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Грег Аллен, вынужденный креатив
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Лекция основателя нео-футуристического театра в Чикаго — Грега Аллена(Greg Allen). Вынужденный креатив: расслабтесь и получите удовольствие. Прочитана на фестивале «Вместе-Радио» 29-го июня 2009. Как получать информацию из событий свjей ежедневной жизни и превращать ее в творчество? Своеобразный театральный блог… Полезно для радио очень! Наблюдать, анализировать и использовать! С переводом на русский. Переводы пьес прилагаются. Hey English speakers! There is an English transcript of a lecture available as well!
Слова, необходимые для понимания: I – я Love – люблю Now – сейчас, теперь, уже
ГРЕГ: Диалектический материализм подонка. Начали. Звонит телефон. Друг спрашивает: «Ты – гомик?» Ответ: «Н-н-не-е-ет…… А почему ты спрашиваешь?» Менеджер по рекламе. Телевидение. Озвучка рекламы. Я идеально подхожу. Большие деньги! Ослышался. Не «ты – гомик?», а «ты – [член] ГАМЭК?». То есть, Гильдии актеров – мастеров экрана! Озвучка. Завтра. Большие деньги! – Занят. Завтра – большие деньги!!! – Правда, занят. Завтра – большие деньги!!! – Правда, очень занят. Завтра – две тысячи баксов!!!!... Поменять планы… пойти туда… Отбой… Пиво… Реклама пива… Протесты… бойкот… контрас … финансировали контрас… Они финансировали контрас!!! Две тысячи? Я буду. На следующий день. Даю урок. Изучаем Маркса. Карла Маркса. Маркс говорит: «Отчуждение рабочего выражается так: чем больше рабочий производит, тем меньше он может потреблять. Чем большую стоимость он создает, тем меньшей стоимостью он обладает. Труд создает невиданные богатства для богатых и нищету для бедных». Закончить занятие… закончить занятие пораньше… сильно постараться… Поймать такси… взять такси… Пять баксов… большие деньги… Мичиган авеню. Большое здание. Верхний этаж. Приятный офис. Приятная отделка. Приятная мебель. Приятные кресла. Приятный ковер. Приятные лампы. (Скороговоркой) Приятные маленькие лампы, приятные маленькие лампы, которые висят на таком приспособлении типа маятника, их легко можно отрегулировать, отрегулировать легким непринужденным движением указательного… (осекается) пальца. Вот приятель. Приятный человек. Очень простой. Приятная гостиная. Приятные напитки. Бесплатные напитки. Бесплатная еда. Бесплатные конфеты. Бесплатные шоколадные батончики. Бесплатный [батончик] «Баттерфингер». Взять один. Положить один в карман. Вот тут всё! Бесплатно! В студию. Три дубля. Я идеально подхожу. Я прекрасен. Подписать контракт. Две тысячи баксов. Пятнадцать минут. Я закончил. Сесть в лифт. Нажать кнопку. Обратно в зал. Взять «Сникерс». Взять маффин. Бесплатная еда. Обратно в лифт. Нажать кнопку. Войти в лифт. Съесть маффин. Положить в карман «Сникерс». Подумать. Приятный друг. Приятная работа. Хочу такую работу. Хочу такого друга. Хочу быть другом. Хочу быть моим другом. Большие деньги!! Обратно на улицу. Съесть маффин. Человек подходит. Человек просит: «Немного мелочи?» Посмотреть на него. Старик. Нищий. Бородатый. Карл Маркс. Увидеть себя: менеджер по рекламе, Мичиган авеню, верхний этаж, большие деньги, быстрое решение. Нет, извините. Уйти. Пойти. Маркс говорит: «Подобно тому, как философия находит в пролетариате свое материальное оружие, так и пролетариат находит в философии свое духовное оружие. Философия не может быть воплощена в действительность без упразднения пролетариата, пролетариат не может упразднить себя, не воплотив философию в действительность». Пятнадцать минут. Две тысячи. За… «Курз лайт»… Хрустящий снаружи, мягкий внутри… Занавес.
