Acapulco Gold (book)

Pengo's 2023 Summer Book Club

I have always been in love with marketing. As a kid, I wanted to sell things. I don’t mean I wanted to make money (I’m still no good at that) I wanted to create product for others to acquire from me.

An artist does, too, but an artist is very particular about what they create. I wanted to make and to find an audience for things people wanted. I would design cereal boxes and candy wrappers. I made greeting cards. I wanted to be a graphic designer, I guess. 

I did try taking courses in design, at Ohio University, and at Kent. But I was never very successful. Mom said I should have gotten a job at American Greetings, and she was right.

I embraced my role making posters and other promotional materials for Guerrilla and Dobama. I was happier designing the posters for Bad Epitaph than I was directing the plays.

Long before becoming engrossed in the TV program Mad Men, which is ostensibly about the business of advertising, I had read a book in high school called Acapulco Gold by Edwin Corley. Written in 1972, it’s an in-depth description of one Madison Avenue advertising executive, told with the same kind of hard-drinking, hard-playing bravado of that aforementioned 21st century TV program, though this story focuses on the account of one firm working secretly to get the jump on federal approval for the recreational use of cannabis.

"Mind Your Own Business" poster
Guerrilla Theater Company (1994)
I drew this!

How would a commercial advertising firm promote weed?

The more amusing aspects of this fable set aside (are they amusing? I cannot tell if the casual racism, sexism and homophobia exhibited by the main protagonist is meant to comment on the mores of the time, or the author’s actual sensibilities and does it make any difference) as a teenager I was largely compelled by the occupation itself – how to create a campaign for the product.

Currently, I am writing the adaptation of a book, a different book, a book for children, and it also tells the story of a product (to be sure, an entirely different product) from first idea to development to marketing and national exposure. 

This children's book is tightly focused on the mission to succeed and how, as is often the case, the effect these decisions have on the lives of those around the actors involved can get lost. Capitalism creates many orphans.

America Hurrah! (1966)

There’s that episode of Mad Men where Don’s second, younger wife, the aspiring actress, takes him to see an Off-Broadway play. The play is very modern (his wife is very modern), the actors are in contemporary dress, but wearing clear, plastic masks which make them appear uncanny.

They are not telling a traditional narrative, they are not recreating a scene from life on stage, there are intercut monologues, stories told with direct address, describing perhaps a single incident from many points of view. The set consists of featureless blocks. The actors sit, stand, turn, fall to the floor, roll over.

Don is either unimpressed by or made unhappy by a monologue by one of the actors about how he likes to drink beer while watching television commercials. This character talks about commercials, and he makes commercials sound awful. They make him ill. Don makes commercials for a living.

The play depicted on this episode of Mad Men (season five, episode nine: “Christmas Waltz”) is a real play. It is America Hurrah by Jean-Claude van Itallie, which opened almost fifty years ago in November, 1966.

"America Hurrah" on Mad Men

Admittedly, I would not even know about this particular play (we didn’t read it in college, it was not something produced when I was at school) had it not received a twenty-fifth anniversary revival at Dobama Theatre in 1994. America Hurrah was first produced in Cleveland at Dobama in 1969.

We have a paperback of the script on the shelf, and I was delighted to find it includes photographs from the original production at the Pocket Theatre. The design team at Mad Men, whose efforts to authentically recreate the time period have been exhaustively discussed, did a picture-perfect job of presenting the play for the program.

It was startling, almost touching. When do we see that, a theatrical moment painstakingly reproduced to be incorporated into an alternate narrative? First thoughts include the "Rocky Horror" scene in Fame (1980) or the "Sleep No More" episode of Gossip Girls.

I mean, we are talking about plays here.

The wife recently shared with me a collection of books on playwriting, books she has incorporated into her high school curriculum. I have been feeling a bit stuck this season and she thought they might help. I was curious to see one was written by van Itallie (The Playwright's Workbook) and so that’s the one I started with. After all, it features a highly impressive quote on the cover;

“Jean-Claude is the only playwriting teacher I ever had.” - Tony Kushner

Well, if he’s good enough for Kushner.

When I was at Last Frontier last month, I was struck by the quality of the work. Almost exclusively I was interested in the stories being told, by their plot and to an even greater extent their emphasis on good structure. And I was reminded why theater. That watching a profound event play out in real time by living, breathing people, capable of error or change, right in front of you, remains and will remain a necessary thing.

The works read and performed in the Play Lab during the day, and those we saw as fully-produced productions onstage in the evenings, were a healthy mix of the realistic, absurd and dreamlike, satiric and poetic, historic and fantastic. Above all I was impressed by the words. The words were all very good words. I felt the present and future of American theater is in good hands.

The Fantasticks (2016)

However, I have also recently been thinking about the kind of playful insanity that struck many theater creators mid-century, and the manner in which they intentionally threw off long-standing traditions of realism to embrace the artificiality of theater in a very obvious way.

This past spring, Great Lakes Theater produced the musical The Fantasticks. As was the case when GLT produced The Mousetrap a few years earlier, many I spoke with assumed they had seen this play somewhere, at some time, only to discover they only thought they had. The Fantasticks and The Mousetrap are each titles which hover just above the eyebrows, and about a half-inch back, nestled in the post-forebrain like some in vitro memory. You can picture it, but you were never actually there.

The Fantasticks tells a very simple story, which can easily be described as a tale where a young Romeo-and-Juliet-type couple are permitted to get married and start a life together and discover how challenging that can be. The production is intended to be highly presentational, with a set that resembles a nearly-bare stage, and modern dress. In the Off-Broadway production (still playing) that means the original early-1960s modern dress, at the Hanna the design was gently influenced by the present day, reflecting a geeky, retro charm.

Clare Howes Eisentrout & Pedar Benson Bate

The show has a narrator, who (as Shakespeare’s Chorus might describe, “prologue-like”) lays down the ground rules so the audience understands that what they see is a representation and in no way meant to be taken as literal. Perhaps in 1960 this was shocking. By 1970 you would find it a bit dated and by 1980 downright condescending. Today it is merely a quaint convention, mellowed by time. Oh, I remember this, I love this kind of stuff. Please go ahead.

I was delighted by the GLT production. Previously only familiar with that one song (you know the song) I was surprised to find there were a couple others which I really enjoyed, most notably They Were You, which is a lovely, lovely song. Having said that, I am not sure I would have been impressed with the text had the performance been in other hands. When you decide to present a play without a representational set, and your costumes are designed to resemble every day street clothes, it truly pushes the performers to be the central focus. And the words.

Twelfth Night (As Told By Malvolio)

This month we are presenting a forty-five minute adaptation of Twelfth Night, a production designed to be presented in area libraries. The library itself is meant to be the set, the only additional piece of furniture is a high school desk. Our four actors are in familiar dress (it’s set in the 1980s) and while they have been tasked with sharing teenage emotions, their primary goal is to present the poetry of Shakespeare with speed, passion and clarity.

Those up for a good time and a brief entertainment have been enjoying these performances very much. Anyone longing for Shakespeare sung in languid, mellifluous tones in Mid-Atlantic accents and draped in Renaissance-era costumery will be disappointed.

Which brings me back to Mad Men. Don was offended by the content, which he took as a criticism of his business, or of his character. Additionally, he may have been unimpressed or even uninterested in sitting in a chair for two hours only to have to watch people dressed exactly the same as he (a suit, a tie, leather shoes) just saying things directly to him, and not presenting an active story he might get lost in.

But then, as the camera cuts from the stage to the audience, we the viewers are also seeing the people on stage and also the people in the audience watching them. The audience in the television program is dressed the same as the actors on stage. The actors on stage are performing a play as part of a television program, performing the role of actors telling stories of modern life (from fifty years ago) as actors from today are sitting in the audience, performing the roles of people (from fifty years ago) whose own fictional stories are part of another story that Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner chose to write about and comment on and that we watch on television today, just as the stories of real people (from fifty years ago) are what the playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie chose to write about and comment on in his play America Hurrah, which premiered fifty years ago.

Well played.

Mad Men (TV show)

These things happen.

And now a word about Mad Men. My wife and I are behind, because we must be behind, there isn't time in the day to watch TV on any regular basis (though we did begin watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a family event on Tuesdays and I am beginning to regret that) but when we have a free evening, we will catch and episode or two of what must be the best-written program I have ever enjoyed.

SPOILERS

On several occasions TV networks have tried to capture the 1960s in a bottle, through movies like The 60's (1999) or more recently the series American Dreams (2002 - 2005). From what I understand, these programs failed because the goal of these projects was to once again remind us what an amazing time the 1960s were, that there was never a period of history more important than that one, and that we must once more venture into these heady days, if only to understand, man.

They were, of course, created by Baby Boomers. Like the movie Forrest Gump, another tribute to that era which ironicly puts a moron at the center of great, historic events even though he has no idea how he got there ... like most Boomers who didn't actually do anything but just lived it and feel they earned their place in history. Like George W. Bush.

