Context, New Text, Black Text, Blue Text

So there's an argument that Ben and I have had once or twice (as opposed to the regular arguments that we have ad nauseam) in which he casually observed that he thought that writing a novel must be the most challenging creative endeavor -- because, as he put it, he'd want to audience-test it in minute chunks. I was immediately resistant to this argument, though it's taken me a while to put my finger on why.

It's a stand-up comic's argument, and I want to qualify that it's one I have a lot of respect for. I'm a huge believer in the necessity of workshopping material in front of an audience. In fact, that was the explicit function of the first Fringe show I ever produced -- Lokasenna was a collection of songs and comedy routines excerpted from a longer script, for the purpose of writing, rewriting, and finding the comic rhythms of the various jokes.

Not that the Fringe was the only place that those scenes ever saw the light of day -- we spent the year leading up to the production working those gags on every stage we could find. In the years that followed, we'd frequently revive them for gig after gig -- in time, man, our shit got *polished*.

I don't regret the time that we spent developing our material -- it produced some lovely bits of writing that I cheerfully stand behind to this day -- but -- well, I'd say it's the benefit of hindsight, but the truth is that any fairly practiced writer could probably have told me what the end result would be: some very funny dialogue embedded in a lumbering, awkwardly paced chimera of a script.

This is why I think the comedian's methods are often ill-applied to long-form work (although the caveat must immediately be made that there are skilled comics, and I'm including Ben on this list, who are proficient at both, putting together long shows by building elaborate structures around their one-liners) -- there's different tools for different goals, and while building a play or a novel may rely on *many* of the same tools, their goals are fundamentally different. Most of my favorite novels would be tedious or incoherent if read in five-minute chunks, while there are plenty of books with clever prose on every page that fall apart as narrative.

(I'd put some of Terry Pratchett's earliest novels in the latter category, though that may put the lie to my argument, as they're very popular. Feh, I say. Give me his later stuff, where the action and characters actually hang together *and make the jokes much funnier*.)

(I sheepishly might also consider placing Penner vs. the Hydra in a similar category, as well, as it seemed to function effectively as a joke machine -- audiences were laughing consistently throughout -- but, I suspect, left them somewhat cold after the fact, possibly symptomatic of placing such a morally troubling character at the play's center.)

This has been, I think, one of the central struggles of my career, learning to write for the short attention span of Festival crowds while maintaining my deeper love for long-form narrative. Tennyson is my favorite poet, not only because of his dazzling versatility, but because of how incredibly *deep* his use of recurring words and phrases and ideas is in his epics. That simply can't be expressed in short bursts. Wagner's genius lies not in his ability to compose themes but in his ability to *layer* them in increasing levels of complexity. That's totally lost when we sample his music like pop songs off a concept album. The Ride of the Valkyries may be loud and exciting, but that's not the point.

(Hi, I'm phil, the world's youngest cranky old man.)

One of the masters of the balancing act, in my opinion, may be Chaplin. Take Modern Times (my favorite movie) -- any one of the individual scenes could be plucked out as a successful comedy short, but assembled they expand on a central idea.

Anyway, that's all a long windup to saying that's why I feel the necessity to hold a full-script reading for Lokasenna (now more marketably titled Norseplay) -- measuring how well the individual pieces work requires, y'know, context and stuff. (Along those lines, this is well-worth reading as well, methinks.)

Taking place this Saturday, and here's the link, if anyone's interested.

This Blog Should Be Retitled "phil Likes Boring Things"

ME: Hey, I've enjoyed talking, but I've got to get going.
HIM: Oh -- are you hosting a panel?
ME: No -- just watching one.
HIM (laughing): You should host a panel. You'd be *hilarious*!

...an observation which was both flattering and dismaying, as I *am* planning on hosting panels for the first time CONvergence this year, none of which are particularly *funny*. (I have sat on panels in the past, including, yes, some comedy ones.)

