THIS IS THE HARDEST PART
There remains a lot I haven’t unpacked in this blog yet. Among them, one of our first workshops way back in the spring with the brilliant Katie Kaufmann and Billy Mullaney. A community conversation with an amazing mix of people in July. Productive monthly meetings with Steve and Miriam throughout the fall. Another saturating intensive workshop just last weekend.
Eventually I’ll circle back to these important parts of our development process (see this post from May that I seem to keep sharing lately). But right now I am swimming in the countdown to the first draft of the script, due in a couple weeks, so that’s all I can think and talk about right now.
Someone recently asked me, “What does a first draft mean to you?” Good question, right? Especially in a process that lives smack on the hinge between a typical playwriting process and a more collaborative creation of work. I am a playwright, responsible for producing a script that we will read aloud for anyone interested on Monday, December 14 (p.s. you’re invited! 8pm at Red Eye, no RSVP necessary). But a director and performer also are contributing ideas, desires, perspectives, and processes along the way (see this earlier post about our approach to working together). But we’re not devising everything together. But we are pushing around a number of ideas on our feet. A first draft of a script written in this collective context may or may not look, or function, like the first draft of a script in a solo writing context.
I think I responded to the question with something along the lines of, “I’d like to have some sense of the work’s shape, what form it’s starting to take - in what direction we’re heading.”
For the past month or two, I thought I was getting closer and closer to that. More recently, I’m not feeling so sure. And that’s okay, because we still have a little time before the deadline. But this really is always the hardest part of the process: trusting that the piece will reveal itself in time.
Okay, perhaps I should share a little about what has happened between July and November after all, to give context to this moment...
At some point in August or September, Steve brought The Tibetan Book of the Dead to the table, and Miriam was reminded of the Jorge Luis Borges short story, The Library of Babel. Increasingly, our conversations turned toward mortality and the archive - the relationship between death and certain acts of creation - from attempts to make sense of the great mystery of what comes after life, to the desire to create legacy, a form of immortality. We began honing in on some thematic focus.
I also checked in with Steve about how consciously he hopes audiences will take away the seed theme of “creations that consume their creators” (his original impulse for the project). Is it something they should walk away thinking about? Or is it an artistic jumping-off point that may or may not be obvious in the end? He said that he’s quite interested in having it be something people experience on a conscious level (whether or not they articulate it as such).
That led me to think about performances in which something is literally built over the course of the event, such as Machine Project’s 24-Hour Roman Reconstruction Project and Pearl D’Amour’s How to Build a Forest. Might something be built during our performance - but instead of being destroyed or taken down, it somehow actually consumes those who made it?
Stirring the stew, we began pushing around the image of a library that, rather than encompassing every possible combination of letters ever (as in Borges), attempts to catalog a single life. A person building a library, creating an archive of existence - an effort to reconcile mortality, or transcend it.
As I’ve started writing in this direction, I’ve realized that such a library indeed would quickly consume its creator; for archiving a life, in fact, points to archiving infinity. We are so inextricably connected to everything around us, all we’ve learned, everyone we’ve known, everything we’ve touched, all our thoughts, dreams, regrets, influences, potential. To try and catalog all of it really would be a never-ending task.
In last weekend’s workshop, Billy Mullaney brought up the excellent quote by Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” So very appropriate. In theater (and “storytelling” in general), a common rule of thumb is to get really specific, because the deeply personal illuminates to the deeply universal. Yet I continually find myself distracted deconstructing what “specific” means. When I try to break down what comprises any given person, it’s impossible not to go down this rabbit hole that ultimately leads me to believe there’s no such thing as an individual person at all - we’re all too inextricably connected. You can’t break down what makes an apple pie without eventually facing the vastness of the universe.
As I write, I’m recalling a blog post I wrote for the Walker in 2013 following a conversation with Sibyl Kempson and John Collins about “focusing on the wrong things,” building work intuitively, and trusting the uncomfortable complexities of truth. Looking back, everything in that post feels immensely relevant to this current process. Click here to read it.
