covid-19: Writing a Zoom play

When Alleyway Theatre put out a call for a digital play, I was gamed. During COVID-19, many theaters are putting out calls for scripts about the pandemic, and have migrated to plays that can be performed by 1 actor or by 2 or 3 who live in the same household and can perform on Zoom with no special lighting, etc.

Alleyway Theatre, though, is re-imagining another form of art—one that can be performed during this or any such situation where stages are closed and no one can go out. I imagine a health pandemic or wartime or the streets are on fire and curfew is at 8:00 pm.

Going digital, Alleyway asks: What “magic” can you employ to use technology to help tell your story in the most successful way? Is it Zoom? Skype? FaceTime? An app? Something else? Is it live? Live to tape? Filmed previously and heavily edited? 

In terms of audience, Alleyway provides questions: Is it interactive? Passive? Zoom fatigue is real.

The best example I've seen in using Zoom as a medium is SNL where a pastor takes us to church but is constantly interrupted by the congregants. However, when he mutes them, he loses call-and-response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYP1mXqiwqc 

For my new play, When women travel, they take a song, I decided to use the Zoom format. My sense is that in the world of social media such as tiktok, an audience is likely to click through numerous pages until something catches their attention, then they click through many more again. For my play, I create a collage of six stories that encourages the audience to switch their attention throughout the show. The two main characters who open the play are on Zoom, and a futuristic search engine named Athena places other characters in Zoom for the teenage girls to study for their year-end project. 

This is an all-female cast, across generations, ethnicity, time-periods, and sexual orientation. These characters are chosen as they relate to the theme of “women traveling.” The irony, of course, is the lack of traveling as people are stuck in Zoom.

The way I came about this idea, is I first thought about a monologue I had just completed. I have 2 monologues ready for performance, and a 3rd one that I call a “monologue collage” which gives it more texture. As monologues can be performed on stage, I thought about what would drive these to be performed digitally?

Each of the 3 monologues is spoken by a woman over 60. They are of different ethnicities and time periods.

I looked across my other plays for women characters, and found a theme of traveling & song.

Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “Quilting the black-eyed pea” popped into my head: “To successfully go to Mars and back you will need a song…take some Billie Holiday for the sad days and some Charlie Parker for the happy ones but always keep at least one good Spiritual for comfort—”

I took 2 of my teenage characters—a lesbian couple—and placed them at the opening of the play where they’re working on their capstone project based on Giovanni’s poem to finish out their senior year. They’re musicians and have gotten into trouble because they turn all of their school assignments into a concert and have been told “no concert, or they’ll fail the capstone project and won’t graduate.”

Stuck at home during a pandemic, exploring seven traveling women in Zoom for their final high-school assignment, lesbian lovers BHAGYA and CHIUNG-WEI clash over their own plans for the future.

On the way to Mali Street. April 7, 2019

covid-19: Haley Clancy writes us a poem

On our last weekend out on the town, poet Haley Clancy was working at the Strip District. She played music for my fiancée Edie & me to dance while she wrote us a poem:

So who knew, never did I think
it would be like this
us dancing in the Strip,
I plant you a kiss, because the
day has been scheduled
but you have always been
my date, right here,
I do feel safe
because I love you.
What a thing to say; it’s been
6 years,
but I will say I do,
I will say it for the rest
of my years.

     © 2020 Haley Clancy

covid-19: Last weekend b4 the shut-down

I say to my fiancée Edie, “Let’s avoid shopping this weekend bc it'll be chaos out there.” Here's what I came back with.

The weight symbols carry

After the shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, my fiancée bought us the Stronger Than Hate t-shirts:

The t-shirt makers, in partnership with the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, send the proceeds to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s Fund for Victims of Terror, benefiting the synagogue in this case. In support of the victims of the shooting, the Steelers allowed their modified logo to be displayed broadly, including clothing, signs, and stickers.

This show of solidarity throughout the city boosted our morale, and my fiancée thought to also pack the shirts for our trip to Israel where we would be spreading the message of unity with the Jewish community there. However, when my aunt saw our shirts, she was stunned.