(Грег и Мелисса сидят за столом) МЕЛИССА: «Титры». Поехали. ГРЕГ: Утверждение. Утверждение. Утверждение. Вопрос? ЗАНАВЕС
(Приведенный ниже текст поют на простую мелодию каноном, а каждый актер вступает там, где это указано.) 6. Писать в то время, как это пишется (Это достаточно быстрый хоровой речитатив, которые исполняется на шесть голосов а-ля Гертруда Стайн. Голос 4 должен быть мужским, кроме случаев, когда на радио нельзя произносить слово «минет». В этом случае мы его заменим каким-нибудь другим). 1: Я пишу. 1: Я пишу ВСЕ: Я пишу пьесу в своей машине по дороге на репетицию, стараясь не попасть в аварию, а вы слушаете когда-то в будущем, когда вы совершенно не знали бы о том, что я пишу пьесу Lecture by Greg Allen, given at FNR I’d just like to start with how I became an artist and how I wound up being in theatre. When I would go to theatre in America, I could not see it without feeling that the people on the stage were lying to me. It’s always seemed that theatre is the place to tell the truth, because theatre is actually going on in front of you. Those are live people in front of you, breathing and sweating and existing. Also where anything can happen because it is in the moment. Usually when I ask people what their most memorable moment in a theater was, it comes down to catastrophes. The time you saw a show and the set fell over. Or the time an actor forgot their lines. Or someone was injured and started bleeding on stage. This is what makes theatre really exciting. Theatre is live and anything can happen. And yet it seemed to me that most theatres were fighting against this. They were focusing on trying to create a perfect performance that takes place for an audience that sits in the dark. Most theatre is about suspending disbelief, where actors are acting, performing unrealistic characters; they use elaborate costumes and scenery, and they try to make no mistakes. Keeping the actors on one side, the audience on the other side of a fourth wall. This is what always haunted me about theatre in America. Because if this is your aesthetic, it seems like movies do that better. ... So I wanted to create theatre that is theatre. Where we embrace the idea that human beings are in front of other human beings. We’re all gathered in the same room, an anything can happen. This creates a chance for genuine communication and empathy between people. Isn’t this hopefully what all art is about? Early on in my career I recognized the power of breaking the fourth wall. Greg gets off the stage and does so—spontaneously interacts with an audience member. It is scary. It is simple. And it is surprising. It kicks the energy in the room into a different place. It is similar to someone walking in this door, naked. The expectation went up in the room. It would change the experience here, and yet it is very simple, and exciting, and surprising. I realized I wanted to explore the power of audience participation and interaction. If I wanted to speak directly to the audience I would have to be honest and I would have to be myself. I would have to be honestly having a communication with you. Therefore the person who would write the material I spoke onstage would be myself, because I am the only one who knows what is true for me. And if I am going to be honest onstage, I am going to have to also acknowledge the fact that I am onstage. ... My theatre would always acknowledge the fact that there are a lot of people in the same room; there would never be a fourth wall. And therefore if this interaction is important, there needs to be no illusion on the stage – no sets, no costumes, nothing that would trick the audience into thinking they were anywhere else other than with in a theatre, with people onstage, with people in the audience. Also if everything we say onstage, and everything onstage, is true, that means all our tasks have to be actual challenges. Is there an actor in the room? Brief demonstration of difference between “acting” a fake task and performing one that is actually difficult. First, a volunteer “actor” from the audience is instructed to pretend that a briefcase with Greg’s computer is incredibly heavy, and he must lift it above his head. The actor skillfully mimes a very difficult process of lifting. Next, Greg asks for “a big guy”, and tells him to stand onstage with his arm straight out. Greg puts the briefcase with computer in the man’s hand, and casually continues to talk to the audience (“So as I said, my theatre must have no illusions…”). When man begins to struggle, Greg reminds him that it’s a very fragile computer and that he must not drop it, and must keep his arm straight. The man continues to struggle as Greg asks him about what he ate for breakfast, what he’ll have for dinner. Finally Greg tells him he can release his arm. So here we have an example of two very different kinds of acting, or performance. The first takes study and time, and you learn skills (Stanislavsky method, for example); the second is just someone – my friend – just trying as hard as he can to keep a heavy bag in the air. Which one did you most identify with? (Audience: the second.) Why? (Audience: It’s more natural. We could also do this.) … If you could see how it affected both of their breathing: the first was an imitation, but the second was more natural, you could hear how it was affecting his breathing. The second is an example of my aesthetic. Both are fine methods of exploring the human