Theater Notes

(Click image to enlarge.)

With the help of Margaret Osburn’s Deepdene Writers’ Group, I’ve recently been working on the first draft of what I hope will be the third play in a trilogy. It’s called “Kitty.” The first play in the series, “Cecil Virginia, 1964,” was produced by the Baltimore Playwrights’ Festival in 1985. (Click City Paper 8/30/85 review, above). The second play, featuring Kitty’s violent husband and his male friends, titled “Joe Pete,” was produced by the BPF in August, 1999, some fourteen years after the first one. As of this date, it’s been over 16 years since play number two appeared on a local stage. Assuming I manage to finish the third play in a year or two—and assuming I’m lucky enough to have it produced—I’ll have proved that in addition to my many other theatrical limitations, I’m one very slow writer of dialogue.

Film Making in Quotes

David Lean was known to say this about the film making process: “I love making motion pictures . . . I love getting behind a camera and trying to get images on the screen. I love cutting and editing. I love putting all the parts together at the end: The sounds, the music, the dialogue. Making a movie is the greatest excitement of my life . . . I love life and I don’t want to die. I want to go on making movies.”

I’m no filmmaker myself, but Mr. Lean’s words give me a sense of what it must feel like to be one. A good quotation can do that. Here are several more small gems of wisdom from famous filmmakers, beginning with that genius Ingmar Bergman, who tells us what he thinks film isn’t: “Film has nothing to do with literature; the character and form of the two art forms are usually in conflict. This probably has something to do with the receptive process of the mind. The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious act of the will in alliance with the intellect; little by little it affects the imagination and the emotions. The process is different with a motion picture. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.”

Meanwhile, movie director Robert Penn put’s his attraction to film this way: “In the theater, the reliance is on the verbal. Film is how one looks, as against what one says. On the stage, you can’t document that. You’re too far back. So what one says is what one is . . . You don’t have to say it in a film. A look, a simple look, will do it.”

Milos Forman, points out the difference, in terms of reality and unreality, between theater and film: “ . . . you know, in the theater you don’t pretend that what you see on the stage is reality. But in films. . . . automatically the photography enables you to pretend what you see on the screen is reality. So I am disturbed when in that reality I see theater.”

Bernardo Bertolucci seconds that: “My primary choice is one against the theater. I believe it is easier and better for me to shoot from reality, to take a position in the geography and environment of real space.”

Director and former standup comic, Elaine May, also compared film to life, and found life wanting: “Yes, there is truth in movies. No, movies are not like life. They are constructed in advance. They have a beginning that has probably been rewritten several times, a middle that has been cut and reshaped, and an end that often has music over it. Most movies . . . have a confrontation scene that provides some kind of insight that affects the characters or the audience, or both. In life we have hundreds of such scenes, scenes in which we say the worst thing we can say, in which each person tells what he thinks is the whole truth. Two hours later we have the same scene again. Nothing has really changed. You can’t get any insights. You usually just get mad. Movies or plays can sound natural, or seem real, or have truth, but they can never be like life. After all, they’re not supposed to run over two hours. “

For some, film offers a unique opportunity to explore the unconscious mind. “I think that the nature of movies is images that are more concerned with our desires than any other part of reality. The nature of movies is to connect with our unreal selves. Freud said that every unexplained dream is a letter from the unconscious which is not opened. Dreams can put us in touch with deep realities, and films are very good nightmares.” Dusan Makavejev, Yugoslav director, offered that pithy opinion in Ciné-tracts, the Spring, 1977 issue.

That master of cinema surrealism and automatism, Luis Buñuel, agrees: “The screen is the superior way of expressing the world of dreams . . . . The cinema seems to have been invented for the expression of the subconscious.” But he thinks films often fail to do this: “My aspiration as a film viewer is to have the movie uncover something for me and this happens rarely.”

For another straightforward comment, I again call on Milos Forman (that’s him at right): “For me film is a pleasure, a desire to tell stories. Everybody likes to tell stories.”

