Charlie Sheen has taught us something after all:

Charisma is a lot easier to manufacture on film than it is on stage.

[EW, image via BBC News]

aww...but we like YOU

Did Radiohead totally dis North America back there? This went out this weekend to their subscriber list:

"all good record stores ... and the USA&Canada" -- what is this, 1770?

 (I know we deserve it, but what did Canada ever do to you?)

Postlethwaite Post-Script

Vanessa Thorpe's tribute to the Everyman Theatre in the Guardian this weekend was a timely reminder of what it is we're trying to build here, and that even if we fail, the benefits from the effort roll down through the years. She notes that Postlethwaite rubbed shoulders with Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, Antony Sher, Alison Steadman and Julie Walters, and worked on pieces conceived by Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale:

The emergence of talent is not inevitable. It takes money and a supportive community to enable an artistic flowering and, if the theatre had stalled then, these stars would not have enjoyed their influential moment together.

A good short read that's worth two minutes.

[The Guardian]

Pete Postlethwaite (1947-2011)

Pete Postlethwaite has died. The possessor of a ubiquitous face, behind which hid considerable skill, he will be sorely missed.

[image via]

Leslie Nielsen, 1926-2010

Like many, I grew up watching Leslie Nielsen only as the uproariously funny comic actor; I didn't realize until much later that he had started out as a serious one. How I loved his work.

(It's only fitting that I learned of his passing from Peter Serafinowicz's twitter feed.)

[image via]

Everything they tell you is a lie

A rocket was launched in Southern California. The video is here. Clearly that happened. The Pentagon is mum -- bizarrely so:

[John] Pike[, director of the U.S.-based security analyst group globalsecurity.org] said he didn't understand why the military had not recognized the contrail of an aircraft. "The Air Force must ... understand how contrails are formed," he said. "Why they can't get some major out to belabor the obvious, I don't know."

I'll tell you why: because they know exactly what it is, and they're not telling.

When I was a kid, two Air Force bombers flew in concentric circles at a low altitude over Brooklyn over and over again. People on the street stopped and stared. Having read my fair share of crazy-but-plausible military coup porn, I thought I knew what was going on. But now that alien infiltration of our planet has been proven, I'm not so sure.

(Seriously, y'all, the Pentagon knows something.)

Sausage Gets Made, continued [All's Fair (Six Western)]

It's been a while since we tracked the progress of our grant-winning development of All's Fair (Six Western). As we gear up for a 2011 showcase, here are some more conceptual designs by award-winning production designer Kina Park:

We've raised a bit of money, but there is so much more to be done. Join the endeavor and donate today.

Sausage Gets Made, continued [All's Fair (Six Western)]

It's been a while since we tracked the progress of our grant-winning development of All's Fair (Six Western). As we gear up for a 2011 showcase, here are some more conceptual designs by award-winning production designer Kina Park:

More to come next week...

let there be light

It's hard to see the bigger picture inside a violent disruption of the status quo, but it's still entertaining to watch newspapers discover the concept of audience feedback, as the New York Times did on Monday:

In most businesses, not knowing how well a particular product is performing would be almost unthinkable. But newspapers have always been a peculiar business, one that has stubbornly, proudly clung to a sense that focusing too much on the bottom line can lead nowhere good.

Now, because of technology that can pinpoint what people online are viewing and commenting on, how much time they spend with an article and even how much money an article makes in advertising revenue, newspapers can make more scientific decisions about allocating their ever scarcer resources.

Throughout the Times piece, the ability to track a published article's popularity and audience is couched in careful terms stressing it's benefits, instead of being seen as an unqualified technological advance. Hewing too closely to audience feedback is pooh-poohed as some sort of degenerate rabble-rousing:

The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report, said Bill Keller, the executive editor. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” he said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’ ”

Instead of being a flawed (or, if not flawed, at the very least limited) business model, the era when newspapers didn't know (or care?) what interested their readers is held up as some sort of halcyon ideal:

Looking to the public for insight on how to cover a topic is never comfortable for newsrooms, which have the deeply held belief that readers come to a newspaper not only for its information but also for its editorial judgment.

A couple items for your brilliant editorial judgement scrapbook, Times:

(And what the hell, let's obey the rule of threes.)

Thank goodness the Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray has the right question:

How can you say you don’t care what your customers think?

How, indeed? It's something Michael Roderick over at One Producer in the City noted well:

If you haven't ever asked your customers to give you feedback, it's like trying to catch fish with your [b]are hands.

