Ren Powell's Blog, page 6

Some Changes in the Works

Basically copy/paste from Facebook:

Since leaving Twitter last year, I have been thinking about my experiments the last few years with social media, the “show your work” approach to publishing, online networking, “gigging”, vispo, and writing…

And recently I’ve come to consider how precious our time and energy really is. It’s time for me to make some changes.

I will continue to keep a process journal about teaching and about specific writing projects here on my webpage. But no more personal introspection off-the-cuff and made public, and I will no longer be trying to keep up with the WordPress newsletter plugin mysteries.

I will be putting finished poems and synopses of plays on substack.

Maybe you’ll join me there? (I will be reading there, too.)

(I am also keeping – for now – the off-the-cuff, unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness diary about living with breast cancer for anyone who might benefit from reading it. It is still on WordPress, as well as this substack now.)

Crisis of Confidence

Mid-flow, everything screeches to a halt. Mid-pentameter “doth” and I am thinking, what the Hell am I doing? Sacrilege to mess with Shakespeare. Where do I get off?

How do I marry the archaic language to a heightened, but accessible language? And then there is the fact that my lines just beg to run into hexameters. Alexandrines. I have no idea why. But I am tired of fighting it.

So be it.

But then there is the question of whether I should toss out all of the names and give the characters new ones. I find myself giving Regan’s lines to Goneril to better build their spines and distinguish one from the other, as I see them in my story. I’m thinking someone in the audience is going to be scrolling through their memory at that point, instead of following the dialogue.

On the other hand, why not. Regan has digested Cornwall. Kent, the Fool. This is not an exercise in paraphrasing doctrine. More like sampling. And drawing from the well that is deeper than even Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s passages as Easter eggs in something new. Nothing really new here in terms for “stealing”.

Weird that I trip up today with needing “permission” suddenly. This whole thing should be a fun romp. Not a comedy, but a romp, nonetheless.

No tragedy should take itself so seriously as to border on any kind of reverence. That’s unnatural.

And definitely makes for Deadly Theatre – eh, Brook?

Rumors

I’m still circling around the problem of the letters. Information flies distances in breathtaking speed in Shakespeare’s time. All these letters. I am wondering how far from Shakespeare I want to go – not in terms of time (the brief is specific on keeping the time period as is – and I don’t think email is a more elegant solution anyway) – but in terms of style.

I am wary of creating a new character who serves solely as a kind of plot device – a sly narrative technique that would never be truly sly. But I am considering it.

And there is the moment of Edgar’s anagnorisis. I just can’t find it in the play. I feel like there must be a lost line somewhere – something that fell off the page somehow. Slipped an actor’s mind as they reconstructed the text for the publishers. Gloucester puts it together the moment he has lost his eyes, learning that his bastard son has turned him over to Regan, he says, “Then Edgar was abused.” Why doesn’t Edgar get his moment. Was Shakespeare simply trying to avoid tying the theme of blindness to the younger generation by letting it slip by (literally) without a word?

Is it so that Edgar, the only protagonist to survive, doesn’t overshadow Lear in the audience’s sympathies? I say sympathies, because I am still unconvinced that anyone has empathy for Lear.

When do we want to like Lear? In the very first scene we learn from other characters that he has “ever but slenderly known himself.” We see in his actions that he is rash and driven entirely by his ego and impulse. He has no sense of loyalty. He curses his own children. And in subsequent acts, he is no better. Do I care that there is a line where he seems to understand how he has oppressed the poor in his realm? I don’t. Because he removes his coat in the storm only in the hopes of gaining something by way of the “philosopher”. He demands to take him (Edgar/Poor Tom) with.

So in his reunion with Cordella, does he truly repent? When he howls over her dead body is he howling her her loss or for his alone?

Henry Howard’s reverse Pieta aside, I don’t buy his love. Even if Shakespeare was a closet Catholic, I am not sure I believed he liked Lear. There was a story before the story, maybe the answer is there in what the people of the 16th Century knew?

