No media from the cabaret, A) because it would have distracted the artists, and B) because there were so many damn people that we had to turn away 30 audience members, many of ourselves included. So to see shots from the shows themselves, well, I guess you'll just have to buy some tickets, wontcha?
Tonight, come behold that Procession of Pep, that Pageant of Preposterousness, the New York Clown Theatre Festival Clown Parade! It begins at Union Square, takes the L Train to Williamsburg, where it will morph into the Slapstick Smackdown known as the New York Clown Theatre Festival Pie Fight! (Participation = free, humiliation = priceless.) And after that will be an Anthology of Asininity, the New York Clown Theatre Free Preview Cabaret! Three (3) (III) free festival-branded events! One night! Millions of slavering fans! No excuses!
To celebrate the opening night of the Festival, please allow us to share with you a collection of the wonderful press we've been receiving, which will help to elucidate and expand the madness:
If you are a follower of The Brick, you have to have spent the summer hoeing permafrost in Franz Joseph Land to be unaware that we are nearly ready to open the third annual New York Clown Theatre Festival. However, on the off chance you actually have just returned from the Land of the Midnight Sunniness, let us give you a brief primer:
1. The Festival runs from September 5 through September 28
2. On Friday 9/5 we kick off with a Clown Parade that starts at Union Square and wends its way to The Brick via the L Train.
3. This Parade is followed by a participatory, interactive Pie Fight.
4. If you participate in the Pie Fight, you will get very dirty.
5. You will also have a kind of jaw-droppingly good time.
6. You will not have time to go home and take a shower before the Free Preview Cabaret, which highlights a number of shows that can be seen in full later in the Festival - so bring your own shampoo.
7. We are not talking about circus clowns here, but Theatre Clowns.
8. Yes, they can be scary sometimes, but only on purpose.
9. They do not do children's birthday parties, so don't ask.
10. If you see enough shows, you will develop washboard abs from all the laughter.
11. We have shows from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, and France.
12. Not to mention the entire U.S. from Hawaii to Maine.
13. Any lingering you prejudice you may have towards clowns will be shattered like some sort of tiny glass unicorn.
14. The shows are like $15 - more than a movie, sure, but do movies talk back to you?
Okay, there will be more tips and tricks in future blog posts, but this is probably more than enough for you to handle. Come one, come all! And as you walk down Metropolitan Avenue, keep your eyes open - you never know who might be a clown...
I was wrong. For your reading pleasure, we now present this final post in the "Collisionworking" Series, in which Ian W. Hill offers some final thoughts on his month of performance at The Brick. As of this writing there is at least one performance left of all three shows, so we encourage you to avail yourself of the opportunity to see as many as possible!
Postscript: Final Thoughts/Influences (on Playing Ball)
One last little piece about influences . . .
In making Everything Must Go and its predecessor in the Invisible Republic series, That's What We're Here For (an american pageant), it occurred to me that they were a sum total of a line of thought that has been growing in me since childhood. A way of looking at the world that comes about from having entertainment that I loved - just 'cause it was entertaining to me - that on some level also encouraged a way of looking at the world through questioning eyes, and expressing that questioning in funny and satiric but still sometimes cutting and dark ways.
It's shown up most in EMG and TWWHF, but it's kinda there in everything I do, and now that it's become clearer to me, it's something to be focused on with more intent in future.
The Invisible Republic shows are dedicated to Harvey Kurtzman, Frank Zappa, and Ernie Kovacs, but beyond those shows, I've realized their influence more and more infects everything I do.
Kurtzman and Bill Gaines of the Mad comic book and magazine tended to downplay any notion that there was any true satiric or political content in what they did, but if pressed, they would say that if they had a message, it was basically, "Kids, don't believe what you're being told, because everyone's trying to sell you something." Which is maybe something kids should be hearing more of today.
Zappa's message was pretty much the same, though he was also a proud capitalist who enjoyed the "proper" use of advertising.
But he disliked the fakery that everyone is always told is "just part of the business, so just go along with it," resulting in things like what happens when The Mothers of Invention are told to "lip-sync" their new single on some 60s TV show:
And occasionally he could bring some of that influence to a pop culture arena:
Ernie Kovacs instilled in me a love for the inexplicably funny at a very young age (PBS ran a series of collections of his work around 1974-1975 or so), but besides things like the perfection of the Nairobi Trio . . .
