I Hate This (playlist)

When the time came to create the original music for the original 2003 stage production of I Hate This, I gave composer Dennis Yurich a CD with everything I had going on in my head. These are songs that just made sense at the time, some that have associations that pre-date Calvin's birth, and some that don't.

Perhaps I should explain. "CD" stands for "compact disc" an easily-damaged cache for digitally recorded music. 

You're welcome.

The themes Dennis created have been incorporated into the film adaptation that will screen on Saturday, October 15 at Playhouse Square. Here is a playlist of the songs included on that CD I shared with him.

Hospital Themes

For all themes taking place in the hospital, I wanted electronic music. Something suggesting a fast heartbeat.

1. Everything In Its Right Place by Radiohead - "Kid A"
2. Idioteque by Radiohead - "Kid A"
3. Blame by Everything But the Girl - "Temperamental"
4. Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box by Radiohead - Amnesiac"

Released in 2000, I listened to Kid A a lot when driving back and forth from Tri-C during Bad Epitaph's production of Cloud 9. That was when Toni was first pregnant.

"Blame" is included for obvious reasons. Temperamental was released in 1999.

During FringeNYC 2001 there was a coffee house in Harris's neighborhood that I visited every morning. It seemed like all they played were Radiohead albums, each day a different Radiohead album. The Amnesiac track was also on a mix that a co-worker played for me in New Knoxville that fall.

Kid A is also the pre-show music I prefer when I perform I Hate This on stage. It brings me back to that time.

Brazilian Guitar Themes

5. August Day Song Bebel Gilberto - "Tanto Tempo"
6. August Day Song (King Britt remix) Bebel Gilberto - "Tanto Tempo Remixes"
7. Fragile Sting - "Nothing Like the Sun"

8. Fragil Sting - "Nada Como El Sol ..."

Photo by Cody York

I was washing dishes on a night in December, 2001 at the aforementioned housing in West Central Ohio, listening to that guy's mix CD, and was caught off-guard by King Britt remix of Bebel Gilberto's "August Day Song." 

I knew the tune, but couldn't place it. Toni had actually gotten me the original Tanto Tempo disc when it was released in 2000, but I hadn't listened to it that much at the time.

The Sting tracks were played at the memorial we held in late May. I like the Portuguese version because sometimes it's good not to hear certain things in English.

Those 70s Themes

9. Three Is a Magic Number by Bob Dorough - "Schoolhouse Rock"
10. Lonely Boy by Andrew Gold - "What's Wrong With This Picture"
11. Cat's In The Cradle by Harry Chapin - "Verities and Balderdash"

Thoughtless hold-music from a certain baby food company. A gag employed often on The Simpsons. We used them in the stage version, but not in the film. Theses ditties in particular were chosen because of their resonance with someone who may have been a small boy between the years of 1974 and 1976.

Music for Crying Out Loud

12. Gymnopedie No 1/Var.1 by Jacques Loussier Trio - "Satie: Gymnopédies Gnossiennes"
13. Gymnopedie No 1/Var.3 by Jacques Loussier Trio - "Satie: Gymnopédies Gnossiennes"
14. Gnossienne No 6 by Jacques Loussier Trio - "Satie: Gymnopédies Gnossiennes"
15. Tales from the Far Side by Bill Frisell - "Bill Frisell Quartet"
16. Gutaris Breeze (6000km To Amsterdam) by John Beltram - "Late Night Beats: the Post-Club Sound of Britain"

Discovered in a shower around 4 am in late 1998 (yes, I heard it on NPR) the Loussier themes were among those that carried me through that bizarre depression I had in early 1999. Odd, that, because 1999 was one of the most fruitful and adventurous years of my life. The other pieces are also discoveries I made that year.

The Frisell track figured heavily on the Last Words episode of This American Life, which remains my favorite episode ever.

The Jacques Loussier album was used as pre-show music for the original staged reading at Dobama in August, 2002. Though no more depressing than listening to Kid A before a show (how many people hear the pre-show music, think "uh-oh" and leave?) the Satie themes are too gentle. I wanted a sense of unease to hit people as they came in, not the sense they were about to see a staged performance of something soft and sentimental.

-- Happy Families XTC - "She's Having a Baby"

Have you got Miss Carriage? 

She's the girl who wants a baby that she cannot find. 

Strange, the ones who want to win the race 

Are usually the ones who fall behind.

A British card game for kids. Sometimes you don't even care what the lyrics of certain songs mean until they start making sense. Currently unavailable on Spotify, you can listen to it here.

17. Kang Mandor by Degung Orchestra - "Putumayo Presents: Music From the Tea Lands"

Finally, there is Kang Mandor. I make reference to it in the scene "the Dream" and the very first time I heard it, in April, 2001, I just wept. It so entirely captured my imaginary summer of 2001, the summer I was going to have with my first-born child, the one I had not allowed myself to daydream about, and yet, it was captured in that recording. I have shared this with very few people until today.

Playhouse Square presents the premiere of the video adaptation of "I Hate This (A Play Without the Baby)" by David Hansen, directed by Chennelle Bryant-Harris and performed by James Alexander Rankin, in the Westfield Studio Theatre on Saturday, October 15, 2022. 

Process L

And if I should start to cry,
And I can't begin to tell you why,
And I stumble when I begin,
It's cause I don't understand anything. 

- Everything But the Girl

"I Don't Understand Anything"

Silence and invisibility go hand-in-hand with powerlessness. - Audre Lorde

Welcome to week fifty. It’s going to be a heady semester, as I conclude the second year of my MFA. Playwriting workshop, yes, I will write another play. A new play. That’s what we do with those. I have no idea what it will be. Isn’t that exciting? Let’s call it exciting.

Also, I am taking a course in illness narratives. My God, really Dave? Yes, really. I love non-fiction, I love memoir. And I have experience with illness narrative. Kind of? Is my solo performance an illness narrative? I guess it is.

Ben Watt, half of the duo Everything But the Girl, wrote the book Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness, describing his experience surviving Churg-Strauss syndrome which left him with virtually no intestines.

Following this ordeal, but before writing the book, EBTG created Amplified Heart, an album my wife and I listened to a lot while we were falling in love. She says Amplified Heart is itself an illness narrative, and I believe she is right.

Ready for Tig Notaro!

Last week, my son and I saw Tig Notaro at the Agora. I first became aware of her when she was featured on This American Life, nearly ten years ago. It included audio from the night she went on stage, four days after receiving a diagnosis stage two breast cancer, and began the set by announcing, “Hello! I have cancer.” It is a legendary set of stand-up comedy, and a brilliant illness narrative.

This weekend I read The Cancer Journals by Gamba Adisa (Audre Lorde), self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and former Poet Laureate of the state of New York. In this brief memoir she lays out her thoughts following a radical mastectomy, with a particular emphasis on societal pressure for women who had undergone such traumatic surgery to wear a prosthetic breast(s).

As she points out, wearing a prosthetic does nothing to delude the wearer of what they have lost, it only exists to comfort the viewer of the person who wears it. People do not wish to see the effects of illness, and by the same degree many would prefer not to read about it, or see it performed on stage. But that’s what we’re doing.

Serial (podcast)

Emmanuel Dzotsi & Sarah Koenig
Photo: Sandy Honig

Recently, Aaron Sorkin wrote an essay for New York Magazine in which he described the journey of his new stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. He was tasked with a seemingly intractable puzzle; stay entirely faithful to the original without changing a thing, but make it fresh and new.

While Mockingbird is a widely-cherished piece of work (the book, the original 1990 stage play by Christopher Stergel, and the award-winning film) presenting it as-is to a 2018 audience held a host of challenges; two notable problems are the unchangeable (see: undramatic) character of protagonist Atticus Finch, and the fact that a story which is primarily about race has few characters of color. Those present do not speak very much.

In the first case, Sorkin has addressed the problem of Atticus’s seemingly flawless character by making that his flaw. Atticus Finch believes that, as Sorkin puts it, as another put it before him, “there are fine people on both sides.” His crisis of conscience comes when that belief is permanently shaken.

As to the other, to creating scenes where the Finch housekeeper Calpurnia, and the accused Tom Robinson get to speak their minds where previously they had not, that is an issue where the estate of Harper Lee felt it necessary to take this new production to court.

Unlike in the 1960 novel, this recent trial played out in Mr. Robinson’s favor.

But the trial in this new adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird still ends in tragedy, as it must. Justice is denied. And the frustration felt by Atticus Finch and the disillusionment experienced by his young daughter Scout remains the main focus of this story, the one white Americans who love it most relate to.

Sorkin here quotes his friend and colleague, director David Fincher, stating, “art isn’t supposed to answer questions, it’s supposed to ask them.” The internet tells me it was actually the playwright Anton Chekhov who said that, but who knows. The point is, Mockingbird remains a troubling work, and in an era where violence against black men in America by those in authority is still an everyday occurrence, is it enough to simply ask questions? Do we not demand answers?

Justice is also the theme of the third season of the podcast Serial. A spin-off from This American Life, the concept is simple -- instead of one, brief story, or one episode-long story, one entire modern American mystery is investigated over the course of weeks.

It would have been hard to top Serial’s first season, and it was. The 1999 murder of Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee had much going for it to create a pop culture phenomenon; teen sex, interracial relationships, Islamophobia, drugs, an attractive anti-hero in the convicted boyfriend, Adnan Syed, and even late 90s nostalgia (pinging cell towers, anyone?)

Episode Six mural art by Martinez E-B
Photo by Moth Studio

And then there is the producer-host, Sarah Koenig, who has no qualms about crossing journalistic boundaries and becoming part of the story. She breaks the cardinal rule of impartiality, developing something of a crush on Syed, and openly expressing confusion and concern about what the truth actually is, which is fine for me because 1) she’s entirely up-front and transparent about it and 2) who the fuck is impartial anymore?

Season two was something of a let-down. The Bowe Bergdahl case, a story of American involvement in Afghanistan, was compelling, fascinating even. But as a central character Bergdahl is, excuse me for saying so, boring. Worse, I don’t like him. Worse, I don’t care about him.

Season three left me emotionally startled at the jump, and kept me there, and for very personal reasons. They broke the mold of the first two seasons by changing focus from a single mystery to be plumbed (a murder, a disappearance) to a larger social ill to be remedied -- namely, the American criminal justice system. And the main character was not a person, but a city. Cleveland.

For nine weeks, Koenig and reporter-producer Emmanuel Dzotsi set up shop in the Justice Center downtown, and followed the stories they found there, drawing a complex web of tales depicting a dysfunctional system through which we meet a engaging collection of characters (people) in places a little too close for comfort.

In episode six (You In the Red Shirt) a citizen is harassed by East Cleveland officers in “the park.” It’s not just any park, though. They say its proper name just once, Forest Hill Park. I take a run in that park every day. There is a world within my world of which I remain blithely ignorant.

I am not going to describe the stories, these citizens, you need to listen to the podcast yourself. Perhaps you already have. But I was startled by how Koenig chose to conclude, with a litany of suggestions. And it’s a long list.

“Don't pile six charges onto a single crime when one charge will do. Don't overcharge to force a guilty plea. Don't lock anyone up, unless they're demonstrably violent. Admit that police officers lie under oath. Get out of the punishment business and turn toward the urgent problem of fairness.”

She goes on for four paragraphs. In this holiday season, she even quotes Dickens: “Don't be insensibly tempted ... into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course.”

Her final word is, “Let's all accept that something's gone wrong. Let's make that our premise.”

And so, they say that art isn’t supposed to answer questions, it’s supposed to ask them. But these days, it is as though even journalism -- tasked with reporting the truth -- doesn’t even ask the questions. Koenig and her team do ask questions, some very difficult questions.

And they dare to provide some answers. Because for God’s sake someone has to.

Behind the Scenes of Serial Season Three, featuring Sarah Koenig and Emamanuel Dzotsi, comes to Playhouse Square on Saturday, December 15, 2018.

Related:
SeriaLand, a blog by Cleveland attorney Rebecca Maurer, providing greater historical context to Serial Season Three.

Cleveland Talks Serial, a podcast produced by IdeaStream. A round table discussion on the series.

Sources:
Serial (podcast)

"Bringing To Kill a Mockingbird to Broadway was nearly impossible" by Aaron Sorkin, New York Magazine 11/26/2018

This American Life (radio)

Radio: An Illustrated Guide
(I own this comic book.)

Recently we had occasion to dig out our old copy of Trivial Pursuit: 90s Time Capsule Edition. The tagline is, “from the most trivial of decades.” Even today, that seems a most accurate description. You can get in trouble painting an entire decade (or an entire generation) with so broad a brush. But historically speaking, we were complacent.

In 1995, when I was creating theater pieces about Gen X nostalgia and long-form improv-inspired by nascent reality TV, NPR reporter and producer Ira Glass introduced This American Life.

Its mission, ostensibly, was to report on life in these United States. Not the famous, or the necessarily newsworthy, but life as it is lived in the corners and in the fringes. I loved it almost immediately, if only because these brief radio diaries were about things I was interested in. Conventions, summer camp, 24-hour diners, Canadians, and terrible sex.

Glass quickly developed a stable of reliable writers he would turn to with some regularity, whose work I greatly enjoyed; David Rakoff, Scott Carrier, Tobias Wolff, Dan Savage, Sarah Vowell, and David Sedaris. You notice that even in this sampling, which I thought up off the top of my head, almost all are men. All were white.

By the late 1990s I was consuming episodes voraciously, even using primitive methods of “downloading.” Due to issues of copyright, TAL came to the podcast game rather late, but early on you could stream the program with players like RealAudio, and I hooked a cassette machine to my computer to record episodes in real time for playback anywhere in house or car at my convenience.

The most compelling to me were the truly moving ones, most notably Last Words, an extended rumination on death. This episode sends chills down my spine through the music alone, prompting me to buy CDs from Bill Frisell, Philip Glass, and to put Brian Eno’s Music For Airports back into personal rotation. It was here I first heard the quote attributed to Yahuda HaLevi, “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.”

A moving sentiment, it has what the kids today refer to as “all the feels.” I did not yet comprehend what that phrase means, though. These weekly journeys into dark corners America were, shall we say, an in vitro experience. I was thirty. I was a slacker. I didn't know much.

On one episode in the mid-2000s, Ira related the moment he was watching The O.C. when two of the characters name-check his show. They’re on the phone and one says he’s listening to This American Life, and the other says, “Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? Ecch. God.”

However, by that point, things had already begun to evolve for the program. The events of 9/11 was a challenge the team met with surprising speed, depth, and clarity. The last program in August, 2001 was about basketball tricks and professional gambling. By September 14, they had assembled a collection of stories they already had in the can on personal loss; co-writing your father’s obituary with your not-yet-deceased father, and David Sedaris writing about his mother’s death.

By the following week they were able to break open tales of how communities experience and cope with (or do not) monumental tragedy and grief with the brilliant episode Before and After. David Rakoff recounts the historic destruction of the steamship General Slocum, which devastated nearly every family in an entire New York neighborhood, and Haruki Murakami reporting first-person accounts of the 1995 poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway.

In telling smaller stories around a subject, and not necessarily about the big story at hand, the producers of This American Life have been able to effectively, and in recent years with more urgency, comment upon recent events. The war years (which have not actually ended) pushed the program out of its comfort zone, and TAL’s definition of what constituted a story about “American life” broadened considerably. We were taken to Afghanistan and Iraq and Kuwait and Guantanamo Bay.

Your host.

I mentioned the prominence of male writers and voices on the program, though even from the beginning there were women producers, writers and reporters like Nancy Updike, Alix Spiegel, Julie Snyder, and later Sarah Koenig (of Serial fame, a TAL spin-off) have played a prominent role. But if you tried to articulate any bias, or particular point of view for the program, it would be that squishy, liberal, can’t-we-all-get-along vibe. Homosexuality was always presented as matter-of-fact (though predominantly male-centric homosexuality) and racism, for example, is presumed to be a bad thing.

For example, in Be Careful Who You Pretend To Be we hear the story of Ron Copeland, who plays a “slave owner” as part of an interactive, historical reenactment. He thinks of himself as a good person, certainly not racist, and it begins to tear at his soul when he has to behave as one for the purposes of education and entertainment. It is an affecting piece. You feel bad for him, the white guy.

In light of recent national events, however, the show has started to lean with greater strength into uncomfortable modern issues … and Ira Glass, the omnipotent, white, cis-male narrator has noticeably begun to lean back. Two remarkable episodes from the past twelve months illustrate issues in American society which have deep roots, but have been brought into sharp relief during the time of the Trump Administration. And in each case, Glass has taken the once rare and now more frequent opportunity to hand over responsibility to another, one more familiar with and a true representative of the subject matter.

Last summer We Are in the Future, hosted by TAL producer Neil Drumming, who is African-American, delved into the subject of Afrofuturism. For the uninitiated, one of the most powerful recent examples of Afrofuturism is the movie Black Panther, and particularly the fictional nation of Wakanda. What would the present be like if white colonials had not ravaged the continent of Africa in the past? But that is merely one way to describe the aesthetic.

FTL, Y'all!:
Tales From the Age of the $200 Warp Drive
Cover art by Paul Davey

One of the stories reflects that episode from almost twenty years ago, about the white historical reenactor who played a slave-owner. In this case, however, it is comedian and actor Azie Dungey recounting her time playing the part of an enslaved person at Mount Vernon. Playing the part of one of those whom our first President claimed to own as property, she was exposed to the mental and emotional abuse of white visitors and co-workers who unintentionally or not saw her as what she was performing -- a servant, an object, an other -- which begs the question; is that not already what happens every day in America?

