In Reach: On Directing

In Reach was the title of an art show that affected me profoundly. The artist, a sculptor I’d worked with on several Milena Group productions, had built, in the middle of a large exhibit space, a tree of gigantic proportions, with fantastical branches made of fabric and newspaper print, a tree alive with its own, as yet unexplored possibilities, whose silhouette projected on the immaculate wall shadows of a beauty I cannot explain. All I know is that, entering the exhibit, I noticed two things: the fact that the tree trunk was a female silhouette evolving into branches and shadows, and the fact that the shadows that trembled slightly with the movement of the crowd reminded me of the exquisite slow rhythm of Butoh dancers.

The artist’s statement connected the female tree with disease, but also with a cure accompanied by the possible disfigurement of the body – often the result of invasive surgical procedures. I thought, here is the wound and the knife inflicting it, disease and cure as one strategy for survival. What truly matters is the mark they leave behind.

It was then that I thought of another exhibit whose name I no longer remember, an art installation in Cincinnati where the artist had juxtaposed images of bodies prepped for surgery whose maps were drawn directly on the skin, with images of natural disasters that had scarred the landscape: earthquakes, avalanches, volcano eruptions. Maybe I’m making some of this up. Memory plays tricks on me quite often. Maybe all of this has happened. In Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes says, “what happened to the truth was not recorded.” It never is.

Why am I talking about this? Because for weeks now, I’ve been working on the script of the Milena Group’s new production, Revision, and I’ve experienced a loss of control, as if a shadow self (not me) has come out to play, bored with its captivity. The script has had more titles than I care to remember. In the end, I opted for Revision because memory is nothing but a revision of the truth.

In the previous post I talked about the film. Vaguely. Now I know what the show, this odd performance-reading-screening will look like. Three distinct parts: a short film about the desert (exile in the desert); a short descent into autobiography (my narrating, on stage, events from my life before and after becoming an expat); a short film about the sea (a state of eternal shipwreckedness). The desert and the sea bookend the reality of expatriation, and are the fictional projections of the truths uttered on stage. Of course I’m terrified. First I thought the fear came from the actual confessions…but no. It’s not that. It’s the blindness that comes with my being both actor and director. Everything I do on stage is subservient to the beauty of the image. How will I see myself? Even if I have a stand-in, her silhouette is not mine, her gestures are not mine. I will direct blind, having to trust (blindly!) the man in the lighting booth. Control. Directing is about control. Not tyranny over people, but the absolute control of the image and its evolution, from moment to moment, on stage. Every play I do tells three simultaneous stories: the immediate one expressed in dialogue; the one that gives it shape (the spectacle); and the one that gives it resonance (music, sound). How will I be able to direct in the absence of seeing?

When I direct a play I am a mass of contradictions: I know what I’m doing and I second guess what I’m doing (this stops, immediately, when the image that’s in my head, or an interpretation of it, materializes on stage). I think in metaphors. I explain everything in images. I don’t know what I want but I know what I don’t want. I have no preconceived ideas, no fixed rhythm in my head. The rhythm of each piece takes shape slowly in rehearsal.

I am a creature of habit. For a decade I’ve worked with the same artists (set designers, lighting people, actors). I had to communicate little. Words were not necessary; we understood each other. But ever since I felt the compulsion to tell the story of my exile to one man, as if, in his capacity to listen and memorize my stories, he was playing a part that had been written for him, inexplicably, even before we met, everything I thought I knew changed. Once I started telling him about my past, I couldn’t stop. One story became ten, and then a script, and two short films, and then suddenly, all my obsessions crawled to the surface of speech, and I found myself without a mask. I felt free, for the first time, absolutely, irrevocably free. And I felt afraid. I felt independent, and I felt connected to him, the keeper of my stories, in a way, I suppose, that people almost drowning feel toward their rescuers. This is how Revision began. And once it started, it could not be stopped.

This is what I know so far. There are two women jn Revision: me, and a fictional representation of me (the girl). The girl is beautiful, graceful, diminutive – the opposite of me, physically. In the two fictional parts of the production, she exists only on screen. In the middle part, as I confront reality, she walks on stage, carrying bags (a sign of homelessness and wandering), and a gigantic chandelier.