I mean, I'm a comedy writer -- I typically see (or perform in) several comedy shows a week. Many of the shows at these cons are performed by colleagues, who I can (and do) see year-round. I know people who go to cons and see nothing *but* comedy shows, but, truthfully, I'm far more interested in watching a room full of scientists argue about bioethics.

In that respect, Minicon is very much up my alley. CONvergence is (among many other things) a party con, and much of it is defined by an (at times exhausting) need to entertain. And it strikes me that it's defined, in many respects, by its inclusivity ("Come one, come all"), while Minicon seems in equal measure to be defined by its exclusivity (for serious, if not necessarily somber, fans of science and science fiction).

(I'm being, no doubt, unjustly reductive here -- CONvergence has plenty of thoughtful discussion, and Minicon has plenty of celebratory silliness -- but dealing in subtleties would ruin, simply ruin, the unfair generalization I'm trying to make here.)

(It's also worth noting that I'm dealing with some very uneven data samples -- I was ferrying back and forth to rehearsals for my other show, and consequently missed a good chunk of the con.)

My main goal in spreading out to some other cons this year has been to see if there's an audience I can capitalize on. And while Minicon wins the trophy for my personal enjoyment -- I count the "Year in Science" panel as one of the more stimulating hours in recent memory -- I'm at a bit of a loss as to how I can use it. (I can imagine a day in the future when I *could*, so that data is useful (if expensive), but my career simply isn't in that place now.)

When the day comes that I can afford vacations, I'm looking forward to revisiting this place. But for an entertainer? For someone trying to reach a critical mass of audience, and build a niche within that? CONvergence? CONvergence is prime time.

Reflection and Refraction

So a lot of my energy for the past week has been going to Steampunk Delusions, a double-bill produced by Hardcover Theater and English Scrimshaw Theatrical Novelties. Hardcover is one of those theatres that's been on my radar for a while -- its mission seemed uniquely compatible with MV's -- and Steve Schroer (the Artistic Director) and I once briefly discussed the possibility of working together (many years ago, and nothing ever came of it).

In any case, I was recommended for the lead in the Hardcover half: The Diamond Lens, a kind of poetic Victorian mad-science story that explores some of the questions that would ultimately lead to quantum theory. (The story's online for anyone who's interested, and it's well worth reading.) This is rare for me, but when I read the thing I immediately wanted the role, immediately thought I might be well-suited for it -- its dense, overwrought language is exactly the kind of thing I've been doing onstage for years, and as for the content -- I'm pretty sure I've *written* this story before: is has some more than superficial similarities to Quantum Suicide, and its protagonist, one Douglas Linley, has some more than superficial similarities to Richard (though, I would say, much more so in the original than in the adaptation).

This is also the first time in a long time that I've done detailed text work on a show that isn't -- well, that I didn't *write*. Steve, I think, is an excellent director, with that rare combination of clarity and efficiency; so working with him has been interesting for me, in that it's rare for me to be able to watch another writer's process with such intimacy.

See, the story poses some unique problems in adaptation, largely because it's told from the point of view of an emotionally reserved introvert. As the ponderous language is much of initially attracted me to the story, I would probably have made great effort to preserve it; whereas Steve's approach has been to take Linley's internal world and to *externalize* it, to find ways to make it animated and theatrical.

Both are, I think, valid methods. But I'm struck by the fact that he chose the one more immediately accessible to an audience, and the thought occurs to me, ruefully, that decisions like this are among the reasons that he still has a production company, and I don't.

Conception, Deception, Veracity, and Mendacity

"I don’t know if this is what happened, but it’s what I remember.”
-Federico Fellini, flinging himself from an exploding taxi at 37,000 feet

So I’ve been devoting a lot of thought cycles over the past week to the Mike Daisey controversy. For those who haven’t been following it (i.e. pretty much everyone outside of the arts community), he’s a storyteller who’s been called out for pretty baldly misrepresenting some information in a political/autobiographical show. I’d say that it’s probably best summarized here, though in the interest of fairness it’s worth noting that Daisey himself took issue with its representation here. I’d also suggest that this is a must-read.

So why have I been so preoccupied with it? Particularly as someone who typically has zero interest in celebrity scandals? For one thing, I think it has some bearing on how storytellers are viewed by the general public. For another, because I think I’ve got something to say about it – if there’s any title I can reasonably be said to have earned in the course of my career (er, other than “pompous douchebag”) it’s that of a storyteller. Ultimately, though, I think it’s because it raises some important and worthy questions about the nature of what we do.

(It’s also worth noting that I had a similar, and similarly ugly, exchange in last year’s Fringe. Most of my colleagues responded with eye-rolling bemusement, claiming that it was ridiculous that anyone would care about the misrepresentation of history in a freakin’ Fringe show, and, well, maybe, but fuck, *I* care. In fact, one of the major themes of the show I produced for that Festival was examining how it’s possible to find an objective history in one that’s been warped to so many different agendas.)

(Which, okay, I’m tangenting again here, but I think it’s worth examining; one of the key questions here is *audience complicity*. While I think it’s likely that Mordred was a historical figure and Lancelot a literary one, the point is that, when I hit the stage with a Southern accent, camo pants, a tape recorder, and a wheelchair, people know that they’re not getting a literal representation of fifth-century Britain.)

(This is, sort-of-incidentally, also why I love schlockfests like John Boorman’s Excalibur and loathe movies like the Clive Owen King Arthur in equal measure: because the former’s all about *magical* truth (awesomely uber-cheesy, B-movie magic), while the latter’s every bit as bullshit, but hell-bent on convincing you of its historical veracity.)

(Two, four, six…fourteen! Fourteen parentheses! Ah, ah, ah.)

This is something that I’ve struggled with in my own career. Descendant of Dragons – my own political/autobiographical show about going to China – was originally titled *Descendants* of Dragons, since in its original conception it was supposed to be a collection of family histories. But as I conducted my research, and the various accounts became more entangled and contradictory, the title had to shift, because it stopped being an objective history and became a personal one – it stopped being about *them*, and it became about *me*, and the only way to respond to my loss of detachment with integrity was to embrace it.

(It’s also a quirk of my autobiographical shows that I only very rarely write *dialogue*, because I’m not comfortable putting words in people’s mouths when I’m not 100% certain of what they said. There are times when it becomes necessary, but generally I’m more comfortable *describing* conversations that *enacting* them. This is one of the reasons I so ardently defend my use of notes for autobiographical shows – I may be *performing*, but I’m not doing impressions, I’m not acting, and I want the audience to be crystal-clear about that fact.)

But I’m a liar, too. To pick a moment at random: towards the beginning of Pissing on the Great Wall, I describe myself sitting and listening to music, unaware that my kitchen is on fire. I don’t remember what song I was listening to, but in the show I claim it was Cab Calloway’s “Chinese Rhythm.” I claimed that because I wanted to use the song there. There’s a number of ways I could have approached that – I could have done some cutesy, meta “I don’t remember what was playing, but it might have been this” thing – and it probably would have been fine, but it would have deflated the momentum of the scene. So I lied.

This is comparatively trivial, but I’m mentioning it for two reasons. The first is because I suspect that most autobiographical shows are full of dozens of moments like these, moments where action is compressed or dialogue is moved to create a more logical flow of action and emotion. (Attributed to Mark Twain: “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”) The second is because I’m a hypocrite: in doing this, I demonstrated that, whatever I may say or choose to believe about myself, on some level I think it’s okay to lie onstage – I’m just quibbling over the scale of that lie.

(That was actually kind of painful to write.)

So, yes, I may be deluding myself, but I believe that Daisey’s broken through to a wholly different level of deception, for three reasons:

1) the sheer scale of it. This isn’t mere arrangement of events, but complete conjuration of emotionally significant moments that he never experienced.

2) That he has consistently maintained falsehoods, *outside of the context of his own show* -- to fact-checkers, in public interviews, et cetera.

3) Because his primary intent was something other than personal narrative. This is where his defenders claim that he was on some level justified – “the ends justify the means” – whereas in my view this is the very thing that makes his actions most damnable – that he appropriated these falsehoods in a show that he intended to weaponize – to suggest that it’s okay to do evil, even small evil, in the service of what they have deemed to be a Great Cause.

I would cautiously identify myself as a fan of Daisey’s – cautiously, because I’ve had fairly limited exposure to his work; I followed his blog for a while, and watched some clips of his shows online (of which his How Theater Failed America is a favorite – I don’t wholly agree with his thesis, but it was thrilling to watch him ridicule so many of the sacred cows in our profession). It’s been strange to watch his response to the scandal, in which he wildly oscillates between being the startlingly thoughtful, articulate writer I’ve come to admire, and writing infuriating shit like this:

"In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson. Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoken to any workers.

Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before."

…which is just so damn many levels of missing the point.

(I also, as a theatre practitioner, don’t find his “It’s theatre!” defense terribly convincing. At times, I find it troublingly familiar to the kind of two-step Michael Moore pulls: y’know, how when he’s called an “entertainer” he becomes indignant and claims that he’s an activist and this is social justice and such, and then when he’s called on his deliberate misrepresentation of information, Moore shrugs and claims that he’s “just an entertainer.”)

In their interview, Ira Glass cornered Daisey on the “theatre” line, suggesting that he was kidding himself if he truly believed that the distinctions he was drawing were ones that his audience was cognizant of. (He made a poor choice of words in saying “normal people”; “laymen” might have been less divisive.) And I do think that Glass is absolutely right: Daisey has been been kidding himself. He’s kidding himself when he suggests that it’s not that big a deal; he was kidding himself when he thought that no one would notice; he’s *definitely* kidding himself with the implication that the people who feel hurt and betrayed are somehow out to get him.

But this, I think, is one of the great existential battles that we as storytellers have to face: not the conscious deception of others, but the far more insidious *self*-deception. Studies have suggested that every time we remember events, we subtly rewrite them. I find it unlikely that the factory guards that Daisey witnessed were actually armed; by the same token, I find it equally likely that at this point, he genuinely recalls that they were. The implications of that, for all of us, are profoundly terrifying, if you give it a moment’s thought.

(Nancy Donoval, a local storyteller who tells many stories about her late father, expressed a similar fear to me: that on the one hand, her stories are a way of keeping her father alive; on the other, her actual memories may be being replaced by the stories. How much of my relationship with my own father is real, and how much is a false narrative that I’ve constructed in the course of writing two shows about that relationship?)

(One of the Catholic-school arguments I found compelling when I was – well, going there – is the idea that the earliest Gospels *must* have some semblance of (capital-T) Truth, because at the time they were written, people who had known Him were still alive. I’ve since lived through two W. administrations, and realized that a populace will continually rewrite its own collective Truth *as it’s actually unfolding in front of them*. I don’t think I’m stretching to suggest that politics, like storytelling, revolves around the construction of narrative.)

I believe that relativism is absolutely (tee-hee) the wrong answer to this problem: to claim that everybody lies, so lying is therefore okay. The ends, as far as I’m concerned, emphatically do *not* justify the means. Mr. Daisey’s going to have to wear this albatross around his neck for the rest of his career, justifiably or otherwise. But in my view, the fact that self-deception is such a perpetual peril for those of us in this profession means that we must remain vigilant against it.

It’s my view that the pursuit of truth is the most critically important of all human endeavors. Deception obfuscates that.

Just ask Fellini.

Unconventionality

Spent the weekend at MarsCon - my first time going, though I've done CONvergence for the past couple of years. Mixed experience, though well-weighted to the positive. MarsCon is much smaller, and that's in many respects a good thing -- while my primary love is reserved for the sprawling and diverse (hence my predilection for cities), it's gratifying to do a convention where, say, the elevators are functional.

Performance went well, in any case (con performances usually do, in my experience, it's a crowd that's there to have a good time and they really *want* you to succeed, to the point that the laughs almost roll in a little *too* easily for my tastes as a comedy writer, so those performances are a great place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there, if you take my admittedly ambivalent meaning) and I attended my usual bevy of panels (I am attempting to crash-course myself to a better understanding of how the publishing industry works, and have rapidly progressed from proud ignorance to profoundly ashamed ignorance).

