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.

The Secret Adversary: Adaptation

I am trying to write an essay on adaptation. Perhaps you have heard this apocryphal story, attributed to Michelangelo.

The apprentice asked how the master was able to take a formless marble slab and transform it into something as soul-touchingly beautiful as David.

Michelangelo took a drag on his cigarette and said, "Chip away anything that doesn't look like David."

With The Secret Adversary I have had a second opportunity to tell the story of an entire novel with one set and five actors. Writing the script I tried not to concern myself with the set - at all - but I did need to think about the players, and how many would be able to appear on stage at the same time.

Surprisingly, this book was much more challenging that The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in spite of the fact that I had limited two of my actors (myself and James) to play one character each, James as the narrator Hastings, who barely leaves the stage, and myself as Poirot. One actor played the other three other male characters.

left to right: Ray Caspio as Boris Stepanov, Brittni Shambaugh as Rita Vandermeyer, James Rankin as Mister Carter
Design by Esther Haberlen

But Adversary just has so many characters, it was challenging to narrow it down. Putting the pieces together, I tried not to think very much about how fast the actors would need to change behind the set. In fact, I was so negligent that up until today I still had a scene in which Ray would enter with a gun in Ray's ribs.

The thing about Styles is that if there are too few characters, there are too few suspects. I like to think I struck a decent balance there, and was able to maintain Christie's mystery until the last few moments.

Adversary isn't really a mystery, though there is a major reveal, though for most of the tale it is pretty obvious that if "Mister Brown" exists, he is one, the other (or both?) of two characters. The story is an international thriller, with the protagonists getting into and out of scrapes, flying entirely by their wits.

I had to chip away anything that wasn't a one-hour play, but not too much that it was no longer The Secret Adversary.

Thankfully, we once again have the great joy of working with Esther, who not only has a great love of the period (England "between the wars") but also a tremendous talent at creating fabulous looks actors can slip in and out of with great speed.

British Intelligence, Member of Parliament, ageing socialite, American millionaire, Russian royalty, German Bolshevik, Cockney thug ... and that's maybe half of them.

Rehearsals begin in ten days.

The Theater of War (book)

The past week was spent at Elyria Catholic High School. Each January the actor-teachers from the GLT Residency program test out the new lesson plans they have learned over the holidays, working with students in a relaxed atmosphere in which they are free to consult Lisa and myself, even during the class period, though they never do. Everything generally works out the way it is supposed to and we provide notes and feedback and they get to move into this next part of the school year confident that they are conducting the lesson plans correctly.

Yesterday an article appeared in the Morning Journal in which Lisa described our work succinctly, “The teachers have taught the curriculum, but we’re here to enhance the curriculum.” That’s what we do. We “illuminate” these classic texts, to figuratively shine a light on them, to bring certain aspects into focus which might otherwise be lost.

Our people perform scenes, but also coach the students in performing scenes, and also conduct exercises and improvisations, and then debrief with discussions which often relate to personal matters. One of our teachers said, “It allows (my students) to put themselves in the characters.”

Many discussion prompts are tried and true, but many have to change as time goes by, depending on current events, the personality of the actor-teacher asking the question, or even their supervisors’ point of view. The Julius Caesar residency took on a different tone after 9/11, for example. But how much can Romeo and Juliet change? Quite a bit, actually. Girls and boys today find Romeo to be much more of a creepy, obsessive stalker than they did fifteen years ago.

But still, Caesar is about friendship and personal belief and R&J is about love and hate. They get the politics, they get the emotions. But what of Macbeth, what of Hamlet? How best to connect teenagers and not only teenagers but our actors who work with them to the outsized feelings of ambition and horrible acts of violence inherent in these works? It is far too easy to hold the titular characters at arm’s length.

For Christmas my mother-in-law gave me a copy of The Theater of War (What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us About Today) by Bryan Doerries. His youthful intention was to become a classicist, studying at Kenyon College to learn Ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew. For his senior thesis he produced a performance of his own translation of Euripides' Bacchae, transforming a hillside in Gambier, Ohio into a makeshift amphitheater. What followed mutated into an interactive bacchanal which drifted late into the night in the manner you would expect. Text became flesh, and this young man felt he had discovered the power of theatrical performance.