You know, I don’t care that Lear dies. In fact, maybe the whole thing is designed so that I can relish in his punishment with the excuse that justice has been done, his “repentance” proof of the fairness of the system, and that I don’t need to feel bad about my own meanness. I can be reassured that there is good, that there is hope for ass**les and vulgar fathers, and that I am on the side of right.

I am still not sure what Edgar’s last lines mean:  “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long”.

Hell, maybe the oldest have taken all their folly with them and the younger generation can live more sensible lives? Maybe they don’t need to see so much stupidity/cruelty? How does this line “we […]/shall never see so much” fit with the theme of blindness and wilful blindness in the rest of the play? One would think the younger were even blinder (can one be “more blind” than blind?) than the older generation? Edgar was blind when it came to Edmund, but that is skimmed over (as I mentioned above). And he does know in the end that Edmund betrayed him – he says so.

And why will they not live as long? Is Fortinbras bringing the plague? Wait. That’s another play.

“The oldest hath borne most” – well, but Lear brought on his own damned Tempest.

I know I have a tendency to overthink. But I think it is an injustice to skim over the text and nod with vague paraphrases and summaries of what it all means. Shakespeare was a better writer than that, and I am not afraid to question what the google-findings want to present as the benchmark for an accurate reading.

I am looking forward to writing full-time for a while now. Weeks or months, I’m not sure yet. I am literally compartmentalizing my time. I’ve started a new blog to write about how I am handling cancer treatment. And I’m continuing in this space (and there, too – and in so many others) with what makes me honestly feel happy and alive in the moments as they come. I once wrote a poem that said it was absurd to say that imagination is a good thing. But it really can be. It can be a source of good things.

Progress

Regarding the AI discussions I have been reading online:

I honestly believe our brains do nothing but reorganize the stories and perspectives we absorb in our lifetime – either through our bodies, or by way of our intellect. There is nothing new, nothing falls from the moon onto our pages. Very much like AI, that will not spit out the “perfect” or “correct” story each time, I think we play with the information. I think there will be people who get very good at feeding in the cues and provide the effective information to get AI to generate popular plays, paintings, “photographs”, poems.

But there will be people (like me) who enjoy the process of doing that themselves too much to hand that over. People like me who like the idea that art is human communication that DOES take place on a partially subconscious level, tapping into our silent knowledge and understanding of our shared (apart) experiences.

I think it’s like sex: you can’t really tell if the other person’s heart is in it or if it’s just an athletic activity for them. I am not sure we will be able to tell the difference with AI generated works, either. But I think – maybe in theater, especially, it being such a collaborative art that it craves a personal physical presence for the full experience – some of us purists will be looking for fingerprints. We will want to know that we are working with other living, breathing humans. Maybe we’ll better appreciate the wabi sabi aspect of art?

I think that the angry discussions are actually about money.

There was a time when dishes were made by artisans. Then at some point, factories could spit them out cheaper and faster and satisfy everyone with their ubiquitous, utilitarian presence. I think the same thing will happen with stories. We will find ways to pass the time, if that is what we want. There is money to be made!

Our lines of who is an artisan, who is an artist, who is a hobbyist will come into question yet again. And at some point, maybe we will learn not to give a shit and focus on the doing of art?

Who gets to make a living at it has always been arbitrary. Are you in good with a Duke, or a Pope?

I am not sure this is part of a process journal – but perhaps! Part of the process is asking myself what I am doing, and why. I am not going to be plugging my brief for this work into an AI to spit out options. Where is the fun in that? My choice to write isn’t a means to an end of any sort. Not now anyway. I think it was when I was younger.

This is a really nice to know about myself. It’s freeing.

Gloucester is stumbling all over my frontal lobe these days, and it is an absolute joy in the here and now.

I allow myself that. And think I have all the more reason to do so, in the face of this “threat” of AI.

To Be Complicit

I watched the Bristol Old Vic Theatre’s streaming of Complicité’s production Drive the Plow over the Bones of the Dead last night. Based on the novel by Olga Tocarczok. I fell in love with theater all over again.

Kathryn Hunter is remarkable. And the physicality of the cast of ten was mesmerizing. The gestures of the desk cop were as choreographed as the movements of the dog. The camera moved in close often, and weirdly enough it was the fact that I could see the rise and the fall of the dead man’s stomach as he breathed that thrilled me.

