W4G on the road

On December 8,1987 I stood outside of St. John the Divine on the upper west side of Manhattan with hundreds of others who could never fit inside the church.  We waited to hear the final words of praise offered over the body of James Baldwin at his going home ceremony.  I remember being heartbroken that his voice was silenced by death and at the same time feeling inordinately proud that so many people had come to be part of his send off even though we knew we'd be not in the pews but out on the sidewalk.  I also remember being annoyed at some of the voices of praise coming from those who'd bad mouthed Baldwin in his life time because they thought his being gay meant he was not 'black enough.'  All of those feelings have lived inside of me since that time and as I wrote "Waiting for Giovanni."

Now, it's been just over a year since W4G premiered at New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco...hard to believe.  The experience of working with the company of actors, designers and staff has spoiled me. They too honored Baldwin's life and set a really high barre for a collaborative, theatre experience!

So I feel fully prepared to move into a new arena, but can I contain my excitement??? New York Theatre Workshop (http://www.nytw.org/) has accepted my play for their staged reading series that supports the development of new work!   I'm not going to get ahead of myself, it is simply a reading...actors with script in hand...done explicitly to help me re-envision the piece and hear what my most recent rewrites sound like.  BUT I am thrilled!!!  This is the theatre that has nurtured work by Tony Kushner, Kate Moira Ryan and Paula Vogel and it gave birth to "Rent!" AND it did win 13 Tony awards this year for "Peter and the Star Catcher" and "Once."

Knowing the company's history of supporting important work and pushing boundaries I'm being ALMOST totally chill.  So when I was told who would direct the reading I nearly lost my ice cubes.  Pulling it all together will be Patricia McGregor, highlighted among the up and coming theatre talent in a recent NY Times piece (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/26/theater/20120226-faces.html/).  And most exciting she worked on one of my favorite theatre pieces: FELA!

This is, of course, kind of like a blind date.  Who knows if what she sees will be what I see but her enthusiasm feels warm and genuine and I can barely maintain my sophisticated cool until I see what she does with the piece in October.  In the meantime I'll busy myself with re-reading the script to see if the story is being told in the strongest way so she has the best material to work with.

James Baldwin is so beloved and iconic in New York City...I promised not to fail him. I'm hoping that some of those folks who stood in the cold outside that church in December 25 years ago will some day soon have the opportunity to stand and praise him again when they see W4G on stage in full production.

Stella!!!!

 

The serendipity of life is sometimes overwhelming…could be a tidal wave or a wave of applause!  This time it was attending the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans.< http://www.tennesseewilliams.net/>   It’s a unique way to experience the arts…relaxing in the metaphorical arms of the Crescent City and feeling the mood and emotions of Tennessee Williams' writing embracing you as well. I’d always felt a kinship with TW since I took a class in college, Williams-Miller-Albee, and realized that TW was gay and could see that the teacher was working overtime to keep students from noticing!  (Albee didn’t peek out until much later.)

At the Festival I participated in a reading of lesser performed Williams work along with a sky full of stellar performers. Somewhere there’s now a recording of me playing Zelda Fitzgerald in a Williams play…not something one would ever imagine coming across in an archives!  I managed not to act like a complete rube when I met Piper Laurie (The Hustler) and Cristine McMurdo-Wallis who I’d seen in “Angels in America.”  She proved to be an angel in person too!  (Sorry couldn’t stop myself and it’s true.)  Meeting iconic actors is like stepping backstage and seeing the magical process of the art form curled up waiting to unfold.

Even more fortuitous for me was serving on a panel about contemporary playwriting and  meeting three playwrights: John Biguenet, a nationally known New Orleans writer who’s plays (including “Shot Gun”) have explored the complex culture of the city and its people post-Katrina.  Now I have a set of new plays to read.

Also on my panel was John Guare, whose “House of Blue Leaves” turned American theatre on its ear.  And after seeing Susan Sarandon’s sensual clean up routine in the film “Atlantic City” (which he wrote) I’ve never looked at a lemon the same way. 