Working in theater, audience feedback isn't an abstraction or some violation of principle, it's our very lifeblood. Some generic newspaper's principled stand against knowing what their readers think when  technology makes it possible is incomprehensible, and baldly suicidal.

But this obligation works both ways.

While there are raw numbers of site traffic and counting clicks, the article tracks more advanced news organizations that rely more and more on readers to answer surveys filling out their demographic picture. I'm one of those annoying minorities who refuse to answer questions about my race -- now that content providers pointedly ask for this information, is my tetchy obstinacy contributing in some part to unrepresentative media? Much as I resent it, media companies wouldn't even be asking the color of my skin ten or twenty years ago.

"The world we're living is getting worse, not better."

Everybody line up for a wrist-smacking by the master:

Today's dramatists are failing to confront issues of injustice, writing instead "for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts", leading political playwright Athol Fugard has said.

It's risky to decry changes in form as simply a decline in quality (I'm not sure I would still want to be doing day-long passion plays simply because that's how we started), I'm not going to discount the thoughts of someone whose work was so dangerous to the status quo it endangered the lives of that artist and his collaborators.

Fugard was a courageous dramatic voice throughout the apartheid era in his native South Africa, enduring censorship, police surveillance, phone-tapping and raids. He was the first to put black and white actors together on the South African stage.

Fugard, 78, is still writing and directing – a new play premieres in Britain this autumn. Speaking to the Guardian, he said he wants "to pass on the baton" to the next generation but is dismayed by a general failure to engage with political issues.

He applauded some of the "extraordinary" political work that has emerged from British and American theatre, singling out Sir David Hare for praise. But he added: "They're not doing enough … at the moment. The world we're living is getting worse, not better."

Playwrights are not adequately confronting subjects such as China's dictatorship and its new colonialism, which are "without significant protest", nor the decline of western morality, African leaders like Robert Mugabe, or drug abuse worldwide, he said.

The first thing of note is that your correspondent's writing is not nearly at a level to change the world, as Fugard's did -- so I'm operating at a disadvantage. Second, I'm not sure that art has to be profound to be good. But in our short experience, we have found that the moment one's focus turns to the marketing of a play, or its reception, the immediate consequence is that the work itself suffers. What artistes so disdainfully call "commercial concerns" do threaten quality if only because the mind can't accommodate being both perceiver and perceived. So of course he's right.

[The Guardian]

brilliantly terrifying

Via Gawker, this story wherein Google plans to market ad space in Street View, replacing real world advertising with the virtual kind:

In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties.

In Google's example, the software could identify the marquis and individual window posters on a theater property and replace them with new information. Through this, a theater could promote a new play in Street View, even if the actual Street View image is completely out of date.

Of course, the patent application anticipates the most obvious question: what if the original property owner isn't interested?

The link can be associated with a property owner, for example the property owner which owns the physical property portrayed. The link can alternatively be associated with an advertiser who placed the highest bid on the image recognized within the region of interest (e.g., poster, billboard, banner, etc.). Any portion of the geographic display image in which the region of interest is located can be selectable (e.g., hot-linked). For example, the image of the coffee shop can be hot-linked to an advertisement for the coffee shop.

This gap between reality and its representation is, of course, not new: baseball fans see advertisements behind home plate that utilize a green screen, and thus aren't really there.

And in our work for the COI podcast, we already run into something similar with copyright law, as a published story and an audio recording of someone reading it are considered two distinct pieces of copyright-able artwork, and can, in fact, have two distinct owners.

But one of the joys of Street View has been knowing that I am getting a snapshot of the world as it appears there. While it's definitely a simple navigation tool, it's also virtual tourism -- and it will undoubtedly lose some of its charm as Progress Marches On.

Marlene Clary

Sadly, we have to report that founding board member and spiritual guide to the company Marlene Clary passed away this morning after a long illness. Marlene was a teacher, director, actor, choirmistress, wife, mother, and lover of art and theater.

It's not easy to distill into a single post what she meant to this company, and to its members, so I wont insult her memory and even try, not just yet. She will be missed.

A wake will be held on Saturday, December 26 at Duffy's funeral home (9th Street, just east of 4th Avenue in Park Slope) from 12pm to 3pm and from 5pm to 7pm. A funeral service will be held on Monday, December 28 at 4pm at Old First Church (7th Avenue and President Street in Park Slope), followed by a reception at the church.

burn the camps down

(or, it's time for a serious attempt at post-racialism)

(In March 2009, we presented a reading of Wrestling the Alligator in anticipation of its June production. This article was included in the program.)

