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After my first solo, Diary of a Madman which was an adaptation of a classic
Russian text, I took some monologues I had been working on and developed them
into a series of different characters. There were several homeless characters in
it - and I knew why - living in the lower east side of NYC, in Harlem, in the
23rd Street YMCA, I had seen a lot of homeless people. IN fact, the first day I
stepped off the Long Island Rail Road to start my first day of classes at NYU
Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Program in NYC, I was walking down 7th street
between 2nd and 3rd Avenue when I saw this old woman pulling a long piece of
gross red meat out of a garbage pail and holding it over her mouth and eating
it. My artist's voice said "welcome to real live, John" the other part of me
wanted to go back to North Babylon and the secure throws of suburbia (now I knew
why mom and dad moved to the suburbs!). My empathy for these people, as well as
the fear of my own potential demise to homelessness if the right circumstances
hit my life too hard, moved me to write about them. I didn't know what the over
all theme was of the piece, I knew there would be a common human thread via my
unconscious mind being in the place it was when writing it, and we'd find out
how to string it together later. I wrote a lot of monologues. I had seen
Bogosian, Gray, and other performance artists and I liked the idea. I didn't
know what I'd be able to do, but I enjoyed writing the monologues. I found
interesting themes, and they sort of wrote themselves as is the case with
playwrighting - you just learn to get yourself out of the way, let the
characters do the writing and guide the structure of the piece the best you know
how. I know that this is all an unconscious/conscious battle to find some
balance, via the use of character as the main notes of the piece, and that the
poetic soul we all have merges into some idealistic perspective (even if it's a
play about total devastation there is usually an idealist wanting others to see
this so they stop behaving in a devastating fashion so the idealism is hidden,
it's the catalyst, not the subject of the piece).
I had to get a Masters degree to continue working at Dol3wing. I had a BFA
which was the same degree as the MFA at NYU If you had all of your academic work
done which I did (long story), so I went to Adelphi and got the M.A. in 2
semesters. I met Denise Welborn there, a very talented actress and director
possessing a high sense of organization, theatrical presentation and was a dream
to work with. A truly great lady, and gifted artist who also was a good friend.
She helped me edit the texts and she added some of her own wonderful humor to
the texts. She worked with me on the Characterizations and knew I was capable of
doing them. My work in this (and I suppose in most of my acting) doesn't bear
down heavily on "realism" solely. I think this is very limited. I hear a lot of
film actors and spouses of them, saying "it was such a great SUBTLE performance"
which means the untalented asshole that somehow got to be a star, who can't do
anything beyond mumble or under act, has created a persona of greatness when he
or she is really just boring and incompetent" but leave it to the Republicans :)
I have a natural propensity for humor - and I believe that any art form using
human characters especially long art forms like plays and films, without humor,
is missing more than 1/2 the experience of being human. Satire, is a form of
sarcastic humor, an elevated perhaps sometimes Comedia Del Arte' physicalization
of character, of moments, of physical comedy and so on. From Theatre of Realism
to Theatre of Alienation, we span the gap between using human empathy to connect
to the character and the technique of alienating the emotional connection, the
empathetic response to place a person into a thinking mode, rather than blurring
his or her rational thoughts about the issues. There are many ways to elicit a
reaction in the audience, and that is what I am after in my work - I am not
interested in making someone cry or laugh simply to make them feel SOMETHING.
Unless it is in response to something happening, that connects and makes them
raise their experience, I feel I have failed - it has to be organic to the
piece. This might sound like an intellectual dialectic, but it's not - it's how
I write, and perform.
We decided that the characters were of two origins - the Victims of society
and the Victimizers. They were all disconnected but at the same time
participating in the same time, therefore their presence dictated the experience
of our society - so we minimalize it. One of my monologues which originated in
my play PRISONERS IN PARADISE, was about a homeless man who was being thrown out
of the outside of Madison Square Garden because it was the Democratic Convention
and he was not wanted by the politicians who were attending and running for the
highest office in the land, The keyword here was GARDEN... a cement garden, an
urban garden of people interacting. So we place the characters in Washington
Square Park, where the audience would meet each of them on their own human turf.
Denise helped me work with simple props and costumes, but I really didn't want
to use any costume other than perhaps all black. I thought in my third
production (which never happened) I'd explore the use of the actors instrument
allowing the characters to exist, without any costumes or props. But for this
piece she was right - it worked well. The result of this piece, was critical
praise, and standing ovations. Again, I was surprised but annoyed at the
ovations - I felt the audience was appeasing me, praising my talent. I wanted
them to not be able to clap, to have to be brought out of the theatre in
stretchers from the emotional, psychological, human opening that would occur and
not go to the diner for a bagel and "discuss the ..."... Of course that was
absurd it was lovely that they appreciated the work. I never did anything
more with this piece, life was getting difficult, but I thought I'd perhaps
start a solo career. This was a 2 hour piece, so I had advanced from 1 hour with
Diary to a full evening and a positive reaction. You never know what someone is
going to think of your work. Courage is about moving forward in the face of fear
- and I had my fears to be sure. But it was all just the work to me to be honest
- and I enjoyed rehearsing more than performing. There is this obligation to
finish the performance - and I rather stop and go over it again. I had thought
of pieces that did that - that improvised with the audience around a theme, and
I saw a string of pieces emerging over years of time titled, TRAGIC AND
I'M STILL LAUGHING 1, 2, 3 and so on until I reached the end of my life - and
the title of that final solo in the series would be TRAGIC AND I'M NOT LAUGHING
ANYMORE! And that would be it.
This piece offered characters that were in the process of doing terrible
things to others, who were deeply indifferent, as well as hugely human and
loving. It's about the Garden of Eden placed in Washington Square Park on the
eve of the new millennium. I think the tree was the garbage pail center state -
maybe an existential image who knows.
The last line of the play is said by STARGAZER who plays his harmonica, a
homeless man who remembers a moment of connection to someone he met in the navy
years earlier who lived in a mud hut in Africa - someone he fell in love with
and who's souls connected on the most basic human plane - as he walks back to
his large box which shelters him from the cold night, he says:
"We're all miracles"...
I'm probably too afraid to do another solo - it's not easy to create, and,
you're there alone. Being the kind of artist I am, I'm not there to make the
audience happy - by far, I want them to be twitching and squirming even while
they laugh. People do hideous things to other people, they act badly in a social
context and pain is ugly and usually unnecessary. I believe an actor and writer,
have the power to make people see these things in themselves and plant the seeds
for positive awareness thus better choices - how we take our vast and often the
ugliest parts of our humanity and make life work. It's easy to kill, it's very
hard, to understand. I do believe theatre is a teaching arena - and I suspect my
attachments to it were for my own lessons, the art of teaching others as I did
for 18 years, as well as being a writer and performer attempting the impossible.
Which is a noble pursuit I suppose.
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