But sitting next to Martin Sherman, the author of “Bent,” proved to be a turning point in my theatre life last month just as viewing his play on Broadway (w/Richard Gere) was in 1980.  When I saw the play (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent) I was devastated by the gay ‘almost’ love story in a concentration camp and thrilled by the writing so I bought a copy.  When I started working on W4G I dug it out of my boxes so I could remember what had moved me and try to figure out how the writer did it!

Meeting Martin Sherman, who had unwittingly (along with Lorraine Hansberry) been my theatre guru was life-changing for a couple of reasons.  It wasn’t just because he agreed to read my play then praised it…though that would have been plenty!  What made my day was that he was able to talk about his experience of playwriting still as a practice.  His work was living inside him as well as on the page.  He was doing work that he wasn’t sure was good!  He was finding his way through work that needed seasoning and sometimes suffered from overly critical responses.  I didn’t expect that.

It’s not easy to stand in front of an audience and talk about your own work whether it’s successful or not.  In his words I found the inspiration to go back to the W4G script and re-enter it.  I need to bring the life I still feel about the work back to it and not feel so anxious about it failing in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago that I can’t really do the re-writing it needs.  I hope to be accepted into a play development program in NYC this fall and we’ll see how deep I can go.  On the trip I’ll be carrying my aged copy of “Bent” as well as some photos I always like to have nearby—the historic figures my characters portray.   

I’ll be adding to the pictures: Martin Sherman and, of course, Tennessee Williams!

W4G peeks into the Apple

 

Playwright Doric Wilson was born in Washington State and grew up amid the opulent greenery of the Pacific Northwest. His move to the grittiness of New York City in 1958 might have been a disaster…but it wasn’t. That was also the same year that James Baldwin was becoming the toast of the town even though his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, had had such a difficult time finding an US publisher. It was also the period in which the West Village was bursting with an interracial art scene that was sparking all kinds of creativity.

Baldwin, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and others mingled with the newly hip generation of artists listening to bebop and solving the problems of the world over bottles of Chianti. Doric Wilson landed in NYC and helped turn Café Cino, a small, somewhat shabby space into a theatre venue known around the world. His plays (And He Made Her, Now She Dances) entered the lexicon of downtown theatre. He was also a social activist and a member of the Gay Activist Alliance, the precursor to the current LGBT movement organizations today.

I’ve no idea if Wilson and Baldwin ever met in those fertile years of the Villages, both East and West. The differing focuses of their activism probably would not have landed them at the same cocktail parties. But they met this past January in mid-town Manhattan when the gay theatre organization Doric Wilson co-founded, produced a reading of Waiting for Giovanni.

TOSOS, which stands for The Other Side of Silence, is part of Doric Wilson’s legacy. When Mark Finley and Kathleen Warnock of TOSOS invited me to have W4G read in January to kick off their 2012 reading season my answer was an enthusiastic yes!  New York is the natural home for W4G since Baldwin was a ‘native son’ and that had been my theatre home for so many years.

But it is a weird thing to see a reading of your play that’s already had a full production. I almost felt like I was cheating on a lover. Or I could say a full cast and crew of lovers!  I had done some rewrites…nothing to totally remake the piece…but I was eager to hear if they worked. During the reading Diane, my spouse, nudged me through out the reading if she heard a new line…or sometimes it felt like a new line because of the different delivery.

Having seen the play so many times it was difficult not to think of the lines in my head exactly as the New Conservatory cast had said them. Wm Hunter, Liam Hughes, Will Giammona, Chris Nelson, Desiree Rogers, Fred Pitts, and Lonnie Haley took the lines and shaped them to their tongues, histories, bodies; at the end of the run word and actor became one. And that was comforting; the play was wearing a suit and it looked good. This new experience was like stripping the play bare so it was standing on stage in its boxers, shivering.

But that’s what’s needed sometimes, especially when you know you don’t have it all exactly as it should be. The shape is still off kilter, some lines (even when the SF cast made them sound good) are not quite right. I know as a writer of other genres that there’s a period in the process when my own ear is not to be trusted. I need another shirt thrown over the form to see if what fits.

So the intrepid actors walked into a small rehearsal room at ART/NY on 9^th Avenue and waded through the dense imagery and vast vocabulary I’ve put down on the pages of two dramatic acts to simulate the styles of some of the greatest writers of the 20^th century. With less than three hours of rehearsal one can not expect a full on performance with nuance and familiarity. Only hope there’s not too much stumbling and dead air.