Yes, we have all had that evening it all came together into an amazing you-had-to-be-there performance event. However, it was only when the author had experienced tragedy in his own life that Doerries began to developed his theory for the powerful uses of theatrical performance. He entered into a relationship with a woman with cystic fibrosis. She taught him a great deal about stoicism in the face of anguish, but also how to embrace everything relevant in life and discard all that simply isn’t important.

Her death was on March 20, 2003, the vernal equinox. On that date, my wife and I were celebrating the second birthday of our stillborn son, Calvin. The year before we held that celebration alone, this time with a six-week old baby girl. Something else was new that day, the Iraq War had begun mere hours before. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end, am I right?

Doerries theorizes that classic Greek tragedy was not created as entertainment, but as something more significant. Having endured long years of war with the Spartans, dramatists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were most likely themselves soldiers, writing for soldiers to perform, for an audience of soldiers to view.

We today have come to believe that Greek tragedy are cautionary tales, stories of how great men are brought low by something called “fate” and their own “fatal flaw” and we are meant to judge them and learn from their mistakes.

Doerries believes this view to be misguided, and narrow. He states that “tragedy (is) a powerful tool for positive change, one whose vast and untapped potential for propagating healthy responses to stress remains wholly underestimated.”

These soldier audiences watched as figures who had endured trials much like their own make painful, difficult decisions, decisions for which there are often few choices, all of them unhappy. These men were not meant to judge the heroes performed on stage, not even to feel “there but for the grace of the gods go I.” They saw these figures and thought that is me. I have that same pain. I have been tried and I have made those decisions and I a trying to learn how to continue.

“Tragedy … aims to arouse then purify emotions … of their toxic qualities,” the author says.

His company, Outside the Wire presents staged readings of these tragedies for select audiences, followed by open discussion. Ajax tells the story of a maddened and suicidal soldier and has been performed for Iraq and Afghanistan War vets coping with post-traumatic stress, and Prometheus Bound for guards in corrections facilities including Guantanamo Bay.

The Women of Trachis includes scenes of Heracles, horribly suffering from a curse, begging his son for death. This last addresses issues of assisted suicide, and in the book Doerries recounts a controversy which arose when a hospital on Cape Cod commissioned a public performance and then got cold feet when their ethics committee feared such a performance would be a tacit endorsement of euthanasia.

I was reminded of an event from ten years ago I had entirely forgotten about. I was booked to perform I Hate This at a hospital on Long Island, and two months before the event the head of OB/GYN announced the event would require his approval and insisted the read the script. He found it threatening and the performance was cancelled. This wasn’t the first time I had offended the medical community, one performance before nurses in Akron was a complete disaster. It was the end of a long day, and the air conditioning was on the fritz … and yet I could definitely feel a chill in the air as I opened the floor for questions.

Someone eventually raised their hand. “Well. What are we supposed to do?” The way she asked, it was obviously meant to be rhetorical.

It’s brave work Doerries has been doing. He enters spaces where no one is ever meant to question the decisions. Theater is all about questioning decisions. But how do my young actors and their teenager students question the decision to murder, I mean it’s obvious … don’t do it, right?

But how do we look past the “fatal flaw” idea, and see in characters like Macbeth our own decisions. What constitutes betrayal? Can you break trust with someone you love and respect and ever be the same person again? Can you accept your own transgressions and successfully move past them?

We believe our time unique in its obfuscation and callousness, but what about Hamlet? Is there another play of Shakespeare’s more rife with broken promises, discarded tradition, and repeated, casual deception? How do you live in a world like that and maintain your integrity?

New LIFE HACKS for 2016!

Have you ever felt like there was a better way to accomplish something you already have to do every single day? I do, I always feel like this, all of the time. Recently however, I have discovered some valuable, little-known, secret LIFE HACKS which have made my daily existence much, much simpler and enjoyable!

Detergent: You know how the box of laundry detergent instructs you to use a certain amount of detergent for a certain size load? Ignore that, use as little as possible, laundry detergent is strong stuff. Use, like, a teaspoon maybe for a medium size load. Your box of detergent will last a long time and believe me, no one will notice.