He had an entire attitude that, even when selling something, made you aware of the process in an honest way while trying to entertain:
And his beautifully "off" metacommentary extended to his own credits:
I guess in the end, what I learned from these people is how to respond to the question, "Why don't you just play ball?" Which is with raised hackles and a determination to do what is right for the work, not for anybody else (which doesn't preclude selling the work, but just selling it honestly), and to focus on the little dark scurrying things that are going on behind the scenes of the big smiley faces al around us every day (but at the same time, to understand the enjoyment you can get from those big smiley faces).
Which brings me to three last videos, from the band Negativland, a group that's also been influential on me in a few ways, in terms of collage and commentary, the last few years. Here, they take on some aspects of pop culture and advertising and language in ways I've also been trying to use, in a stage context (and I quote liberally from a quote they use in the last piece in EMG).
With this post the guest-blogging run of Ian W. Hill comes to its conclusion. There are only three more days left to see the shows, so if you'd like to do so you should act fast. Hope to see you there!
On Harry in Love, part 2: A Big Man, Yelling (aka Influences)
Harry in Love is a comedy. A loud, broad, raucous comedy. The subtitle is A Manic Vaudeville and this is to be taken seriously. The people in it are nuts, the play itself is nuts. Wonderful.
The performance style is manic and stagy in the best way. The one-liners have to explode with a classic style of timing that goes back over a hundred years and isn't often seen so much anymore. It's a specific kind of humor, that traveled the country and eventually entered the movies and early TV, but started as something very much of vaudeville, of New York, of the comedians there, and very specifically the New York Jewish comedians there.
Now, here we are doing Harry with a cast of mostly Gentiles playing Jews and doing this stuff (except of course Ken Simon, who calls himself "God's Tummler" and who probably belongs in the Borscht Belt of several decades ago), but while the style began that way, there are plenty of fine Gentile examples of comedians who took on this style, including a couple of nice boys who started out in vaudeville and worked this schtick to the ends of their lives, in films and TV, and whose timing I find myself directly aping quite a bit in this show:
What's nice about that piece (from their film In Society though they also did it on their TV show), is that they are both almost straight men there as well for a collection of fine comedic second-bananas to do their bits off of, which is also true of this classic routine, done by many MANY comedians, but probably most famous from this version on the Abbott & Costello TV show:
The A&C connection with Harry became particularly clear when I realized there was no way I could yell the line, "I'm not ASKING him to get involved!" without directly copying Lou Costello's cadences on "I'm not ASKING you who is on second!"
Years ago, when doing this show for the first time, Michael Bruno, who was then playing Paul, mentioned looking at Gene Wilder's performance in The Producers for inspiration. I didn't mention this to Walter Brandes, who's now playing the part, as he's a very different Paul, and I'm not sure that reference would work for him.
At the same time, I'm noticing a lot more Zero Mostel in my own performance as Harry – I don't know if I didn't see it nine years ago because I couldn't see myself and Zero in the same category. Now, being a bit older (and, admittedly, a bit heavier), I find myself taking on a bit more Zero in the part.
This scene from The Producers especially gets the feel of what I'm trying to do as Harry down – sorry for the quality; it appears someone decided to videotape the film of a TV monitor, recording the sound off the speaker with the camera mic, and then post it to YouTube, but it's what there is available:
During rehearsals for this round of Harry, a name came up that I hadn't thought of before, but which now seemed extremely a propos: Jackie Gleason.
Maybe I hadn't thought of Gleason before because . . . well, to be frank, while I've always admired his technical skill, I've never at all been a fan of The Great One. He gets on my nerves, and I really, REALLY dislike Ralph Kramden and The Honeymooners
However, once he came up, I couldn't help but see the similarities, and once I could see them, I could use them.
This performance style continues down into theatre of the 60s with plays by Murray Schisgal and Bruce Jay Friedman and Jules Feiffer and even Neil Simon, but with a darker edge. Plays of a category that Richard once put Harry in, something like "big sweaty neurotic New York Jewish men yelling at other people." Unfortunately, the beautiful, fun broadness of this style seems to have vanished in the last couple of decades. It's my pleasure to bring it back for a few more times in Harry in Love, which, if it's even half as much fun to watch as to perform, must be quite a show out there in the house. Wish I could see it from there.
