Advocacy

Manila Pages - Part 7

ANDREA HAIRSTON

Northampton, MA

In the tradition of Rappers, African-American Baptist Preachers, and West African griots, Andrea Hairston calls on any language to express what is necessary.  Griots are poets, musicians, oral historians, praise singers, and diplomats negotiating community, conjuring identity.  Griots shake time loose, allowing us to feel beyond our brief moments, beyond our skin.  They dance down ego-trips, pour libation to the ancestors, and welcome the unborn. Illuminating the past, invigorating the future, these time- traveling Wordsmiths stand between us and cultural amnesia.

Archangels of Funk is my latest play.

Archangels' host says the show is a live performance "between the stations and networks, a rogue transmission broadcasting on a fractal frequency . . . Like a hip Prairie Home Companion, only from the asteroid belt."  Using a variety show format of "interviews, romance, gossip, news, the blues, and radical views, even a mini-drama series and a rant or two," the play explores the possibility of soul repairs in an age of terror and plagues, soldiers in the closet, and a September sky exploding on our heads.  Archangels' host asks us to "Dance life, but if you trip and stumble, then sing life. And if your voice cracks, let your heart keep time.  And if your heart gives out, with your last breath leave your story behind.  And if you are forgotten, come to us, in dreams and visions.  Shake us from these death-like trances.  Haunt us, hound us, like demons.  Until we cannot forget that some slow, shuffling death is not the DANCE that is LIFE."

The other piece I'm working on is:

Stage Fright by Andrea Hairston, with music by Tony Vacca and Pan Morigan, is a speculative music/drama set in a future America where public performances have been banned, ostensibly because of recurring violence/terrorism at sports events, pop-rock-rap concerts, and other large public gatherings.  In the future world of Stage Fright, theatre had just about died out before the banning due to astronomical costs, esoteric content, poor audience attendance, craft atrophy, and dwindling talent pool.  (Current concerns in the field.  Despite Film and TV artists' passionate engagements in theatre, some fear the 'best' talents and minds are otherwise engaged.)  Given computer capacity to generate music, tune voices, adjust rhythms, synthesize bodies, etc., few artists in the Stage Fright world are capable of sustaining spontane­ous, live performances.  An old actor is caretaker of a once popular theatre space.  The theatre's last production, a post-modern performance piece, had as its setting an installation on disappearing diversity-animals, plants, languages, cultures, and peoples going extinct.  Despite compelling images, powerful performances, and poignant theme, no one came.  The production was abandoned during social unrest with the setting in tact.  Creatively working the cybernetic bureaucracy, the actor has been able to preserve this space while other theatres were demolished.  He adds to the installation: masks, musical instruments, and props he scavenges from former performance sites.  Occasionally he performs for himself.

In the midst of a passionate soliloquy from a favorite play, he encounters someone raised in the era without public performance. The stranger/intruder has left a restrictive home environment to experience a 'live' world, to wander in the dangerous public sphere and meet others face-to-face rather than simply on-line.  This character seeks sites where people congregate for secret society performances and could either be an agent trying to hunt down dangerous dissidents or an artistic adventurer hoping to participate in forbidden mysteries.

The setting for Stage Fright -the sculpture, photography, paintings, drawings, and collages that constitute the installation/setting on disappearing diversity will not be silent, nostalgic artifacts, but living images given voice by musicians and actors.  Pan Morigan will research 'endangered' and popular musical styles to score the images.

My aim with both Stage Fright and Archangels is to encourage audiences to be agents of change taking an active role in constructing their own reality. We take seriously our roles as modern griots who must engage and entertain while fostering critical thought and challenging our community to becomes its best self.

That's stuff I've been thinking, about working on.

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JULIE HEBERT

Los Angeles, CA

What I'm thinking about has to do with what i miss from the theater- and that is the freedom, responsibility and risk of authorship- complete authorship of a work.  in film and television there are so many collaborative voices to be considered that in a way it

leaves the author a place to hide - a place from which to say 'i didn't write that, i didn't mean that, they made me do it.'  whether it's true or not it is a comfort when being scrutinized harshly... a comfort not available in the theater.

on opening night of a play i've written i feel more exposed than at any other time in my life, bar none. the play expresses what i think, what i feel --- is truthful, essential, mysterious and worthy of being noticed.   i teach myself through writing a play; i risk exposing my lack of skill, my lack of insight, my lacks in general and it is this very risk that causes growth.  when i write a play i am seeking and i feel i am doing my real work.  my brother died this year and the deep, aching need to write a play about him won't leave me alone as i go through my working day here in hollywoodlandia.

love,
julie hébert

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SARAH RUHL

Los Angeles, CA

One thing that I've noticed, watching language in this country over the past three years (the years of Bush's tenure, and the rise of Schwarzenegger, two right wing coups smack dab in the middle of a functioning democracy) is how much this country craves the language of simplicity.  Subject, object, verb.  Americans love that. We love it.  Coast to coast.  It makes us feel like we live in a simple time.  And I think the left has made fun of this rhetorical principle rather than taking it seriously.

Hearing Schwarzenegger's speeches, which lack all substance, but glimmer with the charismatic leadership derived from simple sentence structure: "I want to govern for the people of California!"  I wonder: What is the role of theater, which examines rhetoric closely, during a time when Americans crave a masked simplicity?  We want simplicity from our politicians, our journalists, our movies, and our advertisements.  We want the illusion that it's Morning in America. We don't want to think about the complexities of destroying another country.  It makes us feel weird.  Cognitive dissonance.  And the palliative for cognitive dissonance in the U.S.?  Simple sentence structure and good PR.

