October 25, 2011

This summer’s production, Midget In A Catsuit Reciting Spinoza, proved to be the summit of my theatrical life, just 50 years on from the first play I wrote and directed, at boarding school. We started rehearsing in April, partly in Brooklyn, in my office at Brooklyn College, and partly in Woodstock. The ensemble scenes required nine of our cast of ten to be present in order to rehearse them (neither the ‘cube’ or Munich art opening scene, nor the final gas chamber scene, could be rehearsed at all with even one person missing, given a choreography requiring the cast to be crammed up against each other). Because of our actors’ working commitments the logistics of rehearsal attendance proved painfully difficult, right up to and including the final week of rehearsal in June. In the event the play came together well at the first dress rehearsal, to my great relief, and pride at – despite doubts and frictions - my planning. Our minimalist set of dressing-room benches worked well, and all the work that Claire Lambe, our company manager and designer, put into choosing and organizing the slides of Dalí paintings which dominated the stage, at the back, on a six foot square screen, paid off brilliantly. By her own genius, and with the help of some heroic, hurriedly assembled co-workers, Claire produced quite wonderful costumes, including Goering’s famous white uniform, Spinoza’s 17th century costume, Salvador Dalí/KingRat’s spectacular fire-engine red satin-looking blouson outfit, the Auschwitz inmate ‘pyjamas’ and the Rats/Nazis costumes which enabled the actors to change from rat to Nazi with the addition of belt, hat and regalia, all giving the production the ‘pantomime’ look the play required; in addition to them, Mary-Jane Hammond’s teatime-with-Hitler outfit, and Carl Schmitt’s Nazi uniform brought realism, along with a host of home-made and bought-in items evoking Nazi regalia. The catsuit of the title, hired at alarming expense from an emporium in Manhattan, made the actor inside suffer terribly from the heat, but looked splendidly grotesque in the midst of the action. It was a production requiring a hundred tricky items from Dalí’s moustache to Einstein’s wig, from a faux 1940s comic book to a faux Dalí masterpiece astonishingly executed by Claire, and for a company without deep pockets and with little time, we were at full stretch to find everything.

Longterm planning had secured a wonderful cast, but, as we lost one or two of them to rival projects, there were times in April and May when we were still looking for our 9th actor, and times when it seemed as if we would never find him or her. The four Rats who double as Hitler’s bodyguard, and were originally intended to be all men (with possibly one of them - this was a later thought - revealing herself to be a woman) wound up, after shuffling our options, to be composed of three women and one man – and far better this way, as it proved. We were also absurdly lucky in getting four superb actors, each of them leading actors in any other show, to play these roles, ever-present and ever-active but short on lines. We had in Tracy Carney a superb stage manager; we had wonderful, unfailing assistants to her in Chiara Harrison Lambe and Phaedra Fowler. Finally we even found a tenth actor, no less excellent, and created for him a new multiple character, the 18th century Lord Mayor of London, also appearing as the art gallery owner in the Munich scene and a Holocaust victim in the naked throng of the final scene.

This scene, which had promised a variety of challenges, was our triumph. It was a scene whose dangers Mikael Horowitz, our superb Spinoza, had reminded me of before he agreed to play the part: it would require exceptional tact. I also knew it would require exceptional choreography. I had the right music: Party’s Fuer Alina. But I had written the climax, beneath the gas jets, as a dance of mimed agony, the agony of the gas chamber deaths; as soon as I addressed it I knew that this was quite wrong: what was required was the opposite of the representation of horror that we, the audience, could imagine all too well, and which was the chief reason for the customary absence, in narrative representations of the Holocaust, of scenes set inside the gas chamber – the ultimate obscenity, no less obscene in art than in its vanished reality – inappropriate because unnecessary as well as obscene; the scene contains no drama, since we know it all too well; what was required and made possible by the scene in Midget as written, and as led up to by the play’s narrative, was a representation of the very opposite of what might be expected. What was needed was a representation of transcendence. Of obstinate survival. I’m no choreographer, and rarely attend dance performances, but I had come up with an image that to my great relief and pride served our purpose well. I also realized that the horror needed to be presented in words instead of a dance of torment; I added a brief, decisive stanza of verse, spoken by Spinoza when the naked cast of victims raise him above them, their arms and hand lifted towards Spinoza as their emblem of the survival of the race. The final, inspired touch was added by a former dancer, Janet Stetson, who gave of herself so generously to help us realize this scene. How were the naked bodies of the cast – all but Spinoza and the Kapo – to leave the stage? We didn’t want to keep them there on the stage floor and further challenge the audience with a naked curtain call; this would not fit. We worried long and hard at different ways of removing the bodies on sacking or blankets, using the cast and stage management dressed as Kapos to tow them offstage. It would have been laborious and distracting, as Spinoza and the chief Kapo played the final exchanges of the play. Janet had the answer: the cast should very slowly roll themselves offstage. It was superb – as if a wind were driving them like dust, to the edges of the stage, where they stood slowly and walked off, unalive.

