"Dreaming as the summers die..."

                   "In a Wonderland they lie,
                    Dreaming as the days go by,
                    Dreaming as the summers die:

                    Ever drifting down the stream--
                    Lingering in the golden gleam--
                    Life, what is it but a dream?"

Q.

The first Quijote rehearsal is in a week and I’m experiencing a sort of paralysis triggered by the magnitude of the project. 

Don Alonso Quijano (my lifelong obsession), meets Alice, (the character I’ve always identified with), in a deadly game of chess. Why? Because Quijote; Or, The Death of Conversation is the last play in a trilogy that began with Noir: A Love Story, a play at the end of which Death played chess with S. Night, the main character, and won. The chess game was my feeble attempt to pay homage to Ingmar Bergman, but also acknowledge that chess puts some order in our collective madness in a way the Marquis de Sade would have appreciated (“Let us put some order in our pleasures” is one of my favorite de Sade quotes...)

So: Quijote plays a game of chess with Alice, and Alice wins (because Alice always does), and then becomes Queen, the way she does at the end of the Looking Glass adventure when, famished, she is introduced to a pudding she’s not allowed to eat (“How would you like to be eaten by someone you’ve just been introduced to?”) 

Honestly, I have no idea if my memories of all things Alice are based on facts (and by facts I mean the fictional text), or if I’ve just made them up. I don’t exactly care. There’s a side to affective memory that I enjoy immensely, ever since I found out that Umberto Eco’s dissertation was the result of a trompe l’oeil. Is this confusing? My apologies. Let me explain. Umberto Eco, the wittiest semiotician in the world, began his career, like all of us, as a grad student tormented by his dissertation. He was writing something about Thomas Aquinas and he was stuck (the way I’m stuck now), and he was strolling through Paris (the way one does when one cannot write one’s dissertation) when he happened upon a second-hand bookstore where he found a book about Aquinas’ aesthetics. He opened the book at random and read a sentence that clarified the scope of his dissertation, so he bought the book, and ran home, and finished the manuscript, and became Magister Ludi Umberto Eco, the greatest semiotician in the world. Years later (post fame) he looked for the sentence that had saved his graduate life. He looked, and looked, but the sentence wasn’t there. He had imagined it out of some desperate philosophical need and, obedient, the sentence had materialized, the way sentences do for Humpty Dumpty, when he needs them most. You see? Full circle. So that’s why I don’t care if the things I remember about Alice are actually in the book. And perhaps that’s why I’m stuck, because I have so much to say: about Quijote, the last dreamer in the postmodern age; about theatre as a mode of singular survival; about disillusionment and fantasy; about Alice who has the courage to follow the white rabbit through the portal that opens inside her dreams; about actors, and directors, and fear, and betrayal, and the extraordinary ability of an empty space to become a space of endless possibility...a stage. Good god, how am I going to put all of this in a play, and make sense?

I write scenes in no particular order. I reread Sartre’s Kean, Pirandello’s Enrico IV, The Quijote, Alice – Through the Looking Glass. I’ve been thinking about this play for years, and yet it’s not coming together. The story is simple: during a rehearsal of The Man of La Mancha, an aging actor loses contact with reality and starts believing he is Don Quijote and, at times, Lear - his two most successful roles. My model for this is Kean, the Regency actor, who lost it during a performance of Othello - his last appearance on the stage - and told his son who was playing Iago, “Oh, god, I’m dying. Charles, talk to them.”  So Henry Kean loses his marbles on the stage and believes that his dresser is Sancho, and the friendly neighborhood barmaid is Dulcinea, and a radio show host named Alice is Alice in Wonderland. The world changes with his perception, and his friends, like those of mad Enrico IV, are afraid to shatter his illusions. Do you remember the plot of Enrico? There’s a fancy dress ball during which Enrico loses his mind. He is dressed as Henry IV and, in his madness, he believes he is the king. His family and friends indulge his madness for years; they dress as members of the court, maintain the charade, only to find out that Enrico had regained lucidity a little after the incident, but had prolonged the farce, for years, because it amused him to see his family in costume, treating him as a king.

You see the difficulty: everything connects. But the most difficult thing for me is the transition between Kean’s reality and his imagination - the world of Quijote, Alice, Lear. I know how the play begins. I know how it ends, with Quijote/Kean on his death bed, having lost the game with Alice (“Oh, god, I’m dying. Talk to them”). But what is in the middle? What treachery, what madness, what unrequited passions, what defeat?

I don’t know yet. I’m searching for the perfect line, for the slow gesture, for the confidence I need to put, in a single play, all my obsessions, all my latest fears, knowing that, miraculously, inexplicably, one day everything will make sense.

