Day melts into eve

I took the weekend off for the second time in a row.  I hope this does not develop into an ill-fated choice.  I’ve very much enjoyed Friday evening, Saturday, and today (thus far).  Although, I’ll confess I feel a slightest bit guilty that its already Four o’clock in the afternoon and I’ve yet to get out of my PJ’s and shower.  I’ve always made fun of my beloved one for her Pajama Days, and today I’ve fallen victim to the comfy-fuzzies myself.

We saw two films this weekend.  On Friday evening, we saw Law Abiding Citizen; which turned out to be wonderfully intriguing, with all sorts of wicked little surprises exploding and hurling this way and that.  On Saturday Afternoon, Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince, which was a good thing to see.  Granted, we were only able to see the second film because it was playing at the Academy Theater—a sort of last stop before disappearing—where films are much cheaper.  Tickets for $4.  And, not surprisingly at all, the fact that it was Harry Potter did play its own whimsical part in coincidental timing. Each year, the crisp air, and bright, drifting leaves of Autumn throw me back into my fascination with magic and mystery.  This year, Harry Potter sealed the deal.

Onto even weirder matters, in my last entry I mentioned that I’d started practicing again some of what was covered in my college Voice classes.  I’ve kept at that, with daily breathing, humming, and harmonic scales.  (I wouldn’t call it chanting myself, although someone else might.)

My beloved one points out: “You breathe all the time, whether you like it or not”, which is true.  However, the automatic breathing we do is quite shallow, we only use a portion of our lungs.  As breath equals voice, and resonance, and the shape of the breath equals tone and texture of the voice, it makes sense to explore what the capacity of my individual lungs is.  I’m not trying to huff and puff and blow the house down, just gain control of some things, about the way I breathe.  There is a point at which my hours of intended breathing—sometimes locked away in the room, sometimes walking to or from work, sometimes waiting for the bus—becomes not altogether productive, considering eventually, I’ll smoke a cigarette, and smoking does steal from the lungs, and damage them eventually.  But, I am content to build up what I can build, until I can altogether quit the habit of smoking.  And, whilst I doubt I’ll ever develop the intensely low, thick, voice of my dreams with any sort of real resonance; I am slowly, so slowly, starting to detect some very subtle changes.

I’m also stretching, daily.  I won’t call it Yoga, because it’s not Yoga (yet).  I’m not limber enough to do Yoga (yet).  But I am stretching daily, mostly focusing on my legs, spine, and arms.  I’ve been re-considering the way I sit while I’m at work, reconsidering the way I carry myself when I walk.  I’ve started doing push-ups again; I was so very out of shame.  I started with ten, then fifteen, then twenty.  Next will be twenty five; which is still weak, but getting better.  I’m also eating an apple before heading out to work; so long as there are apples available in the kitchen, that is.  Sometimes there has been a gap, between running out of them, and replacing them.

Because of all this, I have enjoyed more energy.  I feel—generally—like the blood in my veins is making its full journey, instead of taking several shortcuts.  I don’t have many complaints at the moment; I had a fantastic weekend with my Beloved One.  I’d like sunnier days, though that’s more of a wish than a complaint.  I like the cool, clean temperatures of autumn, and if the raincurtain would pull back a bit, that would be nice.

©  Jeffrey Puukka, 2009.

An update? An essay? A blog.

I shall start with the format suggested by Twitter, and countless improvisation games.  What are you doing? Well, I’ve made myself a lovely cup of tea, and lit a cigarette.  (Perhaps I should not have written that, any health conscious reader has probably just clenched their teeth, and will stop reading at this point.)  Now, I sit at the desk in the ‘bedroom hide-away’, stare at the computer before me, and attempt to type out some thoughts.  There’ve been many thoughts, lately, too.

