One of the central questions of Matryoshka is the place of the serial killer in popular culture. This has, understandably, gotten me thinking a lot about my own feelings towards pop culture serial killers. So, I’m going to start off with a confession: despite being a complete addict of police procedurals, I can’t stand serial killer episodes. Whenever the bad guy is established to be a serial killer, the mystery is over. In an ordinary episode of a cop show, the juicy part for me is figuring out why someone would want to kill the victim, and then by extension, who did it. Whether the dead guy was a loan shark or a snooty member of the Homeowners’ Association, we’ve got a whole host of people with intriguing reasons to kill him. Money, love, betrayal, even petty arguments about whether the neighbor’s grass is too high- these are all motives for violence that make sense, even if we personally find the use of violence to be abhorrent. I myself have never strangled anyone– but I won’t pretend that I haven’t at times really, really wanted to. But my forbidden desire has never stemmed from love of the act of violence itself. It has always been a means to an end– there was a conflict, and violence would resolve that conflict (hopefully in my favor).

Our fantastic violence coordinator, Orion, said something in rehearsal that really fascinated me: “Why do we fight in plays and movies? For the same reason that we sing in musicals. We’ve reached the point where words alone cannot do justice to our emotions.” Violence is the ultimate expression of what is most central to every story told by mankind: conflict. In any scene, actors are asked to decide what it is that their character wants from their acting partner. The scene is most interesting when those wants are in direct opposition to each other. This is the heart of conflict. An act of violence has the highest stakes, and it is the most visceral expression of conflict known to man. People love action movies for the same reason they love rock concerts– it’s a pure emotional rush, extended over several hours.

This is what makes serial killers boring to me, and fascinating to others. The average criminal in a good action movie kills because he wants something– money, power, revenge. Someone gets between him and his goal, so the interloper is dispatched with. The serial killer has no goal. He has no conflict that the act of violence is meant to resolve. The act of violence is, itself, the goal. This is something that will probably never make sense to people who are not sociopaths. Feeling, empathizing human beings do not kill simply for the sake of killing and feel no disgust, guilt, or remorse. How can ordinary people empathize with someone who feels no empathy? The mind of a sociopath, and particularly that of a serial killer, will always be a mystery to us. So what do people do with a mystery that can’t be solved? Well, I find them frustrating and pointless, so I generally choose to put them aside. Others, however, find that the unsolvable nature of the mystery makes it that much more intriguing. This unknowable nature of the serial killer is what assures it a place in our popular imagination.

And here, of course, is where our show comes in: a serial killer story that caught my attention and held it. Matryoshka‘s journey into the depths of the mind of a madman is unlike any other I’ve seen. Instead of being relentlessly dark and depressing, the script mixes in genuine laughs and creates a sense of playfulness, even as it never lets you forget the tense and dangerous situation we’re immersed in. The play doesn’t solve the mystery, but it finds a sense of wonder and joy in the asking of the question. Working on this play has shown me that unsolvable puzzles don’t have to be frustrating and pointless– the very nature of them can in fact be liberating. Looking through the lens of Teddy, I’m finding an incredible array of possible answers. Not about sociopaths– but about all of us. It’s been a fantastic journey so far, and I’m excited to see what we discover next.

The Feast of St. McGonagall opens in two weeks. During the next two weeks we are going to spend a lot of time at Berger Park. Polishing. Building. Laughing. Creating. I am glad that I can add this show to my long list of Plagiarist memories that have occurred on Park District property.

Those of you who have visited The Plagiarists’ Facebook page lately will have noticed that many of our recent posts and photos feature a table. Not a scientific graph with the two-colors-doing-a-jagged-up-down-dance-on-a-grid table, but a four-legged-put-me-in-your-dining-room-and-serve-meals-off-me table. Yup. That Table. Not in any obvious way the most romantic or exciting of subject matters, BUT, as with most good stories, a seemingly common-place object holds hidden powers and magics.

Oh! Let me back up for a split second: (ahem)

Welcome to the world of Sir William Topaz McGonagall, POET. (insert applause here) Which means, essentially: Welcome to the world of our Fall/Winter Show.

We have just begun that electric/terrifying/EEEEEK thing that is a new production. And it is about this guy, William McGonagall (who you’ve never heard of, but get ready – you’ll get all up close and personal with him over the next couple of months). We have excitedly embarked on the process of bringing to life the story of a man who is widely regarded to be the worst poet of all time. Yup. Awesome subject for a play, right?  But just wait! The worst poet….of ALL TIME???? REALLY??? That’s GD monumental, ya’ll – what delicious notoriety! We are bravely choosing to celebrate this self-proclaimed and clearly wildly intrepid artist (the artist part could be argued, but for our purposes we will honor him as an artist) and in doing so, we are using the conceit of a fantastic and bizarre Scottish ritual – The McGonagall Supper. This is a nod to the more well-known Burns’ dinners that commemorate the work of the “other” great Scottish poet, Robert Burns. However the McGonagall Supper is done in reverse, “beginning with whiskey, ending with soup”. And with loads of shenanigans in between. (drumroll, please….shenanigans always deserve a good drumroll). But a SUPPER also generally involves a TABLE….

And so, Welcome Again (take two) to the rehearsal notes of “THE FEAST OF ST. MCGONAGALL” We have started, as many things do, by sitting around a table.