Director Arthur Penn, says: “Film offers the opportunity for constant contradiction between what is said and what is done. It’s closer to how we really experience life. I’m saying that, but I’m really feeling this. And these two things are going on at once. Ambivalence is closer to the human feeling than the simple Eugene O’Neil statement: ‘My father was a bastard.’ That sort of statement that says everything and nothing. Well, film is the exquisite medium for expressing ambivalence. A man says one thing, but his eyes are saying another thing.”

The great film director and former cartoonist—and therefore, beginning with the walls of caves, one of the original image makers—Frederico Fellini, adds this: “Indeed, what is it to make a film? It is naturally, a question of trying to bring order to certain fantasies and of narrating them with a certain exactness.”

Up to this point, our film directors have been dealing, mostly, with abstraction. Now giving his view on the story—the creative “spine” of the film as some might call it—here is actor-director Dennis Hopper: “I believe that you start a movie very slow, very slowly drag people in up to a certain point. Then, just as they get a little restless, you start socking it to them. This makes me favor the episodic structure, like music—something that moves along with short breaks in it: you keep giving people something new, keep building pressure. The you cut off, relax,  go for a ride.”

Robert Bresson claims he drags people into his movies: “As Dostoevsky frequently does, I present the effect before the cause. I think this is a good idea, because it increases the mystery; to witness events without knowing why they are occurring makes you want to find out the reason.”

And finally, directly addressing our original question, former standup comic (with Elaine May) and award-winning film director, Mike Nichols, defined film most simply and perhaps best: “Movies are mood . . . . The thing about something that’s made right—whether it’s a novel, or an opera, or a film—has to do with being hung on a spine . . . The more solid it is, maybe the truer it is.”

Today’s Quotes

“(. . . working on a play.) You do the first job as neatly as you can: She comes in. Then you do the next job: He sees her. And so on. It’s an extraordinarily useful lesson.”

“Elaine May has a wonderful motto: ‘The only safe thing is to take a chance.’ “I think she means that if you stay safe, and don’t take a chance — don’t do something that’s different from the last thing,  something that makes you nervous and holds dangers — if you keep trying to do the thing that worked last time, the encrustations of mannerisms begin to take you over. And pretty soon you’re no good at all — and therefore not safe at all. The longer you play it safe, the less interesting is what you do.”

Mike Nichols, the Director’s Art, by Barbara Gelb

NYT Magazine, May 27, 1984

Today’s Quote

“Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”

Anton Chekhov (Click image to enlarge.)

Short-story writer and dramatist, 1860-1904.

Today’s Quote

By David Mamet

“The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always what does the protagonist want. . . . Do we see the protagonist’s wishes fulfilled or absolutely frustrated? That’s the structure of drama. . . . People only speak to get something. . . . They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it’s just coincidence, because what they’re trying to do is accomplish an objective.”

 

From the Hilton Als commentary, “True Lies”

The New Yorker, June 29, 2015

Today’s Quote

Sam Shepard

“Catharsis is getting rid of something. I’m not looking to get rid of it; I’m looking to find it. I’m not doing this in order to vent demons. I want to shake hands with them.”

Adapted from Rhythm & Truths by Amy Lippman

American Theatre, April 1984  

Four-Minute Memoir

Bad Actors II

This is an edited re-post.
Click images to enlarge.

Joe Pete, staged  by the Baltimore Playwrights Festival in 1999, was my second theatrical attempt to get into the head of the man who, in real life, murdered my favorite first cousin. That man was Phyllis Jean’s husband. In the play, I call him Joe Pete. Since I knew nothing about the real man, the character, except for the crime, is a total fiction. (He is also the same character that was in Cecil Virginia, 1964, my first produced play by the BPF, in August 1985. See Bad Actors I, for details.)

Joe Pete is Kitty’s husband. He’s a working man, inarticulate, violent, someone we come to know through a web of conflicting stories, verbal games played-out among his drinking buddies, and later during interviews with a prison doctor. My goal with this play was to use drama with darkly comedic shadings to deal more directly with the killing of Kitty, to move in for a close-up of Joe Pete, so to speak. And this time, I  swore to myself that there would be no off-stage climax.

