Cuyahoga (scene)

Tonight Fire On The Water opens at Cleveland Public Theatre, which is inspired by the Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969. I am really looking forward to seeing this play, a collaboration between five West Side theater companies, combining as it does local history and theater, and features the work of some of my favorite artists anywhere.

Several years ago while I was reading up on the events of 1936, I discovered that the Cuyahoga had caught fire several other times during the past one hundred and fifty years. I wrote a brief scene as part of the These Are The Times which I later cut.

This scene is not part of Fire On The Water, either ... I just felt like sharing. Enjoy!


CUYAHOGA
by David Hansen © 2011

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
The savage peoples who clung to the banks of the Great Lake Erie prior to the white man’s arrival called itself the Iroquois. And they had a name for the mighty river that wended its tortured route to that great inland sea - CUYAHOGA, meaning “crooked river.”

CITIZEN 1
So ... “Cuyahoga River” means “crooked river river”?

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
Yes! The banks of the Cuyahoga, called the Flats are the powerful digestive system of this tremendous Midwestern economy. Shipping vessels make the impossible turns, bringing freight from the Erie Canal to the rest of the world! The petroleum giants - Shell, Gulf and of course, Standard Oil - store tanks of tens of millions of gallons of fuel right on the water’s edge for easy transportation. And one fateful day in 1936, John Hanzel set the river on fire.

Enter JOHN HANZEL, 36, a working man with gauze wrapped around his face and hands.

CITIZEN 2
Says what? You can’t set a river on fire!

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
Apparently, you can! What happened to you, sir?

JOHN HANZEL
I were on a team breaking the freighter Spokane down into scrap on the East Bank. They tell me a spark from my acetylene torch caught oil and debris on fire ... but all i know was I fell into the river and it was like being boiled in the fires of Hell.

CITIZEN 1
I saw it! The conflagration headed across to the West Bank where that gasoline was stored. The whole damn Flats could have blowed up!

CITIZEN 3
The fire lasted for five days.

JOHN HANZEL
By the time I got fished out I was burned up pretty bad.

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
You’re a lucky man, John Hanzel.

VOICE goes to slap HANZEL on the back. 

JOHN HANZEL
Please don’t do that.

End of scene.

Source: The Plain Dealer, August 2, 1936

Fire On The Water continues through February 14

The Great Globe Itself: Costume Fitting

Clement, 2005

The Great Globe Itself takes place onstage, on one stage, on the stage of the Globe Theatre. However, not just one Globe Theatre, but three. Our performers are in and out of costume during three time periods - the early 17th, 20th and 21st centuries. So there are costumes, and costumes on costumes.

Four our first scene, designer Esther Haberlen presents our theater artists in accurate, everyday Jacobean garb. Richard Burbage (left) the great actor, looks fine and strong, while John Fletcher (right) - the poet - appears a bit nerdy.

Turning to 1936, Esther has reproduced the early 20th century idea of what Americans thought a Shakespearean production was supposed to look like. King Henry VIII (left) is dressed sumptuously, but his guard (right) looks like he has been drawn from a deck of cards.

The virile Mark Antony is decked in a breastplate out of something like the silent film version of Ben-Hur. 

In our modern era, when we freely adapt our Shakespeare any which way, our Prospero has been provided a flowing wizard's robe, in white white white.

Finally, the performers our performers play, when they are not performing the plays within the play, appear in period street clothes (left to right, 1936 and 2005).

Tonight our acting company will have its first complete read-through of the script - rehearsal don't even begin for a couple of weeks. And yet, this is how far out ahead Esther is with her work on the production. Doesn't it all look amazing?

The Great Globe Itself opens March 3.

The Great Blizzard of 1978

Late January 1978, the Great Blizzard. Children, sit down. Let me tell you a story.

Seventy mile-per-hour winds, heavy snow and temperatures close to zero brought the Great Lakes region to a standstill for several days.

That was my fourth grade year. I was the age my son is today, about nine and a half. The previous year was the first I came into awareness of the wider world. Prior to that I did not really know much about pop culture or politics. 1977 was Three Mile Island, the New York City Blackout, the space shuttle Enterprise and Star Wars. Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley and Charlie Chaplin died that year, and I already knew who they all were.

That was also the year I started listening to pop radio, pretty much non-stop. January, dark evening after dark evening, and for many snow days, listening to G98. The top charting hits of that month, they may make you think of many other things, but they make me think of unending snow, and bone-penetrating cold; We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions, Come Sail Away, The Name of the Game, Just the Way You Are, and the aptly-named Slip Slidin’ Away.

