I Am A Writer And Here Are Things That I Wrote

Did you know I am a professional writer? That's right. I type up words—words just like these—and then I put them in a special, top secret order, and mail them off to companies who pay me for them. Truly, it is a wacky life.​

Lately I have been so busy writing things professionally that I haven't had time to tell you about them on this, my blog. Allow me to catch you up, in reverse chronological order, because we writers are saucy like that.​

First, I reviewed Here Lies Love​ for Howlround​, a wonderful website whose name is hard to say out loud. (It's not quite The Rural Juror​, but it's a toughie.) If you click on that link, you can see a picture of me wearing a cat. I talked about this play a bit after I saw it, and what it was like to dance next to David Byrne, but now you can see my fully-fleshed-out critical whatnots. Here is a sample:

Eight drumbeats thud out, a martial pulse that sounds suspiciously like the famous opening bass line to a Talking Heads classic. Two lovers march towards each other through the crowd, and the audience wonders—“They’re not covering ‘Psycho Killer,’ are they? They wouldn't dare!” And then the lovers kiss, the room explodes in disco, and “Psycho Killer” is a distant memory.

Until that moment, I was wondering if David Byrne was the only reason anyone had come to Here Lies Love, the former Talking Head’s new musical, which plays at the Public Theater through June 2. In the last decade, Byrne has dabbled in conceptual art, producing work like 2008’s Playing the Building, a pleasant-enough art installation in southern Manhattan that probably did not deserve the attention drawn by its creator’s name. In his eagerness to cross genres, Byrne is like a much more talented, much less irritating James Franco. Conceptual art is best left to the professionals, but rock is Byrne's beat, and Here Lies Love is a sparkling reminder of why he became a downtown icon in the first place. His name may get them in the door, but the music will make them stay.

​Pretty good, eh? If you like that, you'll love this article I wrote for the Observer​ about Europa Editions, a scrappy independent publisher whose new line of World Noir makes me so happy I could just sneeze. Seriously, I read almost nothing but crime fiction, and these guys have got the goods.

Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests,Total Chaos. But he still has time for a little bass. Fennel-stuffed and grilled, maybe, with a lasagna sauce and peppers, “gently fried.” Some friends are coming over for pastis and Lagavulin and gin rummy by the sea, and they expect the copper to cook.

“I was finally calming down,” Montale thinks. “Cooking had that effect on me. My mind could escape the twisted labyrinth of thought and concentrate on smells and tastes. And pleasure.”

The kitchen is an escape for this harried gumshoe, but Total Chaos, part of author Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, is not mere escapist literature. Mr. Izzo used detective fiction to shine a light on France’s rugged southern port and the corruption that turned his stunning hometown into one of the most dangerous cities in Western Europe. The city loved him for it, and when he died in 2000, Marseilles’s bookstores closed their doors and filled their shop windows with Mr. Izzo’s pioneering novels.

​Pretty heavy stuff? So heavy that maybe you'd like to read something about sports? Or, since this article is on The Classical, perhaps I should say sporps. I write about the proposed Flushing Meadows MLS stadium, and why handing it over to one of English soccer's many billionaires is a totally unfun idea.

This is the dead period in the English Premier League. The title race ended weeks ago, with Manchester United claiming their eleventy-millionth championship in honor of retiring rage-legend Sir Alex Ferguson. At the end, there was nothing left to wonder about but whether or not Wigan Athletic will escape relegation. Coming as it does with the start of spring, this annual tepid period carries a pleasant taste of the English countryside—village greens and quiet pubs and all the other stuff Ray Davies just couldn't get out of his system. But for Manchester City, who will finish second this year, it is a time of seething discontent.

Last May, the blue half of Manchester won its first title since 1966, in five minutes of madness that made the madcap end to the 2011 baseball season look contrived. (Relive it here, accompanied for good or ill by the musical stylings of The Verve.) Manchester City won the FA Cup the year before, and will try for it again this weekend, taking on hard-luck Wigan in a match as well balanced as Goliath vs. David’s asthmatic younger brother. With all their recent success, the placid American fan would expect them to be happy. “You can’t win them all,” we tell them, naively. But if City loses on Saturday, a dapper gent named Roberto Mancini will probably be out of a job. The Premier League is no place for sentiment.

And in a league where a bad season is rewarded with relegation, there is no such thing as rebuilding. (Jeff Fisher, for instance, would not have lasted in England.) Sheikh Mansour, City’s doe-eyed billionaire owner, has dumped nearly half-a-billion pounds into the club, and has no interest in passing a springtime afternoon over a pint of bitter, wistfully crooning, “Wait ‘till next year.” The Premier League system is a mad one, driven by greed unheard of in American sports. So it is maybe or maybe not a good thing that it appears to be on its way to Flushing.

​What's that? You want more? Well I just remembered that I never linked to my Richard Foreman profile on here. Lordy, have I been slacking. It's got a pretty good lede:

One morning last month at the Public Theater, Richard Foreman was having trouble with rage. On a stage crowded with pillows, stuffed animals and string, an actor droned through a monotone monologue. He made it halfway through before Mr. Foreman, the last standard-bearer of the 1970s avant-garde, stopped him in the middle of a line about “incalculable rage.”

“What’s another word for rage?” Mr. Foreman asked the room. “Rage sounds weak.”

“Fury?” suggested the actors. “Ire? Wrath?”

“Maybe it needs another leading word. Not incalculable rage. Black rage?”

The actors offered more suggestions—“blind rage,” “mad rage” “octopus rage”—but their director’s attention had shifted to the lightboard. As the actors waited, he conferred with his staff of 10—some Public employees, some interns—flipping through light cues and eventually casting the theater into darkness. By the time the lights were sorted, and he had settled on “incalculable rage … Rage!” it was time to break for lunch.

It Is Fun To Dance Beside David Byrne

When I was in 9th grade, my favorite album (non-ironic) was Stop Making Sense​, and my favorite television show (semi-ironic) was Degrass​i​. Both Talking Heads and Degrassi had guitar players: one of them a bipolar ham, the other a high-minded goofball with suspiciously dancin' feet. Last night, I saw both of these guitar players.

I'm reviewing Here Lies Love​, David Byrne's new musical, for Howlround's​ new NewCrit program. (I realized last night that Howlround is really hard to say—even worse than Rural Juror​. New NewCrit is just as bad.) To that end, I scored a ticket to last night's opening at the Public. I thought the show was still in previews. If I'd realized it was opening night, I would have dressed a little better. If I'd known this was an option, I'd have made like David Byrne, and worn a jumpsuit.

For details on the production, you'll have to wait on my review, which won't run until it's been written. (And it won't be written until after lunch, at the very least.) But I can say that David Byrne likes his new musical, and so do I. He spent the whole show dancing, bobbing his head, and singing along, providing a nice visual for what a relevant sixty year-old rock star looks like. Seeing him in a theater is not much of a novelty. There's a How I Met Your Mother ​bit about how every New Yorker has seen Woody Allen—that's how I feel about Byrne. I've seen him perform, seen him riding his bike, and seen him (for some reason) give a Powerpoint presentation about architecture. Last night, I got to see him have a very good time.​​

At one point during the play, the audience is forced to line dance. I am okay at dancing, but awful at following instructions, and felt very awkward the entire time. So did everyone else, besides David Byrne, who had presumably had time to practice. He danced behind me, having a good time, but not quite as good a time as the elderly Filipino man who was dancing to my right. ​

After the show ended, the audience didn't want to leave. Filing down to the lobby, we found ourselves being given cocktails, and welcomed to an after party for which I felt distinctly under dressed and quite happy to attend. Craig from Degrassi, who spent the entire play looking ashen faced and confused, was gone by this point. I drank four or five piña coladas, and left after an hour or so, when the sugar in the not-very-boozy cocktails started to make my teeth hurt. I had a marvelous time, and so did David Byrne, and it makes me happy to know that we both enjoyed our Sunday evenings for somewhat similar reasons.

An Hour Or So Later...​

​I just realized this post needs some music. Because the above image made me think of it:

Video from Talking Heads "Naked" 1988. Enjoy sound and vision.

Man, I love this song.​

At The Public, An Honored Brit Has The Time Of His Life

The Detroit riot of 1967 started in the wee hours of July 23rd, when police launched what was supposed to be a routine raid on an after-hours club, or "blind pig." Expecting an ordinary late night crowd, they stumbled onto an 82 person party given in honor of two returning Vietnam vets. Rather than back off, the police attempted to arrest the entire group, setting off a five day riot that left forty-three dead.

Yesterday, the Public Theater started previews for Detroit '67, a new play by Dominique Morisseau that begins during the run-up to the riot. A Public Lab production, ​Detroit '67 runs through March 17 before zipping uptown to the Classical Theatre of Harlem, where it will run March 19 to April 14. Set in one of Detroit's blind pigs, it offers political drama by way of family comedy, backed up by the kind of lush Motown soundtrack one would expect from after-hours Detroit. This morning, Astor Place Riot spoke to director Kwame Kwei-Armah, an Englishman who makes his home in Maryland, where he is the artistic director of Baltimore's Center Stage.

What appeals to you about this play?

From page one, I was laughing my head off. By about page four, I wrote a note, "Please don't let this play be bad. I love this." Some plays do that—you read the first half and it's great, and then it all collapses. So first and foremost, the thing that attracted me was the wonderfulness of the script. Without that, there's nothing.

