1:04 p.m. - 2007-03-26
The IntuiCoaster
You know this feeling: you are going up. You were in line for way too long, after a long day of walking around the amusement park--Disney, Six Flags, the one two towns over that's still independent--and your feet were hurting, but you kept getting closer and closer and the dopplered shrieks grew louder as you got closer to the lucky people already out of the line flying through the air, and you got to the point where you could see people getting in and out of the cars, and then you thought it would be your turn but you'd have to wait for one more car. You got on, and you strapped in, and it jerked forward, and now you're climbing up up up up up up and the track is clickclickclickclickclicking and you just have those few more seconds to talk to your friends before you plummet down and out of control, the possibility of the car jumping off the tracks and taking your life with it always somewhere in your mind, hanging on to the back of your brain as you move through the air at speeds that God and evolution never intended you to survive. Just a few more seconds as the clicking slows and you crest that hill, and then . . .
That feeling.
I was terrified of rollercoasters as a kid. I liked the carousels and the ferris wheels but I was rarely up for anything more hardcore than the Mad Hatter's teacups at Disneyland. I didn't like heights, so the thought of being forced to not only rise up but to descend very, very rapidly was not one I cared to dwell on. I can't remember when it changed. It wasn't overnight. I think the first rollercoaster I managed was Space Mountain, which is dark enough that I didn't have to deal with the visual that accompanied the clickclickclick that, in my head, was a death rattle. I waited through the long line and, to my surprise, loved it. Then came Fiesta Texas, which was in my hometown and which eventually became a Six Flags (but I, like all natives of the time who grew up with Six Flags in Houston, still call it Fiesta Texas). I fell hard for the Superman rollercoaster, which was built along a cliff and which let your feet dangle off the edge. The Rattler was a different story. It was, for some time, the largest wooden rollercoaster in the country. This meant that in addition to being not as big as the metal and plastic rollercoasters, it was noisy, uncomfortable, and dangerous. It didn't impress me, and it hurt. Despite that, I have reached the point where I can't resist rollercoasters. Lift me up, drop me down, turn me 'round and upside down. I'm there.
This feeling has become iconic for me in relation to experimental theatre. Let me tell you about one of the proudest moments in my memory. It was December of 2000, or possibly late November. I was, as many of you know, a member of the board of the University of Pennsylvania's only experimental theatre company, Intuitons (the name is spelled correctly; we were not Intuitions, nor were we, as one poster once said, Intuitons, Penn's only Eskimo theatre company). We had just had perhaps the most disastrous show since I'd started working with them (it was my fifth semester). We had decided to do a piece without a director, not realizing that not only is a director a primary organizer and go-between for cast and crew, he or she or ze is also the ideal scapegoat, who you blame when things go wrong. Things started going wrong, fast, and without a director, we all blamed each other. Some of us were ready to kill each other by the end of things. It was truly painful, and the artistic product was nowhere near good enough to be worth the cost; it was as fractured and washed out as the people involved. I still have traumatic flashbacks to being backstage, knowing that I would have to go on and pretend to be happy with what we'd done, like we were celebrating, and thinking "I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS! I HATE THIS SHOW! I HATE THESE PEOPLE! GAAAAAAH!!!" It nearly took us down. It nearly took us out.
We were looking for the play for the next semester. We'd received three offers. One was for a short piece that looked to offend for its own sake, which wasn't terribly thrilling. Then there was a musical which I believe I at one point started calling "Les Miserables Pays Tommy's Rent" because I am a mean-spirited, heartless bitch. The main contender, however, came from a friend of mine, and of everyone on the board, who wanted to do an urban-style version of Into the Woods. The director was good. Into the Woods would be a surefire crowd pleaser. The experimentation, while an interesting commentary on the piece, would not be so drastic as to risk taking anything away from one of Stephen Sondheim's best, most beloved pieces.
Which was why I didn't want to do it.
If you're friends with anyone long enough, you reach a point where there is The Thing You Don't Talk About. The time when one of you overstepped a boundary, or did something wrong, or there was a strong disagreement. The friendship recovers. It might even be stronger for it. But this is not the thing that you laugh about later. It's The Thing You Don't Talk About. My being the main point of resistance to Intuitons doing Into the Woods is The Thing Peter and I Don't Talk About. I still feel bad, but I will say now what I said then: I was thoroughly convinced that another Penn theatre group, Quadramics, would choose to do Peter's show, and that it would be a success. I was right. It was. I worked on it, as did almost everyone in Intuitons. But because I knew it would work, I didn't think it would be good for a theatre group that called itself experimental.
Other people disagreed. We had just watched an experiment fail. Knowing a theatre piece would work sounded pretty good to a lot of people. But I thought we'd be wasting our time. We needed to bet high and roll the dice with our eyes closed. We needed to prove to ourselves that we could fail and continue to do theatre that was radically challenging. I was in the Penn Bookstore with Leslie, another board member, and we were talking about how we both felt this way, we both weren't feeling like any of the shows we'd received were Intuishows (we were big on Intui-as a prefix). I thought about how cool it would be to do something that was installation as well as theatre, something that would bring out the strengths in all our members. I thought about this idea I'd had after reading about Karen Finley, how she covered herself in chocolate to represent how women were shit on, and how I thought that wasn't going to work because you'd still smell the chocolate, and how interesting it would be to play with smell and taste in a theatre piece. And I said to Leslie, "It would be really great if each one of us took one of the seven deadly sins and did a piece on it, and we put them all together, even having them in different rooms that people could walk through. Just a thought."
