OF BALLYHOO AND BEACH BALLS

Imagine my consternation in the early days of Willy Nilly when a short green bus pulled up to the curb in front of Dixon Place, and a slobbering mob of propeller hat-wearing troglodytes began to stumble toward the theatre, a spectacle reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead.

“Those can’t be the critics!,” I cried, clutching my director’s hand until he fainted from a loss of blood circulation. But alas, they were. Our suspicions were confirmed when we saw that some of the creatures held memo pads and number two pencils in their trotters.

 

By the time the dust had settled several weeks later, we were satisfied. Several critical voices –a couple of them major – expressed delight at what we’d labored so hard to bring them, and we wound up with a page and a half of superlative pull-quotes. Ah, but those first couple of nights! It was as though we’d been set upon by a coalition of the blind, the deaf, and the stupid (but unfortunately not the dumb). The unkindest cuts came from a couple of second tier scribblers from two of New York’s top ranking critical organs, who brought their prodigious storehouses of cultural knowledge and keen descriptive powers to bear in the service of deriding a wayward beach ball, which had managed to accidentally bounce from the set into the audience on opening night. This ball was apparently a sort of bete noir to these critics, possessing all the malevolence of Moby Dick. Like toddlers, or perhaps kittens, they were mesmerized by it. It was the sun around which their reviews revolved. Like fops of the Restoration, each scrutinized the ball down his nose through a pince nez, laughing the ball to scorn. Unfortunately (for me), somewhere behind, underneath, around the ball – unnoticed — there had been a play.

 

This is the story of my life. The independent theatre artist, of necessity, must wear many hats in order to bring his work before the public. In my convoluted career, I’ve learned something of marketing, and I’ve found it to be a double edged sword that cuts deep.  I have serious things I want to say. I express these ideas through comedy. And then I get out there and start selling. And the hard selling I do almost always backfires in the end. Part of the audience, expecting the unchallenging spectacle the hype seems to promise, exits the theatre disappointed and perplexed. (Hey, man, what was that? That was just weird!) Another part takes the hype at its word and watches the play through the jaded lenses I myself have ground. This bunch never does see the play. They merely confirm what they’ve already decided based on the marketing material. In sum, rather than looking with their eyes, they believe just what they have already been told. It is especially depressing when purported theatre critics are guilty of that level of superficiality; but it turns out most of them are.

 

With Willy Nilly, director Jeff Lewonczyk and myself, by joint consent, decided to announce the show as an “exploitation” and mirror the techniques of the mainstream media apparatus in cravenly making entertainment out of murder. By doing so, we hoped to make people think. Our hype almost always serves a double function – genuine marketing, and a simultaneous parody of marketing. This time out, the promotions fulfilled their more quotidian agenda. Filling the houses turned out to be no problem, at least on the initial run. But the bit about getting audiences to think is a tough nut to crack. As a general rule, it turns out audiences and critics believe everything they’re told – hook, line and sinker. If you paint a canvas entirely red and call it “A Study in Blue”, damned if they won’t see the blue – and only the blue – in it. We announce a work of exploitation, and many reviewers therefore leave their critical faculties at the door. (Others, perhaps, never possessed such faculties to begin with). The result: a passel of reviews that ought to be more embarrassing to their authors than the admittedly uneven play should be to its creators. Certain of their lapses amount to critical malpractice. Thus, for example, the lyrics to Willy Nilly’s opening song “Psychedelic Mushroom Cloud Cuckoo-land” (the title of which is a Joycean style portmanteau phrase compressing “psychedelic mushroom”, “mushroom cloud” and Aristophanes’ “cloud-cuckoo land”)  “failed to impress” one reviewer. To another, the climax of the show (which illustrated social breakdown by setting a Living Theatre style contact improv to a sonic collage modeled on “Revolution #9”) “just fell apart”. A number of these whiz kids demonstrated a lack of awareness of pop culture so great that they plainly had never heard of either Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In or Tiny Tim – phenomena at the pinnacle of mainstream prominence at the time of the play’s events (youth is no excuse for such a level of ignorance—at least not in someone who presumes to don the mantle of critic). By the same token, a few equated the presence of a square, deadpan narrator with Rod Serling (apparently the only such character they’ve encountered) rather than Jack Webb or the hundred or so other white-sock wearing cop and D.A. types more germane to Willy Nilly.

And, as always seems to be the case, the play’s more serious underlying themes went completely unnoticed, even by the show’s many champions. Even a page and a half long monologue of deadly earnest content justifying the author’s intentions (a blatantly Euripidean device I often resort to, one that would make Neitzche spin in his grave) failed to clue scribblers in. All I can do is take solace in the fact that comical writers with serious aims are rarely “gotten” the first time around. To Shaw’s contemporaries, Mrs. Warren’s Profession was just a scandalous play about hookers. Unless you announce yourself as serious, and then act serious, and then shove your serious intentions down people’s throats and up their asses, most people will only register the foolishness. If you think this maddening predicament isn’t what inspired Moliere to write The Misanthrope, you’ve got another thing coming.

 

Moliere knew his misanthrope from the inside; he thought the character’s dark thoughts at times, or he couldn’t have written them. But he also possessed the wisdom not to give in to despair. Cooler heads prevail in the play, and Moliere went on to write many other brilliant comedies. We profit by his example by climbing back into the saddle with Kitsch, which opens at Theater for the New City on November12. It is a farce, based on the Roman playwright Plautus’s Twin  Menaechmi by way of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. We hope audiences will merely enjoy themselves. It is a machine to make people laugh. In fact, we hope audiences never bother themselves with this essay. It will ruin the show for them.

 

On the other hand, we hold critics to a higher standard. We hope they will bring to the table more than a superficial working knowledge of Top 40 theatrical hits.

 

A familiarity with ancient comedy would help; the play derives more from Plautus (by way of translation) than from Shakespeare. The play’s main architecture is classical: it is divided into five acts, and maintains a careful geometric organization of characters and events that owes more than a little to Aristotle.

