The Douchebag With a Thousand Faces

“What does she look like?”

The question stymied me. I mean, it shouldn’t have – it was innocent enough. A moment ago I’d been nattering on enthusiastically about a character I was developing in one of my scripts, and it wasn’t until the question was put so baldly that I realized I didn’t have the faintest idea what she looked like.

I could, however, hear her voice clearly – her cadence, her tone, her verbal tics. I may not be much of a visual thinker, but I’m obsessive about dialogue. I think this has mostly served me well, as a playwright who works with some fairly expressionistic material. Over the past twenty years, I’ve had the privilege of seeing many of my characters animated by many different bodies, of all shades and shapes.

The joy of show business is that it’s a uniquely collaborative form. Now, when I pick up one of my older scripts, I see many faces.

---

In what feels like a lifetime ago, I was director of a mime troupe for a youth theatre. After concluding our last project, I asked them what they wanted to work on next. The two answers were “Norse mythology!” and “Commedia dell’arte!”, with some wit immediately suggesting “Why not both?”

I laughed, and then chewed on it. Why not both? Maybe it was nothing more than a kind of apophenia, but the more that I looked at it, the more it made sense to me. Farcical exploits revolving around an amoral trickster? Larger-than-life characters both immune to harm and incapable of growth? So we improvised, and I spitballed character exercises, and we hammered together some wordless physical comedy.

Years later, when I was setting out on my own and digging through old projects, it stood out as a potentially fruitful premise. For months I pored over the Eddas, scribbling down lyrics and one-liners. And after many more months of blind mailouts, a response to one of my despairing posts to rec.arts.theatre.plays (it was 2003, so think Reddit before Reddit, kids) mentioned the Fringe.

There followed a musical revue, a touring one-act, and many, many open-mics. My point is that this process was, at every step, collaborative. Actors ad-libbed jokes, and I reworked them into the text. Audiences told us what was and what most definitely was not working.

Working on the script again after so much time has felt, oddly, less like rewriting and more like a collaboration with a version of myself that no longer exists. I am, by nearly any definition, a better writer now than I was then. But I know too much – I reject jokes out of hand because of course that won’t work. There’s something a little melancholy about looking back at a giddy new playwright who will throw out gag after gag without hesitation.

This was my journeyman project. While I’d been writing plays for theatres on commission for years, this was the first production over which I had creative control. This was the first space I had to give these voices, and faces, free rein.

It feels appropriate. The script contains in microcosm many of the defining features of what would become Maximum Verbosity: the dense language; deconstruction of a medieval text; the casual mixture of comedy and horror; a keen interest in the problem of evil; an admiration for and dread of the harsh face of moral freedom; plus, y’know, lots of dick and fart jokes. Probably more than I would include now, but, hey, I was twenty, and I’d been writing children’s theatre for years. Cut the kid a break.

---

I pick up the script now and I see many faces, and hear many voices. I take pride in the work that I’ve done. I remember the long hours and the fights and frustration. But I also remember that I didn’t do any of it alone.

We live in a world today that I don’t think that younger version of me could have fully conceived of – a world in which everyone has a platform. It’s both wonderful, and horrifying. And I’d say that its existence makes live theatre more precious than ever. Sure, the medium is dying. It was dying then, too. I expect it’ll still be dying twenty years from now, or two hundred years from now. Because if the theatre loves anything, it’s a long fucking death scene.

Taking the words that were once inside my head; hearing and seeing them reinterpreted by so many artists of so many different disciplines; walking into a room full of strangers, and sharing them; I mean, sometimes I have to step back and say, like, what percentage of the population of the planet gets to have this experience?

Thank you for coming tonight, and thank you for listening. I’m an individualist (neither unapologetic nor rugged), and I don’t believe that it’s prudent for me to speak for anybody else. But having the opportunity to share these words with you – heady and hacky, profane or profound - for the past twenty years - has been the honor of my life.

Hic Sunt Dracones

I'm pretty sure that I've written before about one of my key revelations from my days of teaching comedy: that the students who came in with some preconceived notion of "the tragedy of the clown" almost always ended up embarrassing themselves. The more they tried to craft some sort of calculated stage persona, the more affected that persona seemed. But when they focused on problem-solving the material, on telling jokes and structuring sketches and communicating clearly, some sort of raw and interesting and compelling identity would emerge.

It made me a great believer in what I'd call an organic process. Don't think about your voice too much, just talk to the audience. Your voice will come.

I never set out to be a political comic: I wrote a bunch of sketches, set them next to each other, stepped back, and realized that I apparently was one. (I suspect that if I'd started out with the word "satire" in my mind, the results would have been pretty freaking dire.) My last book wasn't formally plotted -- I whipped together stories for holiday shows when I was asked, got bored enough to have them start sharing characters, stitched them together into a narrative, filled and chipped and smoothed until I wound up with a grotesque tale of multiversal redemption. It's not a story that I planned, or that I would have thought of if I'd sat down and brainstormed: it emerged, for lack of a better word, organically.