Just before his death, Quijote writes the longest love letter in existence. His last line is a sad realization: “With regret, with humility, with horror, I understood that I was not the one you loved.”

The exit line, I believe.

The Impossible Dream

I’ve said before that I’ve been meaning to do Quijote, on the stage, for a decade. It’s a lie. It’s been more like a life-long obsession, with victories, regrets, amazing highs and terrible lows and, behind it all, the terrible shadow of the Quijote curse everybody talks about.

From an article on Terry Gilliam’s and Orson Welles’ failures:

“There is a curse that befalls those film directors who try to adapt Don Quixote for the screen. Orson Welles, for one, began filming his version of the Cervantes epic in 1957. When he died in 1985, it still wasn't finished, but in the intervening time, the picture had become an obsession. The project was blighted by funding crises that forced Welles to repeatedly stop filming and take on other directing and acting jobs to earn money to restart filming. The project outlived the man who originally played Quixote. After Welles's death, all that was left to posterity was a series of tantalisingly beautiful scenes.”

And, about the documentary of the unmaking of Quijote called Lost in La Mancha and Gilliam’s attempt to make a new Quijote film:

“If I had a dime for every time Gilliam says ‘We're fucked!’ in the film, I might be able to become a substantial backer for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He says it regularly when some new problem emerges - when he learns that love interest Vanessa Paradis's contract hasn't been signed; when some extras haven't rehearsed a key scene; when the ailing Rochefort takes 40 minutes to walk from his horse to his nearby car; when the money men become unreasonable; when the props aren't right; when the might of airborne Nato seems to be conspiring against him (…)There is also a Don Quixote made in 1957 by Grigori Kozintsev, the sensitive Russian director of Hamlet and King Lear. ‘I heard that version was plagued by problems,’ says Gilliam. ‘It's cursed, I tell you.’“

So here I am, finally taking on this project whose subject seems to have a cosmic pox on it. Why? Because I must. Why? Because I don’t do well with prophecies of doom (unless, of course, I am the one who’s making them…)

I really can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before (how long has it been since the last Glissando post? A lifetime?), but Noir, Glissando, and Quijote form a trilogy that spells Death, Love, and Adventure, in other words, the three elements that sustain every story worth a damn.

There were – there have always been – small, private ironies in my productions. This trilogy is no exception. Noir, a play about one man’s fascination with Death, was titled “A Love Story.” Glissando, a play about the complexities of modern love, was advertised as “ The Art of Cruelty.” The Quijote play, which embodies the century’s spirit of adventure, will bear the subtitle “The Death of Conversation.” There are two reasons for this: one has to do with the incredibly long time I’ve been waiting to stage the Quijote, which makes me think of Didi and Gogo’s conversations while waiting for Godot; the other has to do with the insertion of a new character in the story of the Ingenious Hidalgo in the form of Alice, whose impossibly clever conversations with Humpty-Dumpty and the Knitting Sheep convinced me, a very long time ago, that wit was dead in everyday exchanges. So: Quijote and Alice, madness and absurdity, the proud dimensions of a world who looks at its refection in the mirror and refuses to recognize itself. My character is not White-Rabbit Alice, obviously (Eat me!), but its more dream-like, absurdist version, the Alice of the Looking-Glass world, who plays a game of chess with the old Hidalgo and wins. The last move on the chessboard spells Alice’s coronation as Queen, and the quiet but tragic death of the Knight of the Sad Countenance. I think that, for once, Dickens and I will have something in common, as I too will weep audibly at the death of the only (fictional) man I've ever cared about.

Remember the post where I confessed to my weakness which also happens to be my strength, and the organizing principle of my plays? No? No matter. What I was saying was that, in all my plays, everybody gravitates toward one character who is always a solitary, eccentric male figure, a Steppenwolf, a Desert Rat, a freak. In this respect, this trilogy really affected me, perhaps more than any of my other plays, because I would have done anything to protect S. Night, the character in Noir; I felt both pity and hate for Tony Chehov, the oblique character in Glissando; and I have always been in love, terminally so, with Quijote. For me, he embodies everything: chivalry and romance, absurdity and madness, fiction and reality, victory and failure. The Quest is everything. 

Mine begins now.

Three, Two, One...

I spent the winter break fretting. Now it’s time to move beyond that. What is on the other side of worry? Humor. A kind of resilience I can’t explain, a feverish inertia that has to keep us going until January 10^th.

There’s a new sense of excitement and doom in the air, new because each play feels different, but also because this time we’re working against an established rhythm that’s ensured some sort of sanity for all our past productions.

Two weeks before each play we’d meet every night. At the end, we’d have the show and all would be over by the end of November. This time, because the ACA stage was not available in November, the entire schedule shifted. We had a week of semi-continuous rehearsals in December. Then winter break. People would send me messages, “Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year,” and I’d thank them and reply “Read your script.”

We’re starting rehearsals on the stage on January 3, going through the 8^th - then show on the 9^th. I’ve seen the stage in the configuration I want (it’s a modular stage) only once. Today I went to clarify the last scheduling details only to find the theatre set up for a wedding. By the time we unload large pieces of furniture and 250 small props tomorrow afternoon, the place might be cleared of tables and chairs, but we’ll still have to imagine where the stage ends and the runway begins. Not great for a first rehearsal in the space.

For the past hour I’ve been coordinating tomorrow’s sequence of events. It looks vaguely like this:

-Rent a van (I’ve never had this much blasted furniture on the stage) Note to self: psychological realism be damned. On the stage, it always demands A LOT of furniture.

-we’ve been going back and forth on who’s going to actually drive the van. And the winner is…J because SM (stage manager) has never driven a van, C broke her toe, L has an upper respiratory infection that looks suspiciously like baby pneumonia -- not pneumonia that babies get, but a wee bit of pneumonia... the list could go on. (What will I do when J leaves the program? Mourn for years, no doubt. Become a poet. Never do a play again. Yeah, good plan.)

- SM will pick up “the talent” (inside joke) at 11:40. S, J, JD, SM, and K will be at my place at 12 to load everything up. This will take a while. (Note to self and others: my house looks like a deranged furniture warehouse with random moments of splendor. Psychological realism be damned. A LOT of furniture...)

- at 2pm we’ll be at the theatre full of enthusiasm and the hope that all traces of the previous night’s wedding party have been removed. I imagine setting the stage will take about two hours.

-at 4pm we’ll have a rehearsal sans lights, and with rather primitive sound (on a cd player) because, at that point, we won't have access to the sound booth. I hope to be home by 7 and have an impossibly large glass of wine.

-at 10am the next morning, the longest day of the year will begin (tech and dress rehearsal, or the play in slow motion to set up lights and sound). Six microphones, eighteen sound cues, tons of fades, blackouts, sound bridges, and other things I’m told belong only in the movies.(Note to self: purists be damned as well).

-costumes. What I’ve seen of the costumes filled me with intense giddiness. The sisters look like they’ve stepped out of an unfinished Vermeer sketch. The unfinishedness is the point. As I was discussing the costumes with D we realized that they needed to look like a work in progress. These characters, at the moment our play begins, exist only in the mind of Chehov, the playwright. The play he‘s writing begins as our play ends. The women who populate his imagination are constantly evolving as characters, influenced, despite his best efforts, by his continuously shifting relationships with the actresses playing the three sisters. With D, we decided the costumes should be made of muslin, sort of mock ups of costumes with unfinished seams, sleeves and collars. We chose muted, Vermeer shades of soft beige, and brown, and off white. The sisters don’t have an identity yet, they don’t have “color.” In contrast, the three gigantic paintings that divide, symbolically, the space of the stage, show brilliant, vibrant colors: pink, red, blue. Initially I wanted the sisters to wear these colors: a pink, a blue, and a red costume – but then I realized the necessity of the sketch, of the evolving personalities, of the unfinished nature of the design.

Unable to sleep or to relax, I’ve recreated the set in my house: the sisters’ dinner table where they spend their days waiting for something to happen; the letter writing station – a small black table where every character (but Emma) withdraws to read or write letters; Chehov’s desk with papers and books, and cigars, and a gun (the detective’s gun from “Noir”), which is a bit of a joke: the unused gun proudly displayed on the desk, a reminder of what not to do in a play (never have a gun that doesn’t go off…) This gun doesn’t go off. One is meant to break rules, particularly when the rules are replaced with something else, an irreverent homage to the grand master of psychological drama (“what is my motivation?”), also a nod to the often illogical, unplanned nature of the human being. In other words: beyond rules, life unfolds, chaotic.

It seems I have digressed a little. A lot. I feel feverish, excited, afraid. These are the days when the work of an entire year takes shape and has to coincide with the beautiful images that have fought inside my head from the very beginning.

Oh, how I wish I could explain this, all of this, in endless faculty meetings, in encounters with Very Important Personages, as an answer to the eternal question, “so what is it that you do?” or the version I heard (but wasn’t meant to), “What is it she does? Those little plays…” I don’t know how else to say it: these “little plays” are my life. They’re what I do. They’re what keeps me sane (by means of a detour through temporary insanity). I am alive when I write plays, and when I stage them, and I suffer and celebrate when they’re over. They are my paradox, my contradiction. And this one is coming to an end.

Glissando; Or, the Art of Cruelty opens (and closes) in a week. I’ll be much older by then. But the next day, if all goes well and the image in my head materializes on the stage, I’ll feel younger than ever.