Collaboration II (The Johanna Project)

We've made some excellent progress this week on what I am fondly calling The Johanna Project: we wrote the first scene. It's obviously not a final draft; and it's short; and it doesn't do much but set the scene, in fact it doesn't really go anywhere at all. But COULD go somewhere from here. And it works, for the most part. The characters talk like themselves and talk about the things we want them to talk about.

I think this is a huge breakthrough.

We wrote the scene by switching off line by line - at first with me writing the lines of the mother and she writing the lines of the son. But then with the introduction of the third character, the waitress, we both sort of alternated between the three, as it was appropriate.

We'd done a similar sort of role-playing before, months ago, before we gave the project up, but I thought that one went poorly. That time, she wrote the mother and I wrote the son; I think I made the son overly childish and petulant, and rashly emotional. She fared a bit better with the mother, but she still seemed a bit tied to the 1950's housewife stereotype that we used as a jumping-off point for her character. We also got unnecessarily distracted with an argument about whether or not the deceased father let the son keep a dog as a child.

Why did it work so much better this time? I can't speak for Johanna, but I, for one, am much better acquainted with the characters. All of our talking around in circles, as frustrated as we've been with not moving forward, has definitely given us a much deeper understanding of the characters - and why they're sitting in a room together. We started, logically, with the opening scene and we've been over and through what brings them to this meeting point and what they ultimately hope to get from it, that it was easy to mutually imagine how their initial interaction would go.

All this is great; it makes me feel like we're on the right track.

Upcoming for our next meeting: we're going to read and evaluate the scene we just wrote on our own this week. Then, when we meet, we'll discuss and edit the scene together and then talk about what we believe we're setting up and where we imagine it's going from here. We'll discuss what we hope will happen in the next beat-or-so and then we'll switch off, line by line, again.

Do You Need Help?

Despite having been more or less body-slammed by this past week, I can't resent New York too much for it.

Actually, if I'm being totally fair, I can't resent New York at all. It's not New York's fault, after all, that I lost a friend, or my job, or even my Metrocard. It's not its fault that my computer crashed or that I sat on my digital camera.

And yet, I do, in some sense, hold it responsible. Things are just more difficult in this city, I've found. Where else to you have to drag your clothes up and down five flights of stairs and around the corner on laundry day? Where else can you pay an arm and a leg to live in an apartment so small that the simple question of what to do with your winter sweaters in June becomes a riddle so complex it requires all the power of your spatial creativity? So, while New York did not cause me to have this week, these little tragedies like losing one's job or one's Metrocard take on Brobdingnagian proportions here.

But I don't resent it. It's the nature of the beast, and I knew that walking into the mouth. In fact, the idea that all things are exponentially more difficult in the city is something that drew me to this place in the first place. I know - what kind of masochism is this? But I like the concept of working for one's survival, of being fully conscious of it: every day is a gift, an accomplishment. And if you really want something (even if that something is sweater-space) you simply cannot just sit back and expect it to come to you. You have to get it. It makes you evaluate your priorities: you learn to understand the value of hard work, and know which goals are worth working toward.

In theory, at least.

Here's a story: yesterday, I met a woman struggling up the steps of a subway exit with a large cart full of groceries. I will admit that I am not the most philanthropic of people. I rarely stop for the homeless, or for enthusiastic clipboard-wielders. But I will stop to help a person up the stairs. As one who has carted everything from a shag rug to a wheelchair across this fair city on the subway, I just can't help it. Anyway, this particular woman was very grateful for my help. It was clear to me, and probably to her, that she would have never made it up the stairs without a helping hand.

This phenomenon fascinates me. In the course of my subway travels I frequently come across people or families with loads - mostly baby carriages and related contraptions, but sometimes grocery carts and suitcases - far larger than they could possibly carry on their own. And I see, also, the kind counterparts who invariably offer a hand.

The helpfulness of these good people is an amazing and beautiful display of humanity in a city that is notoriously cold. But it's not this side of the good Samaritan coin that fascinates me, it's the other: the scores of people who, everyday, make their way to the train with carriages and suitcases and carts and the full knowledge that, without the charity of an as-of-yet-unknown entity, they will be stranded.