The democrats in this country, I feel, have capitulated on the field of language as well as on other fields...the criticism of the right is muted, and when we do hear it, from people like Tom Daschle, it is in the language of bureaucrats.  "What we have here is...", says Daschle on the subject of the lies told to Americans, and he pauses. And I'm hoping he'll say: A BIG FAT LIE! or even: MENDACITY! MENDACITY!  But what he says is: What we have here is...a credibility gap!  His sentence goes: Motor, motor, motor...and a great big collapse.  A mincing bureaucratic sigh.  Dismissed.

Who in this country but professional politicians and pundits gives a crap about a credibility gap!  The left needs a better language for criticism.  And I don't know why it should be so difficult, because the fact is that when you're speaking the truth, it often comes out with great concision and clarity.  I think of the truth telling of Martin Luther King.  A man whose life, morals, convictions, and speech were all united in a kind of clarion language of truth telling.  Well, it's impossible to conjure up another Martin Luther King.  But we need someone to say--in plain speech--with conviction--that our government has been lying to us about Iraq.  About a lot of things. All of the PR scams in the world--Condoleezza Rice's job has been transformed into a colossal PR job--shouldn't hide the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  Why no one seems to point that out with sufficient outrage or plainspeech is strange to me.

So, what is the place of theater in times of perverse language?  The lies of seductive plain-speech on the right and the craven-talk of complex professional bureaucrats who are hedging their bets on the left?   We need whole alternative WORLDS of language.  We can have them in the theater.  And people will listen, without the mediation of the media.  We need plain-speech exposed as a lie (see Kelly Stuart's latest play Homewrecker, that takes apart George Bush's speechifying), we need complicated intelligent talk that communicates the complexity of the world (I recently saw the opening monologue of Kushner's Homebody/Kabul and was overjoyed about how much JOY there was in the theater derived from simply experiencing complex political engagement), and we also need simple speech--the simple clarion emotional political speech of an Anhouilh.

I believe that the truth telling in the theater does not even have to have political content in order to work on a political plane.  The truth telling might be about the smell of cigars (see Nilo Cruz' beautiful lyric Anna in the Tropics) but our bodies might remember the sensation of hearing something true.  And we might start to demand that sensation from our politicians.

We need writers.  We need live untelevised space.  We need to remember, in our bodies, what it feels like to hurl truths at one another, one human being to another.

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Brooke Berman

New York, NY

My latest obsessions? I'm so honored that you've asked me but aren't exactly sure what to say or how --

My concerns right now are the following;

How to evolve my own human heart and change.
How do we change?
How do we really change?
What does change mean?
Does it take a long time?
Do we, as a culture, as "the world" change all at once, or gradually, over a long time, so long that no one can see it until it has happened?
Is there ever an "apocalypse" or is it (again) slow-going and less dramatic?
What is love?
Where does love fit into creation and change? Can one do/be/have both? What does a change-positive paradigm look like?

I love making sure that my plays are seen.  I love marketing.  I love outreach.  I love being involved in making sure that the work gets to the people who need to see it - in my case, audiences under 30. Why don't more playwrights feel we are able to act as our own advocates in this regard?  Plays are written to be seen - not because they are OURS, but because they are written to provoke dialogue, change, and movement.

How do things move?

How do we make sure that we, as theater-makers, are healthy and how do we sustain ourselves financially?

How do we survive the lean times?

Hope this is something. I'm sorry it's not more coherent. Don't feel you have to use it. It's just what's on my mind right now.

bb

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PAULA CIZMAR

Los Angeles, CA

Often now, when I speak to some of my women playwright friends, I hear the repeated lament that they feel bewildered and inadequate as writers in the violent world in which we live.  They wonder if they have anything to say that is worthy enough, considering the current state of affairs.  I've been feeling this way, too.   

I confess I used to get impatient with this sort of thing-which would bring on my typical irritated Good-Riddance-So-Just-Don't-Write-Anything-Then kind of response.  But now I'd like to acknowledge the decency of this feeling of unworthiness-and also to point out that it is a product of empathy.  A product of taking in daily pain and disappointment and confusion and trying to process it as a human.   And as an artist.  A product of trying to find a way to somehow put voice to the world's madness in a form that will have resonance for other people and yet will not ignore it or trivialize it or excuse it.  

I keep reminding myself that the countries of the world are composed of people, not situations, not governments.  I keep reminding myself that it is people that I love-not situations, not governments.  And I keep reminding myself that so many people are still voiceless.  So there is nothing inherently trivial about writing a small human story about a person who has no one else to speak for her.  This is not ignoring or excusing a larger global problem, it is merely looking at it and its effects on a more local scale.  But I wonder: Is that enough in a time when my government is operating on lies and leaks and secrecy, playing on people's fears and using the words "patriot" and "national security" as justifications for reducing civil liberties?  I don't know.  I honestly don't know.  I do know that it is the human story that we all crave.  It's the human story that has always drawn us close to the fire to create community.  The tale of the small person caught up in the impossible task, the slaying of the huge, fierce dragon.  That's the story we all want to hear.  I suppose, even now, it's the one I will still try to tell. But maybe I'll start telling it with a much sharper tongue.

--Paula Cizmar, Los Angeles, California

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Y YORK

Honolulu, Hawaii

Plays make use of the fewest words to get at the most meaning.  I like discarding wrong words, pushing them away, wiping them up with sponges, wringing them down the drain.  I like studying correct words, laying them down like bricks, making a temple, a spire. Aspire.

In the world, they're flying around like bullets now, the wrong words. Dividing, isolating, killing.  We're lying low, me and my word friends, BREAD, SPOONBREAD, LIGHT, trying to make a temple to rise up, make peace.  Maybe not a temple, maybe a lighthouse, showing the way.

I am happy that so many sisters are also hard at work with their word friends.   I long to hear them, see their lighthouses rising, sending out word beams, landing like caress, lighting the way.

Y York, no dot

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