The following lines are from a scene in a local bar, the afternoon before Joe Pete kills Kitty. The tavern is a hangout for paper-mill workers. Here we find his friends, Ray and Byron, and Jack, the bartender. The first two are waiting for Joe Pete to show up so they can make plans for a hunting trip. The scene begins with a stage direction:

BYRON takes a sip or two, then smacks his half-empty glass down on the bar, splashing beer.

RAY (pointing): I’m writin’ a song about that.

BYRON: My damn beer glass?

RAY: Not just that, no. It’s about a guy drinkin’ in a dim joint in the bright afternoon. Just sittin’ and drinkin’ and talkin’. Maybe playin’ some pool. Bright sunlight outside, dim bar light inside. (pause) All stuff like that.

JACK (working behind the bar): Yeah. Sure.

RAY: Well, I am. (points again) How light reflects off the glass, how pretty that is?—and that bottle! Ever see anythin’ so—

BYRON (overlapping): What’s the song called, Ray?

RAY (mild pride): “She Took My Love and Took Off.” But all I’ve got so far is—

JACK (overlapping): Ha! Shiiiiiiiiiiiiii-IT!

JOE PETE enters.

BYRON (waving): Hey—Joe Pete, old buddie!

JOE PETE (ignores BYRON, ranting): That Todd is one sorry son-of-bitch! Sorriest no-good son-of-a-bitch that ever lived!

RAY (lightly): What’d the bastard do this time?

JOE PETE: Usual sorry-assed shit.

RAY (remaining positive): Todd get you that straight day work yet, like he said?

JOE PETE: Even if he does, he’s still one schemin’ no-good sorry son-of-a—

BYRON (overlapping, gentle): Word at the mill says Todd put you in for a raise, too,  an—

JOE PETE (overlapping): Look, if I get it, it’s ‘cause I deserve it. Don’t have to kiss Todd’s ass for what’s rightly mine. (pause) Son-of-a-bitch calls me in his office. Says he’s talked to the big bosses. (reciting) “Told ‘em your situation, Joe Pete, It’s up to you now,” he says. “Can’t protect you no more.” (pause): Ha! Who the fuck needs ‘im?

RAY: The man just wants to know what exactly it is you’re after.

JOE PETE: Ain’t what I want. I don’t care. It’s what Kitty wants.

BYRON (innocent): I’m sure Todd knows what that is. I’m sure he—

JOE PETE (overlapping, suspicious): What’s that?

BYRON: I’m sure Todd has the best interests of Kitty an—

JOE PETE (overlapping, cold): How would that sorry shit know what my wife wants?

Continuing, the scene dramatizes Joe Pete’s insecurity at home and at work, his jealousy regarding  his boss, Todd, and his rage at what he perceives as the unfairness of his life.

Trying to write  plays, I discovered that if I had an overarching concept, it helped me to proceed without getting too stuck. My vague idea in this case was that the characters Joe Pete, Ray, and Byron each represent distinct stages in the evolution of the human male (primitive, transitional, evolved). In a sense, the characters grew from three parts of my own split self. For me, Ray was the more interesting character. He  matures during the course of the play and becomes a thoughtful, creative doubter, who isn’t sure the old “manly” ways stand up even while he’s still attracted to them. Ray is willing to change. He is confused (like me), but that is expressed in a positive form, as a wannabe singer/songwriter, rather than in anger and rage.

Working in theater taught me that collaboration must include tact, something that doesn’t come easily to me. I have a history of getting into scrapes (mostly verbal) with coworkers and others. (My mother liked to say that I was her only son born with his foot in his mouth.) Even now, what little tact I have has accrued over a long life. So when I noticed rehearsal problems with the character-development of Ray, I made an effort to be gentle about getting them resolved. The following is a note that I gave my first-time director.

“I see Ray as a mixture of Joe Pete (lost soul/caveman) and Byron (older/evolved/sweet). Ray, at this age, is still more ‘Joe Pete’ than ‘Byron,’ but at least he’s headed in the right direction. Ray’s tough, but shows softer tendencies as well. I’m not sure I’ve captured this in the text. But if you dig deeply during rehearsals, I think you’ll find places where—through gesture, expression, body language, reading emphasis and clever blocking—you can point up Ray’s humanity and his movement away from the ‘lost soul’ model of  Joe Pete.

“When Ray says his wife claims their baby is afraid of him, we need to clearly see real sadness. Another opportunity is Ray’s monologue about throwing their decorated Christmas tree across the room in a rage. At first he talks about the rampage as sort of funny. We need his expression and gestures to show him more sad than amused. There are other places in the script where we can emphasize Ray’s sweeter side. The actor playing Ray is doing a good job, but I would like to see more softness—and have this side of him become stronger as the play proceeds. Let me know if rewrites might help to help achieve this.”

Some critics had problems with Joe Pete’s extreme meanness, and this review from a local paper amounts to damning with faint praise. “‘A man with a rifle is as likely to use it on his wife as on a deer . . .’ (is) basically the attitude toward the male gender in Joe Pete. The titular character even says, ‘A man who ain’t tough with his woman just ain’t a man’ . . . . the playwright’s knack for naturalistic banter proves to be a mixed blessing . . . . the mostly comic bull sessions are meant to incrementally build until the underlying tensions finally explode . . . Joe Pete has a strong theme and solid performances (but) some rewriting could whittle down the redundancies, make the characters more than the sum of a few defining masculine traits, and smooth the transitions.”

On the other hand, one critic said, “The barroom is the classic American dramatic setting for revealing truths . . . where beer is consumed, the talk is aimless and circular, and posturing is elevated to performance art . . . (the playwright) balances the ugly, male swaggering with a rich vein of humor. The oddly catchy language was quoted widely on the sidewalk during intermission (‘available pussy’ seemed to be the favorite). ”

As I wrote the play, I knew I’ve made progress in my own evolution, but also that I still have a way go. For instance, the least perception of unfairness or disrespect can still get a potentially violent rise out of me. It’s happened only a few times, but the fact that I’m still that touchy is troubling. Especially since when it does occur, I also detect, very close to the surface, the icy desire for blood.

I still wonder if I made Ray too goody-goody, sort of over-civilized him. Nevertheless, he is the character with whom I relate the most—not Joe Pete. Perhaps if I had the opportunity to rewrite and re-stage the play (with a different title), I’d make Ray more the focus, since his growth represents the path to a higher plane of behavior toward which I’ve been struggling these many years, albeit with mixed results.

Meanwhile, I remind myself that I could be much worse. The two community theater actor/killers I happen to have known in real life never harmed a stranger, as far as I know, but they brutally murdered people very close to them. (See the Bad Actors I post from 2/28/15). The fact those men resorted to lethal violence suggests to me that, given some extreme situations I’ve been in, I might have gone as far as they did. But I also know that, compared to them—thanks to my still evolving “Ray-like” creative self control—I am very much an amateur.

Copyright © 2015 Jim Sizemore.

Three-Minute Memoir

Bad Actors I

This is an edited re-post.
Click images to enlarge.

Cecil, Virginia, 1964, was the second play I wrote and the first one produced by the Baltimore Playwrights’ Festival, in August, 1985. The story was based on the murder of my maternal first-cousin, Phyllis Jean. While there are positive things to say about the production, it failed my own expectations. I had hoped that writing it would somehow deepen my insight into the murderer, help me understand what drove Phyllis Jean’s husband to kill her. I was convinced that a fictionalized version of the deed would free me from thinking about it—or him—ever again. But some critics said that the play was too much  a portrait of life in a small town, rather than of the murderer and his motivations. The reviews, good and bad, only compounded the emotional confusion I still felt.

In a case of tragic serendipity (cosmic joke?) the actor cast to play Joe Pete, the wife-killer, would murder his real-life wife a few years later. And in an even stranger alignment of dark stars, the woman he killed was a co-worker/friend of mine, her office no more than a hundred yards from my own. His  wife was no tomboy like Phyllis Jean, and she didn’t have my cousin’s red hair and freckles, but she was vivacious and witty and fun to be around. And she had a lovely smile. In those ways, and in her fate, she came to remind me very much of Phyllis.