A penultimate guest post from Ian W. Hill - last one tomorrow morning, so stay alert, citizen!
On Harry in Love, part 1: Foreman & Me
(Yesterday I said I was going to write about some more influences on Everything Must Go and then get to Harry in Love, but it's worked out differently)
I wouldn't be directing theatre today if it weren't for Richard Foreman. I maybe should say, "the work of Richard Foreman," but Richard himself is somewhat responsible personally.
The big love of my life for the longest time was Film, and all I ever wanted to do was to make movies. At the same time, I loved to act, especially on stage. For most of my teens and twenties, if you'd asked me what I really wanted to do with myself, I would have told you that I wanted to make movies and act in theatre.
I went to NYU Film School at Tisch School of the Arts, and loved it, but by the time I graduated, having made a 10-minute Junior-year film, "How Did You Manage To Steal a Car from a Rolling Train?", and an hour-long Senior film, Deep Night, which mixed black-and-white and color live action, animation of various kinds (cel, clay, pixilation), musical numbers, crazed stylistic shifts, fake documentary sections, a hand-cranked silent movie scene, metacommentary through intertitles, and basically everything that I ever wanted to do or see in movies, I was a little worn out and empty in regard to the form. I had made a film - not a great one, but a substantial one - in which I burned through most of the ideas I had about what I wanted to do with the medium, whether they belonged in the film or not. And now my big calling card was a strange, uneven hour-long film, which is a useless length for a movie anyway (as Dan O'Bannon has pointed out, having learned that lesson with John Carpenter when they made the original student film version of Dark Star - below 45 minutes, good, above 80 minutes, fine, anything in-between, there is no use for it in the world - festivals won't take it, no one's interested in watching it), and which most people didn't get and a bare few thought some kind of masterpiece (a phrase I've had applied to my work more than a few times, "some kind of masterpiece" – what is that supposed to mean?).
So, Theatre.
I had been acting on stage more and more at NYU - I wasn't in an actual acting/drama program, so my options were limited, but by Senior year I was on various stages more and more, and increasingly outside of NYU in the Off-Off-Broadway world.
At the premiere screening of Deep Night, stage director Christopher Carter Sanderson, who had directed me a few times by then, asked me how familiar I was with the work of Richard Foreman. When I said I knew the name well enough, but not the work, he said that he would someday like to direct me in Foreman's play Egyptology, and that I would be a perfect actor for Foreman's world.
As I had no idea what that meant, I tried to see the next Foreman play that was up in NYC. I didn't get in - it was sold out - but at the box office I bought the book of Richard's plays - Reverberation Machines - that contained the play Chris had mentioned. I fell in love with Richard's writing immediately, and with that play in particular. And I started thinking about it as a director, as a Theatre Director - not a position I'd much craved in past (though I'd directed plays by Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Thornton Wilder at boarding school, which I regarded as practice in the long run for directing actors on film).
Also, my best friend David LM Mcintyre was directing a lot of theatre, with me often as actor and/or dramaturg-bounceboard for him, and this - including attending some of his classes with Anne Bogart at Playwrights Horizons when I would be acting in pieces there - began to make me start thinking of directing for the stage as well. But I didn't do anything about it; I was content to sit back and act (and occasionally design, as my film school technical knowledge meant I would get tapped to do other things on shows I was acting in that needed tech people).
Eventually, I began to see Richard's shows, and this also opened my head to the possibility of directing theatre – as Joyce and Nabokov had done to me years earlier with prose, and Lynch, Godard, and Roeg had with film, I needed an example to show me that all these ideas I had in my head about what could be done in an art form weren't just crazy, that you could actually DO them and there WOULD be people who would want to share in them with you. You could create works about your personal visions/obsessions in these media, and while some people might call you self-indulgent, what the hell great was ever created in Art without an artist indulging themself?
Jump ahead a few years - I'm acting in Kirk Wood Bromley's Want's Unwished Work at NADA on Ludlow Street, and in some ways I think I've gone about as far with my acting, craftwise, in working for other people as I can. I've got a great part - actually written specifically for me by the playwright over 2 1/2 years of readings - that I'm having a wonderful time with, but I'm not using everything I want to as an actor. I'm having to hold back. I need new worlds to work in, and I'm going to have to create them myself, it would appear, if I'm going to act in them.
