from corey

Help TJT and I spread the word!

2011-10-29T17:27:00.000-07:00

Word-of-mouth, which is a basic, nurturing humanactivity, has always been the most effective way for TJT to “market” its work.Theatre – as opposed to entertainmentproducts – depends on community. Conventional marketing methods methods,though we use them as much as we can afford to, have much less impact thanhaving someone you trust share an exciting, moving or compelling experiencewith you.

More and more of us are recognizing that we mustcreate alternatives to the consumption-driven, unsustainable culture of greedand isolation that gives rise to so much current suffering. The Group Theatrelived one of those alternative visions. Although it wasn’t able to maintain itsoriginal form for more than a few years, it was enough to change our culture.TJT’s work, most of it, anyway, arises from a similar vision. It tells us that thepower to create isn’t owned by anyone. We all have stories to tell and we don’t needthe permission of producers, critics, media conglomerates or even largeregional theatres to tell them. Of allthe stories we’ve told over the last thirty four years, none has seemed moretimely, more necessary to tell as The Group Theatre’s story.

We can’t tell it without your help (sorry if thatsounds like a pitch for donations – it’s not. At least not right now). We have an intuition that the people whowould understand, be moved and appreciate MAZE the most, don’t know we’re here.Whatever the reasons, you, ourcommunity, have the power to change that.

Here's a sample email (with links). You can copy, paste, customize and send to the people you want to come experience In the Maze of Our Own Lives, inspired by the Story of The Group Theatre.

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Dear _____________:

I recently saw a new play that you must see before it closes. It's called In the Maze of Our Own Lives and it's based on the story of the legendary Group Theatre who came together in the 1930s, during the worst of the Depression, and revolutionized American Theatre. Even if you're not familiar with the history, most of what you value in theatre and film can be traced to The Group Theatre's influence. The founders, who are characters in this absorbing play, included Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and others, who, between them, taught and mentored Brando, Dean, Newman, Streep, Nicholson, Woodward and hundreds of others. Others went on to direct the premieres of major works by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan and to produce iconic works like Porgy and Bess.

The play explores the stormy and creative relationships between Harold Clurman, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, producer Cheryl Crawford and playwright Clifford Odets. Odets plays for the Group were the first in this country to give voice to America's poor, its working class and its growing Jewish and Italian immigrant populations.

Here's a link tom BrownPaper Tickets where you'll find everything you need to get tickets, directions, maps and schedules.

Click here for a five-minute long video on the creation of the work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J-driie4-U

The play closes on November 13, 2011, so jump on this!

Sincerely,

[You]

FYI:

The buzz from audience members:

I saw "In the Maze of Our Lives " last week,and felt that I was actually a participant in a true and blood-passionaterendering of what that enormously generative , prismatic group must have beenlike… Corey Fischer has given us something real and rich; something to see andtaste , to smack our lips and savor- Go and feel this wonderful piece of livingtheater! enthusiastically recommended!!

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The cast foundthat honest connection with each other that the Group Theatre must have had. Iwas captivated by their performance in a way that i have never been before. - D. L., Marin

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"I sawthis play a few days ago and it is still resonating with me. I thought it was athought-provoking , deeply felt work, not just about an important period inAmerican theater, but also about the relationship of the artist to his time -how it shapes him or her, and how he or she can shape it, as well. Theproduction was imaginatively staged, well acted, with some brilliant bits ofdialogue and a nice mix of naturalistic and avant-garde theatrical technique. Irecommend it, not just to anyone with an interest in American cultural history,but also to fans of well crafted, serious theater." D .K.. San Francisco

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Sam Hurwitt, in the Marin IJ, wrote:

"Inthe Maze of Our Own Lives is an inspiring love letter to the act of makingtheater...Fischer's vibrant staging compellingly blends heightenedtheatricality and simple human behavior."

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In the SF Bay Guardian, Robert Avila wrote an advance article before the play opened

"Asubject as grand and complex as the Group Theatre — which spawned many famousproductions, plays, and artistic careers for stage and screen, influencingtheater and film making, theater training, and American literature at large —would present any playwright with a supreme challenge. This first run-throughwas proof Fischer and his colleagues had captured a coherent narrative withseveral key, interlocking strands in two well-shaped acts together totaling notmuch more than two hours. Although Fischer would eventually cut another 25pages from the script before rehearsals were over, the play and the staging —which uses an appealing mix of media, original music, and ensemble movement tocreate a delicate dialogue between one company and its historical subject — wascoming across persuasively."

All photos above by Ken Friedman

Corey and "In the Maze..." in the media

2011-10-27T21:11:00.000-07:00

Read Sam Hurwitt's review in the Marin IJ
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"In the Maze of Our Own Lives is an inspiring love letter to the act of making theater...Fischer's vibrant staging compellingly blends heightened theatricality and simple human behavior."
-from Sam Hurwitt's review.

From Left: David Mendelsohn as Lee Strasberg, Michael Navarra as Harold Clurman. Nancy Carlin as Cheryl Crawford, (background: Cassidy Brown as Morris Carnovsky and Joshua Roberts as Clifford Odets in In the Maze of Our Own Lives. Photo: Ken Friedman

Get Tickets. Blog readers, enter discount code ACT for $12 tickets for Friday-Sunday, 10/18-30
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Published 2011-10-01

Encore: Corey Fischer

by / Elana McKernan

Read the profile on Corey in Theatre Bay Area

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Listen to Corey on KPFA's Living Room with Kris Welch

My New Play (on The Group Theatre)

2011-10-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

In the Maze of Our Own Lives, which I've written anddirected, inspired by the story of The Group Theatre, opened onOctober 20, 2011 at TJT in San Francisco and will run until November 23. It’sthe most ambitious project I’ve ever taken on, and, in many ways, is aculmination of my work up to now. It’s an offering that I want everyone I knowto share.

You can see the full schedule, get tickets and see a video wemade last summer during a workshop for the play at Brown Paper Tickets

Robert Avila, one of the Bay Area's finest theatre critics andwriters has just written a feature on the play for the SF Bay Guardian.

I co-founded TJT in 1978 when I was exactly thirty-three yearsold. On my last birthday, I was sixty-six. For what amounts to half mylife, I’ve been able to work within a single artistic home, something rare andwonderful in the world of American theatre.

But all homes are temporary and TJT, that dream made real, isabout to end – at least in its current form. Many of you have already heardthis news and know why we’ve decided to close the company at the end of the2012, thirty-fourth season. If you haven’t, there’s a brief account onthe TJT website, http://www.tjt-sf.org.

The founding members of The Group Theatre created acommunity of trust that allowed them to “build a dream” together and,from it, make a new kind of theatre – one that could shape a still-young,American culture. The plays they produced – particularly those by Group memberClifford Odets – became touchstones for generations of American writers: ArthurMiller, Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, among others.

For me, the great discovery of my five years of research hasbeen that the Group’s story is, perhaps, its greatest and most far-reachinggift to all of us who followed. As I came to know the landscape of that story,I recognized its contours in the turbulent history of all the American ensembletheatres whose work inspired TJT’s: The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, TheFree Southern Theatre, Bread and Puppet, Teatro Campesino, and more. I saw thatbefore 1931, when Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford and abouttwenty more young theatre-makers started the Group, there had been no ensembletheatre in this country. I felt as though I had found my ancestors.

When my travels through the 1930s began, I had no idea that TJTwas approaching its own end as an ensemble theatre or that In the Maze of OurOwn Lives would launch its last season. Life, in all its brilliant, ironic andpoignant artistry, has rhymed our story with the Group’s. There’s a hard-wonwisdom embedded in that story: the closing of any single theatre is not, asHarold Clurman put it, a catastrophe. So it is with TJT. Hecontinues to say that the real catastrophe would be the loss of the values, theimpulses, the inspiration and the energy that gave rise to the Group, to thedream of a theatre that could be “a dwelling place for the whole family ofdecent humanity.”

Neither did I have any idea, when I began work on this play, that a new movement like Occupy Wall Street and all the gatherings it has inspired around the world would be embodying so many of the same hopes for real democracy that motivated the Group.

In the Maze of Our Own Lives is an offering to the ancestors and to the future. In 1978. Albert Greenberg, Naomi Newman and I made TJT’s first originalpiece of theatre, Coming from a Great Distance, the first piece of modernJewish ensemble theatre in this country, as far as we know. At the time,I knew almost nothing about the Group Theatre. Much of what I’ve learnedas we crossed the great distance from then to now is embedded in this play andthis production.

It is said that the last words of the legendary figure, the BaalShem Tov, subject of TJT’s 1978 play, were, "I am going out one door, to come inthrough another." May this work be the “other” door through which the soul,spirit and story of The Group enters. In these times, we can’t live without it.

In the Maze of Our Own Lives would not exist without the enormous collective contribution of the cast, designers, musicians, staff, crew, our families and supporters of all sorts.

Maze card design by Julie Giles

Dance of Exile photo by Irene Young

In the Maze of Our Own Lives photos by Ken Friedman

Tell Congressional Republicans: Don't turn America into a deadbeat nation!

2011-07-21T16:08:00.000-07:00

Tell Congressional Republicans: Don't turn America into a deadbeat nation!

David Mitchell: Hope and Genius

2011-01-10T15:55:00.000-08:00

Most reviews of Cloud Atlas start by discussing David Mitchell’s dazzling narrative surprises, his “Russian-doll”-like use of nested or linked stories that form a larger, over-arching, meta-narrative blah blah…Sorry, I don’t mean to get snarky and I’m really making fun of myself, since I say things like that all the time in all sincerity. But I think that this line of reflection misses Mitchell’s essential greatness which, imho, greatly transcends, though is certainly served by, his technical brilliance, namely, his profound engagement with that oldest of human stories: the struggle to free ourselves from the cruel, oppressive – and usually literal – enslavement to which we subject our fellows and ourselves.

In Cloud Atlas, he plays variations on this theme, first, in its mercantile and violently racist forms in the nineteenth century colonial South Pacific, and then through the corporate greed of the recent past and present, a hellish future bio-tech-enabled slave society, an finally, and even further post-apocalyptic future where small communities try to protect the fragile remnants of human culture from stronger predatory tribes.

What amazes me is that I finished reading Cloud Atlas feeling stirred, hopeful and invigorated; not at all what the description of the content in the last paragraph might lead you to expect. But that’s Mitchell’s genius. His vision is so deep, so inclusive and his love of language and people so palpable that in his work, hope trumps despair, no matter how difficult the truth he tells may be.

His earlier novel, Ghostwritten, reads like an previous incarnation of Cloud Atlas. Even though I read it after reading the later work, I found it compelling in its own right as I did Mitchell's recent, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which made its way onto the New York Times Bestseller List and a number of best of 2010 lists. It's a more formally contained work that stays in a single time and place for the most part. Given that they happen to be the port of Nagasaki in the late eighteenth century and that the central characters are a repressed Dutch clerk working for one of the world's first multinationals (the Dutch East India Company) and a beautiful and brilliant Japanese midwife disfigured from burn scars creates challenges of the kind that Mitchell seems to thrive on. The Dutch merchants were more or less quarantined by the xenophobic Japanese of that imperial era to a tiny, artificial island in the Bay of Nagasaki and only permitted to set foot on mainland Japan by special permission. The tension between two different peoples energizes Mitchell's story of the consequences of encountering an "other" with love or with fear, with curiosity or with a need to subdue.

I don’t believe that his work is all that “difficult” or “not for everyone” any more or less than any other distinct piece of art, which is always subject to personal taste. But good storytelling is simply that. And if you hang in with Cloud Atlas. beyond the first two sections and begin to trust that Mitchell is not just messing with you (he isn’t!) the powerful current of his storytelling will carry you away

Bob Dylan's America: Forty-Eight Years later

2010-12-03T00:42:00.000-08:00

In which my recent reading of Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz and listening to the new release of Dylan’s 1962-64 Witmark Demos provoke further reflections on an American bard.

I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan since the night I first heard his voice in 1962. It didn’t sound like any voice I'd ever heard and it just about knocked me to the ground with its raw and undefended power. I was 17, a high school senior living in the small Southern California resort town, Palm Springs, where I knew no one who shared my passion for the folk music that was being “revived” in big cities across the country.

I’d learned to play guitar during summers spent at an arts camp in the nearby San Jacinto Mountains where kids and adults could study visual arts, music, dance and theatre. It was certainly ahead of its time: a cultural oasis and one of the few places that would hire blacklisted artists like Pete Seeger. He ran a two-week long folk music workshop there every summer from 1956 until sometime in the 1960s. At fourteen I started learning a little blues guitar from Texas legend, Brownie McGee, who, with the equally legendary harmonica player Sonny Terry, taught at the folk music workshop for several years. During the nine months of the year, back in Palm Springs, I had to make do with Folkways LPs of Pete, Brownie and Sonny and other newly re-discovered bluesmen and women from Texas, the Mississippi Delta, and other mysterious places.

I also spent every weekend I could at my aunt’s house in L.A, a three-hour Greyhound Bus ride from the desert. In LA, I had friends from the camp who also played guitar and listened to the same music that I did. I had an uncle, the black sheep variety, who smoked and drank and would take me to the only folk club in L.A. at the time, the Ash Grove, where we might hear Lightnin’ Hopkins or Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, or someone wonderful I’d never heard of. My uncle would let me drink beer and smoke cigarettes while he told stories about being a young radical in Chicago during the depression.

On those L.A. nights when neither friends nor uncle were available, I stayed home at my aunt’s (my uncle’s older sister), happy to play records on her hi fi. Moreover, at 11 o’clock on Saturday nights, an FM DJ named Les Claypool Jr. played folk music into the wee hours. His show was a mix of Folkways archives, fifties headliners like Pete, The Weavers and Josh White, and a few of the emerging "folk" singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Tom Rush, but nothing as commercial as the Kingston Trio or the Brothers Four. I loved almost everything he played and would record his shows on a reel-to-reel Wollensack monaural tape recorder. That night, Claypool said something in a sceptical tone about the cut he was about to play from a debut album by an young unknown from the East Coast with a pretentious pseudonym, but I wasn’t paying too much attention. Then I heard that voice I’ve come to know in a way I know very few others sing: “Well, there’s one kind-uh favor I’ll ask a you....” And everything changed. Can you imagine the pure strangeness of that moment?

I couldn’t picture the singer. Young? Old? Black? White? If it hadn’t been for the absence of scratches, hisses and pops, I could almost have imagined he was an obscure bluesman from an archival field recording by one of the Lomaxes. The weathered sounding voice rang with vitality. It took pleasure in itself. That was – in those days – unusual. Cool was still cool. Most white folksingers still accepted the performance conventions of traditional folk balladry and were pretty dead-pan, even stone faced. Musical performance west of Broadway was a pretty contained affair. When Elvis moved his lower body on national TV for the first time, it was treated as a full blown explosion of uncontrollable Dionysian sexual madness that had to be immediately contained. The cameras were instructed to never tilt down below his belt buckle. Handlers and guards were brought in to attend to the screaming and fainting adolescent girls.

I’d heard the traditional, if irregular, blues “See That my Grave is Kept Clean” on a Folkways re-release of the original Blind Lemon Jefferson field recording, which is actually more mellow and contained than Dylan’s version. What I heard that night was sung at a pushed-up pulse driven by a relentless guitar groove in drop D tuning (that’s when the low E string is tuned down a whole-step to a deep, ringing D). I heard a voice that confounded all the categories I’d learned that were supposed to make “good,” "pleasing,” “beautiful” sounds. The voice was singing with such apparent vigor about all that frightened me the most: graves and coffins, death come too soon, white horses as ghostly omens. I was shaken by the contradiction.

Nearly fifty years later, I’ve been reflecting a lot on Bob Dylan. One of the reasons for this is the recent publication of Sean Wilentz’ magisterial study, Bob Dylan in America along with the release of Dylan’s remastered demo tapes that he recorded on the fly between 1962 and 1964 when he was writing songs faster than he could make records. In the liner notes to the Witmark Demos, we learn that executive Artie Mogull would let Dylan lay down demos in his office anytime he wanted. In a process that had changed very little for a century, the low quality tapes would be hand-transcribed into proper musical notation by a music copyist and a one-of-a-kind acetate disk would be made from the tape. The disk and a copy of the lyrics and music would then be sent to any singer that Mogull felt might be interested in recording the song. The list of unlikely pop stars who recorded covers of early Dylan songs is worth its own study. Dylan’s first album, the one that I can still listen to endlessly, was a flop when released, selling around 5,000 units. But before he recorded his second album, a hot new folk-pop trio, with a very lovely blond singer and two cool guitar players with neatly trimmed goatees recorded one of Dylan’s first original songs, Blowin’ in the Wind. Yep, Peter, Paul and Mary, packaged by the legendary Albert Grossman who also managed Dylan. The immense success of that record launched Dylan into a rocketing trajectory of growing celebrity that didn't slow down until he hit the inevitable set-backs and retrenchments of his mid-career years.

As I listened to the forty-two tracks on the Witmark Demos, some sounding as if they were being sung and played through for the first time, I was deeply moved by the enormous range of material this twenty-two year old had taken into himself. You can hear so many tributaries of wild American poetry, history and song coursing through his voice, through his fingers on the guitar, through his breath pushing into his mouth-harp, through the sounds, the vowels and consonants he shapes with both care and abandon and, always, deep generosity.

Reading Wilentz as I was coming to the end of my first listen-through of the Demos was like continuing a conversation I hadn’t realized I’d begun. Though Wilentz is a fully-credentialed big-time academic – a professor of American History at Princeton and author of several major tomes on the origins of American Democracy – his writing is passionate, conversational, erudite and down-to-earth.

He reveals rather than manufactures connections between Dylan and his cultural, spiritual, musical and philosophical ancestors who include so many more than the obvious ones we expect to find. This doesn’t diminish the importance of Dylan's love for Woody Guthrie or the extent to which he modelled much of his early work on Woody’s. But I had no idea, for example, that Aaron Copland was as important an influence on Dylan as Wilentz suggests.

Wilentz does no less than locate Dylan in an American cultural landscape that is darker, stranger and more inclusive than the sanitized, conventional version. In Dylan's America, which I have no trouble recognizing, there's a figure-ground reversal going on. The marginalized are now at the center. The ones to watch and listen to are the dissenters, the prophets and the rebels in their various changing forms as poets, reformers, preachers, minstrels, vagabonds or outlaws. Wilentz shows us how the founding fathers, and Civil War poets, how Ovid, Dante, the Bible, Milton, Blake, Whitman, Poe, Aaron Copland, Roy Rogers, Brecht, Kurt Weill, Bessie Smith, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Da Vinci, Ferlinghetti, Guthrie, Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Frank Sinatra, Blind Willie McTell, Bing Crosby, Mother Mabelle Carter, Charlie Chaplin, the Sacred Harp, Robert Johnson, Sholem Alechem all appear in Dylan's America, often masked and anonymous, paraphrased, disguised, or transformed, but always honored.

In this version of American culture, there’s no attempt to cover up the raw racial wounding that remains unhealed since the times of slavery. I wonder if what I first heard in Bob Dylan’s voice in 1962 was a preview of his approaching immersion in the American shadow, which sometimes seems to be an elemental curse coming from the nation's origins in theft and violence. Today I listened to the 1967 release, John Wesley Harding, for the first time in at least a decade. Though the songs on this album have always moved me more deeply than many of his others, I had never felt the particular mixture of anger and grief in them as I did this time. They had a weight to them that went beyond the personal.

Listen to this deceptively romantic waltz:

I pity the poor immigrant 

Who wishes he would’ve stayed home 
Who uses all his power to do evil 
But in the end is always left so alone 
That man whom with his fingers cheats 
And who lies with ev’ry breath 
Who passionately hates his life 
And likewise, fears his death

[...]

I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood

And, the last verse of a lyric that Dylan set to melody and form of the old labor ballad, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried

When I listen to these and so many of Dylan's other songs today, I hear American grief, rage and frustrated love howling through the bones of our history.

photos: from top: Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins, Ash Grove flyer, 1964, both from Ash Grove, Music Foundation Web Site.

Against Forgetting

2010-07-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve been helping a couple of young filmmakers with their writing and have discovered some missing bridges on each of their cultural access roads.So I do what I can to improvise zip-lines to help these young dudes across the often barren gully of dead pixels into the forest of the living past from which I find so much inspiration.

Albert Camus

I tell them stories. What else? The time, in 1965, I hitchhiked across Algeria, where, by the way, Camus’ The Stranger is set. Who was Albert Camus? Well, he was a Frenchman born in Algeria who believed that the universe has no predetermined, God-given meaning, but that people can choose to give their lives meaning – or not – by their actions. His novels are about people who mostly fail at that and suffer the consequences, which might have had to do with what he experienced growing up as part of the French colonial establishment that was destroying Algeria, and later, as a member of the French resistance against the Nazis. Anyway. From Algeria, I got to Tunis and then crossed by boat to Sicily where I got very sick and finally, after a shorter boat ride, found a youth hostel perched on a rocky cliff at the very tip of the Italian peninsula above a village called Scilla.I recognized the name from my senior comp lit class as a place in Homer’s Odyssey. Ulysses has to navigate between Scilla, the rock and Charybdis, the whirlpool.

Scilla

I wanted my to convey to my young auteur the numinous sense of discovery that came when I found an ancient name persisting in a landscape where I now stood. The key to that feeling though, which grew through the week I spent resting under shade trees overlooking the straits of Messina and the whirlpool that almost sunk Ulysses, had been given me in the twelfth grade by Mr Sussman, adamant that we drink from those wells to which he dragged us. Homer. Dante. Shakespeare. He had no investment at all in being liked or admired. He threw stinging missiles of chalk at anyone who dared doze in his class. He was on a mission to inoculate us against what he foresaw, even back in 1962. He had to give us a strong enough dose of terza rima, iambic pentameter, and epic repetition, of character and fate and choice and wonder to instill resistance to the packaged emptiness he saw coming.

There were other teachers who followed him. I was blessed to come up in a time before semiotics and new internet memes 24/7 took over the humanities; a time when wisdom, albeit insecure, was still a possibility, when an assistant history prof with no publications to his name could assign The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann as the primary text for a year-long, required undergraduate course on the History of Western Civilization.

In the weekly meetings with my young filmmaker, I find myself blurting synopses of everything from the Spanish Civil War to One Hundred Years of Solitude as if they were sandbags I was desperately tossing onto a crumbling levee. (I’ve been watching Treme.)

The other evening I discovered that a 35 year old young woman I know, a gifted student of psychology and its intersection with spirituality, had, until the other day, never heard or heard of Joni Mitchell. Further questioning revealed her fairly patchy sense of what happened in the time we call the sixties (ca. 1964 – 1977). The analogous years for me and my cohort (I was born in 1945) would be 1934 – 1947, the years that include the depression, the Second World War, the start of the Cold War, and the seeds of both the conformism and the rebellions of the fifties.

My own sense of the “present” as part of a larger narrative, could not exist without the presence of the past. In that sense it’s akin to the Buddhist notion of dependent arising; nothing can come into existence independent of myriad other factors which condition its being. There is no “independent arising.” In other words, everything that happens is connected in space andtime. Here, I must thank my wife for introducing me to one of America’s great working historians, Manning Marable. An idea of his says it all: in order to have a shared future, people must understand their common past.

The Group Theatre at their first summer work camp in 1931

That’s why I’ve been transforming four or five years of research into a play that tells the story of The Group Theatre, who not only changed American theatre forever, but were part of that era, the thirties, the meaning of which, the particularity of which, is also in danger of being glossed over and obscured by generalities and clichés. In learning the stories of that time, I’ve begun to wonder if it was the only time in American history when the assumptions underlying our free-market economic system were seriously questioned by a majority ofthe population. This is also why, at long last, I am watching, on DVD,The Wire and Mad Men, having missed them on their original cable TV presentations. I’m enthralled, especially by The Wire, and understand why the new mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland will hire no one to work for the city unless they have seen all five seasons of that show.

scene from The Wire

Nothing like it has been attempted in any form that I know of. In fact, that project, along with several others of near equal stature have developed a new medium as unlike network television as a Phillip Roth novel is to a 1950 issue of ReadersDigest. The Wire takes around sixty hours to weave a richly detailed, painfully coherent tapestry of stories that form a narrative of American urban life as tragedy, farce and morality play, with the authority of a documentary. As in the best of Shakespeare, we become complicit, at least empathically, with the worst villains, and we see the flaws in the heroes. And the lines between the two are often ambiguous and mutable. About two thirds through the opus, it becomes clear that no matter what battles are won or lost, the community that is inner-city Baltimore is at the mercy of a system so structurally unjust, so clearly distorted to serve the greedy and powerful who are thus so invested in its suffering, that there’s little chance it will ever end unless everything changes.

There’s an article in last week’s New Yorker about the impact of a private, secular TV/radio network in Afghanistan. Since there was no TV, only Taliban approved radio, until nine years ago, the new media is having a huge cultural impact. On the new commercial TV station, men and women are seen talking together, women’s faces are revealed, they read the news, voice opinions, even sing. These are capital offenses under the Taliban version of religious law. But two thirds of the entire population of the country are watching the Afghani version of American Idol even if they have to crank up the village generator to do it. The article argues that this sort of programming is causing the largest cultural transformation in the country since the end of the Taliban regime in 2001-02.

But the U.S. is inured to television and I fear that the brilliant new work now seen on HBO, Showtime, AMC and other cable sources may only reach a fraction of our huge population. This time, I’m less than hopeful of a new consensus that might tip us toward the level of change that we experienced in the thirties or that may be happening in Afghanistan right now. Fortunately, I know a few stories that tell me I could be very wrong.

Carl Safina and Friend

Many of us seem to be wondering if the horrific act of environmental terror wrought in the Gulf of Mexico by BP and all who colluded with their practices might be the tipping point that will catalyze a new level of outrage, action and change. The activist, scientist and writer Carl Safina, in a video talk online at TED makes the most powerful and perceptive statement on the disaster that I’ve heard. He connects it to the moral dimension of every choice this country has ever made about its sources of energy, beginning with slavery! You can see this essential talk at http://tinyurl.com/carlsafina

Robert Bly

As the enormity of the BP criminal catastrophe continues to grow, a phrase has been echoing in my mind: The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved. I wasn’t sure if it was a paraphrase or an exact quote. I imagined it was from a poem. Auden perhaps? Not from 1939. Not from Yeats’ Prophecy. A few moments ago I finally found the source! It’s the last line of a poem I once knew well by a poet who for some years I counted as a friend and mentor, but with whom, sadly, I have not managed to stay in touch over time and distance, Robert Bly. Here it is, as powerful and unsettling today as it was over forty years ago

Those Being Eaten by America

by Robert Bly

The cry of those being eaten by America,
others pale and soft being stored for later eating
And Jefferson
Who saw hope in new oats
The wild houses go on
With long hair growing from between their toes
The feet at night get up
And run down the long white roads by themselves
The dams reverse themselves and want to go stand alone in the desert
That is why these poems are so sad
The long dead running over the fields
The mass sinking down
The light in children’s faces fading at six or seven
The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved

Robert Bly, “Those Being Eaten by America from The Light Around the Body.
Copyright © 1967 and renewed 1995 by Robert Bly.
Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Whether taken as metaphor or observation, that last line spurs my growing desire to stock the lifeboats, the wagons, the starships, the mountain monasteries, the desert wadis, wherever the “colonies” will wait out the interregnum, with the stories that are the carriers of the cultural DNA I’d like to imagine a human future will need.

Recent “discoveries” that might interest you:

Siri Hustvdt

Siri Hustvedt writes novels and non-fiction. I hadn’t known of her until I heard her interviewed by the heroic Terry Gross on Fresh Air upon the publication of Hustvedt’s most recent book, The Shaking Woman, a History of my Nerves. I was immediately interested by the story she told on the air about her own neurological journeys, first with migraines (I, too am a migraineur) and, later, with a never-to-be diagnosed condition that caused her to shake with seizure-like paroxysms when she read and spoke in public. I immediately read the book, a complex but highly readable blend of memoir with an impressively researched history of neuropsychiatry from its pre-Freudian origins to its current focus on brain chemistry and neuroplasticity. I came away in awe of her writerly powers and her hard won expansiveness, which I confess I also envy. I went on to read her two most recent novels: The Sorrows of an American and What I Loved. The former is close to a fictional companion to The Shaking Woman but yields its own pleasures. What I Loved reminded me of the novels that formed me as a young man, full of rich lives deeply carved by painful losses, lived by characters whose triumphs lay in their capacity to love and to create. This one has a first-person narrator who remembers the story as an old man, so there’s a recurring waft of longing and well-seasoned grief moving lightly though the telling. But any danger of sentimentality is balanced by the narrator’s astringent observations of the New York art world (he’s an art historian and critic and the protagonist, his best friend, is a painter and sculptor) and his rigorous engagement with the process of seeing. Siri H is now on my unwritten list of writers and others I claim as kin, a secret guest list for a dream-salon in paradise.

I’d never heard of singer, songwriter and guitarist Dayna Kurtz until I clicked a link in a newsletter from writer Steve Almond. I’m not the only one who is mystified by her lack of fame in the U.S. It seems she’s well known in Europe though. Could be the lame old “hard-to-categorize” excuse since her vocal range is so unusual – and unusually expressive. She often sings in a tenor range or even down to a light baritone, but can also break upwards to a clear mountain-stream soprano as easily as an antelope leaps. She sings her own songs and covers an eclectic mix of others. Even made me listen to “Those Were the Days” all the way through – and enjoy it. Her Klezmer-Apocalyptic “Day of Atonement 2001” is the most moving response in an art form to 9/11 I’ve come upon. She has American roots music – African, Balkan, Celtic, Acadian, Flamenco, Polka, and more – growing from her kishkes and flowering in her voice and guitar fingers. Go listen and if you can, kick in something to help her complete the American release of her latest CD, already released in Europe. Also read her "comments" which have much to say about the lives of today's artists.

I have a shelf full of novels by Steve Stern, Lorrie Moore, Gary Shteyngart and David Mitchel I want to tell you about in future posts, but right now, I'm off to rehearse a reading for the
Bay Area Playwrights Festival of a brilliant new play about the Czech composer Leos Janacek, inspired by his magnificent second string quartet, Intimate Letters. There are seven other provocative new plays being read this coming weekend and next (July 23 - August 1, 2010) so click the link a few lines back for details. The Janacek play (I'm rading the role of Janacek) is Tva, Kamila.

in progress: a life making theater

2010-01-22T03:16:00.000-08:00

reflecting on the frame

It’s a couple of months since The Chosen closed at TheatreWorks in the South Bay. I played Reb Saunders, a tzaddik, the spiritual leader of a Brooklyn Hasidic community that he had led out of Russia after a devastating pogrom. The play is a recent adaptation of the 1967 novel by Chaim Potok which became an instant classic and may well be the most widely read modern American novel about Jewish life.

This was the first major production outside TJT that I’ve done in 31 years. The last one was at the Public Theatre in New York: Joseph Chaikin’s production of The Dybbuk, arguably the best known play from the Yiddish theatre and one of the only ones to have “crossed over,” via translation, to mainstream American and European success.

I’ve been intrigued by the symmetrical framing around my 31 years as co-founder and core member of TJT^{^[1]} by these two productions of extremely well-known Jewish works, and I thought I’d reflect on this notion on this blog. Well, friends, I’m now at 37 pages, over 10,000 words, and there’s a lot more where that came from.

Each time I’ve opened that file, ostensibly to cut it down to something postable, I end up writing more and cutting exactly nothing. In writing about my experiences in New York, working on The Dybbuk, for example, I find myself telling you how I first read the play in Los Angeles and then, of course, I need to write about what I was doing in Hollywood in the first place which has to include my experiences in the UCLA Theatre Department in the early sixties and so it goes, back and forth between childhood, middle age, youth, Jewish identity, avant-garde theatre in America, the founding of TJT… The common thread is the search for the events, the moments of insight and struggle, the teachers and teachings that shaped the actor that I became.

It’s obvious to me that some faction of my inner editorial board has seized control and is off and running on a book-length memoir.

But I really need to complete this post so I can get back to work on the two plays I’m writing, on the music and language experiments I’ve been recording, on my 2009 tax returns…

So here’s the compromise: I’m going to post a handful of excerpts, that can stand on their own, from the growing body of memoir material. Please let me know how they hit you in the “comments” below.

Photos above from The Chosen at TheatreWorks by Mark Kitaoka (top)and Tracy Martin (two lower photos). Pictured with Corey is Thomas Goorebeeck as Daniel

the dybbuk

At some point in the early seventies, the Mark Taper Forum, L.A.’s resident theatre that sits between freeways in what is ironically called “Downtown” in a city that has no center, produced a version of The Dybbuk translated and directed by one of Canada’s most respected directors, John Hirsch. I auditioned for the lead role of Chanon, the young scholar who dies of a broken heart and comes back as the eponymous Dybbuk to possess the body and unite with the soul of his beloved Leah.

The Dybbuk’s historical context starts in the new cracks that were appearing in the once-solid barriers to education and civil society that had kept Jews of Eastern Europe isolated for centuries.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the sanctions against Jews began to ease as the Napoleonic code inspired new freedoms throughout Europe. A growing number of young Jews dared to leave the prescribed path of an exclusively religious education (from which women were barred). They sought lives with greater possibilities than the few offered by a closed

religious community. Instead of studying nothing but Torah and Talmud, they learned physics, mathematics, literature, psychology, anthropology, the whole big apple of – if not forbidden, then certainly suspect – secular knowledge. Thus came about the movement within Jewish society known as haskalah, the Enlightenment. As if making up for lost time, a secular Jewish culture – something that had never before existed in this part of the world – asserted itself with enormous energy and appetite.

In 1911, one of these newly secular Jews, S. Ansky, led “The Jewish Ethnographic Expedition” into Volhynia and Podolia, a forested region in which Jews lived as they had for centuries. (It’s now part of the Western Ukraine.) This was the birth-place of the semi-legendary figure, Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, the charismatic religious rebel who is credited with founding the religious revival known as Hasidism. The Expedition collected songs, stories, magic spells, healing amulets, rituals and incantations. Out of this material, Ansky wrote a play that served as a capacious hold-all for the songs, stories, beliefs and customs that he wanted to preserve. He took seven years, until 1919, three years before his premature death, to finish the play. The Dybbuk is an early version of a mash-up, layering, in one work, a variety of found elements. Many scholars believe that it’s this aspect of the play that accounts for the fact that, alone among the thousands of plays produced by Yiddish theatre companies in the old and new worlds, The Dybbuk was the most often performed, translated, cited, and adapted. It has been adapted as opera, ballet, puppet shows, modern dance, film, and still inspires works of all kinds.

Meanwhile, back in L.A., at that audition, I did Chanon’s tortured monologue during which his Kabbalistic meditations are interrupted by the news that Leah, his beloved – to whom he has spoken only once – has been betrothed to a young man from an extremely wealthy family. Hearing this, Chanon sinks into despair, but then, surprisingly, is catapulted into an ecstatic vision of union with his beloved–his ultimate vindication–and dies.

I’d been trying to understand the work of the Polish visionary of the theater, Jerzy Grotowski, for a few years by then, without the benefit of any actual teacher of that extreme, intensely physical approach to the actor’s training. But that didn’t stop me from having my own ideas of what Mr. G. meant by his opaque formulations. As best as I can recall, I did parts of the monologue while moving into various yoga-like body shapes culminating with a standing bridge in which I bent myself backwards like a bow, supported by my hands and feet, pelvis aimed at the sky. Very hard to speak with any coherence in that stressful a position, but I must have thought it was expressive of either anguish or ecstasy or both. Fortunately Hirsch wasn’t there. Gordon Davidson, the Artistic Director of the Taper whose tenure would last around 40 years but was, at that time, about 15 years into his tenure, was running the auditions. Hirsch would arrive for call backs. When Gordon mercifully asked me to stop, he said nothing other than complimenting me on the ethnic shirt I was wearing.

I’ll save for another posting the flash-forwards to several meetings with Jerzy Grotowski himself, the last of which was in an all night diner on the Pacific Coast Highway near Irvine, where he was teaching at the University of California, which he gleefully referred to in his heavy Polish accent as “Planyet of the Apes!”

Gordon Davidson must have really liked my shirt. I was called back for The Dybbuk, this time to read for John Hirsch. In the meantime, I finished reading the play and was struck by a story that a character called the Messenger tells the audience in the middle of the play. I later discovered that it was a fragment from The Seven Beggars, one of thirteen tales considered sacred by the followers of Nakhman of Bratzlav, who first spoke them in a trance, in Yiddish, while his scribe Nathan wrote them down and later translated them into Hebrew. The fragment, called The Heart of the World and the Clear Spring is a lyrical parable about the way time is created from unrequited longing. The story conflates erotic and spiritual love in the same way that the entire play does, tapping a current that as always run deep in the Jewish collective psyche. The Messenger character was rumored to have been added by Ansky at the suggestion of Stanislavski who read a Russian version that Ansky had written.

At the call back, I remember asking John Hirsch if I could read the Messenger’s story. I think he said no. I don’t remember what I did read. But I recall his large and sad eyes, and I recall wanting to tell him something about the feelings that had been stirred up in me after reading the Heart of the World story. At the time I did not know John Hirsch had been born in Hungary in 1930 and had somehow survived the slaughter – in one year – of half the Jewish population, late in the war. He’d been adopted by Canadian Jews after the war. He said that he was going to cast a number of Canadian actors who had been in his previous production of the play. A few days later, I was offered a very small part as one of the layabouts in the synagogue. On my agents’ advice, I turned it down. Nor did I manage to see the production at the Taper. But I began reading all I could about Nakhman of Bratzlav.

photos from top of section: S. Ansky [2nd from L. with Yiddish authors]; the legendary Habima production of The Dybbuk; TJT's 1989 production of Bruce Myers' Dybbuk for 2 actors w. Corey and Sarah Fry; TJT's 2004 production of same, w. Karine Koret and Keith Davis. Last photo by Ken Freidman; others unknown.

reb zalman of naropa

Shortly after my Dybbuk audition in LA, I found myself at a Northern California retreat center taking a workshop with one Rabbi Zalman Schacher-Shaomi, a unique figure in the annals of American Jewish life. Reb Zalman is now known as the “Zeyde of the Jewish Renewal Movement.”

[He] was born in Zholkiew, Poland, in 1924. Raised largely in Vienna, his family was forced to flee the Nazi oppression in 1938. Settling in Brooklyn, young Zalman enrolled in the yeshiva of the Lubavitcher Hasidim. He was ordained by Lubavitch in 1947. He later received his Master of Arts degree in the Psychology of Religion in 1956 from Boston University and a Doctor of Hebrew Letters degree from Hebrew Union College in 1968.[2]

He left the Lubavitch world, studied with Trappists, yogis, Buddhists and Sufis and became a bridge between traditional Hasidism and contemporary Jews who were seeking a more vital spiritual connection and community than what they found in mainstream American synagogues. At the end of the workshop, I told Reb Zalman that I had a vague idea that I might someday do something that would bring together my Jewish identity with my longing to create theatre that would have the spiritual power of religious experience. He said that conventional ways of bringing Yiddishkeit to life were exhausted and the arts were the only path left for Judaism to take if it were to survive in America. He thought a new Jewish theatre would be a fine idea.

But before I would take Reb Zalman’s implicit and simple suggestion, some years elapsed, that in hindsight seem to have been a preparation for the task of creating a theatre that didn’t yet exist. But, at the time, without benefit of hindsight, they were pretty depressing.

From about 1966 to 1976, in spite of my growing passion for theatre, I chased Hollywood’s version of success. Whether I succeeded or not, though, there was a price. To get work in the “industry” requires a lot of auditioning, and, as Joe Chaikin would later put it, even when I’d gotten a job, it became an audition for the next one. That’s how it works. And worse, I found myself becoming addicted to the rush of getting the part, winning, being wanted, being chosen, having something special to tell my parents who, between them had many years of unlived life in the theatre that I had been born to redeem. All right, I’m exaggerating, But as an only child I had no help in supplying them with the small successes that gave them so much pleasure it shamed me.

vancouver: crow

One year when work seemed to be drying up, I decided to leave it all behind and start a new life in Vancouver, B.C. – Canada. I’d spent almost four months there shooting McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the last of the three Robert Altman films that I was in. While there, I got to know some young theatre people from the area and in the following year, as work in L.A dried up, I accepted an invitation to help lead a summer workshop in Gestalt Therapy and the Arts on a farm on Vancouver Island.

Before I left L.A., I discovered a book-length poem cycle called Crow by Ted Hughes. Crow was part bird, part archetype – a deformed godling who has animal drives, human foibles and spiritual longings. I was drawn to Hughes, in spite of the reputation he had been tarred with by dintof his having been married to Sylvia Plath when she took her life, because he had recently worked with Peter Brook in Iran, creating a new language of primal. Brook and his actors used this language, called Orghast, in the wildly ambitious project based on the myth of Prometheus that they performed at the ruins of Persepolis in 1971. I read that they also studied an ancient Persian language, older than Farsi, called Avesta, and that one Jewish actor had incorporated some texts in Hebrew into the work. I read everything I could find about the project. Perhaps I knew, in a deeper way than I was aware of, that the powerful currents that ran through Orghast would, in time, touch my own life. Then I discovered this other work by Ted Hughes as I was packing to leave L.A. for good, or so I thought then. I stuck it in a duffel and forgot about it.

On Vancouver Island, as that long, intense but good-natured summer of group therapy, bio-energetics, music-making, theatre games, began to wind down, I found the slim volume of Hughes’ poetry and began to read it and then read it again. And again. It was a spare enough work to be able to do that kind of close reading. As I did, I saw that it would be possible to arrange a sequence of the poems as a narrative of Crow’s birth, childhood, initiations, lessons, failures, transformations, eventual death and possible rebirth. During my last days on the farm, I spent as much time as I could in the barn, finding my way though these texts in movement, working the language in my voice until I found a score I could repeat, a score that held Crow’s story.

In Vancouver, in the fall and winter, I found two actors, a director, a cellist and a place to rehearse on Granville Street, at the time, Vancouver’s skid row. I’d take the bus everyday from the big house I lived in with a wonderful group of young architects and social workers, one of whom was a former American war resister who had reinvented himself as a Canadian youth advocate. We lived at the far edge of the bohemian Kitsilano neighborhood, and the bus ride took me over the Burrard Inlet, to downtown Vancouver. Once, in the midst of a snowy winter, I walked from our house across the Burrard Bridge to Stanley Park on the western tip of the city and spent the day observing crows strutting and hopping, black against white,

After three or four months of concentrated work, expanding, elaborating and in some cases, jettisoning parts of my solo score, we had a coherent, funny-scary-sad piece of highly physical, ensemble theatre, for three actors and cello. I “played” Crow, the other two actors, Alex Daikun and Liz Murphy, who had both been in McCabe, played everyone and everything else and Suellen Primost improvised a cello score that acted as a non-verbal commentary on the story. We premiered Crow at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the city’s central art museum, as part of a sound sculpture show that was being curated by John Grayson, a sound-sculptor who co-directed the Gestalt farm on the Island.

The day after our premiere – which we thought went extremely well since we had gotten through it without serious mishap or missed cues and the audience had responded with genuine enthusiasm – we received a review in one of Vancouver’s two major dailies that dismissed us as yahoos who did nothing but obscure Hughes’ wonderful poems and suggested that a simple reading of the poems would be a much better idea than whatever we thought we were doing. A couple of weeks later, the reviewer from the other paper caught up with us as we toured around Vancouver and its suburbs (with one cross-province run out to the interior of British Columbia). He gave us a rave, praising our ensemble work, our risk-taking and our talent.

It was the first validation of my instincts, my vision, if you will, that I’d received. At the same time, I understood, on some level at least, that it wasn’t my “little” self that was responsible, happy as it would be to claim all the credit In fact, it had everything to do with a confluence of elements – the powerful text by Ted Hughes that offered so much to the imagination, body and voice; the willingness, energy and talent of Alex, Liz, Suellen and Gary Pogrow who directed; a process that allowed each of us a voice in the making of the piece; venues where we could perform and audiences who accepted our offering. Though I had experienced ensemble work before this, mainly in an improvisational group in L.A., this was the first sustained effort with a group of like-minded artists that I had undertaken.

It was also my first experience in completing a work of homemade theatre. In my room in Kitsilano, I drew the posters and program covers, I wrote letters to get possible bookings for the show, I corresponded with Ted Hughes’ agent and sister, Olwyn, who was not very pleased to hear what I was doing without her permission. Fortunately, in those pre-internet, pre-fax days, communication across the Atlantic was slow and by the time her displeasure reached us, we had closed the show and had no further plans to perform.

In the weeks after Crow ended, I grew restless again. No one among the actors I knew was ready to initiate new work. With no project and no relationship, Vancouver began to seem less generous. I developed a case of viral pneumonia. While recovering, I had a telephone call from an agent I’d known in L.A. Could I fly down to audition for a TV movie-of-the-week? Not likely, since I didn’t have the airfare. He called back. Seemed that some of the movie was going to be shot in Vancouver and the producer and director were in town at that very moment scouting locations. I was given the name of a hotel in the West End and showed up, guitar in hand, the next day. The role was a drop-out rabbinical student-guitar player in a folk rock trio fronted by the male lead. I met George Eckstein, the producer, known for having given the young Steven Spielberg his first job, directing Dennis Weaver in The Duel, a legendary TV movie, and Joe Sargent, the veteran TV director who had started in the halcyon years of live TV drama. I read a scene, played and sang a song of my own, and got the part.

drawing by Leonard Baskin from Crow

the open theater

Around 1975, I finally saw the Open Theatre, an avant-garde theatre ensemble from New York founded by Joseph Chaikin, that I”d been reading about, with longing, for ten years, in The Tulane Drama Review and an occasional New York Times review. I sensed that of all the legendary companies in the world – Peter Brook’s CIRT, Odin Teatret, The Polish Lab Theatre, Mnouchkine’s Theatre de Soleil – it was the Open Theatre that I recognized, intuitively, as the one closest to my heart.

They were touring the country for the last time. Joe had decided it was time for the company to disband. At one point in the sixties, at the time of their early success with The Serpent, an exploration of the story of Adam and Eve created in a collaborative process with playwright Jean Claude Van Itallie, the group had swelled to forty or so members. By this time, though, there were only eight performers in the company. I saw Terminal, the oldest work still being performed, built around human responses to the idea of death and dying; The Mutation Show, a dream cabaret of life as transformation, full of sly, non-verbal humor. Nightwalk, the last work they had created, on sleep.

I saw them at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the last stop on their last tour. At the time, I was working on a new play by Harvey Perr, a wonderful and very original playwright whose work garnered some off- and off-off-Broadway attention for a while but, sadly, slipped off the so-called radar. Harvey, most recently, has been working as an actor. Harvey knew Joe well so I hoped to meet him and the company members in Santa Barbara.

The images from the Open Theatre that have stayed with me for thirty-five years are the kind Peter Brook talks about in The Empty Space: “The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell – a picture.” They are: The leaning planks in Terminal against which actors would lie, strangely tilted; the square black patches that adhered to one actor’s mouth, another’s eye, as an emblem of the dead; Shami Chaikin, Joe’s sister, who had always acted in Joe’s projects, singing Ani Mamin, a prayer said to have been sung in cattle cars and gas chambers, in absolute stillness; Paul Zimet and Tina Shepherd in The Mutation Show, moving constantly in a signature shuffle, as they pushed an empty frame on wheels. Ray Barry waltzing with only his pectoral muscles, one two three, left pec, right pec, right pec.

photo above: The Serpent by Jean-Claude Van Itallie and The Open Theater, their earliest major work.

how I changed my life

After another year of unsatisfying TV and film work that I took only for the money I was thoroughly depressed. No theatre project that I had gotten involved with ever came close to fruition because, inevitably, one or more of us would leave to do some paying work. To be an actor in L.A. meant putting the “industry” first. Theatre was what you did between jobs. Then I got a call from The Provisional Theater, a politically engaged ensemble whose edgy and outspoken work I had admired since they had split off from another experimental group to focus on anti-war theater. Some members had left and they needed some new actors to help create a new piece, work into an older one and tour the country. They asked for an initial commitment of six months after which, we’d discuss whether I would stay on.

I’ll tell you about that life-changing tour another time. I came back to L.A. after two months on the road, performing in fifteen cities, universities and festivals, and after burning my bridge to a continuing career in Hollywood by saying no to Stephen Spielberg who had offered me a very small role in his very big movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To have accepted the job would have meant leaving the Provisional stuck in Knoxville, Tennessee unable to perform. I had central parts in both plays and no understudy. The loss of fees would have had a dire effect on the company. My agents were very disappointed in me. Actors did not say no to Spielberg in their world. But I was no longer living in their world. And yet, though I loved the people in the Provisional and respected their work enormously, I knew that I hadn’t found my artistic home.

While I was trying to figure out what to do next, I got wind of a workshop with Joe Chaikin that the Mark Taper Forum was sponsoring for a select group of actors. The format was that of a master class in which only a handful of actors would have a chance to actually work on their feet with Joe while all the rest watched. I found a friend with an extra ticket to the invitation-only event. He said that he’d heard Joe wanted people to bring in scenes or monologues from the “classics” which for him included the Greeks, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett and Brecht.

I was staying with another friend since I had no idea whether I’d be staying in L.A. or finding another place tin which to be confused. Browsing her bookshelf for “classics” I came across a paperback copy of Oedipus Rex, not by Sophocles, the Greek, but by Seneca, the Roman. I knew nothing about this version. But I knew it was a good bet for me when I saw that the translation from the Latin was by none other than Ted Hughes. It had been commissioned by Peter Brook who had directed it at the National Theatre in London with Sir John Gielgud in the title role. It was on my friend’s shelf because her ex-husband’s painting was used as the cover of the paperback.

I memorized the central monologue of the piece: a servant acting as messenger gives an account, directly to the audience, of what Oedipus did when he heard the terrible truth about his own identity.

The workshop was held outdoors at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, a poured concrete venue that replaced a wooden one that was built in the 1920s as the home for a Christian “Pilgrimage Play,” it’s now owned by L.A. County. It seats over a thousand. But on the first morning of the workshop only the first couple of rows of concrete benches were filled. I knew more than a few of the two hundred or so actors, writers, directors, casting directors and even an agent or two. Some of the actors were close to achieving full celebrity status. Others were there hoping to be noticed by the casting people or the agents. In this town, actors can never stop auditioning. It was late August, sunny and hot but the location of Playhouse in the Cahuenga Pass meant that steady breezes kept the heat and smog from settling in.

“Who would like to, uh, come up and work?” Joe said in a voice that managed to be hesitant and resonant at the same time. There was a pause. No one moved. I was aware of a strange silence in my mind. Without telling myself to volunteer or to not volunteer, I watched myself raise my hand. Joe nodded at me and I got up and walked onto the stage, wondering if Joe remembered me from the handful of words we’d exchanged in Santa Barbara. I felt detached from the voices in my mind who were accusing me of unbridled chutzpah that I would surely be punished for. How dare I, who wasn’t even a bona fide Taper-invited up and comer, usurp this opportunity to work with this legend from New York?

I told Joe and the audience what I was working on and began, assuming Joe would stop me after a few lines and reveal something crucial that I had missed.

But he did not stop me. Hughes’ stark phrases pulled themselves out of me like living things, out of my insides, up my esophagus, out my mouth. I felt as if I was standing a step behind or to the side of myself, watching this story that I was telling happen. I was aware of two presences, one that belonged to Oedipus, the other to the persona telling his story who was not entirely me.

When I finished. There was silence for what seemed like a long time. Then, Joe asked me to do it again.

Later, I think, Joe, who was sweating in spite of the breezes and wore sunglasses that hid his wide-open blue eyes, spoke about the possibilities that open up when the actor becomes a storyteller. Rather than treating me as a student who needed “correction” or repair, he addressed me as a fellow seeker who shared a curiosity about this phenomena that had just occurred, as it happened, in my body and voice. I must have been in some kind of trance. I remember almost none of the content of anything he said, only that I was experiencing a raft of unnamable feeling-thought-perceptions.

During the next four days of the workshop he asked me to do the monologue several more times. Again, he had little to “teach” in any conventional way, but continued to offer reflections on the nature of story, on the storyteller/actor’s movements between different kinds of time, between different places, sometimes being in more than one place at the same time. He was modeling something, I knew. A stance of radical inquiry, a way of deconstructing what acting is in order to rebuild it with a new understanding.

Each time I let that story/language/imagery come out of me during those days at the Pilgrimage I felt that I was in the presence of the sacred. To some extent it came from the emergence of that primal story from my body. But the particular quality of Joe’s attention, and the experience of being its recipient, that was what evoked the numinous.

When the workshop ended. I waited outside a cluster of people all eager to connect with Joe and when I found an opening I asked him whether he had any plans to teach anywhere near by in the future where I might be able to do some more work with him.

He said that I could come work with him in New York the following winter in a laboratory/workshop he was putting together. “There isn’t a lot of money…” he stammered slightly, surprisingly shy when he wasn’t addressing the large group, “I mean, there isn’t any money to… you’d have to get to New York, you see, but there will be some, you know, funding – to pay people. Not a lot, but…”

When he stopped, I asked him to repeat what he had just said since I was sure I hadn’t heard him correctly. He did, and I understood that, yes, I had heard: I was being invited to come to New York and being offered money to work with Joseph Chaikin.

The joy of that moment was utterly new to me. People, friends, were coming up to me to ask what Joe had said to me. I mumbled something about The Winter Project as it would be called. It would take me a few years to understand the true source of the joy. I had been seen. I had been recognized as someone whom I did not yet know. All I did know was that at age 31, I was finally going to New York.

[1] My role in TJT has changed fundamentally in the past year (2009) from full-time involvement in all aspects of the company’s life to an intermittent, project-to-project relationship, with the leadership of TJT now in the very capable hands of Aaron Davidman and Sara Schwartz Geller. Artist and Executive Directors, respectively. Another way of marking the changes in the company has been its change of name from Traveling Jewish Theatre to The Jewish Theatre San Francisco, thus retaining the initials by which it is increasingly more known, TJT.

[2] http://www.rzlp.org/index.cfm?objectid=1AC7523B-D612-00A6-AD2660515C50079B (The website that supports Reb Zalman's work)

Here is a short linked bibliography for further reading on:

The Dybbuk and John Hirsch

Tormented Master by Arthur Green, a psychological biography of Nachman of Bratzlav

Joseph Chaikin's evocative (and only) book, The Presence of the Actor

An Acrobat of the Heart, Stephen Wangh's brilliant and practical elucidation of the processes developed by Jerzy Grotowski

Crow by Ted Hughes

Orghast at Persepolis by A.C.H. Smith, an account of Peter Brook's 1971 international experiment.

To Be Continued

Read This Book!

2010-01-17T15:43:00.000-08:00

I feel compelled, as never before compelled by a book, even before I finish reading it, to shout, especially to my male friends who, like so many American men, do not read fiction, you must read this book immediately! I’m talking about A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias.

In brilliant and transparent prose, Yglesias[1] fearlessly explores his own life as a husband, a stumbling young lover, as a devoted caretaker to a dying wife, as a man full of rage and helplessness and as a writer. Here’s one of the many paragraphs that made my heart stop:

“And in that paralyzed silence, he realized that ther was something in his brain which -- despite all the hours spentlearning about survival rates and the nature of metastasis, despite closely watching his father die of prostate cancer -- he hadn't known he would lose, this something in his head that had been present since Bernard Weinstein rang his doorbell twenty-nin years ago. In this silence of her silent, flowing tears, he realized that it was something essential which soon would be gonem and that it was more than simply the expectation that Margaret would stay alive. He had no word for it. A note of music, perhaps it was his name being called, something he didn't always enjoy, something he had grabbed for rescue, something he had possessed with pleasure, something he had resented with anger. In the carpeted silence of this luxury room of disease, he felt it depart for a moment, a preview of his robbed future, and he understood that this was real in a way nothing should ever be real, that their marriage was a mystery he was going to lose, despite twenty-seven years living inside it, before he understood who they were.”

If time allowed, I would have inhaled this book in one reading. Instead, I find myself stealing moments that turn into hours, standing in hallways or at the kitchen table when I should be washing up and getting back to work, transfixed by one devastating recognition after another. I’ve been married the same length of time as Enrique, though, kinehora[2], my wife is healthy. Like Enrique, I could not believe my overwhelming good fortune in winning a beautiful, accomplished and loving woman, though I had to wait until I was almost forty. Enrique meets Margaret in his early twenties. By alternating chapters telling the story of their meeting and courtship in the “bankrupt New York” of the seventies, with chapters set in the novel’s present time of 2004, days before Margaret’s death from bladder cancer, Yglesias has found an ideal narrative structure that allows the reader enough relief from the inevitable arc of loss to keep reading what otherwise might be unbearable. Instead, by moving back and forth in time, he gives us a prismatic view of two lives growing together like wisteria and roses and coming apart as any living being eventually must.

Perhaps I’ll return to this after I finish reading the book, but my admiration, appreciation and sense that this book is answering questions that I had not known how to even ask, prevent me from waiting to post this.

[1] Rafael Yglesias is a half Jewish, half Cuban and Spanish novelist and screenwriter who, like the protagonist of A Happy Marriage, Enrique Sabas, dropped out of school when he was sixteen to write his first novel. He stands in the middle of three generations of writers. His parents were Helen and José Yglesias both noted novelists and non-fiction writers who were also part of New York’s left-wing literary culture for many years. His son Matthew is a writer and highly respected blogger on politics and his younger son Nicholas is also a novelist.

[2] Yiddish. Literally, a compressed pronounciation of the sentence: Keyn ayn hara, “No evil eye” used as a magical defense against bad fortune when the possibility of future good fortune or catrastrophe is mentioned

The Tzaddik from Montreal

2009-11-26T10:19:00.000-08:00

The Leonard Cohen concert in San Jose, on November 13, was one of the best musical performances I've ever seen/heard in my life. Actually, it was of a whole different order. Here's this seventy five year old man who sings, with only one break, for 3 hours, incredibly complex music with a band of nine consummate musicians and singers, and often, in the course of a song, sinks to a position where he's seated on his heels singing his heart out like Jolson, sometimes to the audience and sometimes to one of the musicians, having a deep conversation with whomever he's with, in musical phrases. Then, he rises fluidly, in one motion on those 75 year old knees, moving like a cat. An old cat, but still... He literally skipped on and of stage several times and constantly, humbly, with no artifice, thanked the audience (after intermission he thanked us for hanging in and not falling under the influence of "my songs which are allegedly so depressing.")

He introduced the band once in each half of the show, bowing in Zen Buddhist-inflected reverence before each one’s considerable skill and talent. He gave each one a “title.” Dino Soldo, the reed player is “The Master of Breath,” Bob Metzger, legendary studio guitarist is “The Architect of the Arpeggio.” Javier Mas, a string player from Barcelona is the “Shepherd of Strings” and drummer Rafael Gayol is the “High Priest of Precision.” He honored Sharon Robinson, his collaborator for the last 10 years or so, who has written the music for many of his recent songs, and who sings gloriously, with an extended solo version of Boogie Street. Belying its title, the song starts with a heart-rending, gospel-influenced, a capella verse. He also gave the angelic Webb sisters, who, with Ms Robinson form his impeccable back-up chorus, a song of their own. Accompanying themselves on guitar and Irish harp, they had thousands in tears with If it be your Will one of L. Cohen’s most nakedly spiritual songs.

The audience of 10,000 or so at the HP Pavilion ran from young fashionista types to old Jewish types like me with a full range in between. The common factor was the universal appreciation for the man and his music which very often reached levels of collective joy.

Generous, funny, self-deprecating, gallant, graceful, knowing, beautiful, inspiring. The concert may have permanently altered a few of my neurons, in a good way. He is a bona fide Tzaddik. (Heb. a holy person; a spiritual leader similar to the Buddhist notion of the Bodhisattva, one who places the spiritual health of the community above his or her own personal enlightenment.)

My attendance was a gift from my dear friend Jonathan Greenberg, a renaissance man if there ever was one, and an equally serious fan of L.C.

You can buy most of the individual songs from the set on iTunes or at Amazon or get the entire Live In London on CD or as a DVD, (which I have yet to see). You can also hear a typically haimish (Yiddish: down home, personal, real) Terry Gross interview with il Maestro here.

Van Jones, Obama Adviser, Resigns Amid Controversy

2009-09-05T22:55:00.001-07:00

I'm very sad that the Obama administration did not stand up for Van Jones. His appointment was one of many hopeful signs I was so grateful for in the exciting times around the inauguration. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't understand why the President and all of us who support him are allowing the demagogues like Beck and his ilk to call the shots by seizing the narrative. Now is the time for all progressives to unite and reject the racist, cynical, hate-filled manipulations coming from a handful of distorted egos like Beck, Limbaugh and the rest. There's no way, in spite of Van's elegant resignation comments, that the the Becks of the world won't see this as their righteous little victory and continue looking for inconsequential but inflammatory factoids they can use to pick off another good person.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Paralleling

2009-05-21T00:59:00.000-07:00

Note: I’ve recently published the latest issue of Musing on the Muse. In it you can find links to the works discussed in this post. [go]

I have been living three parallel lives, it seems. I’m not even sure if parallel is the right word to describe the relationship of the three very different places I’ve been inhabiting these days.

First, there’s the so-called everyday or “real” world which, right now is dominated by economics even more than usual. In this world commentators struggle to name the condition the United States and hence most of the world is in. A recession? A depression? Merely a crisis or a melt-down (these last two have the implied benefit of being brief and temporary conditions). Lately, some of the professional namers seem to have settled on “The Great Recession” which, I think, is pretty depressing. Whatever you call it, the poor are poorer, the wealthy are distressed and the middle classes are in shock, panicking and grieving the death of their honorable, American dreams (no irony intended) of home ownership, limitless education for their children and a long, dignified retirement, or regretting the bad counsel they all-too-willingly believed and the indulgences they were given no reason to deny themselves.

Next is the world of Budapest in the year 1944 when the Germans finally invaded and, making up for lost time, set new records for speed and efficiency in achieving their final solution. In a mater of weeks they exterminated three hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. My point of entry to this world is a play I’m writing, inspired by a short piece of non-fiction by Irvin Yalom, who’s known to many as the accomplished author of several novels and collections of short stories and as an eminent psychiatrist who has authored seminal works on group therapy and existential psychology. The material he asked me to adapt for the stage is about his friendship with Dr. Robert Berger which began in the fifties when both were students in the Medical School of Bastion University. Berger, who went on to become one of the world’s great cardiac surgeons, was born in Hungary in 1929. After his family was taken by the Germans in 1944, He escaped from a group that was waiting for trains that would take them to a concentration camp and spent the rest of the war underground. Forged identity papers let him pass as “Aryan” while he worked in in the Jewish Resistance. He was fifteen. In 1947, after a couple of years in displaced persons camps in Europe, he came to the U.S. as a refugee. He put himself through Harvard by working construction and getting scholarships before starting med school.

The Holocaust came late to Hungary. Because the country had allied itself with Hitler’s Germany when the war began, It had not been invaded or occupied until the last year of the war, when elements in the government tried to make a separate peace with the allies. The Hungarian Fascist government that took over, the Nyilas or, “Arrow Cross” are said to have outdone the German Nazis in violence. rapacity, and delight in random murder. Fortunately they were only in power for a few months before the war ended.

I feel honored by Dr. Berger’s willingness to tell me his stories as I write the play. Since he lives in Boston our talks have been by phone. Both he and Irv are amazing men. I need to resist going on at length about their friendship and Robert’s story. I’ll just say that the precipitating event in Irv Yalom’s story and the play I’m writing is a new desire of Robert’s to finally tell his story. During the last sixty five years, he has maintained a nearly complete silence about his life in Hungary. But not too long ago, an unusual and surprising experience triggered a flood of memories, and he turned to his old friend for guidance in forging a relationship to them.

When I listen to Robert. I’m keenly aware that I’m listening to one of the last witnesses to that world-engulfing phenomenon that is still so hard to talk about, write about or imagine. This has prompted me to look at the fact that I’ve been relating to the Shoah [1] one way or another for many years. Perhaps because I’m an American Jew born in 1945 just weeks after the official “liberation” of Auschwitz or for reasons less knowable, I’ve not been able to avoid it for very long. Having committed myself as an artist to material connected to the Jewish imagination, its shadow is unavoidable.

At one point, Robert suggested I read Fateless a novel by a Hungarian author, Imre Kertesz, who is the same age he is. First I saw the film by Lajos Koltai from a screenplay by Kertesz, who was the 2002 Nobel laureate in literature.

It just might be the most powerful film about the Shoah ever made. Both the film and the novel bring a shockingly fresh approach to the experience of a 14 year old, middle-class, extremely assimilated Hungarian Jew without any sort of Jewish identity before his descent into Auschwitz, Buchenwald and a small slave labor camp.

Probably the most unusual element of both film and book is Kertesz’ refusal of all received ideas, all clichés about suffering and victimhood. Like Israeli author David Grossman whose masterpiece, See Under: Love I adapted for the stage ten years ago, Kertesz refuses to sacralize the Shoah, to treat it with the reverence and piety that overlay so many worthy yet ultimately deadening works about it. This allows Kertesz and Koltai to admit the possibility of happiness and beauty even in the deepest layers of hell.

There is a moment in the film when inmates of the slave-labor camp, in striped uniforms and caps are forced to stand in “roll-call” formation for a horribly long and painful time. Koltai places his camera behind and above the prisoners with the entire group of about fifty or a hundred visible. The camera hardly moves for a vary long time. There is mist or fog. After a while various prisoners can no longer keep still and begin to sway, very slightly. As the swaying spreads, stops, starts again, I could not help but be moved by the ethereal beauty of the human movements which had the same ineffable quality as the movement of trees. At the same time, the raw brutality of the situation remained present. The ability to hold both truths in a single image is the sign of artistic mastery that, in this case, is ruthlessly free of ego, polemic, or any hint of inflation. The same mastery exists in Kertesz’ writing. An example, after the boy is back in Budapest just after the war’s end:

But one shouldn’t exaggerate, as this is precisely the crux of it: I am here. And I am well aware that I shall accept any rationale as the price for being able to live. Yes, as I looked around this placid, twilit square, this street, weather-beaten yet full of a thousand promises, I was already feeling a growing and accumulating readiness to continue my uncontinuable life. My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should be an engineer, a doctor or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey, like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak up about that, the happiness of the concentration camps.

If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don’t forget.

After watching Fateless, I thought about the times I’ve heard myself and Jewish friends say that we’d burned out on the Holocaust, the Shoah, not even knowing what to call it any more. We had studied it, researched different aspects of it. Seen every film about it from Night and Fog to Schindler’s List, laughed at Woody Allen’s neurotic, Holocaust-obsessed persona, hoped that the lessons of the Shoah would make genocide unthinkable and agonized over every new replay of “ethnic cleansing” of madness in Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, where it kept happening anyway; agonized over the Israeli refusal to let go of the Shoah as the justification for their own brutality only to be confronted with elements of the Muslim world embracing Holocaust denial and nineteenth century anti-Semitic screeds that had been discredited for over a century ago while Hindu nationalists in India started book clubs to discuss the management principles for success outlined in Mein Kampf and progressives, people of the left, in Europe and the Americas, with whom I've always identified, were responding to Israel's overwhelming use of force in Gaza with language that seemed to cross some invisible line into, once again, anti-Semitism.

Even so, I thought, after watching Fateless, continuing to contemplate the endless stream of suffering and madness, selflessness and courage that flows from that fissure in the middle of the twentieth century and allowing it to work its way through my imagination seems to be part of my job description for this incarnation. [more about Fateless from NPR]

Way back in the first paragraph I said I was living in three parallel worlds. The third is the newest. A few weeks ago, a health-care practitioner I know hired me as a creative guide and mentor to work with a young man in his care who is being treated for various cognitive, emotional, and substance abuse disorders. I’m being purposely vague in the name of confidentiality. The relevant part right now is how powerful an experience it has been to spend time with a young man so brilliant, aware, sensitive, multi-talented and so lost. I can remember all too well my own lost years at the same age, in my early twenties, and how much I longed for guidance. Whether it was less available then or I just didn’t know where to look I’ll never know. But I catch myself feeling, now and then, when spending time with this young man, that I’m actually able to live the fantasy, that I know many of us share, of being able to time travel and offer reassurance to my younger self that, more or less, things will improve. I’m sure the therapy industry has a term for this. Something like positive-counter-transference maybe.

So here I am, living richly and fully in a couple of different centuries (and I said nothing about my wife, son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren who are another huge part of the collage) while, from a narrow economic perspective we’re all supposed to be teetering on the edge of the abyss. What I can’t figure out, when it comes to the economy is: how much of the enormous losses of recent months are related to what we could all agree has real value, and how much of this panic is in the realm of consensual unreality? But I’ve never really understood what money really is once it gets very far from its origin as a way to make bartering a little easier.

[1] Shoah is the Hebrew word for catastrophe that many prefer to Holocaust which carries, in its etymology, a sense of sacrifice and offering which the extermination of Jews, Gays, Roma, the deformed and mentally ill and Communists was definitely not.

art and last two photographs: corey fischer; others from Fateless

Singing Makes me Happier than Worrying

2009-02-23T23:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve stopped listening to the radio when I drive. As much as I enjoy Terry Gross and Ira Glass on NPR, I realized that by automatically turning on the radio each time I get in the car, I was overloading myself with proliferating iterations of the bad news I’d already gotten from the NY Times website earlier in the day.

So lately, I either listen to KCSM, the jazz station for the Bay Area, nurturing my new appreciation of a kind of music I never paid much attention to in the past, or I make my own music. If you’ve been reading musing for a while, you know about the song-story-poems I’ve been writing and recording. Recently I burned a CD of some rhythm tracks I had made on my computer so I could improvise with some back-up as I drove. Indeed, this makes me happier than listening to people tell me more things to worry about . *

In a similar vein, I tried something new a while back when I went hiking with a friend. After we’d walked and talked for a while, I asked him if he’d like to do a little free-form vocal improvising while we walked. This particular friend, Evan, is also an improviser so it wasn’t a big leap. Yet, it wasn’t something we’d ever done together outside the studio. One of us started a repeating, rhythmic pattern and the other joined it and after a while, transformed it. And so it went, walking, breathing, listening, feeling the vibrations of voice and the solidity of the ground under our feet, the movement of air that carried our voices. We weren’t trying to make anything in particular, there was no way to make a “mistake.” In improvisation, what might elsewhere we considered a mistake becomes an opening into a new exploration of tone or rhythm. The only real mistake is to stop listening.

For me these are two examples of living the change I want to happen. I feel myself - and sense in others - a longing to balance the insane amount of busy/work/more/overload! imperatives that we live under with activities that are older and healthier, that unfold as we unfold, as we take time to notice our breath and our bodies. That’s why I do workshops and theatre and music and play with rhymes and rhythms. But I find a new desire to make the borders between Art and Not-Art more permeable and bring the attitude of serious play that we cultivate in the studio and rehearsal hall into the rest of life. It comes naturally when I 'm with my grandchildren; it can be embarrassing when we do it with each other. But if I stay with it, the awkwardness soon fades and the pleasure, the joy and the connections grow. And whatever catastrophe I thought I had to prevent by keeping endlessly busy will not take place as a result.

* The offering this time is a sound mix. It's a rhythm track I made on the computer so you can try out what I describe above. Click here to try it. Instructions will be given.

And now, this issue's recommendations (all titles are links to more about the work):

I finally saw The Visitor (on DVD) and found it worth the wait. This compelling film by actor/writer/director Tom McCarthy builds quietly to a climax that left me disturbed, celebratory, sad and angry all in the same moment. Richard Jenkins, whom I've admired since noticing his work on Six Feet Under, deserved the Oscar nomination he got. He's a wonderfully subtle yet fully individuated actor. Also in the movie as a woman who. in lesser hands, might seem too good to be true, is the luminous Haim Abbas, a wonderful Palestinian actor who worked in Israel for years and is now based in Paris. The two younger actors, Palestinian and Senegalese, play unusual, complex people whose fierce love for each other, dignity and generosity are simple and natural elements of who they are and where they come from, and, ironically, are exactly what we North Americans desperately need. In the last frames of the film, all of that knowledge seems to radiate from Richard Jenkins's newly kinetic body.

I'm slowly working my way through The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon. I heard the author on the Moth, tell a story about a recent experience in Senegal taking part in a ritual put together for him by a village healer who uses traditional methods to heal depression. It was such a funny and vivid telling that I was drawn to read his magnum opus. As someone who has had my own troubles with the black dog, I was a little hesitant, but so far I find it anything but depressing. Solomon's willingness, his resolve to tell the truth of his own experience is salutary and his painstaking research into the history, the causes, treatments, symptoms, cultural responses to depression are tremendously informative and in de-stigmatizing the disease, comforting. I haven't finished reading it, but I already sense that anyone who deals with depression in any capacity, whether as someone who is vulnerable to it themselves or as someone who has to interact with depressed people, needs to read this book.

On a purely joyful note, I've been listening to music more than at any time since the sixties. No question that is has to do with the iPhone a friend gave me. I've been discovering a new world of terrific young singers that I enjoy in a big way. If you like downloading mp3 files, click the names. Otherwise, you can find CDs at the usual places. First, there's Hilary Kole who sings the most amazing version of What'll I Do that Irving Berlin could have ever hoped for. Another, better known, angel-voiced singer is Madeleine Peyroux, who at times, sounds uncannily like Billie Holliday, but with a persona and taste all her own. Her version of Dylan's You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go. is delightful and so is everything else I"ve heard her sing.

Finally, TJT's second production of the season opens this week. Pulitzer winner Donald Margulies's Model Apartment gives new meaning to the term dark humor. I'm not involved with this production with Naomi Newman in a central role, but I read the play when we were considering it and I found it both terrifying and side-splitting. I'm looking forward to opening night on Sunday, March 1 at 7PM at TJT. You can get tickets online through the JCC of San Francisco

I’ll be teaching an introductory 3-hour long workshop in Berkeley on Sunday, March 14 called Drop the Blocks that Stop You... It's a chance to get acquainted with your own creativity, usually a much more powerful ally than we expect; one that can give us the energy, the sense of play and hope that we so need in hard times. Appropriate for all levels of experience. $40 up to March 10, $50 after. Click logo at right to register or contact me if you have questions.

Next, I'll be teaching a six-week long class called Finding your Flow: Creativity 101 for Tamalpais Community Education at Tam High's theatre in Mill Valley on Monday nights, 7 to 9 PM, March 31 to May 11. No class on April 13. The cost is $180 and you can c lick to go to their website to register.

all photographs by corey

The Voice is a Ladder between Worlds

2008-09-12T00:43:00.000-07:00

I dreamed I was singing in harmony with a long-lost friend, our voices vibrating in the air that was both inside and outside of us. It was an ecstatic feeling, as such singing can be in waking life as well.

The dream led me to reflect on the truly mysterious attributes of the human voice. The dictionary lists 24 different meanings for the word, but let’s stay with the top two:

1. The sound or sounds uttered through the mouth; 2.The faculty or power of uttering sounds through the mouth by the controlled expulsion of air.

Through the activity of muscles, nerves and breath, our bodies make sound. Mouth, tongue, teeth, lips give this sound shape and texture. Its resonance comes from the empty spaces inside us, from the vibration of bones and flesh. In all its meanings, voice is invisible, and travels across space as wave forms that set in motion tiny pieces of bone and cartilage deep in our ears which, in turn, connect to our brains, nervous systems, bodies triggering a range of involuntary responses in the listener.

My first experiences of the numinous, as a child, came through hearing. Though I had only the most superficial and literal understanding of the central Jewish prayer, Sh’ma Yisroel… Listen, Israel, this force we call God, is indivisible, is One, I knew from experience that the sacred came to me through hearing human voices under certain circumstances.

Between the ages of eleven and nineteen, I went to a summer arts camp for kids and adults. My mother got an office job there to pay my tuition. My father worked on the maintenance crew and acted in The Taming of the Shrew one summer. I was introduced to theatre, graphic art, ceramics and music in open-air studios surrounded by pine trees whose resins melted in the dry summer heat releasing an odor that still comforts me whenever I smell it, over fifty years later.

The high point of the summers was the annual folk-music festival run by Pete Seeger. In those years that place must have been one of the few that would hire him, ignoring the blacklist which had been terrorizing the country. Hearing Pete Seeger sing the South African song of liberation, Wimoweh, with that falsetto African yodeling he did, stirred my insides and gave me goose bumps When he sang The Bells of Rhymney over the dark crashing chords of his 12 string guitar, something in me swelled and vibrated.

Then I heard blues for the first time. Pete brought Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry up to that Mountain enclave to perform and give workshops, Sonny’s whoops that would pick up his harmonica’s cries when they reached their peak disturbed me as, later, would the voices of Robert Johnson and Bukka White. Brownie’s deeper voice contained landscapes and textures, sun-warmed, smelling of earth and tobacco.

By the time I was fourteen I owned a number of Folkways archival anthologies of the old folk blues people from Mississippi and Texas and other places that might as well have been other planets, so far from my middle-class Southern California were they. Their singing was more raw and much less polite than anything my parents would listen to, and it was where I heard God.

I also heard and felt the sacred in the voice of the young, overweight cantor who taught me my portion of the Haftorah, the Prophets of the Hebrew bible, that I was learning for my Bar-Mitzvah. Irwin Halpern, in his twenties, already a husband and father, not much more than ten years my senior, must have been raised in an unassimilated enclave of traditional Jews. He had learned to sob out those modal melodies and intricate melismas that Eastern European cantors had refined over the centuries. There was something in me, very old, that responded passionately to Cantor Halpern’s channeling of these sounds. The same part that responded to Pete Seeger’s voice and Brownie’s and Sonny’s. Was it the minor third interval that George Gershwin recognized as one of the elements that Jewish and African-American music had in common? Their resonating bodies that focused and amplified their voices which rose directly from the ground? Whatever the connection, it was powerful and blew away the echoes of Pat Boone and Johnny Mathis whom I slow-danced to at parties.

At the same time that I was drinking in the blues, Appalachian ballads and black gospel, I carried a growing bag of shame and frustration over the fact that I couldn’t sing. I couldn’t sing. I was told by a succession of teachers from 4^th grade on to just mouth the words during the winter classroom choral events. I knew they were right. My “tone deaf”-ness had been confirmed when someone gave my father a tape recorder. They had just come on the market that year, 1954. I was nine. The microphone energized my father. He became playful in a way I’d rarely seen. I loved being with him like this. We spent hours singing old songs from the vaudeville shows he’d seen as a young man, and he’d imitate Danny Kaye and Spike Jones. I sang along and piped in with stuff I’d heard on the radio or the playground. This was before music had ever really stirred me the way it would in a couple more years. When my father played back the whole hour or so that we’d recorded, I was appalled. My father sounded pretty much the same as he had when we recorded. But I sounded nothing like the voice I imagined I was producing. What I heard was the weakly quavering voice of a little boy who had no idea what pitch and rhythm were.

I started playing guitar two years later, in the mountains. I still believed that I couldn’t sing. But gradually, my voice started to respond to the sounds of the guitar. The guitar began to teach me. It taught me how it felt to match my voice to its note and to let my voice move with its voice. I began to understand how it felt when I was “on” pitch, more or less in unison, as opposed to being off the note. I started letting myself sing along in groups. Down by the Riverside. This Land is Your Land. I met another kid in my high school who played guitar. He’d learned old cowboy songs from his grandfather and I played and sang along with him. Old Shep. Little Joe the Wrangler.

But I was a long way from trusting my voice. It hadn’t recovered from its delayed adolescent deepening and frequently went its own way, out of control.

Meanwhile I had decided that I wanted to be an actor. Up until then, I hadn’t articulated any particular choice of livelihood. As a six year old I’d passed through a scientist-president-cowboy phase and a writer phase and then forgot it all until a moment when I was ten or eleven and a character actress came into my parents’ cleaning store next to the rear entrance of Republic Studios (now, part of CBS) and chatted with my parents for a few minutes. And right then I knew I wanted to be an actor. I knew it deeply and fiercely though I had little idea of what an actor actually did.

I’ll skip forward a couple of decades during which I completed my secondary education, acted in some pretty dreary high school plays but had a great time playing Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus – up in the mountains – went through four frustrating years in the UCLA Theatre Arts Department with a year of education abroad in France, Spain and North Africa, embarked on a career as an actor in film and TV, got involved with improvisational and other kinds of experimental theatre and avoided going to New York or London which were the only places where there seemed to be a chance of actually getting some real training.

The only training I had received was conventional. At UCLA, it amounted to an incoherent hodgepodge of received wisdom from the “learn your lines and don’t bump into anything” school of acting. I remember being told, in an acting class, that I had a “wonderful vocal apparatus” but given no clue as to what that meant.

Luckily, I stumbled into a powerful source of inspiration that countered the deadly flatness of the academic theatre of those years. Jeff Corey, another legendary figure whose life had been shaped by the anti-Communist blacklist, brought me home to myself by insisting that the actor had to bring his or her own personal, quirky creativity to any role. Use yourself was the secret formula that broke the trance of the purely mechanical approach I had been taught at UCLA. Jeff was the first teacher I’d had who talked about impulses – the irreducible atom-like quanta of intention or desire that manifest as gesture or utterance. Something that begins inside the actor ends up outside. I had been given a way to claim my own experience and I was grateful and frantic to put it into practice.

Although Jeff spoke eligaically about the Group Theatre and the values of experimental, ensemble work, he was, for the most part, helping actors get jobs in the Hollywood marketplace. And though I was happy to make as much money as I could in that world, in my heart I pursued a dream of a very different kind of acting in a very different world.

For three years I worked with an Improvisational group that, unlike the comedic, second-city flavor of improv, aimed at creating powerful, moving, coherent and completely improvised full length plays at least once a week.

In almost all this work, voice was taken for granted. Even in the experimental improv work, the focus was on character and structure with little attention to the basic elements that actors work with: voice, body, thought, emotion…

Then, in the early seventies, I worked with a director who had come out from New York. He had been in the first production that Richard Schechner, editor of The Drama Review, created with a group of young actors who would become The Performance Group, and nurture talents like Spaulding Gray and Willem Da Foe and eventually transmute into The Wooster Group after Schechner left.

This was my introduction to work based on the ideas of the Polish radical theatre philosopher and director, Jerzy Grotowski, about whom I’d been reading for two or three years in The Drama Review. Schechner was one of the first American directors to be influenced by him.

Sam Blazer had acted in Schechner’s Dionysius in ’69 but his real ambitions were toward theatre criticism and directing. I read a brilliant essay he wrote in the L.A. Free Press and was impressed. When I heard he wanted to start an experimental company in LA, I jumped on it.

[Sam died a few years ago in the Bay Area where he had become a therapist working in the Gay community.]

Sam had us do long exercises lying on our backs on the floor that began with whispering our own names to the ceiling over and over and gradually moving the whisper toward voiced speech. He told us to let our voices lead us, to go where they needed to go. I remember hearing multitudes of voices calling my name whenever I did that exercise. My mother of course, schoolyard bullies, lovers, but also voices I couldn’t name. Some of them didn’t seem exactly human. Even less human were the voices that emerged in other explorations when Sam asked us to let go of language and let our voices roam the space and ramble through their own possibilities, pushing on limits of high and low, loud and soft.

The company got smaller and smaller as time went on. There were sessions when Sam and I and Harvey Perr, the playwright who was working with us to shape a play out of our explorations would be the only ones in the studio; my voice, the only one at large in the space.

Sam introduced me to Grotowski’s notion of vocal resonators. Where conventional vocal training usually speaks of only two areas of possible resonance – the chest and the head – Grotowski held that every part of the human body can resonate, that the voice can root itself in a hand, a stomach, a knee. This became my first foray into the vast landscape that the voice can travel. Later, I would discover more when I spent a month in a southeastern French village working with Marita Gunther (1928 – 2002), one of the elders of the Roy Hart Theatre and a direct conduit to the work of Alfred Wolfsohn.

[from Left: Grotowski, Wolfsohn and the young Marita Gunther in London, Roy Hart in performance]

Alfred Wolfsohn believed that the so-called “normal” voice was a pale fragment of the true potential of the human voice. There was no reason men could not sing soprano or women bass, no reason not to give voice to all the angels and beasts within us. He had come to his ideas about the voice, in part, while by hearing the cries of dying soldiers on the battlefield during the First World War. After the war he experimented with the voice in Berlin, at a time when so many healing processes seem to have been developed – Wilhelm Reich, Ida Rolf, Fritz Perls, Charlotte Selver and others were nurturing seeds that wouldn’t fully flower for another thirty years or so. Wolfsohn worked mainly with opera singers until the Nazis came into power and as a Jew, knew he needed to escape.

In London, Roy Hart, a South African Jewish actor, became Wolfsohn’s protégé and, during the sixties, founded his eponymous company. Marita Gunther had been Wolfsohn’s most advanced student as well as his lover. Roy Hart, his wife and his mistress all died in a car crash just after the whole company had relocated to a crumbling chateau in the South of France. By the time I got there, in 1987, a second generation was starting to take the leadership from the founding members who had survived the early years of desolate winters doing odd jobs, repairing the chateau and building a respected international teaching company with a large and devoted following.

Every day for a month, Marita guided me into the “dismemberment” of my voice and then helped me put it back together. Using a process named, with ironic understatement, “The Singing Lesson,” she would begin at the piano asking me to follow the notes she played. These series of notes might be the usual fragments of major or minor scales that we all know so well. But after a while, she might have me repeat one or two notes and then suddenly say, “There! Again!” and I’d try to remember what I had just done. Before I knew it I’d be in a completely unknown territory. Sounds that I’d never ever heard myself make poured out of my body. Marita would exhort me to go further or lower or higher. My skull might feel as if a laser was boring through from the inside out, or two different sounds might be coming from my throat at the same time, or…

The RHT have old recordings from the sixties of Roy Hart himself performing something from one of the few productions that the theatre presented in their London days. You hear what sounds like two distinct voices, though one of them sounds bleached and desiccated like an image of a hungry ghost from a Tibetan Buddhist thangka

What Roy Hart was doing though, was very different from the chorded vocal techniques we’ve grown used to after repeated exposure to the Tuvan Throat Singers or the Tibetan Monks. It wasn’t part of an indigenous tradition of singing with the whole voice. It was Western; it sounded tortured but still carried a sense of the numinous. The right voice for Euripides.

Most days after my Singing Lesson. I would ramble around the narrow roads and goat trails to one swimming hole or another that someone had told me about. A river with a name as sinuous as its shape, the Salindrinque wound its way around the dry, rocky hills of Les Cevennes, the region we were in. The Salindrinque had many smaller tributaries and there was no end of deep holes with water-striders stilt-walking lightly on their surfaces.

I went everywhere on foot which was anything but a hardship. The weather was glorious that summer and the distances were long enough to make travel eventful, but short enough to keep it pleasant.

One day I walked back from a long afternoon at the best of all the swimming holes I’d found. I could lie in the sun on a fifteen foot wide slab of granite to warm up from the bracing water. The swimming hole was in a deep and narrow valley with no houses nearby. As I hiked up to the road, I sang wordlessly, deeply pleasured by the freedom, and a sense of mammalian contentment that saturated every cell. I kept vocalizing, letting my voice roam where it would. It felt fuller, deeper and at the same time, brighter than I was used to. A green lizard, about two feet from head to tail tip rain up the white plaster wall of a house I was passing. Its green was as vivid as a chameleon’s, a radiant, joyful color that looked exactly like my voice sounded to me.

I’ve written and told that story a lot. There’s an earlier version somewhere in an old entry in this blog. One of my favorite gleanings from the world of neuroscience is the discovery that memory is actually nothing like a tape recorder or a camera. Memory, they say, is something we create, over time. As we retell ourselves and others the story of an event, we begin to remember the telling rather than the original experience. The process actually causes physiological changes in the protein structures that build up as memories accumulate. You can read more about this in A General Theory of Love , a book that I consider one of the most important that I’ve read in the last ten years, at least. So in telling this story over and over, perhaps I’ve created a lens that lets me know my voice in a new way.That moment, on my walk in the Cevennes, has become a green metaphor for the mystery of the voice.

Pete Seeger on a 1950's short-lived TV show hosting Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry. They're about the ages they were when I first met them as a young teen-ager.

photos, from top: Pete Seeger and a young folksinger; Brownie McGee; Jeff Corey; The Performance Group in Dionysius 69; Jerzy Grotowski, Alfred Wolfsohn and Marita Gunther sometime in the 1940s, Roy Hart; bridge and stream in the Cevennes where the Roy Hart Theatre is based at the Chateau de Malerargues.

Last.fm: Moving the Air Around

2008-09-05T12:18:00.001-07:00

“The word moves a bit of air, and that bit of air moves another until it reaches the ear of the one who hears and is awakened…”- Paraphrased from Rebbe Nakhman of Bratzlav.

I just uploaded seven of my voice pieces to Last.FM. The URL is:
http://www.last.fm/music/Corey+Fischer/Moving+the+Air+Around

You can also click on the "digg" link below to "digg" my efforts. Digg is a web rating site that more and more people are using to spread the word about their various obsessions. Enjoy!

read more | digg story

The Gift. A Pebble. A Shirt.

2008-07-05T23:49:00.000-07:00

Years ago, my wife told me to read The Gift by Lewis Hyde. When I did, I felt that Hyde was telling me about the world in an entirely new way, the way of the gift. It has been years since I’ve picked the book up and I’m sure there is much I misremember. But Hyde’s central vision of a “gift economy” in which art has a particular role has never left me. I visited Hyde’s website and found out that his current work in progress is a book on the Creative Commons, which is a notion I’ve been pondering myself [See a previous post here: Originality is Overrated].

The associative path that led me to Lewis just now was an idea that has visited me several times over the last few years. I was hardly the first to have had it. I found versions of it in the writings of ecologist and entomologist E. O. Wilson and the visionary Thomas Berry, among others. But it’s Nobel laureate in medicine, George Wald, who articulates it most clearly:

Surely this is a great part of our dignity...that we can know, and that through us matter can know itself; that beginning with protons and electrons, out of the womb of time and the vastness of space, we can begin to understand; that organized as in us, the hydrogen, the carbon, the nitrogen, the oxygen, those 16 to 21 elements, the water, the sunlight--all, having become us, can begin to understand what they are, and how they came to be.

Forget for a moment any claims of uniqueness attributed to the human species. I’m talking about humans only because I’ve been one for 63 years and thus can claim, at least theoretically, some knowledge of human experience. And in my experience, when I give the gift of my attention to the sky or the ocean, to a tree, flower or fish, to another human or a red-tailed hawk or a cat, I am soon aware of an impulse to praise.

Could the evolution of this capacity to attend to and praise the natural world be a strategy of life itself, used to balance all the aggression against life that humans are so capable of?

Attention. Gift. Praise. Love. Give attention. Give praise, Give love. Praise the gift. Praise the world. Praise love. Love the gift of attention and praise. I have noticed that often, for me, the most affecting expression of these human activities is a form called the object poem. It has been practiced by Neruda, Bly, Hirschfield, among many others. Here is one by the Polish master, Zbigniew Herbert.

The pebble
is a perfect creature

equal to itself
mindful of its limits

filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardor and coldness
are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

Now here’s another associative leap. A few weeks ago, I took a workshop given by the choreographer, teacher and – I would add – philosopher, Mary Overlie. Mary’s best known contribution to the fields of dance and theatre practice and training is often attributed to someone else. I mean The Six Viewpoints. Known as, simply, Viewpoints, it is often assumed to be the invention of Anne Bogart, well-known avant-garde director. Viewpoints has overtaken Stanislavski’s and Grotowski’s methods of training for the actor in some quarters. I was introduced to some exercises third hand that I was told were Viewpoints. But in Mary’s workshop I discovered that, in her original formulation, The Six Viewpoints are not exercises, though many exercises and experiments have been and will continue to be developed as ways to explore them. Bogart and Overlie worked together at some point, though I know none of the details, and would welcome a comment from anyone who knows the story. Bogart altered Mary’s six Viewpoints and presented them in well-attended training sessions that she and members of her Siti Company taught. I sense some tension around the complex issues of ownership and intellectual property though Mary said very little about it.

Mary’s Six Viewpoints are: Space, Shape, Time, Movement (the flow of impulses within the body) Emotion (presence rather than illustrations of feeling sad, glad, mad …) and Story (also thought of as logic). She spoke of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as one of her conceptual influences, particularly his idea of Qualities. For Mary, the Viewpoints are the performer’s materials and she led us through a series of explorations of each one. In these exercises I began to understand where the forms that I had been told were Viewpoints had come from. Perhaps the one most commonly used is what Mary calls Stopping and Walking. A group of any size begins walking in the space. They are instructed to simply walk – adding nothing, no attempts to “express” or “invent” anything – and to stop and to walk again on their own timing – while noticing, paying attention to the particular viewpoint that is being explored. If it’s Space, then you notice the constant changes to the nature of the space created by the group as it moves or is still. Bogart, as I understand it, added more Viewpoints such as topography (the patterns of movement on the floor).

But here’s the connection I want to make. Mary sees her work as being informed by Post Modernism and its primary tool of deconstruction. As she spoke, it became obvious to me that I had been using these terms for a long time without knowing their real meanings.

Where Classicism and Modernism both assume a vertical hierarchy of values, Post Modernism lies the vertical down on the ground and looks at the world horizontally. On the horizontal, there is no hierarchy. Nothing is more worthy of attention than anything else. I take this as another way of articulating what the Buddhists call Beginners’ Mind.

It’s a state of not knowing and it requires courage to enter. You’re not given a map though maybe you get a compass, or the tools with which to make a compass.

Deconstruction then, is a way of exploring on the horizontal. It has nothing to do with destruction. Mary said: “To deconstruct a shirt, you use a very sharp razor to carefully take the seams apart. You don’t just rip it up. You take it apart to see how it was made and you put it back together.”

So here’s another poem, one by Robert Pinsky, close in form to an object poem and a perfect embodiment of deconstruction.

The Shirt

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers--

Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt ballooning."
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

I’ll leave off without trying to wrap these associations up. Any attempt at suggesting I know what this all adds up to would be a pose.

Please share any thoughts this give rise to by clicking the comments button below. I’ll be teaching two workshops soon, a three hour, “The Creative Moment” and a weekend intensive on theatre-making. Click here for more.

Pay Attention

2008-05-11T17:14:00.000-07:00

Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer prize winning story from the April 8, 2007 issue of the Washington Post tells about an experiment they conducted that involved the young virtuoso violinist, Joshua Bell, performing in a busy Washington, D.C. subway station during the morning rush. If you haven’t heard about this or read the article, I suggest that after you’re done here, you take a look. The Post asked Bell to dress as a street musician in jeans and baseball cap and play with an open violin case at his feet to see what would happen. When they asked Leonard Slatkin, the conductor of the National Symphony, to imagine what would occur, he predicted that at minimum, a hundred people or so would gather to listen. A pretty humble prediction considering that Bell is arguably the greatest violinist on the planet and that he would be playing a Stradivarius valued at 3.5 million dollars in a place with great acoustics. The article goes on:

“Bell decided to begin with ‘Chaconne’ from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it ‘not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version.’

“Bell didn't say it, but Bach's ‘Chaconne’ is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.”

On the Post’s website (link above) you can watch a couple of minutes of video and listen to the entire audio recording of the 45 minutes that Bell played. In spite of the background train and human noise, I find the music passionate and soulful.

As you might guess by now, a lot fewer than 100 people stopped to listen.

“Seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.”

Reading this catapulted me back to Paris, 1965, when I was seeking maybe not my fortune, but at least a few francs for a meal and a bed by playing traditional blues and fingerpicking folk songs like “Railroad Bill” and “Freight Train.” Before I learned the ropes, I was thoroughly ignored. Like the Bell experiment showed, context is all important. No one paid attention a solitary guy with a guitar on a Left Bank street corner at one in the afternoon no matter how well he played the blues (medium OK, I’d humbly submit). But, find an attractive young woman to pass the hat, work a crowded café at dusk when everyone’s having their apéritif, et voilà, the five franc notes would fall like lovely autumn leaves into the hat. Later, when I hooked up with a Yemenite-Israeli Gospel singer between her bookings with “Big Jones and his Little Sisters,” an American quartet she fronted, passing as African-American, real crowds would gather until a squad of gendarmes would break the party up.

I also thought of the Native American blessing that one may walk in beauty. Years after my street-singing days, when I was going off on a long and arduous tour of Europe with TJT, someone advised me to always look for experiences of beauty as I traveled. It was wonderful advice because it opened my attention to the possibilities that are part of every moment.

In relation to the “Muse,” attention is paramount. Inspiration lurks everywhere, whether it comes in the form of angelic music offered up freely in the unlikeliest of venues, or the faint call of a bird at the edge of morning or an overheard story.

In some forms of Buddhist meditation, the only instruction is to pay attention.You can start with the breath, but you’re told that your mind will, of course, wander, so pay attention to its very wandering. If thoughts start pouring or zooming through your mind, pay attention to the thoughts. Don’t believe them or take them seriously, just pay attention, notice that thoughts are moving through your field of awareness. Or bodily sensations, sounds, memories, emotions.

That same kind of attention, the kind that doesn’t judge or choose or try to change anything is also essential to any kind of improvisation, which is to say, essential to the creative act.

Check my latest newsletter for some related books and some experiments, exercises and games to help wake up your own muse.

photos c corey fischer

Originality is overrated.

2008-04-02T22:58:00.000-07:00

We don’t exist in a vacuum. Even the most isolated artist has her influences. For some this is a source of anxiety, as the critic Harold Bloom has made much of. He took what seems to me to be a hyper-Freudian stance that creators fear the power of their artistic “fathers” which manifests as “influence.” Bloom put an Oedipal spin on it with “son” killing father by breaking free of his influence.

I take another view, perhaps influenced by sitting on the Jungian side of the aisle. I celebrate those whose work or life – consciously or not – has shaped my own. I see myself as part of a continuum, a community that stretches beyond the boundaries of time, space and culture.

We create our identities from myriad sources. And we who live now have a dizzying abundance of music, literature, performance forms, imagery and story available at the click of the mouse. (a phrase that would have been incomprehensible twenty years ago.) A few minutes ago I wanted to add some links to people I mentioned below with websites related to them and within seconds I was listening to voices of the dead and the music of an old friend I haven’t seen in years.

In 1965 my roommate (who went on to become an accomplished composer and brilliant guitarist, Daniel Maya, left) and I became enchanted by an album called Inventions by American guitarist Sandy Bull. It was the first instance of “fusion” or “world” music that we had ever heard. Bull was perhaps the first western musician working in a popular context to bring Indian and Middle-Eastern musical forms into his music which was equally inspired by American folk and traditional blues. Years before Ry Cooder’s and Paul Simon’s brilliant collaborations with musicians from different cultures, Sandy Bull was learning to play the oud from Hamza Al Din, who was still, at the time, an obscure Nubian oud player. By the time of his death in 2006, he had become the most famous master of his instrument worldwide, had records produced by luminaries like Mickey Hart and was an inspiration to an entire generation of young guitarists.

At the same time that I was listening to Sandy Bull, I was also pursuing my passion for experimental theatre. I came across the writings of Antonin Artaud, early twentieth century prototypical “mad genius” theatre visionary who had an epiphany while seeing performances of Balinese theatre at an exposition in Paris in the 1920s. After several years of theatre-making in Paris, His quest led him to Mexico and Native peyote rituals. Shortly after his return to Paris, he was arrested and incarcerated in a mental hospital. Friends had him transferred to Rodez a facility in unoccupied, Vichy France. (self-portrait, left, done in Rodez) He was released in 1947 and after a spurt of new activity, he died. Artaud ‘s life was mostly a grim struggle against his own demons, opiate addiction, depression, episodes of schizophrenia. For a time he was embraced by the avant-garde, but even then, he couldn’t quite manage to “fit in.” In 1926, he was officially expelled from the Surrealists. Since childhood he had been in and out of mental institutions, had been treated with electroshock and more drugs. Though he never came close to realizing his vision for the theatre during his life, his influence on future artists is incalculable. Without Artaud, we probably would not have had Peter Brook’s groundbreaking production of Marat/Sade. Almost all the experimental theatres of the sixties took something from him. Members of the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, The Wooster Group and many more, had, at one time or another read Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double. One of my most important mentors in theatre, Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theatre, cited Artaud as a formative influence. It was, perhaps, in the early work in Poland by Jerzy Grotowski, that Artaud’s hope for a theatre that made no attempt to imitate “reality” but, rather, created a new language and cracked open the fragile shell of bourgeois societal facades came closest to being realized.

When I started UCLA in 1962, a chain-smoking, intense, slightly older fellow theatre student named Saul introduced me to Artaud and his sufferings. For years, I puzzled over his opaque writings and joined others in a basement below UCLA’s Royce Hall to invent exercises we hoped would crack open our own bourgeois facades. I still feel great affection for the clueless young man I was in my early twenties. Perhaps not so clueless as a matter of fact. After all, he was willing to descend into that basement and hang out in the unknown with something like patient resolve.

(left: Deena Metzger, the writer who first gave me a sense of what that was all about.)

What this says to me about influence is that it need not be literal or direct. The theatre I eventually started making – the work that one day bore fruit in Traveling Jewish Theatre – was not particularly “Artaud-like” in any way, yet had Artaud and his writings not existed, that work would not have been the same. It was in the encounter with his texts that the energy resided.

This, for me, is the most important quality of what we variously call culture, community, even civilization. Or, even better, commons. Commons can mean either land owned by the community (common-union, communion) or the rights to use land owned by another for grazing or fishing. An artist owns his work, but the community has rights to fish for inspiration in her waters. Sometimes one’s influence on another is simply to show that it is possible, it can be done.

I’ve just finished recording a new hybrid spoken-word/song/rap/blues piece that is an unapologetic homage to Bob Dylan, who, along with Leonard Cohen, Walt Whitman, Grace Paley, Phillip Roth, Joni Mitchell, Blake, Shakespeare, Peter Brook, Rilke, Bill Wilson, Laura Simms and hundreds of others, I claim as models, teachers, sources of inspiration and whose works have altered the way I produce mine.

"...like chords of deep music"

2008-02-23T22:59:00.000-08:00

I met a man named Karl Knobler at Deb Fink’s party for the closing of Dead Mother, the recent TJT production I was in. Karl’s a psychologist, about my age, and we immediately began the kind of allusive conversation full of digressions and surprising sudden turns that feels very similar to Jazz. The kind of conversation I take delight in.

As we jumped between a few dozen topics, Karl mentioned the idea of “Affective regulation” (see the work of Dr. Allan Schore, www.allanschore.com) To explain the concept, Karl told me how women, whether they have had children or not, will exhibit dilation of the pupils when hearing a baby cry. Men’s pupils do not dilate under those circumstances unless they have already become fathers.

Reflecting on this later, I was reminded of some lines from a poem by Rilke: “…that harsh hand / that kneaded him as if to change his shape.” (Robert Bly, Tr.) and thought about the ways we are worked upon by the aggregate of experience, time, the natural world, the stories we live until we become utterly transformed.

I remember a moment in Australia, thirteen years ago. I had just come out of the ocean. I’d been swimming for a long time at Bondi Beach, even body surfing a little. When I got out of the water I could still feel the energy of the waves surging inside my body. And I imagined myself as having been reshaped by the water. Could this be the “purpose” of a life: to be transformed – cooked, in a sense, ripened – into something nourishing for some larger being?

Usually, when I think about creativity, I’m the creator. But these notions of being changed on a neuro-cellular level by life, reverse the field. I’m the raw matter, we all are – being sculpted, carved, tuned, plucked, dissolved and reconstituted in new forms.

I welcome another path away from seeing the “Artist” as some isolated, unique, solitary, almost hermetic figure; a controlling, masterful, domineering archetype which the world can maybe do without for a while. Perhaps it was in recognition of being altered by powerful forces that the first “art” emerged in the world. In expressing our creativity we are continuing a dance with Big Life, simultaneously tasting our power and our humility, harmonizing our unique voice with the great chorale.

One more memory. 1987. The Cevennes, hill country of Southern France. My wife has just departed for Poland, where she will join nearly a million Poles on a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, the patron of Poland and symbol of the Solidarity movement. I’m staying on in the Cevennes to continue a very arduous kind of voice work led by a members of the Roy Hart Theatre, a compelling and eccentric theatre company based in a chateau in the region. I spend 5-6 mornings each week in a studio there and, after lunch, ramble around the rivers, streams and gullies of the Cevennes, seeking rumored swimming holes and stumbling over vestiges of old dry stone walls that had been assembled with precision and love in another time. One hot, bright afternoon after finding a perfect swimming hole, big enough to stoke across, deep enough to kick down into numbingly cold water, after hours in and out of the sweet clear water, after drying myself for the last time on a granite slab, I walked back to the village where I was staying in blissful exhaustion, letting my voice roam free, wordlessly singling melodies I’d never heard before. As I walked, my voice opened in all directions and suddenly a sound clearer and richer than I’d ever heard come from my body rang out and at that very moment, a large bright-green lizard, shot into view onto the bone-white stucco wall of a house. In the logical magic of the time and place, I had no doubt the sounds that had been coming out of me had conjured or summoned the Lizard. Its color and my sound were identical.

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke (Tr. Robert Bly)

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

In the current issue of my newsletter, Musing on the Muse, I suggest the following as a response to the idea of “being created” that I explore in a much shorter version of the above writing;

Do a ten minute timed writing experiment. Alternate beginning each sentence with “Once I was….” and “Now I am…” Complete each sentence as you go, writing as quickly as you can, not allowing your hand to ever stop moving on the page until the 10 minutes is up. Let go of any need to “make sense.”

Here’s what happened when I tried it myself:

Once I was sap

Now I am crystallized honey at the bottom of the jar

Once I was heaven

Now I am a water logged plank

Once I was golden tumbling

Now I am reddened patience

Once I was hungry all day

Now I feed wolves

Once I dreamed of a blazing touch

Now I dream of maps

Once I remembered all their names, the color of their thighs and the songs they sang

Now the glue is dried out and the photos have fallen from the album

Once I ran along the shore until the sun was gone

Now I am wrapped in blankets

Once I bit cords of silk

Now I sew dishrags

Once I barked in confusion, circling the city

Now I know how to breathe

Once I slept on the moonlit roof

Now I give my body to the water.

Make your own Art

2008-01-14T21:48:00.001-08:00

It has taken me most of my life to begun to understand that one of the greatest shortcomings of our modern western culture is the “professionalization” of art, and creative expression that came along with industrialization. I started writing about this in the current issue of Musing with the Muse and will continue here.

When I was ten, I decided I wanted to be an actor. It had nothing to do with recognizing that I wanted to act. I had never acted in anything. I was claiming an identity: Professional Actor. From then on I acted in any play I could. I hung around the entrance to the old Republic Studios on Radford, in Studio City, at the end of the block where my parents had a dry cleaning store. Some customers were non-celebrity character actors. I was thrilled whenever one of them came into the store when I was helping out after school.

It wasn’t until I was 16 that I had my first taste of what theatre, what acting was really about. I’m eternally grateful to my parents for hustling me off to an arts summer camp every year. I started with the Junior Players, acting out fairy tails the teacher would read to us and went on to High School Drama. At 16 I played Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Quite a leap from “East of the Sun West of the Moon.” Suddenly I was being asked to look at death. To ask questions about an afterlife. To understand what the word soul meant to me.

I hadn’t been the director’s first choice but the kid who had been cast didn’t want to have to memorize so many monologues. Mephistopheles was played by a tall raven-haired girl with whom I fell in unrequited love. For three weeks I lived in a heightened, even altered state inside Marlowe’s incandescent blank verse.

What I experienced had nothing to do with a profession, a career or a livelihood, but the only way to re-enter it was embark on a course of training to become a professional. At least that was the only way anyone seemed to know.

It took me five years to have an experience remotely comparable to Faustus. It was in my last year in the Theatre Department at UCLA. Finally I found a faculty member who seemed to care about theatre as much as I did. He was a self-proclaimed Marxist and a devotee of Brecht but was somehow untainted by doctrine. He cast me in a small role in Brecht’s first play, Baal, an expressionistic paean to polymorphous sexuality unlike any of his more sophisticated, ironic, political, later works. James Kerans, who died not too long after that time, offered no magical key to unlock the mysteries of acting, but he offered a vision of the world he wanted to create on stage. My part was that of a drunken street person Baal encounters on Corpus Christi day. The drunk is obsessed with the trees nailed to doorposts that are a part of the traditional German celebration of that holy day. He sees them as crucified beings and identifies with them. I had been working outside the university with an acting teacher who was the first I ever heard say that acting depended upon the unique experience, body, memory and creativity of each actor. In Baal, I was able, at last, to understand this. Though I was only twenty, I found where that drunk lived inside my own psyche.

It was beginning to dawn on me that I probably wouldn’t be able to do much work like this as a professional actor in the conventional theatre.

The next thirteen years of my life were split between two somewhat conflicting ambitions. One was to work outside the mainstream pursuing visions of forming a theatre collective that would support the approach to acting and creativity I discovered in Baal and one or two other innovative productions. The other was to become a successful actor in film and television.

I felt fortunate when I started making a living in TV and film. But after ten years of it, I had to admit that the work I was being paid for was, mostly, meaningless or worse. It demanded so little of me that it was easy to become cynical and give very little to it. The real energy in that life occurred at the moment of getting the job: being picked, chosen, validated by the powers. Between paying jobs, I would pursue the waning vision of a vital, life-changing theatre. But all of us who shared those dreams were all too willing to abandon them whenever our agents called with an offer of “real” work.

I reached my “bottom” when, out of pure greed and a lot of delusion, I accepted the role of Don Quixote in a really loathsome project that ripped off the images of Quixote and Sancho to make a painfully un-funny cartoon-like, slapstick, salacious and ultimately incomprehensible mess of a film. I was relieved that it never got released, and as far as I know was shown only once or twice on pay TV in a Hawaiian hotel.

After the Quixote fiasco, the Provisional Theatre, an L.A. company that had grown out of the anti-Vietnam war movement, invited me to work on a new project and to tour with them for two months. I jumped on it. During the six months I spent with this group, I learned that I was capable of more hard work than I had ever imagined. Whether I was schlepping the set or creating a character, performing or driving the van, I was part of a tribe of wandering players in which everyone did everything and everything we did was meant to serve people spiritual and political nourishment.

Even though I chose not to stay with the Provisional as a permanent member for reasons I’ll get into some other time, the experience re-aligned me powerfully. Like Rilke’s statue of Apollo, it told me to change my life.

After two years working in New York with Joe Chaikin (yes, clearly another story) I called two friends and colleagues together to create Traveling Jewish Theatre, now in its 29^th year of existence.

As an actor, I had discovered that I didn’t want to be a “professional” who rarely has any choice of what she will act, who auditions, gets hired (if lucky), and does his best to please the director who hired him. I didn’t want to be a specialist who has permission to only perform one task that is her specialty. Such as acting. Such as acting one certain type of role over and over. I wanted to make theatre: to act, write, direct, explore, question, discover, construct, compose, shape, edit, with people who excited me, at the service of whatever seemed most compelling, most necessary at that moment.

I see no reason why anyone who is willing to do the plain hard work required, should not make theatre in that way or music or painting or dance. As the wise and wonderful Oliver Sachs recently said in a lecture, “There are forms of neurological organization that can only be addressed by art, not by logic or reason or systematic things…The arts are an absolute necessity in life.” (On Cambridge Forum. Download or listen)

Hands

2007-11-23T17:01:00.000-08:00

I will soon launch a monthly e-newsletter about creativity called Musing on the Muse. The preparations for this new project have triggered all sorts of images, ideas and memories all related to that central theme. It’s as if I’ve evoked for myself, the kind of “flow” that I hope Musing will trigger for others. I offer the following, from my off-line journal.¹

¹It may be old-fashioned but I believe that the notion of boundaries between the private and the public are still essential. It’s not a question of propriety, but of letting one’s Muse (or one’s creative unconscious) know that it’s safe, that nothing will be shared unless it agrees.

In my earliest complete memory I ask my father to let me play with the “coughing saw.” I was two. That was what I called the coping saw. A small saw with a frame like a square with one side being a skinny flexible saw blade. I guess my father let me play with it because of the relatively little harm it could do. My father was happiest when he made things. Furniture. Simple pieces done without power tools, inspired by something he read in Popular Mechanics. A bench. A set of Adirondack chairs on which he painted hearts and clubs, diamonds and spades.

I got the message that shaping materials with your hands can either be full of pleasure or fraught with frustration. But I never managed to absorb any of my father’s skill with wood. As I grew, my impatience sabotaged any chance of getting measurements right, and by the time I got to high school woodshop, I hated anything to do with carpentry. I had no faith I could ever get two pieces of wood to fit together. It took me a lot longer to discover that it’s almost impossible to make something satisfying without faith.

Fortunately I went on to other forms. When I was 13 or 14, I discovered ceramics. The potter’s wheel. The first time I succeeded at centering a ball of clay on the spinning wheel, I felt something completely new. Anyone who’s ever thrown a pot knows that almost indescribable sense of sudden alignment, when the awkwardly spinning off-center mass between your hands at last composes itself around the invisible center . I found clay at a summer arts program for kids. I wasn’t much better at it then than I was at woodworking, but my father wasn’t there to have to measure up to. I did as well as any of the other kids, so I was free to explore the process on my own with no one to please.

One summer my father planted tomatoes. Everyone was surprised that this New York Jewish Broadway stage manager had it in him to grow a bumper crop of tomatoes that just kept coming all summer. Looking back, it doesn’t seem so strange. He put his hands to it. And his hands always knew so much more than the rest of him.

Around the same time, during the only three years of my childhood we owned our own house, he built me a playhouse in the half-acre of San Fernando Valley former citrus orchard that was our back yard.

I loved the playhouse. Mine! All mine. One day I decided to make something. I found an old radio some one had abandoned. I moved its tubes around and discarded some to make room for one of my several broken clocks in the innards of the half taken-apart radio. It was a Time Machine and boy, did I want it to work. Now, for some reason, my father had wired the playhouse with electricity and I felt compelled to plug in my Time Machine. Electricity was a kind of magic and plugging it in would have to make something happen.

It did. The radio started smoking and gave off an awful smell that burned my nostrils. At least I had sense enough to pull the plug.

After ceramics came oil painting and pen and ink drawing at the same camp. Then the making of things took a turn. I started playing guitar and what I made now was incorporeal: music. But still, it came from my hands. My father never touched a musical instrument, though he had sung parodic ditties in vaudeville amateur shows and stage-managed two or three Broadway musicals with Fred Astaire. So the guitar, like the clay and the paints, was all mine. Part of the world I made to which my parents could not gain entry. To have this world was terribly important. It was important to listen to music they couldn’t understand. Well before rock ‘n’ roll and the generation gap, when I was 14, in 1959, I discovered the Folkways series of archival recordings of Mississippi Delta Blues artists. The oldest, funkiest, blackest ones were the best, as far as I was concerned. Blind Lemon. Bukka White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Hurt. The funny thing was that I really didn’t like the music all that much back then, but I learned to love it. I tried to play it on guitar. In the summers I’d learn Lightnin’ Hopkins riffs from L.A. kids who came to the same camp. One summer, Brownie McGee and Blind Sonny Terry taught at the place and, of course, I was in Brownie’s guitar workshop. By then I was 16 or so and had thick calluses on my fingers. As much as I loved the guitar and clay and paint though, I had no real ambition to ever make a living by making music or bowls or dark landscapes.

I have managed to make my living through my creativity, though. As an actor, or a writer or a teacher or director, I’ve been blessed to have experienced enormous satisfaction, surprise, awe, validation, appreciation and love as well as frustration, stasis, emptiness and grief, but that’s another story. The point is, only a very few aspects of that work involve making things with my hands but I still have a nearly constant powerful desire to do just that. These days I only take out the guitar once or twice a year and then I become lost in trying to remember the old riffs, the licks, the finger-picking patterns, the songs. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I go onto the back porch and draw, with pencil, stump and kneadable eraser, what I see – plants, flowers, a piece of weathered wood, it doesn’t matter. A familiar, clear trance over takes me and my hand’s movements themselves are a kind of seeing.

2007-08-20T23:46:00.000-07:00

Death of a Salesman closed on June 10 It was the longest, hardest and most satisfying role I've ever done and it's been hard to let go. Next up, 2 X Malamud, which consists of his two greatest stories, The Magic Barrel and The Jewbird performed in the "Word for Word" style. Both stories were hugely successful when first produced by TJT, The Jewbird in 2000 and The Magic Barrel last year. I've had the fantasy of doing an all-Malamud evening for a while now. And now I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew, swallow and digest. The characters I play in each story -- Saltzman the marriage broker and Schwartz the "Jewbird" -- could, arguably, be thought of as the same archetype in different manifestations. I'd call this archetype the Jewish Trickster. He has much in common with the "Holy Fools" that show up in various cultures. He can be irreverent and annoying but also a purveyor of spiritual teachings, often experiential ones. In Jewish folklore, the prophet, Elijah, often takes on this role when he appears as any number of unsavory characters to test people's real level of compassion, surprising them with his transformation into the powerful figure of the prophet.

I'll be fleshing out this idea on the TJT Blog in the weeks to come. Stay tuned, and if you live anywhere near Mountain View, please come see 2 X Malamud in August!

Death of a Salesman

2007-03-17T18:13:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of rehearsals for TJT's upcoming: Death of a Salesman (Opens April 8, previews start April 5, 2007), in which I play WIlly Loman.

For schedule and tickets, click here.

Here's what I wrote about the reasons TJT is taking on this formidable challenge:

In February, 2007, TJT begins work on a breakthrough production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman that will reclaim the Jewish context that Miller, writing in 1949, felt constrained to “censor out,” attempting to create an ethnically unmarked family whose struggles would have “universal” appeal.

Our production will be directed by our Artistic Director, Aaron Davidman. Corey Fischer and TJT Associate Artist Jeri Lynn Cohen will play Willy and Linda. Scenic design will be done by Giulio Cesare Perrone (designer of our productions Opening to You and Isaac). Jess Ivry, whom TJT audiences will remember from The Bright River, will perform her original, solo cello score live throughout the run.

Why a Jewish Death of a Salesman?

TJT has always held, as a working principle, that universality can only come from specificity. We’re certainly not alone in this view; more and more late 20^th and 21^st century writers, artists and thinkers have moved beyond the notion that specific ethnic or cultural markers needed to be jettisoned in order to create works of a truly universal value. This mid-century notion may have been a reaction of second generation immigrants to the limitations of the “old world.” What I find fascinating is that, almost in spite of himself, Miller created a character (Willy Loman) who is caught is that very struggle to assimilate, to re-invent himself as an American free of the poverty, backwardness and isolation of the shtetl or the ghetto. But Miller, in 1949, was perhaps – as a writer, anyway – caught in that struggle himself and felt bound to make Willy a generic American.

Willy Loman was recognized as a crypto-Jew as far back as 1951, when one of the most accomplished actors of the Yiddish theatre, Joseph Buloff, translated the play into Yiddish and played the role of Willy. The production was a huge success in New York and on tour. George Ross wrote, in a review of the Yiddish Death of a Salesman:

“The great success of Joseph Buloff's production is that it brings the play "home." The effect is remarkable. Buloff has caught Miller, as it were, in the act of changing his name…”

And just last year, the contemporary Jewish playwright Karen Hartman wrote,

“Death of a Salesman suggests but does not explain an immigrant anxiety, the fallout from Anatevka with all clues removed. The Lomans seem alone in the world, or at least in Brooklyn. The sense of them as a displaced family comes through the absence of any other relatives (Willy, the son of an unnamed Midwestern peddler, has lost his only brother two weeks before the play begins) or history, rather than culturally specific referents—no pogroms, no old country yarns, no particular cause for feeling "kind of temporary" about oneself. The play's Judaism, like that of its characters, lies in its not being anything else—not rooted New England, not a sweetly rotting South. Details have been erased, leaving a sparse, attenuated world that is universal and also incomplete.

I'd suggest that the psychically fluid structure of Salesman tends to stick for contemporary playwrights, while its resistance to naming Jewish content has changed for now. For example, it's impossible to envision the shifting structure of Angels in America without Death of a Salesman, but equally difficult to imagine Tony Kushner holding back cultural detail.” (http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=131)

So the intention behind our production is to restore those missing “clues.” Unlike the infamous production of The Crucible by New York’s Wooster Group (it was subject to a cease and desist order initiated by Arthur Miller) TJT will take no liberties with the text, but will, rather, explore it from its own particular perspective and esthetic – that of a contemporary Jewish ensemble theatre.

As Karen Hartman points out, Miller was not entirely successful in purging all yiddishkeit from his play. It reveals itself in the monitory cadence of a line like “Attention must be paid..” Ross, referring to this line, writes: “Here, and in many places, one felt in the English version as if Miller were thinking in Yiddish and unconsciously translating…and sometimes when his English filters through the density of his background, it succeeds in picking up flavor on the way.”

For a company who has based its 28 year-old reputation on the creation of original work and the development of new plays across a variety of forms, engaging with an iconic American play can be seen as a radical new direction. Likewise, realizing that the largest part of its work has looked toward the Eastern European Jewish Diaspora, the Shoah, the Middle-East for inspiration, we want to explore the American Jewish experience of the last few decades; the period in which American Jewish identity went through such surprising transformations.

An interesting side note to the 1951 Yiddish production by Joseph Buloff can be found at: http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=331. Chloe Veltman interviewed Luba Kadison, Buloff’s widow and an important yiddish theatre performer in her own right. Veltman says:

“Arthur Miller was delighted with her portrayal of Linda in a Yiddish version of Death of a Salesman at the Parkway Theatre in Brooklyn in 1951, as was the scholar Harold Bloom, who wrote to Kadison just a few weeks before her death, saying her Salesman was the most moving he'd ever seen.”

Appendictis

2007-02-19T11:43:00.000-08:00

I'm finishing up a couple of weeks recovering from a sudden (aren't they all?) appendectomy, and about to start rehearsals for Death of a Salesman.
Aside from writing a couple of grants for TJT, I've been watching DVDs (A 1972 TV version of Awake and Sing with Walter Matthau, quite good; a 1966 TV version of Salesman with the monumental Lee J. Cobb reprising his original Broadway performance and George Segal as Biff, Gene Wilder (!) as Bernard. Remarkable piece of work. And, the brilliant and moving last episode of Six Feet Under) and writing letters like the following, at the request of MoveOn.
I urge you all to do the same.

"As a staunch progressive, I've always supported you, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein. Now it's time for you to act unequivocally and lead a movement to definitively put an end to our tragic bungling in Iraq. It's way past the time for "Non-binding resolutions" Congress has a responsibility to take a strong, meaningful stand against escalation and for a withdrawal of U.S. troops (our best way of truly supporting them) from what has become a chaotic civil war. Beyond the immediate issue of ending our counter-productive involvement in Iraq, I urge you to initiate measures aimed at restoring the dignity and moral standing of our country, especially in the eyes of the people of the middle east, and at eradicating the conditions -- chiefly the sense of hopelessness -- that give rise to terrorism and anti-U.S. sentiment."

An Overlooked Novel that Shouldn't be

2006-12-18T20:50:00.000-08:00

Even though I can count on a couple hands and a foot or two those of my freinds who actively read novels, I feel duty-bound and actually quite happy to tell you to go to your library, used-bookstore or log on to Amazon and check out The World's Room by Todd London. (image, L) This beautifully understated book was published in the spring of 2001 which may account for the lack of majors reviews it should have, by all rights, recieved.

In a first sentence that even the most curmudgeonly Lish-like writing teacher would have to approve, London begins: "When my brother hanged himself in a shower stall at St. Elizabeths, I took his name..." From this wallop of an image, Erich Hoffman's fictional memoir proceeds through his parent's fractured marriage, his mother's search for a life that fits her outsize expectations and that takes her, three children in tow, all over Mexico and dumps them in Venice, California in the late sixties, through his brother's suicide and, in the books's central arc, his own struggle to find an identitity. What sets this book apart, beyond London's wit, compassion and finely-tuned ear, is the way he actually unpacks the search for identity.

By telling the story of a young man who has chosen to commit a symbolic
suicide in emulation/expiation of his brother's actual one, London can trace the process of Erich/Teddy's painfully self-conscious creation of an identity with infinitely more self-awareness than most adolescents. Layered between the so-called normal trials of the American teen-ager's life, are glimpses of a soul laboring in isolation to jerry-rig a persona that might stand against the void. Lest this sound too self-seriously existential, let me add that the book is full of a wry, subversive humor. "No one said anything about our family dividing, though clearly this was the beginning of the end of us as a numerical whole. First, we'd been seven together, (five plus two). The five became four when we left Dad, then three when Erich died. The two would age and die, first Papa, [Erich's grandfather] then Oomie [his grandmother]. Mom would also die, even before her mother, and Deborah and I would be left as two. I'm calculating ahead, though"

Todd London is the Artistic Director of New Dramatists, a wonderful organization that does everything it can to keep talented people writing plays in America. In New York last month, I had the good fortune to spend Thanksgiving with him, his equally gifted wife, playwright Karen Hartman, and a lovely group of people I had not met before that day. When I asked Todd about his novel, he gave me a copy. Now I pass it on to you. Enjoy.

2006-12-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

I’ve just come back from nearly two weeks in Washington, D.C. and New York on TJT biz. We were in D.C. to work with Liz Lerman and her Dance Exchange on a collaborative project that’s described – along with a report on our time in D.C. – on TJT’s blog. New York was about meetings with various people who may help the company bring some work back to Manhattan. Again, more about that TJT’s blog. What I want to write about here are two amazing experiences I had as an audience member of two wildly different but equally powerful theatre events.

On our first day in NYC, Aaron (fellow TJT-er) invited me to join him at the Public Theatre to see an in-house reading of a new play, And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi by Marcus Gardley, a young African-American playwright who had written Happiness is a Dreamhouse in Lorin, a play our own Aaron directed for the Shotgun Players in Berkeley this past fall. It was about the history of a Berkeley neighborhood and was based on research and on interviews and story-circles with members of the community, several of whom were part of the cast of thirty who performed it. It was a huge, well-deserved, celebratory, sold-out, lines-around-the-block success. It was the most powerful, moving and accomplished piece of community-based theatre that I’ve ever seen. Something truly and powerfully healing can happen when people – who may never before have had the opportunity – are asked to tell their stories and are listened to and are invited to join in the process of giving form to those stories. Marcus, Aaron and the more experienced actors in the cast were able to fully contribute their skills without ever encroaching of the sense of ownership that the community had in the play.

Naturally, I was looking forward to hearing something new from Marcus.

When I emerged from the Astor Place subway stop and saw the banners of the Public Theatre waving against a scrubbed blue sky, I was overcome with a flood of thirty year-old memories. I had spent many months here working with the late Joe Chaikin, founder of the Open Theatre and, for the two years that led to founding TJT, my mentor. Among other projects, I was in his production of The Dybbuk, in 1977 and walked this route from the Astor Place station half a block to the Public for the length of the unconventionally long rehearsal time he insisted on and for the ten or twelve weeks of performances. I shared a loft with Bruce Myers, on loan to Joe from Peter Brook to play the central character. Bruce was the only Jewish member of Brook’s Paris-based international theatre center. We shared a passionate curiosity about the possibility of creating a kind of Jewish theatre that no one had never seen. While I waited for Aaron, I looked for the bar across the street where Bruce and I would go after work and continue the Jewish Theatre conversation that eventually led me to start the work that became TJT and Bruce to create the two person Dybbuk in Paris and perform it to acclaim all over the world. I couldn’t find the bar. In 1989, TJT did Bruce’s two person Dybbuk, in which I played all the male roles and in 1994, I directed it with two younger actors.

I saw Aaron standing across the street, back at the Public. “What’s the matter?” he asked when I got close. I hadn’t realized that tears were running down my face. “Flashbacks,” I said.

The reading was in the same theatre that The Dybbuk had used and as we sat down, my eyes went right to the stage left corner, just in front of the proscenium arch, where I had my “big moment” in The Dybbuk, telling a story by an eighteenth century Jewish mystic who would appear as a character in TJT’s second play. But as soon as I let my eyes take in the dozen or so actors already on stage, sitting in front of black music stands, the ghosts of ’77 faded. And when they started reading, I was transported to the Louisiana-Mississippi border, the river itself, during the civil war. And the river spoke. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the xeroxed program from the day so I can’t tell you the name of the awesomely talented woman who played “Miss Sippi” who is also Oshun (an oraisha, spirit, in the Yoruba/Voudon/Santeria traditions) and has a love-hate relationship with her uncle, Hades. Her powerful, rolling voice perfectly carried Gardley’s lush and sweeping language. At times, when the language would seem to reach its limit, the River would overflow into glorious song. The woman playing her had the voice (among several others) of a gospel preacher/singer. In fact, the entire cast, without exception, was flawless. I don’t know how much rehearsal they had – hours for readings are limited by Actors Equity – but all of it seemed to have been concentrated on the actors’ connections to the characters. There was no attempt to semi-stage anything, which sometimes happens in new play readings. Everyone stayed in her chair. The rich performances allowed our imaginations to do the rest. (To stage or not to stage is part of an ongoing, sometimes heated, conversation I’ve had with colleagues.)

The play, on one level, anyway, is a version of the Demeter/Persephone myth. Here, a black, enslaved woman named Poem lives Persephone’s fate and is taken underground by Hades. Poem's father is Damascus who after being lynched and emasculated is reborn (with help from the Tree on which he is hanged) as Demeter and searches for his daughter. Poem also has a mixed race daughter named Free whose father is a white Cajun. Free has been raised white. Her white step-mother, Cadence, powders Free's face to hide her blackness. . Her white father has been off fighting Yankees but has finally gone AWOL to find his way back to his beloved wife Cadence, his mistress Poem, and his daughter, Free. Meanwhile, Damascus/Demeter appeals to Miss Sippi for help in getting his daughter back and she confronts Hades in a mock-apocalyptic mano a mano. Oh, yes, Jesus also keeps showing up in various contexts, always black.

Not being a trained critic, I didn’t even think of taking notes, so swept away was I. There’s a lot of specific details I’m forgetting. All I can say is, remember the name, Marcus Gardley. He’s only twenty-seven but has been writing for years. He teaches at Columbia and is a member of the New Dramatists, a very far-sighted and generous organization that grants seven year memberships to playwrights who receive all sorts of support during that time. Most of the major American playwrights of the past dozen years or so have been members. Marcus is major.

On the other end of the spectrum, a few nights later, toward the end of the trip, I saw a highly polished, thoroughly rehearsed, well-tried out-of-town production of Company – a revival of Sondheim and Furth’s 70s musical directed in a very special, stripped-down style by John Doyle, who had directed last year’s Tony-winning Sweeny Todd. All twelve performers were triple talents: they played all the instruments virtuostically – every kind of string, reed, brass, keyboard and percussion instrument including tuba, french horn, sax, clarinet cello, bass, flute, violin, guitar – were fantastic singers and accomplished actors. I've never seen so much talent in one production. It's about Bobby, a young man on his 35th birthday confronting his own puer-nature – his boyish unwillingness to commit to a relationship – by means of a series of scenes with his various married couple friends, for whom he acts as a screen on which they can project their own dramas. In the end, in a glorious, life-affirming but completely unsentimental choral finale, all the couples bear witness to the particular gifts that only come with time, patience and acceptance as Bobby (as sung by the masterful Raul Esparza) has his own epiphany in a counterpoint song. Unlike Sondheim's "Into the Woods" which I saw a few years ago, this production dispenses with conventional and glossy stage effects – the set was a series of simple transparent acrylic cubes of different sizes. The brilliant notion of finding performers who could play the score (which is very complex and rich) without a conductor (!) as well as sing and act, thus losing the conventional separate orchestra in the pit between audience and stage, created an intimacy and a sense of mastery that you experience when you see circus performers doing impossible, death-defying acts. I mean, imagine three women doing a number where, while dancing, they seamlessly alternate between singing and playing saxophones in a constantly surprising and engaging musical arrangement that also reveals character and moves the action. And that was just one of many equally stunning moments. Raul Esparza, as Bobby, deserved every good thing Ben Brantley wrote about him in the New York Times review and more. It’s unusual to see such a young actor work with such wise restraint and understatement and then, in one incandescent moment, release a lifetime of unexpressed feeling in a single, devastating howl.

I become a blogger

2006-10-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

The last thing I need is another reason to spend time at the computer. But after setting up a blog for by wife, author China Galland on a different blog host and then discovering that it had a pretty inconsistent interface -- meaning we'd never know what the thing would look like after we posted it -- I thought I'd switch to "Blogger" and see if we could do any better. But in setting up the account, I found myself putting in my own name and information and, thus, find myself writing a blog.
I am a 61 year old actor, writer and director who, for the past 28 years, has been a principle member of Traveling Jewish Theatre a company I co-founded. Besides writing for the theatre, I have published short fiction and non-fiction in several places. Some of both can be found on my website.

Besides the existence of TJT, I am most proud of: a play, See Under: Love which I adapted from the novel of the same name by Israeli author, David Grossman; my enduring marriage; my growing relationship with my children and grandchildren.

I am working hard not to fall into despair about: the likelihood of a Bush-instigated attack on Iran; the worsening state of Israeli-Arab relations; the long shadow still cast by slavery over our attempt at democracy; our violence toward the earth and toward our fellow-humans that we seem incapable of ending.

I am comforted by language as it is used by authors like Phillip Roth, Toni Morrison, David Grossman, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri and many others; I am comforted by my friend Norman Fischer's translations of the Psalms; by the stories and teachings of Jack Kornfield; by the life I encounter underwater when I dive; by my co-workers, my wife and family who also struggle with the paradox of finding hope while remaining vulnerable and responsive to so much preventable suffering.

If this blog thing actually works, I might come back for more. I might invite some of the above-mentioned co-workers and family to post topics. We'll see.