Why Oxygen?

I was asked the following questions by Taffety Punk's P.R. person, KM, about Ivan Vyrypaev's Oxygen and why I brought it to the theatre for them to consider producing it.  I thought I would share the questions I was asked and my answers here.


1. What resonates most with you about the play?

I was in in western Poland on September 11, 2001. 

My mother called me to tell me a plane had just struck the World Trade Center.  I remember dropping the phone and running down the stairs where I was staying to make it just in time to see the live shot of the second plane striking the WTC.  I remember the following moments involved me hyperventilating, searching out air with my lips.  

Ever since then I have been searching for oxygen in many, many ways.

I was visiting family and friends in Poland during the prior two weeks, and was leaving for several train rides across the continent of Europe on my way to study abroad in England.  On September 13th I stopped in Munich.  On September 16th I was in Amsterdam, and just a few short days later I was in London, just a stop on my way to a sleepy southwest English town called Totnes.

As an American I saw much of the following year's worth of events unfold from outside my country's borders while splitting time between Poland and England and traveling with a theatre company on various projects.  I officially returned to the United States a year and three months after 9/11, but in some ways I felt like I never really came back.  I still do.  The America I knew was hermetically sealed away in my mind, and I felt like I was now always looking at the country I grew up in, my country, with a completely different set of eyes and ears from a void in space...mostly because of the things I experienced in those first days, weeks, and months after 9/11.

I encountered people who had anti-semitic theories about the end of the world, like a rich American business man in Munich who told me about his limo drivers who were all from "The Arab World" who were like soothsayers of "the coming American apocalypse" because of "our involvement in Israel."

I met people who would ask if I was an American, and then would promptly thank me for dragging them into their war when I said I was one, and that any additional violence against my country we had earned because of our actions pre-and-post 9/11.

Then I reacquainted myself with my country...where all my friends would look up at the sky whenever they heard a plane going overheard with great anxiety...and I simply wondered what they were so scared about.  Why were they holding their breath?

I felt at once detached from my American-ness (let's call it), and yet completely affected by it.  I was neither "one of us" nor "one of them."  I suddenly had a fully detached eye and ear for everything from my American friends, as well as my European friends, and other internationals acquaintances. 

I felt like no person, no artistic expression, no piece of literature, no music, nothing could have expressed exactly what I felt, and the swirl of disjointed, yet seemingly connected thoughts spiraling around my head.

Then sometime in 2007 or 08, a professor at Towson University handed me a copy of Oxygen.  I thought, and felt, like Ivan Vyrypaev had put my thoughts and experiences, in some semi-distant way, onto paper. 

It had a strange mix of Christian, Judaic, Arab, Eastern European, American, European, international and yet local viewpoints that I have struggled with discerning for most of my life since 9/11.  

I don't know what the play itself says.

I still don't know if it has a formal message.  

It certainly has plenty of questions.

However, what ultimately draws me to it is this sense of a writer, an artist, and a person who is tired of history and tired of trying to read between the lines in order to figure out the subtextual meaning of all the world's madness, especially when none of us are very sure which lines to read between anymore.  It's a script that rips apart conventions of performance and replaces them with a shattered vision of the world that is a mosaic of impulsive and improvised creativity, disciplined performance, thorough character study, as well as anarchic destruction of all forms.

I think of the last line of the play which references a meteorite from cold, cold space falling on the generation of Sasha and Sasha.  After viewing the film Armageddon in the late 90s I used to say to most of my friends, whenever they were feeling a bit sad or anxious, that they shouldn't worry because a meteorite from space was going to crush us all and obliterate all our sins and accomplishments...so none of this mattered anyway.  I used to say that as a joke.  When I saw Vyrypaev offered that as a final image to this piece, I was sold on it for good.  I don't know if he meant it as a cruel, sarcastic joke, or as a relief from carrying the world's burdens.  I knew I wanted to perform this piece...in order to find out what it was to me...to find out what happened to my America, my world, which was obliterated by several silver meteorites on 9/11.

Then maybe I'll be able to breathe again...

2. What compelled you to bring Oxygen to Taffety Punk? 

I always liked Marcus' approach to this thing called "punk rock theatre."

