Our Midwest Journey (1995)

The Mississippi River

Twenty-five years ago my wife Toni moved here from New York City. We did not know at that time we would be married, we didn’t know any of this. My first marriage was over, my first theater company in the rearview mirror.

I had a new project, though. I was to start a series of late night productions at Dobama Theatre. I had proposed two ideas, an evening of short plays written by twenty-something actors about their experiences as adolescents and children in the year 1980, and a long-form improv based on the MTV reality program The Real World.

The first was an idea I had proposed once or twice at Guerrilla, using our skills as writers of brief plays to compose an entire show on a single theme, but it never came to fruition. Long form improv was something I also wanted to experiment with, but had no skill or training in it. I just knew it existed.

Before starting this new job, Toni and I decided to take our first road trip. It was a test of our new relationship, it was also terribly indulgent. We enjoyed room service and each other, and checked out historical sights and tourist traps on our way up to the Twin Cities to spend a few days with my brother, Denny.

I was also compelled to see as many non-traditional performances as possible, as though any one of them might provide me with insight or ideas to steal for this new project. It was a mania. Looking back, I am shocked by how many shows we saw on this trip, and how many ideas for the Night Kitchen actually did originate on this journey.

The following italicized passages are excerpts from my journal.

Thursday, July 6, 1995 - Chicago
We saw “Harold” (sic) at the Improv Olympics (sic) … it appeared as though there were very few rules … they would take one word (mine: moon rocks) and make a half-hour piece out of it. It went everywhere and always came back to the central theme.

I wonder how much was planned and how much they were truly winging it.

Danny Hoch

This was the period when both Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were working at IO (Improv Olympic), and so the odds are good we saw at least one of them that night, but there’s absolutely no way to prove that.

Regardless, deconstructing what I saw this one night formed the basis of my directing concept for The Realistic World, and pretty much every long form I have directed since. Perhaps I should have taken a class.

Friday, July 7, 1995 - Chicago
Saw "Some People" and "Too Much Light" ... In “Some People” Danny Hoch (24 yrs old, fm NYC) portrays eleven different people … to blur the line between “we” and “them.” It made Toni miss NY … the only kind of theater worth doing, theater that teaches, that instructs, that makes you leave with more than a smile on your face.

Special note: Remember all the disenfranchised Generation X’ers w/multi-color hair hanging out under the “L” asking for change.

This last sentence is a line I included almost word-for-word in the text for The Vampyres.

Saturday, July 8, 1995 - Chicago
We saw “Klown” Unbelievable. Helmut Voelker, with the big forehead, unwavering, glassy-eyed stare and gaped mouth, piercing high laugh, he couldn’t break eggs except on his head, he was so frightening and pitiful, REMEMBER HIM … like a wild animal. He frightened me. And when his hand was hit by a mallet or his penis was cut off, or his gift of a rose was refused, he howled and cried so pitifully … I remember “Incomparable Pablo” at O.U. An evil little clown show, but those kinds are so powerful.

Die Hanswurst Klown

Late last year I wrote more about evil clown shows, including Die Hanswurst Klown: Pick Us and We’ll Burst, and you can read about that here.

Sunday, July 9, 1995 - Milwaukee
“Realistic World” idea I came up with in the shower … open show with introductions; one character has a monologue describing (improvised, of course) an uncomfortable event that took place “the other day.” Then all those involved act it out.

Unknown to me, IO had by this time already featured a program called “The Real, Real World.” I am sure it was hilarious, I was always aiming for a king of improvised cinéma vérité, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Break. The “narrator” comes out and gets a volunteer from the audience to describe something real that happened and then the characters act that out, taking it to a different (or who knows, maybe not) conclusion.

The very first time we did this opening night of The Realistic World, I asked someone in the audience what they did earlier that day and they said they had attended a funeral. I literally froze, literally. I turned into actual ice.

Another idea: give audience members the opportunity for additional participation by inviting them to wear a (button, ribbon, toilet paper) and if an actor needs someone new in a scene, they can just pick someone out and use them. Brilliant, no?

No. That is another fucking terrible idea.

