Mike DiSalvo
Time for
a Summary
Okay. Let’s start with the short of it.
First, I want to say that I really enjoyed your Twitter Plays. Lots of fun and
interesting ideas. Not easy, huh? I know it wasn’t, because only two of you
were able to actually stick to the 140 character limit. :-) Which I think just
goes to show that as a writing exercise it really is a difficult to craft a
Twitter Play that fulfills the needs of dramatic form. The winner was clearly
Erica, who actually posted her play on Twitter. Check it out…
Well done, Erica!
Second place goes to Sarah, whose play TERMIN-HAIR-TER
clocked in at 136 characters, and told the harrowing tale of a follicle that
refuses to go gently into that good night.
For the rest of you, here’s a helpful tool for the next time
around:
It was interesting to watch everyone wrestle with the idea of
having only a certain amount of letters—not words, letters!—in which to
make your point. Lisa’s was close, at 142 characters, but also needed a setup
to detail exactly who was talking to who. Osi ran up to 148 characters, and was
one stage direction away from making the cut. Austin’s was also very close, at
150, and read like a scene from a missing Beckett play. Emily’s was funny and
interesting, but also needed stage directions, which pushed the final count
over 300. But the special award of the
week goes to Dharmik, who essentially told me to shove my word count where the
sun don’t shine and wrote a 1,526 character fictional conversation between Mr
and Mrs Kanye West. Well played, Dharmik.
I don’t intend to poke fun—okay, maybe a little—but to show how
very hard the Twitter Play is to write. Of course, most of us will always find
O’Neill and Shakespeare more rewarding as a piece of theater than a single
tweet play, but the lesson to be gleaned in this exercise is: Just how clear
and concise is your story? If we were to apply this to our upcoming thesis,
I would challenge us all to try and write a 140 character description of your
one-person show. And if you find that impossible, maybe the idea is not clear,
concise, or powerful enough. Just a thought. Much like crafting an underlying
principle, we better serve our ideas by being able to present them in so
straightforward a fashion as to make them impossible to ignore.
And now for the long of it….
Austin starts us off with a
reminder that Paul Thomas Anderson is a badass.
The beginning of There Will Be Blood is a poetic and largely
silent masterpiece of storytelling. There is no music, no score, no dialogue.
Just Daniel Day Lewis on the hunt for oil. It is both claustrophobic and erie,
and—as Austin says—a beautiful example of showing and not telling. This
is especially true for cinema, and the beginning of this movie perfectly lays
out the isolation of the protagonist. An isolation that only gets deeper and
deeper the richer and more “popular” he becomes. Austin finishes his post with
a video of John Cage’s 4’33, which exemplifies the idea that “just because you
didn’t think of it, doesn’t mean it isn’t art.” It is literally four minutes
and thirty-three seconds of…nothing. Nothing played by the orchestra, nothing
sung, just…silence, and whatever ambient sound exists in the room the song is
played in. The video Austin links to is worth watching just for the intensely
animated way the conductor raises his baton and officially begins the piece.
And then just stands there. And then at the end he raises his arms with a
flourish to signify that the “nothing” is officially over. Amazing. It’s a good
reminder that something doesn’t have to necessarily be long, to feel
long. Four and a half minutes isn’t very long in the grand scheme of things,
but sitting through that piece feels much closer to half an hour. As the sing
in my grandmother’s bathroom used to say, “How long a minute is depends upon
which side of the door you are on.”
Osi does a fantastic bit
of sucking up by referencing a hot new play taking the world by storm, Trophy
Room, by…somebody, I don’t really remember who. Not important. In the play
there is a debate about the good or bad “ness” of the end of Bill Wither’s
song, Lovely Day. If any of you are unfamiliar, Mr Withers decides to
hold out the word “day” for what feels like a goddamn eternity. Have a listen,
if you dare…the torture starts at the 2:56 mark…
I mean, really??? You’re just gonna keep holding that note over
and over and over again, Bill? No other ideas? No modulations? Just “daaaaaaaaaay”
for as long as possible, huh? This is the song that plays in purgatory!
Sorry. To each his own, Osi loves the songs. But it sent her
down a rabbit hole of, “What is the longest note ever sung?” She posts a fun
little video that is worth watching. For those interested in the nerdiest
youtube video ever, I give you this:
Which is the longest note ever held at a required decibel and
frequency by the Guiness Book of World Records.
Lisa starts her discussion of time by reliving the nightmare of past
middle school dances, and how they all seem to be underscored by the inevitable
playing of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. Versions of this song last
anywhere from eight to thirteen minutes, and Lisa marveled at it’s continued
popularity at school dances. Again, time is relative. Were you lucky enough to
be dancing with your middle school “soul mate,” I imagine no version of Stairway
would be long enough. A good start!
Lisa’s explorations of Led Zeppelin led her quickly to an actual
stairway to heaven. Or rather, a really long staircase in Hawaii that if
photographed from the right angle seems to go on forever. And from this she
delved into the different “sizes” in Gulliver’s Travels, and the
paintings of Cyril Rolando, who depicts hourglasses sinking into the
ocean. Time literally drifting away from us.
Next up was Emily, who talked about her favorite long-take fight
scene on film, which comes from the original version of Oldboy. It is a
gorgeously filmed, brutally choreographed, single-take masterpiece. It’s also
worth watching the homage that was in the first season of Daredevil…
Fun shout out to Dark Matter: you never really see what happens
in the rooms. :-)
Emily talks about the effort and art that goes into to planning
and carrying out a long take like this in cinema. What is gained by presenting
a piece of film in one unending take? Maybe subconsciously it makes it more
difficult for the view to look away? As a director, you are saying, “Don’t you
dare! This is gonna be something you’re gonna want to watch every second of!” Or
it could just be showing off, hard to tell sometimes. Emily signs off with some
random bunny cartoons that will haunt your dreams forever.
Next we have Andrea, who draws our
attention to the power that lies within turning time into a brief moment to say
exactly what matters. (After, of course, giving the necessary bend of the knee
to Iron Butterfly’s Ina Gada Da Vida). In the hands of singer/songwriter
Ani DiFranco, 120 seconds are all that are needed. Andrea links to DiFranco’s
song Not So Soft, and the beat-poetry-with-no-music power of words.
Andrea makes the point that in a commercially homogenous pop-radio atmosphere,
where every song must be between three and three and a half minutes, DiFranco
dares record a mere 2 minute music-less poem! Inspired! This reinforces that,
just like P.T. Anderson dared to open a movie with 15 minutes of all but silent
images, DiFranco dares to let her words stand on their own merit and in exactly
as much time as is required. For those not familiar, DiFranco also did this (in
a mere 136 seconds!) on her first album as well, with The Slant:
And just because I’m a fan, here’s the same poem set to music…
Moving on to Dharmik. Oh, Dharmik. Oh,
sitting alone in his room bottle at the ready and half empty uploading his blog
four times in a row Dharmik. Seriously, Dharmik was so confident in the power
of his post that he posted it four times. And how right he is! It is a
genius reminder of the cyclical nature of time relative to our own
infinitesimally small lives; how we are bound to repeat everything over and
over because nothing is original and all is fodder for the grist mill.
Especially when that fodder is the mind-numbing banality of Kanye and Kim.
However, Dharmik goes on to draw our attention to the next step
in technological theater: the Text Message Play. These plays are made up of text messages
between two or more people. There are apps you can download which will allow
you to experience people sending text messages back and forth. Like a 21st
century radio play, you wait in anticipation…why hasn’t Rachel texted Tom
back??? What happened when she went out to the woodshed? Where is she??? As
Dharmik asserts, this format works best for the horror/thriller genre. But they
are a legitimate form of storytelling, and one which takes our innate
understanding of time and plays upon it’s expectations. Using that silence,
those three pulsing dots that tell you a text is coming…and maybe never does.
Spooky.
And so we come to Mark. Yeah, baby. Yeah. Mark grapples with the
possibilities of the truly short, truly succinct plays of the Neo Futurists. He
prints in its entirety (granted, it’s only one small page) the play The Idea
of You by Dave Awl. This is an interesting and affecting piece of writing,
and I think proves the point that Mark was making nicely. That, while it’s
always fun to luxuriate in a long
evening of brilliant theater, there is also opportunity to be found in
compressing your idea into the clearest and briefest mode of delivery possible.
This one page play has everything required of modern drama: beginning, middle,
end, conflict, resolution, etc. As the Bard said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
Sarah, too, talked about
music that stuck in her brain from her formative years, as imprinted by the
long and short musings of the band, Relient K. She went on to discuss the
ability of theatre to stick with an audience, and whether or not that should
even be the end goal of theatre and it’s practitioners. She posits that it is
not for us the artists to concern ourselves with whether or not our play, or
movie, or song will resonate with an audience, nor is it for us to worry about
if the story will be remembered. Rather, she argues, all we can do take is
relish in our ability to create at all, and find whatever meaning we can in
that which we create. Only then will we be able to present something to an
audience that has any chance at all of “sticking” with them. She also has a
cute video of father time, a TED talk about memory, Jim Croce’s Time In a
Bottle, and a ten-hour video of Lamb Chop singing The Song That Never
Ends. Sarah wins the award for most free time dedicated to her blog.
Lastly, we have Grandma Erica. Despite her tendency
to go to bed at ludicrously early times, she wins the Post 8 Blog-Off for her
love of the indescribable play Jerusalem, by Jez Butterworth. I, too,
saw Mark Rylance in this play. And like Erica has written…there are simply no
words. It is an incredible role, mammoth in its scope and size and vision.
Rylance commands the stage (as he tends to do in any role), and finishes the
three hour plus performance with a speech and scene that defies description. I
found myself equally inspired, awed, and broken by watching it. Erica touches
on the energy and strength of will necessary to perform this role, and the equally
exhausting toll it takes on the audience to experience that performance. I
remember walking out of the theatre, turning to my wife and saying, “I don’t
know how to do that.” I like her relating this to Speak Bitterness, and
the idea that performance of this time and length transport both actor and
audience into an almost delirious realm of “otherness.” Spurred on by poetry
and sweat, we as actors should endeavor to carry the audience with us to that
realm, so that together maybe we can navigate, as the almighty Prince said, “…this
thing called life.”
In resolution, I suppose it’s only fair to write my own Twitter
Play:
The Blogger Examines His Post
Me: I feel I lost the thread.
Them: Indeed. Time to save and print.
Me: But maybe--
Them: No.
Me: OK
Good week of blogs, everybody. See you in class.
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