Cecil is an ensemble play with nine speaking roles. The character of Kitty, Joe Pete’s wife, is based on Phyllis Jean; Asher, the editor of the local paper, represents me. The story is told from Asher’s point of view and the first scene in his office is designed to define the relationship of those two friends since childhood, and to foreshadow the tragedy to come. In the complete scene we also learn that Asher had been hired by Kitty’s guardian to keep an eye on her on the school bus, in the same way that my grandmother paid me to spy on Phyllis Jean. But that’s pretty much where the resemblance to real life ends. The Baltimore Sun critic wrote that “Watching (the play) is like looking at a cut-away version of a small town.”

Here are a few lines from Act One, Scene One, beginning with a stage direction.

We hear a typewriter. Lights up in the office of the Cecil Herald. ASHER, who has a small town businessman look about him, is using his index fingers to tap out a story. After a few beats KITTY struts in. She is a small woman, pretty, light makeup, flowing red hair, the toned body of a dancer.

KITTY (after a long beat watching ASHER work, teasing): It’s O.K., Asher, don’t pay me no mind. Just pretend I ain’t here at all. (ASHER finishes the line he’s typing and looks up. KITTY, still teasing, snatches the typewriter paper and reads the headline): “Country Man Is Charged With Murder” (she glances at him, then continues.) “Four children have lost their mother and may lose their father for some time as the result of a long gun slaying at 7:30 last night in the Blue Run area of Cecil.”

ASHER (mock-stern): Kitty, give it.

KITTY: Lordy, what is this?

ASHER: Guy shot his wife over in—

KITTY (curious): What for you reckon?

ASHER (ignoring the question): Kitty, please, I’ve got this deadline—and a headache.

Many who saw the play agreed that my female characters were well-written, “for a man.” Any skill I may have for writing from the female POV is likely because as a young boy I spent a lot of time listening to women in all kinds of settings. My favorite half-sister ran a beauty parlor, and when she had to baby-sit me on a workday I’d tag along. I loved to watch and hear the women sitting under the hairdryers, flipping through Look and Life and Collier’s, gabbing about this and that, appearing at once cute and serious and silly in hair curlers—talking, talking, talking.

Aside from the reviews (brickbats included), the fun of hearing actors say my words, and experiencing how a play is staged, the BPF production was my reward for months of hard work. But the nagging fact remained that the murder, as written and staged, happened out of the audience’s sight and was, as one critic said, “. . . the off-stage fulfillment of (an) ominous promise (and) so perfunctory we are cheated of pathos. Perhaps the playwright wanted us to see the play’s climactic event as just another news item in the Cecil Herald. Still, murder is not a subtle crime. It calls for more than suggestion.” That critic had me pegged.

While the play was an OK first effort, I came to agree that Phyllis Jean’s death needed to be—deserved to be—dealt with directly. And, because of my inability (unwillingness?) to face it at the time, I had hidden it off-stage. As serendipity would have it, though, I’d get a chance to try again.

More about that soon, when I post Bad Actors II . . .

Copyright © 2015, Jim Sizemore

Château de Lacoste

By Kathleen Barber

Provence, France, July 2014

As I climb from the village to the Château de Lacoste, the castle home of the Marquis de Sade, I realize that I am little more than a papered-over fourteen year old. I am still searching for my life, even though by now, I have lived most of it. I stop on the precariously steep path to wait for my friend, Lorraine. She has known me since I was fourteen and I marvel at her generosity in forgetting who I was back then: a swirling vortex of disappointment and desire laced with a foolish belief that there was something out there that would put me in order—if only I could find it.

A slice of gold catches my eye. I peer down a long, dark alley formed by two ochre buildings standing like angry lovers, an arms-length apart. Beyond the alley lies a quilt pattern of gold and green farmland. Lorraine passes me, good-naturedly complaining about my fascination with going up hills.