 

A knowledge of the early works of Brecht would also assist the critic. (Happy End and St. Joan of the Stockyards were particular inspirations). Young Brecht was a parodist. In the tradition of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Cervantes, and even Bach, his technique early on was to vacuum up cultural products and glue them into his theatrical vehicles; so much so that he was often accused of plagiarism. Yet Brecht was a man of his time and place. In fact, he is the foremost advocate of a theatre oppositional to classical values, even to our own times. Like Eisenstein and Meyerhold before him, he sought a way to theatricalize the Hegelian dialectic; his Epic theatre would build not to some single satisfying climax as in the Aristotelean theatre, but mimic the variety theatre and the novel by containing strings of discrete moments, each with its own point, flattened out over a picaresque journey. The historical moment described in Kitsch­ – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the momentary culture clash between the twin materialist philosophies of capitalism and communism – provides fodder to explore the dialectic (embodied here in separated twins who spend their lives in the two warring blocs – half money-grubbing decadents, half over-regimented sheep). In Kitsch, classicism wars with Epic technique (songs, intertitles, direct address). Ideas are thus embodied in the silliness, for those able and willing to look beyond the veil.

 

And to quote the television pitchman: “But wait: there’s more!” For the play parodies Brecht. In plays like Happy End, St. Joan and In the Jungle of Cities Brecht had betrayed (intentionally or otherwise) an imperfect knowledge of the America he depicted (a knowledge gleaned almost entirely from Hollywood movies and popular songs). We do the same with our own sketchy, romanticized idea of Berlin. The play is written in the voice of a translator, as though from across a great distance. The fabric of the play thus describes a world where communication within and across cultures is at the very least troublesome, and at its worst, impossible. For the playwright who grapples daily with such problems of communication (spawning, for example, this essay), the theme is a highly personal one. But the Timonist in me fears that the majority of reviewers (let’s not call them critics) will receive precisely none of these elements I’ve described, having been distracted by some untied shoe or unbuttoned fly.

 

 

 

The opinions expressed in this editorial are solely those of the author. His professional associates, past and present, had no hand in its creation, and are just as annoyed as you are.

The Blood Brothers Present the New Guignol

I can’t recall receiving so many invitations, or seeing so many ads, for so many halloween shows, haunted house attractions or parties — if you wanted to and you were able to clone yourself, you could probably do a dozen different such events every night this week. It’s very exciting to me since Halloween is my favorite holiday, although I’m mighty glad I’m not competing against all this glut. At any rate, I’m either rehearsing or traveling every day between now and the unholy holiday, so will get to see none of them. But if I had to choose only ONE to see, it would have been The Blood Brothers Present the New Guignol, which opens at The Brick tonight. Not just because the Nosedive guys are friends and colleagues, but also because they were ahead of the current curve, and they’ve been doing a different edition of this horror-show for several years. I confess the campy hosts are my favorite element — I like my horror mixed with laughs…just like real life, heh heh heh. At any rate, that’s my endorsement. Please buy the ticket I would have bought (or to be more accurate, mooched).

Here’s how: http://www.bricktheater.com/bloodbrothers

Stars of Vaudeville #61: The Three Keatons (and Buster)

“Maybe you think you were handled roughly as a kid – watch the way they handle Buster!”

– a 1905 ad for The Three Keatons

Here’s something we haven’t seen in a while–a domestic abuse act! Many people today don’t know that the great silent comedy star Buster Keaton (whose birthday is today) started out as part of a family act with his parents, Joe and Myra. By the time he left the act to star in motion pictures with Fatty Arbucle at age 22, he had already been doing slapstick comedy for over 86% of his life. He’d also conditioned himself to be nearly impervious to pain, out of sheer physical and psychological necessity.

Myra Keaton came from a show family. Her father Frank Cutler ran and performed in the Cutler Comedy Company, a travelling medicine show that also featured melodramas, banjo music and blackface minstrelsy. Little Myra (who stood 4’11” even in adulthood), played piano, coronet, bull fiddle and sax, and sang.

Joe Keaton got involved in the company when they passed through Oklahoma (then known as the Indian Territory). Joe was a character – a sort of cocky, bull-shitting drifter like Billy Bigelow in Carousel. The sort of man who relished a fight at the slightest perceived insult. Ed Wynn called him a “totally undisciplined Irish drunk”. Cutler hired Keaton as a sort of roustabout. Keaton attempted performing as well, but he was a big flop. It was clear to Cutler that Keaton’s primary interest in the company was Myra. Not interested in having such a worthless wastrel as a son-in-law, Cutler gave Keaton the axe. Keaton left the company but Cutler’s plan backfired. Myra ran away and married Keaton instead.

Several years of privation and hardship followed. Where life with the Cutler company was relatively comfortable and respectable, Joe and Myra were now shifting for themselves with far inferior medicine shows, just barely eking out a living.

While they were performing with the Mohawk Medicine Show in Piqua Kansas in 1895, Myra stopped to give birth to their first child, Joseph Frank Keaton. Legend has it that the baby literally had a steamer trunk for a crib. While performing with the California Concert Company, Joe and Myra became the best of friends with Bess and Harry Houdini. It was Houdini who supposedly nicknamed the child “Buster” when the precocious child fell headlong down several flights of steps, although this may be apocryphal (print the legend!).

In 1899, the family moved to New York City to break into vaudeville. By this time, they had evolved quite an act, developed in their years with the medicine shows. Called “The Man with the Table,” it involved Joe doing everything conceivable acrobatic that it is possible to do with a…table. He would dive onto it, do handsprings off it, fall from it onto his head. He might choose from a couple of different climaxes for the act. He might place a chair on top of the table, and from a standing position, leap so high into the air that he would land sitting in the chair (when he was sober enough to get it right). Another showstopper would have Myra sitting on top of the table, and Joe kicking her hat off her head. (The martial arts style high kick was Keaton’s specialty. He had developed the technique while brawling, and it was always his secret weapon in those situations. Keaton could kick up to eight feet high.) Meanwhile, while Keaton was doing all this kicking, falling and leaping, Myra would play her cornet, which was thought to give the act a little class.

Their first New York job was at Huber’s Museum, where their buddy Houdini had also gotten his start. It was only one week’s employment, and it’s a fortunate thing it was: at Huber’s you worked 15-20 shows a day – a grueling grind for anybody, but hell on an acrobat. After the Huber’s date, Joe unsuccesfully pounded the pavement for some time, before fortuitously bumping into Tony Pastor on the sidewalk. The fast-talking Keaton described his act to him, and landed a job. They did 3-4 shows a day during the engagement, and they were last on the bill.