One of the challenges we had anticipated – the potential discomfort of the cast, stripping naked – never materialized. The whole cast had of course committed to it before rehearsals began, and in the event all the coy plans I had made for us to disrobe in stages – to dine together, naked, in order to grow accustomed to each other – proved laughably unnecessary. We simply decided, one day, to play the undressing scene to its naked conclusion, and did so with no embarrassment that I could detect. The scene itself gave to nakedness a sacred quality, which we all felt, and never had nakedness felt more natural and inevitable, or less prurient.

The audience, too, reacted to the naked scene with profound emotion, emerging stunned from each of our 7 shows. The Holocaust itself commands piety, but I hoped we would go beyond this appropriate if obligatory response, and allow the audience to revisit the gas chamber not only as the hideous abstraction it necessarily is, but in its physical reality – without exploitation of its horror. The actors were remarkable in the scene; Mikael Horowitz, our Spinoza, brought so much force of emotion to it (and to the preceding scenes) that I encountered several members of the audience who reported that they’d had to stop themselves from running onto the stage to rescue him. Phillip Levine, who played God in the play (in numerous incarnations including Sir Arthur Midget, Tommy the Cat, Arnie the Guard, Albert Einstein and Carl Schmitt) played his final incarnation as the chief Kapo with an appalled compassion that was no less heartbreaking than Spinoza’s predicament as a reluctant survivor of the murderous gas.

Mick O’Brien’s Dalí drove the first half – and provided the longest, lurid second half ‘erotica’ scene – with a tour-de-force authority that kept the play afloat through its many transformations; the part had been written for him, as Mary-Jane was for Kris Lundberg, who brought even more to the part than the author could have envisaged; both Mick and Kris were so masterly that all the battles to arrange their Equity contracts (through an Equity intermediary who went on vacation and then fell ill, on return) were a distraction we could scarcely regret. Having the two of them with us brought the production to a higher plane. Fortunately we also had wonderful performances from Ric Bennett as Goering, Neil Howard as his bodyguard and rat-corporal with his minions, Teri Mateer, Violet Snow, and Andrea Maddox - whose ad-lib-strewn robing of Kris to meet Hitler was a high point of the production – and from Marcus O’Really (really) as our 10th man in Lord Mayor’s, Gallery-owner’s, and Auschwitz victim’s guise.

