MeyerBros

i’m working on and off on my follow-up to “sadomasochism” which i wrote in the spring of 2005. “sadomashochism” was a fairly straight-forward one-act explosion of love and pain and repression - written in that good-old psychological realism sort of way. when we performed it last fall, i began playing with it - cutting this and that and turning into more of a theatrical event with music and dance and spectacle and the works. i realized that to really get the feeling i wanted would require a full-out physical collage a la chuck mee jr. now i’m working on that.

i read an interview with chuck mee the other day (thanks michelle and project muse) in which he talks about joseph chaikin and ‘random emotion theory’. chaikin’s theory as stated by chuck mee is:

I think there are things that everyone feels at least once every 15 minutes: embarrassment, for example, or humiliation, from no-where, without apparent cause; sudden gr ief , anxiety, dread, distraction — as though a spirit or monster of some kind had passed overhead; regret, impatience, hatred, and unreasoning rage. It’s not the same for everyone. Some people I know feel none of those things, but instead, every 15 minutes they feel vengeful, jealous — they are immobilized by envy, a longing to possess something or someone, greed, lust, a wish to put something in their mouths.

chuck writes out of this emotional theory rather than the freudian psychological aproach that needs each feeling to be explained by the feeling or action before it. chaikin also uses it as a director, having actors cycle randomly through emotions as a scene progresses. both claim the result is amazingly realistic and powerful.

i’m sure that has something to do with another theory i’ve been mulling over as i work. my theory is that ‘young love’ is a self-perpetuating myth along the lines of ‘redemptive violence’. just as violence becomes our only option because we expect it to be, young love dies out over time because we expect it to. once you believe in a theory of young love, there is no good reason to attempt anything else. love will slowly degrade as you watch it with complete certainty that ‘this is just the way things are’. aha - here’s the connection: (more…)

oooo… I was with you right until that last bit.

(Sidenote: I was going to post this as a comment on Eric’s post, but then it got long and I decided to make it my own post. A review of his post, if you will.)

Some great questions, points, musings… But the “edification of the artists involved” part I question. At the New York Times, there is an ombudsman (yes, he’s a man), and he is the person who speaks for the readers (ie, the audience) - not for the paper. Speaking for the paper (ie, the artists) would be the editors in their editorials (like the Artistic Directors in our letters and director’s notes to audience). So the way I understand it, an ombuds for a theatre would be someone on staff who would express views of the audience (”the people”), not views of the artists.
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the SSDC and the DGA are entangled in an all out (sometimes legal) battle over copyright issues. everyone, surprisingly, wants to be paid for the work that they do.

i’ve been reading the latest issue of The Dramatist, a magazine that i recieve as a member of the DGA. i love this magazine as much as i hate it. every issue is thrilling, inspiring, angering, pathetic, self-centered, energizing, smug and insulur. what more could you ask for in a publication. i am reminded with every issue that New York is the only important place in the world (with the occasional minor exception of Chicago), playwrights are the only important people in the theatre, and nearly everyone is out to get me. i can also read back-to-back articles by Marsha Norman and Richard Nelson, the former listing her simplistic rules of playwrighting (which she teaches at Juilliard) and the latter arguing that such rules are the bane of playwrighting (which he teaches at Yale). neither one, you will notice, is too far from the center of the universe, which is Broadway. and neither one dares question the centrality of playwriting in that universe. this is, after all, “The Journal of The Dramatists Guid of America, Inc.” the issue concludes with a playwright’s legal battle against a former director in copyright issues. i disagree with both sides of that one article. that’s a lot to disagree with, but as a young anabaptist radical i consider myself up for that sort of third-way challenge.
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