I’ve been missing my Dad immensely, since he’s moved to the beach.  I miss our get-togethers.  I especially miss the get-togethers of times gone by, when the Pub at Edgefield was still smoke friendly, and the chess board was always on the table, precariously situated in between our drinks.  I’ve been thinking a great deal about theatre.  I’ve slowly been reading the Trevanian novel, Shibumi, which in a strange, abstract way, has only been encouraging me to think more about theatre.

I’ve always been the ‘quiet, introverted, lost-in-thought’ type as it is, but the last few weeks, even I feel like my thought processors have been on overdrive.

The boy whom I so often write and tweet about is gone for a weekend dose of respite.  With the flat deliciously quiet, my Beloved One says: “You’ve obviously been wanting to write.  You should write.  I’m tired of seeing the same old ‘A book is a book, yes?’ on your website.”

That raises a lovely point about girlfriends/boyfriends/lovers/spouses/partners:

There is no doubt that any relationship includes a healthy dose of maintenance.  It’s that maintenance—especially in the forms of commitment, intimacy, or sacrifice—that typically scares people my age away from participating in relationships at all.  However, whatever work there is, is well worth it.  The lovely perk that slowly sneaks up on you over time, is that after you’ve invested your trust and love in someone, they will surprise you time, and time again with care.  They care about you.  They crave your well being as much as you crave it yourself.  And sometimes, when you might be feeling rather confused or conflicted about what to do, they will make a suggestion that totally serves your best interests.

She surprised me—yet another time—the other day.  I was—yet again—in my chair in the bedroom ‘hideaway’ looking at the website of one theatre company or another.  She came in, rested on her knees beside the chair, kissed my hand as I glared at the computer screen, and said “You’ve got it bad, huh?”  (The itch.  The bug.  The gnawing teeth of the addiction.)  For a moment, I thought she had summoned her paranormal girlfriend skills. I had forgotten I’d confessed a few days earlier that the deep, unresolved need to return to directing, and to keep at it, hasn’t left since around Shakespeare’s birthday (April), when it always bites me especially hard.  Yes…I’ve got it bad.  I’m not ashamed of having it bad, either.  Why I’ve got it, is put better here, than I could hope to put it myself:

“A theatre is the laboratory of civilization; the dreamspace where we probe the soul, dissect politics and religions, and re-enact—always with our own particular spin—the universal struggles of humankind:  survival, love, ambition and reconciliation.  Who would not want to spend a lifetime investigating this?”

(Robert Cohen, director/scholar/theorist.)

My theatre career, if one could even call it that without laughing, has been comprised of about ten years of artistically ambitious choices, backed by poor personal decisions, and not enough balance, or clarity to really allow the goodness to come through.  The events of the last half-year have led me to break down and accept, (or grow up and embrace) two things.

1. There’s no doubt that I need to go forward, and include theatre as an equally central part of my life again, if I’m going to live up to my own expectations of living life on this planet, and not feel like a hack.
2. There is—however—no way that I am prepared to go about it in the same, flawed way.  There may not be a “right” or “wrong” when it comes to the aesthetic elements of theatre.  But there is a line between right and wrong when it comes to running a business.  Artists can be selfish and manipulative, and they can unwittingly cross that line in pursuit of getting the most use out of supporters or colleagues, and—quite simply—trying to survive.  I’ve made some poor choices, and some very wretched errors-in-judgment in the past.  They resulted in mistakes, and promises being broken.

I slightly feel like the last few years of not doing much theatre at all—at least, not on the scale which I prefer—has (in a way) been a personal form of atonement.  I’ve been homeless, I’ve been bored, I’ve lost some very talented collaborators who I used to think of as ‘crucial’.  There’ve been points I’ve felt a bit like I was drowning, under an ocean-liner’s load of regret collapsing on my shoulders.

I can’t go back and fix the past.  But, I have learned a great deal, and I can remember to reflect—going into the future—upon my poor choices in the past.  If I bump into people I used to know, with whom I fallen from grace, I can try to apologize.  But that’s all I can do for the past, along with learning from it, and doing things better, fairly, and right in the future.