She explained that to wear the symbol of the Star of David in Jerusalem would represent nationalism against Palestinian Moslems and anyone else not Jewish. Well, that’s not the message we wanted to send!

In the United States, where Jewish Americans are the minority, the symbol represents support.

In Israel, where the Jewish community is a majority, the symbol reverses itself as supremacist.

This 4th of July, Nike planned to release a shoe sporting the Betsy Ross flag design:

The company quickly cancelled the shoes when former football quarterback Colin Kaepernick pointed out its racist symbolism. Originally a symbol of pride for US independence from England—representing the 13 colonies—the design is now being waved by White Supremacists. Different groups of US nationalists are using various symbols prominent during the time of slavery in order to intimidate minorities in the country.

And US Americans are pitted against one another as they argue for and against Nike’s decision.

This controversy over the Betsy Ross symbolism makes me think of Frederick Douglass when abolitionists thought to honor him by asking him to speak at a 4th of July celebration. The date was 1852. Furthermore, the Fugitive Slave Law had been passed two years prior, which extended the danger of slavery into the free states. Douglass titled his speech: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?:

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY.

I think about the conversations we need to have as a country about the wrongs of our past in order to heal together, and certainly the diverse effects of these symbols give us a place to start.

Germany had this conversation within her borders and with Israel and the Jewish community worldwide. South Africans have done this during Mandela’s presidency (1994-1999). Indeed, Maya Angelou writes in her poem for Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993: History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

Here is my new ritual: To listen to Dr. Angelou every 4th of July:

Happy (US) National Poetry Month!

The blessed angels

by Toi Derricotte

How much like
angels are these tall
gladiolas in a vase on my coffee
table, as if in a bunch
whispering. How slender
and artless, how scandalously
alive, each with its own
humors and pulse. Each weight-
bearing stem is the stem
of a thought through which
aspires the blood-metal of stars. Each heart
is a gift for the king. When
I was a child, my mother and aunts
would sit in the kitchen
gossiping. One would tip
her head toward me, “Little Ears,”
she’d warn, and the whole room
went silent. Now, before sunrise,
what secrets I am told!—being
quieter than blossoms and near invisible.

Best poetry read in 2018: The Undertaker’s Daughter, by Toi Derricotte

What I love about Toi Derricotte’s poetry is her raw honesty of what most people would protect as “family secrets.” Every night, I turn one page after another because I want to see what Toi will let us know next, and what connections and insights she makes of it.

“Family secrets” insinuates something is wrong. Something is certainly troubling; but in the world of poetry whose essence is to open up the complexity of our experiences, I marvel at Toi’s perseverance as she zeroes in on the doll; on the pet fish, Telly; on the concept of memoirs; on the photo of a dad holding his baby girl which appears on the cover of the book where love, harm, and the mangle of actions and emotions are untangled, revisited, re-explored, over and over again.

Perhaps Hollywood movies and sound-bites on the news like to present our lives as here it begins, this is what is good & evil, and here it ends; poetry—especially Toi’s—lets us think, ponder, and wonder, and Toi’s poetry in particular makes it easy for us as the readers. That is to say, Toi’s poetry is accessible for a complex subject.

I want to ask Toi whether she put in hours of turmoil to write this book. I want to ask whether she woke up in the middle of the night, often, to continue the writing, and whether she stopped at times because she couldn’t yet get to the right word, and whether at times the rush of adrenaline had a symbiotic relationship with what she was discovering as she wrote. Or if Toi’s process is very different from my imagination. I’m trying to understand how poets wrestle with this type of complexity, then make it so clear.

I saw Toi at several poetry events in Pittsburgh these past few weeks, but was too shy to ask.

Maybe another time I can talk with Toi about her process of writing. For now, I ended this blog piece with the word “Respect,” then deleted it; with “Honor,” then deleted; with “Thank you, Toi” and deleted.

I’m still searching for the right word to match my emotion and the life changing within me.

