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It is late on a Saturday morning in early March and the basement of the Flea Theater in New York City's TriBeCa District is buzzing with a dozen playwrights gathered around two long tables pushed together upon the Flea's second stage. They huddle in pairs around laptops emitting weird sounds and comic voices, cackling with glee. A silver-maned maestro in an open flannel shirt and worn Levi's slowly circles the tables, sharing each duo's amusement These New York playwrights are watching cartoons. These aren't just any cartoons. These twelve young writers didn't fight their way downtown through the muddy slush of a particularly mean late winter to watch "Tiny Toons" on Nickelodeon. These are special cartoons. These are cartoons the playwrights just created themselves as the opening exercise in the first meeting of the third season of the Flea's innovative, alternative approach to The Playwriting Workshop, Pataphysics. Pataphysics, advertised: "New Work and New Ways of Working." Pataphysics, the workshops with the enigmatic name and the clear vision spanning March through June and facilitated by what may well be the shortest list of cutting-edge, rule-bending, envelope-pushing playwrights to be found in a single program anywhere these days: Jeff Jones, Eduardo Machado, Irene Fornes, Erik Ehn, Mac Wellman, Karen Finley. "The normal state of being a playwright is being stuck," says the casually-attired Jones, after he has more or less regained his group's attention following its foray into cartoon-making. The "tools and rules" of the cartoon-creating software, Jones continues, have allowed the writers to create small stories and interacting characters without it seeming like work, or the stark hopelessness of the playwright's greatest fear: a blinking cursor upon a blank screen. The create-a-cartoon program, Jones explains, reintroduces "an element of fun and play that we lose rather quickly when we sit down to write." It's also one hell of an ice-breaker, and only the first of a deep bag of tricks Jones reaches into over the course of his quartet of three-hour workshop sessions. At one point, a stuffed animal appears to underscore a message, for whom Jones provides a kind of raspy, Rocky the Squirrel voice in a brisk dialogue exchange with himself. "I have a three-year-old," he laughs. His charges are mesmerized. "Jeff's workshop seemed to me like a kind of avant-garde theatrical pool party, with Jeff as the rad, beneficent host," says playwright Madeleine George, a past participant in both Jones' and Eduardo Machado's versions of Pataphysics. "Jeff's workshop was hugely fun and thought-provoking, and the largely deconstructive exercises he gave us to do, each one more like a rapid little mindfuck than a prompt for writing an entire scene, made me see stage text in a startling, contingent way I'd never seen it before." While George found variances in approach as distinct as the individuality of the writers themselves, there were also similarities. "One thing that both workshops shared was a kind of cheerful dismissal of the 'official rules' of playwriting, those Aristotelian charts and graphs that lesser writing classes rely on for their structure." It is this "cheerful dismissal" of conventional approaches to playwriting and play development -- conventions often perpetuated by leading MFA playwriting programs -- that helps to form the core of purpose to the Pataphysics series. "It's about creating new work, a gymnasium for the writing brain," says Gary Winter, the Flea's Literary Manager, chief coordinator of the Pataphysics series, and a playwright as well. "The teachers selected are known for their groundbreaking work. They have made their careers by writing for the stage in their own unique way. It's an opportunity for artists who know and admire the work of these master playwrights to sit down with them and pick their brains." Brain-picking and mind-expansion -- if not outright explosion -- are key components of the Pataphysics approach. "These teachers challenge our assumptions about writing," Winter continues. "It's easy to get stuck in one's own head as a writer, and I believe the workshops are expansive in nature. They open up a writer to new ways of thinking." The six playwrights facilitating this Spring's series may be similar to one another only in that their approaches are so disparate. "The personalities, methods and temperaments of the teachers vary widely," Winter says happily. "Mac Wellman, for example, may discuss landscape as a driving force in a play. Irene Fornes does visualization exercises. Erik Ehn has a series of exercises that helps writers get to the poetic. The classes are about process, not about completing a play." Madeleine George came to Eduardo Machado's workshop at a time when she was "stuck and anxious" about a work in progress. "Eduardo's class was perfect for me at that moment, because it was all about taking some elements of a piece you are already working on and injecting them with fresh energy, giving them new room to breathe." Although feeling awkward at first, George ultimately came to find Machado's process liberating. "Eduardo emphasized physicality -- our own and our characters' -- a great deal," George recalls. "He would often have us begin writing by becoming acutely aware of our bodies, transporting those physical sensations into the body of one of our characters and then going from there. We spent a lot of time with our eyes closed." Spending a couple weekends with your eyes closed or creating cartoons both belies the underlying demanding nature of the workshops and makes the selection process of participants an especially difficult one for the Flea Literary Manager and his cadre of five other playwrights who volunteer to evaluate applicant submissions. Writing samples are read blindly by the Flea screening crew, after which they convene and discuss. "We're interested in writers in all stages of development," Winter says. "Often the teachers get involved and help select students based on writing samples and résumé. And many participants are hybrids: actor-writers, director-writers, teacher-writers. Novelists and poets have also come." And sometimes, amidst the specialists and the hybrids, new and lasting partnerships are forged. Playwrights Crystal Skillman and playwright-director-composer Jerry Ruiz met in a Mac Wellman workshop in January, 2002. "Over the two weekends, Mac asked us to do several exercises outside of the workshop," Skillman remembers. "My favorite one was where we were asked to write songs using research from the library." Skillman chose the story of King Solomon and the famed temples he built with the