Six impossible things before breakfast

When breakfast is orange cake, anything is possible.

Throwing a net to pull in a few things swimming around in my mind today, from this morning onwards.

Advice that Ana shared with me yesterday, from a wise friend of hers experienced in theater:

1. If something matters to you (the playwright/writer for performance), put it into dialogue. Directors can (and sometimes probably should?) ignore, resist, rethink or otherwise render moot (mute) any stage direction you write.

2. Include at least one impossible stage direction in each piece. This will challenge -- reshape and open up -- the director's imaginative relationship with the text. (Ana's impossible stage direction made me laugh out loud. I won't tell on her, though.)

I woke up thinking about this, and then I read John Lahr's piece about Sarah Ruhl in this week's New Yorker. (Which mentiones an example, from "Eurydice," of Ruhl's impossible stage directions.) I haven't seen or read any of her plays--her "Dead Man's Cell Phone" is currently in production in NYC--but synapses are sparkingsparking just from reading the New Yorker piece.

How a poet becomes a playwright: something to do with "confusion about the confessional 'I' of the poetic voice" as Lahr writes of Sarah Ruhl as a poet writing in the wake of her father's death. She said:

I didn't know what a poem should be anymore. Plays provided a way to open up content and have many voices. I felt that onstage one could speak lyrically and with emotion, and that the actor was longing for that kind of speech, whereas in poetic discourse emotion was in some circles becoming embarrasing.

Of course, you could say forget what a poem "should be." Forget "embarrasing" and forget "some circles" -- who cares about them? And I still do want to keep writing poems, including poems with wide content and many voices. (As so many of you, dear blog readers, do already.) But I also remember the acute discomfort I felt at the beginning of my process with this piece, when I still thought it was going to be a series of poems. I was so incredibly unhappy trying to string together the various juxtaposing planes of the piece in my mind, so stuck. And panicked, for reasons that weren't clear to me at the time, about the 'I' of my poetic voice. I know that writing for performance has been an opening up for me. (I hope this will carry back into my poetry: I don't see myself as having passed the point of no return from poet to playwright!)

How a poet writes plays: Begin with a metaphor. Make it literal, make it real. Go from there; play it out. (Sarah Ruhl's first play, "Dog Play," opens with the Dog howling "as though his heart is breaking." Later, the Dog says, "I dreamed last night that I could speak and everyone could understand. I was telling them that he is not dead, that I can see him. No one believed me.")

How a poet tells stories: Like Ovid, not like Aristotle:

"Aristotle has held sway for many centuries, but I feel our culture is hungry for Ovid's way of telling stories," she said, describing Ovid's narrative strategy as "one thing transforming into another." She went on, "His is not the neat Aristotelian arc but, instead, small transformations that are delightful and tragic." And she added, "The Aristotelian model--a person wants something, comes close to getting it but is smashed down, then finally gets it, or not, then learns something from the experience--I don't find helpful. It's a strange way to look at experience."

It's a relief to read this. Part of why I've been avoiding the word "play," the word "playwright," is that I don't experience myself as a linear storyteller. Or, more accurately, as an Aristotelian storyteller. (This despite the brilliant playwrights I know who mess beautifully with the Aristotelian arc. Hello, Sharon Bridgforth. Hello, Daniel Alexander Jones.) Also this morning, I heard the tail end of a Weekend Edition piece on August Wilson, who I do experience as an Aristotelian storyteller. And, of course, a brilliant playwright. But, see above, that's not the only kind of playwright to be. (Aristotelian, I mean, not brilliant. We do all have to be brilliant.)

Sarah Ruhl also says: "I like plays that have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost inexplicably. The acting style isn't explicated, either. It's not psychological." So she wants actors to go from one feeling to another, without backstory or rationale -- just embodied emotion in the moment. Lahr that says Ruhl "prefers the revelations of the surreal moment to the narrated psychological one." Reading this, thinking about it, I begin to wrap my mind around the kernels of my own aesthetic. I've been asked that question -- what is your aesthetic -- time and again, most often by Sharon (thank you, Pa), and it's always been hard for me to think about. But now I start to see, at least with this piece: it's about reality without realism. (Oh! This is what I loved about Pan's Labyrinth--which I've also had difficulty putting into words, except to talk about children, fantasy, and violence.)

Lightness. A friend asked me what my reaction was to people laughing during the excerpt of "Are We There Yet" that I read on Friday--an excerpt dealing with blood memory, assimilation, heritage, the Holocaust. I was so gratified, I told my friend. I had hoped they would! The themes in the piece are so hard, there has to be humor. If people don't laugh, the whole play is just a beating. Everyone would shut down, close up. I need people's hearts open. In the New Yorker piece, Sarah Ruhl pulls out Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium to show John Lahr the essay about lightness, an imaginative quality that Lahr describes as "the distillation of things into a quick, terse, almost innocent directness." From the article:

'In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought,' [Calvino] writes. Ruhl, in her plays, contends with the pressing existential issues; her stoical comic posture is a means of killing gravity, of taking the heaviness out of her words in order to better contend with life. 'Lightness isn't stupidity,' she said. 'It's actually a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom--stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you're experiencing them.'

This takes me to Calvino's lecture on lightness, which I haven't read in a few years. About halfway through the lecture, Calvino says, "I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know there is such a thing as a lightness of frivolity." It's a lightness of thoughtfulness he's talking about in literature.

We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above all things like a cloud, or better, perhaps, like the finest dust, or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations. [August Wilson! Absolutely succeeds in that.]

It really says that. A field of magnetic impulses. Which is, in case you haven't been insatiably tracking Einstein's intellectual development lately, what first got Einstein thinking about relativity. And which figures largely, if invisibly (how else?), in "Are We There Yet."

In his lecture, Calvino applauds examples of literature that have fulfilled each tendency, weightlessness and weight (where I admire August Wilson, he commends Dante), saying:

At this point we should remember that the idea of the world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things so well. So, too, we would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it.

The task for me, then, is to create an experience that lets the people in the room, or the readers, know the weight of the world, but feel the lightness. (For Calvino, this doesn't exclude grief, just defines how it is experienced: "melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness." )

But how does Calvino define lightness? I like Lahr's gloss very much, but it's good to go back to the lecture and follow Calvino's many floating iterations of lightness. At one point, he lays it out almost linearly (especially when I don't retype the literary examples in between):

First there is a lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency....Second there is the narration of a train of thought or psychological process in which subtle and imperceptible elements are at work, or any kind of description that involves a high degree of abstraction....And third, there is a visual image of lightness that acquires emblematic value....

Like that, like the sudden appearance of three layers of gauze floating above, around, and under one another, I can clearly see three of the elements I've been working with, and working to create, in writing "Are We There Yet" --- lightness as material for creation.

Incidentally, back to August Wilson, I think his work, contending as it does with the weight of the world, can still be seen to contain that second form of lightness: in his incredibly finely-wrought evocations of history through the concrete, day-by-day experiences of his admirably thoroughly-embodied characters, places, times. Re-reading his work for this quality of lightness might be a way for me to learn from his craft without being overwhelmed by the distance between what he does and what I'm thinking of doing. (Did you know that he was working on a comedy about coffin-makers at the time of his death?)

But back to Sarah Ruhl, Calvino, Ovid and Aristotle. Calvino writes (still in his essay on lightness):

For Ovid, too, everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world. And also for him there is an essential parity between everything that exists, as opposed to any sort of hierarchy of powers or values.

Of course, I think of Einstein, "the central principle of special relativity is that no observational vantage point is singled out over any other. " This essential parity is necessary for transformation, Calvino continues:

Ovid's world is made up of the qualities, attributes, and forms that define the variety of things, whether plants, animals, or persons. But these are only the outward appearances of a single common substance that--if stirred by profound emotion--may be changed into what most differs from it.

Here, then, is the lineage of Ruhl's transformational aethestic, as she's traced it.

I told Sharon that when it comes to the artistic lineage of my writing for performance, I feel like Tony Kushner is my mother and Sharon's my father. (Mother being, for me, the parent I most obviously resemble, the mothertongue I speak, and father the source of the underlying structure of my thinking and assumptions about the world I inhabit.) This, as Sharon pointed out, makes Laurie Carlos, her mentor/mama, my paternal grandmother. (It probably also makes Bertolt Brecht at least my great-uncle on my mother's side, given Kushner's influences, and Grace Paley my mother's mother's something-or-other-cousin. ) Maybe Sarah Ruhl is the long-lost older sister I never knew I had.