In an interview with Deborah Solomon for the New York Times Magazine promoting her new book, The Hemingses of Monticello, Annette Gordon-Reed responded to Solomon’s assertion that “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings were pioneers of our increasingly mixed-race society”:

I don’t think we are increasingly mixed-race. We’ve always been a mixed-race society.

In his seminal work Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Paul Gilroy outlines how “the modern times that W.E.B. Du Bois once identified as the century of the color line have now passed.” He encourages us to be brave as we face the abyss, since “the demise of ‘race’ is not something to be feared”:

People who have been subordinated by race-thinking and its distinctive social structures (not all of which come tidily color-coded) have for centuries employed the concepts and categories of their rulers, owners, and persecutors to resist the destiny that “race” has allocated to them and to dissent from the lowly value it placed upon their lives. Under the most difficult of conditions and from imperfect materials that they surely would not have selected if they have been able to choose, these oppressed groups have built complex traditions of politics, ethics, identity, and culture. The currency of “race” has marginalized these traditions from official histories of modernity and relegated them to the backwaters of the primitive and the prepolitical. They have involved elaborate, improvised constructions that have the primary function of absorbing and deflecting abuse. But they have gone far beyond merely affording protection and reversed the polarities of insult, brutality, and contempt, which are unexpectedly turned into important sources of solidarity, joy, and collective strength. When ideas of racial peculiarity are inverted in this defensive manner to that they provide sources of pride rather than shame and humiliation, they become difficult to relinquish.

Gilroy’s subsequent argument, that these populations must be “persuaded very carefully” to relinquish these identities bears little weight: rather, the former subjects of institutionalized racism must be shocked and awed into a new post-racial consciousness.

This upheaval can be initiated very simply: with a moderate dosage of truth. Reveal to “black” Americans that their fought-for identity is, in truth, a lie: they have, in fact, shared a bloodline with “the other” this whole time. The family crest forged from scraps and shards is revealed—through its internally fuzzy logic—to be a serpent.

After all, if the duality of us and them holds any weight, if we and they are so immutable (if, indeed, we are better than they are), the obliteration of this concept of two inviolable camps cannot be achieved through gradually relinquishing its precepts: they must be obliterated. “Our” fate must be inextricably and instantaneously bound with “theirs” by no other means than eliminating the illusion of meaningful difference between identities.

The color line between the descendants of African slaves and European colonists is not the cultural rift that defines this century—the line itself is blurry almost beyond recognition; the flimsiness of the evidence upon which the descendants of slaves and descendants of their owners is, however, all too apparent.

In addition to the President of the United States, the recently appointed president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Benjamin Jealous, has a white parent and black parent. Such pairings are not remarkable; they have only been remarkable in how stridently slave states (and some “free” states) worked to legislate against them (as comedian Dave Attell once noted, no one writes laws against things people don’t want to do).
Instead, what is remarkable is that two institutions significant for their symbolic power are led by individuals of nebulous racial ancestry. The color line to which Du Bois (a founding member of the NAACP) referred now runs, it would seem, right through the man who runs the organization he founded to address it. The presidency, constructed by the framers of the Constitution to present America’s face to the world (a task in modern times assigned to the Secretary of State, a position occupied twice by the descendants of slaves and three times to women) is now occupied by a man who would have been counted as three-fifths of a person by the constitution as originally written.

At what point do the symbols erected by society to reflect as well as guide that society’s development need to be updated and, if necessary, discarded when they have outlived their usefulness? Why, then, do we cling to a racial arithmetic that fails to add up?

It would be one thing if the stakes were lower; unfortunately, at issue is more complex than a leaky faucet or an inefficient tax code—it is no less than the very prism with which we view ourselves, and consequently the world around us. We allocate resources (funds for college education, employment opportunities, artistic legitimacy) based on models of guilt and racial camps that no longer apply. We resemble Civil War re-enactors, playing out roles in a society that no longer exists, gleefully ignorant of advances or changes made in the meantime, for the comfort of playing out a script, the end of which we already know.

That’s acceptable for a car salesman from Fairfax who wants to while away the weekend outdoors wearing scratchy wool; it’s dangerous when we live entire lives under false assumptions. There are some (David Duke, 50 Cent, Al Sharpton) who live comfortable lives based on these assumptions. They cannot be blamed for exploiting a marketplace they had no part in creating, but we have a larger responsibility—as consumers—to alter that marketplace. Just as car drivers in the seventies embraced the catalytic converter, as hairspray and refrigerator consumers in the eighties abandoned CFCs, we need to stop consuming outdated racial categorization. Like the toxins that have come before, they are killing us.