We all stayed in our houses during the blizzard itself, but the after-effects lasted for weeks. Fortunately, my best friends lived two short blocks away, there was indoor play, but with so many days off, much of the time was spent at home, on my own, watching TV, drawing cartoons … and driving my mother crazy.


Mother was a home maintenance expert, or what we used to call a housewife. And she had her own life, one which my houseboundness encroached upon. I have no idea what my brothers, aged 13 and 16, were up to or where they were. The middle and high schools were also closed, but they were independent enough to have conspired to get away with the assistance of friends and older friends.

Mom had art appreciation classes at CMA, and asked if I wanted to wander around the art museum while she was there. Can you imagine that? Nine year-old kid, wandering around an art museum entirely unattended. In the 1970s, that was a great premise for a YA novel. Today we’d be the lead story on FOX 8.

Gets better – I didn’t want to investigate the art museum, I was more interested in the Natural History Museum. So I wandered around that place unattended, for several hours. Taxidermy is the aroma of my childhood.

There used to be an exhibit documenting the effects of pollution, located near the entrance to the building. It was very upsetting, a replica toxic waste site, a dump with oil covered gulls and all manner of household product containers wrapped in discarded plastic bags, choking a freshwater pond. Thank goodness that exhibit isn’t there anymore to trouble my thoughts.

Other days, mom would have classes at the Lakewood Public Library, and I would haunt the microfilm desk, taking out spools and spools of the New Yorker, just to look at the cartoons. Not just any New Yorkers, mind you. I started in 1925.

Of course, it wasn't all about keeping me preoccupied when she had other things to do. We'd sometimes go to the Rocky River Rec Center, and hold hands and ice skate while they played Bob Seger's Night Moves album on the loudspeakers.

My mother turns 80 next month, and it makes me think of things like this.

Source:
Remember Blizzard of Jan 26, 1978? Weather Historians Recall Blizzard of Legend

Resolutions for 2015

Ten Resolutions for the New Year

1. Read more plays. You know how many I plays I own that I have left unread? A lot. Plus - shorter than books.
2. Write more plays. I wrote a lot in 2014. I mean, really, Good boy. And yet, it was really not enough, not close.
3. Submit more plays. Also did a lot of this in 2014. There are countless opportunities out there. Find them and pursue them.
4. Attend more plays. Harder than it sounds. I have a lot more responsibility at work and also we take co-parenting very seriously. Bonus - as they get older I can take them to more stuff (another reason I don't miss the baby part.)
5. Less screentime. Pick up a play to read or something. 
6. Continue to conquer the house. It has taken twenty years but is slowly bending into your (communal) image.
7. Game night doesn't have to be a thing. Game time does.
8. Eat the right food, drink the right drink. Work out.
9. More good things. Less bad things.
10. Bet on the Cubs over Miami in the World Series.

Free For All (book)

"I could have killed Clive Barnes if I'd seen him in person ... there are times you feel that way. You would actually commit an atrocity because the feelings are so intense."
- Joseph Papp, Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told

On one occasion, when New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes gave a thoroughly negative and condescending review of the Public Theater's world premiere production of David Rabe's In the Boom Boom Room ("Oh dear. Let us hope that the Shakespeare Festival will have better luck next time.") artistic director Joe Papp phoned him at home after midnight to tear him a new one.

This is a fact which is corroborated by each party in Kenneth Turan's fascinating account of Papp's tenure as the creator and driving force of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, Free For All (2009).

Let's parse that. Imagine you are a writer. You love theater, that's why you have made your career watching it. You eat, breathe and sleep theater, the way others immerse themselves in commerce, or construction, or craft. In fact, you are fortunate enough to see all theater available to you. You aren't some suburban academic who had a sideline making a couple bucks writing theater reviews for a local paper with a subscription of a couple thousand. You see everything, everywhere, around the world.

In the privacy of your home, the phone rings in the dead of night. That's the time when I expect either a wrong number or to find a close relative has died. Instead, in your torpor, the producer of one play you reviewed needs very badly to insult you at length, to in fact threaten you with violence.

After all, it wasn't as though Papp hadn't already lost his shit on Barnes. By his own admission, Joe Papp put Clive Barnes against a wall once. So what if he was Joe Papp, admired by hundreds of artists and thousands and thousands of New York audiences. Does he have the right to harm a writer for doing his job?