Carry a Notebook: Do you ever have a great idea but then forget to write it down, or worse use the "take a note" feature on your phone? If you're like me, you usually completely forget there's all these notes you've dictated into your phone. It's ridiculous! Just carry a small notebook in your pocket or jacket at all time - and don't forget a pen. When you think of something brilliant, write that down!

Shave Your Scalp: (for bald people only) For a while after losing my hair I would keep it all short and neat, but there would be all these little hairs on top of my head. Just use ordinary shaving cream and shave those suckers off! No one wants to see those pathetic, tiny hairs on your big, bald head.

Butter: What is this, the 1970s? Cook in butter, cook everything in butter. Saute onions and garlic in butter and then cook your vegetables in that. Then all your vegetables will taste great!

Aren't these great ideas? Now let us never use the term "life hack" ever again.

Nowhere Generation (1991)

From NOTES FROM L.A. 
JUNE 1991 - VOL. 1 NO. 1 - TEMP 72°

Now you can’t afford to take all the drugs your parents used to take
Because of their mistakes you’d better be wide awake.
- Elvis Costello, “The Other Side of Summer”

I’m a member of the Nowhere Generation. I’m a representative of the youth of today, and I’m mad. The world’s in a mess (again, as it always has been, as it always will be) and as a youngster I naturally find it necessary to blame those who came before for all the world’s problems. In fact, no generation in the history of the world has had their rebelliousness so thoroughly documented as the generation that came just before mine.

In the next few months I will be writing about the world, and my place in it, but first I’d like to get a few things straight about the New Generation Gap and what it means to me.

If a generation can be defined in sociological terms in a twenty-two year span, anyone who was born between 1961 and 1983 qualifies. 1961 was a very special year. The introduction of the Pill effectively brought down an enormously self-indulgent birth rate and brought to a screeching halt the production of that generation know affectionately as the “Baby Boomers” and less affectionately as “Those Hypocritices Who Might Have Saved The Planet If They Weren’t Side-Tracked By Their Own Desire For Wealth And Power.”

Harsh words. But this is coming from a member of the Nowhere Generation, a moniker divined, oddly enough, from Esquire yet highly preferable to other titles, most prevalent being the Twentysomethings.

The fact is the top end of My Generation is turning thirty this year, including my brother. He’s no yuppie. He was too young to have been a hippy if he wanted to be, which he didn’t, and his aspirations for power only concern furthering his modest career as a radio producer in Minneapolis. He always used to remind me of Doonesbury’s Mark Slackmeyer, and that’s cool, seeing as Gary Trudeau remains on of the few Boomers who recognized very early on the selling out his peers would be doing. His animated Doonesbury special in 1977 showed his characters, still in college, pondering whether or not any of their heroic civil disobedience during the turbulent late sixties and early seventies would amount to anything, and his 1983 Doonesbury musical chronicled these same characters’ graduation and individual desires to abandon idealism and strive only for personal achievement.

And what’s wrong with personal achievement? you might ask. Nothing. I’m all for it, and if I were any better at it I wouldn’t have time to sit here and bitch. But, as a friend of mine expressed recently, the Boomers came up with several good ways of changing society as we know it, but didn’t have the patience to stick with any of them. So we, the younger generation, who should be impressing our elders with our vibrancy and promise, only depress them and remind them of how short they fell.

As a result, the great media/entertainment machine, which has followed the whims of this most-largest-generation-in-history ever since their conception, churns out television shows stroking the Boomers’ egos on matters such as their success (Thirtysomething), their past (The Wonder Years), and they even tried to glamorize their future with the (thank god) cancelled-almost-immediately My Life and Times, a drama about an octogenarian in 2035, reminiscing over his life. As Tom Carson of the LA Weekly said about this latest effort, “given their track record so far, it may be vanity to assume the baby boomers will have valuable lessons to pass on to later generations.”

But what’s my point, right? Well, for a moment there is no point. But that’s what’s wrong with my generation, or haven’t you been reading Time? We find no point in anything. The great majority of us will settle for modest comfort, and we don’t even expect that.

Everyday I hustle my youthful, 22 year old butt up the Santa Monica Mountains and look out over the staggering metropolis of Los Angeles, and if you know much about L.A., you know I can’t see very far. Rather than taking it all in and feeling a burst of self-aggrandizing energy and proclaiming, I can change the world! I will change the world, me and all my friends! -- instead I curse those who came before me, promise not to drive as much, and hope I outlive the planet.