Stephen Vittoria’s 2005 documentary One Bright Shining Moment chronicles the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern. Dick Gregory recalls the visceral hatred McGovern engendered on the part of the political establishment, and explained it succinctly: when one has been in darkness for so long, it’s only natural for the slightest bit of light to hurt.

This is the dilemma Americans face today: a flash of pain as we acknowledge the singularity of race in this country, or over dependence on an outdated racial model that promises to hurt less simply because we’ve lived with the pain so long it’s been reduced to a dull throb.

We’re surrounded by examples on either side of yesterday’s racial divide who embrace old categories, chauvinisms, and hatreds because they’ve chosen the devil they know over the devil they don’t.

It’s on the rest of us to choose differently.

Sketches on James O'Connor's "Timor Mortis"

Henry is in a coffin. Numb from the waist down, he attempts to make sense of his surroundings and of the life he lived before landing in this limbo. His only companions come in the form of a wine bottle, notes with meaningless aphorisms that descend from the void (the origins of both are unknown), and a beautiful if aloof woman who stalks by his wooden cell without so much as acknowledging his presence. Henry’s reverie—which has been underway for either eight minutes or eighty years—is interrupted when Henry gets a visitor. The Devil comes calling, with an offer to end Henry’s torment on a rather sweet note; but the price for peace is going to be steep...

It takes a lot of nerve to curse God, especially when you’re his prisoner. Even in a secular society, blasphemy holds a powerful deterrent force.

James O’Connor’s Timor Mortis, which COItc premiered in January and February of 2009, marked our first production to spark audience walkouts, baleful glares at staff, and even a confrontation with our stage crew by one particularly devout woman, incensed we would have a character say to God: Fuck you, you bastard.

“After all,” our erstwhile critic declared: “God is all I have.”

But the shock of hearing the line had blunted the point. For Henry (the character with the chutzpah to curse Him), God was all HE had left as well.

The value of shocking art, religion in theater, and the merits of self-censorship are all topics worthy of their own articles—and that is precisely why they will not be examined here. Instead, we invite you to examine with us some of the larger tropes within which Timor Mortis finds itself—and the ways playwright James O’Connor bucks established norms in this genre.

O happy the man who still can hope
Though drowned in a sea of error!
Man needs the things he doesn’t know,
What he knows is useless, forever.
Goethe, Faust

The problem with the Faustian bargain is that the other shoe barely has time to drop before the final curtain does. Stories of sinners getting their just desserts end just as the dish is served.

DON GIOVANNI
Terrors unknown are freezing me,
Demons of doom are seizing me,
Is hell let loose to torture me?
Or does it mock my sight?

CHORUS
Torments eternal wait thee!
Burning in endless night!

DON GIOVANNI
My soul is rent in agony!
Condemn’d to endless misery,
Oh, doom of wrath and terror,
No more to see the light!
Mozart, Don Giovanni

Elements
Timor Mortis is a full inversion of the typical Faustian tale on three counts:

(1) It begins where other stories usually end;
(2) Its protagonist is unexceptional; and
(3) Its protagonist doesn’t willingly enter into a deal with the Devil.

Syntax
The playwright’s other vocations as poet and translator are reflected in the visceral descriptive power of his character’s words. In the tradition of Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh, Timor Mortis is a play about storytellers whose stories sometimes wind out of their control.

The lighting designer for our world premiere of the play rightfully called it “fully theatrical”: it contains in its execution setups both grounded and otherworldly.

Starting with literally nothing in the void, Henry creates a world with rules and reference points: a never-ending bottle of wine, visitations from unknown creatures, notes from the heavens and a crashing organ. From this perch, simultaneously precarious and firmly grounded, Henry evokes his past life: the freckles of his wife’s back, the sometimes wonderfully messy, sometimes horrifying physics of lovemaking.

These experiences are no less concrete for not being recreated on stage before the audience. On a whim, the Devil recreates the happiest moment of Henry’s life, which Henry subsequently witnesses and relives simultaneously. These are events which live theater—unrestricted by the cold camera lens, and yet far more grounded that the literary voice—can deliver.

The distinctive syntax inversions of O’Connor’s play emerge most strongly in his inversions of trope, outlined above and expanded upon now.

(1) It begins where other stories usually end.
What makes Timor Mortis existential is that the life Henry’s lived is actually a secondary concern. The moments of his existence on earth that resonate after he’s left it are positively pedestrian: Henry is as far as one can get from a Wagnerian hero with his opening:

HENRY: I woke up this morning in a coffin and I have no idea how I got here. It’s a complete mystery to me. I don’t remember being sick. I don’t remember having a heart attack. I don’t remember a car accident. In short, I don’t remember dying.

