This Post Contains Photo Evidence That Cats Are Rude

Yesterday I tried to explain that my one week break from entertaining you was due to some poppycock about finishing a rewrite of a new play.​ This was a pathetic lie. In fact, the reason I spent seven days not typing for you is pictured above. The problem is A Cat, and it is a doozy.

I mention it not as part of some bald-faced traffic-grab. As far as I'm aware, photos of cats are among the least popular things on the Internet. I share this with you because a bit of historical research has shown me that my problem—a cat on the thing I'm working on—is not something I have to face alone. In fact, it's been happening for hundreds of years. From The Atlantic Wire​:

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Image ripped off from the Atlantic Wire, taken by Emir O. Filipovich.​

Now, via medievalist Emir O. Filipovic, evidence that cats have been up to this same mischief for six centuries: inky pawprints, gracing a page of the 13th volume of "Lettere e commissioni di Levante," which collated copies of letters and instructions that the Dubrovnik/Ragusan government sent to its merchants and envoys throughout southeastern Europe (Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia etc.), according to Filipovic -- sort of a 15th-century Federal Register. The particular document that the cat got its paws on dates to March 11th, 1445.

​Not only is this adorable, it is reassuring. My cat isn't the only nuisance—my work isn't the only work being interrupted. My lie about finishing a play can die here. Obviously, it would have been impossible for me to work on the play anyway. When the cat isn't on the computer, she's here:

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Dog is man's best friend. Cat is writer's worst enemy.​

To Break the Oscar Habit, Just Say No

As a kid, I lived for Oscar night. I filled out a ballot, I read up on history, I became incensed over who won and lost, even though I'd seen almost none of the movies. For a long time, I felt the same way about Saturday Night Live​. At some point, to lessen the heartache that comes with watching a beloved institution slide into meaninglessness, I cut my losses. More on Bullett​. 

Just as schoolchildren the world over have accepted the roundness of the earth and the deliciousness of pizza, everybody knows that Saturday Night Live is terrible. That doesn’t mean that nobody watches it. Like cigarettes, inactivity and (sadly) pizza, Saturday Night Live is a bad habit, and one that must be broken for a person to lead a healthy weekend life. The show’s relentless badness—and the fact that there are sometimes other fun things to do on a Saturday night—makes breaking that habit fairly easy. Quitting the Oscars is much harder.

I wrote in December about my resolution to avoid Oscars preview coverage, which is as entertaining as a horserace with no horses. This was fairly easy to stick by. On Sunday, I will keep a promise I made to myself the year that James Franco staked a claim to being the worst Oscar host of all time. I will find something better to do on Oscar night.

Seriously, folks. Respect yourselves. Skip the telecast. Watch movies instead. You love movies and—unlike the Oscars—they love you right back.​

'Szechwan's' Bandleader, On Keeping Brecht Lively

This month's hot ticket has been on Fourth Street, where Taylor Mac is bringing Brecht back to life in the critically lauded Good Person of Szechwan. Rollicking, zany and heartfelt, it is everything we've been told Brecht isn't supposed to be—and it is absolutely marvelous. Although the show is built upon Mac's typically white-hot all-singing, all-dancing performance, Good Person is bolstered by its house band: The Lisps.

A Brooklyn-based band whose instruments include a suitcase full of bells and a built-in washboard, their look is whimsical but their sound has meat. In 2012, they premiered Futurity, a musical of their own. Astor Place Riot spoke this morning with bandleader César Alvarez, about doing musicals yourself, and how to keep Brecht from boring. Good Person of Szechwan runs through February 26th. I suggest bludgeoning whomever you have to in order to secure a ticket.

How did you get attached to this project?

Basically, Taylor Mac is an acquaintance and sort of a hero of mine. They were trying to nail down what they were doing musically with the piece, and Taylor said, "What about César Alvarez, and that band The Lisps?" They were looking for somebody whose musical approach would help them tell the story, but would also be fun and wacky and not quite on the nose. If you read what Brecht said about music in his plays, it's that the music should be its own, standalone thing. 

What's great about having a band doing the music is that we're an autonomous creative unit. We have our own style and approach and performative language, and we bring that to the piece. We're not a pit band—hired guns who show up to play the score—but a creative group that's there alongside, commenting on the story, critiquing it, and enriching it. What's fun about the production is that it's totally wacky and fun and ridiculous, but it's also very Brechtian without being academic.

What do you mean by that?

Brecht is an incredible lion of dramatic writing, and he came up with an entire philosophy of what theater should do. In the translation and canonization of that brilliant idea—of theater as a way to raise the consciousness of humanity—it's become academicized. The usual translation of Brecht's German word—which I'm never gonna say right—is "the alienation effect." [Director] Lear [deBessonet] translates it differently. She translates it as "making strange."

Translating it as "alienation effect" has led people to think that Brecht wants you to alienate your audience. But Brecht was a populist, a fan of vaudeville and silent film and jazz. He wasn't interested in alienating his audience—he just didn't want to hypnotize them. This is Lear's genius—she's figured out a way to take this incredibly dense work, and make it both poignant and relevant, but also really fun to watch.

Between this and your 2012 musical Futurity, The Lisps have gotten very theatrical. How come?

A band can be very insular. We love each other to death, but after seven years, you get sick of working with the same people. When we wrote a musical, we suddenly had twelve new band members!

Now we're a band that's gotten really good at stepping out of our comfort zone. As the MP3 generation takes shape, what you start seeing is bands redesigning themselves for a more collaborative and networked world. As analog as our band is, what we're doing theatrically has everything to do with the fact that it's not enough to just make albums any more. People are searching so desperately for performance, real life experience and three dimensional entertainment, that a lot of bands are starting to reach outside the typical touring and recording format.

It's the best thing we've ever done as a band.

I'm working on a musical right now with a friend of mine who's a musician and a composer. He's never written a musical before—what would you tell him?

My advice is, do everything the opposite of how you think you should. We didn't have any idea how to put on a musical, but we just put it up. Everyone who actually does musicals would say, "Don't do that!"

We just played our musical for our friends, giving us the chance to workshop it in this incredible way. We never played our musical with just a piano, we always had the full band there. That's what helped us get it produced, that we just did it ourselves. 

I'm dying to see a DIY musical culture. When bands and composers and electronic musicians start pulling their music out of the forty minute set in the bar, and start telling a story. How cool would it be if there were an indie musical culture in New York?

The word "musical" carries a lot of baggage. But in the end, it's a deeply American form that's influenced everyone in some way. Everyone's seen musicals. Everyone's seen The Lion King. Everyone was in their high school musical. Even the most disaffected indie kid was in Grease or Hair. The form is much more open than Broadway might have led you to believe.

Are you planning on more musicals?

Right now I'm working on a space musical, which merges the experience of a musical with that of a video game. I'm interested in thinking about how changing technology is going to alter the way we experience musical theater. And we're continuing to work on Futurity, looking towards its New York premiere, which will be imminent.

Hasty Explanation For Radio Silence: A New Play!

My mother always told me that, when cooking for people, to never apologize for the food. If it's bad, don't serve it. But if it's good enough for the table, don't prejudice your guests by saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry—the chicken pot pie turned out awful" just before they take their first bite.

I'm not sure why I'm telling you that, except that it's always good advice, but I did want to apologize for the week's silence. I'd like to be able to say that I spent the last seven days on a transcontinental bender, but the real explanation for my uncharacteristic lack of blather has been more ordinary: I've been finishing the rewrite of a new play. 

It's nearly done now, so expect regular updates to resume this afternoon. And if any of you are interested in reading a just-completed comic mystery about murder and mayhem in off Broadway theater, drop me a line.

How Does David Ives Start A Short Play? Quickly

Like some sort of magical flying rabbit, Primary Stages' current revival of All In The Timing is light, fluffy, and will have you home by 10 o'clock. When most Broadway shows threaten to end just before 11 pm, that's a value not to be understated. But that's not all! All In The Timing is simply delightful. Don't believe me? Ask the Times.

Last week, I spoke to director John Rando about what makes this evening of one acts click. Today, the interview ran at Bullett. Right now, you can read it.

As you’ve directed it, All In The Timing rockets past quick enough that the actors barely have a chance to breathe. What makes that speed possible?
David’s writing is so distilled, and so like music. My job is teaching his tempo. It’s a very detailed, specific process, where an actor has to find a through line, find a character, find an emotional reality—and at the same time recognize that the language is heightened and sharp and quick. Being able to do that takes a lot of musicianship from the actors.

This seems like a collection of plays that, directed badly, could fall flat on its face. How did you avoid that?