experience, but mind is simpler, and takes no training or pretense, and is more direct, hopefully for the audience. Both Stanislavskian Realism and Neo-Futurism are vast, impossible endeavors. Any serious actor worth his mustard will say (Stanislavsky) acting is impossible. You need to know yourself, know your character, and become that character while you recite their lines as if for the first time – to say nothing of feeling as well – and you need to do that night after night. I find that impossible. I also find Neo-Futurism impossible – to truly be yourself in front of an audience is impossible. There’s always a certain level of self-awareness that one has when standing in front of an audience. And I’ve always thought, why try something if it isn’t impossible? So I simply try to bring truth to the stage, very, very directly. In Realism you look out and imagine what could be. With Neo-Futurism, you look in and try to examine who you are. And both create great art. … (about the name “Neo-Futurists” and connection to Italian Futurism): I have to explain that I am inspired by Italian Futurist forms, but I do not worship Futurism. Simultaneity, brevity, speed, dynamism, synthesis, body madness, art of noise, and authenticity. But I am not into the violent, sexist, fascist part. Hence the Neo-Futurists not Neo-Fascists. We are about peace, and understanding each other. About the play Greg has been performing since December 2, 1988, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind: 30 Plays in 60 Minutes: It is an experiment in performing 30 plays in 60 minutes. If you were to come to the show, the admission would be 9 dollars, plus what you roll on a dice. You would then be handed a menu with 30 titles, numbered 1 through 30. Someone would come out on stage and instruct you to order by number. Across the stage there is a clothesline, with pieces of paper on it, numbered 1 through 30, and you, the audience, would call out the number of the play you want to see. The first number we hear, we jump up and pull down first number, announce the title, strike formation, and say the word “Go”. All of our plays start with the word “Go”. And you would experience something like this: (PLAY: Title) That gives you a sense of the chaos that is in our theatre. You heard the people shouting out numbers, and at the end we each say the word “curtain,” and that tells the audience to call out the next number of the next play they’d like to see. There’s an onstage darkroom timer that counts off sixty minutes—when it goes off, the show is over, whether we’ve done all the plays or not. It is an honest-to-God attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. The plays themselves are all written by (members of) the performing ensemble, who are all writer-director-performers. Each is conceived by individuals and crafted around their own personal truth. The show is therefore performed in a random order, with serious plays next to comic plays, political plays next to abstract plays, experimental next to very personal. Some plays are monologues, some are dialogues, some ensemble; we perform with 5 to 8 people on stage. Some are choral, dance, music, puppets, deconstructions of classic plays, movement to music, conceptual, screeds, anti-plays. Often audience participatory. We also have lights and sound, and props, and audience, and ourselves on a bare stage. The plays range from 3 minutes to 3 seconds to negative time (you can figure that one out for yourself). I always felt if songs or poems convey an entire world, why can’t a 2-minute play? You can walk through your life and get one idea, and from that one idea, you can write a play. You just need to cut to the very heart of the matter, and write that truth. And then the show changes every week. By Friday and Sunday night – the audience rolls a dice on stage. The total of 2 rolls is how many shows we have to create for the next week. So every week we put in between 2 and 12 new plays – 50 weeks a year. So we are also in rehearsal every week, for 50 weeks a year. We average 330 new plays per year, and have created over 6,500 plays so far. … We perform on Friday and Saturday night at 11:30, and Sundays at 7 o’clock. … We have also been performing in New York for 5 years. It should be pointed out that when I started out creating the show, when I was 26, there was no late night theatre in Chicago. Now 20 years later there are 40 to 50 shows any given weekend late night. So what we’re creating with Neo-Futurism is basically non-fiction theatre. All 30 plays for Too Much Light are written from this aesthetic of truth onstage, and in most cases personal truth. I would call Title, which you just heard, more of a structural play. But now I want to focus on how to write plays about your life. Thinking of it almost as autobiography, or documentary, or living newspaper. The advantage of being a writer-director-performer is nobody gets in between me; I am very directly expressing my life. Theatre is an immediate art form, so I am embracing that, and trying to cut through any artifice that you would find in the normal theatre. So, whatever happens in my life can be material for a two-minute play. The next play I’d like to play … I wrote this play when I was teaching a class on theatre history, talking about Marxism; I had to leave class early to go down to Michigan Avenue, the biggest street in Chicago, go upstairs in a spiffy highrise building, and record one sentence for a television commercial, which made me more money than my entire theatre career to that date. So this is how I approached that in a play. The play is called Dialectical Materialism of a Schnook. (PLAY: Dialectical Materialism of a Schnook) … I wanted to explore (my own) hypocrisy in a play. I find hypocrisy an excellent inspiration for work. If you look at your own life and examine what you believe, and then what you do, and you find them in contrast, how can that be? And if you examine that onstage honestly, and just present it out there, I think the audience will empathize. Everything we say onstage in this show and in all of my shows at the Neo-Futurists is true. And yet the audience, because of theatre training, thinks we are lying. We did a play where my friend Stephanie pumped milk from her breast for her baby onstage, and yet after the show someone asked her if she actually had a child. They thought we had rigged up some elaborate trick to make it look like milk was coming out of her breast. People refuse to believe that what we say on stage is true. So we have to instill in the audience that everything we do is true. … … In addition to putting your personal life onstage, it’s important that everybody put their personal take, their personal interpretation of the world in everything they do. … So there should be no conflict between one’s professional, creative life and one’s personal life. They should be integrated. Sometimes when I describe my work to others, I fear it sounds very self-absorbed. But the creativity is what keeps it from being self-indulgent. If you always focus on the truth, then it transcends me-trying-to-get-you-to-feel-for-me. A simple example is a play called Honestly, in which we ask the audience to nominate one of the performers, … and then we ask the audience to ask the actor any yes-or-no question, and the actor will answer honestly. And although you think this may show who the actor is, it usually reflects more of the audience, because it’s only a yes-or-no question. It’s very important that theatre raise questions and not supply answers. We focus our performances on just presenting the work, and letting it be. We don’t need to sell it, we don’t need to tell you how to feel about it, we just worry about being honest. We don’t have to do a lot of emotional preparation, we just say the truth. But we also are constantly analyzing our lives for our own work. If we are very personal in our work, it also becomes universal. … For example, this next play: This is a response to my next-door neighbor catching me in the street with a question. She is still my next-door neighbor … There is an expression in America – “Good fences make good neighbors”. This play is called Good Fences. (PLAY: Good Fences) When I talked to her, there was just … so much information so quickly, I felt the way to express it would be to write down what I remembered she had written, and have it collaged in so many ways, and I felt so bad. So once again, focused on my own hypocrisy, my own expectations of this woman, and then the reality. It is also good to think of our work as a living newspaper. We respond to various events that are going on in our community, in our country, and in the world. The best example of this was on September 11. Since it was a Tuesday, we knew that that night, we had to have a creative response to what had happened. Like most people we were stunned and watching the television, but we also knew that we had a responsibility to have a creative response to this world-changing event, or it would seem like the ultimate lying onstage that weekend for our audience. So that night we actually put in 6 plays of the 30 all about the World Trade Center, from a non-verbal movement piece, to a monologue with raining sheets of paper in honor of all the temporary employees that were there in the building at the time, to me, just conveying how my daughter, who was 3 at the time, looked at the television and tried to understand what was going on. It was one of the times I was most proud of “Too Much Light” because we were able to respond to something so quickly. (It’s important to know it can also go the other direction. … Sometimes the world works faster than we could respond to it, and some very penetrating, in-the-minute plays became very dated, very quickly.) … We often give voice to those who are silenced. We give audience a chance to onstage see people who reflect them, that aren’t usually seen in theatre. And the audience returns to our theatre so see how we will respond to what happens in the world, as well as what happens in our own lives. I will never forget a play I wrote called “A Small Effort”, where I demonstrated with a pile of green peas and a small train, (what happened) when I was very depressed in high school and attempted suicide. The play is just a parable but at the end I make it clear that the story is about myself. And I talk about wanting to give hope to young people like me who are in the audience. By showing that there is hope in the world and you can survive and move on. And at the end of one particular performance a young girl came up to me, and she whispered in my ear, “Thank you.” I think that was one of the nicest gifts I’ve ever gotten. Our audience tends to be very young, as you might imagine, doing late-night theatre. In America, most theatre-goers are about 80, so our audience of 20-30 year olds is really a