So I'm living in NADA during the extension of Want's, as I've lost my NYC apartment and have decamped to my Mom's place in Maine for the most part, and I've come back to do the show and help out the other shows going on there, including Edward Einhorn's production of Foreman's My Head Was a Sledgehammer.
Seeing Edward's production (done at a time when the majority of people would say, "I think Foreman's plays can only be done by Foreman" if you mentioned someone else doing one) and rereading Richard's collections gave me an idea, and I said to Aaron Beall of NADA one day, "I think NADA should do a festival of other directors doing Foreman's plays." He nodded thoughtfully and walked away.
Two days later he came back to me and said, "That idea? A festival of Foreman plays? Do it. Next June, it's yours. Get it together."
And so I did.
The reason Richard is directly responsible for me being where I am today is that he said "Yes" to the idea and encouraged and helped me a bit in getting this together (he'd say he didn't do anything, but just agreeing to it and giving some written advice to the directors was enough to give the festival a certain amount of cachet). We did three years of the No Strings Attached festivals (named, appropriately on many levels, by Edward Einhorn) at NADA, doing somewhere around 35 plays by Richard, including several world or USA premieres. Richard saw a performance of each show. During year two, having seen me act in several of the shows, he mentioned that he had written a play called Harry in Love many years earlier, and he thought I'd be good for the part of Harry, which was quite flattering, and even more so when I saw the play – not that it's a flattering character (it ain't), but it was flattering as an actor to think a playwright would think you capable of this demanding role.
Interestingly, with Harry, though, I was back to doing the kind of theatre I had mostly walked away from when I started to direct, and it started me considering even more possibilities as a director – that I could alternate my personal, idiosyncratic pieces with other pieces that were just there to make people laugh, which I enjoy doing anyway. So now I knew I could do a wider range of plays, and I have ever since.
Richard is the man all of this comes back to then, for me. Why I do what I do, in so many ways. Even down to – as with some other people I know who started out as Foreman devotees – not bothering to see his work for the last several years, not out of disinterest, but because I have other work of my own to do, and have to get to it, and I've probably gotten most of what I can out of Richard by now (though I'm still thinking of directing the USA premiere of his play George Bataille's Bathrobe next year).
In the end, what I've learned from Richard is to be myself, and be true to myself, as an artist, whatever that may mean. Which is why I am doing, HAVE to do, Spell AND Everything Must Go AND Harry in Love all at the same time right now. Not to do so wouldn't be right, at least for me.
Another entry from Ian W. Hill. Only three more performances of SPELL left, so order your tickets today!
On Spell: Creation and Influences
Spell started from some fragments in some notebooks and computer files. Someone was talking, and somehow I realized it was a woman named "Ann."
Ann said a few things here and there that I took down.
Someone was talking to Ann - I called him "Bill," just to give him a name at first, but I never figured that name would stick (and it didn't).
In one of the fragments, to my surprise, some witches appeared, and the word "spell" came to mind as a possible title for where this was goin g.
I finally put together one file of all the little fragments I had in different places that seemed to want to go together. It was a 4-page Word file called "SPELL" and this was what it said:
*****
(fragments to be figured out and ordered later)
(light bulb scene)
ANN Say we had a light bulb here . . .
Light bulb on stand shoots up out of the center of the table. ANN points her finger at it like a gun, “pulls the trigger,” and it clicks on.
ANN . . . and it’s on. I can’t just look at that and deal with it as just a light bulb
(detailed light bulb explanation to come)
Not just light bulbs. Something that complex. Tables. This table. Who built it, where, what hands, what conditions. How did he or she feel? Did they have a cold? Who did they give that cold to, later that day after they made their piece of this thing? I m in a diner, I go to put the sugar in my coffee from one of those sugar pourers, you know, the, the diner . . ? (Demonstrating the “diner kind” of sugar dispenser with a pouring gesture. BILL nods.) And who made that, that there in my hand? Not just that, that there’s a factory somewhere of people, lots of people, making these. And a place in that factory, maybe a factory of its own somewhere where they just make those little metal flaps at the top of the lid that the sugar comes through. Just that little piece of metal, and how many people did it take to make that, and who are they, and what are their lives around making these little pieces of metal. I picture them. I follow them home. I watch their TV shows . . . dinner . . . evening with the kids . . . maybe friends over . . . It’s paralyzing. Not being able to just ignore it. Accept it. If that’s . . . You get what I mean?