We have always talked about what it meant to have the dedication of a highly-trained, diligent artist, but the ability to toss away any inhibitions that would allow us to take on new forms of theatre, and challenging content.  

Whenever I see a play, or performance piece at Taffety Punk I felt like it was a breath of fresh air.  This play needed an environment where Oxygen could thrive.  This theatre is that place.

3. How will you be approaching the stylized language and format of the play, as an actor?

I'm going to approach it the same way I've approached language my whole life...like a strange man in a strange land just trying to learn the language.

Oxygen by Ivan Vyrypaev...

Oxygen by Ivan Vyrypaev...

I've been waiting three or four years to do that play ever since R.Q. handed it to me.  It was this past Friday, the day before New Year's Eve, when M. from Taffety approached me about doing it, and then read through it with E., who would be playing HER, and L., who would be directing.  They might even get S.P. to be the DJ.  Initially I thought of it as a larf, to read through something that had been so elusive to me for the better part of 1/2 a decade.  There were at least 3 different attempts to get it (somehow) off the ground myself...and now...I decided to jump on board and perform it with their company...by the end of February.

During the reading E. just kept saying, "I love it...but I have no idea what this is."  I have to agree.  Three or four years of reading, and occasionally rereading the script I still have no idea what it is.

After discussions with Y.U. last year over coffee I at least learned that Vyrypaev wrote the script as a generational response to years of Russian psychological and subtextual playwrighting.  It was my understanding the playwright, and Russia itself, were tired of trying to read between the lines, especially when they're not even sure what lines to read between anymore.  Judging from the sentiments in the script, and the recent events in Russia, that's exactly what that script is generally about, but still, even Y.U. said, "The script has no specific meaning.  It is a blueprint for performance.  It is...what you make of it."  I told that to E. and she just laughed.  We also agreed the first four pages or so are incredibly daunting...for me.

I told L. that although I've been pining away over doing this script for so long that I don't want to treat it like a sacred cow of some kind.  Best to just focus on communicating the thoughts in it and finding what structure we build with this blueprint.

Now all I have to do is resolve my car issues, whatever is happening with C., and resolve to take that class for my teacher certification later in March.

Yeah.  It's going to be an interesting trip on this one.

It's always nice to hear from old friends.

It's always nice to SEE old friends.

Today I could both of those VERY unexpectedly on my new HTC 4G phone when D.G. called me up on Skype and we had a video chat on my phone.

It was like a conversation straight out of The Jetsons.  We were talking (well, I was...) on some electronic device the size of a Triscuit.  I could walk around the room with him in my hand as we briefly caught up, shared intentions to get a beer together very soon, and...well...let him tell me how much he admired me in graduate school (he was an undergrad then), and has admired me ever since with all the stories he's heard of what I've been up to in the last few years.

Funny.

I've had all these people who keep coming up to me in the last few months telling me how much they admire me, or are jealous of me...and all I ever usually think is how far behind I feel in my life...like I haven't caught up to another runner in an ultra-marathon that I've been running since 2006.  To tell the truth, I've always felt like I've been running that ultra-marathon...so...since...1980?  Maybe I just don't know how good I've got it, or how much potential I have to make something happen...?

I always feel and think like what I'm doing is not enough.  Not enough for what?  Who knows...

D.G. seems to still think I'm the bee's knees.  M.K. from Taffety also emailed me today to tell me he and the company are considering doing Oxygen...and wants to know what I'm doing during the next couple of months. I've been waiting for that email/correspondence of some kind for months.  Now...  I don't know what to do about that. Direct it?  Act in it?  What...?

D.G. believes in me.  M.K. believes in my proposition.  My students, as I found out before winter break, seem to believe in me.  Maybe I can start to believe in myself...  Maybe.

In other news, got out of "that house" today.  Pat and Chairman Diem helped me move out of there today.  Pat had the quote of the day as we were lugging out the last of my stuff from there:

"Bye, bye, Crazy House!  Smelled like Cup O'Noodles and weed all the time."

Well...yes.  It also did my head in to live there for the last month or so...especially since "the confession."  I never felt safe, and am now living with P. and A. in their basement apartment.  That works for the time being.  I was able to organize that move quickly...and it was done in a day...all because of my new Jetsons-like phone.

The future is amazing.