The Keatons were now a vaudeville act. It remained only for Buster to get involved.  His first onstage appearance was at age three, when he crawled and joined his parents uninvited, to gales of laughter from the audience. It wasn’t until Buster reached the age of five that he became a regular part of the act.

The Three Keatons’ act would play as shocking and as dark today as it no doubt did  then. The gist of the routine was that Buster would torment Joe while he was busy doing something and then Joe would proceed to “discipline” him. “Father hates to be rough,” he’d say just before slinging his son around stage like a sack of turnips. Joe and Buster were dressed identically in very strange grotesque outfits. In a typical routine, Joe would come out and sing a song. Buster would enter from behind and carefully select a broom from 15 or so that were arrayed onstage and then, taking careful aim, crack Joe over the skull with it. In another bit, Joe is shaving at a mirror with a straight razor. Unseen by Joe, Buster begins to swing a basketball attached to a rubber house over his head, each pass getting closer and closer to Joe’s head until it finally smacks him. In response to these shenanigans, Joe “swings Buster around, bounces him off the scenery, throws him offstage”, and otherwise exercises his fatherly perogative.

Nobody had ever seen anything like this before. It gave the act an edge, a gimmick that it had previously lacked, and the Three Keatons now became a big success. Offers flooded in. Though the Keatons were never major headliners, they were successful and constantly booked. They were very well known and had lots of fans. Will Rogers wrote of going to see them on his honeymoon – and preferring them to the Great Caruso.

The success of the act can be chalked up to two things. One: shock value—one could not believe what one was seeing. Two, and more importantly, Buster turned out to be a child prodigy, a sort of Mozart of physical comedy, with a gift for mimicry and improvisation that already outclassed most adults in the field. The critics raved about Buster.

James Austin Fynes, Proctor’s general manager was one of the first to spot Buster’s talent. He advised Joe and Myra to claim Buster was seven years old to help forestall the trouble with the authorities that was almost sure to come.  At the turn of the century, they played Proctor’s Albany, where they did so well, they were moved three times to better spots during the run. In 1901, they played Proctor’s Pleasure Palace, truly the big time.

As time went on, the act got progressively rougher. A suitcase handle was sewn onto Buster’s back so he could be easily picked up and thrown. Keaton regularly chucked the little guy into the orchestra just for laughs. Like a cat, Buster needed to become adept at taking falls, relaxing and tumbling into them, or risk broken bones or worse. Joe even threw Buster at some hecklers once, advising him just before letting him go to “tighten up your asshole”. Buster came out okay, but he broke one of the young men’s noses. There was a Pavlovian quality to Buster’s training. He was not allowed to cry or laugh or else he’d get beaten. This is the origin of Keaton’s famous “stoneface”. Meanwhile, his father’s self-discipline was such that he once accidently kicked the eight-year-old Buster in the head, rendering him unconscious for 18 hours.

It’s heartening to know that even in those less enlightened times, plenty of people were outraged (and many more, were at least uncomfortable) with this act. From the first, the Keatons were plagued by the attentions of the Gerry Society (the NY Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children). Gerry representatives would frequently come around to spy on the Keatons’ shows. The Keatons did everything they could to thwart them, right down to dressing Buster in a little suit, derby and cane so that he would seem like a midget. Joe compounded his own woes by envisioning an Eddie Foy-like kiddie empire, involving Buster’s little brother Harry (known as “Jingles”) and baby sister Louis in the act. In 1907, Keaton trotted out the whole brood on stage for a benefit, and was nabbed but good by the Gerrys – banned from the New York stage for two years, when Buster would turn “16”. (Really 14, for the Keatons had been making Buster two years older). Without Buster, there could be no act; he was the one who got all the raves. Lacking Buster’s talent, Jingles and Louise were shipped off to boarding schools. A 1909 tour of England was a disaster, when the bookers and audiences there were apalled and offended by the child abuse. The Keatons sailed back to the US one week later. That year they got their revenge by staging their triumphant return to the New York stage at Hammerstein’s Victoria.

Joe revealed his business acumen (or lack thereof) by turning down an offer from William Randolph Hearst to portray Maggie and Jiggs in a series of silent comedies based on the comic strip “Life With Father.” Joe had an irrational dislike of films…one which his son very shortly was to prove he did not share.

The act went progressively downhill from this point. As a teenager, Buster got bored and sloppy in the act. Joe’s drinking got worse and worse so that he could be reckless, mean and sloppy himself on stage. Buster, tired of absorbing his blows, started hitting his father back. By the time we reach the point of a twenty year old and his drunken father angrily trading fisticuffs onstage, we have strayed really far from the charms of the original act.

In 1916 Joe’s long simmering feud with Martin Beck came to a boil. Beck was the manager of the Palace as well as the Orpheum Circuit. He was notorious for his weekly meeting wherein he conferred with his staff like some Anti-Claus and decided who was naughty and who was nice (and consequently got work). Joe Keaton was never nice. The final nail in his coffin was an incident in Providence. Keaton, enraged by some cheap prop furniture procured by a stingy stage manager, proceeded to smash every stick of furniture in the theatre. It was just a matter of time before the Keatons were finished in Big Time.

A few days later, Beck was backstage when the Keatons were about to go on. “Make me laugh, Keaton” Beck is reported to have taunted. True to form, Keaton literally chased Beck out of the theatre and half way down the street. It’s a hot tempered vaudevillian indeed who tries to strike the most important booker in vaudeville.

Finished in big time, the Keatons started working the lowly Pantages circuit, but it was hopeless. At this point, Joe was never NOT drunk. Buster and Myra quit the act, leaving Joe to sober up on his own.

The Keatons’ agent Max Hart (who was also an agent for Will Rogers, W.C. Fields, Bert Wheeler, and Eddie Cantor) booked Buster in The Passing Show of 1917. This was a very good booking indeed. Neverthless, Buster dropped this prestige gig in favor of what was at the time a huge gamble: he opted to make films with Fatty Arbuckle instead.