I have a million questions about the process, about combining film and performance, about the soundtrack’s fluctuations, about the possibilities of light. I’m working with people who don’t know me. I have to find a new vocabulary for everything I see when I close my eyes. I know, I know: this is how every play is made. A bunch of strangers get together and find a common rhythm in three weeks, and some feel like stabbing others, and then on opening night, they all get along and profess their love for one another. Well, has anyone wondered why there’s so much bad theatre out there? Could this alienation effect (My apologies, Herr Brecht) have anything to do with it?

The more I write, the more I need to talk. Before I talk to the audience, I have to talk to someone I trust. I have become impatient, reckless, abrupt. Summer is coming to an end, time is no longer patient. What I want takes time, and isolation, and possibly a lack of concern for the outside world because I’ve been moving toward this project for years, with increasingly autobiographical and meta-theatrical projects, until this avalanche of memories took over and asked to become a play. But this is not how the world works. Even the art of theatre takes into account social graces. I am afraid that this thing I’ve kept bottled up for over 20 years is changing me. It is not a play. It is an act of reaching toward another.

I am in reach. I have arrived at an impasse. But as the exhibits, and the books I’ve learned from taught me, flight begins with the impossibility of flight and the disease is often its own cure.

Crossfade

Perhaps S. is right. Perhaps my need to be understood clearly, utterly, and completely, to remove any shadow of doubt from my actions and interactions, is my form of insecurity. My fear: being misunderstood, being used as a textbook, without feelings, without emotions. There is a lot at stake here. What is at stake: the concept of home, of belonging.

I split, I split, I’m splitting. I want to be whole, contained by a single landscape to which I belong entirely. Is there such a landscape? Will I ever find peace?

This is what I now understand about my film:

-that its script will mimic the form of a textbook, an instruction manual (like a survival guide, a travelogue, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “This time, there will be no witnesses.”)
-that its title, following the Quijote’s elaborate and absurdly long chapter designations, will be elaborate and absurdly long, something like The Internal Exile’s Guide to Survival in the Desert with an Apocryphal Sequel Describing Similar Techniques for Survival at Sea.
-that the woman’s voice (when will people stop calling women “females” and men “males,” like the terms are interchangeable? They’re not. Do your bloody homework) will be clinical, detached, precise, as she catalogues landscapes and ways of surviving them
-that the man’s voice, asking important, elemental questions, will be the opposite of that. That the two will never address each other directly, demonstrating the well-known fact that communication is an illusion, that the purpose of the other is to expose you to your own, humbling solitude.

Imagine the following dialogue:

"SHE: The necessity for this script is to be found in the following considerations:

-that after 25 years as an exile, I felt the need to clarify the term

-that I met you

-that I finally understood the split inside me after reading a book that explained, quite unapologetically, the difference between tourists and travelers. Tourists plan their return trip from the beginning; travelers care little about retracing their steps. Thus tourism is closer to a full circle, to that movement of revolution that always accompanies social change, when a disappointing political regime is replaced by another, disappointing political regime in a dizzying movement whose endless repetition we call progress;

- that the need to define my position as an expat presented itself when, after months of poring over you, as if you were the rare edition of an exemplary book, I realized I wanted to come home

-that home itself was a term I would have to redefine as it had, in me, neither spatial nor temporal anchors

-that the successful nature of this definition (a revision of sorts) rested, partly, on the success of our collaboration which would be guaranteed only by a complete lack of secrecy

-that you who know nothing of the place I come from, you who feel so resolved inside your beautiful illusions, you who have found your way to me by understanding that everything I know, I know from books, and that there are only two landscapes you compete with – the desert and the sea; you must have understood the risk I’m taking here, and yet you stayed, knowing that my biggest fear is not stagnation, but the monstrous untimeliness of things.

-that I would like to disturb you on an elemental level not just because it’s you, but because I’ve never troubled anybody like that except maybe that 23 year old who left on my doorstep, wild flowers incased in a block of ice he’d fashioned himself, and when I didn’t believe his intensity, he shaved his head and went on a pilgrimage but not before saying “One day you’ll regret this.” I regret this.

HE: Are you writing to me?

SHE: I’m always writing to you. I am an exile in exile, like the man in that Italian novel, who found himself shipwrecked on a shipwreck. Imagine the disappointment. Faced with his imminent death, he discovered the shipwreck was a library, a floating book depository, a tomb. So he read, and he wrote letters which survived him. What else could he do? This script will not survive me, but I must write it for you, for me, for the fact that this imaginary conversation (because I’ll never send you this letter so you’ll never know what I think of you) happens in the desert, a place where, they say, nobody gets lost. People die or go mad, but the desert always returns them after a while. I read that in a book."