I wonder if it wasn’t the invitation to play – the reminder that I have to be actively involved in the suspension of disbelief – that moved me. There is no attempt at illusion, and the audience cannot be passive. Even via the medium of film, this is theater. Can it be as simple as this? What a simple magic trick. NOT an illusion.

I recently heard an excellent playwright interviewed on a podcast. He said that it was poor playwrighting (emphasis mine) to use a narrator. As a rule of thumb, of course. And I see that: as a rule of thumb. So I have been thinking about the use of the narrator in adaptations of novels for the stage – yes – but also the role of asides in Shakespeare’s plays. His weirdly-fond use of letters notwithstanding, he was too good a playwright to have used asides as a crutch. We don’t need Richard III to tell us how he feels about seducing Lady Anne. His actions tells the audience everything we need to know. Richard III is playing with us. Inviting us in. He is elbowing all the drunken labourers in the pit. Winking. It’s FUN. Even in a tragedy, it is fun.

There are no narrators in Shakespeare’s plays. I need to be careful in my mind not to conflate the convention of speaking to the audience with lazily-crafted “telling”.

I honestly believe that we are historically myopic in our common view of theatrical norms and the way we let ourselves talk about them. Shakespeare didn’t “break” the fourth wall, because Diderot hadn’t even proposed it yet. Brecht’s idea that being reminded that we are at the theater would create emotional distance is – to be honest – a bizarre belief in my mind. Where did that come from? We literally have first hand accounts of audiences being moved to tears by Antigone when there was absolutely no attempt at verisimilitude or illusion of any sort. Antigone herself was a dude shouting through the megaphone-like mask. It’s as though, all up in their current trend of “realism”, when the Modernists responded to film with their re-theatricalizing, they actually forgot theater history as they were borrowing from it. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe I am responding entirely from my own generational perspective and limited education. It’s my impression that when players speak directly to the audience – in our out of character – the actors feel like they are being transgressive.

I think we should think of building a fourth wall as an exception in the theater, rather than something presumed in the performer/audience relationship that needs to be broken.

I’ve been wondering what I will do about asides in the new play. Who, and why?

In the scene on the flat moor, when Edgar tells his father he’s on the precipice, Edgar seems to almost apologize to the audience for being a jerk. I think the purpose of this aside may be to show Edgar’s character (his action revealing his insecurities) rather than furthering or explaining the plot. Showing, not telling. A concise use of text.

But, somehow, it’s more fun when the bad guys take us into their confidences.

Letter as Plot Device

I am curious how people manage to keep parallel projects going. How to keep interest in something when you aren’t actually obsessed.

There are stories I keep returning to. That lie in the back of my mind waiting to be picked-up and made real. I am afraid of many of them. Like Doctor Frankenstein: What if my creatures are twisted mistakes.

If you love something enough it becomes real. And it lasts for always. There’s a lesson that has stuck. An academic lesson in one sense, but in another the truth of devotion. I have been devoted to an idea or a perspective and it has become real in every sense that matters. These are the monsters in my writing room.

Always question our gurus. External and internal. Be no more devoted to them as you are to the oxpeckers with their good intentions and singular focus.

The artistic director is on board with my project of sampling Shakespeare. I don’t see it as being any less respectful than a total modernizing of the language. I am making no absurd claims of authorship of the original text. I could argue I am picking up Shakespeare’s own practice of “lifting” from other works.

The theater website has published my working title – but not my logline. Am I writing an adaptation, or am I writing a play that expands on the original work? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead isn’t considered an adaptation of Hamlet. I’ve seen it described as a parody. And as a play that expands on minor characters. But the themes are entirely different. The purpose of the storytelling almost unrelated. I am working more closely tied to the moral to the legend, and the play. At least as I understand them/it.