Maybe Mr. Spacely will call me soon to offer me a job with Spacely Sprockets.

Christmas Mutant Powers

Everyday the principal of the school where I work sends an email to everyone in the faculty and staff with a "Question of The Day."  The question two days ago was the following:

Tis the season to be gifting!

If you could give just one thing to your

students/faculty/peers/school

what would it be?

I don't normally respond to these questions for various reasons (the main one being that my office computer at the school is probably operating at the same speed of a Windows 98 computer and it's not worth the hassle of sitting around for 5 minutes trying to open a second email).  However, seeing as it is the holiday season, and I was looking to avoid work, I thought I'd take the time to write a thoughtful response.

I would give them the Christmas miracle of Santa’s sleigh flying overhead…and having the sudden burst of energy from his reindeer taking off from the continental United States (in order to reach Europe in time for his Christmas Eve appointments) send out an electromagnetic pulse across the land that would wipe out all computer systems, electronic devices, and social networking websites (that one is for the kids), so we could all have a holiday free from appointments, stress, unwanted constant cell phone “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” messages on our Blackberrys and smart phones (followed by the obligatory, “Why aren’t you responding?” messages…),  and holiday TV advertisements that for some reason ALWAYS seem louder than the TV show I’m currently watching, or casually trying to ignore as background white noise as I try not to think of the gifts I forgot to get, or all of life’s responsibilities in general.  Then, in the buzzing peace left in the wake of Santa’s fluctuating magnetic field, we would all remember the true meaning of Christmas: PEACE ON EARTH & GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN…and just one quiet moment to ourselves, or with our loved ones.  AND, as an added fringe benefit, I bet the gamma rays left over from Santa’s sleigh’s explosion would give us magical Christmas mutant powers.  Who wouldn’t want that?

I got a response back from someone in the mass chain who wanted to know if his/her Christmas mutant powers could include flying?  I wrote the following response to that:

I’ll contact the North Pole’s envoy at the United Nations and see if he can get his country the freedom to develop an elf-run nuclear program without fear of diplomatic sanctions.  Their scientists have told me they can install a portable nuclear reactor in Santa’s sleigh and it could be up-and-running by the end of the week.  You should be flying by Boxing Day.  Warning: I’m told the side effects include smelling of peppermint bark and leaving a red-and-white candy vapor trail everywhere you go when in flight.

With work properly avoided in the moments it took me to write those responses I think that all was put right with the world. 

Merry Christmas everyone, and enjoy your new mutant powers!

My Wat

Every so often I'm asked by a friend to work on a new independent project.  Currently I'm reading (or trying to read, anyway...) Alexander Wat's My Century:  The Odyssey of A Polish Intellectual, which was given to me by R.B.  He also gave me a copy of Wat's Lucifier Unemployed, a collection of Wat's short stories.  We're talking about possibly putting some sort of script, performance piece, or...whatever...together about these texts.  Reading through My Century a few passages instantly connect with me about my artistic process, my life, and my thoughts in general about life lately.  Considering it's so difficult to find the concentration to write lately, I thought maybe taking down someone else's words might set off a few sparks.


From the introduction by Wat's interviewer for the book, Czesław Miłosz, I found a few statements that seemed to be more about someone working on an artistic process rather than an intellectual statement of his life:


"It was not Wat's intention to be a chronicler of his centrury; what he sought was the secret, hidden meaning of events."
-  p. xx


In the last few years especially I've become less concerned with addressing the implicit and inherent political statements out of various theatre pieces.  I've come to appreciate writers like Samuel Beckett who wrote about such things as the "secret, hidden meaning of events."  His writing doesn't seem to be tied to one particular political context, or way of thinking, and his dramatic writings seem to live somewhere out of time...in all times.  If only I could achieve something like that with my work.  My writing.  My acting.  Anything.