Now that I’ve climbed out of the ocean onto the shore, I look to the future.  Theatre. I think.  What about theatre, I ask.  What is my place?  What will theatre be, a lifetime into the future?

I once—for being only one person—had an admirable personal library of plays, theatre history, scholarship, acting theory and so on.  With a three year history of moving, putting boxes in storage units, selling books at used bookshops for cash (desperately needed at the time), I only have a few remaining books of Shakespeare.  Whatever research I do now, I do online.

The more I peer into reviews, current culture, and current ambitions in theatre, the more I begin to feel like I was born too late to live a lifetime doing the sort of theatre I’ve trained to do.  America—that is, the United States, the churning kettle of diversity that it is—came late onto the scene of global civilization.  We’re a nation that’s only some 233 years old, if we count from the Declaration Of Independence.  Forgive me if I sound unpatriotic, but the United States does not—in my opinion—have a long, illustrious history of theatre.  (Mind you, I’m excluding the more ceremonial/ritualistic definitions, for the moment.)  Since the Greeks, I’d say Europe has a longstanding history.  Even before Shakespeare, traveling groups of players roughed their way across Europe presenting Miracle, Morality, or Passion plays, illustrating on contrived stages the motifs of religious teaching.  Britain has a longish history, when we look back at Shakespeare.  Russia would have to be Britain’s counter part, in my view, with the contributions of Stanislavski’s theories, and the Moscow Art Theatre.  But, America?  What does America have?  We have Broadway and its history of musical theatre, we have the Regional Theatre movement, and there we slightly burn out.

What happens next?

I’m starting to submit to the opinion that if there is an off-camera tradition for actors in the future to belong to, that theatre of the future, may resemble some of the avant-garde, performance arty work that one can see (or read about) cropping up in places like the Romanian National Theatre Festival.  Theatre that re-invents theatre.  Theatre that tries—as much as to simply do good work and to put on a good show—to change the relationship with its audience, or at least, the vantage point.  The further down that road one goes, one thing becomes clear.  The well attended theatre of the future, will be the ‘exciting’ theatre.  The best performance of text will become less and less important.  It will increasingly become about the most interactive experience.  Think Tony & Tina’s Wedding.  A specific example of what I mean, on our own shores, is at American Repertory Theatre. . .

Artistic director Diane Paulus has transformed the theatre into a club, to produce Randy Weiner’s The Donkey Show, a disco explosion of the words, images, and themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Now, I’m not in Boston, so I haven’t seen it.  But I don’t think the audience at the Donkey Show is seeing a beautifully acted performance of text.  What the photographs and video excerpts make clear that they are seeing, though, is beautiful men in g-strings, beautiful women wearing nipple-pasties, beautiful people dancing on platforms, and diving into mosh-pits.  That doesn’t sound like Shakespeare to me, necessarily.  But it’s not supposed to be Shakespeare, it’s the aftermath of Randy Weiner having been inspired by Shakespeare.

Is it theatre?  I don’t know.  It certainly seems Dionysian, and we must remember, Dionysus—with all of his spirit—has been the reining God of Theatre for some while.

One thing is clear.  In recent years, theatre companies all over America have been asking: Where has our audience been going?  Why isn’t a new one coming?

The first question is easy to answer.  That good old audience, who loved nothing more than to see a play on Friday evening or Sunday afternoon, has slowly gone to the graveyard.  The second question, Why isn’t a new one coming? is difficult.  Perhaps it’s not even the right question.  Perhaps the question to ask instead is where the next audience will be coming from.

Either way…  I can’t be doing all of this thinking for no reason.

It’s brewing.  Something comes anon.

©  Jeffrey Puukka, 2009

What happens in Vegas…

Photograph courtesy of Corbis.

