Hello, December

Amazing the way time accelerates.

In November, I opened and closed Big Love at Caltech. We had a fabulous cast of undergraduates who really explored what this play meant, now.

Then I began making site visits to the various ensembles featured in the NET Micro-Fest: Critical Mass Performance Group, The Ghost Road Company, Watts Village Theater Company, and The Post Natyam Collective. All of these groups were amazing and insightful and wonderful, and they revived my belief that theatre just might be able to change the world.

In December, I indulged in the Micro-Fest. Then I recovered.

And in the middle of all of that, I applied (and keep applying) for academic jobs.

More specific writing on these events to follow.

Check Mee and the American Myth

I just finished reading Chuck Mee's memoir, A Nearly Normal Life, which was, of course, amazing, fantastic, insightful, poetic, and powerful. You know, like anything Chuck Mee writes. (Obviously, I'm a fan. And it seems that with Chuck Mee, you're either a fan or your decidedly NOT a fan, with no in-between space).

I love this:

In truth, though I didn't know about it at the time, there were some real hardcore deviants in America in the fifties, whose lives and work, like those of my friends in Barrington, were going to make the world more accommodating for me and for others who suffered from some form of difference. (189)

And then this:

The fifties was not an undifferentiated era of conformity; a great change was already under way, one of the most fundamental transformations in America in my lifetime - not an advance in technology, nor a growth in productivity, nor a new strategic place for America in the world, but more fundamental than any of those: a change of mind. (190)

I think of all the mental and emotional labor it took to act as if there was conformity, a nice normal normalness - to act that in the face of the obvious difference: the difference of a friend struck by polio, or of the gay person(s) in the community, or of the people of color that were woven into real life but not the ideal life of television and film, or of the things that we each don't feel that we're told we are supposed to feel. Yet the myths, the stories that took so much effort to believe in, did give comfort.

Not by coincidence, this topic emerged during rehearsal last night (Mee memoir, Mee play, Mee-reading dramaturg). As we discussed Olympia, we came to the realization that she has her illusion - so beautiful, so comforting, even if a little odd - of love and marriage and happiness. And by god she is going to make reality fit that illusion. Until it simply cannot.

I suppose the disillusion is inevitable for all of us, as individuals and as a nation. It is necessary, and yet so painful (most painful for those who have invested all their time and labor and energy into it) to see it washed away, to come to accept reality for what it is and still fight to change it tangibly, and not in fantasy only.

Dramaturgy is like...

Dramaturgy is like living in Borges’s library during the day and then emerging into Carnival at night.

I Miss You, Pleasant Rowland

I never thought I would say it.

I stepped into American Girl Place today - I needed to pick up the newest catalog, make sure I was correct about the theatre (it is no more), and just take a quick peek at the place in preparation for an article I am going to submit.

Dr. Martinson, this ain't your grad student's American Girl Place.

The American Girl that I wrote about in my dissertation, the one that so effectively straddled the line between a mom's wants and her daughter's wants, the one that masked its storeness by constructing itself as an empowering educational resource and an experiential destination, the one that schooled young girls in refined taste a la Bourdieu, allowing girls to gain fluency in upper middle class cultural practices like seeing theatre and cafe dining, that American Girl is gone. It has been overwritten in garish pinks and purples (wherefore art thou demure berry interior design theme?) and animated to look like an awful Bratz-meetz-American-Girlz mash-up (only NEW My American Girls dolls come to life online at innerstarU.com) and buried in too many flowers and stars and butterflies (with whimsical faux hand-drawn clip art!).

I miss the old American Girl.

Not that I retract my critiques. I don't. Old American Girl did put forward a simplistic narrative of American progress as basically good, with only a few minor bumps (displacing native peoples, slavery, manifest destiny, orphan trains) along the way to the multicultural utopia of today in which we are all the same (so long as we are upper middle class - and preferably white). Old American Girl did teach girls about competitive consumption and social positioning. And the Old American Girl Musical Theatre pieces did favor deadening theatrical practices, did enforce racial difference (but only for people of color), and did serve as a commercial brought to life.

And now? It still does all that, only now it all seems so cheap. Not the prices, mind you, NEVER the prices - as long as suckers are willing to shell out the same dollars and get less, then the joke is on them. But the crap (now literally crap) you can buy, the store, the experience, the brand - its all so cynically lessened. You can practically taste the Value Engineering that has happened when you walk through the doors of American Girl Place or page through the catalogs. You can almost see the corporate honchos sweating over the products, looking for ways to save $.01 here and another over there by skimping on design and production and quality. You can essentially hear the meetings in which marketers discuss how "archiving" their historical characters will create a buying rush AND allow the brand to grow by introducing new characters. It slaps you in the face, this rush to maximize profits by giving consumers less and less and telling them it's all the same.

It was bad enough to have old American Girl make so much money by artfully masquerading as a school, a library, a museum, and a dose of feminism. New American Girl doesn't even have to be artful about it.