This is one thing that's always dazzled me about many of my colleagues: their ability to churn out catchy, marketable titles, then sit down and write a hit show that fits. This isn't a dig! Many of those scripts are superior farces. It's not drudge work, but a process that stimulates their imaginations.

I'm envious; mine has never worked that way. I typically start out with a handful of lines and images and premises that feel like they go together -- I loop them together, try to carve out a narrative that makes sense of them. Usually this falls apart. A small percentage of the time, I come out the other end with a story or a show that I really like -- a smaller percentage of the time, I find an audience that really grooves on it. (It's probably unwise for me to publicize just how much marketing is an afterthought.) Much of the past decade has been my making peace with the notion that the transformative work of genius I'm hoping to leave behind is growing less and less likely -- it's far more plausible that I'll die some weirdo tinker, churning out vulgar curiosities in his basement.

There's a great gulf between the kind of writer I would have chosen to be, and the kind of writer I ended up being. Which is a pretty rambling lead-up to the point that I never intended to be a horror writer -- but at some point, I had to step back and acknowledge that over the years, I've written a fuckton of horror.

---

I've been wearing the "horror guy" hat for a while now, not least because I'm one of only a small handful of local tellers to consistently work in the genre. There's always been something a little strange about this for me. I'm not saying that the stories aren't horror, I'm saying that they ended up in a different place than they started. In my own heart, I'm a fantasist -- but one who believes that magic should be fucking dangerous.

Magic -- by my definition, anyway -- represents some sort of violation of the natural order. For someone as compulsive as I am, that can't be anything other than horrifying. Whether we're talking faery wells or fox spirits, no one brushes against that other world without being transformed, and nobody walks away unscathed. A sip of those waters is loss and madness and terror, and transformation is a lyrical word for death.

Jonah heard a voice of power on the wind, and ran for his damn life -- I'm saying that that impulse makes complete sense to me.

---

So if my intent wasn't moralistic, what's the moral that I found? When I laid the stories out end-to-end, I discovered (and, uh, spoilers for, like, half the stories in the collection, I guess) that apparently my favorite twist is a protagonist who discovers that they are, or is revealed to be, the monster of their own story. (Hence the title.) What that says about my own psyche is probably best left to others.

In retrospect, it's not all that surprising -- while there is great peril in excessive self-analysis for the organic-process guy, from my point of view, one of the major dominating themes of, like, everything I've ever written has been the problem of sin and redemption. This is probably unsurprising from a Catholic author.

Redemption is challenging to write about -- nobody deserves it, and we can't survive without it. Vengeance is always more appealing, but its end is always despair.

Ego and appetite are both obvious and omnipresent. Redemption is, at best, a tortuous, lifelong process. Worse, it's both tedious and unromantic. Falling is more thrilling than climbing, after all, and there's a reason more people have read the Inferno than the Purgatorio. But someone resolving to try to make that climb -- someone planting their foot and taking one meaningful step upwards -- I believe that to be worthy of a story or a song.

These are the stories of those who fell.

There is an imperfection in the human mind - a crack, a flaw, a crevice - one that fascinates and repulses all those who find it. It is empty of all but impulse and appetite and the memory of hope. What if you looked over the edge? What if you fell? And after the fall, what would you see in the mirror?

Dragon shadows, bleeding statues, wolf dreams and time machines - your biological clock is ticking, and it's time to get metaphysical in this twisted cabaret of the macabre. This is the road map to your own personal inferno, fondly dedicated to everyone who is dying...especially you.

Fully illustrated by artist Tom Cassidy, and with a foreword by author Michael Merriam! 

WARNING: contains tales of horror and dark fantasy, and consequently some disturbing, violent, and sexual imagery, including descriptions of sexual assault. 

Launch party this Friday at Strike!

Holy Fooling

"Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven."

When I was studying at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic High School, to the delight (okay, I mean, let's be real here, to the weary annoyance) of my friends, I was known for the composition of what came to be called "phil-poems." These generally represented brief but luridly described episodes in which a hapless Jesus would stumble across increasingly depraved scenarios. Once they had served their purpose, I would fold them up and conceal them in various books around the school library, and I'm only a little ashamed to admit that there's still some part of my lizard brain that reduces me to helpless schoolboy giggling at the thought of some future student picking up a copy of The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and being scandalized by soaring verse describing Christ participating in a squirrel orgy.

The humor (insofar as there was any) came from the clash between the nobility of the savior, heightened language, and utter filth. I have apparently failed to outgrow this impulse. (Indeed, much of the comedy I find funny, from the Marx Brothers to Monty Python, revolves around applying an astounding level of artistry to astoundingly stupid things.)