help of the seventy-two devils he summoned up, then bottled up and cast out to sea. Inspired by the possibilities, Skillman began work on new scenes of stories these devils told, mostly through songs sung by a secretive schoolboy rock band. When the time came to share the results of her work in Wellman's class, Skillman just "let loose and sang them, although my voice is not great and I have somewhat of a complex about it. Mac turned to me and said something to the effect of an endearing and amused, 'You're crazy.'" Ruiz recalls being impressed with Skillman's work even in its early, nascent form: "When we read her scenes aloud in Mac's workshop, I just knew it could become a vibrant, funny, edgy full-length play." When Skillman later submitted her short play, "Translations of Signs" to the theater company Ruiz was directing for, he grabbed it. "It was daring, surreal, dark, dangerous and sexy," he says. "As soon as I read it, I knew it was the show I wanted to direct." When Ruiz wrote some underscoring for "Translations" and Skillman realized he was a composer as well as a playwright-director, what was to become "72 Devils" took off in earnest. "Mac's exercise from Pataphysics had drawn something very intense and different out of me, had begun to unlock the lyricist inside of me," Skillman remembers. "I felt there was a great story here to write through song." Thirty songs, to be exact, written together and via email with Ruiz over the next year. The growth of this collaboration, along with Ruiz' own "Brownian Movement" began to lay the foundation for Avant Pop, Ruiz' new theater company that "combines the sensibilities of and ultimately transcends the boundaries" that separate avant-garde art and pop culture. "It's a hybrid, subversive kind of genre that takes archetypal pop culture imagery, characters and stories and turns them inside out and upside down," Ruiz says. "It's about taking old, almost mythical stories and spinning them out in a way that is fresh, startling, poetic and heightened." Avant Pop's debut production opens at NYC's HERE Arts Center March 27 with "Depth of Sight", three short plays by Crystal Skillman, including "Translation of Signs". "Again," says Ruiz, "this all goes back to the Mac Wellman workshop." And looks to continue on, as well. "From '72 Devils' workshops at the Flea to performances at the Knitting Factory, Jerry and I continue to push each other more and more, back and forth," says Skillman. "It's been a crazy ride, but the work continues to be excellent, and just keeps getting better and better." Establishing and nurturing relationships with Pataphysics "graduates" is one of the benefits of the workshops Flea Literary Manager Gary Winter savors. "It's a terrific way for us to get to know writers," he says. "Just last fall I put through four workshops for writers, and most of them had taken a Pataphysics workshop. It's really nice to know that the life of the workshops carries on, and that if we like working with you we can, within reason, see that the work follows through at the Flea." Established nearly six years ago by Artistic Director Jim Simpson and designer Kyle Chepulis, the Flea -- dubbed such by Pataphysics instructor and Flea board member Mac Wellman -- offers two theaters, a 70-seat proscenium upstairs and a 40-seat basement black box, in a stern-looking turn-of-the-20th-Century structure on a narrow street in TriBeCa. Emphasizing what Winter terms "political plays, plays that break the form" of traditional dramatic storytelling, the Flea also impresses as one of the most immaculately-maintained small theaters on either coast. Perched in a basement anteroom shortly before a preview performance of A. R. Gurney's "O Jerusalem", near where stage manager Heather Prince mixes up the evening's batch of very convincing-looking ersatz Johnnie Walker Black, Winter reflects upon the overall vision of the Flea. "It's always fluid and evolving," he says. "Hopefully, we'll continue Pataphysics and ask other teachers in. We'd like to have writers from other countries come in." Such as? "Hey, Vaclav Havel is free!" Winter laughs. "And the Flea wants to get more involved in the educational aspect of the business, as well. Pataphysics has opened the door for a lot of writers to get to know us. Some go their own way afterwards, some have stayed on to volunteer." Playwright Anne Washburn provided the initial spark that ignited into Pataphysics while working as the Flea's office manager three years ago. "I was in a bar one night with Mac Wellman and Jeff Jones and they were talking about teaching and Jeff said that if he were running a playwriting school he would require each student to read every major piece of dramatic literature ever and then write a play a month on such topics as 'hardware' or 'cutlery'. I thought, 'Wow, I want to take a class from this person.'" Inspired by this barroom soiree, Washburn approached Flea Artistic Director Simpson with the idea. "I thought it would be great to have workshops at the Flea taught by really interesting people in which you were made to write. Jim was all for it. He had a lot of artistic history with Mac and Eduardo Machado and he loves the idea of learning through practice." Plus, Washburn adds, "because Jim's a quixotic person, the idea of running workshops strictly at cost appealed to him." Indeed, the many hours the all-volunteer staff puts into the Flea after their day jobs, seems only to add to the richness of the camaraderie surrounding the workshops and the theater's role as both host and facilitator. "Pataphysics has definitely helped make the Flea a vital part of the theater community," notes Winter. "And since nobody is making any money, the friendships and relationships one makes can be quite rewarding." Playwright Crystal Skillman agrees. "Pataphysics was incredible," she says. "Not only for bringing such talented people together for each workshop, but also in hitting home that this is our theater community. We create it, we support it and we pave the way for new plays that question the concept of what a modern play can be. I feel very close to my fellow writers that I've shared my workshops with. I see them at the theater, ask them for their thoughts and share my work with them. It has helped make me feel that, as an 'experimental' writer, I am not the only one struggling to be heard. It has strengthened my resolve to keep pushing through until my voice can reach even further." Pataphysics, defined: "The Science of Imaginary Solutions." -- Brook Stowe
For
more information on upcoming Pataphysics workshops, "Depth
of Sight", an Avant Pop Production Presentation Copyright © 2003 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |
