Events Upon the Near Horizon

I'm going to be on a panel at the Brecht Forum on Friday night, talking with other people whose plays have political themes.  There will also hopefully be a short excerpt from the play (under 10 minutes), in the form of scenes and monologues from Mary, Matt, and Nate.  I may humiliate myself; they will certainly not.

FringeNYC at the Forum
451 West St (between Bank & Bethune)
7:30 PM

A History of Violence

"She ought to be slapped for writing it."

I had the pleasure once of hearing my play discussed by people who didn't know I'd written it.  Invisibility is a privilege of playwrights; actors are seen by the public, while we hide in the shadows.  Interestingly, the reaction (summarized in the statement above) was not the one that haunted my nightmares.  (I have a reoccurring dream of being condemned by the rabbi during Yom Kippur services.  I barely even go to services.)  The speaker felt that the play was anti-Palestinian; I'm not sure if she'd stayed for the second act or not.  I loitered in the hall where she was talking to her friend, trying to look casual.  I awaited my moment.  When the conversation seemed to be turning away from AK-47, I approached.

"I couldn't help but overhear you talking about that play*... I wrote it, and I was just wondering if there was anything you wanted to ask me about?"

Oh dear.  Much back-pedaling.  Much equivocating.  Many, many chances, all of which I took, for me to show off all the research I had done, all the care I had taken.  Some implicit apologies.  Some satisfaction.

I narrated this incident to my father later.  "Well," he said, "you're provoking everybody, kid!  Isn't that what art's supposed to do?"  I hear this a lot, and I suppose to a certain degree it's true, but it also seems worrying likely like a commonplace.  Is it my job to provoke?  Or is my play insufficiently clear, that someone could see it and come away with the idea that I was condemning Gazans and excusing Israel?  Artistically, I prefer to err on the side of obscurity rather than heavy-handedness, but the entrance of politics does complicate things.  I don't like to think of my play as being itself propagandistic, but if it can be read in the way that my critic in the hall read it, then it takes on some aspects of that genre, a notion with which I am not comfortable.

* A dirty lie.  I could totally have helped it.

Disclaimers

So, like every good Child of the New Media, I have, of course, used Facebook to advertise our show.  And, like every good Facebook user, I am friends with people I haven't spoken to in years, and people I met casually at a party one time, and probably people who have mistaken me for somebody else of the same name.  My nose being to the publicity grindstone, I invite all these people to come see the show.  Since I am a hardened insomniac, I check back in at 4AM to see who's planning to show up.  I see that Mary and Matt are planning to come; that's good, because we don't have understudies.

I see that two people have already definitively decided that they're not coming.  I know who they are; I don't know them that well.

I can already hear Becca tactfully suggesting that I am perhaps a little paranoid, yes?  And  I am decidedly paranoid.  But I, looking at their (Arabic) names make anxious (probably incorrect) guesses about what they, looking at my name, may (incorrectly) guess about my play.  Such as: since it is written by this playwright with the Hebrew given name and the German-Jewish surname, it must be a defense of Israel.  It concerns "Tomorrow's Pioneers", so it is about how Palestinians are anti-semitic.

But obviously it is no more fair for me to assume that these are their reasons for not coming than it would be for them to make those assumptions about my play.  Nevertheless, I'm filled with a pathetic desire to take every opportunity I can to assert or suggest my actual values.  I won't fall so far as to begin writing "Not anti-Palestinian!" on the postcards I hand out, because once you start going there you might as well break out the fine-tipped pen and write a little essay about how your play is about different ways of conceptualizing/narrativizing traumatic events and the concept of home, and the loss of home.  And once you've done that, everybody knows you're not a blind supporter of Israel, and nobody wants to see your play, because it sounds boring as fuck.

And it just seems craven: why should I have to fall all over myself to prove that I'm a moral human being with an independent opinion?  Just because I'm Jewish?  No.  No.  You'll have to trust me, and give me credit, as you should try to trust and credit every writer.  (Or at least, until they have proven themselves unworthy of such credit.)

Theatre Has No MPAA

Tonight an actor from my other show* told me that she'd seen a child on the B train admiringly holding a postcard for our show.  She estimated the child's age at 4 years.

People.

Watch your children, please.

Yes, there's a fuzzy puppet on the postcard.  Yes, the word "Sing-Along" appears in the title.  Did you notice the "AK-47" bit?  This is ironic juxtaposition; it's meant to illustrate the circumstances which the children of Gaza find themselves in; circumstances which your 4-year-old American child should, by the grace of God, never have to endure or even contemplate.

I thought this went without saying, but then again, at my meeting with the Fringe folks, they asked if the show could be sorted into the "FringeJR" category, so evidently it doesn't.  I can't say if we're "PG-13" or "R" or whatever nonsensical category the movies are using these days, but I can say this: DO NOT BRING SMALL CHILDREN.  They will be bored, upset, or possibly psychologically damaged.

*A contemporary adaptation of the Bacchae, much more in my usual sex-and-violence line.  We're about to go out into the parks of New York City and scare the joggers a little bit.  Check us out.

Sound Cues Appear, As Does the Lighting Designer

We had a run-through tonight for the benefit of Jimmy the lighting designer.  As we're missing Adi and Nate, it was a little bit crippled, but we persevered.  (Becca stood in for Adi; I stood in for Nate.  Sadly, we did not get the chance to show off our interpretations of their speeches.  How disappointing!  Back to hiding our acting-lights under the dramaturgy- and playwriting-bushels.)  The sound cues of the BBC made their exciting appearance; Dina and Nate have lent their voices, and Lucy her recording experience, to the creation of authentic-sounding news-clips-that-never-were.  (The texts of these are assembled from a large collection of actual news clips and news articles, which took about five days straight to read, watch, listen to, and sift.  Research is a barrel of laughs!  Like monkeys, I tell you!)