Then came the meeting. Which show would it be. I think we rejected the musical first. It came down to the offensive piece or Into the Woods. It was not a fun debate. It was going long into the night. We were tired, and restless, and it was clear that none of us were passionate about any of it. I finally said, "Look, to be honest, I don't think we should do either of these shows." Alex, our chair, was annoyed, and said in a sharper tone than he normally used, "Alright, Rudy, what DO you think we should do?"
"Well, there are seven of us. We're all good artists. What if we each took one of the seven deadly sins and did a piece on it, whether it's a scene or a piece of visual art or whatever. THAT'S what I think we should do."
There was silence. Then the corners of mouths began to twitch upward. People started talking about what we could do. The energy, for the first time that night, was picking up. And then I heard a noise. I heard the clickclickclickclickclickclick in the back of my head. I could feel the rollercoaster going up up up up up up. My hands clenched like I was holding on to the bar, ready for the first huge plummet down down down to who knows where it was going to go.
The decision was made. We had to contact some very disappointed people, which sucked. But we came back together. We confirmed the idea of doing the sins show. The Seven Deadly Sins is still, I think, the best theatre project I have ever been involved in. Five board members divied up the sins; Jeff got Gluttony and Greed, I got Pride and Lust. The scenes ranged from the hilariously absurd to the deeply political to the stunningly horrific as we moved from Envy (Alison's piece: two women in an art gallery, wondering if one can truly envy an object) to Pride (mine: a set of intertwined monologues about identity politics, taking pride in race, sexuality, and gender into the realm of loathing other and the self), to Gluttony (Jeff's: the Devil's own infomercial for food), to Lust (mine: women and men dancing--to Tori Amos, shocker of shockers--in chocolate and champagne, only to be attacked and drowned by religious fanatics looking to cleanse their sins), to Greed (Jeff's: an audience game show where greed is good, or is it?), to Sloth (Alex's: a video on a pill that will take away all your stress and more) to Wrath (Leslie's: a rapist and an abusive mother are ripped limb from limb by the ghosts of their victims). We had a lavish set, and the best costumes. The publicity campaign was amazing, with teasers and posters done by an AMAZING artist (the ink drawing of Envy still haunts me). I still cherish my T-shirt from that show, so much that I only wear it on special occasions. And at the video-viewing party, each director invented one (or two) of The Seven Deadly Shots.
When we were in rehearsals, and the show started shaping up really well, I started bragging about the fact that this was all my idea (I WAS doing the scene for Pride). Some of my fellow board members begged to differ, so I was vindicated when Leslie, in her director's note, mentioned that I had come up with it. I wasn't just prideful of the good idea, mind you. If I took pride, it was in the fact that I was willing to take the risky move--something I don't always do--and that I believed in my friends enough to do so. I knew we could pull it off, and boy did we.
I was thinking about this last night. See, my actresses and I had the opportunity to put on our Emma Goldman show in a REAL theater for pay. But something felt wrong. I realized that the only reason I wanted to do this was for my own ego and resume. I felt like Satine in Moulin Rouge: "'A real show! In a real theater! And you'll be . . .' 'A real director!'" I didn't want that. I knew that what we would put on wouldn't be the best thing we could do. The script wasn't something we felt was extraordinary. I felt like we, the four of us, could write something remarkable, something that added a new dimension to all the work done on Emma Goldman.
We had a meeting last night at my house. I made the main course, one of my actresses provided excellent side dishes. We talked. We knew it would be a lot of work to get our show up in two weeks, and when it came down to it, we realized that if we were going to do that much work, how great would it be to do something that was entirely our own. I kept asking them if they were willing, if they were ready to write and improvise and create an entirely new piece. And as it became clearer and clearer that this was the right choice, that writing our own show is exactly what we should be doing, that having a theater would be worth it if and only if our own voices could be heard, a certain feeling came back.
There were voices this time. Voices that had grown stronger since I was 20 and didn't have a care in the world. "What are you doing?! You're giving up a theater space?! You're giving up another month or two of your time?! Are you crazy?! Do you really think you can do this?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" But behind those voices I heard a whisper, a clickclickclickclickclickclick that was telling me that I was still exactly where I needed to be, doing exactly what I needed to do.
Scripting starts Tuesday. We're aiming to go up in late May/early June. I felt so fantastic that I decided to slut around again online, and found myself a man so good that I've been singing naughty Liz Phair songs all day long. I call that celebrating. I am scared as Hell and wouldn't have it any other way.
Last night, as we were making the decision, someone asked me "So what do you think about all this?" meaning saying screw it and doing our own thing. I said, "I think . . . this is how I roll!" That got a huge laugh. But it wasn't quite accurate. That isn't how I roll. It's how I rollercoaster.