People I have talked to who “know” the play say that I’m an idiot and the play is all about Lear “going mad”. Is it? It makes me wonder what the real definition of drama is. I mean, I am reading through the dramaturgy books on my shelf and all – but in layman’s terms, as the dictionary describes it, a drama can be “an emotional event”. But an event is not a story. Dramaturgy is sometimes simply defined as the structuring of the events in a story. In the first scene, Lear’s daughters say that their father in “[…] the best and soundest of his time hath been but rash. Then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-engraffed condition..” So the audience witness irrational behavior and then is told that this is nothing new. Lear slides in and out of his rational mind.

But Lear is the storm that knocks everything around him out of orbit. Gloucester loves him and, being the kind of man who follows his desires rather than his contracts, he destroys himself by loving him. It’s kind of his pattern. Gloucester’s story is tragic. His love child is his demise. And the son he sired out of obligation (whom he describes as a son “by order of law” -thus not desire) suffers, too, but overcomes it all to lead the next generation into future. For all the bawdy laughs and lusty language, Shakespeare moralized an awful lot. In another package, I wonder if we would swallow it.

A bit like the letter tropes, really.

I am in no way criticizing Shakespeare – just as not being able to figure out how any of the characters in The Bacchae fit the role of academic “rules” of a tragic figure is a criticism of Euripides. It is all about play – rules as tools – and different perspectives on familiar stories. Not even Euripides handled the actual gods with god-like reverence. Thank god. I sometimes wonder what Shakespeare would have done had the Queen not said that religious stories were forbidden. What plays are we missing out on? How would he have his cake and eat it too in our day and age?

Having said that – that is not at all what I am trying to do. Maybe I identify too much with the batshit crazy side of Lear – the shitty parent – to want to go there.

I have fallen in love with Edmund, in a way. At least, developed a kind of devotion to him. Now her. This is her coming of age story.

Oh, and Oswald. It was my son’s suggestion that Oswald should be a teenager. They won’t make it through, I’m afraid. No “coming of age”. Or will their be a kind of death-bed-quantum-leap into maturity? Oh, who knows.

But I’ll be damned if they are going to fob off a letter as their dying gesture.

Of the Tree of Knowledge

(I wasn’t sure this belonged in the process journal. But it does.)

The rise of AI artworks makes me sad and a little freaked out about the future. I figure we’ll adjust and somehow find our humanity in this – or adjust to the (potential) truth that everything we do in our brains, with our brain is formulaic. We let go (most of us) of the Ancient Greek idea of a genius – the external spirit that inhabits a person we then call an artist.

But we haven’t let go of this idea of our exceptionalism.

If we can appreciate “art” in the absence of a human artist – then isn’t the act of appreciating art inherently a purely narcissistic act of introspection – and not one of communication?

Might not AI artworks ultimately isolate us from one another entirely? Are we left discussing how AI allows us to view our selves? Art as a tool for self-expression and communication becomes a tool for introspection and indoctrination?

Aren’t we creating the “creature” that will in turn create us? Have we now stumbled onto the truth of our own delusions of free will and “consciousness”?

I think every sci fi writer has already asked these questions. It no longer feels like hypotheticals and speculation.

I don’t know what will happen to any of the arts. Looking at that sentence, I am hearing editing advice from college: why are we stating the obvious here? There is a rubric that I have learned that determines “good” writing: often lazily equated with “effective” writing. Language is a tool. It has an immediate purpose as well as a subjective pleasure.

Maybe it will be liberating for all of us when the arts are no longer tied to economics and social hierarchies. Maybe the part of “art” that is about feeling/recognizing a human connection will go back to the body. Everything will be about breath and movement again. Not about intellectual legacy.

Maybe there will be an admission of collaboration on a level that exposes the delusion of *individual* contributions to a culture?

I am thinking about how I crave recognition for my art. Crave it, quite honestly. How it was supposed to serve as some kind of key to get me into the penthouse – rich OR famous. My exceptionalism recognized and acknowledged within the cultural system I live in. “Followers”. Money.

Isn’t this the real fear? We tell ourselves that artists have a unique ability to convey through one or another medium the truth of the human experience. What is there is truly nothing exceptional about artists. That who gets/has gotten what recognition for a moment of collective “understanding” is determined by the hive’s algorithm. Kind of random.