Monday, July 10, 1995 - Madison, WI
Should I use improv games in the rehearsal of “Bummer”? Maybe one day a week.
1st day warm-up, hand out scripts, run them, discussion of content, pick five for memorization?
2nd day warm-up, run scripts, test memorization. Show & tell.
3rd day Improv day? More running of pieces?

The Infinity Room
The House on the Rock

Not a particularly inspired entry, but I am amused now by the fact was I was spending so much time fretting about my impending responsibility. You can read more about Bummer here.

Tuesday, July 11, 1995 - Spring Green, WI
Taliesin -- the home of Frank Lloyd Wright … (the studio) even has a little theater … a curtain designed by his students for his 90th (?) birthday … It smelled a bit mildewy but it was a theater. I’d love to mount a whole Shakespeare on that tiny stage.

From there to the House on the Rock. Monstrous! The most gifted architect in American history in the same town as this incredible, unbelievable THING.

It was like a real-life nightmare, all twisty & turny & dark -- were we indoors? underground?

The music machines … The Mikado. Glistening, gilded and red. The song it played, “Danse Macabre” -- I could have cried. Frightening! I will use it in the “Vicious Cabaret.”

True to my word, we did use the recording of the "Mikado" machine as the opening theme for This Vicious Cabaret.

Wednesday, July 12, 1995 - Winona, WI
(in a coffee house) "The Compass"
p. 42 Die Schmiere, “it means ‘smearer’ or something. It’s a cabaret which puts everything down.”
P. 43 Latin: Provisus, past participle of provider, i.e. To provide, providence, “to see ahead”
the negative, “improvisus” - unforeseen

Janet Coleman’s book The Compass was a revelation to me, about improvisation and, coupled with Jeff Weingrad and Doug Hill’s Saturday Night, about the corporate whoring of modern comedy. It was a foundational book for my award-winning play one-act This Is The Times.

Thursday, July 13, 1995 - St. Paul, MN
It was 102° today. Toni and I decided to give ourselves a break and just sit in a cold theater and watch a movie. But the place up the street (by Macalester) had their a/c busted and so we drove all the way into Minneapolis to see "Apollo 13."

This was the weekend that over seven hundred people died in Chicago during the heatwave of 1995.

Friday, July 14, 1995 - St. Paul, MN
I dreamed again last night about showing up to the first "Bummer" rehearsal without anything prepared.

Toni, my brother and I went out to see an improv show in a bowling alley. They have this little theater on the side. The troupe was called "Jump Up and Run." We three were the only ones in the audience, so we got our money back.

They “rehearsed” for us. They did two pieces, one called THX (“the three of you are listening”) where they act out a mundane activity (bowling) and two of them on microphones make the sound effects.

Then they did a musical based on a decade (Denny said 1850s) and an object (pasta). It was pretty funny.

The Young & The Weightless

This fascinating cabaret space is at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. Several years later, when I was performing the Minnesota Fringe I caught a couple shows there, and I have to say there is nothing like being served a big fat cheeseburger, fries and a beer in the middle of a one-man solo performance of Hamlet. You can read more about that here.

Saturday, July 15, 1995 - St. Paul, MN
We saw "The Swan" at the Jungle Theatre. Interesting play.

Then we returned to the Bryant-Lake Bowl and caught an 11 PM performance of "The Young and the Weightless." Now there were more people in the audience.

A science fiction, musical soap opera. All improvised, they included what happened last week in the program.

They had a tendency to talk over each other, or to wait for someone to say anything. The funniest ones in the show were from "Jump Up and Run" … for the most part the whole experiment was fun, enjoyable to watch, etc. I am inspired.

I am also ready to go home.

Sources:
"Funny Business" by Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune (4/9/1995)
"The Compass, The Improvisational Theatre that Revolutionised American Comedy" by Janet Coleman, University of Chicago Press (1990)

The Realistic World

When asked what made him qualified to criticize theater, former Plain Dealer theater critic Tony Brown was fond of saying, “I got the job.”

If you were to ask what made me feel qualified to create a long-form improv comedy, when I had received little to no training in the artform, I could have said much the same thing. I took two courses in college, and I had seen a few club and long-form improv shows.

I shared a detailed history of my education learning through trial and error in a post last summer.

Following the inaugural Dobama’s Night Kitchen production, Bummer, we went straight into rehearsals for The Realistic World.