One can hardly imagine Die Walküre’s Siegmund waking in Valhalla with such words.

Walking along the beach with his mother, the glimpse of his wife’s nipple in the corner of his infant daughter’s mouth—these are not the elements of an übermensch ready to take on the gods, but the offal of an ineffectual bourgeois man who’s spent too much time on a Freudian couch (Sigmund instead of Siegmund?). Which takes us to

(2) Its protagonist is unexceptional.

THE DEVIL: I like you, Henry.
HENRY: Do you?
THE DEVIL: Of course I do! Why do you think I’ve been looking after you?
HENRY: I don’t know.
THE DEVIL: You’ve made me very proud. I almost feel like a father to you.

How could such a pedestrian man spark the protection of the Prince of Lies? Clearly because this is not entirely true: Henry is exceptional, just not while he’s on Earth. Henry’s moment to shine comes after he’s departed.

This tension, between the prosaic and the profound, underpins the entire play: if he is not a great lover like Don Giovanni, if he is not a great physician like Faust, what is it that makes this man exceptional, that makes him catch the attention of Lucifer himself?

The basic question confronting all acting students (and playwriting students, and directing students) is sometimes called the Passover question: why is this night different from any other night?

Henry’s plight is at once prosaic and profound because he makes clear that he has been in this state for some time, and the events he witnesses—notes dropping from the sky, aloof women strutting down imaginary catwalks—are everyday occurrences. However, the play mainly encompasses exceptional moments: his intimacy with the messenger, his colloquy with the Devil. What changes? What makes these things happen now? Why is this night different?

In a similar vein, Henry divorces, re-marries, continues to have affairs, and lies to his second wife (a lot). These are, sadly, not abnormal behaviors for a man. So why is he special? Because out of Henry’s commonality springs the audacity to speak truth to ultimate power.

HENRY: Who are you?
THE DEVIL: You know damn well who I am. By the way, I’m the one who wrote that message regarding solitude.
HENRY: Well, forgive me for saying so, but you’re not much of a writer.

Henry’s essence is irreducible because it started at such a basic level; a philandering husband willing at first blush to blame his children for the failure of his marriage has no compunction cursing God’s love; a post-man stuck in a coffin with a numb, engorged penis has nothing to lose in telling the Devil he’s a terrible writer. The power of Henry’s defiance is underwritten by his ultimate impotence, underscored by the fact that it is preceded by a shrug.

And that defiance takes us to

(3) Its protagonist doesn’t willingly enter into a deal with the Devil.
Henry is, in fact, exceptional to the Devil by possessing a quality he has in common with all of humanity: free will.

The Devil needs Henry to choose his path in order to claim him as one of the Devil’s own. This is something Henry simultaneously accepts and rejects: even as he takes the oath, Henry continually defies the Devil’s will, up to their final exchange.

There is not a little wish fulfillment in the Devil’s fascination with Henry. Lucifer as a fictional or dramatic character holds such interest to many because he is usually used to embody our collective id; he offers us the most tantalizing rewards the corporeal world has to offer, but also is that very desire personified.

We want the Devil to appear and tell us the things we desire the most can be ours, and moreover, that desire is—in and of itself—okay. (See The Devil’s Ten Commandments, below.)

The Devil
The Devil that occupies the pages of Timor Mortis, like the play itself, takes a sharp right turn from the expected Lucifer of lore and popular culture. He is closer to the fallen angel of the Bible, less warped by being the embodiment of evil and more by the loss of love. From the Devil’s first significant question to Henry—It’s not easy giving up love, is it?—love is revealed to be a touchstone; the harvesting of Henry’s soul an inconsequential byproduct of Henry’s declaring allegiance to the Devil’s nihilism:

THE DEVIL: You must renounce the afterlife. You must renounce your own soul. You must believe in nothing. Nothing, Henry, but the earth and the stars.

The Devil’s bargain of Timor Mortis is perverse in its most basic sense. It’s one thing to declare one’s nihilism as a means to grab onto something definite—the refusal itself—in the face of the indefinite (existence of God, the afterlife, etc.); it’s quite another to do so in the very face of its evidence. The Devil requires Henry to disbelieve his own eyes, to defy them. This is the sordid underbelly of free will; one can freely choose one’s own annihilation, and the Devil exploits it to its utmost.