Everything is difficult in the city. It would be easy for this to create a ruthlessness in people, an every-man-for-himself-and-take-what-you-can-get mentality. And sometimes, I think, it does. But in spite of it, sometimes it also creates this. All of these people rely entirely upon the kindness of strangers simply to get from point A to point B. We live among people; our lives are inextricably linked. Activities like grocery shopping, or going to the airport, or taking the baby out in the stroller, which might be done privately, must be done socially here. Out of necessity, we respect each other, we care for each other, we must allow ourselves to be cared for as well. Somehow, counter-intuitively, the hardness of this place creates a softness, a necessary vulnerability. I love this.

Oddly, though, I myself have never accepted the proffered hand on the subway. I've struggled with my own share of groceries and suitcases, not to mention the occasional mammoth prop (the wheelchair, for example, which I used to tote from my apartment in Harlem to a bar in the East Village on a regular basis) and every time a stranger has offered me help, I've refused it. I have to learn to carry this myself, I think. If I don't, how will I manage to carry it when there's nobody around to help? I'll get soft, I won't be able to do it.

Now, as I'm suddenly beginning to feel insurmountably weighed down by the burdens of the city, I wonder if this is exactly my problem. Instead of bending in the wind, like the skyscrapers around me, I've been standing impossibly rigid, and my foundations are cracking. All this time I've lived in this place, loved this place because it was making me strong. But what if it turns out that strength is the last thing the city needs from me, or that I need from myself? Softness, perhaps, is not a terrible fate that I must avoid if I want to ensure my own survival; it's what I must yield to if I want to survive at all.

Welcome Back to NYC.

So, it's been a rough week. I spent the first part of September on vacation back home in New Mexico, idyllically alternating in between snacking on junk food and watching junk TV. It was fantastic, and a much-needed respite from my progressively muddled life. I felt like a tangled string on a yo-yo, winding further and further into itself until it is such tensely twisted mess that correctly working the yo-yo is an impossibility until you hang it out and let it slowly unwind itself.

I did a little soul-searching, took a few deep breaths, and returned to New York with new strength, and a renewed resolve to work through the challenges the city put forth. And Lord, did the city take me at my word.

My first evening home, I received an email from my job informing me that I was fired. What happened while I was gone? And what could I have possibly done in absentia in the two weeks in between the last shift I worked, when I still had a job, and now, when I have none? Maybe I will never know. That was day one.

I have been home a little over a week and have thus far lost:

1. My job
2. My computer (crashed)
3. A brand-new unlimited Metrocard
4. A best friend
5. A digital camera (sat on it)
6. My most recent rental from Netflix (That last one is kind of lame. But on top of everything else, by the time I got to this one, all I could think was, seriously? Come on.)

Wow.

(Okay, the computer is an exaggeration. My computer ACTUALLY crashed right before going out of town. And it is now fixed, as of yesterday (minus all my data). But it was a terrifying challenge trying to find a job over the past week without being able to look at Craigslist or print resumes.)

The worst is definitely number four, but for the sake of brevity, we'll skip that for the time being.

The thing about this week, though: it feels too brutal to even be coincidence. I've felt very at sea about my place in New York City of the past few months, very torn about whether or not I have a place here. I've loved this place with an unrivaled intensity since I was eleven years old, and the first four years of life here were thrillingly sweet. But now, suddenly, I'm questioning my ability to be the person I want to be in this place, to create the life I want to create for myself, and - most importantly, because this is the first and only reason I chose to live in NYC - to make the art I want to make or even grow as an artist here anymore.

And - is it love that's keeping me here anymore, or is it just stubbornness? And, maybe, a crippling fear of failure?

So I worry, and I cry, and I basically withdraw from society for nearly three months, and then I finally get enough distance (literally, physically) from New York to do a little thinking. What I thought about, and what I decided, that's another post too. The point is: I come back to New York and I'm ready. I've realized, come what may, this is where I am right now. I'm going to be present. I'm going to be open and accepting of both the challenges and the gifts it brings forth.

And it gives me... this week. It's as if the city responded by saying, "Okay, Leigh. You want to talk about being strong? You want to say you're open and accepting of this life? Prove it. Be open to THIS."

And I'm trying to be. After months of feeling unable to cope with even the most mundane of life's little bobbles (Seriously. I once turned into a sobbing wreck because my cat pooped outside the litterbox. I SAID it was a bad few months), I've now been dealt an emotionally crushing week and I'm realizing... I'm moving forward. I have to, and I am. Welcome back to NYC.

Collaboration

My best friend from my hometown and I are collaborating on a play.

This was my idea. Johanna, my friend, is a writer - mainly a poet. She is, without exaggeration, the most amazing poet I have ever met in real life. I will concede that she has some competition with some established poets - some of the well-published authors who are generally celebrated within poetry circles as the geniuses of our time. But within the circle of real-live people whom I have actually met? She is beyond compare. And, I should point out, I went to Sarah Lawrence, a school chock-full of talented writers. She truly has a gift.

Johanna has also tried her hand at a little short story and novel writing, although, to my knowledge, she has never quiiiiiite finished a story. (If you read her prose, you'd understand why - dense as hell. All the rhythm and imagery and tightness of a poem, but sustained for, like, 40 pages.) She mentioned to me that she'd like to try her hand at playwriting and I thought, oh my god. I don't want to sound like I'm using my oldest and dearest friend, but if she actually put her massive creative talent towards playwrighting, and followed through? I could have an all-access directorial pass to what might be some of the most amazing new work available in the theater. And as one who has struggled to find new work to be excited about over the past four or so years, this sounded incredibly enticing.

But Johanna, for all her poetic prowess, has very little interest in the theater as an art, and thus very little knowledge of playwriting, dramatic structure, etc. Here's where I come in. I thought - hey, I know how a play should be structured, and I'm a pretty okay writer myself, so what if we collaborate?

We spent a couple months bouncing ideas back and forth and then we stopped. I think, because we both sort of hit a dead end. We could talk endlessly about the characters - their backstories, their motivations, their arc. But when in came to actually, physically writing some dialogue, we hesitated.

I, very laboriously, clunked out a couple scenes between a mother and a son. They - if I do say so myself - failed SPECTACULARLY. I forgot that, of all the genres of writing I have tried my hand at, playwriting (alas) is the one at which I am the least adept.

But now we've gotten back on the horse, we're collaborating again and it looks like we're still just circling. We had what might have been a productive conversation yesterday, or might have been more putting-off on our parts, about wants. What does the son want? What does he get in the end? Ditto for the mother, and the waitress.

I'm sort of... haunted by Edward Albee. The Zoo Story keeps hanging over my head - the quintessential example of what, I think, we're trying for with our play: two people who need something from the other talk their way around each for a while and discover truths about themselves and human nature in general in the process. And then they get, or don't get, what they need.

Except, Zoo Story eloquently expounds on human connection, what it means to be and feel alive, and... well, YOU know. Everybody who's read or seen Zoo Story knows. And our play will just be two people yelling at each other - or resisting yelling at each other, as the case may be.

I know it's a pretty common creative demon to have the better efforts of another hanging over your head like this. I face it all the time as a director (*coughLearDeBessonetcough*). But I think it's got us both - at least me - in a point of complete paralysis, and I'm not sure how to work through it.

Maybe we're just not great collaborators. When I've collaborated with Sarah in the past, we sort of have a rhythm: we discuss, and then she writes. I'll be honest, this rhythm has often frustrated me. Why is she always the one that writes? But I can't seem to get my pen to the page as fast as she does - maybe the reason is because I can't seem to get my pen to the page at all. Maybe Johanna and I both need a Sarah for our collaborative process, and both of us are unsure how to step up to the plate and be the Sarah.

Return

I'm back, after a long hiatus. This isn't the first time I've dropped of the face of the blogging planet, BUT, in my defense, my last post, on the first of June, was followed by the most emotionally trying three months of my life. I'm... hoping that's all behind me?

I won't elaborate, because the specifics of my unraveling aren't particularly interesting or even unique, and, anyway, this isn't my diary. I only mention it because with it has come a subsequent questioning of my life in the theater - my drive, my passion, my abilities as a director, blah blah blah.

I told you it wasn't interesting or unique.

But, as this is ostensibly my theater blog, the whole crisis of, um, vocation? may come up again so - there it is.

In the meantime, I also wanted to mention that one of the things that I clung to during my time of crisis was, in fact, a line from a play. And a play by a colleague, at that. Andrea Lepcio's Looking for the Pony, a play which I had the pleasure of seeing as a reading and later as a full production, is an amazingly poignant story of two sisters' efforts to accept one's cancer diagnosis. The older sister, practical and steadfast, is always advising the younger, who is more passionate, eager, and headstrong, to "ammend the goal," rather than plow stubbornly forward with a plan that isn't working. This advice is particularly touching at the end when -- spoiler alert -- the older realizes it's time to ammend the goal of surviving her cancer.