Once upon a time, we were young children. We did terrible things, played games that really weren’t all that much fun for our un-willing partners, and piled embarrassment upon our Parents with our lack of inhibition and atrocious manners. Why did we do these things, you ask? I’ll tell you. The answer is simple; we were young children. Then one day, we became adolescents. Impulsive creatures of hormonal rage. We lived it up in the summertime, and danced, crawled, squirmed, or punched our way through high school. Ah, yes; High School: the house of good times, the hall of bad times. The cavern of testosterone, cheap teenage perfume, laughter, tears, cliques, and wads of chewing-gum stuck to the bottom side of rickety desks.

After this profound and pitiful chapter of the human experience, we each took our own road. Some of us went to college. Some of us did not. Some of us joined the military, some of us went to hippie communes in places we’d never heard of, simply because we wanted to get as far away as possible. However, no matter how we filled the blank pages of the post-high school choose-your-own-adventure book, we had one thing in common; slowly, we were becoming adults. Seventeen passed into eighteen. Eighteen to nineteen. Twenty, twenty one, twenty three.

And somewhere amid that cluster of years, we encountered a tragic truth. Those things which branded our high school experience—gossip, rumors, the pressure to please the people we look up to—things which we hoped would stay locked up in those classrooms and musty lockers, did not stay put in its proper place.

We don’t live with our parents or guardians any longer, and we may now do a lot more watering plants, washing dishes, and taking out rubbish than we ever did before when they were our ‘chores’. Yes, we’ve come into our own, haven’t we? We have jobs, paychecks, bills, migraines, maybe even children. But, what happens in High School doesn’t stay in high school, and we still have our daily dose of drama.

I was recently reminded once again of this ironic disappointment, because my Beloved One has a cyber stalker. It feels like High School to me. I don’t particularly enjoy it either, because I hated High School!

I suspect we’ve figured out now who her bullying cyber-prankster is. We’ve not yet agreed on the proper reaction, but, we have pinpointed the culprit and their motivation. Pain.

Revenge Begets Revenge

“Human Beings are capable of doing inhuman things.”
—John Malkovich

I’ve the uttermost confidence that nothing I write here will sway the aforementioned individual from carrying on with a string of arsewipely deeds. However, I do hope to motivate some of you people who find it difficult to let go of your past, whomsoever you may be. I honestly don’t believe that I personally know anyone like that—thank God—so I’m not dispensing advice to any of my friends when, I advise you to consider your own safety before you torment your ex-lovers for sport.

John Malkovich—kooky actor extraordinaire—tells us: “Human beings are capable of doing inhuman things.” Well, he would know wouldn’t he, he’s John Malkovich. However, when we try to stomp out our bad memories by poking the beast that caused them, we’re overlooking a fundamental trait of human behavior in our victim: everyone has a snapping point. Not a breaking point, when they’ll surrender, a snapping point, whereat they’ll go berserk. You can only slap a person so many times before they get tired of it. Most people lack the self control to not get angry and respond in kind. Apart from your immediate physical well being, you do run the risk of joining the ranks of the crude and cultureless in the process of ruining your enemy’s life. So remember, as you chuckle and consider all the deliciously humiliating and hurtful twists and turns you can hurl the object of your hate: It may not take too long for your victim to become your victimizer. People who’ve been poked and prodded along to their snapping point, encounter such a huge rush of rage and adrenaline that they are temporarily immune to universal concepts of right and wrong. As your whole ambition is to empower yourself, and take power from your foe, be careful you don’t end up in a body cast, (or body bag).

The Past Does Hurt

“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.”
—W.H. Auden

The second thing to consider is your overall sense of peace. Yes, the past does hurt. Rejection still stings, even if it is from ten years ago. We may see someone who ripped our heart and soul into shreds in a shop, and if we aren’t careful to control our thoughts, it can begin to keep us up at night. The pain of the past floods into our present. However, when we dwell on the past, we render ourselves incapable of accepting a future. And, what you truly don’t know—no matter what you believe—is what that future holds. It could be so much happier than the days gone by.

I think you owe it to yourself to let what’s passed wither behind you. God knows, I owe it to myself.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

© Jeffrey Puukka, 2009