In 1995 the first so-called “reality” show, MTV’s The Real World had wrapped up its London season, and after four years of throwing seven young people together to show “what happens” (nothing did) the producers were about to begin forcing things to happen. They stopped casting normal people who possessed things like dignity and shame, and started dragging in sluts and assholes.

Impressed as I was with the narratives of the early seasons, especially San Francisco which featured six very likeable people and one dickface who the rest immediately kicked out of the apartment, because that’s what you do. The idea of our performance would be for seven actors to assume alter-egos which they would carry from performance to performance, week after week. A few additional actors (we called them “ringers”) would play pizza guys, waiters, family members or boyfriends, whatever was suddenly called for.

Meet Christine

This first iteration, The Realistic World 1, featured Amanda, Christine, Dan, Erin, Jeff, Marty and Tia - their real names. The setting was a fictional rental house in Tremont (this was confusing, some audience members wanted to know where in Tremont we were performing) and we would use some word association and ask the audience some questions at the start of the show to act as subject matter for the story.

Yes. The very first performance, as host, I asked an audience member to share the worst thing that had happened to him recently and he said he came straight to the theater from his uncle’s funeral. I was literally speechless. I have it on video, I couldn’t say anything. That was AMAZING.

We kept the framework basic, each performance started with a house meeting where all seven actors would share issues inspired by the audience suggestions, and then break into two or three person “give-and-take” scenes (we called them "Change Ups") cutting from one scene to another, and the action (ideally) would build.

Finally the first half of the performance would end with the “Miracle Scene” which took place in one agreed upon space, and into which an unlimited number of actors could appear. In this scene, it was very important for actors on the stage to give-and-take focus, so though you did not necessarily leave, only one conversation was happening audibly at any one time.

It was called the “Miracle” scene after that New Yorker cartoon by Sidney Harris where there’s this chalkboard with an elaborate equation and a blank space just before the solution which reads, “... then a miracle occurs.”

Then we’d do it again, change ups followed by a “miracle” scene. There would also be "confessionals" in which a character would sit on a stool and improvised a monologue about their feelings.

An entire episode was book-ended by a house meeting, during which everyone would toss out grievances or personal news which would be fodder for the show, and we would conclude with house dinner. Each episode someone would be responsible for making “dinner.”

DAN: (incredulous) You made dinner?
TIA: Tacos.
ERIN: Did you make any without meat?
TIA: Yes.
ERIN: (surprised and delighted) Really?
TIA: Yes.
(beat)
TIA: They’re the ones with nothing in them.

The second iteration, The Realistic World 2, debuted twenty years ago tonight, on January 20, 1996. There were only seven "episodes" of The Realistic World 1, and seven for The Realistic World 2, which was directed by Erin Cameron. The cast consisted of myself, another Dave (our names the source of many varied nicknames) Sarah, Trish, Tom, Haley, and Anne.

The first run was an interesting experiment with some wonderful moments, but Erin was able to shape the scenario into a much more polished performance, and we had all learned an awful lot from the first go round. Each member of the original cast was a ringer for this one, and they had the opportunity to create recurring characters within this new neighborhood.

TRW2 was set in an apartment on Coventry, which was much less confusing for everyone and we were able to make reference to many venues on the street with which everyone was familiar.

Haley & David

Living inside of it myself was a bit heady. I created an Über-David, an insecure stock trader with a sharp tongue, I had the opportunity to be the kind of bust-out asshole you might know me as if you only know me through Facebook. However, the fact that I was the oldest of the house members (at 27 almost ten years older than Haley, our youngest at 18) made me the butt of many age-related jokes.

Really. I have been dealing with this shit for a long time.

Anyway, it was exciting to craft an alternate personality and to see how much he might change over the course of seven episodes. The agenda that my character had often bumped up against those of other characters creating some true friction which didn’t always remain on stage.

Critical response to our little experiment was mixed. The Free Times accused us of wanting it both ways; improv comedy laughs and compelling personal involvement, which "this callow troupe isn't up to delivering." Scene said "something this young and hip is a boon to any city which boasts a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," though they may merely been baiting the Free Times.

