This Is Out of Character for Me?

Spent a solid twenty minutes defending a comedic rape scene to my advisor today. I'm really trying to understand how to approach rape in art. I think it's important. Rape is a thing that happens. A complicated thing that happens. And complicated things are meant to be unraveled--not shut into shoe boxes.

Rape is also really in right now--as slang, jokes, perpetually in young adult lit. As a writer, I need to explore it. As humans we should all explore what we think rape means--how we can uplift our communities from it, how we can help victims heal and avoid. As a comedian, it's in my personal philosophy that anything can be funny. Not that everything is. But that anything can be. So. I'm paddling in strange oceans. I am in school. This is the time to take risks. I don't appreciate being told there is a topic I simply must avoid. Especially when the same professor assigns Anne Bogart's "Embarrassment" essay to me. LEAP?

During college I was a champion for all rights all the time, and I was a stickler about a lot of things...but it's complicated. It's complicated to give ideas power by rolling them into punchlines and also complicated to give ideas power by only accepting them in episodes of Degrassi.

Someone will be offended. Of that I can be sure. But someone always is.

Terror

A staged reading of my newest play goes up in three weeks. This weekend I sent a draft as done as it could be out to potential actors, and pressing send was terrifying.

When artists talk about terror, it often sounds over-dramatic. And, it is. To an extent. But fear is fear, and, no, whether people hate or love my writing doesn't put me in life and death peril...the results of sharing art with someone who dislikes it is, in my opinion, often worse. I know because people I love have shared art with me I don't like before, and now, I don't care because I digest asteroids-worth of colleague/sketch partner/fellow comedian work, so it's same jokes different day, some good, some not. But, when I was more immature? There was a little grain of judgement I got to keep in my pocket about kids in class who wrote crappy short stories, the students in the Acting I showcase. Oh, dear God, please do not let me fall to that fate! Do not let people I respect see me as I brattily saw that dummy freshmen doing a subpar scene from Barefoot in the Park! It's childish, but I can't help it. TERROR.

It was luck that I brought Anne Bogart to work to read on downtime today. I fittingly decided to read her essay on terror, and I so needed to read this quote by Martha Graham (bolding is mine):

"There is a vitality, a life-force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unque. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you."

Read: I can do eet!

One Nation, Of Individuals (with Liberty and Justice for All)

This semester my Dramatic Writing Workshop is reading Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares. Yesterday we discussed her essay on Memory, which is largely about Americans' lack of memory (recognition) of the shoulders we're standing on when it comes to theatre. A classmate noted that visual artists learn to copy before they can create. They're constantly making art, turning around, revisiting Picasso, Degas, Rembrandt, then mimicking for a while, then facing forward again and marching on.

Playwrights don't much do this. We think it's important to know the basics, but no one holds you to it. The sentiment appears to be "There's too much"--which is kind of true--we definitely don't have as succinct a canon as art history (or maybe I'm just telling myself that because I still haven't read, say, Raisin in the Sun). Not only are we forgiving about neglecting our past, we are absolutely unforgiving when it comes to dragging it along with us. It is not good to be impersonating another writer. If possible, our work should be nothing like anyone's ever seen before. Not only is this basically impossible, if it were possible, approaching the goal of sheer uniqueness in this way is like just deciding to take a running jump off a roof and say we will be the first human to fly. We need to walk before we can run--and absolutely before we can soar.

Why are we this way? Why do we want to be so new? Why can't we stand to repeat classics, to learn from what has come before us? Bogart says it's a matter of not recognizing and using our own culture because American culture is so jumbled and illusive. You can't pin it. Are we religious? Yes and no. Are we helpful? Yes and no. Are we obnoxious? Yes and no. We're not even unanimously rich or talented or polite or impolite. We have almost no common literary background. We have no ritual. I can get behind this theory of not using our culture because we don't have one, but I think a more likely reason we don't go back and reflect what has come before us is because part of our culture...actually probably the only consistent part of our culture is being individual. We were founded because of persecution, we like to protest and riot and be free, and thus...write new new works.

Desert morning. April 2012.

Just some stuff I'm thinking about at 4 AM...which is another story.

The world shines as I cross the Macon County Line.