Mad Men, however, tricked everyone into thinking it was a cheeky period piece. Created by a member of Generation X (Matthew Weiner, b. 1965) he chronicles the events at a fictional advertising agency during a period before he was even born, starting in 1960. And in its way (because I know too much about what is going to happen already) this series stands out in its ability to tell the story of the times and how they were a'changin' better than anyone has for the obvious reason that he started with interesting characters, cast great if largely unknown actors, and have provided them with powerful writing.

Last night we took in the episodes The Fog and Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency back to back.

Let me start by saying my brother tipped me off, maybe a few months ago, that there will be an awful moment involving a lawnmower. And let me say that, in spite of this warning, when someone literally rides a John Deere mower into the office of Sterling Cooper, I was paying such deep attention to all the details of every storyline, that it didn't even occur to me that I was looking at a lawnmower and that something terrible was about to happen.

Back up. So Don's wife Betty (January Jones) is having their third child. Watching childbirth on TV, anything to do with it, always presents an ick factor for me. Because I know what it is to be afraid, every single time. Sometimes they die, these things happen. But not on TV. Even the episode of Six Feet Under, a TV show about death, gave one of the main characters a preeclampsia scare which concluded with a healthy baby and mother. These things happen, except not on TV.

Well, there was that one episode of E.R. I watched, the only episode of E.R. I ever watched, where Doctor Mark Green misses the signs, but even in that one the mother dies, not the baby. Never the baby.

Actor Matt Bushell has a featured role as a prison guard who is expecting his first child and shares the waiting room with Don (John Hamm).  The wife and I were marveling afterwards at what totally amazing scenes they shared together. Bushnell had this incredible, fully-formed character for these few scenes, going emotionally toe-to-toe with John Hamm, it's just another example of what great writing and acting and directing has the potential to be. The guard's anxiety and fear about losing his wife (who is having a very difficult labor, it is a breech birth) and what might happen if he needs to raise a child on his own are palpable and real. His euphoria at the news of the birth of his first child, a son, are beautiful.

After Don's child is born, he visits Betty in the hospital with flowers. He passes the guard pushing his wife down the hall in a wheelchair, Don smiles brightly, the guard looks blank, catches Don's eye, a smile of recognition flickers but then he looks down and away. Cut to Don, who appears confused.

It's such a brief moment. It's never referred to again. These things happen. Who caught that?

Episode reviews:

TIME: Like many of you, I wasn’t sure exactly what to make of the shamed look Dennis [the guard] seemed to give Don when he ran into him in the hallway. But I wonder if it goes back to his pledge that having the baby would make him “a better man,” and realizing now that it was just nerves and the Johnnie Walker talking.

The A.V. Club: And what does the later scene when the two men pass each other in the hall mean? Dennis can’t acknowledge Don. Is he a reminder of a promise already broken?

The Guardian: When Dennis ignores him later on, you almost wonder if their exchange really happened.

Most reviews I found do not even mention this moment. They were all so preoccupied with the guard, with Don, and with Don's issues, no one notices what is so terribly obvious.

The guard, his wife. There is no baby.

As for Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency - one of the most (literally) painful puns in the history of television - I can hardly share the pertinent details. Suffice to say I woke several times in the middle of the night, rubbing my feet together like a neurotic grasshopper.

What is shocking to me is that this program, Mad Men, which received a great deal of attention at the outset because it featured smoking and drinking and wild office parties, and presented this kind of nostalgia for the good old days when men were men and women were women and no one sued you for being an asshole in the workplace, evolved slowly (but not that slowly) into a rumination on the fragility of human existence.

Even in the midst of an ordinary day, you can die. Someone you love might die. A complete stranger can be horribly maimed, right in front of you. You can put your love hope and trust into another person who will hurt you. You can be vaulted from joy to the deepest sorrow, in a moment, just by moving through the ordinary pathways of life.

I have watched in horror as my wife split her brow, my son's skull was fractured, my daughter's forehead gashed, and I have held a dead baby. Ordinary life fucking scares me.

If moments like the lawnmower incident were commonplace in the storyline, the show would be grotesque. Seeming as it so totally random (except, come on people, don't drink and mow) is to me just one more reminder that these things happen, all the time, and we must be careful.

Originally posted on Daddy Runs Fast.

On Creativity

The wife and I went to see the Cleveland Play House production of RED at the Allen Theatre on Wednesday. My memory of the Broadway production were still strong, and I was looking forward to rediscovering it. The wife enjoyed it a great deal, leaving the theater with her head swirling. My original take on the script was that it wasn’t as powerful as it might have been, against the towering, brutish character of Rothko, assistant Ken (on paper) came across as the idea of someone who might exist, rather than anyone who actually does.

The most powerful impressions of when I saw it in 2010 was Molina’s subtlety of humor, the strength of his fragility, and the design -- the sound, the set, the light, and the paintings. Especially the paintings. As I found each of these elements wanting in this incarnation, the script came to the fore as the real star of the show, and I respect it a great deal more. And I actually thought Randy Harrison’s Ken was an improvement on the original,* pushing what I had previously dismissed as a requisite painful backstory into something necessary to the narrative.

I believe now that RED could be, and perhaps some day should be, performed with little or no set at all -- and none of Rothko’s paintings. The Broadway and CPH sets were almost identical, a realistic painter’s studio. On B’way, however, every scene featured a different Rothko, upstage, looming over the proceedings. When either player described the work, we could see it, but the paintings kept changing. After all, the artist is supposed to be creating over thirty different large-scale canvases. At the Allen we got one main one that stays for several scenes, a few others to the side which had to be viewed from a severe angle (Rothko would not have approved of that) and of course, the blank canvas that gets primed right before our eyes, a neat trick which is thrilling the first time you see it.

Most missteps in this production were directorial. The most glaring of which was choosing to put on painting on the “fourth wall” -- a painting wee do not see, because it is hung on the proscenium, invisibile to us, with the actors looking out at us to see and comment on it. At one significant moment, Rothko is inspired TO PAINT! He instructs Ken to bring him paint, to add pigment, Rothko is massaging a brush … what can be going on int that man’s head? In New York, he was facing upstage, at an actual canvas, one he has already informed us is unfinished, and in that moment, we, the audience, are thinking the same thing … Is he going to PAINT? What will he PAINT? Is this really going to HAPPEN?

It is an electric moment of possibility, which I will tell you goes unfulfilled, with an explosion of anger and regret. However, in Cleveland, he was facing us, the audience. There was no actual canvas. Is he going to paint? Of course not, don't be silly, there’s no canvas there, dummy, there will be no painting.

These is one of those moments in the theater that I recall the voice of Roger sitting next to me in the audience, when I am so fortunate to attend a show with him, that he hear him mutter under his breath, “Bad choice …”

He does that a lot during other people's plays.

Directorial choices notwithstanding, it was in large a great night. And we had plenty to talk about on the way home. Because these are the stories I love the best. Stories about artists, and about the act of creation. Those are the plays I enjoy, and the films, about writers and painters, about designers and even about chefs.

Remember Suede? Suede remembers YOU.
My favorite movies include The Moderns (painting) Ed Wood (moviemaking) Big Night (cooking). This is why I enjoyed the first few seasons of Project Runway, to my own surprise, because it was about watching designers realizing their ideas. It’s why I can’t watch it anymore, because the producers emphasize headgames and physical exhaustion and the work is terrible.

We are currently trying desperately to catch up on this thing Mad Men. We started season two last night on Netflix. Now, I won’t pretend that my primary interest is not the same as everyone’s; the style, the music, the smoking and drinking, the dream that someone like Jon Hamm could actually walk among us.

But it’s also about ideas, and about creativity. About using art and words to shape emotions and to change the way people think. Sure. It’s about advertising. About selling stuff. And we can have a lengthy discussion about the difference between selling a philosophy and selling deodorant. The point is, I am drawn to stories that play out discussions and actions, the negotiation between people, to create art.

My wife and I were winding back through the previous season, I was trying to piece together how Peggy came to where she is at this point. The show takes its time, there are few sudden leaps in any direction for any of the characters. So, how did this reserved, plain-looking woman, get the attention of someone with as much power and ego as Draper. It may have come as a surprise to some that this meek woman wants something, we all do, we all want something. But there were clear lines at that time, and she crossed them to get where she wanted to be.

Then my wife reminded me, she was in the sample pool for lipstick. She was able to tell Don that in order to “understand” a woman, you should ask a women. Now, in the episode we saw last night Peggy uses the tired phrase “sex sells” and Don calls her on it. That’s not why he hired her, so that she could talk like just another man.

But he didn’t say it like that. He said it better than that. Because he’s Don Draper. And you don't even know you are.

Some who have witnessed The Velocity of Autumn at Beck Center have remarked about the manner in which art acts as a bridge between the estranged mother and son whose story it is. And this strikes me as odd, not because it is not true. I guess it is. As the person playing the son in question, I am so embedded into the character, getting from point A to point Z, I am not thinking of the larger how of how we communicate. It's just me and my mother, trying to reach each other, and not knowing how. And she paints, professionally. Or used to. My character is a searcher, a watcher. A life-long student. I hadn't thought of how it appears to others.

UPDATE 7/25/2019: The "original" Ken on Broadway, whom I was apparently so unimpressed with, was Eddie Redmayne.