breath of fresh air. They actually line up around the block of the theatre waiting to get in. Without any advertising whatsoever. I would like to give you an assignment. … It is simple, but complex. I would like you to write three sentences which tell your life story. Now obviously we could all write the same three sentences: I was born. I am alive. I will die. But it’s which sentences you choose which is where the art is. I’ve seen people do this with three sentences which are about today, or with three specific moments of their life, or use three different quotes – and a million other variations. I will give you five minutes. … Some perform their sentences. Greg, to last performer: Now I would like you to add two sound effects, one between the 1st and 2nd sentences, and the other between the 2nd and 3rd. Next, Greg asks two performers to create a collage, by using the sentences of one person’s “autobiography” and the sounds from another’s. This is an experiment in collaging things without intention…. This is an example of how you could move from your own life story and add an abstract element to it. We are sense-making people, we make sense of the world. So no matter what happens, it usually resonates with us somehow. It’s often important to make the choice of not having the elements of the work (costumes, sound effects, lights) say the same thing the words say. Otherwise it is redundant and unnecessary. When you think of your work, of the words saying one thing, try to think of how the sounds would work with those words as a metaphor, or as something contrasting. It makes the audience work a little bit. And like a good lover, you don’t want it just handed to you – you want to work for it a little. Then it is more beautiful and appreciated. Theatre is hard work. That’s why it often has an intermission to give us a break – like the one we will take now. Intermission … The advantage of creating 2-minute plays is you can play with many forms over the course of the show … song, non-verbal movement, some are interactive, some are funny, some are tragic, some are both, some are abstract/metaphoric/allegorical, some are straight-forward monologue. But all are true. … Even form itself is truth. It is what is actually going on in the room; if it is a self-conscious form, there is no illusion. The next play is a simple way to express an entire relationship. The piece is called Building. (PLAY: Building) Just through five words, to express how you start with yourself, find someone else, find love for them, find no love for them, find no love, and wind up with yourself, but hopefully come back to love. … Often using inconsistent or diverse structures within the same piece works very well. Diversity of structures, not unity, is good for focus and excitement, and surprise. When Too Much Light works well, (with) each new play, the audience has no idea where that play is going to go. It could be funny, it could be serious, interactive…And because each night it is performed in a different order, each performance is different—and not just for the audience, but also for the performers. We may have to go from a silly dance piece to a very serious monologue … sometimes all the serious plays come together, sometimes the funny plays… We leave it to the randomness of the world. And this is how I’ve been able to do it for 20 years, because it keeps me interested. It keeps the audience and the performers guessing, working, and surprised. It is very important always to have a surprise. And sometimes if you simply think of it as such, that each piece needs a surprise, it’s a form that always works well. When you create a piece, is there a surprise? So even for my full-length pieces I make sure that form fits function. … Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious … came from me doing TML noticing that people would laugh at anything, because their expectation was that we were a funny show. … And I was angry at people for going with their preconceived notions. So for Jokes, I aimed to kill comedy forever. It took the form of a lecture demonstration with audience participation, where we would do something that was funny, and then analyze it to death, until it was not funny ever again. Of course, this didn’t work, but it was a valiant endeavor. … … In Crime and Punishment … my real aim was to see how obedient the audience would be to our directions. We limited our audience to 50 people, we gave each of them a recorder and headphones, and taught them how to follow the directions that we gave to them through the player. Their first task was to go into a room with a fishbowl full of photographs. People were supposed to look at the photographs and decide whether the person in the photograph was innocent or guilty, based only on what they saw. They would then attach them to a wall, where the word “guilty” was written, or the other wall, which said “innocent”. So immediately they had to make a snap decision. The photographs were photographs of previous audience members. They then proceeded into the theatre proper where they sat in seats. My partner and I were handcuffed and gagged, and bound in chairs, and the audience had to figure out how to free us to perform the show. They always did. We would then interview each other as to the worst crime we ever did, and then instruct the audience to turn back on their tapes. Up until then, all their directions had been identical, but now they found that they had about 200 different activities – each person having 10. These ranged from writing a confession to the worst crime they ever committed on a piece of paper and leaving it on their seat, to getting mug shots taken, leaving fingerprints next to the crime they had committed, shouting “Fire” in a theatre full of people, to wearing a trench coat out to the local liquor store and pretending to be a shoplifter, burning money, going into the toilet, unlocking the door, taking their pants down and shouting “Hey, I’m naked in here!”, and all other sorts of things that pushed how far they would follow our directions. … One of the activities was to go into a small, dark, cold room, and to wait for the end of the show, without talking to anyone – turn off your tape, and wait. As we performed the show, we found people did whatever we told them to, including going into the small room, which was called “the rat room”. We would take pity on them and go open the door and say, “Hello, what are you doing here?” They would say, “The tape told me to stand here and wait.” I would say, “Whose voice is on the tape?” They would say, “It’s yours.” And I would say, “Well why don’t you come out?” They would say, “I don’t think I should.” I pointed out that the tape also told them not to talk to anyone, so why were they talking to me? They usually would be incredibly silent and stare off into the room. … The whole thing was a test of obedience to authority, which is a famous book by Stanley Milgram, and we were very obvious about this. And yet we found that as long as there is an authority figure standing next to someone, you will do what they tell you – old ladies, young people, you name it. … At the end of the show we locked everyone in a large room with their confessions and punishments and photographs on the wall. We encouraged everyone to walk around and read all the crimes people had committed, and then to discuss whether this show upheld or contradicted Stanley Milgram’s findings that people would do whatever you told them. My interest was in crime and punishment. And there were various allusions to Crime and Punishment in the show. One person was told to put on a nametag that said “Raskalnikov”, and to carry an axe, asking people if they’d seen the pawnbroker. Another person was told to wear a nametag that said “The Pawnbroker” and go around asking, “Have you seen Raskalnikov?” This seemed the perfect style, the perfect form, to explore what is crime, what is punishment, what have we done – once again, hypocrisy – what do we believe and what would we do. And the shocking results that we would do whatever we’re told. Another full-length piece as an example is King Lear, which I have always felt is about the end of the world. So one of my productions of King Lear literally falls apart—actors forget their lines, the lights come up in the wrong place, and ultimately the actors just leave the stage and the audience is just sitting, and then they ultimately leave. And hopefully they will realize that this is what King Lear is about: this incredible emptiness, this desperation—very unfulfilling. Recently I did a show called Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill. It is a 9-act play that goes for 5 ½ hours. When I read the play, I thought, “This is an outrageous play.” For some reason O’Neill thought it was a good idea to have all of his characters speak their thoughts onstage. … It also is a very Freudian approach to these characters, and it takes place over 25 years; the characters age 25 years. When I read it I found it just outrageous and preposterous, and yet at the same time kind of amazing, amazingly shocking. … It was right up my alley. It had not been produced in almost 50 years. When you read the book, there are endless character descriptions and adverbs telling the actors how to perform each and every line. So for the audience to have the same experience I got from reading it, I had those lines spoken onstage, including character descriptions like this: “There is an indefinable feminine quality about him, but it is nothing apparent in either appearance or act.” How do you play that?! … Since I had 9 acts to play with, I could use a different style for every act. One scene, [the actors] only read the adverbs that O’Neill wrote for their lines and we cut all the dialogue. … And it surprisingly still conveyed everything the act needed. … So once again, this was my way of sharing my shock and amazement at this play. When we premiered at the biggest theatre in Chicago, someone on the balcony stood up and said, “This isn’t O’Neill! Why are you butchering this play, this beautiful play?!” … I love O’Neill, I think his stuff is very funny. Of course, O’Neill would not agree. But I think the humor we brought to the play heightened the tragedy. And these hecklers really bonded the audience together. I thought I would be successful if about half the audience stayed for the full 5 ½ hours, but about 95% stayed, and there was an instant standing ovation at the end. This was the form I thought was right for this play – I wanted to convey my feelings about this play. I also did a full-length play called The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen. [Ibsen] wrote 26 plays and we took the last 2 minutes of every play and slammed them together. Almost all of his plays end with this amazing climax. … In The Last Two Minutes we have 3 suicides, 2 heart attacks, someone jumping off of a bridge, someone falling off of a steeple, madness, and 2 avalanches. … I staged each ending to reflect uniquely the history of theatre, starting with the single actor, and moving up to melodrama, and ending with Beckett. And even though these were large structures and forms, there were still moments were the audience cried, it was very moving. … (PLAY: Writing as It Is Being Written) About Writing as it is Being Written: It’s important to use the form that you are given and see what would exist in the reality of that form, rather than trying to turn it into something else. … Another example of form is The Interview. (PLAY: “A Neo-Futurist 12 ½ Question Meta-Survey” by John Pierson) That play turns the genre of interview upside-down. I’ve used interviews for a number of other full-length plays. In the middle of a show I would just bring someone onstage and ask them questions. … In my piece on Marcel Duchamp, called A Duchampian Romp, even, … when we got to talking about Marcel Duchamp’s virginity, I brought someone onstage and asked them about theirs. I asked them questions about how they lost their virginity: with whom, what was the circumstance, was there alcohol involved, did you ever see them again, what do you think they are doing now? For another play called A Child’s History of Bombing, I brought someone onstage in the middle of the show, and asked them the classic question: if you were with Hitler before the war, in a room, would you kill him? That show also revolved around American military atrocities, and centered on interviews with my uncle George, who, when I grew up, was very exciting; nobody knew what Uncle George did, because he worked on something called the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. So this show centered on me going down to Tennessee to interview my 85-year-old uncle about his participation and his feelings about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. … It turned out that he was 21, and a young, excited physicist, who was given the possibility to expand the Periodic Table by inventing a new element, which when you’re 21 is pretty damn exciting. And I found I was really the first person who asked him about the ethics of his activity in the Manhattan Project. And he was this beautiful, lovely, well-spoken 85-year-old man who really looked at his past and very honestly talked about his hypocrisy, his contrasting feelings about the situation. I like to ask the audience, and I like to ask people, about their lives. I did another show called You Asked for It, which would give the audience exactly the play they wanted. I interviewed the American public about what kind of play they would want, and I wrote America’s Most Wanted Play and America’s Least Wanted Play. This was based on the work of former Soviet conceptual artists Komar and Melamid, who made the paintings most wanted and least wanted for each country. This was a very difficult assignment for theatre, since the least wanted play had to have no conflict and all the action take place offstage. Radio has a problem: you can’t see it. But if you embrace and exploit that fact you have great radio. Samuel Beckett’s play All That Fall is a full-length play that centers around someone having something in their hand at the end of the play which is not described. He never tells you what it is, it is left as a mystery because you can’t see it. Monty Python brought us the first full eclipse of the sun for radio. This of course is absurd. In theatre we strive often to have a silent black box to create another world, but often it is best to use the actual environment around you. … (Site-specific plays), the idea of doing a play in an alley, in the train station, in the grocery store, is very exciting because you have real people and a real place. And this is why acknowledge our audience and perform primarily on a bare, intimate stage. We approach all theatre as site-specific theatre, creating the perfect show for the perfect space. This is a great example of using this as a theatre with all the wonderful books around you; you could create some piece that uses the motif of a book. Similarly, in radio, the environment you are given is often richer than the silent recording studio for that interview. It reveals unexpected and much greater depth in material and surprises. Perhaps rather than editing out those contradictions or tangents that your interviewee goes on, you leave them in, or follow one and that is your story. I think we all need to embrace the contradictions and hypocrisies and bizarre truths of reality. For real life is often much more bizarre, surprising, and meaningful than anything we can make up. I’d like to read the new piece that I wrote for a theatre called Dad’s Garage, it’s called Don’t Try this at Home. The idea behind this show is to use a song by a band called They Might Be Giants. They put together a collage of pieces called Fingertips, comprised of 23 very short songs between 5 and 15 seconds. I was given the assignment to write a play based on a 10-second song, the entire text of which is … “Everything is catching on fire.” For the stage play it would be someone sitting behind a table in a coat and tie, with slides being projected behind them, but it is the sound of the slides that is very important, and the slides are blank. Greg performs a new piece called Don’t Try This At Home.
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