After a brief apprenticeship with Arbuckle and a short stint in the army in World War I, Keaton went on to make 19 perfect shorts (1920-23) and 10 perfect features (1923-28) for his own company, Comique. Surreal, fast-paced and highly inventive, these films continue to inspire film-makers as diverse as Woody Allen and Steven Speilberg today. These highly personal films usually pitted Buster against impossibly overwhelming forces such as a tornado, a burst dam, or an avalanche of boulders, against which he emerged victorious through sheer offbeat ingenuity. Rare even then, Buster did all of his own stunts, accounting for many cheerfully broken bones over the years. Some of his films, like The Navigator were huge hits in their own day. Others, like The General were major flops that have over time come to be considered masterpieces. A marriage to Natalie Talmadge (whose sisters were both movie stars, and whose brother in-law Nicholas Schenk was a major mogul) assured Keaton status as part of Hollywood’s royalty throughout the 1920s.

In 1928, he became a contract player for MGM, and after a couple of great silent films (The Cameraman and Spite Marriage), he began a long and painful path to almost total self-destruction.

His decline may be attributed to several factors. First, oddly enough, his voice. Although he had a great one, it worked against the type of characters he usually played. His character was usually a young man, a wispy, and lovelorn character. He was often cast as a sort of wealthy naif, a young New York playboy pampered by butlers and the like. The image contrasted sharply with his squeaky, raspy voice, which was naturally deep and hardened from years of smoking and drinking. This, combined with his rustic Kansas accent, undermined the romantic leading man idea. Keaton had the voice of an old sailor – the voice of experience, a character who goes to bars and visits prostitutes. If he’d begun playing farmers – farmers with crazy inventions out back in the barn – his voice would have worked in talkies. Second, MGM tampered with his character. In Keaton’s third wife Eleanor’s words, previously, “he had never been a bumbler.” Instead of creating chaos wherever he went, Buster’s character always tried to impose order on a universe that was chaotic. Now the studio increasingly cast him as an incompetent, the sort of part that did not jibe with his natural dignity. Furthermore, for his last three features he was teamed with Jimmy Durante, no shrinking violet, who couldn’t help but hog every scene he was in, while Keaton floundered in uncertain seas.

Despite all this, Keaton’s talkies, though nearly unwatchable today, were big hits at the time. In them we see sad evidence of the third and most crucial factor in Keaton’s rapid decline in the early thirties: he’d inherited his father’s alcohol problem. Each Keaton performance is progressively more unbearable, as his liquor problem grows to the point where it was visible onscreen. The problem was exacerbated by his divorce from Talmadge in 1932. By then Keaton drank so much he either missed workdays or would be drunk for the shooting. L.B. Mayer fired him, but Irving Thalberg pleaded with him to come back. Buster, brazenly assuming there would be offers from other studios, turned Thalberg down. The other offers never materialized.

From here, Keaton tumbled to poverty row, first with a series of two-reelers for Educational Pictures (1933-37), then some Columbia shorts directed by Jules White of Three Stooges fame. The 1940s were his toughest decade, when he worked primarily as “technical advisor” for MGM films. A highly successful 1947 performance at Cirque Medrano in Paris helped rehabilitate his reputation, as did some 1949 shots on The Ed Wynn Show. In 1950, he had his own Buster Keaton Show on a local Los Angeles station, then went on to a series of much cherished guest shots in films and television over the next 17 years. Keaton worked on prestige TV programs such as Playhouse 90 and The Twilight Zone, as well as numerous commercials. Films beckoned one again, too. High profile cameos in Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight (1952) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) brought him back to cinemas, although in both these films his scenes had an eerie, unearthly quality, as though he were some sort sort of ghost from the early days of flickers. In the sixties he was a familiar face in the Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach party movies – something akin to hiring Heifitz to play third fiddle at a barn dance. If the beach party movies weren’t proof enough that he’d take whatever work he could get, in 1964 Keaton starred in an art film called Film by Samuel Beckett, where he was directed to stumble around bumping into walls with a sack over his head.

One of his last projects turned out to be the very last one for his co-star Ernie Kovacs, a TV sit-com called The Medicine Man. It featured Keaton as the Indian sidekick to Kovacs’ travelling snake-oil salesman. Keaton had come full circle to his medicine show origins. He passed away in 1966

In addition to the dozens of films Keaton made himself, there are two bio-pics for the intrepid investigator to explore. The 1956 film The Buster Keaton Story is reportedly terrible. Much more interesting and accessible is 1969 film called The Comic starring Dick Van Dyke and directed by Carl Reiner. The film is clearly based on Keaton’s life (among others).

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

The Yes Men Fix the World

I first became aware of the Yes Men when they were part of an article I wrote about theatrical protest for the Village Voice during the Republican National Convention in 2004. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are the titular characters. Their m.o. is to infiltrate actual corporate and government-sponsored convenings masquerading as presenters, and then to give heinous, completely objectionable talks, savoring the acceptance of their Swiftian propositions. Flim flam men to the core, they perform the valuable function of exposing the dark underbelly of the Bottom Line philosophy. It shouldn’t shock anyone to know that, while multi-national companies talk a good line about corporate responsibility (see any PBS sponsorship promo), when you get inside the corridors of power, human values and morality aren’t even on the table. It’s strictly about profit.

Their new film The Yes Men Fix the World gives us a front row seat at several of these jaw-dropping, hilarious stunts, and takes us behind the scenes to show how they are planned. At a 2005 Dow Chemical conference, the two give a presentation on “acceptable risk”, symbolizing actual harm to other human beings that’s profitable (hence acceptable) with a Golden Skeleton. At a petroleum conference in Canada, they share candles supposedly made from the boiled off fat of a victim of climate change named Reggie Watts: a new, cutting edge “bio-fuel” with more than a little in common with Soylent Green. At another event, they pass themselves off as representatives of Haliburton, introducing a preposterous new invention called “Survivaballs”, hazmat suits to be permanently worn by the rich and powerful after they destroy the earth. After this and several other of such presentations, the speakers are generally approached by approving audience members with words of encouragement, or at best, mild suggestions for improvement. The grand-daddy of the Yes Men stunts occurred when Andy Bichlbaum went on the BBC in 2004 and announced that Dow Chemical (which had recently acquired Union Carbide) was finally going to make equitable restitution to the residents of Bhopal, India for the 1984 industrial disaster, which took thousands of lives, and destroyed tens of thousands more.

Incredibly, these actions don’t seem to have had any legal repercussions for the pranksters, probably because they are INVITED to all of these platforms. (Granted, the invitations are the result of traps in the form of fake web sites). But there are repercussions. The BBC stunt resulted in a $2 billion drop in stock value for Dow Chemical that day (until the hoax was revealed). This development reveals an unpleasant reality, one from which the Yes Men draw the wrong lesson. The fact is that if all the CEOs and the boards of directors decided tomorrow to grant huge payouts to all the people they’d screwed over, they would get the same treatment as Mr. Deeds did in the Frank Capra movie. All of their fellow stakeholders would stop them. Corporations are not moral entities; they never have been; they were never meant to be. The market is a force of nature. Like fire, it is both an invaluable gift to mankind and an occasional horrible disaster. The movie is at its weakest when it attempts to ridicule representatives of libertarian think tanks as they try to explain this scientific fact. Morality is the business of other spheres of human endeavor: let the media, the church and government be a check on the worst excesses of corporations, for sure. Just so we’re clear—I’ll go even farther than the Yes Men. The callous perpetrators of Bhopal should be placed in stocks and have rotten vegetables and profanity hurled at them for the rest of their despicable lives. But the Yes Men’s sweeping indictment of free enterprise is adolescent at best, retarded at worst. The market developed and distributed the very video equipment on which they made their movie. The food in their stomachs — unless they subsist on Victory spam — is the result of free enterprise. And the one human institution capable of punishing capitalists and making them behave, the government, when given too much power, is the worst environmental (Chernobyl, Three Gorges Dam, the air and soil of Eastern Europe) and human rights (the Holocaust, Stalin’s relocations, Pol Pot) offender of all, making big corporations look like also-rans. The reality is, the only force that can put the check on the blind, corrupt, wicked humans who run corporations…is other blind, corrupt, wicked humans. It has nothing to do with any system. It has to do with the behavior of each individual human, and the choices they decide to make. Shame on anyone who who deprive someone else of life and liberty–or the pursuit of happiness.

The Yes Men Fix the World opens at Film Forum on October 7. For more info, go here.

Dispatches from the Tribe’s Diaspora

Mere days after the curtain closed on the last performance of Willy Nilly’s premiere run, I sought the company of my compeers wherever they now lurked. I found them scattered throughout the demi-monde, like so many orphans adrift in a theatrical gale, in no less than four separate shows, which I was able to catch in three consecutive days. Here is the madness I encountered:

On Tuesday, I caught Adam Swiderski (a.k.a Beach Nut Barney Carlson) with his musical outfit Supermajor performing the rock opera Viva Evel Knievel at the Brick Theatre. Penned by my compadre Lynn Berg (with music by Miriam Daly), this witty multi-media lark tells the bone crushing story of the All-American motorcycle daredevil, from his early jumps over mere parked cars…to his Quixotic rocket launch into the Snake River Canyon…to the Phoenix-like rebirth of the family franchise in the person of his son Robbie. Dry as the Nevada desert, the piece seems to walk a fine line between pure goof and genuine admiration for this larger-than-life mad man…a line only someone who’d been a kid during Knievel’s heyday could ever fully understand. Me, I fit that bill to a tee. Like Berg himself no doubt, I was one of the thousands who built makeshift ramps in his backyard, popping wheelies on his bike before sailing two or three feet into the stratosphere over piles of toys (and occasionally my sister, when we could catch her). Swiderski was well cast in the role, not strictly because of his white bread persona, but because he and Supermajor pull off these amazing songs (or parodies of songs?) with the assurance of, well, motorcycle jumpers. Ya either have a blast doing numbers about how someday you’re going to leap over the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle…or ya flame out. I’m glad to say that in Viva Evel Knievel, no bones were broken. In the lingo of the cyclist, it was a Triumph.

On Wednesday, I went to see Rich Lovejoy (a.k.a talent scout Danny Weiss) do his solo turn in The Dark Heart of Meteorology at Under St. Marks. I’ve come to know Rich as the sort of actor who’ll say yes to everything, including getting naked at the drop of a hat — sometimes before the hat even touches the ground. In this piece (written by Stephen Aubrey, directed by Jess Chayes), he delivers another sort of nakedness, one quite unexpected. Granted the piece contains its fair share of surreal absurdities.  In the play, Rich is a tv weatherman in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Having fled his job and his family he inexplicably now travels around the country telling his story to groups at increasingly sad venues, from a college, to a high school, to a church basement, to a rehab center. The unpredictability of the weather is a metaphor for the senselessness of human tragedy in the monologue, and Rich’s chops, I learned, run the gamut from slapstick to pathos. It surprised me that he has access to sadness, but upon further reflection it shouldn’t have. He has a soulful quality, and we stay with him throughout his weird journey, and want more of it. The actual play needs to percolate some more, I think; it possesses potential yet untapped. But Rich mines what’s there, and it’s a solid performance. For info on tickets etc, go here.

After Rich’s show, I hied me over to Otto’s Shrunken Head to see the Electric Mess do their Yardbirds tribute. The personnel of the Electric Mess contains three members of the Willy Nilly company, Esther Silberstein (Nazi, the Fifth Hoarse), Derek Davidson (bass, musical director), and Oweinama Biu (Farfeesa and electric sitar). Here, they and their cohorts unleashed a string of note-perfect Yardbirds covers, including “Come Tomorrow”, “Heart Full of Soul”, “Evil Hearted You”, “For Your Love”, and 6 or 8 other tunes I didn’t recognize because they weren’t on the greatest hits LP I played as a teenager. Esther is a show-woman non-pareil, literally trotting out her Jaggeresque maneuvers with throat and boots to match. She and the band have done their homework. I was especially impressed by by “Evil Hearted You”, on which she sounded so much like the original I kept looking around to see if there wasn’t a DJ involved. Not be outdone, Ow took over the vocals on a couple of numbers, notably “Heart Full of Soul”, matching his frontwoman in both substance and style (which is really saying something).