Anyway, in the past three months, as I've fallen further and further down the rabbit hole of who am I? where am I going? etc., it's given me stabililty and strength to remember that it is an option to "ammend the goal."

I think I might email Andrea and tell her her words have been a comfort. Because that's what we all wish for, isn't it? That we could share a moment, however small, however fleeting with another person? That something we've created might find its way into another person's life with all the significance and meaning that we felt for it?

Baba Post-Mortem

This post is long overdue, but I never reflected at all on my most recent project - a piece called "Baba," by Marcus Harvey, a one-man autobiographical show which told the story of the author's lifelong struggle to accept the absence of his father, who walked out when he was just a baby.

I was asked to direct in a desperate, last-minute request, after his original director had to suddenly leave the piece due to a family emergency. The whole deal was done in less than 24 hours - he offered me the job without even having met me, I accepted without having read the script. The experience could have ended in complete disaster for both of us. But, as luck would have it, Baba turned out to be one of the more rewarding creative experiences I've had since moving to the city.

I was terrified when I first accepted the project. I've never been a big fan of the one-man genre to begin with, and this one seemed particularly daunting. In addition to examining the effects of fatherlessness, it also, I believe purported to examine themes of "black male identity." I could not think of three things I knew less about than being black, being male, and being fatherless.

Upon meeting Marcus and reading the script, most of my apprehensions disappeared immediately. Marcus was warm, inviting, and refreshingly open to collaboration and suggestions, which I found to be pleasantly surprising given his closeness to the work. And as for the work itself, despite being a very specific story of one man's very specific journey, it was transcendental in the way all good stories should be. It spoke to a universal human condition: the need for, and often inability to attain, love and acceptance from those around us, and the difficult journey to look to ourselves and find that love and acceptance from within.

In my last post-mortem I mentioned my idea for a new experiment: to remove the ego from my work and stop worrying about what I will do to make the work interesting, resonant, and unique. Dispense with my need to put my creative stamp on a project. Do the work and have faith that the end result will be interesting, resonant, unique, etc. simply because I have done the work and done it honestly. Baba proved a perfect project to test this hypothesis.

I could see from the first reading that I was needed. Marcus desperately needed an outside eye to give the piece rhythm, structure and texture. The piece was rich with decisions to be made and ways to make myself useful. I did my best to provide what I could and, ultimately, I know it was better than it would have been without me. At the same time, it was never my show, it belonged to Marcus. It was more than easy to avoid claiming creative ownership of the show, it was impossible to do so. I didn't make a great play. I only helped Marcus make his play great.

It turned out to be a liberating difference. I never felt the need to prove myself, I never felt the pressure of walking into a rehearsal thinking, "What am I going to do today that will be amazing?" I simply came to rehearsal to watch, observe, and respond. And the play, I think, did not suffer for it. I went into the project with the intention of making Marcus's story as polished and as compelling as it could be, and I'm pleased with the end result. From this point of view, from the end-product perspective, the experiment was a success.

But there was a price to pay for the loss of creative ownership. While it gave me perspective and a new-found openness to the process, it took away a little of the energy and excitement. With me as just the helper-elf, I had trouble feeling the spark that usually ignites within me during a really good project. I couldn't have worked harder for Marcus but somehow, in some way, I was less invested. I was less thrilled when a breakthrough happened in rehearsal, less disappointed and perplexed with choices I had made weren't working out. And although this is, I'm sure, the very same thing that gave me the objectivity that made the process so smooth and well-realized, it also took away a little of what makes me love directing. I wasn't as nervous on opening night, and, when Marcus took his final bow, I wasn't as proud.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the creation of art has turned out to be such a resolutely selfish endeavor. It's always been about the need for self-expression and thankfully for the rest of us, some people have the knack for expressing really, really good shit. Not me, I guess, but some people.

But the question is: is it worth it? I've always said it's about the product, not the process, so, by that logic, whatever attitude helps me make the best art is the attitude to have, right? Even if that attitude makes me love it a little less?

Lascivious Something

Lascivious Something, the new play by Sheila Callaghan, playing now at the Women's Project, elicited not one, but two never-have-I-evers. Never have I ever:

1. Been so acutely aware that a play is inappropriately titled
2. Been held in such intense rapture by a single monologue.