With David’s short plays, the first twelve lines of the play are the heart of the show. Getting the beginning of the play right—visually and emotionally—makes it all make sense. We’ve got three monkeys sitting around and typing and randomly trying to produce Hamlet. It’s ridiculous. But making that very clear at the very beginning allows the audience to catch up quickly. Because they’re short plays, you don’t have time for exposition. Your exposition’s over before you know it.

I like that. If, after the first twelve lines, you haven't set everything up, you're doing it wrong. David Ives knows. He's a funny guy.

On a related note, am I the only person who's sick of the phrase "an evening of one acts"? I used it above, and I'm not proud of myself. In the intro to the Rando interview, I called it "a clutch of one act comedies." I'm going to keep trying to come up with clever new words for that kind of thing. The day's theme is vocabulariety. You heard it here first. And probably last.

The State Of The Union: Strong, Stronger, Strongest

A nifty little piece from Monday's Times goes into the modern history of the phrase, "The state of the union is strong"—a speechwriting cliche that is now impossible for a president to avoid, lest he appear a negative Nancy. Like other irritating aspects of the President's annual address, this bit of fluff is the fault of Ronald Reagan, whose brand was optimism, and whose superpower was an ability to wring life from meaningless phrases. It was not always thus, says the Times!

Presidents once used other words to describe the state of our union. President Jimmy Carter liked to call it “sound.” President Harry S. Truman liked to call it “good.” President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a lyrical moment, described the state of the union in 1965 as “free and restless, growing and full of hope.”

And when things were not going well, they said so.

“I must say to you that the state of the union is not good,” President Gerald R. Ford said in 1975, citing high unemployment, slow growth and soaring deficits. He added, “I’ve got bad news, and I don’t expect much, if any, applause.”

To prevent future generations from being bored to death by their elected officials, I hereby provide a list of adjectives, free of charge, to describe our union's state. Because the speech is nothing but political theater—have I mentioned lately how much I hate that phrase?—it doesn't matter if the chosen adjective is accurate, or even sensical. It's Washington—nobody's listening anyway, not even Ted Nugent.

So, the state of the union is:

• Bumping
  
• Crunchtastic
• Even flabbier than expected
• Disgruntled
• Over-caffeinated 
• Dimwitted
• Zesty
• Zestacular
• Zestacious
• Sexually mature
• Stuck in traffic
• Arachnophobic
• Increasingly horny
• Pretty drunk for a Tuesday

Million Dollar Concept: Sleepytime TV

An overactive radiator has made sleep a luxury for me the last few weeks. By six AM, oppressive dry heat forces me awake, and I stagger out of bed as crispy and delicious as a supermarket rotisserie chicken. Because I can get five times as much work done from 6 AM to 10 AM as I can from 10 AM to 5, this is not such a bad thing. I've had an uncommonly productive winter—writing, reading and consuming oatmeal at an unprecedented rate—but I have also been indulging in a more dangerous habit. I have been thinking about morning television.

It should be the insomniac's friend. The news is soft, the anchors are smiling, and everyone is drinking coffee. (Or pretending to, anyway. What's in the mug, Scarborough?! What's in the mug?!) This format makes sense for happy viewers. But who is happy in the morning? I ask this as a borderline-morning person—someone who doesn't mind getting out of bed to type words on a computer, but who does not want to have to smile while he's doing it.

I think there's a market for sleepyfied morning television. Instead of wide-eyed weathermen and giddy anchors, I want to see people on TV who look like me. The on-camera personalities should be fresh out of bed, hair mussed and pajamas wrinkled. I want yawns, coughs and bleary-eyed, awkward silences. I would like a few members of the news team who fucking hate being awake at this hour, and aren't afraid to let their coworkers know it. And, whenever possible, I'd like one of the correspondents to be hungover. I want a news show that says, "Hate to be awake? So do we."

The news reports can be mumbled or altogether silent. I see a segment where the lead anchor scans the papers quietly, and then half-heartedly attempts to explain something interesting that he read—something like a concussed Pat McKiernan. As the morning wears on and the caffeine takes hold, the anchors can become a bit more lively. By ten AM, they're either wide awake or on their way back to bed.

The show to pair this with, of course, would be drunk nightly news. At six o'clock the anchors are just starting on their second round, and everyone is feeling good. "Terrible news from Afghanistan," says our overly confident chief political correspondent. "And I am here to tell you all about it."