We were fortunate to have our lighting man, and the Byrdcliffe Theater’s guardian spirit, Zack Jacobs, at his most creative, as well as ever-present, running the board at each performance. It would have been a challenge for a well-funded and fully equipped theater, amateur or professional, to have produced a show as elaborate and – according to our audience - as professionally accomplished as our production of Midget. For us, with our part-timers overcoming all the often infuriating demands of the rehearsal schedule and the play’s needs, to bring to our audience something as theatrically masterful as we were able to do, made me prouder of it than of anything I’ve done in the theater. And the play as a text reached deeper, I felt, than anything I’d produced; it was more ambitious not only in respect of the final scene, but in view of the project of bringing off a two-act surrealist play, a thing often considered impossible – with the exception of Waiting For Godot, which is aided by repeating much of the first act. Surrealism refuses narrative suspense; that’s its first rule. So how keep an audience interested, past an hour? I seemed to have brought this off by lucking into a history-bending plot, with a play within a play (the pantomime of Dick Whittington, providing each of the characters with a vaudeville incarnation) enabling me to convey something about the Holocaust viscerally rather than intellectually: the plot not only permitted but obliged to me to stage a scene inside the gas chamber – necessarily the final scene, since nothing can follow such a scene – but, just as importantly, it hinged on an expressive narrative trick. When Spinoza succeeds in condemning himself to the gas chamber, and is led (half led, half carried) to his fate by Hermann Goering, we believe we have seen the conclusion of this 300-year old Eternal Jew’s story - Spinoza’s story in the play. This is confirmed when we jump forwards to Dalí and his ladylove in a postwar world, a scene that completes the pantomime thread of the play when Dalí unmasks himself as King Rat, and he and his rat-minions, robbed of their Nazi powers, are captured, leading to a play-ending tableau. But no: the stage manager’s voice returns to the play, inviting the actors to get changed for director’s notes in the green room. The scene that then follows is the pay-off of the play’s multiple threads. As the pantomime actors undress, their talk of ‘a shower’ morphs seamlessly into the talk of Jews in the Auschwitz ante-chamber to the gas chambers, undressing and anticipating a shower. We have believed that the implied horrors of the gas chamber, given us in the scene that ended in Spinoza’s exit to his doom, have been realized in the play and that we have left the gas chambers behind us. But – and this was the whole narrative trick, anticipated earlier in the play by a similar move backwards in time – the gas chambers are never behind us; they are always potentially about to recur – and this was what the narrative enforced, as an experience rather than as an idea. We were there again, in a hideous time loop; back in the gas chamber we thought we had left behind. Now, as the actors were fully naked with all their clothes hung up where they began at the start of the play, above the dressing room benches, the audience realized they would be taken all the way. It was this reversion, and not just the fact that with Spinoza’s survival at stake, we could stage a scene in the gas chamber – with the permission of the blackest of black farce premises, a man trying to get into the gas chamber, to end his tormenting immortality – that gave the final scene its power. The Eternal Jew, we then saw, survived the gas chamber, as history confirms.

The production was a triumph (tiny, one could say, in scale – less than 400 people witnessed it, during our 7 performances – but it could have been no greater and no more rewarding for me if our audience had been a thousand times that) for my muse, one I had given up hoping for. ‘Pure theater,’ one lifelong theater professional called it. I knew how fortunate I was. I could never have thought up this plot, nor could I have thought up a plot that would allow me to stage a scene inside the gas chamber. And yet it came to me - not by labor but by grace. It seems that patient devotion to narrative led me to it by the hand, forgivingly, after 50 years’ service: years of puzzling, fascinated, over narrative, grateful for whatever peaks I climbed but always conscious of higher ones, and always lamenting my shortcomings. Not in ten lifetimes could I have hoped for this gift.

That it came in a play about the Holocaust is surely no accident, although I’ve hunted in many other groves as well as in the perpetually haunted forests of the death camps. My family on my mother's side all died in the camps except for my mother, her two sisters, her mother and one cousin. When the Gestapo came to fetch my great-aunt Cilly (the ‘C’ is a ‘ts’ in German, ‘Tsilly,’ short for the German version of Cecily, Cäcilie – pronounced ‘Tsetsilie,’ a name my great-aunt shared with Richard Strauss’s wife and many Germans before and since), who persisted in sending care parcels to our relatives in the camps, she saw them arrive at her house, from the window. She climbed to top of her building and jumped off. Someone in our family has to remember Cilly. Turns out it's me. For 50 years I’ve been thinking of her and her courageous leap; I think she gave me this play.

