Tag: Pronouncements

Sleepless or Sleepful

Speculation

In the early 22nd century a hiphop ensemble shall be propelled to stardom with their hit The N*s I’ve Fucked, until it is discovered to have been penned by a white supremacist and powerful member of the ruling party.It will be a minor controversy within a maelstrom of controversies which will blow over in short order. Awards will be rescinded, records updated. The artists will be forgotten while the partyman skates.

Or Maybe It Wouldn’t Be

You!
No, not you, sit down,
I have other plans for you.
They are long, far-ranging,
and complicated.
You!
On your feet,
You’re slipping and you’re slow.
But you’re perceptive,
you pretend not to but
you pay attention,
Like when I answer without rancor
or pretense of moral outrage,
from having judged, and balanced needs
against best probable outcomes,
Direct and honest like instinct.
I saw you get that,
That’s what I fancy about you.
I’m not out to fuck you,
in any sense of the word,
that would be disastrous,
in any sense of the word.

I & language & being

How I manage to stay on my feet durning performances is by clinging to the wall.
I pull myself up, handhold by handhold.
Words crumble and fall around me. I look for a path and follow its logical progression.
It’s scary, but there’s always another word where you need it.
Sometimes you have to make do and grab at the next best, and the next, and hope,
that when you slip,
you can grab another word and ride it to safety.

Myself, then, is a path of words that manifests in performance. Myself is maintained word by word, for as long as there are words.

But what is myself in wordless times? In silence and solitude, I pace and drink coffee and commune with dogs. Myself blindly balances on a single foot and finds that, by strumming or muting invisible lines of tension, pain can be, not averted, but channeled, partially, elsewhere in the void. Myself is a silhouette in a blue sky, tensing and relaxing without words.

The Play Must Go On

Goddamn it. Theatre is a collaborative art and the most egalitarian. It’s those aspects that I’m having to come to grips with.

To be specific I’m talking of the writer-director-actor triad. Together we become, like god, responsible for making and learning from creation.

I want to get lazy, throw up my hands and accuse Kaufman of dropping the ball, of failing to develop the characters. But that’s a novelist’s job, not a playwright’s. In the theatre that role is handled by a triad. A tribunal.

That committee had better be empathetic, passionate, and dedicated to learning and creating.

I think we are.

But it’s nerve-wracking, and I feel powerless. My last collaborator bailed. Left me holding, and I couldn’t complete the play without her.

So, yeah, I have some trust issues…and the collaborative aspect of theatre freaks me out.

It’s like this.

The writer splits early, and all we are left with are words, and it takes talking to figure out what they mean. It takes the interplay of sharp accepting passionate minds to come together.

Don’t bail on me.