Everywhere

I have never before tried to resist so passionately writing these entries.
Passionate resistance (engaged resistance? militant? never mind…) gets me nothing since I lose the battle every time, and do end up writing them, although I tell myself that something that started as a joke inspired by a 60’s British show,* has taken a serious turn and is in danger of alienating half of the potential public.

I look at the production diaries for The Happiness Machine or The Silentio Project and, although vaguely introspective, they contain mainly surmountable problems – technical, mostly, which could, in fact, ruin the show, so there’s definitely that tension and worry there, but not this…necessity for confession, for placing under the microscope every single shift in the affective structure of the play, something I have experienced ever since I started work on Noir. And now, of course, the title of an article I read the other day comes to mind – “The Cognitive and Affective Structure of Paranoid Delusions” –  there’s more, something about schizophrenia and “abnormal explanatory tendencies,” and I think, my, my, how everything connects, and I remember my professor of World Lit (which we did study in college although it wasn’t on any exams, just to realize that we weren't alone in the universe writing in a bloody vacuum!) would say, “When everything connects, RUN!” which sounds great in principle, but is completely absurd in reality because I am a semiotician and so I’d have to run constantly, beautifully, breathlessly, because things connect everytime, everytime.

A list of things that stubbornly connect:
1. Love. “So there you are, my love,” a conclusion of sorts presented to the audience twice, as part of the lyrics of a song that almost bookends the production, although the staging into the abyss continues. If this is confusing, I can’t help you. Not today. Come see the show and everything will become clear. So, on the subject of love. I mentioned it in the first entry, trying to explain a certain dimension of Immediate Theatre (Brook’s term) which Deadly Theatre lacks completely because it cannot conceive of it. Affection, gratitude, love for one’s production and its people, because they (the people) are the ones who take words flattened on paper and make them breathe. (“Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” Thank you, Mr. Emerson. I’ve been carrying this thought with me for decades now, ever since I decided I needed to say in this language – not my own – everything I could communicate in the one I was born with. Cut these words. A sentimental bloodbath).

So love then…Practiced within a landscape of detachment, among men and women who’d rather conquer the Old West (they have) than go on a date (“NIGHT: This is excruciating”). I have been staging love story after love story, hoping to find the perfect balance between my internal rhythm and the “real” reality, knowing that it might never reveal itself (chimera), feeling (everytime, everytime) more at home on the stage, in the middle of that story than inside the one that contains me. And people ask: if it is this difficult to stage a play, if it drains you so, why do it? The answer is simple and immensely complicated if those who ask know me very little: I do it because it helps me breathe, because this is the only way I know to connect (not superficially) with other human beings, because, in the process, relationships are forged that remind me of the way people relate to each other in books – which is lovely, and intense, and meaningful, and completely impossible to sustain in reality.

2. Water. Images recur: in Urmuz, the secretary was a mermaid whose desk was inside a bathtub; a sea voyage followed. In The Happiness Machine a giant ship, the one I made for the “Habitat” art exhibit, was hanging from an impossible tree outside Larry Tarkowsky’s window. The Silentio Project’s torture scenes were inspired by well-choreographed waterboarding scenes in the movies. Yes: “I know of torture scenes from the movies” sounds delightfully stupid, but better than the truth (Not today). Water. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover has the most complex scene involving bodies and liquids (water, wine, tears, urine) that I have ever seen. It is breathtaking and humbling. Years ago I saw an entire show staged inside a 30 foot pool placed in the middle of the stage. Front row spectators received tickets and towels, just in case. Possibly without knowing it, Night is drowning internally. There are unhappinesses that feel like underwater breathing. Kafka feels like that (see the beginning of The Castle). Kafka’s sparse sex scenes feel like that. Insomnia (the original, not the remake) feels like that. You go through the motions mechanically, you take in air, but you are drowning.

3. Flight: all the (dangerous) ways I make the actors move on the stage to suggest imponderability – the possibility of flight. Bodies arrested in motion, caught (midair) inside some accident of fate. Most often (this happens frequently in Noir) the idea of flight is suggested in a dialogue line or an inflection.
K. is very good at this, mostly without knowing it, because his inflections accomplish imponderability two ways: there’s the suggestion that contact with another human being will make him flee – physical flight, then; and then there’s a certain softness of speech that, to me, suggests a lightness (of being? Ha!), as if his words, once released, float through the air toward the other person. This happens rarely, when he’s relaxed, at night, and allows himself an intimate connection to language (not always to the person language reaches, though). At the very end of the play, C’s voice accomplishes something similar, something I love, a light, quiet goodbye – not melodramatic, not dripping with sentiment, but something very similar to flight. If this doesn’t make sense, I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to explain it. Flight, the moment you sever your connection to the ground that holds you prisoner, is another definition of freedom. (Freedom to do what? Ah…)

4. Text(s). The text of the play – never complete, constantly evolving, never resolved (that would be deadly, no?) is both necessary and problematic. Necessary as a skeleton, a scaffolding that sustains this entire enterprise (“This So Called Disaster” comes to mind); problematic because of its physical presence on the stage. I used to love that; now, the proximity to the public makes me hate it, and yet the physical text makes a point about its own existence. Books, pages, libraries cannot disappear. We cannot survive another Alexandria incident. Culturally, we simply can’t afford it, so I bring texts on the stage to remind everybody of their physicality. Noir’s text functions strangely, though. For months, now, K. and I have been exchanging lines form the play which seem to fit every single situation we find ourselves in (personal, social, academic, textual...RUN!) and yet, inexplicably, in rehearsal, he’s still handcuffed to the text although he quotes all of it, by heart, all the time (everywhere, everywhere). The text is the point of origin. The final result rejects the text. Conclusion: the text is its own problem.

Roughly, three weeks to the show. Roughly, I’m somewhere between happiness and worry (not despair: notice the optimism?) Everything connects constantly, stubbornly, creating a paratext around the text of the play and the text (psychopathology?) of everyday life. This should be comforting (my world makes sense). This is terrifying.
So there you are, my love.

*The Avengers, if you must know. If you’d like details, ask.