Thursday night, I caught Willy Nilly’s star Avery Pearson with his sketch comedy group Really Sketchy at Shetler Studios. Avery began the evening on a high note, impersonating a sex-crazed bonobo wearing nothing but a pair of adult diapers. From here, he became a French Revolutionary during the Great Terror. And so and so. Here we should point out that Avery is a team player in an ensemble that also include Sara Lauren Adler, Duane Cooper, Mark Garkusha, John Calvin Kelly, Dani Faith Leonard and R. Elizabeth Woodard. (But I also espied Willy Nilly’s stage manager Guenivere Pressley in the tech booth. Whore! Whose light cues won’t you call?!) More imaginative and eclectic than your garden variety sketch comedy troupe, Really Sketchy was winningly pleasant until the second act, when they proceeded to dazzle. I thought I had written the mother of all fart sketches, but mine is but a foothill next to the Matterhorn that is Really Sketchy’s fart sketch. No stone is left unturned in this Rabelaisian romp, concerning one Harry Bottom, the “Phantom Farter”. The writing in this epic is top-flight, as are the acting chops of the cast, who are often called on to fake dramatic moments in this rags-to-riches story about a performing flatulist. See it if you dare; smell it if you must.

This little Whitman Sampler accounts for seven of our little Tribe. What can the others be plotting? Ah, my friends, my friends. We’re born, and then we die, all in a heartbeat of time…

Spitting in the Face of the Devil

Bob Brader and I met in the most delicious context possible. We were fellow actors in a project to bring the complete works of Ed Wood to the stage. As pleasurable work, this cannot be topped. Were I to somehow secure a job doing only this for the rest of my days, I would die a happy man. Bob, who somewhat resembles the original Flash Gordon Buster Crabbe, was uniquely suited to the work, with his all-American haircut, twinkling eyes, and smile that makes Burt Parks look like Leonard Cohen. Bob was forever playing the leads in these things. He just seems put on the earth to wear a striped tee shirt and seek shelter in mysterious, secluded farmhouses on rainy nights, vaguely perplexed that the “doctor” who’s taken him in has found it necessary to lock his bedroom door from the outside. If you haven’t already guessed, he’s one of my favorite actors.

But man cannot live on bread alone. I first got an inkling that there was more to Bob when I asked him to appear in some show and the word came down that he was withdrawing from the scene for a time to work on some serious solo writing. Well, this impressed me, too. While we’re on the Flash Gordon analogy, it’s heroic business dredging up your ugly past and making a show out of it. Most actors have such pasts, or they’d pick some form of steadier work, one that didn’t involve pretending to be somebody else. The heyday of autobiographical performance art was the late 80s and early 90s. What I saw of it, I generally didn’t like, usually because the perpetrators had a habit of symbolically assassinating villains from their youths without ever doing any self examination, which should always be a writer’s first job. Brader doesn’t make this mistake. He spits in the face of a couple of “devils” in this piece. The principle one, you won’t be surprised to learn, is his father. The other is himself.

Bob Brader, Sr. sounds like an appalling character, apparently incapable of love, and engaging in all sorts of abuse of the helpless charges under his roof. Through some genetic miracle, though, Bob Junior was born funny. As a consequence, his revenge becomes an enjoyable – and meaningful — ride. The meaning comes from the fact that, while Brader Sr. incessantly belittled Junior’s gift for mimicry, Junior now uses that very gift to even the score. Sitting at a table Spalding Gray style, Brader conjures up a vast catalog of characters from his life: teachers, doctors, girlfriends, all his relatives, and (everyone’s favorite) Paul Lynde. While Brader’s take on the old man feels a little two dimensional (an uncomplicated, irredeemable villain), the other portraits are diverse and often hysterical. “I always liked Bob”, says one of his maternal grandparents at his father’s funeral, “He never did anything to me.” But he did plenty to Bob Brader, Jr., his mother, and (spoiler alert) some of Bob Jr.’s friends. And the powerful refrain, repeated pointedly throughout the piece, is one we must always take away from testimonies like this: “And nobody helped.”

Brader’s piece, developed with his wife and director Suzanne Bachner, very carefully points out who might have helped: a treacherous guidance counselor, barbaric doctors, a weak if loving mother, and teachers who prize his talent but take their interest in him no farther. The old school take-away from a piece like this was that the “system” was at fault, that there might be some sort of political change that would make it impossible for such creatures as Brader’s father to act with impunity. But Brader is smarter than that. George Orwell, noting that many critics and scholars often made the mistake of claiming Charles Dickens as a socialist, wrote a perceptive essay correcting the record, asserting that Dickens was merely a humanitarian. Dickens, that chronicler of cruelty to children, never claimed that any “system” could change anything. He merely aroused our sympathy. There’s only one person in your life who can right any wrongs, correct any injustices you encounter as you slalom down your treacherous personal slope. And that person is you.

Spitting in the Face of the Devil played most recently at the 2009 New York International Fringe Festival.  The team’s new collaboration Sex Ed opens tomorrow night Where Eagles Dare Studio Blackbird. For details: http://bob-brader.com/.

Coney Island Boom-a-Ring

That’s it. Time to eat my words, and then wash them down with Kool-Aid. A few weeks ago I posted an item here in praise of the Cole Brothers Circus, one that elevated that show at the expense of the vastly bigger, badder Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey outfit. But yesterday, I saw the latter organization’s tented show Boom-a-Ring out at Coney Island, and I have to reverse myself. While still not the circus of my dreams, it sets a new high water mark.

Almost literally. Tropical Storm Daniel was dumping sheets of rain on Coney Island when the boys and I arrived for our annual pilgrimage there, making the circus the only thing doing. The trek from the subway station to the tent (which is pitched on the other side of Keyspan Park, an effortless jaunt on a normal day) was an epic trial. By the time we got to the box office, the three of us were soaked to the bones and shivering. We desperately needed things to start going right.