"Finally he spoke: 'I'm really getting quite a kick out of this notion of playing God like a dirty old man in Skidoo. You wanna know why? Do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?'

'Always?'

'If they're not, then it's a misuse of your power to make people laugh.'"

I suppose it was inevitable that I'd find my way to the comedies of Aristophanes and the rituals of

Dionysos (patron of liquor and the theatre); and, as I stumbled back towards faith, that I would find its echoes in my own religious tradition -- particularly in the Middle Ages (which is probably reason #69,105 for my fascination with that period). And I did lots of reading. I read about the many uncomfortable inversions of the Feast of Fools, and the conflict it created between the Church (body of Christ) and the Church (political machine). I read about Saint Simeon the Holy Fool, and the vulgarities in which he would indulge to mock the world of the flesh. I read Dante Alighieri and looked at the paintings of Bosch, at their many descriptions of torture and deviance and insanity, and quickly developed the suspicion that, like many horror writers before and since, their position of piety allowed them to revel in some seriously impious art. And I read a fuck-ton of the aforementioned Chaucer, with his tales of Biblical tomfoolery and anal penetration and what have you.

What I experienced while reading the medieval humorists wasn't so much an expansion of consciousness as it was a sense of recognition -- a clear sense that the sacred and the grotesque are not only compatible, but that the profane and the profound can coexist, should coexist, in some crucial way *must* coexist.

This has been occasionally bewildering to my audiences. I've had reviews of my comedy shows that criticize the apparent contradiction when I leap from a sincere expression of faith to a ten-minute sex farce. (And it undoubtedly presents a marketing problem, when patrons on the left dread the former, while patrons on the right dread the latter...) But the fact is that shock is the by-product, not my goal, and the contradiction has never really been all that obvious to me. Certainly not in all the art I've ever truly loved, with their poetry and obscenity and song and flesh and breath and divine madness.

"The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!"

The dirty jokes, in a way that I've been struggling to articulate for the entirety of my adult life, represent not some deviation from my faith, but its ultimate expression. And -- as someone who spends a lot of his time doing highbrow deconstructions of Malory and Thucydides and their ilk (and don't get me wrong, I love that work, too) -- I find, perversely, a kind of innocence in reaching back to touch that giggling schoolboy. Y'know...intimately.

Which is a really long windup to my announcement that, hey, I wrote another book!

It's December 21st, 2012, and something's gone terribly wrong with the timeline. Now it's up to Saint Nicholas, a soft-boiled detective, and an unknown carpenter's son named Jesus of Nazareth to set things right in this giddily blasphemous collection of literary parodies by internationally touring storyteller phillip andrew bennett low. Fully illustrated by cartoonist Kay Kirscht, and with a foreword by comedian Joseph Scrimshaw!

WARNING: May contain mature language, as well as immature and insensitive humor regarding genitalia, flatulence, regurgitation, sex, drugs, rock and roll, lies, videotape, duct tape, tapeworms, subversion of ethnic stereotypes, fulfilment of ethnic stereotypes, hate culture, rape culture, ape culture, horticulture, and/or a general posture of deep reverence for deep irreverence. Not for the faint of heart or stomach.

Launch party November 28th at the Phoenix Theater. I don't know if my cast of drunken prophets and trickster angels will find a home with you, but I'm pretty confident that a cash bar won't hurt.

The Secret Book of Jesus

I've been buried enough under both touring and paid writing assignments to not have been able to blog this particular production -- but I've gathered enough online detritus that it's worth collating here.

THINGS TO WATCH

1:03     The Secret Book of Jesus - Kansas City Interview. Brief and fluffy interview I did at the KC opening.

1:25     The Secret Book of Jesus - Teaser Trailer. Trailer I put together for the show some months ago.

2:57     The Secret Book of Jesus - Fringe Teaser. Live promo I did of my show at the Kansas City Fringe.

THINGS TO LISTEN TO

51:29     What's So Funny? Podcast interview I did with Levi Weinhagen about writing and performing comedy.

1:01:12     Body Mind Spirit NEWS. Phone interview I did with a holistic radio program in Michigan.

1:07:43     Screw It! a podcast about wine. A rather silly podcast interview that involves evaluating sundry liquors.

THINGS TO READ

07/15/2015     Kansas City Star Promo. A nice plug from Robert Trussell in Missouri.

07/21/2015     Zenfolio Photo Album. Some photos that were taken of me at the KC Fringe.

07/23/2015     KCMetropolis Review. "A slow-moving production, this is a show to see if you have a good grasp of scripture."

07/28/2015     RedCurrent Interview. An interview I did with Laura VanZandt shortly before opening.

08/05/2015     Single White Fringe Geek Review (5 stars): "This Jesus, Mary and Joseph, all shown to have rougher edges, tempers, and senses of humor, become so human, as do those around them, that you have to remind yourself they are all central figures in a religious narrative that some people never think twice about."

