored with the idea of the character), at best, it would have been a briefly humorous distraction. At worst, it would have forced all the actors onstage to do a lot of justifying of the denial of something already established: that the killer’s mother was not in the picture. And where they went instead—into the drooling madness of Jay alternately withholding and offering the detectives information on the whereabouts of his latest victim—was amazing. And probably couldn’t have happened if I’d forced my darling onstage.
The show was awesome, due almost entirely to everyone else in the cast. They were so, so good last night. And while every actor would like to be part of that creation, sometimes the best way to help the creation be great is to step back and let it happen, to leave a pile of darling corpses in the wings.
Take risks, support each other, tell the story.
From the 2005 production of Lookingglass Alice
These were the three underlying principles of Lookingglass Theatre that Andrew White cited in his acceptance speech for Lookingglass’s Tony Award for Best Regional Theater (video of the speech here. Now, that may seem like boilerplate stuff, but what doesn’t necessarily come through in those words is the level of commitment Lookingglass gives to those words, and has done for about 25 years now. What I don’t think Andy mentioned in that speech is that the early production to which he refers happened while they were all students at Northwestern University. While I don’t think I saw the production of “Alice” that he cites, I did see others of their productions, “The Serpent” (which I think was the impetus to moving forward as a company), “Still Life with Woodpecker,” and “West.” What struck me in each of these productions were a few things:
1) Holy crap did they take risks. I still have vivid memories of scenes from “The Serpent.”. From a very visual representation of the “begats” section of Genesis (seriously, is there a duller part of the Bible? Until you see actors writhing on stage begetting, that is) to disjointed representations of assassinations to a stylized violence of Cain and Abel unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, I continually found myself with my mouth agape. That I still can visualize those scenes 25+ years later… in editing SmokeLong Quarterly, I’ve often talked about the stories I love being the ones that I can’t stop thinking about months later… I can’t stop thinking about “The Serpent” a quarter of a century later, and most of those thoughts come not so much from the text, but from the level of risk (and reward!) in that particular production.
2) Those risks so obviously wouldn’t have been possible without tremendous support and trust among the actors (and director). Some of the movement literally could have caused tremendous injuries if the partners in those movements hadn’t been absolutely committed to supporting them.
3) They worked their asses off. In truth, I misremembered the third point Andy made as “Work hard,” rather than “Tell the story.” I remember hearing (second-hand) that when Lookingglass played the Edinburgh Fringe in ’87 (as did Mee-Ow) that LG members were discouraged from hanging out with members of Mee-Ow while there. They were all friends, but LG was there to work. Similarly, it often seemed, while they were in rehearsals for shows at NU, they virtually disappeared from the social scene. They still had lives, yes, but their focus was absolutely on the work. While I never got to attend one of their rehearsals, in my imagination, they were focused and intense (in other NU shows, I worked with most of the members of LG, and even individually, their focus was clear).
The Regional Tony, to me, wasn’t so much an accomplishment in and of itself (or something they ever specifically aspired to) as it was the outside world recognizing a quarter century’s worth of very talented people committed to one another and to those three goals.
As we’re getting ready to go into our first auditions for Interrobang, Lookingglass has been much on my mind. When Randy and I first met at Feierabend to discuss our goals in starting an improv group, one of the things I said was that I wanted to commit to working hard, and that this specific goal was counter to much of my early acting history (one director said as much about his experience with a show I did at New Mercury in ’93). I’ve always deeply loved ensemble work in general (and ensemble improv in particular). And, since getting back into improv, I’ve been dying to find a group with which I could grow and make a high level of commitment to supporting and pushing one another to become better individually and as a group.
I think Interrobang is getting there more and more with each rehearsal. The understanding among each of us that we’re not going to play it safe and that we’re going to be right there for each other… that’s awesome. And, somehow, almost instinctively, even in our crazy-ass experimental free-form, we never let the story drop.
So… while I can’t speak for every single member of Interrobang as to what we’re looking for in the auditions, I don’t have to look much beyond Chicago’s “theatre without a net” to voice what I’m hoping to see: take risks, support each other, and (in a slight deviation from Lookingglass’s credo) trust that the story will find itself if you do those things.
One last line from Stephen Colbert’s recent commencement address at NU: “In improv, you are not the most important person in the scene; everyone else is the most important person in the scene.”