On living in a different culture Miłosz notes about Wat's experience in America:


"As of now at least, more good people are to be encountered in America than Europe.  Theirs is, however, a somewhat seemingly careless goodness because there is a low level of psychological intensity in human exchanges here, both of the good and the bad.  If Wat, a typical Central European intellectual, had expected debate, deference, an attentive and devoted audience, he was sadly mistaken.  He soon realized that no one had the time for long conversations here, that everyone was on his own.  You want to give a lecture, fine, give it. You want to write, write; you don't want to, so don't.  All this creates an impression of indifference, of the individual vanishing into a landscape and masses of people, both of which dwarf him.  This impression may often be mistaken ,but it can be depressing."
- p. xxi


I often feel this way, and I was born and raised in the Untied States.  I can remember a graduate school professor, M.C., commenting that I "seemed to be carrying the weight of a thousand years of history" on my shoulders.  It was in that same conversation, in that awful pizza joint across the street from Meadows School for The Arts, that he tried to reassure me about my inability to get along with some of my fellow classmates, or to make any sort of meaningful connections with them by saying, "You know, Mark, not every conversation, every social interaction in your life has to mean something deep...right?"  Those are words I've tried to hold onto since then...especially since leaving school for the arena of the working world of theatre.  There are more and more times when conversations seem like they're just skirting the surface of even superficiality...even with those who call themselves intellectuals.  And those who don't...?  Well, there's a sort of animosity that comes from anyone who perceives someone else as one...as if they're angry that they were denied some access to that knowledge. I find myself at times avoiding interactions with these types, but completely nixing them out of one's life does expose one to, like Wat, feelings of vanishing into the landscape and masses of people.  However, the standards seem to have changed since Wat's day.  Being an intellectual in his day, or his social group was defined by reading philosophy and intimately knowing the inner workings of a totalitarian regimes prison systems.  Today, simply watching some other TV program than a reality show makes one a pseudo-intellectual.  The intellectual bar has been lowered, but the feeling of isolation remains the same.


The following is a statement I think, if properly reworded, could help my theatre students understand something about their processes, but I'm not quite sure how to phrase it in a way that could help them:


"Stature is not easy to explain.  It is not measured by what is called talent, because the talented are not always deserving of respect.  Neither is it measured by intelligence itself, for various uses can be made of that faculty.  Stature is like authority, and when granting it to someone, we do not doubt that we are giving that person any more than is deserved by nature."
- p. xxiii


Finally, for tonight at least, there is a statement directly made by Wat that was about the 20th century, but could be about today's general climate...about my general internal climate...


"I don't know if it was an advantage or a disadvantage, but we had begun to realize that the old had come to an end.  Some absolute change had occurred and you had to make changes; it didn't matter how, what, to where, but you had to break things, change. ... First and foremost, there was a need, intellectual but emotional as well, for a total renewal, a feeling that some sort of earthquake had occurred, an absolute earthquake..."
- p. 4


That about says it for me.  


Who knows if we'll end up creating that theatre piece.  I need to finish hacking up a lung before I can deal with a creative process, or the earthquakes happening all around and within me lately.  There's only so much thinking, or considering one can do when dealing with annual bout of bronchitis.  


God my lungs hurt.

A Man And His Hat

Long night.


Longer day.


I was rehearsing  A MAN, HIS WIFE, AND HIS HAT by Lauren D. Yee the last few days in Washington DC at Theatre J with some really fine actors.  Yet another process where I was absurdly racing back-and-forth between Baltimore and DC in my car...which I am convinced will either break down for good soon, or (for some reason or another) flip over somewhere on the highway leaving me hanging upside down by a seatbelt and having my final thoughts be, "Boy, I wish I had cleaned out my car so my mother would think I had, at last, become somewhat neater in my life.  Ah crap.  Here comes an 18 wheeler full of potatoes and olive oil."  And there the end will be.


Nightmares of becoming a lame highway salad aside, the reading went well.  It was performed at The Greater Reston Arts Center in Reston, VA, a town that resembles some smaller squares in New York...if those squares had been put together by by corporate interior designers from Wal-Mart looking to entice the upper and upper-Middle classes to their digs.  Anyway, it marked the first time that, after 4 years of friendship, I finally got to read/perform-at-all with the fine-and-talented TBR.  She played my wife in the piece to my cranky-and-lazy-and-sloppy Slavic/Jewish Hetchman.  


There's more to write about with this whole process, but noting the first night that I got to perform with a good friend is good enough for today.


The thoughts swimming around my head today about other things will take some more time to write about...and seeing as it's 1:15AM and I have to be up by 6AM (at the latest) this wouldn't be a wise train of thought to disembark.  Best to leave that engine in the station...for now.