And then, miraculously, they did. First, the advertised ten dollar seats proved not to be a fable. Hilariously, we were given the absolute worst seats in the house. But in a one ring circus the worst is still great, and besides, we moved twenty rows down during intermission. Every aspect of the show turned out pleasant like this. We’d gotten there an hour early to purchase our tickets, thinking we’d get some lunch at Nathan’s before the show started. The kids didn’t want to go back out in the rain however. That was fine; I’d forgotten about the Ringling Bros. pre-show, when the children get to meet the performers in the ring. This is usually Bedlam, a nightmarish cacophony of squalling brats and pushy New York parents clambering over one another in order to trample the apprentice clowns. But on this day, because of the storm, my kids and I shared the stars of the circus with a few dozen other well-behaved tikes and their parents. The boys were still hungry of course, and though everything at Rinngling Bros. is famously overpriced, even that went right. Though the popcorn was six dollars a box, when I handed the candy butcher a twenty, he gave me back $24 in change. I found myself having to lecture the man on the art of grifting.

And we still haven’t gotten to the show! Imagine the resources of the Ringling Bros. show in the service of a more tasteful artistic vision reminiscent of more straightened one ring tented shows like Cole Bros. and Big Apple Circus. Well, perhaps “reminiscent” is less apt than “stolen from”. But there is a fine old tradition of such theft in show business! Thus I didn’t exactly mind it when the size, shape and color of the Ringling Bros. tent is almost exactly the same as Big Apple’s, and the stage set and band configuration are based on Big Apple’s aesthetic. (The gobos in the shape of exploding cartoon stars pointed at the roof of the tent were perhaps taking the theft a bit far, however). Likewise, beginning the show with the National Anthem as a pretty girl rode around the ring on an elephant carrying an American flag is a touch that first made me fall in love with Cole Bros. No matter! It’s a terrific show! So much better watching six clowns you can recognize and appreciate, rather than six dozen ones scrambling and mugging and leaving you fondly gazing at the exit signs. My boy Charlie sharply recognized Justin Case, the French accented trick cyclist from Big Apple. But there’s so much in this show that you won’t find in its more impecunious competitors. Big Apple has fired all their performing elephants – Ringling Bros. presents a trio. Even better, Ringling Bros. is one of the few shows that still presents big cats – eight or so white tigers who leap over one another and grimace and pose ferociously on command. As a topper, the gorgeous tiger-tamer goes directly from the cage into the stratosphere, where she performs on trapeze. Other memorable moments: a pack of performing dachsunds, a gentleman who does trick shots with a cross bow, tumblers, jugglers, and a trio of motorcycle daredevils who ride around the cage of death. These are all that spring to mind at this writing, although there was much more. I couldn’t take notes (my paper was too soggy) and I was too cheap to buy a program. And in the end, that was probably sinful of me. The thought that the three of us were on the receiving end of a show like that for $36 makes me feel like I’ve done the impossible – committed a swindle against the circus.

Why do I still hold out and say that it’s still not perfect? At this stage, it’s merely a matter of sound waves. I could do without the loudspeakers blaring top 40 hits during the pre-show, and the show’s original musical score was very much not to my liking. Music creates atmosphere. The circus is supposed to be romantic, it’s supposed to take you away to far away times and places. By definition, it should be old-fashioned. I want calliope! I want it to sound like a carousel or a John Philip Sousa marching band! The day I finally walk into an American circus that sounds as magical as it looks will be the day that I love it without reservation.

http://www.ringling.com/PortalContent.aspx?linkID=856&parentID=848

A Comedy About the Manson Family?

Why did you write a comedy about the Manson family?

That’s what everyone keeps asking me. To me, a fitter question might be, “How can all the other writers NOT write one?” As prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, author of the runaway bestseller Helter Skelter smartly knew, the saga of the hate-mongering hippie cult leader is surely one the most astounding true stories of all time. But a deadly serious one.

However, as the attorney for the defense, allow me to cite precedent in the violent, ribald pages of Voltaire, Swift, Fielding, Pope, Rabelais, Jarry, Moliere and even Charlie Chaplin (who by the 1940s was making comedies about Hitler and the Holocaust). Technically speaking, Willy Nilly is (like the work of the writers I named) not a comedy, but a satire. In a comedy, little things go wrong until they magically right themselves…and then everyone gets married. In a satire, characters representing the human race are shown committing follies – even atrocities – and are ridiculed. The difference in approach is between acceptance of the status quo and a rather sophomoric dissatisfaction with same. If anything, ironically, the satirist (with his accentuation of the negative) is the more naïve and idealistic of the two. He dares to hope for something better from his unpromising subject, or else he wouldn’t bother. The hell of it is, by using tragedy as the raw material for his comedy, he sets himself up to be misunderstood by the majority of audiences who can’t be bothered to probe beyond the outer skin.

Real murder, racism and sexism are not funny. But hypocrisy, self-satisfaction and lack of self-awareness truly are. On the other hand, you have to admit, Charles Manson himself, the real Charles Manson, is pretty funny. In fact, he’s a clown. How do I know that? Could it have something to do with the fact that the mainstream media has given this murderer countless hours of prime air time, piped his image and his voice into millions of American living rooms, and millions of us have sat there, riveted, hanging on to his every demented word? Charles Manson, in fact, is an industry. He sells tee shirts. He has a Web site. He cuts records. He is a celebrity. Yet the source of his notoriety is a rash of murders. This might also be said of O.J. Simpson, Che Guevara, Stonewall Jackson, Robbespierre…oh, any number of people. In fact, I’ll go you one better. Manson learned everything he needed to know in a series of U.S. “correctional” facilities, that is, before becoming a darling of the American media, selling his fair share of deodorant and breakfast cereal on the airwaves, while far more efficient killers operated under the radar at the very same time.  Do I think Manson and his deeds are funny? No. But I think we are. For being drawn to his narrative and being so facile with our condemnations – when we spend our entire lives as part of a “family” no less bloodthirsty.

If you haven’t already been — pardon the expression — bludgeoned over the head with this information, for full show details: go here: http://www.pipermckenzie.com/willynilly/

Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, and Other Plays

Some major international theatre encyclopedia (I forget which, but I believe Geilgud was the titular editor) made me furious once for its dismissive description of Sam Shepard. The assessment was something along the lines of “amazingly inept in his early work but he eventually started writing real plays in the late 1970s.” This is a common attitude among the general public (insofar as they ever think about such things) but the G.P. can be forgiven for occasional philistinism: they’re too busy building bridges and serving lattes and driving taxi cabs to dwell much (at all) on theatrical aesthetics.