Nothing is like the TV show “Smash!” The cast doesn’t come together and burst into song, know all the lyrics and dance routines after one day of rehearsal. And certainly not after only a three hour read through.

However the TOSOS cast were like the burst of sun in the morning illuminating all around them. K. Todd Freeman, Russell Jordan, Nicholas Wuehrmann, Dudley F. Findlay, Jr., Desiree Burch, Anthony Johnston and Lee Kaplan each tasted the words like a new flavor of ice cream and sang them into the air delivering a new interpretation. Their work was both weighty and playful, just what I needed to hear. I tried to take notes on what I wanted to rewrite but it is difficult to stop watching actors work. It’s a magical thing. No wonder  ‘The Dramatist,’ the periodical of the Dramatists Guild, just devoted a full issue to actors!

Doric Wilson had a wonderful idea when he started TOSOS…theatre is a collaborative art and we need ways to find each other.  I am pursuing ways to have structured time and attention on the script which can bring it to the next level. Then I’ll be looking forward to seeing who we get to come on board again to collaborate in the next phase as magicians…I mean actors.

Of These Matters

In his 1956 New York Times review of Baldwin's novel, Giovanni's Room, Granville Hicks wrote:
      "Mr. Baldwin writes of these matters with an unusual degree of candor and yet with such dignity
       and intensity that he is saved from sensationalism."
 The 'matters' he was talking about were the romantic entanglement of the main character, Giovanni, a marginally employed bartender in Paris, who falls in love with an American tourist, David, who happens to be on vacation with his girlfriend/almost fiance. Hick's review was both generous and cautious.  Given the period and this culture's erotophobia in general and homophobia specifically this novel was not what was expected from the nation's preeminent young essayist on the Black Civil Rights movement.  

I've written a lot of literary and film reviews and I can feel Hicks shaping his words carefully so that his appreciation of Baldwin's work is clear.  He compares him to Proust and admires his style; at the same time he's quite restrained.  I haven't read other work by Hicks so I can't honestly say if this is he usual writing style or if it was a special tone for the New York Times and the anticipated backlash.

Although many people think I use Baldwin's words in the play--I don't.  The Granville Hicks quote is the only place where I use any words other than those of my imagination.  As I prepare to go to NYC to see the reading of the updated version of the play I reread the full review Hicks wrote. When I did I realized I had fallen in love with the quote and used it to help set up a monologue but I hadn't really taken in the full review. I had also not thought about what it probably took for him to write favorably about a "homosexual novel" featuring all white characters written by a young African American. 

Their New York City was a very different one from the one I'll visit next week.  In 1956 people still spoke in full sentences with words of more than one syllable. ( I meant that as a simple observation rather than being snarky,sorry.) And they wore shapely clothes and admired philosophy and ideas.  Okay, it was also segregated, still run by robber barons and who knows what other degrading history I've glossed over in my glowy look back!

But it is still NYC and theatre and actors and directors and audiences...and words.  So I am going to read some more Granville Hicks to find out who he was, how he came to understand Baldwin's novel and be brave enough  speak kindly of it in print.  Despite the censorious nature of the culture in which he made his writing career Granville Hicks understood that Baldwin was writing about "the rareness and difficulty of love" and wasn't afraid to say so.  That's what "Waiting for Giovanni" is about to and I hope someone will say that about it back east.


It will be fun to be back in Baldwin's...and Hicks' town!
 

A glorious greed

"The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all."

James Baldwin's observation about a writer's need is both accurate and chilling.  In one sense Baldwin was thrusting his writing out into the world as if it was a life raft that could help float us to freedom.  In another way, just like many of us, the raft is also for him.  It's meant to buoy up ego, to help love find its way to him.  In the satisfaction of a story well told (whether fiction, non-fiction, poetry, song or play) comes a desperately craved moment of validation.

But it's only ever a moment.  Then the writer climbs back into a carapace and begins again, almost oblivious to the world outside, at the same time taking everything.  The cycle of how a play emerges from that hidden place inside a writer's life reveals that greed. It's a cycle that is shared by all the artists collaborating on the project.  Since it's rarely a straight line from typewriter to stage lights sometimes only the hunger the writer has inside can urge the work forward.  