Books by Toi Derricotte

Degas ballerina sculpture … and meandering storytelling

Photo by Edie; sculpture on display at The Frick Pittsburgh, July 2018

I know Degas’s paintings for his ballerinas but I never knew he also made this sculpture – bronze with cloth for the tutu and hair ribbon. Cloth for the tutu and hair ribbon. It seems it would’ve been very unusual in his time period (1880s) to step outside the usual all-bronze cast.

When I googled the sculpture, it turns out that Degas did use an unusual medium, but not what I thought. His original sculpture was made using a real bodice, tutu, ballet slippers, and real hair – and cast in beeswax. The full sculpture was covered in beeswax except for the tutu and hair ribbon.

Apparently the bronze version (a number of them) was made afterwards by his heirs.

The sculpture by Degas received mixed reviews at the time, for numerous reasons.

I’m fixed on the cloth. I imagine an artist who sidestepped the classics because he had to go his own way, bringing the texture to life.

This makes me think of Nikki Giovanni who sidesteps the classics of poetry books when her writing moves among poetry, prose, mail correspondence, a movie:

From Whence Cometh My Help*

It should be a movie. Starring S. Epatha Merkerson as Ethel Smith. She would be driving down I-81 right before the Hollins exit. There would be some smooth jazz, a Coltrane piece from Giants Steps or maybe something by…

and then more poetry (Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems). Giovanni and Degas both had to do their own thing, which makes great art.

Playwright Diana Burbano has recently written a blog piece about why fewer women than men seem to send plays out for production—even when invited, “qualified women will say no.” Burbano notices a number of wonderful plays by women that don’t follow “a strict narrative structure” (or classic structure). “Why isn’t it OK for these plays to change the way a story is laid out?” Burbano says; “I wonder if trying to shoehorn themselves into a rigid structure isn’t half the reason so many women feel uncomfortable submitting? Perhaps they feel they will never get it ‘right.’”

I agree with Burbano that we’ve got to keep sending out our plays, written our way. I’m ever optimistic that great art prevails. “The narrative is starting to change,” Burbano says: “People like me LIKE your meandering storytelling, and we are starting to be the people who will be the first to learn of your work.”

*From whence cometh my help: the African American community at Hollins College

Best poetry read in 2016-2017

Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin: The editors Philip Cushway and Michael Warr first proposed this book of poetry in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, and as they were putting the book together the Black Lives Matter movement took off, so the editors redirected the focus. Each poet provides a statement of her/his evolution and purpose as a poet, followed by one poem. The editors chose an image to go with each poem. In choosing top, dynamic poets, and providing “historical and cultural underpinnings from which these poems arose,” the editors created a book of art accessible to poetry readers as well as non-traditional poetry readers. The editors noted that many of the poets cited Gwendolyn Brooks as their influence and mentor. I noticed that many of the poets began publishing with Cave Canem, which makes me infinitely proud of writers who make a home for voices otherwise not heard. For an anthology, 18 women poets to 25 men poets could be improved, but it’s better than most. The poets, also, are across generations. Too many favorite poems for me to call out a favorite, but I do tend to gravitate to the Emmett Till poems.

The nerve of it: poems new and selected, by Lynn Emanuel. My favorite thing about this book is that Lynn mixes up old poems with new in order to make for a new reading experience. That’s the first I’ve seen this done, and it works beautifully. Lynn creates various projects, writing poems vastly different from one another. My favorites: “inside gertrude stein” and “Halfway through the book I’m writing.” I studied the opening lines of each poem to understand how Lynn pulls us in:

(a) In the cooking pot my aunt's long spoon pets the lamb's

In the cooking pot [INCITING INCIDENT] my aunt's long spoon pets [ACTION VERB] the lamb's [UNEXPECTED, TENSION]

(b) in the teary windows, the woodlands heave

in the teary windows [INCITING INCIDENT; METAPHOR] the woodlands heave [ACTION VERB, TENSION]

Dear All, by Maggie Anderson. Favorite poems: the title poem, and “The Sidney Lanier Best Western Motel in Gainevsille, Georgia, I think of the great Polish poet” – because what I learn from each poem actually changes my life. This is what the poets Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, and Adrienne Rich did for me when I was in my 20s, and here Maggie is doing it for me now. Wow.