Source Material - Text #2

I'm calling it text #2, but it's actually the third part of a play cycle. There is a title, but I want to stay away from that for the time being.

It's a surprise to me that I'm returning to this work. I thought I was done with it. Until I discovered a little item called "The Expanding Vacant Spot" in Greil Marcus' book The Dustbin of History. There I discovered the fate of little Maggie Louise Gudger (one of the children documented by James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). Maggie died at the age of 45. She drank rat poison. So there it is. My jumping off point.

As I work on this new text, I'm thinking about the previous two plays I devised from the Agee/Walker text. Considering what worked, where I fell short, and where my interests are now in contrast. In the first production, I was much more interested in remaining true to the text - the intentions of Agee. Agee specifically. But in looking back, I realize I was on the right track when I wrote a scene where Agee and Evans discuss their work.

The contrast between the two is stunning. In his essay, Marcus compares Agee to a faith healer and Evans to a coroner. It's a dead on description of these two artist's approach to their work, and the strength of the first play was in highlighting their difference and their attraction to each other artistically and sexually. I also focused on the musicality of the text and the earnestness with which Agee wrote.

What I missed was the irony - I was aware of it, but didn't focus on hitting it home for the audience. Agee was also constructing a rather long argument against another work - And You Shall Know Their Faces by Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell - a work he was deeply offended by with regard to its objectification of the families documented - the patronizing, entitled attitude the authors took towards persons, places, and things. He felt the book made no attempt to document or reach any understanding about the lives of families, but instead consided it a tract that reinforced East Coast liberal's view of poverty as a "cause du jour."

In the second text, I think I hit the irony both in devising the script and in the direction of it. Maybe it turned some audience members against the show. They saw it as being frivolous with a serious subject - poverty and need. I wanted certain characters to reek of insincerity. To expose their shallow thought processes. But also to dive into the depths with them when they went there - often unexpectedly. I wanted the show to be tight and unrelentless. I was able to give the direction a filmic quality. We worked in the studio trying to devise physical ways to convey the idea of a close-up and a frame using only the actors' bodies without being literal. I'm not sure this was apparent to anyone - except for a film editor we had in the audience one night. But it created a good focus for the actors. The control they had over their movements served as an editorial device highlighting and/or distancing the text from the action.

In approaching this new text, I'm thinking about distance, objectivity, and objectification. About irony and humor. I'm currently reading A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke. In the book, Handke sets out to write about his mother's suicide by creating what he called "formulations" - a method of composition that allowed him to maintain his distance from his subject. He wanted to construct a text that would stay true to the facts of his mother's life without "standing in"
for her or obliterating her by making her a character. That is the task I feel is necessary in the construction of this play and one that I was attempting in the play I wrote as part of NAPLWRIMO (achieved with minimal success, but hey, that's what first drafts are for). Anyway, enough meandering. Until next time.

The following 3 pictures are from the set of part 1 of the play cycle. It's simply text applied to gallery flats. It was quite an effective framing device for the play and looked beautiful onstage. I'm coming back to these for the following reasons:

1. I'm attracted to text.
2. I like that this text has absolutely no meaning unless you are close enough to read it - onstage it's an object.
3. This play is about objectifying persons, places, and things.

B

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn't need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.

B

Documentary: That's a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. You have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. Art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.

B

My thought is that the term 'documentary' is inexact, vague, and even grammatically weak, as used to describe a style in photography which happens to be- my style. The item should be documentary style- an example of a literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.