Process LXIII

Mary Todd Lincoln
(William H. Mumler, c. 1870)

As the semester winds to a close, I am confident in how well things have proceeded. I lost an entire week due to illness, and yet I am ahead of the homework game. I needed to complete at least 120 hours for my teaching internship, and I think I passed that finish line sometime, I don’t know. Today.

That was a difficult new work to bring to the finish line. I had a big, long cry in the shower after it was completed. That was a surprise. I haven’t cried like that in years. Not for two years. I was alone then, too.

As the semester winds down, I become wistful about online education. I have really enjoyed my illness narrative class; we have been covering a wide variety of often very affecting material. And in spite of our Zoom assemblage, I have become attached to this collection of students. They are all unique, compassionate, quirky, shepherded by our wonderful professor. I’ve loved this class, even though we have been attending from our personal spaces.

Then again, my personal space is a couch in front of a fire during the chilly Ohio months. Would I prefer traveling a half hour to get to a cinder block room downtown. I imagine not.

I will graduate in a year, and yet we are almost through. No classes this summer, fall quarter, next spring is all about the thesis. What will be my motivation to create, when there are no assignments with deadlines? Two plays a year, for two years. It’s a big deal.

And my brain, the reading, how will I keep up? When someone chucks a book at you and says read it, then write about it, then we’re gonna talk about it, that’s amazing. You make associations across narratives, connections between classes, and over the years.

Yesterday, reading Out of Nowhere Into Nothing by Caryl Pagel, I learned about William Mumler, so-called spirit photographer. He let people believe that his double exposed images revealed the ghosts who accompany us, watch over us, and comfort us. It’s bogus, of course, but it feeds the imagination. Tuesday night I had a dream that I was visited by the ghosts of my parents; they were dead, in my dream, I knew that. These were their spirits. It was a revelation. It was sad, it was also an adventure.

(Later she quotes Roy Scranton’s book Learning To Die in the Anthropocene, which was assigned to me in a different class this semester, another example of my current educational experience answering back to itself. Are there really so few books? Is the world smaller than we believe it is?)

I need to write about ghosts. Like, literally, that’s the next thing I need to do, write a few scenes with ghosts in them.

See also: Lincoln In the Bardo (book)

Random Thoughts at the Commencement of the Season

This rock. The hardness. The completeness. The firmness. The ancientness. The water, in constant motion, all water the same water, always different water, the illusion of stillness, of the cessation of time. The trees beyond, evergeen, the uninterrupted vastness of the sky, from end to end, reaching high above, all the colors one can see.

How we fought. How she fought. I was stoic. I did not cry. I did not complain. I did not lose control. I kept it in. I remembered the past. I hoped for peace. And I wanted to be there. And I was. To help her cross over, to stop fighting.

How do we cease to be? How do we move from who we are to nothing at all? How can we live in the knowledge that all that lives must die, including ourselves?

By loving. By connecting. By enjoying everything and everyone. By making each moment the moment. The only moment. It is not about importance. It is not about significance. It is only about being. It is only is.

The Short Play Project: Mourning Series

I began writing these short plays in late September. That might seem a long time ago for most people, given our current situation. To me, that was the last moment before my mother began her sudden and inexorable decline.

She was in the hospital the first weekend of October, and again two months later. A month after that, she was dead. Writing these plays was one way of trying to make sense of losing her. I mean, it never did make sense. But at least in writing these I remember what it was like just before we lost her.

I am particularly grateful for the performers who took on these scripts, and created these lovely short films from them.


"Magic"
Performed by Liza Grossman & Phil Gould


"Café"
Performed by Emily Mathews & Tom Wolan


"Call"
Performed by Josh D. Brown

You can watch the entire Short Play Project here.

Play a Day: Paper Cranes

Kari Bentley-Quinn

For Sunday, I read Paper Cranes by Kari Bentley-Quinn and posted at New Play Exchange.

Okay, so. First things, first. I have been asked to consider a new title for my monodrama I Hate This (a play without the baby) for performance in another country. The request was sincere, and respectful, and included a good argument for making the change in this case.

Also, yesterday I spent the afternoon rooting about in my mother's attic, appraising personal effects, making notres of the things that she had stored for someone to eventually make a decision about (not her.)

Now I am reading a play about love and mourning and I am finding it all a bit too much to take. Still, good play.

"Everyone's always infecting someone with something."

This is such a warm and tender play, full of grief and longing. I was once told I wrte plays about "decent people" and I am still not sure if that was a compliment or a criticism. So many stories are people with awful, deceitful characters, people I don't want to spend two hours with, or five minutes.

Okay, sometimes. But not usually. And they don't touch me at all.

Bentley-Quinn has crafted a sextet of inter-twined relationships and in anothers' hands they would all meet in a big, explosive, shocking reveal but surprisingly, they do not. And that was the right choice because this story of grief and loss deserved to remain at the center of the plot and not become the subject of emotional porn.

Sorry, I hate describing what this play isn't when what I meant to say is how enamored I am of what it is. A testament to the paths of grief and and th inevitability of change, and the hope that we can understand and survive the needto move forward into an uncertain future.

Who should I read tomorrow?

On Procrastination

This is how I always point at Jeremy.

Saturday afternoon, I moderated a panel discussion at Cleveland Public Theatre called Considering the Source: Creating With Existing Material, presented by the Dramatists Guild as part of CPT’s annual Entry Point festival of new works.

Panelists included Nina Domingue, Eric Schmiedl, and Jeremy Paul, and we picked apart their creative process for (among other works) Nina’s The Absolutely Amazing True Adventures of Ms. Joan Southgate, Eric’s work adapting the novels of Kent Haruf, and Jeremy’s recent interactive production of Dante’s Inferno.

Nina Domingue

The panel itself went well. I felt a little stiff, but at least I was prepared, and providing equal time to each panelist, and between the four of us there was a wide variety of material to be discussed.

I had been invited to moderate this panel a few weeks ago, a few days before mother died. I said yes. I thought it was crazy, I was fairly certain her death would come very soon, did I have any business committing to an event I may need to cancel? Would I have time for this? Where would I be in my headspace in two weeks time? I said yes.

As it turned out, it was a good decision to have made. I would have regretted saying no. Ever since January 2017, when CPT first produced Entry Point, the weekend has been a creative oasis in the midst of a dark time.

That first year I acted in someone else’s work, my eleven year-old son attended and has strong, positive memories of the works he experienced there -- and he was there because the female-identified members of our family were in Washington, D.C., taking a stand for women’s rights. To paraphrase Emile M. Cioran, “A new play is a nation’s suicide, postponed.”

Shortly before the panel began this past Saturday, Molly Andrews-Hinders, CPT Artistic Associate, asked me how my Test Flight piece was coming along, which is to say my new script The Witches. Test Flight is in April, and rehearsals begin soon. It was a perfectly supportive question, we were catching up, it was not an inquisition. But for the briefest moment, I felt like the teacher had asked about my progress on a term paper that I had not yet started.

The truth is I haven’t written a word for The Witches since November. And I do not feel guilty about that. I had made a promise to myself to complete the first draft by the end of calendar 2019. Tragedy intervened, and I told myself to leave it on the shelf awhile or else I would go mad. It will be there when I am ready to return.

When I have two assignments looming it can be difficult to concentrate on either one. When I have three, I’ll just scroll Facebook for eight hours.

Sometimes I will procrastinate on the next thing due by writing the thing that is due later, which can be very helpful as when I finally do bear down on my immediate project, at least I know I’ve made headway into the next one.

This winter I have concentrated on the very next deadline, fully aware there was one final deadline to meet before I could think about spring. These included:

• The November Witches reading draft
• The production draft of Sherlock Holmes
• Scripts for the Christmas Carol writing contest
• The Sherlock Holmes teacher resource guide
• The grad school application
• Adapting three chapters of a children’s book
• The source material panel
• The eulogy for my mother

Cleveland Public Theatre (2022)

I have thought about my mother’s eulogy for months. Even before we knew she was dying. Yet by yesterday morning I had only jotted down a few phrases, and I woke with a hangover. I had one, painful morning to create a public declaration of who I believe my mother is. By 10 AM I was writing it. At 2:30 PM I was reading it. They tell me it was good.

Another deadline met, another promise kept.