Jimmy sat at the edge of the playing space, examining actor-placement and stage-layout and writing on large sheets of paper with the name of the play at the top, which look very technical but which I don't understand the nature of at all.  Afterward, we sat down, and he pronounced upon such subjects as When There Will Be Blackouts and What We Will Do About Footlights.  Fun fact: did you know that lighting boards are the only pieces of technology in the entire universe that are still manufactured with floppy drives?  And only floppy drives.  Lighting board manufacturers are evidently sure that the world will soon see the logic of returning to a storage method with data capacities measured in kb.  Which doesn't fit in your pocket.  And is vulnerable to magnets, dust, and very hot days.

Jew to Jew

Sorry, folks, just a little something I have to get out of the way.  A little bit of intra-faith business.

Confidential to the Anti-Defamation League:

You are making us look bad.  I know you do good work; I know there are times (many!) when Mel Gibson needs to be told what's what, and I know (and appreciate!) that you have spoken out against anti-Muslim sentiment in the past.  So now is not the time to quit and start mealy-mouthing it.  There is a tradition of Jewish social justice, and I'm proud of it.  Don't let us down.

And while we're having this chat, can you please quit equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism?  If you argue that (Israel = Jews) then, by the commutative property, you imply that, in any sentence, the words "Israel" can be safely replaced by "Jews."  And considering that there are sentences out there, depressingly true in their original form, that say things like "Israel tortures prisoners," I would really prefer that that substitution didn't take place.

Thanks, guys.  I'm glad we had this little talk.

Publicity Efforts

Or, In Which I Am a Glorified Litterbug.

So we have about 40 pounds of postcards left.  FringeCentral will dispose of some of them for us; some of them will go out in the mail.  But what to do with the rest?  Where can I leave these where they may be found by people who’d like our show?  I find myself on Christopher Street, chin in hand, pondering.

Solution #1: Beside the stacks of copies of The Onion.  People who can detect sarcasm and irony will surely enjoy our play!  (Or at least, enjoy it a good deal more than people who can't.)

Solution #2: On the shelf next to copies of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza.  Please don’t tell the people at the bookstore I did that.

Solution #3:  In the hands of the startled Haredi guy I pass on the street.  We’re asking for trouble by our very existence; why not ask for a little more?

Solution #4: On the counter of the vintage store which seduces me inside with a sale on books.  The clerk is too stoned to notice.  (And almost too stoned to remember to actually charge me for the book I inevitably buy.)

Solution #5: ...please email/comment if you have solution #5.  This is a very large number of postcards.

Everyone Loves a Puppet

Adi got to use a real puppet today, instead of a sock or an oven mitt.  He rapidly developed a close relationship.

Now everybody wants to play with the puppet.  Puppets, as it turns out, are completely irresistible.

If this puppet does go on to become Fadl, it will need to lose its pigtails and long eyelashes.  As gender-reassignment surgery goes, that's on the cheap-and-easy side.

The "Sing-Along" Part

And today we sing the songs!  Those songs, so perky, so catchy, so completely impossible to sing in public!  I have training in writing “proper” formal lyrics -- the AABA song, the ballad, the verse-chorus -- thanks to Deborah Brevoort and Gary Gardner, both of whom I trust will not show up to see how completely I’ve disregarded their wise instructions.  We haven’t got time to launch into full songs, so I pack all the gleeful, wild lunacy I can into long single verses.  Unfortunately for you, the listening audience, that is plenty long enough to get songs about war, suicide bombing, and the glory of Hamas stuck in your head.

(Am I bragging?  Maybe a little.  But Lucy co-wrote the melodies, so I’m only half-bragging.)

Below, a picture of the dancing.  I can take no credit for the dancing, but I can assure you that it is very amusing.

Full Run

We ran the whole play tonight!  Much to everybody’s relief, we discovered that it is not, in fact, an incoherent disaster when it’s strung together in the right order.  In fact, you might say it was great.

Tonight the part of Fadil the puppet was played by a blue oven mitt.  Adi’s puppet-voice alters depending on what he’s using, and the blue of the oven mitt brought out a touch of Grover.  You remember Grover, don’t you, boys and girls?  Fadil is extremely cute.

Nate’s bad Arabic was great tonight (though Lucy reminds him to go faster).  The problem we face with the play is: Quentin (Nate) and Hassan (Adi) speak Arabic in the play, but since the audience has to be able to understand it, it’s “translated” into English.  Hassan’s Arabic is represented by a fairly idiomatic English with direct translations of some frequently-occurring Arabic phrases.  (“God willing” for “Inshaallah,” for example.)  But, if they’re speaking English, how can we let the audience see how bad Quentin’s Arabic is?  My solution as a playwright was to write his lines in bad English.  “Bad English” comes in a lot of flavors, depending on what a person’s native language is.  In my experience, for example, English tenses are often difficult for Chinese speakers.  But Arabic tenses are simple, and an American would probably have more trouble with plurals than with tenses; unfortunately, as Becca points out, messing up English plurals makes Quentin sound like a moron.  So we try to strike a balance -- Quentin, when he speaks Arabic, has a small vocabulary and a stilted way of talking.  When he shifts back into English, he’s very colloquial, and says things like “I’m probably just, like, stuck in my undergrad slang.”  Nate helps the effect by pausing to search for “Arabic” words, and speaking fluently in “real” English.