We knew we had made some kind of impact when the new "club" improv troupe in town, Cabaret Dada, made reference to us during one of their performances. Asking the audience to suggest emotions, one called out, "Ennui!" Host Jeff Blanchard made one of his iconic skeptical faces and said, "Ennui? What do you think this is, The Realistic World?"

Night Kitchen developed other long-form improvs (One Step Beyond, Soap Scum) which succeeded in providing a definite story structure (urban legends, soap operas) but also relied a bit too heavily on tropes and types. I think what I love most about The Realistic World was the same thing I enjoyed about the first few seasons of The Real World, watching real young people figure out real life situations realistically, with real emotions on the line -- happiness, embarrassment, affection, humor -- everyone reaching to achieve their own personal success or failure. It's what people in their twenties do.

Recently I uncovered our Trivial Pursuit - 90s Edition. Yes, there is such a thing. It came in a silver, metal box with the legend, The most trivial of decades. Indeed, as Carl Jung once said, “May you live in interesting times.” I wish our times were as dull and introspective as they were twenty years ago.

In The Night Kitchen (book)

When Dobama Theater Artistic Director Joyce Casey asked me to curate a late-night series of performances for teenage and young adult audiences, it didn't take me very long to choose a name for the project.  

The play I was currently writing, The Vampyres, was set in a goth-themed coffee house called The Night Kitchen. There a couple allusions to children's books in the play, in particular books that went to dark but dreamlike places.

When Dobama's Night Kitchen started I was twenty-seven. I had already put on the trappings of adulthood -- marriage, home-ownership, divorce -- finding each an ill fit. I was in a new relationship with a woman who encouraged me to re-discover the childhood I had always been determined to scorn, deny and suppress. My mission was to create works which respected and celebrated young people, from their point of view.

Joyce kept trying to thrust This Is Our Youth upon me to direct for DNK. I have a lot of respect for Kenneth Lonergan. I really like his movie. But stories about wasted people acting wasted are really boring ... I couldn't get past the stage direction describing as one of the kids "expertly rolls a perfect joint." Really? That must have been an amazing joint. I think it was eventually produced at Beck Center, but anyway.

We had a basement after dark, when the adults had checked out, to be creative. That was dreamlike in itself. And for this guy in his late-twenties it was a race against the clock, I started getting delirious around 12:30.

In The Night Kitchen was published by Maurice Sendak in 1970. Since publication it has remained controversial, and for all the wrong reasons. Well, there's one reason, and it's between Mickey's legs. There's a boy running around naked in it!

Yes, well. There's a boy running around in my house, naked, pretty much every day, but I wouldn't call that pornographic, and I would have some pointed questions for anyone who does. The child doesn't read In The Night Kitchen and think it is sexual, only a sad and ashamed adult does that.

And there was never any nudity in Dobama's Night Kitchen either, unless you count that time Peer's junk fell out of his pee jays during The Realistic World 3, but I wouldn't call that sexual, either.

In The Night Kitchen was inspired by, practically stolen from the classic, early 20th century comic strip Winsor McCay's Little Nemo In Slumberland. That comic featured a boy's dreams where anything could happen, and did, on his fruitless quest to reach Slumberland to take his place as rightful playmate to the Princess. More on that later. 

Remarkably, I received the second volume in a large-format, collectible edition of the strip which includes at least one strip in which Nemo appears naked. Because in dreams, this happens all the time.

The being naked part. Not being eaten by a polar bear. At least, not to me.

Sendak's In The Night Kitchen also does not include any polar bears. But it does include three, gigantic chefs who may look like Oliver Hardy, but that only softens the fact that each sports a "Hitler" mustache and attempt to bake the obviously circumcised Mickey in an oven. Yes, there are far more disturbing things to trouble a person's sleep than a small child's genitalia.

So this theater project was named for an often-timed banned children's book, and for three years it felt like a cozy playhouse, a respite from the adulthood I thought I'd wanted. Leah, who was in her teenage years back then -- in fact didn't even start attending DNK shows until after I'd stepped down as director of the project -- once recounted to me the feeling of excitement she always had walking down those steps into the basement, it was like a vibration, maybe because the music was always played a little too darn loud, not knowing what was going to happen that night.

A surprise farewell to the Night Kitchen, June 1998.