08/06/2015     Minnesota Playlist Review:  "...low’s delivery is pitch-perfect for the material: equal parts prophet, bard, and snake oil salesman...his flair for showmanship serves nicely to leaven the dense language and subject matter of his material."

08/07/2015     Grail Diary Review:  "I walked out wanting to read his script.  And peruse his sources. And ask him what he thought about what he was saying."

08/01-10/2015     Minnesota Fringe Festival Audience Reviews (11 reviews, 4-star average): "Funny and fascinating apocrypha about Jesus told with phillip's trademark exhaustive research, humor, and precise wordplay, but without the esoterism that can scare some audiences off."

08/14/2015     One Girl, Two Cities Review: "...one heck of a storyteller, and he’s picked some strange stories about Jesus’ youth full of unfamiliar words that a lay person could easily trip over. phillip’s a pro, though, and I didn’t notice even a single misstep."

08/17/2015     Alpha Omega Arts Review: "...performed with lots of passion and the promise of drama...would be far better suited as a book than as a performance. It's not that the content is bad theology, although I'll leave that to clergy to decide. It's simply bad theatre..."

08/19/2015     NUVO News Review (3 stars): "...you have to be impressed...low is a very commanding storyteller."

08/20/2015     Plays with John & Wendy Review: "low’s delivery is crisp and entertaining, and contains no judgment of the texts...why balk at the infant Jesus confronting a dragon?"

MY REVIEWS

I have collated my coverage of the Minnesota Fringe Festival (46 articles in toto) at this link.

...my profound gratitude to everybody who took the time to come and see the show, and especially those who took the time to share their thoughts afterwards. I'm honored to have had the opportunity to entertain you, and hope that you'll continue to extend that opportunity to me in the future!

Morals

"'You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.'

     'Perhaps it hasn't one,' Alice ventured to remark.

     'Tut, tut, child!' said the Duchess. 'Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."

It probably doesn't come as a surprise that someone who founded a theatre company entitled "Maximum Verbosity" is a die-hard fan of both Lewis Carroll and his elaborate wordplay.

In any case, I read. A lot. I always have, or at least for as long as I can remember. Embarrassingly, my drug of choice for much of my adolescence was pulpy Dragonlance novels. Margaret Weis has had more influence over my prose style than I should probably admit, and I remember picking up a copy of an anthology that she edited -- Fantastic Alice -- Jesus, it must have been well over fifteen years ago.

Most of the stories were forgettable. The thing about Carroll's brand of nonsense poetry is that it lends itself to interpretation. It lends itself rather too easily. It's not pure abstraction, but it has just enough clown-logic stitching its outrageous images and phrases together that it's pretty easy to conclude that these whimsical faery-tales are all about sex. Or death. Or pedophilia. Or necrophilia. I certainly have my own ideas and conclusions about what was churning in Carroll's subconscious, but modernism's tendency to break down literature in the most facile manner has led to some pretty goddamn absurd results.

There was one story in the collection, however, that wormed its way into my subconscious: A Common Night, by Bruce Holland Rogers. The tale of an English professor tormented by images of Wonderland the night of his wife's death, it was a take on the subject that managed to be morbid without being self-indulgent; that seemed to both comprehend and respect Carroll's whimsy for its own sake.

As I've grown older, and found myself confronting death time and again, it's a story that I keep coming back to. Fifteen years is a long time remember a bit of prose, and as I've been struggling with the subject again, it occurred to me that, hey, I'm a playwright/producer. Hey, I bet I could find Mr. Rogers' contact info online. I could at least ask. All these years in show business, and I still haven't gotten used to the notion of people saying "Yes."

Announcing my withdrawal from ensemble production is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I've spent a lot of time asking myself what returning to it means. Season announcements and grant proposals? Am I a Producer again, instead of just a Storyteller? What does it mean?

And it's taken me this long to realize that I'm being too much like Carroll's Duchess, and looking for a moral in everything. It doesn't have to mean anything. This is a story that I need to work on right now, and this is how I need to do it.

It's been a mix of the new and the old. It's my first time purchasing a license from a living author -- that's new (and terrifying). On the other hand, I'm booking a venue, hiring staff, and holding auditions. That's very familiar.

Which is all a long way of announcing auditions for my first ensemble show in four years. Want on board? Know anybody who does? Check out this link. Let's figure out the next step together.

 

IamA Touring Storyteller

Just poking my head in to say that updates for the "Rage Across America" tour will continue on Libertarian Rage, but in the meantime I'm taking a swing at answering a few questions on Reddit. Linky link

Ragin' On

...a heads-up to anyone following this blog that I'm currently on tour again with a political comedy show, and posting over on Libertarian Rage. Check it, yo.