By the ten o'clock news, though, the smiles are beginning to droop. Most of the hooch is gone, and coherence has followed it out the door. The anchors are necking, the weatherman is drawing dirty pictures with his telestrator, and on-camera interviews are becoming unnecessarily aggressive. The sports report is incredibly emphatic, and even if by the end we're not sure which team won, we know that "The Knicks are fucking awesome this year, and the Mets are goddamned bullshit." Because the crew has been drinking too, it's hard to tell what's really going on. But we're positive that everyone's having a good time.

The next morning, we sound the alarm for the morning show, confident that we won't be subjected to any false smiles, and that everyone will be authentically giddy if they find that Mario Batali is coming to show them how to make the perfect breakfast pizza.

Embarrassing Dating & Embarrassing Congressmen

And while I'm posting clips, there are two more that I was too busy—read: lazy—to share with you good people. Ze first comes from Narratively, one in a collection of vignettes about the pains, horror and strife that come with dating. It's an incredibly embarrassing story from an incredibly embarrassing time: the middle of my freshman year of college.

It seemed I was the only person on campus not getting laid hourly during my freshman year at NYU. The trouble was a steadfast commitment to a long distance girlfriend whom I loved too much to cheat on.

Long distance relationships are tricky because long distance sex is unfeasible, for now. So I dreamed up a Valentine’s Day surprise to return to her bed as soon as possible.

She expected me back in Nashville late February 14th, but I decided to cut class and go home a day early. I’d tell her to step outside her house, where I would be waiting for hugs and kisses. It would blow her goddamned mind.

You'll never guess it, but complications ensue. While I'm bothered by the Narratively editors insistance on splitting my work up into tiny little paragraphs, I think the story turned out well. They're fun dudes to work for, and I'm hoping to do more of it in the future. 

The second post is another one at Bullett, this time about the already-forgotten controversy over historical inaccuracy in Lincoln. It's mostly worth it for the alliteration of "Kushner Krushes Kongressman." At the end, I reach some conclusions about the truth, which I hate.

It’s silly to demand accuracy in film. The IMDB comments section for your average historical drama is populated by whinging history buffs who don’t understand that movies are not supposed to be textbooks. Anything that must be sacrificed for the sake of the story should be sacrificed. When I first heard of Courtney’s ire, I was naturally sympathetic. It seems like such an easy thing to get right, and Lincoln’s grotesque run time turned me against the movie long ago. But Kushner has a way with words, and he talked me into it. If he changed those votes on purpose, then he had a good reason. The historical record is meaningless. Storytelling is king.

Enjoy your Tuesday, you wonderful literate person, you.

Tuesday Morning Conspiracy Theories: Netflix Edition

Like most other good New Yorkers, I used this weekend's snow-splatter as an excuse to spend three straight days half-naked and fully hungover. By the time cabin fever had set in, I was full of chili and ideas. Namely, this snowstorm was no accident. I explored my theory yesterday afternoon, at Bullett.

As last week’s blizzard bore down on the northeast—and by the way, have you ever noticed how storms are always bearing down on places in news ledes?—New York City hunkered down, Broadway auctioned off tickets in a firesale, and Weather.com turned into Kent Brockman. In the city’s media landscape, fear reigned. But somewhere in the shadowy land of Los Gatos, California, the overlords of Netflix were smiling. For them, everything was going to plan.

Essentially, I think the entire thing was a Netflixian plot to make sure that everybody gorged on House of Cards. And I think that entire show is a plot by the pork farmers of America to make sure that the nation buys more ribs. Seriously, the ribs in that show look goddamned amazing. Pork barrel politics in the most literal sense.

In short, I am issuing a plea for ribs. Please cram as many as you can into your USB ports and email them my way.

Need A Smile For Your Umbrella? I Know A Guy

Victor Hugo's 1869 melodrama The Man Who Laughs is best-remembered as a story about a smile. Its hero is Gwynplaine, a young boy condemned to a life in the circus after his face is carved into a gruesome, permanent grin. The character, famously played by Conrad Veidt in a 1928 silent film adaptation, is among the influences for Batman's Joker. It is not a long leap from Veidt, to Nicholson, to Ledger.