I miss you, Pleasant Rowland.

A brief thought on directing

I love directing, being the one whose task it is to guide the storytelling of theatre. I love cultivating my vision, which all the time gets better and more refined through the input of my artistic team. But I want to resist the notion that directing is the pinnacle to which we should all strive. In fact, I want to resist the Director-as-God thing that dominates theatre production in our culture. Not that I think that there shouldn't, finally, be one person with the ultimate say in the room. I do, especially when that person is me. (Actually, to be completely honest, I think that even more when it isn't me and I wish it were me; I long for that authority most when I really wish my ideas were landing with (and really know that they are being dismissed by) the person who is in charge). It's just that, when I am the one at the helm of the ship, I really rely my collaborators.

Which is why I am so looking forward to participating in the NET (Network of Ensemble Theatres) Micro-Festival this December, and look forward to making connection with some of these theatres to join them in their collective endeavors. I really want to find new models of creation. Not that the prevailing system is bad or wrong - it can be great (I'm thinking especially of my work with Kamesha Jackson Khan) and it can produce amazing art. And, in my experience, it can also lead to really muddled and/or simple and/or boring work. It depends entirely on the director.

And THIS director wants to really take the risk to explore new ways of working, to see if maybe new forms of theatre might emerge.

Interdisciplinarity

I've been working the past week on a job application letter, and a significant portion of this specific call deals interdisciplinarity. It's a topic that keeps coming up. ATHE, for example, is looking to heighten the stakes of the MD (multidisciplinary) panels, to make them so in form and content, and not solely in name. Flexibility of approach, thought, and communication, and the ability and determination to always look further than one's own comfort zone, so vital to the creation of theatre, finally has gained traction in the academy.

But it's always been there, right?

Certainly my own approach to theatre - both study and creation - involves interdisciplinarity, which to me is one of the key defining features of dramaturgy. And when I think of my practical work, I always consider myself first a dramaturg and second a director. This, of course, follows my exposure to theatre - I was literally, chronologically, FIRST a dramaturg, and only LATER a director. But titles shift and I know this, and I love directing (truly, I love directing as much as I love dramaturgy) and I know this. My view of myself as a dramaturg has to deal with the sensibility with which I approach any theatre piece. That is, in an interdisciplinary manner.

Dramaturgy requires looking for connections across difference - often different research subjects, different methodologies, or, as in my current work with Caltech, entirely different worlds:science/technology/engineering and the arts. (There shouldn't be such a discernible distance between the sciences and the arts, but it is palpable and undeniable). I am struck by how many of our group are drawn to the theatre - really drawn in that you see them sort of crave touching that artistic side of humanity - and yet how quickly they limit that artistry by making it something small and quantifiable, and also denigrate it by deeming it something inessential and unserious. It is my task to really try to connect with this audience and stress to them the absolute necessity and vitality of art. And this requires all the interdisciplinary muscle flexing I can muster, because I need to basically show them that their mode of thinking, with the different processes and values that entails, is as necessary as is ours as artists. And that our work, our research, our creation, is as needed as the next scientific or technological advancement that they create.

Empty Space, pt. I

It's the end of September, and despite the blazing heat here in Los Angeles, the cycles of the academic year are kicking in and it is starting to feel like fall. After a rejuvenating eight days at Director's Lab West, I find myself refreshed and ready to dive into production work at Caltech, writing at home, and, of course, the job hunt across the nation.

Working on Big Love marks a new experience for me: this is the first show that I am repeating. I directed it several years ago at De LaSalle High School in Minneapolis (a production I still adore), and I am now dramaturging it at Caltech in Pasadena. This isn't my production, it's being performed with an entirely different set of actors in an entirely different context, and yet I was concerned that I might simply attempt to recreate what I had already done, and in that attempt, create something deadly.

Last night at auditions, reading as one of the sisters on stage (we are short of women right now), I looked out across the bare stage at the unpopulated auditorium and was struck by just how empty Brook's Empty Space is. The stage seemed immense and without structure. Which is always how it is, I realized, when we start on these creative journeys.

With my DLS ensemble, we had together constructed an edifice, an architecture in which our story was told. That building is gone (as it should be, since it was of that moment), and now a new one must be raised. Those collective handholds are gone, and maybe it is because they once existed so tangibly for me, and now do not, that I was able to notice their absence.

But this is always how it is: an empty, somewhat terrifying space that we come together to fill. We build so much through our doing theatre.

Directors Lab West

Huzzah!

I was accepted into Directors Lab West! I cannot wait to take a week to really immerse myself back into the art of directing. It's so easy to let the everyday overwhelm the artistic...that's why I am thankful that this program exists to provide the necessary break from the quotidian that enables art to happen.

I'm also thrilled at the prospect of deepening my ties to the Los Angeles theatre community. I'm ready to really make roots here.