Universality

Just read this very interesting article on Scott Walter's blog about story creation...

He quotes Joseph Campbell:

"The folk aspect, which simply has to do with people and things in stories and time and space is called desi, which means local, popular. On the other hand the elementary ideas, when the diety is represented, are called marga, the path.

I've always been under the impression that to make a story "universal" (which is what everyone seems to want), it's always a mistake to concentrate on the mythic (i.e. "generic") at the expense of the details. The more personal and detailed a story is- even as the plot gets farther from the actual experience of the audience- the more the audience can project themselves into the story and see themselves in it.

Perhaps it's part of my perspective as a Gay man, being perforce subjected to heterosexuality and its tropes as the predominant vision in media growing up (I always say Lamar Latrell from Revenge of the Nerds was my first real role model- the pickin's were slim in the 1980s), I'd had to project into stories alien to my own experience. But I do think that's a capacity of all human beings, to be able to understand and empathise with any story and glean something that they can take back with them.

Now I'm considering it's the marga we can all feel, despite any desi which might be alien to our experience.

99Seats, in response to Scott Walter's post, says:

A Great Play lives in that place between the big, universal truths and the specific language of a specific time and place. The language of Hamlet is specific to Shakespeare's world and times, but the story soars above it. The same holds for Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Or Death of A Saleman. We need them. We need great masterworks that elevate the heart and soul, that capture the human spirit in amber and hold it up to the light.

I think the play(s) that best exemplifies that idea of A Great Play is Angels In America. The marga is there, of course, but it's the desi that really made it so real and vital for its time.

Are we writing for art? And is art a springboard for fame?

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

- From The Economist

Man, this applies to theatre in a big way. The big Broadway blockbusters like Mamma Mia, Rock of Ages, even Phantom of the Opera... they pull in the tourists looking for a Real Broadway experience, and they get flashy fluff. Certainly fluff can be fun, but really in any media, art rarely sells.

In other news, (re:)Directions Theatre Company is planning the Anybody but Shakespeare Classics Festival for this Summer. A pretty interesting idea:

The Anybody but Shakespeare Classics Festival, hosted by (re:) Directions Theatre Company at the 14th Street Theater from May 17-June 6, 2010, is designed to celebrate the work of playwrights who have been overshadowed by the immortal bard; left in the dust by his rapier sharp wit and general put out to pasture in favor of the 2,189th revival of Hamlet. Any text from any country that was first written or performed between 1500 and 1700 will be considered. We are primarily seeking reinventions, original adaptations and translations that preserve both the spirit and the majority of the original text.

If I wasn't already pretty booked up for this Summer, I'd consider busting out some Lope de Vega or Middleton.

Serving hell in theatre

So, I'm desperately hoping this is some kind of hoax: Tucker Max Headed for B’way? Christopher Carter Sanderson Says Yes. None of it makes any sense.

Gorilla Rep is known for doing insightful outdoor adaptations of Shakespeare and other classics.

Tucker Max is

• so 1998
• probably about as real as James Frey
• a D-Bag

Sure, some of Tucker Max's stories are amusing gross-out fratire*. But still, the only reason I can see for even contemplating this would be to get more D-Bags to come to the theatre, so the theater can have their money. But really, nobody wants more D-Bags going to the theatre. When they do come, they're drunk and late, and they're always texting through the play anyway.
And the Tucker Max movie was apparently a huge flop (I wasn't even aware it actually existed until I started poking around on his site-it apparently premiered a couple of months ago); so why would putting his fratiric stories on stage be any better?

This just reeks of terrible idea.

* frat + satire = "fratire". I didn't make it up.

Inspiration

Inspiration comes in the strangest of places sometimes. I am a big fan of Dinosaur Comics, and a recent comic about computer simulations led to my first play of 2010, a 10-minute piece called Pocket Universe. Very pleased with it. Sometimes it feels as though ideas just gather in my head like a puzzle, and then all of a sudden they all fit together, and I know what the play IS. That's happened to me a few times, where the Full Play just sprung out of my head full-blown, like Athena. Which is not to say it was perfect on the first draft, but it's almost like taking dictation.

Most of the time it's harder to write, but I find the more I DO write, the more often these flashes of play just come to me.

I'll take "Generic for 100, Alex"

So just got forwarded a play submission opportunity, where the first thing on the Theatre Company's application page is "Check out our mission statement. Make sure you get what we are all about!"

This is the mission statement:

[Theatre Company] is an empowerment to both audience and artist, fostering artistic growth and opening new avenues for creativity and full self-expression. [Theatre Company] brings the conversation directly to the audience; engaging them and creating an environment where powerful ideas flourish, leaving all enlivened and inspired.

So... I should submit a play, then?

No Smoking On Stage in Colorado

Colorado has concluded that its ban on smoking in public areas extends to its theaters and the people acting in them. Link from Extra Criticum.

This is highly annoying to me. I don't smoke myself, though I have smoked onstage (back when I was acting, in a college production of Harold Pinter's One for the Road, where I tortured someone with a cigarette). A number of my characters in the plays I write smoke. I hate seeing fake smoking.

Tom Robbins has a wonderful section in Still Life With Woodpecker about smoking:

Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

You just can't get that with fake cigarettes.

I have for some time wanted to have an evening of short plays where smoking is the point: get a fire marshall to stand by with an extinguisher for the night. Just need to find a theater where that could happen. Maybe just do it outdoors next Summer.

Write Your Own Play

I'm firmly of the opinion that if you don't like a play, either because of politics, style, or if it just doesn't work, the best response is to write a better play.

I wrote my upcoming The Empress of Sex after being inspired by the awfulness of the book of Triumph of Love...

Recently I saw and reviewed The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever!; there were many things about the play I didn't like, but what was perhaps the most frustrating were the great ideas that they let slip by- they took the idea of having two Queer shepherds seeing an angel and witnessing the birth of Jesus, and instead of saying something interesting which might have illuminated the relationship of homosexuality to religion, the playwright chose to make a Bareback Brokeback Mountain joke (which consisted of the phrase "I Wish I Knew How to Quit You" and ridiculous stripper-cowboy costumes).

SO, I'm taking the idea they abandoned and writing my own Nativity play, called Pleased as Man with Man to Dwell, after one of my favorite lines from "Hark, The Herald Angels Sing".