I've recently discovered that my Senior Essay (a.k.a. thesis) for my English major is available thanks to Haverford College's website. It seems that anyone can download it as a pdf file. So, if you are interested (and still reading this website!) you should check out my essay "The Rape of the Author: How Charles Mee (re)defines authorship and its manifestation in his play Big Love". Hope you enjoy it!

ENCORE! ENCORE!

We've added an ENCORE performance of "First Love"!

All 4 original performances are sold out, so we are performing again this Friday night at 11:30PM. If you are interested, please email theater@brynmawr.edu for tickets.

Less than 24 seats available, so don't wait!

SOLD OUT shows!

"First Love" is SOLD OUT on Thursday and Friday.

There are only a few seats left for Saturday, but there's a lot of room left for the Wednesday preview.

Reserve your tickets today if you don't want to miss out!

That 70's Show

In some of the notes that I’ve been sharing with Abby during our past couple of runs and rehearsals, I’ve been talking a lot in terms of how Harold and Edith fall in love with each other at such an advanced age the same way that a pair of middle-school students fall in love with each other. They talk about communism, “Howl”, and their adventures in live, in a similar way to how pre-teenagers talk about movies, TV, cartoons, Nickelodeon, or whatever else middle-school students talk about these days. We see Harold and Edith being bashful with one another, awkward, shy, as if they were prepubescent. Yet they can’t walk without their canes, they have to take their pills, they change each other’s diapers, and they don’t hear or see a damn thing. We therefore find in them an example of ‘puppy love’ at the age of seventy.

I bring up the contrast between these two images we’ve created with these characters because I feel that unconsciously we have done the same with our set. We started out talking about Magritte and the juxtaposition of familiar images in an unusual context or proportion. This helped us develop our set: a sandbox bed, giant pillbox, a very well dressed bird-cage, etc. Indeed, all these images are use familiar items in rather unusual contexts. Yet, they have also created, in great part because of our color choices, a sort of coloring book set. It’s lively, colorful, and youthful: more like the waiting room of a pediatrician’s office than a geriatric center. Of course, we then encase all of these images in the ancient lobby of Goodhart (no offense to that wonderful building) and all these young-looking images clash with the oldness of the building. In our attempt to create a surreal landscape of juxtapositions we managed somehow to emphasize and/or underscore with the set the biggest juxtaposition of them all: the flimsiness of the love Harold and Edith share and their age.

Ultimately, I feel that this should help our audience ask one of the most important questions surrounding this play: did Harold and Edith truly love each other, or did they simply share an infatuation? As with saw with the Beckett story of the same title, the male lead did not truly love his partner, but merely became infatuated with her before running out of her life. Is this what Charles Mee is trying to do here? Present us with a 70 year-old couple that develops a ‘crush’ with each other and confuse it with love? Is it really love if it is so childish? Or is this precisely what love is? Why it’s no big deal? Both our performances and our set have evolved during the past few weeks to direct our attention to the clash between these two ideas: the maturity of old age and the childishness of love. I personally feel that after I started working with you on this production, this became one of the big questions that I wanted to present to the audience. We’ll find out next Tuesday if they really catch on to it.

Flowers as Pacifiers

We've done a lot of work on the flower scene since you posted your thoughts on Ophelia, Jorge, but here are some musings in the wake of our discussions and experiments:

Can this speech eulogize love (a positive thing in itself, the pure definition described in the "one pebble" speech) while at the same time mourning the way people have treated it? I think the negative things that have come out of it, exemplified in the "this is why a man" smashing scene, should certainly take precedence over the glowing, dreamy thoughts that may give way to those negative things. Still, I think it's useful to remember that, as you've pointed out, this is the sort of bad news, or death sentence, that can't be delivered too harshly, not without causing more smashing, more pain. To couples still in the fluff zone, still having their first picnic and "I cherish you" moments, the realization that sooner or later destruction will come is not exactly an easy one to take. The flowers can act as consolation - not to dumb the truth down, not to make it better, but just to show that what's dying is a beautiful thing, not a scary thing in itself. I am trying to tell this truth as gently as I can; I don't want to yank the growing weeds out of the ground but instead carefully make them aware of the ruin they're about to cause.

Selling flowers is one of the ways that I relate to the world. Just as making sure that Harold enjoys the tart earlier in the play gives me a boost, a sense of having done something productive, a reason to move on to my next task, giving people a nice bouquet helps me feel connected to those around me. In this case, my routine (giving flowers, finding those precious little moments to share with others) provides me with a context in which to place this darker news - the gravity of which I wouldn't usually welcome into my life. I need somewhere to hand off the things I've found out following the rejection, the disaster, and the recovery I've just gone through, and I need that handing off to fit into my personality. I am not going to scream at people or yell at them or force my warning upon them; I'm not going to outwardly condemn them or persecute them. I am going to walk up to them, carefully, knowing that they are on the other side, foreign. They're aliens or kittens, to use Mark's analogies. This is going to be as difficult for them as it has been for me.

This is not about delivering bad news to a specific couple or letting a certain person know about impending doom. It's about coming to terms with something painful, taking it in, seeing people who are still back where I was, before I knew the pain, and taking the opportunity to give them this news, to let them get out, to tell them what's to come, what not to do, what it's too late to avoid doing. The flowers give me a medium I'm used to as well as a way to establish the trust of my listeners before telling them what I have to say. Flowers are not immediately threatening; only when you see the destruction inherent even in them, even in the pretty and innocent things (even a child bears marks of uprooting, chopping, ruin), do you see the funeral going on everywhere.