For years, now, I’ve evaluated everyone else's insecurity. Perhaps this is a film about mine.
Another obsession: to vivisect a character, split her open, show her insides, shout “Don’t you see she has nothing to hide?”  Perhaps this is a film about that.

Insecurity, honesty, exile.
An experiment: what happens when the kind stranger across the table, the one you’ve decided to open up to, without boundaries, without shame, without expectations, reminds you that you are nothing but a kind stranger?

Perhaps this is the beauty of that equilibrium, that equality you so desperately seek.

We split, we split, we split!

A little while ago I made a vague attempt to explain to a group of strangers my understanding of the possibilities of The Tempest. I wanted to use The Tempest as a frame and talk about connections (I was in the process of connecting with someone, utterly, for the first time in years); about the way the waters relate to the desert, about how they are both opposing landscapes with the ability to kill.

Influenced by Craig (who was nothing but a Quijote of his time), Peter Brook directed The Tempest three times (or two - I can't remember), pausing for decades between productions. I envy that silence. But more than anything, I envy the fact that Brook had the luxury to experiment, that his circumstances were such that when he treated the stage both as a refuge and as a laboratory (research), people understood, and did not question him.

In his version of The Tempest that I like the most, actors carry fragile ships on their heads and move inside perfectly empty spaces, watched, from above (a scaffolding?) by the rest of the cast. (I had made a little wood figurine with a ship attached to its head for that talk, but when the time came to reveal it, I hesitated too long, and the moment passed, and I felt foolish. I still have it - the figurine, not the foolishness - hanging from my chandelier, in punishment.

The Tempest. Later, John Gielgud (Craig's nephew, it turns out), played Prospero in Greenaway's exasperatingly beautiful Prospero's Books: "We split, we split, we split."

I split, I split, I'm splitting: between landscapes that seduce, and landscapes that kill; between endless and disappearing landscapes; between people who attract me, like the desert, and their treacherous side (the waters); between a desire to live forever, and a colossal fear of old age.

This is what this piece is about. My mistakes, my hesitations, my permanent status as an internal émigré. Somehow, mermaids are also involved. "Here by the rocks, in the foreground, a mermaid is to lie, half-dead."

And so the experiment begins: writing a script that is not a play, the story of a woman trapped between two landscapes, a film-and-reading spectacle of sorts whose nature will reveal itself to me later, because form follows content and has a responsibility to it, the way we have a responsibility for form.

Here, by the rocks, in the foreground…

Kean, the Magician

Tonight, as I watched the actors peel the tape off their faces again (hello, wireless mics taped at the jawline!), as I watched them ignore the pain (just as a fun weekend experiment, try taping a mic to your face when you’re sporting a beard), and remove the white face paint that turns them into the friendly inhabitants of a theatre purgatory, I thought of the strange days I live every time I do a play, and how I take everything for granted. 

It’s only when I think about it that I realize the beauty of this strangeness, the fact that most people do not spend their evenings staging spectacular fights at the foot of improvised windmills; do not carry shopping lists that say “batteries, eyeliner, milk, combat boots, hair spray, sword, chalk, pink camo rag;” do not wake up in the middle of the night with the perfect solution to a scene that, only a few hours before, seemed impossible.

It’s still a mystery to me how every play finds its rhythm eventually, a rhythm imposed by the image with which I begin every production, but also by the way the members of each cast move together, complete each other’s gestures, and come to depend on each other’s impulses. I never know how to communicate this rhythm because, in the beginning, I don’t know what it is. Take this trilogy: conceived initially as a radio play, Noir had a sparsity of movement I’d never tried before. Like all my plays, it was an experiment. I wanted to see if I could create an enormously powerful character who would never move, and who would control the other characters’ actions through the sheer force of her will. And so Angelica, the Angel of Death, was born. She walked on stage as in a trance, sat down, wreaked havoc, claimed a life, and then left, dancing slowly in the rhythm of an intoxicating melody. She never got up once during a 75 minute performance. At the end, and many months after the show, people told me how vulnerable they felt before her, how much her presence intimidated them, how powerless they felt. 

Of course, I have Beckett to thank for this need for immobility as an expression of containment and will: I like actors to do nothing but be. It takes a while to persuade actors used to constant movement to be completely still. Stillness is an art and it is beautiful. It’s like feeling comfort in the presence of the other’s silence. It’s a way of existing, peacefully, within yourself. I also like the opposite: a certain nervousness that makes the actor’s body tense and supple, as if attuned to a secret rhythm only he can internalize. In Q I asked Kean to do something he does naturally, something I’ve seen him do many times when he concentrates or waits for a development: a quiet, subtle drumming of the fingers on the table top, like a signal his body sends into the immediate immensity of his surroundings.

Of course, now that I’ve asked him to do it, he does it less, as if prompted by an existential stubbornness he can’t control. But when he does allow himself to forget he’s on stage and his fingers find that rhythm again, his entire posture changes, as he gets ready for a confrontation that may never unfold.

In reality Kean is a walking contradiction: both a soft-spoken tenor (oh, how I fight his gentle, Southern inflections) and a baritone when he controls his voice; both lithe and powerful; both elegant, graceful, subtle, and somewhat intrigued by trash. A philosopher who stays on the surface of things because he can turn surface into content. It’s a gift (and a curse). I like working with him. I like seeing the way he gets a little better every day; I like the way he controls each line once it makes sense to him, each movement. There’s a moment at the end of the play when the Director (who’s also, very clearly, the Angel of Death from Noir – I’m stealing Bergman’s “man plays chess with Death” image from The Seventh Seal to communicate this), whispers something in Kean’s ear, touches his shoulder (a movement that mirrors a similar occurrence at the beginning of the play) and, gently, helps him leave a world that showed him little kindness. I don’t know what Kean does in that scene, I don’t know how he does it, but his entire body relaxes and falls in such a beautiful way, that I always find myself holding my breath until Death places him gently on the ground. This is the rhythm I can’t communicate immediately at the beginning of the rehearsal process, the one the actors find, slowly, as their silhouettes come together and separate, as if in a dance. There was much dancing in Noir, and a little bit of dancing in Glissando. In Q, this turns into the moments when Death and Alice guide Kean through the strange and hostile territories of the purgatory, the way Virgil once guided Dante through the nine circles of hell. Both women walk purposefully, slowly, rhythmically, holding Kean’s hand, and never once looking back for fear they might lose him. Poor Kean…

I love this play and its actors. Ok, I love every play, but none has been as out of joint, as mad, and happy, and desperate, and meta, and philosophical, and superficial, and self-indulgent as this one. There’s a trace of Marat/Sade there too, the image of the asylum and its residents staging a play about a revolution.

Kean says, “I feel a war coming,” and that’s how I’ve felt for years now, waiting for a confrontation that may never happen between me and the immensity that surrounds me, perhaps to put an end to my internal exile and bring me home, once and for all.

The Art of Telling Lies

Someone stopped by my office tonight, before class, and asked if I was ok. I can't explain how I knew this wasn't a casual, polite inquiry. I just did, or maybe I needed it to be a real question because I wanted to talk about the play.

I talk all the time. I talk to people about their problems, I talk about the department's problems, about worries and possibilities, about strategic plans, and money. I talk on the surface of things to the surface of people, not because there's no substance to our conversations, but because the part of me that really matters has no place there.

The only place where I am completely honest is the stage. Honesty is crucial. Oh, I've lied before, mostly to spare people's feelings - little or giant white lies. And a long time ago, I lied to stay alive, I lied about my writing and its purpose, I lied about my thoughts. Whenever I talk about fear and art (the consequence fear has on the artist), I think about those times, decades ago, when I learned to lie as I learned to write. With the decision to leave behind a country that proved so hostile to my being, came the decision to never lie again about anything important, to practice a brutality, a bluntness of expression that I find comforting. There's much more to be said here, but this is not the place to say it, to explain the extraordinary freedom I find in simply telling the truth, telling the emperor he's naked, confessing to my phobias and snobberies, cultivating my (very few) vices, spending time strictly with people who give me joy, forgiving little and forgetting nothing, discarding (human) baggage. This is what I say, what I do, in every play. Once a year, I gather my obsessions, place them inside a coherent frame, and call them a play. It's what's keeping me alive. It's the space I create when reality becomes brutal, inconvenient, or simply disappointing. I can't lie about theatre, about performances, direction, or script, but I also can't stop talking about the people I admire -- usually, the people I work with on a production -- whose unusual qualities astonish me.