BILL Does that make things difficult?
ANN (bitter irony) Well, it makes it difficult to acquire money. If you know what I mean. Earn my keep.
BILL What do you want to keep?
*****
ANN (looking off) I hear voices . . .
BILL Tell me about these voices.
ANN No, I mean—
BILL Don’t be afraid.
ANN I’m not afraid, I just—
BILL Stay a spell.
ANN Stay what spell?
Spell occurs. Three witches. Silhouetted through back scrim wall.
WITCH 1 Stay.
WITCH 2 Sit.
WITCH 3 Remain.
*****
(floor becomes ceiling – fabric – on pulleys)
(noir detective)
(ANN gender switch, back and forth, unsure – ANDY, maybe?)
Sit a spell.
Spell this.
Spell it for me?
Are you good at spelling?
*****
ANN I thought I was an artist. I was always told I was an artist, so, hey, I’m an artist, right? Then I got to thinking I was just a craftsman. Woman. Craftswoman? Person? Crafter. Crafty? Then I decided I was somewhere in between, and what kind of place is that to be? After all.
*****
(politeness/manners/chivalry part of monologue)
(being in the grey, between black and white, problems, advantages, disadvantages)
(things have moved on)
(technology. shifts.)
(bread and circuses)
(business scene with lots of machine sounds, images of money, bills, large. projected?)
(noir figures. violence. multiple beatings.)
*****
Well, anything can happen in this place.
Do you mind?
Mind?
Mind.
Me mind?
You mind.
I mind everything and nothing. All at the same time.
*****
(everything slides)
(drug, voices, insanity, dealing with it discussion)
*****
Did you ever want to be normal?
Jesus, hell, no! (beat) Well, no, maybe that’s not true. For a moment, time to time, very brief. Only when I was in discomfort and wanted comfort. Thought “normal” would have given it to me. Ease. An easement, of a kind.
*****
Say this was—
(as a repeated opening to various scenes/thoughts)
(ANN and ANDY alternate imagining the lives of people in businesses/houses seen from a train – “Colonel F.G. Ward Pumping Station,” “Mr. Fox Tire Company,” “Sal’s Collision and Son,” “Action Box and Container;” a factory with cracked windows painted with green enamel; plains of burned-out, busted, and just plain left for dead vehicles; a back sunporch on a river, filled with stuff, over the windows and the screen door; two International Klein Blue doors stuck in the side of an old, shabby tin warehouse; a faded smiley face with “Always Happy To Serve You!” in italic on the yellowed sign of a building, no other signage visible.)
*****
And that was a start. To continue, I decided that Ann should preferably be played by Moira Stone, so I had a voice in my head to write for specifically.
Other things began appearing in the fragments. Bombs and terrorist references started showing=2 0up. Then I realized that Ann was being questioned in a little grey room somewhere. Was it a doctor or a military interrogator questioning her?
Maybe both?
Or maybe not, but she sees it as both.
Ann, as noted at the end of the notes above, now also had a male alter-ego, Andy. But wait, which one was the real one? Was one dreaming the other?
And maybe the interrogator was also one person split into two genders?
Possibilities continued to assert themselves.
As with most of my work for the last few years, this was becoming a piece about the United States of America, and was in some way a scream of pain about where things had gone and were going - badly - for this country that I love and feel so conflicted about. It was becoming an argument between my heart, which had begun to believe that violent revolution was the only way any positive change was going to happen here, and my head which is well aware that violent revolutions almost never work out in the long run. The argument in my ow n soul became the argument in this little chamber that is also the inside of Ann's head, with all the various voices and points of view trying to make themselves heard.