We now will speak in defense of critics.

Theater critics are people who write articles for publication about theater. Sometimes they are critical evaluations of theatrical performance, or news items about same. These essays can be published in a print publication, or online, or both.

Like them or not, like how well-written they are or not, like what their artistic point of view is or not, these are the writers who, by choice or design, professional or amateur, write about live theater. No one else does that.

Without their efforts, no one outside of the theater world would know live theater still exists. These are the people who report on theater.

You might think, what right do they have to criticize the work? Well, none, actually, there is no right to criticize. But they do it, anyway. Some are educated, some are not. Some are pretentious, but so are you.

Some have a deep history of theater knowledge - and of local theater knowledge, which is much more irritating - while others do not. Artists pick and choose whether or not this is a blessing or a vice, depending on what has just been said about them.

We have our favorites, and there are those we make fun of on Facebook. Often. One in particular, he's a clown, but seriously. Without these few, these miserable few, there would be absolutely no one writing about the work we do.

We cannot ask for better because there is no better. We have several fine, thoughtful, opinionated, clever, diligent theater critics in our struggling metropolis. There are also a few cranks, but believe me, I have read many Cleveland area theater reviews, in the Plain Dealer and the Press and the News, dating back decades and decades, that were as bad as those written today.

It is my opinion that it is unnecessary to write to a letter to the editor of a paper with a daily circulation of 45,000 to demand the head of the theater critic. You sound like an idiot.

It is unwise for a member of a small budget theater company to place a private phone call to the editor-in-chief of a weekly tabloid to complain about one article written by the theater critic. The editor will only tell the critic about the call and they will laugh at you.

It is unimaginable to picture an artistic director - even one as important as Joe Papp - physically assaulting a theater critic.

Okay, not that is not actually unimaginable, not in Cleveland, but still.

I just read an entire book about this man, one of the most important figures in the history of American theater, and that's what stuck with me. To this reader, that is his epitaph.

They are critics. They are writers. They have no agenda, and they also have no power. They ain't your marketing department, they don't work for you. They cannot make your show live or die, certainly not today, not in Cleveland. That's your job.

So get back to work.

The Great Globe Itself: Two Holes and a Plaque

Shakespeare might have been born in Stratford, died in Stratford ... but he really lived here in London. - tour guide, 1990

Twenty-four years ago as a young student taking a holiday university tour to England, on a rainy December morning, I witnessed a most unimpressive sight. A sooty plaque on the wall of a post-war factory building, indicating that the Globe Theatre, the very stage for which William Shakespeare had written his plays, was at one point in history around here, somewhere.

At that moment in time, there was also located nearby two large holes in the ground. Pits, really. One was the excavation site of the Globe's smaller competitor, the foundation of the recently-unearthed Rose Theatre.

And perhaps more significantly, another short walk down the south bank of the Thames, was a great muddy, vacant mouth, the groundwork for the as-yet unbuilt Shakespeare's Globe. Whether it ever would be built was even then uncertain. There were many at that time who found such a building project elitist and in fact entirely unnecessary.

Regardless, what they found at the Rose was auspiciously timed to excited the imagination about this new Globe, and also to provide valuable data on original construction. And if there is thing I hope to show in my new work The Great Globe Itself is the trajectory from Cleveland to that plaque to that sloppy hole in the ground.

Inventing Meaning for "The Tempest"

There is a strong resemblance.

Now my charms are all o’erthrown

And what strength I have’s my own.
- Prospero, The Tempest (Epilogue)

Writing is like magic.

Picture the aging William Shakespeare, summoning to him the spirit of creativity, a tricksy spirit which reveals to him the true story of a shipwreck I the recently “discovered” Bermudas.

Shakespeare sees himself as master of this island, drawing to it this doomed vessel. Aboard, lords and gentlemen who have shown disrespect for his writing, but also a fine husband for his younger daughter (already 26 and without prospects).

At that same time, he struggles with his Bête Noire, that which inhibits his creation; lust, anger, drink, vulgarity, struggles to keep this Devil down in the hole. He plays with the nobility, terrifying them with monsters, treating them as toys.

Finally he composes a great play for his child and her man, forgives his ignorant enemies and critics, sets down his pen and paper (“staff” and “book”) and chooses to retire from writing.

Wouldn’t that make a good play?