UPDATE: Following a two year delay, "The Absolutely Amazing and True Adventures of Ms. Joan Evelyn Southgate" written and performed by Nina Domingue and directed by Nathan Henry opened at Cleveland Public Theatre on Friday, April 21, 2022. 

My mother's hands.

These hands are not more like.- HAM I.ii

I have my mother’s hands. Long, thin fingers, veins close to the surface, standing out like bluish vines beneath the skin.

When I was a child, I was fascinated by these veins, standing out like inverted rivers on a relief map. I would poke at them to see how would divert beneath my touch. “Stop that,” she would say. My own children have done the same to my hands, and I say, "Stop that.”

Her final days, her hands could not be more different from each other. Her right hand, which had stopped obeying commands from her brain a month ago, lay still, devoid of muscular connection or attention. It was a soft and flat. skin rounded and smooth, like glass. Useless.

Her left still lived, wiry, boney. Her face had gone slack, emaciated, her left hand our best indicator of how she felt. She would raise her left arm, hand outstretched, to say, “I’m here. You’re here. We are together.” She would reach, grasp for attention. To hold hands. To say hello.

Or so we thought. Perhaps she was visioning, greeting those she thought she was seeing. We cannot know.

She would also clench her left fist, her arm in a stiff left angle. We took this to mean she was in pain, and we would provide medication. I like to think we were easing her suffering, and not merely depriving her of communication. She spoke with her left hand.

My mother died last night. She was washed and dressed, her cold hands placed across each other. They were alike again, and just like mine.

Play a Day: The Guilt Mongers or Los Traficantes de Culpa (for those not willing to submit to the Anglicization of our people)

J. Julian Christopher

For Wednesday I read The Guilt Mongers or Los Traficantes de Culpa (for those not willing to submit to the Anglicization of our people) by J. Julian Christopher, and available at New Play Exchange.

This is one of my favorite play titles ever. Because every classic play should have this title. Death of a Salesman could have been called The Guilt Mongers. Hamlet could have been called The Guilt Mongers. Or Oedipus the King.

Those are great plays. So is The Guilt Mongers.

A deathbed family drama, people who choose to spend as little time in each other's presence as possible are pulled together for the final moments of the head of the family; she who is mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, wife, all. No one is terribly glad to see each other.

"You are on some self-loathing shit," comments a nurse, which could be said about almost any one of them. They bounce off each other like satellites, their pain is played in the open, bitterness graced with tremendous humor, with that love and need for acceptance and forgiveness that rides just beneath the surface, even in the most congenial of families (like mine, I guess.)

The release that comes when the moment has passed, it can't be called happiness, and even relief doesn't sound right. But it is a familiar feeling and through his words and characters Christopher communicates this moment of exhalation with rightness and compassion.

Technology can be a beautiful thing. As I was reaching the conclusion, a character plays music on their phone, and without really thinking about it I found the piece on YouTube and started to play that music.

Play a Day: Girl Becomes Bone

Callan Stout

Monday morning I read Girl Becomes Bone by Callan Stout, and available on New Play Exchange.

Science fiction! My first play this month featuring science fiction. Yesterday, docudrama, today science fiction. Or speculative fiction. The wife will set me straight later.

The play originates on the planet Threa, which in an anagram of earth, also a near-homonym with "three" or third from the sun. The name reflects the degree to which its human inhabitants have been unable to emotionally and psychologically leave their abandoned planet behind.

A religion evolves on this new planet, one inspired by the mystical poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Its tenets and rituals are, depending on interpretation, fixated on an eventual return or the acceptance of no return. At least that is how it appeared to me.

Like Christianity, there lies at the very edge of consciousness the anxiety and terror of having been utterly abandoned by God, which is a kind of perpetual mourning. The insatiable need to comprehend and cope leads to ritual, which, when you are watching someone else do it, appears nothing more than obsessive compulsive disorder.

“Should not our ancient suffering have been more fruitful by now?” Indeed.

Last night I dreamed I walked into a Theaterplex. It was a like one of your suburban "big box" movie centers with popcorn and video games, except inside every theater there was a play going on.

Callan Stout's new work, you do not look, will be presented later this week as part of Columbia Stages New Play Festival.