Gathering around this table allows us to be (joyfully and indulgently) at that point in the process where everything is new and “on the table”. Everything is shiny and scary and mysterious and possible. The very very very infant stages of play-making where so little is known and so many things are possible. We have gathered in a room, played theatre-games with strangers, said a bunch of words for the very first time, tried a ton of things on for size, still not determining whether they are too large, too small, or JUST RIGHT. And that’s ok. Everything is malleable and shape-shift-y and surprising. But we come back to sitting around a table.

So, we’re The Plagiarists. If you’re here, you’re probably familiar with us, either through our work, our members’ work, or these salons, which have turned out to be a large part of our identity and how we relate to the theatre community here in Chicago. When we started this, it was – like many of our projects – sort of an experiment. It was an experiment in walking our particular walk, a walk dedicated to the idea of sharing inspiration and influence, not just among ourselves, but with the entire community. We wanted a venue for members of this artistic community to come together, meet one another, talk shop, and try some of their own experiments. In June of 2009, we commenced this experiment with a program of short plays. Since then, we have held the salons monthly, showcasing companies, festivals, solo artists, and some odd little pieces that wouldn’t have a home elsewhere. In that time, I have missed only one salon – so I feel I have the authority to speak about the results of our little experiment.

I’ll start with some statistics:

Number of real Theatre Companies that have hosted: 16 – 40%
Number of fictional Theatre Companies that have hosted: 1 – 2.5%
Number of solo artists that have hosted: 9 – 22.5%
Number of salons hosted by puppets or featuring puppetry: 5 – 12.5%
Number of times I sat at the bar during the salon because this room was too full: 2 – 5%
Number of times salon was held at Danny’s during a blizzard: 1 – 2.5%
Number of plays called “Raccoon Poaching Meathead” performed: 1 – 2.5%
Number of times we read Batman comics: 2 – 5%
Number of times one of those comics used the word “boner”: 36
Number of wedding proposals: 1 – 2.5%

But we all know that statistics always fail to tell the whole story when it comes to theatre. I would offer here some examples that I think better illustrate what I’ve learned from the salons. I understand that anecdotal evidence isn’t scientific, but this is an artistic experiment, so I’m allowing it.

First of all, I would argue that the salons have offered a lot of evidence that you don’t need a theatre to make theatre. I have said this for a while now, when people ask me about the salons – that I have seen some of the most striking, amazing, innovative, and inspiring theatre I’ve ever seen here in the back room of the Black Rock. I know this is a lesson we all learn early on, and one that we keep learning, but it’s easy to get trapped in the trappings of modern theatre, and the salons have always served as a corrective, at least for me.

Another lesson salons have taught me is that theatre can handle subjects of any scale. Joe Mazza’s The Anatomy of The Flea consisted of just a performer, a tiny suitcase stage, and a lot of deft miming, but had more to say about love and obsession than any number of full-length plays. Emilie Syberg’s Antarctica salon used a number of theatrical devices and styles to capture the nature and history of an entire continent.

I have also learned that there will always be failures and successes, and they will be unexpected. We’ve had salons we were disappointed in, certainly, but the one of the joys I’ve found is that the most amazing salons took me completely by surprise. One of my favorite salons was nearly cancelled. We had to change locations at the last minute, and then a blizzard blew in that afternoon and shut everything down. So it was a brave but tiny handful that tramped through the snow to Danny’s where Carolyn Hoerdemann hosted an evening of letter-reading and music. We could see only the darkness and the blowing snow outside as we sat in a warm little circle, passing around warm popcorn and listening as Carolyn and her compatriots read words that already been sent out into that void and come back safe.

The salons, ultimately, have been a success for us, and we hope a success for you and the people who have performed here. But theatre, in its very (and very old) bones is ephemeral and mortal. Some companies that have joined us here have retired. Some of the plays we saw here and loved in a workshop state went on to fail in performance. Some of the projects piloted here never got past beta testing. We are sad when a company we like ends its run, or when a play doesn’t work, but we must also recognize that there will be another play, or that five new companies will spring up from where that last one fell, or that even great plays end their runs eventually. No matter how brilliant or prepared you are, you will occasionally fail, especially if you’re reaching for something worthwhile. In a way, this is the lesson of all theatre: we were all here, we had this experience together, and now it is over and you will go out into the world, carrying it with you.

In the time since we started the Plagiarist Salons, any number of similar programs have sprung up all over town. It’s tempting to grumble, but early on we realized that when you call yourselves The Plagiarists you can’t complain. As our manifesto charges us: “The name of the game is GIVE ALL.” And besides, a lot of them are way better at it than we are. The sense of community we sought to foster and the place for odds & ends that we sought to provide is now the prevailing trend. So, we have decided to end this particular experiment, share our results, and give y’all a glimpse of what we’ll be up to in the future.

Despite the wonderful performances I’ve seen here, the thing that I will miss most about the salons is you. This may sound cheesy, but the fact is that the audiences that attend these salons are some of the warmest and most generous audiences in Chicago. I always tell people coming to perform here not to fear failing, not to worry about whether everything is perfect or to get too upset if they make a mistake or five. We are here to share in and celebrate each other’s work, and you have made that happen. It’s easy for all of us to be cynical and judgmental, to feel we are in competition for roles, for audiences, for attention, but for some reason I always feel like that gets suspended here. So thank you for coming, not just tonight, but all the Mondays you’ve joined us here and listened and laughed and had maybe one too many for a week night. And later, when the salons are over, as you go out into the world, please carry it with you.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/this-is-your-universe.html

It reminds me of the Total Perspective Vortex, the torture device/execution method in Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant At The End of the Universe. The Vortex gives its victim a true “sense of perspective” as to the size of the universe and their importance in it, which immediately melts their brain. I was obsessed with the Hitchhiker’s books as a kid, and I can’t help but think this was an excellent lesson to get at such a young age. That’s not to say that each person isn’t important – one could also say each person is a universe, or God, depending on how Gnostic you want to get. Just that in the face of our insignificance in the shared universe, it’s useful to keep things in perspective, both as a check to our own self-importance and to how seriously we take the day-to-day things we struggle with.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

HOW DO YOU MAKE A PARK?

Do you plant trees?

Get a permit?

Sketch out a baseball diamond?

Section off a square of grass?

Something more? Something less?

So tell me, how do you make a park?

Here’s how you can come celebrate International Plagiarism Week with The Plagiarists!

I AM SAYING THIS RIGHT NOW

Thursdays – Saturdays, January 12th – February 11th at 8 PM
Location: Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan (Granville & Sheridan)

First up is our new world premiere production! Inspired by the work of Tony Schwartz, I Am Saying This Right Now is part memoir, part fiction, part borrowed, and part original, a mix tape of memories, scenes, and sound art that explores the human compulsion to document our lives and our world. Tickets are $20 for regular patrons and $15 for students & seniors. Tickets can be purchased at brownpapertickets.com, by calling 1-800-838-3006, or by cash or check at the door.

What’s So Dangerous About Dancing?

January 15, 2012 starting at 8 PM
Location: Danny’s 1951 W. Dickens Ave. (Damen & Dickens)

The party continues when The Plagiarists’ annual night of dancing, drinking, and danger returns! You know the drill: a momentous raffle, a Dance Contest rife with guts and glory, and even some snacks for your eating pleasure. Come for the music, stay for the chance to claim the trophy for THE MOST DANGEROUS DANCER OF ALL!
Featuring DJs AEROMASS.
No cover.
Seven bucks to enter the dance contest. It will be glorious.
(dance contest starts at 9pm)

SALON THIRTYTWO: Shawn Barnett – Occupy This Variety Show

January 16, 2012, 6:30-10:00 PM (programming beginning at 7:30 PM)
Location: The Black Rock Pub, 3614 N. Damen Ave. (Damen & Addison)

FINALLY our 32nd Salon features performances inspired by the Occupy Chicago movement! A variety of performers will present an original or relevant works that express their individual feelings on the occupy movement, including comedy, music, drama, and video.

Kate Nawrocki as Wabansia and Ken Miller as The Documentarian. Photo by Lindsay Verstegen

What happens to something that is forgotten? Nothing I suppose. Forgotten events still occurred. There effects may still even linger, even if we don’t recognize the source of these effects. Forgotten people still lived. Forgotten toys still take up space in attics and landfills. So, nothing happens. In my last post, I talked about how repeatedly accessing a memory changes it. Every time it is recreated it changes a bit. So it is the remembered things that something “happens” to. In light of this, isn’t it interesting how we fear forgetting? On a personal level, we often try to bury the bad memories and work to preserve the things that bring us joy. I remember, as a kid, having the revelation that what is happing now will never happen again. That every moment passing was lost forever… there goes another one… and another… and another.  I don’t think this revelation is an unusual experience. Everyone probably ponders it at some point. Shutterbugs around the world are forever taking snapshots, photos that aren’t necessary taken for their artistic value (though, in my opinion, given time, even the worst snapshots have aesthetic value – they’re like wine that way), but are instead taken to document a moment: a late night at Denny’s with your friends, a grade school field trip to a state park, a visit from an out of town pal, a well-earned vacation in a land far away.  And there are the unremarkable photos that you don’t know why you took. Someone (an old classmate? You can’t remember…), off center, surprised, looking up into a flash, washed out by the sudden light.  Your kitchen, your mom rolling her eyes at you as soon as you aim the camera at her.

It’s all about forgetting. Being afraid to forget. What happens when we forget?  Nothing happens.  How terrifying.

Everyday more and more of my memories tumble into that great black hole of forgetting. But I don’t really even know the difference. I can’t tell you what they are. I just have a sense of them being gone.

In I am Saying This Right Now, the subject is audio recording, not photography. But the principle is the same. Our documentarian works to preserve the sounds of everything he encounters, especially those sounds that are most at risk of disappearing. The quality of someone’s voice may be one of the first things that fades from memory.  It is hard to articulate and therefore hard to capture. I remember having long conversations on my family’s landline phone, curled up in the musty, ratty chair in our basement. I remember the feel of the rotary dial, and what was said in the conversations, but the voices are gone, I think.  It’s hard to say. Maybe if one of those voices from the past called me today, I would know immediately who it is. Much like the effect voices have on the contestants of Here is Your Life. (Not to be confused with This is Your Life. I am, of course, speaking of the Sesame Street segment.)

Carrying around a portable recorder is not as common a hobby as photography. There are a million reasons why this might be. Despite that, I think we can all relate to that impulse to hold tightly to physical evidence of our past, as proof that it actually happened, to remind us that we were there, to leave evidence of our existence when we are gone. It’s not just photographs. Some people collect movie ticket stubs, greeting cards, postcards, bottles, doodles, buttons, keys that no longer fit any doors, jewelry they don’t wear – all various souvenirs of the life they’ve lead.

I leave you with a recording by Brian Michael Lucas, sound designer and contributing writer for I am Saying This Right Now.  It is his journey down the Santa Monica Pier, the music, the arcades, the roller coaster, a record of a singular day when these sounds existed in this combination just the once.

SantaMonicaPierEdit by Byrd Monster

However…

At some point in time when I was a kid I had a realization. I had thought what I was remembering was fact. I thought it was what I saw at the time of occurrence, as if there was a camera hidden in the pupil of my eye capturing everything I saw.  But as I replayed these well worn memories over and over again I started noticing things. 

The memories were evolving.

They must have been changing over time without my notice because when I went to “turn on” a memory I started seeing things that couldn’t have been recorded by my camera eye.  Namely, I was seeing myself. I’d replay a memory, and I would see myself on Gina’s porch. I was laughing as I hung a small blue rug over the railing, playing house. Clearly I never saw that happen. The implications of this did not escape me.  If I could invent these pictures accidently, then how was I to be certain that the rest of the images weren’t fake too?  It was somehwhat disturbing to me at the time, but I kept it to myself and continued to enjoy my reputation for having a fabulous memory.

As an adult, I was reminded of this once again a few years ago when listening to a particular episode of Radiolab.  (Do you like Radiolab? It’s fabulous.) This particular episode was called Memory and Forgetting (fair warning: the last segment will break your heart). This is when I learned that the memory most recalled is the most corrupted, in a way.  You must recreate a memory every time you recall it, and the more you recall it the more you create.  Memories are not recorded, they are imagined. There never was a camera in the pupil of my eye. There was only my imagination recreating my favorite days over and over. Conversely, the memories that are suddenly unlocked by a smell or song, a memory you haven’t recalled since it was first created, is the most trustworthy. These memories have not been amended and added to over time by your imagination.

As a painfully nostalgic person, this was a profound realization for me.

It was impossible to avoid thinking of this as we worked with the Lynda Barry writing technique to create I Am Saying This Right Now. The exercises unlocked some very vivid memories.  Suddenly you remember that resting on your best friend’s desk was one of those plastic gumball machines, or you can suddenly see with all clarity the poison control center sticker stuck to the side of the rotary phone that used to be in your parents’ basement, or you suddenly remember a board that was loose on the deck of the house you grew up in. Details like this bob to the surface, plunging into air after years of being long forgotten… Are they actually forgotten details?  They feel that way. It feels like the locations, people and events of your past are emerging in sudden clear focus, but if we are indeed reimagining events every time we recall them, these details could just be embellishments of the mind, stimulated by the creative exercises, filling in the empty spaces. Who knows?

I think, to a degree, we have always instinctually known this. If you want to accurately remember how something looked, you take a picture, you make a video. If you want to remember someone’s voice you record it, you save their voicemail messages. But this behavior can affect your memory too, I’ve noticed.  When I think of high school, in most of memories I see myself and my friends wearing clothes that we are wearing in the pictures I have, behaving in the same way. I have memories of being a kid and meeting my cousins at a certain family reunion at my Great Grandmother’s house, but, after years of believing these memories, I was told by my mother that I wasn’t there. She had gone without me.  But I thought I was there. But she must be right: the pictures in our family album, that I had looked at so many times, show no evidence of my presence.

Examining your memory too much can make you crazy. And looking for truth in memory is impossible. So, I have quit worrying about it and embrace the potential falsities in my mind’s remembrances. We should be grateful that we are automatically creative enough to fill in the missing holes in the pictures providing us a way to vividly feel the journey we’ve taken, allowing to elaborate on our past. Working with the writing exercises I was frequently aware that what I was writing couldn’t be what I actually experienced. There is no way I remember my childhood in such color. But it doesn’t actually matter.

What occurred in those memories contributed to who am today, and how I remember them is a part of who I am today. Writing for this show was a great opportunity to fictionalize events in my life, and I liked it.

I will leave you with a story by James Dunn, who was a part of our writing group. This is his memory of Washington Square Park in New York.

***

I am in Manhattan, but it’s actually just a park with a nook of steps and the Rastafarians are here to sell weed, which is perfect because I am here to buy some. Green, orange, gold and purple are the colors this August morning. I can smell the body odor from 20 feet. I have heard the weed here is good. Buy weed, get tattoo is all I seem to have to do today…And in Manhattan nobody gives a fuck if you buy weed right on 16^th street. There is lots of music, but it all comes from tiny little boom boxes poking out of baskets filled with incense…that you better believe is for sale. My best pal Joey is with me…and he’s nervous. He wants to be with Ornette Coleman, not Bob Marley. But we both want weed and it’s cheap here…we’ve been told.

“Ay, boys. It’s a nice day, huh?’

“We want weed.”

“Okay. Hold on.” 50 dollars is exchanged. I am better at this than I ever thought and there are no pretty girls around.

Handshake comes, and minutes later I am so stoned…so completely stoned. High on drugs. I feel content, adult, horny, funny, young. I am really so happy and stoned and looking forward to the future I could cry. My skin felt tight. I was all muscle and sinew. I was in the ocean just yesterday. I can play the guitar pretty okay. I don’t want to play one, I just want that fact to swim around. Pretty soon I see a guy who has all the seven deadly sins tattooed on his back and a face representing each one.  “Hey man. Where did you get those tattoos?”

“Fun City tattoos”

“We want to get tattoos today. Can you take us there?”

“For some weed.”

“Sure.”

He took us and we walked into the basement storefront. We explained what we wanted and each paid way too much for our tattoos. I got an Irish flag on my upper bicep and Joey got some horn rimmed glasses on his ankle.

the walks of janet cardiff

houses of relatives i’ve only been to once when i was younger

the smell of coffee brewed late at night

the times when we used to write real letters

joseph cornell

myths

stores with no signs but the windows are full of junk and every day or so the front door is open, but no one comes in or out

lavender

neighbors’ names on mailboxes

parties that are infinite

sirens in the distance

nick bantock

songs your parents sang under their breath

perhaps a part 2 shall be added to the list as well.

————————————————————-

another thought I keep coming back to as well.

where can we find silence anymore? in thinking about sound I can’t help but think about silence. so few places do we turn off our cell phones. i can think of a few, but not many. and even those few are quickly being taken away. planes, churches, the theatre, museums. where else? where has silence gone?

In previous weeks, though this blog I’ve attempted to explain the early inspirations and ideas that led to I Am Saying This Right Now, The Plagiarists’ next production. Working with the techniques described over several months meant that the many writers working on this play generated A LOT of material. And a lot of this material underwent multiple transformations before the script became what it is today. The many layers of adaptation involved in this feel too convoluted to explain in detail, but have become the seeds of something I want to explore a lot more in the future. What I mean is:  We created our own recordings based on Tony Schwartz’ work. We wrote stories based on those recordings. The stories were adapted into scenes, monologues, or other theatrical elements. Then they were adapted again as the many pieces of the script were assembled into one cohesive play. At many points in this process, individual pieces were cut and left behind as the script evolved on its own into something specific that couldn’t possibly contain every idea we’ve had along the way. And currently it is undergoing its final translation as directors Kim and Paul and the entire production team make a living thing out of these words and recordings. Adaptations of adaptations, and translations between artistic mediums.  I love it.  I love studying how the final product does or does not resemble its starting point, like a game of telephone.

So, now that we’ve shared the origin and creation process for the show, in the coming weeks I plan to post some bits and pieces from various stages in the process and dig into some of the themes that the play explores. As discussed in my previous post, in the beginning we sort of wrote without expectation and with vague goals.  Our major and minor themes surfaced through our recordings and impulsively-created stories.  It was terrifying to me at first, throwing the door so wide, but we had Schwartz and we had Barry, and we had regular conversations ,sitting on my living room floor to keep us tethered to the same world.  I remember at the second meeting we were all to come in with lists of things we wanted to record.  Everyone brought in four or five ideas.  Most of those ideas were never realized and most things we did record were not mentioned that evening.  But suddenly, starting the next day, every tiny event that occurred in our lives seemed like an opportunity to build our tool box.  Stuff sounded different than it did before.  We noticed the sounds of our radiators more.  Quiet walks suddenly were loud with passing cars, the sound of a basketball hitting the pavement, someone else’s headphones loud enough for you to hear as they pass by, the bugs, the birds…  And we got excited for what seemed an opportunity to catch a special sound: a moving day, getting an x-ray, a trip to the dentist, a visit home.  This events, still ridiculously mundane, took on significance, became landmark events. Somehow in the recording of them they became bigger than they were, and the opportunity to edit gave us profound control over the most boring events of our lives. For example, observe how contributor Ian Miller’s average trip to the dentist to get a filling becomes a surreal ballet…

Dentist 1-2 by Byrd Monster

I imagine doctors in lab coats and swim caps moving in slow motion, throwing instruments to each other over the head of their patient!  The tools slowly loop and spin, as if in zero gravity, and the dentists dance, jumping high and floating slowly down with each step in their procedure….

Weird…

I like to recognize that there is magic stuff in the things we do every day. Anything can be extraordinary when put in a certain context. All I have to do is remind myself that I live on a spinning planet in a vast universe and that is enough to make the tiniest accomplishment rock my socks off. So, it’s fun to make these little things we do stand out, to remember that each moment that occurs is singular and doesn’t ever happen again. I think recontextualizing these moment does just that.

We are making something. A friend today told me that amongst the highs and lows and gifts and losses and struggles and awards of 2011, the thing he regrets is that he didn’t make anything. “I made nothing,” he said to me and seemed truly pained to admit it. I asked what he meant. And we got into a discussion of how enormously valuable it is to have some creative out-put. Whether it be a few rudimentary sketches. Or a batch of gnocchi. Or a knitted tea-cozy. Or a full-blown puppet show. We get to define ourselves in so many ways. But what we create is truly paramount. And having really gotten this rehearsal process rolling, I am wildly aware of the day to day creating we are doing.

We are making something. It is always mind-blowing to me how many steps have to happen successfully for an idea to become a THING. An actual, realized, physical someTHING. Someone has to have an idea. They have to be brave (or sometimes dumb) enough to voice it and brave (or dumb) enough to ask for help. And then some crazy alchemy of timing and availability and commitment and momentum and personalities has to occur. And voilá! Idea becomes thing. This particular thing started as Kaitlin hearing an interview with Tony Schwartz. Innocuous enough BUT between the then and the now, enough yeses were said, enough circle pegs fell into round holes, and enough hard work/silly luck/collected sounds/penned stories happened to make a sticky idea into a full-tilt play. And now the play is becoming three-dimensional. A thing. A LIVING BREATHING thing. In a real room (actually in an awesome mansion plopped down right at the Chicago lake front). With real people (a spectacular group of actors & directors & designers who you will hopefully get to meet over the following weeks). The idea is happening. This is HUGE.

We are making something. And the ingredients we get to play with are limitless. Theatre gets to be the hot-dish (“casserole” for you non-Minnesotans) art-form that has the potential to combine every other art-form. It is this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-crock-pot of using an always-varying assortment of things to create deliciousness. Theatre, at its best, is creative writing, is performance, is music, is dance, is visual art, is architecture, is sculpture, is behavioral science, is story-telling, is education, is politics. This is why I paid a zillion dollars to “be an actress when I grow up.” Because I couldn’t actually decide which of those things was most important. We kinda get to do it all. With a devised piece and this much constant collaboration, we REALLY get to do it all (or as much of “it all” as we feel like). And this week at rehearsal, this script (which was once only an idea, lest you forget) started to become theatre. Spoken words became a ballet. Music became motion. An answering machine message became orchestral. A coat rack become a dance-partner. Stories became choreography. Staircases and windowpanes became percussive. Memories became songs. Strangers became relationships. This is the part of the process that is the most mysterious. The most invigorating. And the most banana-cakes. Because, no holds barred, anything can become anything else. Brave, imaginative, curious, (or sometimes-just-dumb-enough-to-keep-trying) humans can find the chemistry in this chaos; can do mind-blowing things in a space together. Moving. Breathing. Creating. And MAKING. We are making something. And I, for one, am so excited to see what it will continue to become.

What It Is teaches us to stop worrying about what to write and to just write. Frequently we don’t know “where to begin,” but the stories you need to begin are already in your head. Anyone who has lived a life has stories.  With Lynda Barry’s technique, writers use a single word like “car” or “coat” or “attic”, to make a list of various cars, coats, or attics that exist in their memory.  Then we choose one and begin looking at that memory a little more closely. What can we see? What can we smell?  And that becomes the beginning of your story. It’s amazing what long-locked-up details reveal themselves through this technique. Mundane particulars, that seem long forgotten, rise to the surface and set your scene for you.  And everything important is contained in those little details. You mainly just need to get out of your own way.  It feels really good! After playing with the technique for a while, when I went back to the writings that resulted from these exercises, I found a whimsy and an honesty that I think can’t be achieved when you chase it. And I loved the structure of the technique. Besides the mean kids and mean teachers, I actually liked school as a kid. I liked the structure, the homework, the assignments. It was so easy to feel accomplishment, so easy to know where to start because you were given a box to play in; and if you wanted to push against the sides of that box or even run right out of it, it was still there to give you a place to start.

And the book is beautiful to look at!  Gorgeous messy collages made out of things you probably have in your own home are on every page. Besides making you want to write, the book renews any love you might have ever had for notebook paper and glue.  I had great fun with What It Is and held on to Jack’s copy until days before he left Chicago to go to away to grad school, forcing me to go out and buy my own.

When I decided I wanted to collaborate with other writers to create a Tony Schwartz-inspired script, Lynda Barry’s techniques seemed like a natural part of the equation. I was interested in adapting the technique to our purposes, perhaps at times using a recording instead of a word to evoke an image. It was perfect on two levels: first, I knew I wanted the group to write together at meetings, as opposed to everyone writing on their own at home.  I wanted there to be some kind of cohesive voice and agreement on the direction of the script, and I felt like this could only be achieved with ample face time and lots of time spent reading and listening to each other’s work. These exercises gave us a structure for the group writing sessions.  I think it also puts writers of all experience levels at the same starting point. We all followed the same rules, sat in the same room, and used the same jumping-off points.

Secondly, the exercises are perfect for a play that deals with memory. To me, the Tony Schwartz work and Lynda Barry writing technique fit together like puzzle pieces.  Both work to capture a moment in time, to evoke a vivid image of something that happened in the past. 

I wasn’t entirely sure how this would work. The technique is difficult to use if you are creating a scene for instance, so my plan, in the beginning anyway, was to just not worry about it.   I wanted the group to create and collect as many sounds as possible and write as many stories as possible. I wanted to build a giant toolbox.  I would worry about adapting these things into a play later.  I also wasn’t worrying about what the play would be “about”. I was operating on the faith that these things would reveal themselves in time, themes and characters would emerge naturally. The wacky thing about all this is that it worked.  After about a month of sharing recordings and doing writing exercises together, the group spent a week going over everything we had made.  We talked about each writing and each sound and what theatrical possibilities it inspired. The shape began to emerge. We chose stories that we would like to adapt into scenes, expounded on ideas accidently revealed to us in our spontaneously created text, and a shadowy version of our Documentarian appeared.  The next time we met, we had scenes to read.

I genuinely miss our writing meetings. It was such a great motivational force to me. I like to think that the group brought out the best in each other. Even though we all used the same exercises and the same starting place, individual voices and styles emerged that became stronger as our process went on. And different styles created the basis for our characters’ voices.  And every session was fun. It sounds like a funny way to spend a Friday night, but I highly recommend getting pals together to write.

I don’t know how Lynda Barry would feel about it, but I’ve become a bit of a disciple. I really enjoyed sharing her techniques with other people, and I hope I get to do it again.

I wasn’t introduced to Tony Schwartz’ work until his death in 2008, when On The Media aired a piece by The Kitchen Sisters titled 30,000 Recordings Later.  My husband had listened to it early in the week and correctly dubbed it “right up my alley.”.  I was hooked, and immediately bought all of the Tony Schwartz recordings that I could find. I couldn’t know how far-reaching the influence of this moment would be.  Not only did it inspire the creation of I Am Saying This Right Now, but spurred strange changes in my behavior and artistic tastes.  First of all, I got a crappy little digital recorder that I started carrying in my pocket. I’d use it to record the sound of rainwater draining into a storm grate or cursing, honking cab drivers on Monroe.  (To my great disappointment the sound was awful and I would need to upgrade recorders in a few years.)  And it changed what I listened to and how I listened to it.  Since conceiving this project, I’ve been introduced to the work of so many great composers and sound artists. I had never heard Steve Reich until Jeff Duhigg, one of the workshop participants, brought in a CD for me.  Delia Derbyshire was perhaps one of the most exciting new encounters, and not just because I am a nerd for The Doctor Who Theme which she was a part of creating, but because she created amazing otherworldly sounding electronic music in the 60’s, stuff that would sit very well on a mixtape with The Knife today. The writing group that created I Am Saying This Right Now alerted each other of every relevant radio and sound event they encountered and shared all their favorite broadcasts featuring Vin Scully or Edward R. Murrow.

But back to Schwartz. 

He was born in 1923 in Manhattan, New York City.  He grew up with radio.  He wouldn’t read, work or do his homework without it turned on. When he was kid, he explored ham radio, but soon discovered that the people he would connect to were interested in the technical aspects of sound transmission, not  in person-to-person communication.  He got to speak to people all over the country and beyond, asking what they had for dinner, what kind of work they did, what music they liked, but they would ask him what kind of equipment he was using and about the quality of the transmission he was receiving.  So, for a time his participation amateur radio faded.  He continued to listen, however, especially when at 16, he went blind for 6 months due to an illness. He studied graphic design and was an artist for the navy during WWII, but returned to sound in 1945 when he bought a Webster wire recorder and began recording the sounds of New York, its people, its industries, and its music.  He became friends with many folk singers of the time, big names who were at the time too poor to be able to record their music on their own.  He recorded Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, Moondog, and Josh White.  He’d hear them on the radio, and then look them up, contacting them to see if they would like to be recorded. And most said yes.

Making all this more significant is that since the age of 13, Tony Schwartz was agoraphobic, unable to travel more than a few blocks from his house.  Unwilling to limit his sound collection by his inability to travel, in 1946 Tony Schwartz started a lifelong career as pen pal (or whatever the audio equivalent of that is).  He requested (and remarkably received) the addresses of others who had bought Webster wire recorders, placed ads in news papers around the world, and in this way exchanged recordings with over 800 people in over 52 countries.

That same year, Tony began a weekly radio program on WNYC that ran for over 30 years. A wealthy New Yorker who loved the show asked to meet him and wanted to fund the creation of a full length album of recordings.  The result was New York 19, a detailed audio documentation of Tony Schwartz’ postal district, the extent of the world he was able to travel. This was the first record by Tony Schwartz released on the Smithsonian Folkways label.  There would be 13 more. 

Despite his early disinterest in the technical side of sound, circumstances ended up driving Tony be an inventor and innovator.  He created the first portable tape recorder.  He created a lapel mic that would allow him to unobtrusively interview and record cabbies, grocers, children, shoppers, loiterers, police officers, construction workers, street venders and zoo animals.

In the mid-fifties, the advertising world took note of the work Tony Schwartz was doing, and he became a sought-after advertising sound man, creating radio ads for Coca Cola, Johnson and Johnson, and others.  He was extremely successful because, in his opinion, he applied the same philosophy to his commercial work that he had used in his sound documentaries, appealing to what people were already thinking about instead of trying to put thoughts in their heads. Starting in the 60’s, his advertising focus shifted to creating Public Service Announcements and political campaign ads, most notably (to me anyway) a very successful anti smoking campaign credited with influencing the decision to remove cigarette commercials from television.

In addition to these successes, Tony Schwartz was a teacher and a mentor to many, using the telephone to instruct classes at colleges and universities around the world from his home studio in New York.   Looking at his facebook page is striking, as most of those commenting are not fans in the way that I am – a distant admirer – they are family, friends, and students who knew him, were moved by him, who learned from him. The page has become a network for people to exchange memories of Tony and update each other on the lives and happenings of mutual friends.  He made millions of friends, was wildly successful, but was not really “famous”. 

In our play, Tony and his work was our starting point. The distance we’ve traveled from that point has meandered into the work of many other artists and into many other lives, but the influence is still evident in our Documentarian’s love for sound.

My theatre history teacher was fond of saying something along the lines of: “Realism is a genre that has been very popular in one part of the world for about a century.” Yet, somehow, we often treat it as the true form for theatre, and for modern literature, the only mode for the serious writer. Shakespeare probably gets by because he qualifies as “magic realism” – code for “fantasy that we don’t want to call fantasy cause it’s literary and we don’t believe fantasy can be literary unless the author has been dead for a long time.” Anyway, even the author he’s talking about seems to think this sort of thinking is a little suspect.

Of course one also notices that the critic himself has written a book about werewolves, so I can’t help but wonder if his dislike of genre fans stems from personal experience with internet trolls.

Despite all this, it warmed my heart to see yet again our favorite cliche deployed in a review that seems so against them: “But unless they’re entirely beyond the beguilements of art they will also feel fruitfully disturbed, because “Zone One” will have forced them, whether they signed up for it or not, to see the strangeness of the familiar and the familiarity of the strange.”

Our mission strikes again!

A few years ago, I became obsessed with the work of sound archivist and radio artist Tony Schwartz. He was a pioneer in many ways: revolutionizing sound recording technology, developing new media theories,  and creating some of the most powerful and recognizable commercials in history, but I think his greatest and most eloquent contributions to the world were the over 30,000 recordings he collected in his lifetime. They were recordings of friends, family, animals, traffic, strangers, politicians, musicians, kids, cabbies, animals. He seemed to have a variety of reasons for collecting them: to educate, to preserve, to share, and, I hope anyway, for the sheer joy of listening to them. Listening to his recordings transported me through time and flooded me with nostalgia. I dug old tapes out of shoeboxes stacked high in my closet and listened to sounds from my childhood.  I thought about what sounds I would want to record in my life today. I thought of everything in between that I didn’t record… I wanted there to be a play about this experience, using the medium of tape to document a life.

The play was written by a group of 13 people. We would meet a few days a week in my apartment.  Each session usually started with us listening to a recording by Tony Schwartz. It was fun to sit in my overly full living room, gathered around my not-so-great stereo, quietly listening to recordings with other people, some of us looking down, looking out, listening, the way families used to listen to radio shows (or so I’m told by old timey photos and Ken Burns movies.)  After listening to Schwartz, someone would present a recording they had collected and perhaps we’d discuss it, describing the images that it brought to mind or shared stories that it reminded us of.  And then we would write.  We wouldn’t write scenes, we’d write stories, very fast eight-minute stories about our own lives created using a technique developed by the very neato author and cartoonist Lynda Barry. And then we’d read our stories and go home. And that was most meetings, except for the few when we sat and reviewed every story we had written and every sound we had collected, and asked ourselves “What’s there?”

Amazingly, through this process a play was created. Our Documentarian, I am Saying This Right Now’s Virgil of sorts, emerged for us. Part Tony Schwartz and part us, he began to shape our play, showing us which way he wanted to go. And he introduced us to the more magical, and more mysterious, Wabansia, who always escaped every attempt made to pin her down and hang her with an identifier.  She held in her hands everything we had ever forgotten, everything we meant to remember.  And, together with The Documentarian, we crafted voices and characters out of our stories, people to live out the memories and recordings we desired so much to document.  As our Documentarian chases a memory that he lost long ago, we begin to remember stories and feelings that we ourselves had forgotten.

Intrigued? (…I hope?)

NEXT WEEK: More about Tony Schwartz!

***

I am Saying this Right Now will open at Berger Park on January 12, 2012. 

Directed by Paul Kastner and Kim Miller

Conceived and Edited by Kaitlin Byrd

Written by Sid Branca, Kaitlin Byrd, Jeff Duhigg, Joshua Dumas, James Dunn, Paul Kastner, Brian Michael Lucas, Layne Manzer, Sara McCarthy, Ian Miller, Lindsay Verstegen, Andrea Wallace, and Jessica Wright

Featuring  Sid Branca, Chad Brown, Ben Johnson, Dylan Marks, Sara McCarthy, Ken Miller, Kate Nawrocki, and Jessica Saxvik

Stage Managed by Elissa Shortridge

Production Design by Caitlin Fergus

Sound Design by Brian Michael Lucas

Lighting Design by John Jacobsen

Costume Design by kClare Kemock

The show will open January 12^th and runs Thursday – Saturday through February 11^th (January 12-14, 19-21, 26-28, and February 2-4, 9-11) @ Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan – at the corner of Granville & Sheridan, just East of the Granville stop on the Red Line

More details soon!

Keep an eye on http://www.theplagiarists.org for updates!

Anyway, so apparently some quote from Elizabeth Dole appearded on Scott brown’s website as part of a message purported to be from the man himself. He is obviously innocent, for two reasons:

1. Nobody writes that stuff themselves anyway. If it hadn’t been lifted by some staffer (accidentally, according to them), it would have been written by them anyway. We know that.

2. It’s a great quote:

“I was raised to believe that there are no limits to individual achievement and no excuses to justify indifference. From an early age, I was taught that success is measured not in material accumulations, but in service to others. I was encouraged to join causes larger than myself, to pursue positive change through a sense of mission, and to stand up for what I believe.”

I mean, who doesn’t agree with that? It’s exactly the sort of positive, yet non-specific pabulum that is the meat of any modern political speech. How could any mortal politician resist using it?

VERDICT: NOT GUILTY