POST NOTE: Almost twenty-five years ago, a small tribe of Cleveland expatriates lived on a cul-de-sac in Venice, CA. One of my pastimes was editing a newsletter, with plans to mail copies to our friends and family. Before the first issue was completed, I had decided to come back home. Happy New Year 2016.

Twenty-Sixteen

My hopes for the new year are for everyone else. My son will transition to middle school, my daughter to the rarefied arena of eighth grade. My wife is writing a new play for production. I would prefer the Presidential election not become much worse, but there is little hope for that. Civil unrest continues to rise, agents of death conspire to foment hate and oppression here and abroad.

In our small corner of the world we continue to make things bright, to love our neighbors, all of them, and to do that thing we do - create art. It is not on a grand scale. It’s the small stuff that makes every day worth living.

This time last year I was aware of two productions. As of today, I am aware of two productions. This winter the outreach tour will be my adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, and this summer my adaptation of Twelfth Night (as told by Malvolio) will be presented in association with the arrival of Shakespeare’s First Folio in Cleveland.

   

However, at this time last year I was unaware that there would be a new production of I Hate This which would make me consider at the piece in a fresh light. Surprises are welcome, too. The moment has passed in which I feel the urge to press things too hard, to force an action. It has hardly been effective for me, anyhow.

Current events are horrifying, and dispiriting. Yet I am not in that place to comment upon them. My musings are much more philosophical (or cast in a negative light, merely wistful) but these questions must also be asked. We are all complicit. We are all connected. For now, I will keep my focus tight.

Best wishes for a good new year.

MORNING UPDATE: Two nights ago I had a dream that my new play was selected to receive a staged reading at a festival curated by Lin-Manuel Miranda but when the reading of my play began they were actually performing "Hamilton."

Last night I dreamed that another new play I had written - a different play, a play that does not yet exist - was receiving a staged reading at a local playhouse. And nothing went wrong! It was a successful reading in a successful dream.

Two dreams about new works, and they are both about readings, not productions. What does this mean? How will this fadge?

The Attic

Our home was built in 1937. Fifty-six years later I moved in. Twenty-two years later I am still there. It would not surprise me to learn that I have lived there longer than any other individual.

When I turn 81 years old I will have lived there for 56 years myself. All things going the way they do, this is a thing that will happen.

Our home has a walk-up attic. It could theoretically be turned into another room. At present it is used as intended, as a storage space. In the past is has been well-organized. Since we started having children, it has become a repository for things for which no one has a use, but do not have the emotional fortitude to dispose of.

Clothes, stuffed animals, magazines for preschoolers, and stacks and stacks of “work” from Montessori school.

This season, as it has been continually cool, I have been doing the good work, sorting and reclassifying materials. The wife has neatly organized boxes of material from her studies which more or less remain where they are, or have been stacked higher in accessible but out of the way spaces.

The children are old enough to participate in decisions about their materials, which can be classified as recyclable, to-be-sold, or stored for future consideration.

And then there are my boxes, which perhaps take up the greatest share of space, and for which “Stored for Future Consideration” is an age old classification covering cassettes from childhood, magazine graphics from adolescence, notebooks from college, and the marketing materials from three or more theater companies.

Walking into my attic is like walking into my brain. And that can be a very unhappy place to visit. I cannot look at a thing without remembering a moment, and without warning suddenly find myself, as the man said, unstuck in time. Listen:

Twenty-fifteen has been significant in ways intensely personal and I have finally, at long last, come to that point in my life where it has become necessary to divest.

These items have no value, to anyone. There will be no future biographer for whom these items will create any interest. Descendants - my children - will not know what to make of them. Newspapers, magazines, tokens, damaged posters, novelty postcards, VHS tapes of television specials, cassette recordings of compact discs, trinkets whose origin simply isn’t interesting, even to me.

I file photos. Photos and programs (programs to performances I have attended - those dozens of programs from show I produced are now reduced to a few apiece for archival purposes) and articles relevant to me, these are boxed and labeled and stored. But already I have disposed of boxes and bags of useless junk.

It feels good. It feels so very good. I don’t want to see them anymore. I don’t want them cluttering up that space above my head. My attic. My brain. And then there is space. And I miss space.