Our current news is that our company is embarking on a production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo at the Rhinebeck Center for Performing Arts during the first weekend of January, and in Woodstock on the second weekend, directed by Tracy Carney and designed by Claire Lambe, with myself playing Donny Dubrow, Lou Trapani playing Teach and Alex Bennett playing Bobby. Details from the Rhinebeck Center for Performing Arts or on our company website at thewoodstockplayers.com.

This summer’s play, Hedgerow Specimen, a new play I completed in August, will be seen in June at the Byrdcliffe Theater in Woodstock, followed in September (we hope) with a production – as yet a notion, unsecured – of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot with myself and Mikael Horowitz as Vladimir and Estragon.

Dear reader, if you’re within geographical range, and these sound like events you would like to attend, please visit our website at thewoodstockplayers.com, please support us, and please come and see our productions!

July 25 2010

Dear friends:

May and June 2010 were eventful months. My latest play, Magus, was headed for the Byrdcliffe Theater in Woodstock, as a staged reading accompanying a full production of Edward Einhorn’s Rudolf II, which had recently completed a successful run in Manhattan, in the hands of UTC, Edward’s company. Magus was written specifically to run in repertoire with Rudolf II, and be cross-cast – i.e. use the same actors. This plan collapsed when the leading actor in Rudolf II, playing Rudolf, and due to play Franz Kafka in Magus, dropped out at the last minute. It seemed as if Magus was without a home until it dawned on me that I could stage the play myself in Woodstock, at the Byrdcliffe Theater, and stage it fully, not a mere reading. To that end I hastily formed a company, The Woodstock Players, with my wife as company manager and set designer, and we assembled a fine cast and threw the play onto the stage, myself directing and playing Sir John Dee, one of the main characters. I had to hope that my rusty directorial skills, unused for three decades and more, would return, while also remembering to learn my lines and give a performance in the play. Happily I find that advancing age brings rewards, including a degree of merry calm I rarely felt when I was younger. We had the support of UTC who donated their magnificent Rudolf costumes, while other local companies chipped in with costumes and props. Even so, staging an elaborate faux-sixteenth century five-act drama, albeit set within a 1920s Prague lunatic asylum, was a stretch. All fears as to whether it could be brought off in a short rehearsal time – 11 days – were dispelled by the time the first night arrived. We were sold out in advance, and managed to survive the delayed arrival of the actor playing Cervantes, who was flagged down by police and his car towed (strangely appropriate for the author of Don Quixote). While we waited for Trey, our magnificent Cervantes, I serenaded the audience with tales of the founding of drama, from the Osiris rites onwards, in honor of our hundred-year-old, leaky, rotting but ever-enchanting theater building, which began its life as a pottery and retains a wonderfully antique and improvised atmosphere. The play was given a wonderful reception, and on the following night we were turning people away, after seating as many as we could on the floor between the stage and the seats, cross-legged. On the blog, ‘The Book Of Ideas,’ a visiting Manhattan theater director wrote, "I have not seen an audience participate with theater like that since I was a child visiting London. Even then the audience was not as effervescent as this crowd."

The production’s success impelled the Rhinebeck Center for The Performing Arts to invite us to transfer the production to their theater in the first week of January 2011.

All of which augurs well for next year’s production of Midget In A Catsuit Reciting Spinoza. And, inshallah, for the years to come as The Woodstock Players establish themselves and grow. We are bringing Dangerous Ground, a Manhattan multi-media company, to Woodstock in September, to present Robert Kelly’s Oedipus After Colonus, following their world-premiere run at the HERE space in Tribeca. I am playing Oedipus in this production and I urge anyone who is in the New York area, or can make their way there, to come and see this remarkable new play by the greatest living English-language poet. We open September 8, and run till September 12, at Manhattan’s HERE, followed by performances in Woodstock on September 17 and 18.

I’m also currently appearing in Neil Howard’s film 200 Years of Stink-Eye, and am relishing this baffling but happy return to theatrical favor, after 35 years devoted to writing novels and radio drama. (And teaching – but this is essentially a beloved hobby that earns my keep, and not, in my case, a calling.)

Enjoy this wonderful sunlit summer, which I hope you’re sharing, wherever you are.