Ernst and Mee

Emily's insightful post on Ernst last week motivated me to research the work of this painter (Mee's dramaturg!) a bit more. I still do not know much about his work, but I feel that by looking at more of his paintings, I have started to understand a little better why Mee is interested in this type of work.

What caught my attention about Emily's post was her suggestion that the main difference between Ernst and Rauschenberg is that the work of the latter uses images that have a specific meaning attached to them (i.e. the Statue of Liberty, the American flag) while the former opts instead to use images that do not necessarily signify anything, but that are defined by the context of the collage. I've included bellow some pictures of some of Ernst's pieces in which I think this happens. Oedipus Rex (in part I chose this piece because of its clear relationship with Mee's remaking of Greek plays, although it is not a "collage" technically) presents us with a set of images ranging from a hand, birds, and a chestnut. Fruit of a Long Experience, more along the lines of a small assemblage, does the same with a set of tools.

I have selected these two images not only because I feel they support Emily's argument, but also because they complicate it as they suggest that instead of choosing discarded images (as Rauschenberg often does in his pieces), he uses things that are still of value, that are still alive, that are not garbage. Thus we can distinguish how the hand appears to be moving, we see life in the bird's eyes. More interestingly, Long Experience presents us actual tools that can be used for the construction of something, perhaps the Fruit of someone's work. On the other hand, Rauschenberg offers us old newspaper clippings, wood that he found in a dumpster, pieces of instruments that have been thrown out (check out the previous post on Rauschenberg . He wants to resurrect the garbage, the dirty, the wast, the low forms of art. Ernst points us towards what's still of use, what can help us build or produce something.

In an interview with Gideon Lester from the A.R.T. during their production of Orestes 2.0, Mee said: "I was certainly influenced by Max Ernst's "Fatagaga" collages, made at the end of the First World War, and by the work of Robert Rauschenberg, who took the stuff of the real world - the junk, the rejected material, the scattered shards - and put it together and said, "This is art." That appeals to me personally as well as aesthetically." The quote suggests that they were both two distinct influences on his work: one that taught him how to put together these assemblages that he calls plays and another that taught him how to take the garbage of everyday and use it as art.

To answer some of Emily's questions about Mee's work, the "neutrality" of the images he uses really depends on which play we examine. For instance, bobrauschenbergamerica is staged on an American flag, and characters come it with cups from McDonald's and such. All images that we have a clear connection to. In Big Love the sisters make reference to L'Oreal products, but then they violence they engage in feeds from completely neutral images (i.e. irons, knives, throwing themselves to the floor). I also think that Mee uses images that are signify something and then makes them neutral. In Big Love, he inverts a famous line from My Fair Lady and has the sisters yell out "Why can't a man be more like a woman?". I feel that with instances such as these, we are unable to really make the associations that are necessary to connect an image with a specific meaning and are able to process them as more neutral. This is what happens, I think, with "Howl" in our production: the reference (appropriation) is clear, but upon hearing Carl Solomon being called out, we don't necessarily associate it Ginsberg's poem and it becomes just another poem. This is how I feel that Mee approaches Ernst's fatagaga pieces.

I personally still think of Rauschenberg's work as a better model for us to think of Mee's playwriting. This may be a result of having studied his work more and actually having seen may of his pieces, something I hope to have the opportunity to do with Ernst too. Yet, the jaggedness of Rauschenberg's pieces is more reminiscent to me of the fragmentation of Mee's plays. Also, Bob's pieces appear to combine high and low forms of art in a way that is more compatible with Mee's writing. Yet, we can all arrive at different conclusions about which one of these two artists (or any other one!) is more useful to study in order to approach Mee's plays since, after all, that's what he wants us to do. For this reason, while Rauschenberg may have had a great influence on my adaptation of the script, it wasn't him or Ernst, but René Magritte who served as my dramaturg when I began directing this production.

Oedipus Rex

The Fruit of a Long Experience

Mee on the News

A professor of mine referred me to a short article aptly titled "Copying Rights" on the current issue of Newsweek (March 26, 2007) which makes mention of Charles Mee. The article is not particularly insightful and focuses mostly on listing artists who are are taking similar steps in sharing their work with their audiences. Yet, it does emphasize how "the idea that appropriation and influence are inherent to the artistic process" is being promoted by many rising and established writers, musicians, and such.

This article is mostly useful for our work when we think of it in relation to the NPR profile on Mee that I mentioned a couple of posts back. This idea that the public domain should be expanded to include most (if not all) of the works that are in publication, that we should create a "cultural commons" in which we can share, appropriate, and reuse each other's work appears to be gaining popularity in the current art scene. The Newsweek article mentions a website called Creative Commons that is taking the needed steps for this to happen legally. The name of the website itself is already reminiscent of some of the ideas that Mee promotes with his (re)making project. Is this the future of writing? Of art? Like Mee says: this is how Shakespeare and the Greeks created their works. This is how James Joyce wrote Ulysses and how Kathy Acker wrote, well, every single one of the novels. If this sharing, this creative commons, did not exist, our work on this production would not exist either. Are we, by participating in this practice of (legal) appropriation, insuring that the explore the possibility of how art is actually created as we reuse elements in our culture and/or a dramatic/literary tradition?