And while I say, in rehearsal, "I don't believe anything you say. Say it again. Convince me." Or: "Too many gestures. Sit on your hands and say the line again." Or: "Stop being self-conscious. Slow down. Control your body. You look like you don't know what to do with your arms." Or: "I don't like the way you walk. Move in the rhythm of the music. Now stop. Whisper Now sing. Do it again, do it better..." what I think is this: I wish  I had time, in every rehearsal, to tell you how much it means to me that you're here, willing to sing, and crawl, and shout, and walk in slow motion until you're too exhausted to feel. Without you, I couldn't live in this world of my own making, my refuge, my obsession. Without you, who meet me, without complaint, at the end of your day just to "do it again, do it better," my work would be silenced, a mute pantomime without history, tragedy, or depth. I think: how beautiful your hands are; how gracefully you move, how gloriously sad you look in this light. I think: I love your face, I love looking at it, I love the defeat in your eyes, the frantic movement of your hands, the inflection of your voice on the last line of your monologue.

So why don't I say these things? Because there's never enough time, because before the play is ready for its public, a million little things need to be changed, perfected; because I can't lie about perfection either, and rhythm -- the rhythm of each play, its heart beat -- is in the details.

I have been told by the veterans of the Milena Group that they only lasted all these years because they learned not to take offense. I understand. I appreciate the effort, the work, the perseverance and, above all, the malleability that allows me to turn them into my characters.

(It is true: I fall for all my characters, however eccentric or flawed they may be. They belong to me and I depend on them, and there's some endless, inexplicable connection which, at the end of the performance, when the lights go up and we all know we've made something beautiful, is worth every hardship)

Every time I look at rehearsal photos, and see the extraordinary faces of the players, I need to talk about the play, about its place in my life, about its consequences. Remember what it felt like when you published your first book, your first story? When you read your poetry, before an audience, for the first time? Remember that feeling? A test of endurance of sorts. Fear, and anticipation, and the possibility of doom, and an uncontrollable sense of joy. That's what it feels like every time I do a play, and have to witness the reactions of a few hundred spectators to those million little details that matter so much.

That's what I wanted to say tonight when a kind soul asked me how I was. I wanted to say: I need to talk about the play, about the people in it. I wanted to say: I am afraid, I am terrified, but I can't stop, and I can't lie.

I wanted to say: they'll understand, eventually.

The Meta-Ghost

Whenever I have to stand before a group of people and, within 20 minutes, tell them what I do (see the format of the academic conference), one of two things happens: I either go slightly over the allotted time and show production photos and videos, read from the blog, explain the genesis of the project, and treat the session as I would a recruitment event (please join the Milena Theatre Group; we won't lower your IQ), or do the exact opposite, and finish quickly, going briefly over the main points and then waiting for the whole thing to be over so I can leave. I'm not exactly sure what makes me choose one scenario or the other. For the most part it has to do with the speakers before me, with the audience, with my degree of exhaustion and, maybe, other small things.

The conference I just returned from prompted a combination of the two scenarios: I felt enthusiastic enough, but finished early because I could not get over the previous speaker's deadening commentary on an otherwise superb, completely silent, slow performance piece. Later, when she also said that "performance does not create its own space" my suspicions were confirmed. It also didn't help that the conference took place in the loudest part of New Orleans and, to be articulate, I need to hear myself think; and that, half way through the presentation, it occurred to me that maybe a third of those present knew what I was talking about when I mentioned Quijote, Kean, Camino Real, or Six Characters in Search of An Author. That's when I realized the rather strange place I (and, by extension, the Milena Group members) occupy. We do neither pure research (a clinical discourse disconnected from the object of its analysis by the writer's usually acknowledged unfamiliarity with the stage), nor do we do entertainment. We occupy the space in between, and treat each production as an endless revision of an intimate critique.

For me this means revision upon revision of the script - the subject of much affectionate mockery during rehearsals - with an understanding that revision means re-vision, a re-imagining, re-shaping of the original idea until the play finds its rhythm, and I know exactly what I want to say and how I want to say it.