"Waiting for Giovanni" grew out of a blend of those urgent needs--both Baldwin's(as they were perceived by me watching that raft float by) and my own.  I always imagine that I'm writing something that will maybe save someone's life...or change it...or at least give them something to think about for more than 10 minutes.  I push, cajole, call out...whatever it takes to get people to come sit in the audience and see what I have to say...what Baldwin still has to tell us.

After an amazingly successful run in San Francisco...sold out for almost the entire run...figuring out where it goes from there is not easy.  A theatre group in New York City is doing a public reading of W4G in January, and unlike the previous road the play has traveled now it is in the hands of someone else who is new to it.  The group will cast and direct and present their vision of  my vision of Baldwin's vision. Scary.  Magic.

It's only a reading; no commitment; I'm not even sure I can get any producer types to come and listen. I'm going to send off a newly edited version of the piece next week like it's a life raft and hope people need to climb on board.

Of the I sing...

"I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." James Baldwin


I read that quote when I was much younger and it really framed how I think of political activity.  Coming of age during the Viet Nam war, I heard the phrase "Love it or leave it" continuously from conservatives who felt patriotism was only revealed by how fast you could raise a flag.  Instead Baldwin's words reinforced what I learned in civics classes...remember those!   Our country is only as good as the work we--we individuals and as groups--put into it.

The Civil Rights Movement was successful, in part, because of the sit-ins it staged to grab the public attention.  Watching an elderly woman be pepper sprayed by anti-Occupy Movement authorities in 2011 is just as shocking as seeing Black marchers set upon by police dogs in the 1960s.

The Occupy Movement has reminded us of our responsibility to pay attention and act.  Whether you like the methods, feel threatened by their appearance on your doorstep, worry about the break down of the social contract (which has already been broken, by the way, by banks and government regulators), or simply feel uneasy because there have been no ready-made demands...that is not what is most important.  In fact feeling uncomfortable is one of the first ways we can tell change is happening.

What is significant is that enough people from a broad spectrum of communities and interests have actually acted on their social concerns and are trying to get officials to think about what happens to people when profits are the sole basis for decision making.  Not all of us are going to grab our gear and go sit in a public plaza or a tree...I need a little more help getting up from a cement bed than I used to...but there are ways to help make the process work.  I ask myself: What would Jimmy do?  Maybe start by asking questions about the ideas rather than simply stating your annoyance. Maybe ask what is the historical context for such dissatisfaction.  Or just ask what do people need who are out there?  Think about it...ask your local OM folks.  The 99% are not without resources. 

When we criticize our country we're showing our faith in its ability to grow and mature.  No one would say one shouldn't try to correct the table manners of children, or not teach them to read or how to cross the street.  This is a young country and it needs all the help it can get. Any positive attention (large or small) we give to the dilemma of people vs profits will create more positive energy.  Can't hurt.

A Poet's Heart

James Baldwin was inducted into the Poets Corner this week, only the 44th writer so honored in the space at Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (NYC).  Fitting as this was also the site of his memorial service which spilled out into the streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1987.

I remember standing outside with hundreds of others, milling around straining to hear any small thing, watching the notables who entered and being furious at the welcome accorded those who'd been so rude to Baldwin because he was gay and therefor 'unworthy' of carrying the torch for Black civil rights.  But nevertheless it was thrilling to know that Baldwin was so memorialized in that place...much as Black lesbian poet laureate Audre Lorde was less than a decade later.

Although Baldwin wrote only one book of poetry, JIMMY'S BLUES, the truth is that most of his work was poetry.  His heart was infused with the metaphor and magic of poetry; his view of humankind was similarly imbued with a confidence that only a poet can have...that is a belief in the power of what is not there.  What is not on the page is part of what makes poetry brilliant.  Baldwin believed in the things that human being had not yet achieved.  

Baldwin had belief, despite his unblinking eye, and complex understanding of human frailty and our capacity for evil.  The spaces between the words that define who we are were quite clear to him and are what kept him from bitterness and what kept him writing.

His poet's heart made life worth living...for all of us.