Hills excite me and Lorraine never says ‘no’, which is fortunate as we are spending a week in the Luberon, the hill country of Provence. Cobblestones make the path uneven: we aren’t ashamed to hold on to the handrails. In America, we probably wouldn’t be allowed to walk up here. In America, we are so bent on suing our neighbors for every bump that life gives us that we allow little risk . . . little adventure. I imagine the servants of the Marquis trudging this path, bringing grapes from the farm, a blue bowl recently fired, or perhaps a query about a daughter last seen following the Marquis through a side door of the local church. Hanging on a coral-colored wall of a butcher’s shop is a poster announcing Festival de Lacoste, an annual celebration of music and theater created by Pierre Cardin who is also the current owner of the Château. The poster lists Puccinni, Tchaikovsky, Natalie Dessay, and I want to hear everything.

We navigate the last of the cobblestone pathway and all at once are entering the upper courtyard of the eleventh century castle. At this level the building is mostly a limestone ruin. I wonder if there are ghosts. My breathing is heavy with anticipation; my heart is bursting with the discovery of a new world. I turn to see a road and a carpark nearby, but rather than feel foolish for having made the climb from the village, I feel sorry for the tourists who have driven. I smile at Lorraine and she grins back, then makes her way to the magnificent sculpture of a muscular man, his form unnaturally posed. The statue is both beautiful and disturbing, and its placement against the canvas of the sky, magnificent.

A sculpture of a disembodied, imprisoned head of the Marquis de Sade draws me to it. Though his victims have been long at rest, his torment is still not over. I shudder. Instead of thinking about gardens and wine, I find myself trying to reconcile the impulse of life that is sometimes loving and sometimes cruel. What has brought me here?

I go to the edge of the hill and look down and down and do not fall and do not step back. My eyes sweep over the Luberon valley, and I long to explore every town, stand in fields of grapes, climb every hill. A forgotten self writhes beneath the layers of family, career, husband, friends . . . of definitions unsought and dreams abandoned. Time is running out.

“Ready?” Lorriane asks. “There’s plenty more to see today.”   I have known Lorraine since she was fourteen, too. When I look at her, I see her sisters, brother, parents—see my own family. Days of unfulfilled longing and moments of exaltation have brought us here. Layers of my life peel away and they float down the hill on a Provence breeze. There is more to see, and Lorraine and I are both still looking. We go back the way we came, and nothing looks the same.

Click images to enlarge.
Copyright © 2015, Kathleen Barber

Kathleen Barber, on the right, stands with her friend Lorraine in a field of Provence lavender. Ms. Barber has had over fifteen plays produced in Baltimore community theaters, most recently In the Shadow of Lushan, produced by Fells Point Corner Theater as part of The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Kathleen is a partner in a manufacturing business, The Fairlawn Tool & Die Company, founded by her father, which has served as the basis for several of her plays. She has had short stories published in Teen Magazine, New England Senior Citizen, and The Maryland Poetry Review.

Sam Shepard on Play Writing VI

Adapted from: The Pathfinder

By John Lahr, The New Yorker, February 8, 2010

The male influences around me (growing up) were primarily alcoholics and extremely violent. I listened like an animal. My listening was afraid.

I  just dropped out of nowhere. It was absolute luck that I happened to be there (NYC, 1963) when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting. I think they hired everybody. It was wide open. You were like a kid in a fun park—trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened . . . . For me, there was nothing fun about the sixties. Terrible suffering . . . . Things coming apart at the seams.

I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced. There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer . . . . There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.

When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come  . . . . Break it all down in pairs. Make the pairs work together, with each other. Then make ’em work against each other, independent.

I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable . . . instead of embodying a “whole character,” the actor should consider his performance “a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme,” . . . . to make a kind of music or painting in space without having to feel the need to completely answer intellectually for the character’s behavior.

Character is something that can’t be helped. It’s like destiny . . . . It can be covered up, it can be messed with, it can be screwed around with, but it can’t be ultimately changed. It’s like the structure of our bones, and the blood that runs through our veins.

(I was) dead set against revisions because I couldn’t stand rewriting . . . . (The plays) were chants, they were incantations, they were spells. You get on them and you go. Plays have to go beyond just working out problems. (They have to move) from colloquial territory to poetic country.

I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing, and endings are a disaster.