Through February 24th, the Stolen Chair Theatre Company presents an adaptation of Hugo's story, performed in the manner of a silent film. Completely without dialogue, it tells its story through creative staging, talented acting, and 102 projected title cards. It is not a parody of the genre; it is not a museum piece. Instead, it is one of the loveliest bits of theater New York has seen this year. This afternoon, Astor Place Riot spoke to director Jon Stancato about the Joker, his actors, and the prosthetic that keeps his laughing man smiling.

I saw this play on Saturday, and I haven't been able to get Dave Droxler, who plays Gwynplaine, out of my mind. You guys got really lucky with him, didn't you?

It's kismet. I can't imagine anybody better able to tackle the specific challenges of the role. He can break your heart and make you crack into laughter in the same second. To mimic Gwynplaine's permanent smile, the actor has to wear a prosthetic device which holds his face in that smile position. Stephanie Cox-Williams, our designer, has created a prosthetic that he can wear for ninety minutes. There's been a lot of talk over the years about how to create the Joker character, the man who laughs, and she's done a very good job creating something wearable.

Dave has basically no use of his mouth in the piece. He's without voice, and all of his expression has to come from his eyes and the movement of his body. 

How comfortable is that prosthetic?

I think Dave is a very, very generous soul, in that he tells me it's wearable because he knows I would be kept up nights if he didn't. The first few drafts of it, he would take off the piece, and the smile lines would remain on his face for a few days afterwards. He's such a soldier that he would say no, no, it's okay. But we worked with Stephanie to make sure that wasn't happening as often. The latex scars that run up the sides of his cheek help deflect some of that discomfort. We have a little spray water bottle that he uses to keep himself hydrated between scenes, because he can't close his mouth to drink. 

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I think he really, really enjoys the challenge that this creative limitation gives him. I think there's something really satisfying in knowing that Conrad Veidt and Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger have all had to deal with this challenge in different ways.

Does Dave have a favorite Joker?

I'm not sure! I'll have to ask him. He posted a picture on Facebook of a figurine of the Jack Nicholson Joker standing behind the Heath Ledger Joker.

My favorite is the Mark Hammill one, from Batman: The Animated Series. But he doesn't have to wear a prosthetic.

In the 1928 Man Who Laughs, it had to be a silent film, because Conrad Veidt couldn't speak at all with his device in. It was an internal denture that kept him from moving his lips at all. Dave at least can comfortably mouth words.

But Veidt could take his out between takes.

Dave's stuck there for ninety minutes.

If your actor can't move his mouth and can't use his voice, how do you help him build an interesting character?

Luckily, we only worked with actors who were very adept at scripting their own bodies. I'm a movement-based director, but not a choreographer, and I can't come in with a vision of how everybody should be moving in this play. We bring in specific bits of the scenario, little plot points that need to be accomplished, and give the actors an opportunity to build the movement sequences themselves. Based on what they've done, we're able to refine it and say, this moment was really clear, this moment wasn't. It becomes an editing process.

We spent a lot of time exploring how to express very simple emotions with the body. We watched a lot of movies together. We read a lot of articles. We learned what was okay and what wasn't within a silent film. You talk about how directors shouldn't give line readings? I've been giving chin readings. There's something about the silent film aesthetic that can only be accessed with a lifted chin. There's something about the way the light and shadow fall on the chin. Every actor in the play got the same note from me again and again: "Chin up, eyes wider! Chin up, eyes wider!"

A big part of any silent movie is the title cards. Did you and the playwright, Kiran Rikhye, have any kind of rule of thumb about when a card was needed and when it wasn't?

She and I never had formal discussions about when an intertitle was necessary and when it wasn't. The script I had to work with was the series of intertitles and the staging written in between. Almost every rehearsal, she'd get a sense of when the intertitles no longer felt necessary, and when we needed another one. She was very careful not to overstep the bounds of what the medium is allowed to do.

I loved when you do close-ups, with the actor downstage, looking at the audience, his face lit in golden light. Those were the moments when I most felt like I was watching a silent movie.

What I love about those moments is, those are moments when we're most directly emulating a film trick. And it should completely fail, because this actor, instead of being forty feet tall, is just sitting there, five to six feet tall, in front of that down light. But they do feel that they are that big.

Well that's great! You've created a bit of magic. Even you don't know why it works.

What I said early on was that I wanted this to be magical, I wanted to create a sense of wonder in the audience with every lights-up. And the team brought that. I've now seen it dozens of times, and the magic never fades.