The Happiness Machine

I've decided to write about the last weeks of rehearsals before our show on November 20th. In my mind, at least, I've been writing this blog for ten years, ever since The Milena Theatre Group came into existence. Since then, we've done fourteen original productions, neither text plays, nor art installations exactly, but a combination of the two with an emphasis on the things that interest me most: physical theatre, exquisite choreography, the human silhouette and its relationship to the space that surrounds it and, ultimately, the stage as a space of endless possibilities.

It is difficult for me to begin thinking about a play without having something new to say. I don't mean only a new story, but the visual language we employ in every production as well. Strangely enough, the people I admire most -- writers, artists, directors -- all repeat themselves (Auster, Hesse, Wilson, Brook). So here's the contradiction: while I admire them intensely for everything they've done, I find repetition, in my productions at least, inexcusable. A sign of failure or fatigue. When I sense that, I take a break. I don't do plays for a while. I'm talking about repetition because it's on my mind, because in the play I'm working on now, a few repetitions are necessary. More about this later.

I started working on "The Happiness Machine" after my father died last October. First, it was just an image: a man, his self-imposed exile, a radio station with a slightly fantastical history. A man in a radio station broadcasting nonstop...His past concerns me less than his present. Whatever makes him live the way he does (a traumatic event, I imagine), does not interest me. I'm interested in the people who come to depend on his program, who listen to everything he has to say.

I needed a name for the station and I came up with "Habitat," (Habitat Radio) because that's the title of the story I wrote about my father when grief counseling proved completely useless...Perhaps I'm digressing. Perhaps the connections are only clear in my mind. So let me try to go through the sequence of events again. My father's death after a long, long illness. His progressive isolation from the world of the healthy. His utter solitude, his despair (I remember the day he asked for a gun, convinced that another day in the hospital would drive him mad. I remember the doctors telling us he was suffering from dementia. I remember thinking how obvious it was that they were incapable of recognizing despair, I remember the anger that kept me going).

Several months after my father's death I wrote "Habitat," the story of a man who cheats death by becoming miraculous, by turning his defeated body into a landscape, a refuge for other exiles. Then, inexplicably, I started making flying machines: a hot air balloon, a Zeppelin, a tiny plane and a large, translucent ship -- all contraptions made of wire, tissue and fabric. I painted gigantic butterflies that consumed other butterflies, I enclosed home-made spiders inside glass-walled terrariums. A landscape (slightly familiar) was beginning to emerge. My friend, artist Susan David, who has been my set designer for seven years now, suggested an art exhibit, a show that would contain all these bits and pieces -- images from our future play. I already had the main character in mind - the lonely man, trapped inside the radio station, broadcasting into the night. I imagined him reading from his favorite books, crying after reciting his favorite poems, screaming in pain or anger, laughing at his own jokes, terrifying little children with his stories. "This is Habitat Radio and your host, Larry Tarkowsky, bringing you happiness 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I weep, so you don't have to." The play was taking shape. I didn't exactly know what it was about (plot), but I knew it had to contain my father's loneliness, his great despair, his absurd need for happiness. The Happiness Machine.

Susan painted three giant canvases -- the face of the main character showing these extreme emotional states. Our art show opened in September. We called it "Habitat," of course, and told people it was some sort of a "preface" to the play. I had already started rehearsals in August...So here we are now, three weeks before the opening night. The cast: excited, exhausted, chatty, me - full of doubt and doom. Saturday was our first day on the stage. When I saw the state of the floor, the missing spotlights, the ugly tables and chairs, the dusty curtains, I almost cried. We spent the first thirty minutes or so sweeping and peeling tape off the floor (courtesy of the theatre department, who did a play there and left in a hurry)...The first rehearsal on the stage with a new sound guy (unusual for me as I tend to work with the same crew for years) felt endless. Nothing is perfected. Movements are hesitant. The choreography needs a lot of work. I find myself unable to communicate exactly what I want because this play has an element of realism I can't avoid (my father, the isolation, the despair), something I cannot stylize, and realism depresses me, upsets me, paralyzes me. I have nothing to say about it and it communicates nothing to me. And yet, for this production at least, a touch of realism is necessary. Blending that with the fantastical world my plays usually reveal, is a problem.

After the rehearsal I spent time with Susan trying to find "a cure for the ugly." The ugly stage, the ugly floor, the ugly lights, the ugly furniture. Conceptually, the space almost resembles "Rear Window": there are several apartments we can see simultaneously, containing all the people who listen to Habitat Radio. Some sort of furniture is necessary, but there's something so banal, so "deadly" (see Brook's Deadly Theatre) about stage furniture, that I needed to make a drastic change. Naturally, the change is a departure from realism. To cure the ugly, Susan and I decided that all the furniture needs to be white. And all the props. And the costumes. White tables, white chairs, white gun, white pill boxes - an aseptic asylum-like world containing "the normal people." Then, there's Larry, and Habitat Radio (black, gray). My ships, Zeppelin, air balloon and plane float somewhere above the characters, like a promise. Caryl Chessman's Death Row cell has black and white elements (black and white stripes on the bed, a black and white chess set). I have to paint the floor as well because some genius painted it black without primer ( this was a beautiful, hardwood floor) and now all the peeled tape, and months of rehearsals, and scratches, are visible. I think of the work to come - the precision work that gives a play its rhythm and the physical work needed to transform an ugly space into something fantastical -- and I wonder why I do this to myself every year. This play (this year) marks our ten year anniversary. I created The Milena Theatre Group ten years ago. It feels like a lifetime. It feels like I've just begun. This is for my father, for his colossal unhappiness, for his lonely death. There is much laughter in the play and a lot of weeping. I can only hope the public will understand that the characters' few moments of happiness exist in that strange space between tears and laughter.