Among my favorites was an update on the International Space Station, and the research that's taking place there. (Plus, I'm one of those guys who's a total sap for images of the Earth from space.) It made me truly mournful that future progress on that frontier seems to be (for now) stalled -- Newt Gingrich recently proposed a Mars expedition and was practically laughed off the stage, so it's an endeavor that we apparently lack the collective will for.

Okay, so, here's the thing -- cons are typically an experience of rapidly oscillating between bliss and fury for me, and that's totally down to that community. At its worst -- I'm a great believer in the importance of civility, and while the attitudes of con-going geeks are certainly grossly exaggerated in the media, I do find a portion -- greater proportionately there than in the general population -- of the rude, of the obnoxious, of the self-absorbed.

The unscarred, Harvey-Dent side of that coin, however, is a portion -- significantly greater proportionately there than in the general population -- of those who have teared up at the thought of the colonization of space; who have spent their share of hours poring over medieval texts; who believe in the careful and thoughtful dissection of entertainment; who believe, truly and without irony, in the wisdom of the past and the promise of the future.

A few years back, there was a panel about the Fringe at CONvergence, and one of the panelists offered a description of one of my shows: an Arthurian romance set in Appalachia to bluegrass music; at which the audience burst into applause, which is a pretty far cry from the eye-rolling that most of my colleagues greet such projects with. And it was a revelation for me; I certainly don't regret the amount of time I've spent trying to angle my material to a hipster audience -- it's made me an exponentially better writer -- but at a certain point, it's worth considering that one of the things I've been banging my head against may be demographic mismatch. My appropriations of myth and legend probably have a lot more crossover with the audience that's animatedly arguing about Tolkien's Elves than they do with the audience that's shelling out to see their fourth sex comedy this month.

I'm convinced that the convention crowd is a powerful resource -- certainly the Scrimshaw Brothers and Vilification Tennis have found a way to capitalize on it. One of the many things I'm hoping to learn here is *how*.

Mic Open, Mind Ajar

Another of my goals since shutting down production has been to re-commit to the open-mic scene. I initially threw myself into it pretty aggressively when I first moved out here -- Jesus, around a decade ago -- and I remain a great believer in it; just about every show that I've produced in that time has gone through a couple of weeks of previewing there.

I maintain my fondness for them for the very same reasons that I suspect many other storytellers dislike them: because it's an audience that isn't there to see me. Most of them don't give a shit who I am or what my last successful show was. What matters is, can you grab a microphone and engage? Which is always a humbling, and therefore important, exercise.

But what's striking to me this time around is that, comparatively, there aren't as many opportunities for *storytellers*, persay. There's Word Ninjas, of course. There's also the Story Slam (which is competitive) and Folktales Rising (which is really more of a writing circle than an open-mic). Ball's is one of the few mics I've been to that seems legitimately multidisciplinary to me -- not skewing towards one form over another.

Beyond that, there's shows you can lobby for a booking at, like the Monday Night Comedy Show or Sample Night Live or Firsty Thursday or Patrick's Cabaret, but the nature of such a process favors polish over experimentation. Otherwise, I'd say the remainder (that I've seen, and God knows my knowledge isn't exhaustive) tend to slant to either slam or comedy -- e.g. the Artist's Quarter will let you perform whatever you want, but boy howdy that's a slam audience.

But the more I think about it, the more I suspect that there's an underlying *structural* discrepancy. Slam and comedy both have clear (well, clearer) ladders -- a comic can gradually (over many years) work his way up to hosting to featuring to headlining. A poet can work her way through competitions to Nationals. And a storyteller can...? What's the next rung on the ladder, after open-mics?

I built a reputation as a storyteller on the Fringe circuit, but that was pretty chaotic and haphazard and I don't know that I'd recommend it. More (i.e. actually) successful storytellers seem to slide in through a variety of side doors -- Kevin Kling through radio, David Sedaris through print, et cetera.

So I suspect that the dearth of storytelling-oriented open mics is a symptom, not a cause. But a diagnosis isn't the same thing as a treatment. And I still have a fuck of a lot to learn.

New York, or a New Low

So I’m sitting on an airplane again, which means that it’s time to write, to try to extract some sense out of the events of the past week (or to impose a narrative upon them, depending on one’s perspective).

***

Yvette greeted me at the door by casually mentioning that she had a rare copy of Norris J. Lacy’s five-volume translation of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle – I own a heavily abridged single-volume reader, but copies of the full text run into the hundreds of dollars. She’s apparently been pushing for her university to order a set for some time (which they finally did, due to a rare surplus), and noted with some amusement that she was to date the only one to check them out.

The Cycle’s interesting to a medievalist (armchair or otherwise) since it represents Malory’s primary source for Le Morte d’Arthur, and a close examination of the text reveals a lot about the dude as a writer: what he chose to use, what he rejected, which word choices he borrowed and which were original, et cetera. The fact that my sister is one of the rare people in my life who gives a shit about any of this is a part of what I enjoy about our visits.

She’s one of the few people – okay, the only person I know – with whom I can have these long, rambling, drunken conversations about Middle English and Latin. And it’s energizing – it’s done a lot to restore my faith in these Marvellous Enquests and Adventures; that there is wisdom, and excitement, and illumination in these aging illuminated manuscripts.

Not that that grants me any insight into how to market these stories. But I’m remembering that pursuing that insight is a worthy goal. Maybe even worth a lifetime. There are certainly worse ways to spend one, before the Dolorous Death and Departing out of This World of Us All.

***

Speaking of long, rambling conversations, it’s also been a pleasure to reconnect with Charlie again – and as a teller with whom I share a lot in common in terms of both genre and style, it’s an opportunity to compare notes on some of the unique problems posed by our adaptations (e.g., how to approach the use and frequency of proper names in the source material).

He was also generous enough to share with me the script for a new show he’s working on – I don’t know how public/private he wants to be with the details, so I’ll be vague, except to say that it’s in the middle of a long development process, and that I think that it’s brilliant – possibly the best thing he’s done.

It’s also, curiously, an epic – an order of magnitude larger than his previous sources – and what’s interesting for me has been watching how he approaches the bulk of material. Whereas my approach has generally been to select individual episodes and expand them, giving their dramatic moments room to breathe, here he’s striving for *completeness*, pounding breathlessly through dozens of episodes at a breakneck pace. They’re both valid and effective approaches, but the differences, I think, are illustrative.

***

I also took the opportunity to check out some shows at the FRIGID Festival, including 3 Sticks’ The Traveling Musicians, which I found to be just fantastically entertaining, the best kind of Fringe mash-up, both a loving homage and a snide ridicule of the Brothers Grimm and the spirit of rock. Watching them, it was strange to think on how our companies first met, dancing together in an empty theatre in Kansas City – a fond memory I was pleased to find they still retain.

Bizarrely, there was a large number of Minneapolitans in the audience, and as far as I know none of us coordinated with each other – we independently and spontaneously chose to descend upon the same place. I spent much of the evening talking shop with Nick Ryan, who spoke warmly of the Festival. It looks like a lot of fun. Plus, hey, New York press always looks pretty impressive on a resume.

***

I actually had a notably positive experience in the city this time round. Several of the locals suggested that this is because the city’s changed a lot in the past decade, but I think the more salient point may be that I have. The subways are crowded? I got my pocket picked in Suva. The bathrooms are dirty? I got food poisoning in Lisbon. The traffic’s lousy? I got run over by a rickshaw in Beijing. The city’s too big? Shanghai is over twice as large. I suspect that the assertion that New York is the greatest city in the world is borne of sampling error.

But the respects in which the city fails to live up to its myth make me, oddly, more affectionate to it. Before, I was overwhelmed – now, I know I’m competent to navigate this place.

***

All in all, a stimulating excursion, both intellectually and creatively. Now, back to memorizing lines…