Hypnotized (Hopefully) by A Dream

"“It would...be a beautiful thing,” [Pierre Curie] wrote, “to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science.”

"The separation of radium from the alkalines required thousands of tedious crystallizations. But as she wrote to her brother in 1894, “one never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.” After four years, Curie had accumulated barely enough pure radium to fill a thimble."

- from "Madame Curie's Passion" in the online version of The Smithsonian Magazine

I recently read this article on Marie Sklodowska-Curie in The Smithsonian Magazine upon the urging of my mother.  Our Polish pride usually pulls us toward any article, TV show, film, or random insurance commercial remotely mentioning our heritage.  This time the source material, written by Julie Des Jardins, proved to be quite rich and thought provoking.

Mostly it has me thinking about how Marie Sklodowska-Curie suffered a great deal for her scientific work. She dealt with slow-and-steady radiation poisoning, long bouts of isolation, and the self-denial of many pleasures.  I won't go into describing the article any further than that.  Ms. Des Jardins does an excellent job all by herself in having written it.

However, it's the two quotes I posted in this blog that have me thinking...

As an artist always trying to strengthen, deepen, rediscover, or maybe even discover for the first time, his process, I am particularly struck by that second quote.  "...one never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done."  Having just closed Arms & The Man at Constellation Theatre in Washington DC I have to admit I am in the post-show-closing-malaise that happens to most actors.  I told a few friends recently that coming down off a show   I ask myself simple questions like:

"Did I really just do that...for 11 weeks?"  

"What's next?"

"Do I need to create a performance to feel complete?"

"What the hell happened to the rest of my life while I was lost in this constant commuting between Baltimore and Washington DC, between teaching and rehearsing, between bouts of performing as a teacher and Sergius Saranoff?  I mean...do I actually have a 'rest of my life?'"

"What's next?"

"What am I teaching tomorrow?"

"What happened to my plans to live and work in Texas?"

"What happened to my plans to live and work in Poland and Slovakia?"

"What's next?"

"Do I keep this bloody moustache I grew out for the show?"

"When did I appropriate all of those British-isms into my daily speech?  Did I do that when I lived in England?  Was that really 9 years ago?  Is there a future THERE for me?"

"What's next?"

"Should I find a doctor...a dentist...an optometrist...a chiropractor...a specialist for my left wrist...?"

"Should I move...again?"

"What's next?"

"Should I begin writing with Paul?"

"What do I do about these classes I have to take for teacher certification?"

"What about this personal life of mine?"

"What about all these people who seem very angry with me, that seem to be coming out of the woodwork every other day...and hour some days?"

"What's next?"

I sift through all these questions, and more, and find there's not even enough of whatever is my radium to coat a pinhead, let alone fill a thimble.


"What if...?"

There are several of those in my life...the "What if..." questions.  I could go into hundreds of those.  Here I have to quote the first non-academic show I ever did, The Lion in Winter.


"'What if' is a game for scholars.  What if angels sat on pinheads?  What if I were king?  It's your game, Geoff.  You play it."  

It is a fruitless game.

Still, I find myself drawn to thoughts of starting a family...and having a wife?  An irrational life mate?  A long-term girlfriend/partner?  Children?  


Maybe it's not a romantic partner?  A long-term collaborator?  

I left a good kind of that last one in Spišská Nová Ves, Slovakia back in May.  My friend, Peter, on the night before I left to head back to Poland, drunk on Slovakian Fernet liquor he said, in a broken Slovak and Polish, "My God!  Why is it the only person I feel like is my true artistic brother lives several thousand miles away in America?!"  I felt similarly.  However, I feel that connection with several "artistic brothers" around the United States and Europe.  

Are they elsewhere?

"What's next?"

That pesky question immediately comes up.  The search for who is next inevitably brings up the what.  It's best to take up John Lennon's advice here.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

Is that advice?  I guess so.  Anyway, that kind of thing can't be planned...romantically, artistically, or professionally.  The opportunities present themselves and one must jump at them...and it's why I end up on Pierre Curie's quote:

“It would...be a beautiful thing...to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams..."

It sure would be.  I look forward to being hypnotized by a dream rather than questions.

Perhaps I'm already in a dream and I don't even know it...