We talk about how important education is for the arts – for art “appreciation”. We ooo and aaah over the occasional “natural” talent.

What if it is all a sham? Our concept of the “human experience”.

Does this mean that all that is left is … *being* human?

—

Huh. Now I need to walk the dog.

Lost Among the Trees (Again)

Verse daily featured a poem I didn’t want to like. The diction, I guess. Might have been the form itself. A poem a day is a reminder to slow down.

Morning coffee, dates and the blackbirds’ singing in the dark. Saturday. The final weekend before the students’ premiere, I have a few minutes before the working day.

Lear is tucked away until next Friday. And I am scrambling until then.

All these years of student productions, I have learned to do everything in the last minute. I’ve learned to trust. And we’ve always stumbled through. Teenagers are simply amazing.

So there is that.

And there is a kind of personal/professional satisfaction in the work – in the creative demands of chaos. But I think I don’t want to do it anymore. I am stuck in a pattern of panic and pulling-through. The find myself only maybe reaching the same level of artistic competency every year because I’m not even aiming to be better at this particular thing that I’m repeating: the panic and the pull-through.

I love the brainstorming that happens while devising – the whole process is energizing and fun. But then when I am ready to put the breaks on and focus on the details – well. No. Because 15 or so complex lives are being played out in the rehearsal room and the bathroom and the wardrobe room. Because 200 minutes a week for 8 weeks is too little to hold the demands of a full-on from-scratch production – with amateurs, no less – and I have no interest in using students as übermarionetter. I respect their creativity too much to have them mimic my preconceived production. I would lose out. Everyone would. That is not where my strengths or interests lie.

I have always been a person who sees the trees and not the forest. I am realizing how true that is of pretty much every aspect of my creative work.

There are paintings of landscapes with forests or cities that you only see at a distance. Close up – nothing individual exists. I admire them for many reasons. But there are also paintings that give you the experience of sap on a tree branch. That allow you to zoom out on your own: bring the big picture from your own perspective and experience. Even if that means that you say, “this thing, this doesn’t exist in my world – how beautifully strange”. I like juxtapositions. I like intimacy.

When I first began teaching, I worked with creative dramatic teachers who were interested in the theatrical process as a holistic learning process. I have never thought that way. And to be clear, I still don’t. But I realize now that I am interested in process – as a creative, artistic process that is still at heart l’art pour l’art. I’ a’m beginning to understand exactly what I enjoy about collaboration – and what I don’t.

What a weird thing to discover after so many years: to identify what it necessary and what is not. What I am doing this weekend? It is time for me to finish up and move on. There are other ways.

The Perspective of Live Theatre

Last night I watched a new play that is streaming on National Theatre at Home. Salomé. A visually and audibly stunning, code-switching performance with Arabic, Hebrew and English. The story is told with repeating poetic text and some dialogue – a retrospective narrated by “nameless” – which puzzles me since not only is nameless obviously Salomé, but the play itself takes her name as its title, so I keep wondering what I am missing.

If I understand the concept of the play, Salomé is presented as a martyr herself – martyring herself by subverting Herod Atipas’ efforts to keep John the Baptist alive. She ignites the tinderbox by allowing herself to be the vehicle for his martyrdom. So the young woman was – not nameless but – not seen for who she was. Political, not lustful. Independent of her mother’s will or whims.

I actually love the premise. Bit puzzled by the Herod-as-Jesus tableau of the last-supper that is impossible not to associate with the staging of Herod’s feast. In this play, Herod asks Salomé to dance, but she doesn’t really dance (thank god). Certainly not the dance of the 7 veils. I am fine with this since it isn’t even mentioned in the bible and the play already walks a fine line of portraying misogyny and surreptitiously feeding it – as does every play that tackles these kinds of issues. The climax of her dance, with the actress holding and moving an almost incomprehensible amount of fabric in her fists, waving heavy curtains that cover the entire stage wall (oh, the colors and textures of this production are so beautiful it’s almost painful), unequivocally falls on the side of right.