This past spring, the episode Five Women, hosted by producer Chana Joffe-Walt (a female-American) told a story about one empowered man -- a so-called progressive, liberal man, by the way -- and the manipulative effect he had on five women he worked with, was romantically involved with, or in several of these cases, both. The President of the United States is an unapologetic serial harasser, who only this week mocked the #MeToo movement, but the outrageousness of his sins have served to created not merely a conversation, but a revolution is the way we consider inappropriate and/or inexcusable behavior across the society.

The past year and a half we have seen historically marginalized people’s rights and liberties threatened, at the same time witnessed as they have used their voices in new, exciting, insightful, and powerful ways. And while This American Life was never meant to be at the forefront of fierce social debate, I am glad that this program, which originally focused on stories most trivial, has evolved to reflect the current moment in a manner most relevant.

The Santaland Diaries (1999)

Curtis D. Proctor as Crumpet the Elf
Photo by Anthony Gray

Following the success of Hamlet, Bad Epitaph Theater Company decided to produce some more plays. In addition to Wendy MacLeod’s Sin, it was decided to try a Christmas show — The Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris, which had recently been adapted into a solo performance.

The radio version, which was simply a series of “reports” written by Sedaris for NPR’s Morning Edition about his experiences work as an elf in Macy’s Santaland in Manhattan were a huge hit in 1992 and established him as a popular humor writer. Listening to This American Life I had become a fan of his work and thought his sense of humor fit with our hip Gen-X vibe (I say that ironically, can you tell?)

Ordering a copy of the script, we found this one-hour piece was accompanied by a second act called Season’s Greetings. I’d heard that piece, too, on This American Life (performed by Julia Sweeney) and it’s, well … it’s a nasty piece of work. I couldn’t imagine following the potentially hilarious Santaland with such an ugly monologue. Don’t get me wrong, it’s funny … but it’s horrible. Take my word for it. You can listen to it here, if you are curious.

So during the summer of 1999 I sent a letter -- a real, paper letter -- to the company that holds the rights to the play version of Santaland. I asked if we couldn’t instead perform Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol, about a theater critic who is reviewing a Christmas pageant at a local elementary school. That thing is hysterical. In my imagination, we could perform that short piece first as a curtain raiser before the main event.

Dramatists Play Service got back to me in short order to point me towards Sedaris’s own publisher, as they do not have rights to his other work. Right. Should have figured that out myself. So I wrote his agent a letter — a paper letter, through the post! — and heard nothing.

By fall, I sent a follow-up letter (paper) and soon received a polite letter in response informing me that yes, they had gotten my letter and sent it on to Sedaris’s New York residence, but that I shouldn’t get my hopes up as he was currently residing in France. They also let me know that under no circumstances should I produce any work of their client I did not have the rights to.

Not a problem, we had moved on by that point anyway. Our plan was to present The Santaland Diaries on its own. Just a one-hour act, who cares, right? It will be fine. Besides, we had Curtis Proctor cast as “Crumpet the Elf” and he was fucking perfect.

Shortly before the holidays I got a call at home and checking the caller ID I could see it was a 212. I didn’t know the number, but figured it must be Harris. Picking up the phone I heard a familiar voice.

“Hi, can I speak to David Hansen?”

“This is he.”

“This is David Sedaris.”

“Oh, hi!” I said, and immediately sat down.

He explained that he had just gotten back into New York and received my letter, and apologized for not calling sooner but wanted to respond to my kind request but that he wasn’t letting anyone, anywhere adapt any of his work ever again.

I told him I really appreciated his call, and that it wasn’t a problem, we were going to produce just The Santaland Diaries, by itself, and leave it that.

He went on to tell me the story of how he had been approached by Joe Mantello about the possibility of an Off-Broadway production starring Paul Rebuens as him.

“Great,” Sedaris told me, “All I thought was, ‘I get to smoke pot with Pee-Wee Herman.’”

What he didn’t know was that by entering into this agreement, the stage adaptation (originally starring Timothy Olyphant, and not Paul Reubens) was no longer his to control, and that anyone who wants to and pays the fee can produce it. Put mildly, this runs contrary to the kind of control he would prefer to have over his own writing.

“It’s not really a play,” he insisted, “there’s no character there, it's just a bunch of stories.”

Again, I thanked David Sedaris for his call.

“I really wish no one would ever produce The Santaland Diaries,” he said again. “Anyone. Ever.”

Awkward.

We produced it anyway. It was a big hit. In fact, The Santaland Diaries continues to be one of the most-produced shows in America, year after year.

Sorry, David.

See also: The Santaland Diaries (2017)