This play asks about why, in Detroit in '67, people reacted the way they did. Why was there this automatic combustion? But more importantly, it is a brother and sister play. One is a dreamer, and the other is a pragmatist, and the play beautifully explores how those tools both hinder or perpetuate one's life.

And it's got music! Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson—this brother and sister have quite the 8-track collection.

Correct! Oh my God. The truth is that we did a couple of workshops and readings of the play before we went into production, and I never used the music, because I didn't want any of us to think that somehow the music can save us. The music is the icing, but the play does 99.9—no, the play does 100% of its own work. I don't want people leaving the theater saying that the music was wonderful. They walked in knowing that the music was wonderful. They need to leave talking about the play that just punched them in the stomach.

And this is going up around the same time as Motown: The Musical. 

Yes! It is, isn't it? And the funny thing is, we share a costume designer.

I saw that you were made an OBE this year. Tell me a little about that, for Americans who might not be familiar with the honor.

Basically, it's the Queen's jubilee honors. Twice a year, the Queen invests and gives honor to people across Britain whose work—it's like your freedom medal, that the President gives. It's not just artists—it's a bit difficult to describe. It's the one they give you before you go to to Sir or Lord, if you continue to be a good boy. At Center Stage, we call it Knight Light.

How did it feel?

Magnificent. It's a tremendous honor. In fact, the day that it was announced in the media, I didn't say anything about it, and I got maybe five hundred hits on Facebook. It made me cry three times. The outpouring of love that I received—everyone should receive that in their lifetime, and not just at their funeral.

Why did Oskar and Mandy think you were right for this?

In Dominique and I's first meeting together, she asked the same question. I threw it back to her, asking, "Are you actually saying, 'Negro, what the hell does your British ass know about Detroit?'" And she laughed at that.

I think the reason is that, as a playwright, I had written a similar play. It's not similar in its dialogue, in its story, in anything that happens in it, but it is similar in theme. Oskar's brilliance is that he said, "I think you know where Detroit '67 is."

Oskar Eustis knows how to put people together.

And what a beautiful combination! I have had the time of my life. We really have developed the play over the course of the year. One of the great things about Dominique—not only is she a wonderful writer, but she's a wonderful rewriter.

Forgive me for repeating myself, but I've had the time of my life. I'm a man of my theater. The Public does ten shows a year. I do seven. So it's not like I don't know what it takes, but I tell you, god the Public is run well. They know how to look after a writer, they know how to look after a director, they know how to look after a play. I've learned a lot, watching them, about how to run my own company.

Anything in particular?

New play development. How one invests in new plays. How one nurtures writers through the process. How one communicates. It's small things, but they made me go, "Uh-huh." Clarity of leadership, and clarity of communication about aims and objectives.

I'm seeing masters at work.

The Hardest Working Man In Monologuing

Earlier this year, when monologuist Mike Daisey got himself into hot water for lying on National Public Radio, I was conflicted. Actually, no—I was giddy with the kind of spiteful joy that comes from watching someone successful take a big step forward, look down, and find they are ankle deep in shit. Plagiarism scandals amuse me endlessly, and while Mike's screw-up wasn't plagiarism, I found it compelling for the same reason: we like to see cheats caught.

Daisey apologized, saying that he should not have brought Steve Jobs to This American Life—not because it contained falsehoods, but because it was a theatrical work unbound by the constraints of journalism. That struck me as a cop out, for the show's run at the Public theater was billed as non-fiction, and the audience came to be told something true. Embellishing details was a betrayal of that trust, and the fact that Mike revised the show to remove the offending bits tells me that he understood this.

I didn't feel conflicted until I heard that the Public was bringing him back for a run of six original shows, starting in October. Screw that guy, I thought. He cheated, he lost, game over. But then I interviewed him, and I was happily reminded that artists—everybody, really—are much more complicated than the news media can comprehend. 

"At PS 122 I used to do a new show every Monday night," he told me last week. "I would give them these sort of evocative titles, but I wouldn't actually work on them until an hour before the audience was there. As they would come in, I would create the outline and perform the monologue. It was really pivotal into making me the artist I am now."

Daisey's extemporaneous style makes such speed possible, and the simplicity of his set-up, which requires nothing but a table, notes, and a glass of water, keeps it cheap.

"The work develops faster than it does in traditional American theater," he said, "in large part because we own the whole widget."

Even when off-the-cuff, Daisey's work seems scripted—polish given by a mind with an uncommon ability to quickly organize stories in a meaningful, often powerful way. Lots of people tell stories. Daisey is a storytelling machine.

It goes on like that. Mike Daisey screwed up badly, and to atone he is working as hard as he can at the thing he does best. Perhaps I was the last person to reach this conclusion, but the guy definitely deserves a second chance. I'm glad I wasn't too stubborn to give him one.