The rest was pretty standard fare; a solid piece by a talented playwright - structured, articulate and thought-provoking, but not without its missteps.

But first, the never-have-I-evers. The play, which tells the story of August, American former Marxist activist living on a remote island in Greece with his young Greek bride, Daphne, and the unexpected arrival of Liza, a tempestuous woman from the August's past, is a very, very sexy play indeed. Sexual energy pulses through the stage; almost everybody kisses everybody else by the end of the play. The lascivious part of the title most certainly seems - at least at first glance - earned.

But upon further reflection, lasciviousness has little to do with the actual point of the story. The play is punctuated by little pops followed by rewinds of crucial moments in which a slightly different scenario yields drastically different results. This notion of a branching, warping chain of events in which even small causes lead to large effects is underscored in a monologue by a young boy at the end of the play. In it, he talks about the belief that his every move will affect profoundly the outcome of his entire world. He thinks to himself, "If I blink my right eye this will happen. If I blink my left eye, this will happen." He describes it as an overwhelming feeling, he asks, in a world where there are so many infinite possibilities for the course of every fraction of every second, how can anything seem real?

This, more than anything else, is the crux of the play. It examines the fragility of human existence, its terrible impermanence. In every moment of every day, with the wrong breath of the wrong word, everything can change. What we knew to be solid ground can disappear beneath our feet. It is in the struggle to cope with this truth that the "lascivious something" springs. The characters, in their lustful learnings, are trying desperately to reach out for something real to hold on to. At one point, August tries to describe the [nature] of his ex-lover to his young Greek wife by telling her that she would cry - sob - every time they made love. The first time, he recalls, he thought he was hurting her, but she said, "It's not the pain... it's the mortality."

The struggle to understand and accept this mortal fragility is much more the backbone of the the story than the sexual energy it creates. It seems woefully inappropriate to have given that energy such importance in its lascivious title.

There were other [missteps as well]. August and Daphne keep a young girl - or is it a boy? - on under the pretense of hired help for their vineyard. Turns out, though, that the girl/boy is actual more of a sexual toy that they keep around for their personal entertainment. The child, it is revealed, spends whatever part of the day she(he) isn't in a drunken stupor playing inappropriate sexual games with August and Daphne. The point of this particular line of the story confused me. What was it supposed to illuminate about the characters? How did it contribute to the story as a whole? And why - why was she/he so gender androgynous? The part was played by a woman, but mostly referred to as a boy, until Liza, upon meeting her/him asks, "Why do you call that girl a boy?" August and Daphne shrug the question off and never answer it satisfactorily.

The only possible purpose I can imagine for all of this is to take sympathy away from Daphne and August. As a couple they are eccentric and flawed, and it not unreasonable to believe he would have lived a more satisfying, actualized life if he had stayed with Liza and continued with his activism, or if he had left Daphne and returned with her. But for all the problems of their marriage and life, they mostly read and genuine people making a genuine attempt at a life and a relationship that they can be okay with. The boy/girl sex slave lets us know that the two of them are just as crazy and cruel as Liza, if not more. I.... think? Still, it seems like an awfully big bomb to drop for very little reason. For the life of me I can't understand what the child contribute to the larger story as a whole.

Still, for all it's problems, there was that monologue. The monologue, delivered by Daphne, begins by her telling Liza teasingly that she knows a story about her. When Liza is bewildered, August joins in the goading, "What is the one story my wife would have to know?" And he shows her a scar on his hip. Daphne starts the story slow and light. They were young, they were living out of their car, they hadn't showered for a week. They spent most of their time smoking pot and having sex. The story picks up speed and intensity as Daphne describes brazenly, in excruciating detail, right in front of her husband and his ex-lover, the last time they made love. How Liza was said she got so afraid sometimes, and how August seemed to make her solid. "You said the word 'need'," says Daphne (I am, unfortunately, paraphrasing), "And then you said it again." And then she bit into Augusts hip so hard she came back with his flesh in her mouth. "You woke up with his blood smeared across your mouth, and August was gone. That was the last time you saw him until now." The vivid detail, the violence, and the urgency combined with the terrifying immediacy of the relationship between the teller and the listeners of the story held me rapt. When Daphne finally let me go at the end of the speech, I was breathless. It was heavenly.