Setpieces
The Devil’s Ten Commandments

THE DEVIL: Forget your wife, Henry. You’re dead. And now you shall be judged according to my Ten Commandments.
HENRY: You have Ten Commandments?
THE DEVIL: What! I can’t have my own Ten Commandments?
HENRY: No, I just thought...
THE DEVIL: Only God can have Ten Commandments! Is that it?
HENRY: I wasn’t saying that.
THE DEVIL: I’m sure you know God’s Ten Commandments! So why don’t you know mine? Nobody ever knows my Commandments!
HENRY: But I don’t know God’s either. I mean, yes, I know a few of them, but I don’t know them all.
THE DEVIL: You don’t know even one of mine! You didn’t even know I had Commandments to follow!

Marlene Clary, COItc's Director of Readings and Young Artist Development (as well as the director of Timor Mortis' world premiere production), has observed that although the Devil sets his own commandments as a parallel to God’s, where God’s Ten Commandments are proscriptive, the Devil’s are descriptive—even permissive. They allow Henry to justify his behavior. The Devil himself describes them as insights gained over millennia of observation: Devil-as-anthropologist. This is a far cry from Goethe’s source of torment. The Devil’s Commandments are anything but: they establish him as Henry’s advocate.

The Bargain
The temptation of what the Devil in Timor Mortis has to offer in no way resembles classic soul-selling tales: or if it does, it is a Faustian bargain taken to its most extreme degree, temptation on steroids.

In one reading, rather than sell his soul for a short-term gain on earth while losing sight of the long-term picture (like Faust), Henry is persuaded to embrace the Devil’s view of a life that Henry has already lived, and thus can either re-live it in his mind for all eternity, or re-live it in actuality one more time before having his existence nullified permanently.

In the other, this actually is a Faustian bargain: but instead of luxuriant decades on Earth in exchange for an eternity of torment in Hell, Henry is given the opportunity of ten minutes of ecstasy in exchange for an eternity of nothing. This is extreme on both ends of the bargain: ten minutes of heaven is powerful stuff after a century of numbness. (But the other side of the deal is equally overloaded: it is arguable whether an eternity of torment [and therefore self-awareness] is preferable to an eternity of not existing—but it’s less debatable that the latter is a far more drastic result.)

Hell is Others, Hell is You
It’s a dilemma reminiscent of Sartre: no matter how seductive, tempting, demeaning, or demented the Devil appears, his ability to torment Henry has nothing on Henry’s capacity to torment himself.

sketches on B Walker Sampson's "Assistance"

(We presented B Walker Sampson’s Assistance as part of our Spring Reading Series in March 2009. It's a favorite of a few of us, and one of the productions we'd like to eventually stage. Below are the program notes.)

A synopsis (of sorts) of Assistance

After the close of business on the 76th story of an office building in New York or an island north of Siberia (no one is quite sure), assistants meander through the wee hours of the morning until the head of the company—until tonight, a figure of myth—makes him or herself known.

About the Playwright
B. Walker Sampson’s play Puppet Kafka will premiered this Spring at the HERE Arts Center, produced by Drama of Works. His other plays include: Silent Steps: A Play with MacGuffins (Outsider’s Inn Collective); Absence of a House (Double Take Theatre); What Do You Think of the Moon? (Audacity Theatre Lab’s “Eye in the Sky” radio theatre project); and Roosevelt Island (BRIC Studio; HERE Art Center’s American Living Room Festival). His play Alceste was part of Soho Rep’s 2004/05 Writer/Director Lab reading series, and additionally his plays have been read at the Playwrights’ Center, Theatre of NOTE, Manhattan Theatre Source, and the Flea Theater. His plays, poetry, and articles have been published in Midway Journal, The Saint Ann’s Review, The Brooklyn Review, Stirring, and American Theatre. He received his MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where he studied with Mac Wellman.

Sketches on Assistance
The less you struggle, the less it will hurt.

While no character explicitly says these words, it’s a major thrust behind B Walker Sampson’s Assistance. As outlined below, Sampson echoes Harold Pinter in taking a concept that would seem innocuous when expressed by a figure of authority in one context, and turns it into a thinly veiled threat.

Most people are no stranger to the anxiety, awkwardness, and fear that accompanies one’s first day at a new job. That’s to be expected. But what if the parameters of that job where changed; what if the moment you sat in your new cubicle, dismemberment and torture were de rigeur, and the laws of physics no longer applied?

Sketched out below are some elements of the playwright’s piece that struck our fancy for more detailed examination. It’s also perfectly acceptable to slap this pamphlet shut and simply listen to this hilarious and terrifying piece.

Either way, the less you struggle, the less it will hurt.

B Walker Sampson’s Assistance exploits wholeheartedly theater’s potential for spectacle. Just as the cubicle farm rotates over the course of this play, there are various lenses through which one could view Assistance—like a rotating display for greeting cards. We’ll try, briefly, to outline a few of them in one cursory spin.

Elements
The rotating set
The spinning cubicles of Sampson’s world create an environment completely out of balance. The audience is denied their customary comfort, that of a stationary unit set through which characters move.

This is particularly disturbing as the world of Assistance is that of shifting rules and assumptions. Lemple’s coup d’etat under these circumstances is not only to be expected, it is inevitable.

Syntax
Sampson’s language, while heightened, is not loaded for the performers. And while the situations are reminiscent of Pinter’s comedies of malice (more on that below), what distinguishes the playwright from his forebear is while Pinter’s menace was lurking very close to the surface, Sampson’s language conceals the iron fist beneath more layers of silk. But unlike Pinter’s plays, which sometimes include the disintegration of language, in Assistance we witness instead the construction of an alternate language and vocabulary.

A delightful idiosyncrasy of Sampson’s text is, for lack of a better term, optional coherence on the part of his characters.

Playwright Wendy MacLeod ("Schoolgirl Figure," "House of Yes") has spoken of the indicators of a good playwright. In her estimation, one such indicator was the presence of secret language—a language with its own internal logic: while not important for an audience to understand every meaning to a line of dialogue, it’s sufficient that the audience recognize the language as uniquely weighted between the characters, even if the underlying meaning is obscure. This is a sentiment echoed by Brecht:

Incorrectness, of considerable improbability even, was hardly or not at all disturbing, so long as the incorrectness had a certain consistency and the improbability remained of a constant kind. All that mattered was the illusion of compelling momentum in the story told, and this was created by all sorts of poetic and theatrical means. (emphasis added) [Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (Willett, John, ed.). New York: Hill and Wang, 1957, p. 182.]

Sampson has taken this to its extreme: characters (Bolen more often than his colleagues) express themselves in ways that are obscure to everyone but themselves—and are comfortable living in this vacuum: it is the expression of language, as opposed to its comprehension or veracity, that cements one’s existence.

Storytelling
The setting of the action does not change from the cubicle farm (even as its location does; see below). It thus falls on the characters to create the world beyond the office, or to at least carve out a niche they control within it.

Selby, the only character free (it would seem) to leave the cubicle farm, obscures her identity upon her return; her presence allows for some autonomy from the farm’s rules.

Lemple alludes to the man tied in her kitchen; while the shades and significance of this illustrative story shift depending upon what light you choose to view the play (see below), this narrative becomes significant when she ultimately re-creates the scene with Metz.

Bolen has no world beyond the cubicle farm, and therefore re-writes his present to exert some form of control. It is a childish idea of control, steeped in upending the chessboard in order to see the pieces bounce. Bolen’s kingdom does not extend past the reach of his arm; his efforts to maintain control over that kingdom seem, when placed in a larger context, quite mad: King Bolen in the valley of the (imaginary) dolls.

Metz’s storytelling (Metz / Zzzzzz is a name, a bodiless force of authority, a sound of menace [the worker bee, the stinger bee]) is particularly iconic of Sampson’s work: his tense is not present, but conditional:

METZ: What if I sat here all the time? What if this was my station up here? I could be well-positioned. I would be watching over you. I would never move. My ass would ossify, in this chair. I would never move. You would never move. We would be so still and so busy and would be a picture of productivity. (Pause.) Though I would take naps. I would allow some slumber for myself. As my miscellany man, you would monitor my dreams and make power-point presentations out of them set to a 1970s French electronic symphonic soundtrack.

He is assessing the potential impact of these actions as he does them. Is this an escalation of his power, a la comedy of malice, (see below)? Or is he working to opposite effect, undermining his authority by questioning it (not “I am,” but “what if?”)?

It is only in the surest of hands that a character’s words so fully underscore and undermine their position simultaneously.

Setpieces
Aural, visual, and elements of technique that will shape the play you are about to see:

(1) The ringing phone
In working to alienate the audience—to make the familiar unfamiliar [Brecht: “A representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.”]—the ringing phone is the starkest example of Sampson’s effort.

Through its ubiquity, the unanswered telephone’s kinetic tension is often overlooked. A ringing telephone—white noise in an office environment—is nevertheless pregnant with possibility: a summons, a plea for help, pending devastating news.

(2) The clocks
By prominently displaying multiple time zones, Sampson neatly juxtaposes the simultaneous rigidity and fluidity of the human perception of time.

The clocks corresponding to foreign locations are essential because there are foreign locations, but they are simultaneously insignificant to the characters because those locations are not present.

This paradox tidily folds in on itself when Lemple, as a coup de grace on her coup d’etat, transports them, through simultaneous manipulation of all three clocks, to Faddevskij. In one fell swoop, there becomes here.

(3) Alienation

SELBY: Once you’ve decided what kind of person you are, your skills will develop accordingly.
BOLEN: And what have you decided?
SELBY: Perhaps if I had been...
(Pause.)
What was I was going to say?
BOLEN: Something sentimental.
SELBY: If it was sentimental, I would cherish it. Having once had promise—or the thought that I once had promise, even if or especially if that thought is mis...miss...a mistake, then. It’s not something I feel fondly about. It only causes me pain.

In his Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht consistently aspires to maintain a distance between the performer and the role being performed; at no point should there be any illusion or confusion as to where the performer ends and character begins.

Sampson expands upon this approach by writing this distance into the characters’ language, wherein they maintain a distance from their own words. At various moments the characters seem to maintain running commentaries on their own words, to striking effect.

Prisms of Analysis
Absent a specific performance or determination of approach, Sampson’s text is wonderfully protean, accommodating various approaches—approaches that are sometimes mutually exclusive.

Assistance as Office Farce (Comedy of Manners) Taking a certain view (perhaps with the head tilted to the side, one eye squeezed shut), Assistance is a delightfully naughty office romp, placed within the context of a situation that is both absurd and all-too-familiar. Haven’t we all worked with a Bolen, the colleague who pops up above the dividing wall that demarcates our rather porous privacy and over-shares, oversteps bounds, overstays his welcome? And yet he has survived in this environment longer than anyone else, in spite of how ill-suited he seems for the simplest social interaction in the outside world. Since we’re not Lemple, we can laugh at her plight—because we’ve been trapped there before ourselves.

(In this prism, Lemple’s man tied in the house is a setpiece in a comedy of manners: any audience member acquainted with mind-numbing sexual harassment workshops will recognize this story as wildly inappropriate, even as Lemple thinks it might be appropriate, given Bolen’s wood and obsession with Selby. The absurdity emerges through her fundamental misunderstanding of the norms of this world, on display as starkly as a nudist at a Victorian tea party.)

Assistance as Pinteresque Mindf*ck (Comedy of Malice)
Sampson’s work is very clearly written in the same vein as Pinter’s comedy of malice, among which the slightly sinister sexual references, the baldly malicious upending of just-established truths, and nods to a quite possibly apocalyptic outside world (pace Beckett) are only a few of the shared elements.

Metz is the clearest embodiment of malice. He is Nick, the interrogator of One for the Road, he is Goldberg of The Birthday Party, and the uniformed thugs of Mountain Language. Metz’s refusal to say Bolen’s name, but merely to mouth it, is a gut-punch to witness.

(In this prism, Lemple’s man tied in the house is powerful not because of its veracity, which cannot be definitively confirmed, but in why Lemple chooses to tell it. By creating a reality in which she keeps a weeping man tied up about the neck in her kitchen, she creates a self that is powerful. The fact that she re-creates the scenario with Metz, would, however, lend credence to the story: the audience sees that she is certainly capable of such things.)

Assistance as Artaud (Theater of Cruelty)

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. [Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage (ed. Eric Bentley), New York: Penguin, 1968, p.66.]

The white slides are a kind of moral purity, the relocation to Faddevskij a violent rebirth, the dogless collar is an image irrevocably connected to Lemple’s man in the kitchen. Together these things make Assistance a Magritte painting with the breath of life—albeit the breath of a pervert at the other end of a telephone.

(In this prism, Lemple’s man tied in the house is important more for the image it creates in the minds of her listeners than because she says it. A bald, naked man eating food like a dog is as important a stage picture as the rotating cubicles, because of its potential to illuminate through alienation [pace Brecht].)

A Belly Flop in the Minefield
A tug of war between comedy and violence, coherence and anarchy, runs throughout Assistance’s pages.

Buffeted on all sides by changing rules, upended hierarchy, it might be temping for the onlooker to keep his head down and avoid any conflict—indeed, any contact.

Sadly, that’s the surest recipe to lose control, only to regain consciousness tied to a chair with a ball gag jammed in one’s mouth.