I rewatched some of my favorite movies - one of my favorite conceits, dramatically, is that the work is happening inside the head of the main character, and we are perceiving things as he/she interprets them emotionally/psychologically, not as they are "really" happening. So I watched Point Blank and Fight Club and Bad Timing and Detour and Myra Breckinridge and especially the David Lynch series of stories told inside the minds of people trying to run from the horrors of what they've done (or is being done to them) in the "real" world: Twin Peaks; Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and INLAND EMPIRE (and one could arguably include Blue Velvet and Eraserhead in this form as well, maybe).
As mentioned last entry, I also watched Ken Russell's The Devils, whic h involves a person being interrogated for a crime that they do not consider a crime by a governmental organization, and which, as typical with Russell, goes wonderfully off the rails into stylization, almost abstraction.
The Devils, which began life as a stage play by John Whiting as well as a novel by Aldous Huxley, reminded me of another stage work transformed into film that interprets and twists some real historical facts (both, oddly enough, in France) into a new statement: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (aka Marat/Sade) by Peter Weiss, directed by Peter Brook. Watching this film, I felt even more of a kinship with certain aspects of what I was going for, in terms of political debate in a cell, with madness lurking.
Here is the entire film of Marat/Sade (if you really want to watch it all online, best to click on the title link I just gave and then click on "watch in high quality" as each of the ten chapters comes up):
As this was happening, I was assembling a cast that seemed right for this play (and, luckily, Moira could do it). I wound up with a fine one to start - and still, as not all of them made it to the performances themselves, due to getting jobs they couldn't refuse - a good one to finish.
I started work with the cast with just fragments like the ones above, and some music, figuring out the scenes and structure as I went. The cast members, who I was now writing the play for and around, influenced it greatly in their own persons, attitudes, backgrounds and voices. I wrote lines of dialogue and used tones of voice I wouldn't otherwise, just because I could HEAR the voices of the actual cast talking in ways I wouldn't always have going inside my head.
For example, I had wanted, just for sonic purposes, the witches to speak non-English languages. I was tired, even as someone who speaks only English fluently and French brokenly, in the tyranny of the English language all around me and in my shows, so I cast actresses who could speak other languages. Somewhat by chance, these actresses I cast were Cuban, Palestinian, and Chinese-American. Now, in a play about patriotism, nationalism, violent revolution and/or freedom fighting (depending on how you look at it), this suddenly became Something That Had To Be Dealt With - and quotes from Castro, Che, Arafat, and Mao suddenly wound up being juggled into the mix. Which was hard, and it took me a while to figure out how to do this without upending the play into endless didactic political discussions - in fact, it took almost up to the last minute, but I'm happy with where it went.
It was weird how and where ideas would come . . . I was still trying to figure out how to write the scenes between The Man - a representation of various men from Ann's past - and the three Fragments (aspects of Ann in her past personae), without much luck when I frustratedly went out to get Berit and I some dinner one night, and as I was turning my car from Avenue S right onto Ocean Parkway, the entire way to write the first Man/Fragment scene appeared in my head just during the time I had the steering wheel turned. One of the best "Eureka!" moments I've ever had as a writer, though at the same time worrying, for it seemed like the solution was to write a scene that - to people who knew Berit and I - might sound as if it were, uncomfortably, a transcribed argument between the two of us shoved into the play. It isn't, and we don't have discussions quite like this one, but you might think it's about us if you just know us a bit.
I'm not sure how strong you could say Berit's influence on this play is. One friend, after seeing it, said, "So, you wrote a play about someone who's a combination of you and Berit going insane." I was a little put off by that, even though Berit somewhat agreed with the assessment. I think it may be a bit reductive of what the show is. Still, while I did write all of it (except for the quotes), I don't think certain aspects of it could have come out of me without B's influence in my life, especially the gender/feminist sections.
At the same time, B is worried about putting the valid feminist arguments in the mouth of a violent madwoman, but then she shrugs her shoulders and sa ys that there's no way to be 100% PC on this stuff, so why try . . .
Moira Stone as Ann, Fred Backus as General Doctor Jane, and Alyssa Simon as Doctor General Jane (or is it the other way around?)
I was writing and fixing up until days before opening, but wound up with a script I'm pretty damned proud of. There are bits I'll probably go back, look at and rethink after the run, but it's my first original 2-act play, and it works pretty much as I want it to.
More notes tomorrow on influences for Everything Must Go, and maybe I'll get to Harry in Love as well . . .
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