Critics and editors, however, should know better. As I recall, the edition of the book of which I’m thinking was from the 1980s or 90s. Shepard’s freeform experiments – as valid as those of Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock or Lester Young – were by then decades old, and clearly not a matter of ineptitude but bold artistic choice. And furthermore, they were clever, powerful, funny, poetic, and theatrical in a way that most conventional playwriting rarely seems to be.

Dismissal of this kind of experimentation has been my bete noir for decades. I came to New York with a trunk full of such plays, many of them produced for audiences of appreciative crickets. It turns out I was two decades behind the times, but also two decades ahead. There now seems to be a receptive audience again (if a downtown one) for wildly nonlinear work, largely I think due to the indefatigable proselytizing of artists like Mac Wellman, Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group. And you could have knocked me over with a feather when I discovered Young Jean Lee’s work was of the same type.

I’d seen her name (if not her work) constantly, reinforced by the branding masterstroke of her naming her theatre “Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company”, after the fashion of dance troupes. I’d seen but one of her plays “Christmas”, which must be the most economical play to produce ever written: it consists of a set (a tiny house) and taped voices – but no live actors. Other than this, her popular downtown hits (the ones contained in the just published Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven) are new to me. And new is the operative word. Her writing has remarkable freshness and spontaneity, as though she’s managed to switch off the inner censor that usually throttles the id before it wriggles out into the ether.  Consistency of character, voice, situation are all intentionally up for grabs.

What makes her work still more interesting is that this formalism (or antiformalism, which of course a kind of formalism) is mixed with devastating honesty. The freeing up her own voice enhances, rather than diverts from, the expression of her identity as an Asian-American, as a woman, as a Pacific Northwesterner, as a jack Christian, as a whatever else she is. Her work represents a new, far richer and more highly evolved state of affairs than the literal-minded, often autobiographical identity-based writing that was so popular in the 1980s. (The stridency of that writing can be forgiven though when you recall the presence of the character “Long Duck Dong” in the 1984 film Sixteen Candles. I am a vaudevillian and that character even offends me.)

Young Jean Lee deals with such stereotypes from a seeming position of strength. She can slap them around, she can explode them, she can ignore them, she can even pay them homage. In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals the purported villain is “Fu Manchu” — not the historical dynastic ruler, but something closer to the reprehensible stereotype once played by Peter Sellers. But not quite. The character is black, though dressed in Chinese clothes. In the original production, it was played by Thomas Bradshaw. And though he is the traditional villain, and seems that way for awhile, in the end, he and all the “oriental masses” are wiped out by a pair of stereotypical white people named Terence and Sheila (the supposed victims) using an “oriental killing machine”.

In The Appeal, “Coleridge”, “Wordsworth” and “Byron” fight like a bunch of high school girls, and even sort of talk like them. While they are poets and banter about poetry and philosophy, the names of the characters are carrying most of the symbolic freight. Their speech is contemporary and frequently moronic. (This is a technique I call the “Whatever Aesthetic” and credit to Gen X and the trickle-down influence of punk. The humor derives from a certain “fuck you” to the expectations of the audience. I’ll expand on this idea in a future post).

All playwrights with any self-awareness know that all of their characters are merely some version of themselves. Lee takes that fact of life and makes it manifestly obvious, in much the same way that many painters set out to show that paintings are “just paint on canvas”.  Her plays, despite the fact that many have several characters and “situations” (if not exactly plots) still feel like stream of consciousness interior monologues taking place inside the head of Young Jean Lee. Some stretches are like automatic writing – surreal. Some express modern angst, neurosis, self-doubt, self criticism. Some express racial bugaboos. Some express metaphysical questioning. Pullman, WA (named for no reason and for every reason in the world after her home town) contains all these streams, and are spoken by three characters who are “named” after whoever is playing them at the time. In essence it is a soliloquy.

These two tendencies (the free exploration of stereotype and this flattening out and splintering of character) come together in the title piece, in which the characters are merely divided into “Koreans” and “White Persons” and the theme of racial identity is kicked around like a pig’s bladder. A major color in her work is the latent cruelty in the seemingly gentle – it appeals to me very much. Traditionally, Asian women are socially docile. Layered over this, you have the Evangelical Christianity Lee was raised in. But bubbling and simmering beneath them both…let’s just say I wouldn’t want to take one of those kicks (but of course I have, every time one of her characters levels a shot gun at Europeans. Thank God I’m part Cherokee or I might be dead!)

And speaking of thanking God, the most recent play in the bunch Church deals with her religious upbringing.  An appropriate subtitle might be “The Revenge”. A bunch of smiling, bubble-headed Christians preach to the audience, the things they say growing crazier and more nonsensical as they go along, but their attitude remaining the same. Anyone who has ever watched JoelOsteen knows this isn’t absurdism, but kitchen sink realism.

Suspicious Package: RX

No knee-jerk fan of either technology or audience interaction, I literally had to be pulled off a bar-stool and dragged up the street to participate in Gyda Arber’s inaugaural edition of Suspicious Package last summer. I was surprised to find it an extremely pleasant experience. A half dozen strangers are handed hats, ipods and character names, then sent on their way. The ipod delivers a series of commands (e.g., walk to such and such a location); lines of dialogue to read; old time radio style interior monologues; and actual movie-like scenes. Each participant thus has a different journey; each experiences a different piece of the same story, in this case, a murder mystery. It’s all a great deal of fun, although last year I did wind up walking a couple of blocks in the wrong direction, and then had to go really fast to catch up.

This year no one had to twist my arm to go (and Gyda’s a good arm-twister). I volunteered. And it was even more of a hoot. This year’s story is a science fiction yarn concerning an evil pharmaceutical company, a plague, nanobots, and mind-control. The mind control theme is reinforced by the fact one is being told what to think and do by an electronic voice for 45 minutes (which is less “science fiction” than you probably think, when it comes to that). Certain technical aspects of the experience have been improved upon over last year’s, and the audio and video vignettes contain a wider cast of characters, all duly hilarious.

They’re all my friends so I make no pretense at objectivity. I will say that if they asked me to play charades at a party, I’d tell ‘em to take a hike — but I’d participate in Suspicious Packages again in a heartbeat.

Go here, if you would like to live the experience: http://www.bricktheater.com/antidepressant.