Last weekend’s intensive workshop at Red Eye, which started on Friday, November 20, first brought together Steve, Miriam, and myself with intrepid performers Pramila Vasudevan, Ryan Colbert, and Billy Mullaney, plus the glorious sound duo Beatrix Jar, for some experiments in language, sound, and movement improvisation. (We think there might be a section in the script that is improvised, so were exploring possibilities for how it will work. Very fun! More on all that to come.) On Saturday, I wrote for most of the afternoon. On Sunday, this time with only Steve, Miriam, and myself plus Pramila and Billy, we read through what I was calling a “pre-first-draft draft” – decidedly not an official first draft, but a compilation of pages ordered with growing intention. Some of the material was reworked from July and some was new. I was thinking a lot about this action of building a library, juxtaposed with text, interactions, and other images that might overlay or interrupt it.
The performers did a beautiful job reading and we had a rich conversation after, but I left the workshop feeling unhappy with the text. A lot of the writing didn’t feel as evolved as I had thought it was, and I was having trouble articulating my own thoughts, questions, and responses to other people’s questions. The clarity and excitement I’d had while in the writing zone was gone, and suddenly it all just felt like a big mess.
I also haven’t even mentioned yet what I know is on most people’s minds lately, which is that the world around us seems to be falling apart at a faster rate than usual. Terrorism of unfathomable proportions is unfolding daily around the globe, including here in Minneapolis with the tragic shooting of Jamar Clark by police on November 16 (just a few days before our latest workshop). It is difficult to focus on anything besides the latest Twitter updates when so many people are hurting so badly. All weekend, I wrestled with being in our workshop and writing instead of protesting at the 4th Precinct.
In one haze of scanning social media for updates, I found a blog post by Sun Mee Chomet for the Minnesota Humanities Center, reflecting on being a grad student in acting at NYU when 9/11 happened.
She writes:
Zelda Fichandler (world-renowned theater maker and founder of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.), head of the Acting Program, sat quietly waiting, listening to the silent chaos of her students’ minds. My classmate, Darren, finally spoke, “I just don’t know what it’s all for…I mean what are we doing? We should be down there helping the firefighters. What is the point of acting now? It’s meaningless....” There was silent nodding in a room filled with fifty plus aspiring young actors at the cusp of their careers.
I will never forget Zelda’s response. She said quietly, “The firefighters are doing their jobs. We are not trained to do what they do. We would be in their way. We must do what we have trained to do. The world will need to try to understand life again. They will need to heal. We, as artists, will help them to do that. The world needs us, just as they need the firefighters.”
Later in the post, she continues:
Zelda was right. People did come to the play [The Three Sisters by Anton Chekov] to laugh and cry and to examine life with us. Towards the end of the play, as the youngest sister, Irina, each night I said the lines Chekov wrote in 1900: “The time will come, and everyone will know the meaning of all this, why there is all this suffering, and there won't be any mysteries, but meanwhile, we must go on living… we must work, we must work! …It's already autumn, soon it will be winter, the snow will fall, but I will be working, I will go on working…”
And so, amidst a month of feeling the weight of the world’s chaos, frustration with my own progress, and uncertainty in the face of this looming deadline, I am striving to go on working - and to be patient, an active observer (paraphrasing John Collins). I spent a good portion of Thanksgiving weekend poring through the text for this play, cutting big sections, writing new material, and rewriting old material. I also slept on it, kept tabs on Twitter, read ostensibly unrelated books (Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking has been profoundly important this week, for reasons that require a whole different post), and shared food with a lot of people. This coming week, I’ll be looking at everything with fresh eyes and staying open to where it all might lead.
The play is cohering more slowly than I’d like - but it’s happening, steadily, bit by bit.
This is the hardest part.
But we must work, we must work!
images: 1 - Cover of most recent pre-first-draft draft 2 - Billy Mullaney doing a movement improvisation in our November intensive workshop at Red Eye 3 - Ryan Colbert, Miriam Must, and Beatrix Jar in our November intensive workshop at Red Eye