The rape scene was probably effective when seen from the stalls and balcony. Herod, kneeling behind Salomé, pulls a veil over her face – she leans forward screaming as he pulls back and thrusts his pelvis forward. The problem was, filmed as almost a close-up shot, it was impossible not to see the Scream mask of popular culture and the whole scene took on a weirdly and certainly unintentional and inappropriate perspective.

I am not thinking about this as a review, but was thinking in terms of theater and filmed theater and the possibilities and what is lost with forced perspectives. I saw this last night after an interesting mentor session with a young director who was describing her directing concept to me before presenting it to her cast. The thing was, it wasn’t a theatrical directing concept – it was a kind of storyboard she was working from. I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it until I had watched Salomè.

And it brought me back to writing. What the playwright’s job is vs. the director vs. the actor. How collaborative theater (isn’t always but) can be.

I was reminded again recently how the playwright’s stage directions are followed in the States, where they are so often disregarded entirely in Europe. How much of my mental storyboard can I squeeze into spoken text? How much to I want to? Do I even need to mental storyboard when I am writing?

The text in Salomé is poetry. It repeats often, as do some scenes. Like a song’s chorus. The dialogue rarely involves people talking to one another – but rather performing for one another – as is appropriate for this story/production.

Yeah. I am grateful for the National Theatre’s streaming services. But it is not the same thing as live theater. The audience has a choice and is active in any stage production.

No wonder we are seeing so many productions where they use film for close ups to force the perspective. The extreme of auteur theater? The far end of the spectrum for audience participation?

There went the timer.

Resisting Structure

Hook, Plot 1, Pinch 1, Midpoint, Pinch 2, Plot 2, Resolve.
Start with Plot 2, Hook, Midpoint. Fill in the gaps.

An little exercise in storytelling.
What do you do when the hook is what hooks you as a writer? And the Plot 2 point seems almost irrelevant in your own involvement with the story?

Maybe it is poem, not a story? Isn’t every poem a story, though?

Is retrospective technique a stale way to deliver the necessary exposition?

I watched an adaptation of The Seagull yesterday, and I wondered if they’d hopped over all exposition. If I had come to the story without knowing the story, would I have been confused? (And that is aside from the Russian/Shakespearean thing where characters go by so many names it can spin your head: what did she call him?)

I had to turn off a film halfway through the other day because it was breaking my heart. I still don’t know where the story goes past the Midpoint. It lingers in my mind though, the fairy-tale like hook, plot, pinch. I feel like a kid: “Shhh. Hush. Stop talking. This is too much.”

I lie in bed and the story comes, and I feel like a climber who has barely made it up the first steep climb, and needs to rest and consider whether the second one will be endurable – what makes it worth it? At this point, have I already had the experience?

What is finishing bring to the experience, really, but a sense of finality? There’s nothing in the exposed composition to foreshadow hope.

Are there stories we need, but don’t want? Are there stories we need to break off from the source and finish on our own?

Or is watching/reading part of a story that moves you this much like observing a painting with a corner of the canvas hidden? Impolite? Disrespectful to the individual artist?

It is all individual. Stanislavsky said that generality is the enemy of all art. So where is the fine line of specificity? No one watches the actors and knows all the actor’s work.

I wrote that last sentence twice. Changed it again. No one “sees” all of the actor’s work is debatable, I guess.

It is the invisible stitch of poetry that holds everything together. The backside of the tapestry. Robert Bly talked about it, and so did Aristotle.

Sometimes when I have seen something that really, really moves me, I want to share the space of savoring but say absolutely nothing. I know that the invisible stitch is an individual kind of knowledge. And if you tug at it, it might unravel. Shhh.

So does this mean I don’t trust the storyteller to end it right? Does this mean I fear the storyteller will expose my wild imagination as something too fanciful? Too beyond the pale? Too disconnected from everyone else’s story?

I remember reading as a kid. I could often be completely lost in a book, going through my day with one foot in another world, like wearing a new color or all the fragrances of another landscape as an invisible cloak. Sometimes it was heavy and dark. But always, always magical. Into myself and outside of myself at the same time. A part of my consciousness stitched into an invisible alternate reality. Another reality so individual it opens up into the nothingness of everything.

If I stay here… at the midpoint… I can stay here.