So let's look back at the trilogy. Noir: A private eye (or private I) falls in love with someone he believes to be the Angel of Death because he can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Glissando: a playwright/director can no longer distinguish between his cast and his characters. Q: an actor haunted by his previous roles is not sure whether the people he interacts with exist in reality or only in his mind. You see the pattern: all these plays are structured around the Quijote syndrome: the inability to distinguish between reality and make-believe. So what do I want to say with the Quijote project? Things get a little complicated here. I want to tell the story of Kean, the actor. The way I see it, his backstory is this: at the top of his game, Kean loses it, has a nervous breakdown on stage. Afterwards, every time he steps before an audience he lives in fear of a repeat performance. The stage (his refuge) has betrayed him, so he takes it out on theatre, rages against it, blames it for everything. But what about the ghosts he sees? What about his tense interactions with his director? What about Alice? The only way the script can maintain an internal logic while all the characters surrounding Kean play many, many parts (The Director is also the Red Queen, and also part of the Quixotic Chorus; Alice is both sweet, the Knight's lost little girl, and treacherous and manipulative as the host of Wonderland's radio show, and so on), is for Kean to be dead at the beginning of the play. Remember Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? Yes, that scenario. So Kean is dead, and doesn't know it, and all the characters around him try to open his eyes to the truth - like when the White Rabbit, stumbling over Kean's resting body, says, "Halt! A corpse!" - but Kean doesn't listen because he's more interested in blaming others for his failure, and unable to face the fear at the heart of his defeat. Fear and art, fear and its impact on art and the artist - my longtime obsession.

I remembered, the other day, another favorite quote from Eco's Name of the Rose. It's an exchange between someone I don't remember and the main character, a proto-Sherlock Holmes. "What terrifies you most in purity?" asks the forgettable fellow. And the Sherlock character replies, "Haste." I've loved this exchange for decades, for about as long as I've loved Quijote. And remembering this I understood why slow motion (the opposite of haste), and endless revisions, and months not weeks of rehearsal are necessary to what I do; because I hate haste - immediate, impulsive decisions - with a passion.

Another realization I had on the way home (so this was a productive conference after all), was that the reason I want to say a million different things in this play -- everything about theatre, and love, and fellow-feeling, and rhythm, and communication, and buffoonery, and adventure, and death -- is because the Quijote contains all the germs of all the genres and all the stories that were ever told. Death, Love, Adventure. The same thing, really. Or maybe - theatre.

A mad, mad play, this is shaping up to be, and I love it as much, or maybe a little more, than all the other plays because it is disjointed, and allows theatre to question life and vice versa, and lets me put together, inside a now coherent frame, all the stories I've ever cared about.

At the end of the play, with the help of the Chorus, the Director/Angel of Death reveals to Kean that all the characters surrounding him are both real and imaginary, and that because he died on stage, he is forever tied to it, a ghost haunted by ghosts.

Kean, the meta-ghost. Haha -- We've really done it now.

Q: A Tragedy

“I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy.--Accordingly I set off thus:”(Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman)

I like beginnings. I like starting new projects, new productions, layering texts, finding my way out of the fictional woods. The Quijote project – assembled, subverted, reassembled, and forever hopeful – has finally found its shape. I've found the perfect beginning, which means the production’s slightly manic rhythm makes sense now, as the adventure gallops towards its inevitable (but also perfect) end.  

An observation: I love looking at close-ups of the actors’ faces. The rehearsal photos often capture their expressions, or a gesture, the position of a hand, the arch of an arm, the head thrown back in a moment of delight. I love that. These are movements that happen naturally, that no amount of dogged work will trigger, because they happen spontaneously, in that obscure, and impossible to define space where theatre begins, in absolute freedom from narrow-mindedness and fear (have you noticed how often the two go together...?)

This Friday, with Dulcinea and Sancho (or Millie Mae and the Mad Hatter – as you wish), I’m going to New Orleans to talk about the evolution of the Quijote project at the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts. It’s a joyous occasion to connect with past Milena Group members who now teach at other universities, and introduce the Group and its work to a new public. We’ll read a few scenes, I’ll talk about the crisis/opportunity scenario, and then show this film that captures the mood of the whole piece. While speaking, I’ll imagine the final version of our exemplary tale, with masks, and costumes, and  lights, and a completed score composed specifically for the production – the end of the Death- Love-Adventure trilogy. And as I have a strong propensity to begin very nonsensically, I will not balk my fancy, and accordingly,  I’ll  set off thus: