When I was in New York over spring break, I went to see An Illiad by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Petersonat the New York Theatre Workshop  featuring Stephen Spinella and Denis O’Hare on alternating nights.   I saw Stephen Spinella. The script was very interesting and engaging at certain moments, evoking thoughts and feelings about the seemingly everlasting nature of war.  Going in to see An Illiad, I was a bit tired, my fault, but I remained tired throughout, which I think had something to do with the production.  While I left the theatre feeling somewhat unsatisfied, I also left thinking, largely about why I felt unsatisfied by the production.

The script was very engaging at moments. One interesting tool that the playwrights employed was that of requiring that the audience fill in some of the play’s imagery.  The entire story was very imaged based, it is after all, a one-man show, so throughout the play, both actor and audience inhabit and create many different images.  Often, the poet (the narrator of the story) would evoke and image of a character, by saying for example, “Hector, he was a good father, an all around good guy, a guy you want to be friends with, kind of like…”  And then he’d move on without filling in the blank.  This requires the audience to personally engage with the story by supplying their own image of who that person is from their own lives.  Sometimes the modern parallels were drawn for the audience.  In order to allow us to understand the rage that came over Achilles, for example, the poet says something along the lines of, “you know like when someone cuts you off and you think I could just kill you right now, hit you with my car, and if that doesn’t kill you I’ll get out of my car and tear you apart, limb from limb.”  This story uses modern examples in which rage, fear, love, the need to protect, betrayal, etc. arise, thereby insisting the audience relate these “far away” events of the Trojan war to their own lives.

Of course the play was not just about the Trojan war, but rather war in general, which is very present today.  These feelings and situations are not unique to ancient Greece, not even to organized war, but actually occur in our daily lives.  We are all capable of these acts.  And we all have the potential to commit them or to choose not to.   I had trouble filling in some of the images left up to the audience.  This was just as interesting to me as the images that I could fill in.  For example, we were at one point asked to imagine standing in a field of bodies, we were told “you know what that’s like”  I don’t know what that is like.  It made me acutely aware that these horrible things are happening in the world and I have no idea what that feels like.  In some ways I can relate to war and in some ways I am completely removed from it.  What does that mean when citizens are removed from war?  Does that enable the war to keep going?  If all of us knew what it was like to stand in a field of bodies would wars even be happening?

One incredibly moving moment was when the poet simply recited wars throughout history, the list when on for a full five minutes or thereabouts.  We were forced to sit there and listen to the names of all these wars, some of them I was familiar with and some of them I was not.  Through telling the story of the Trojan war, the poet is telling us the story of every war throughout history, and reminding us that it is indeed a story that we all know.  Towards the end of the play, the poet does not want to finish the story.  He can’t go on, it is too heartbreaking.  Instead of re-enacting the story as he has been mostly doing up until this point, he simply recounts it in a narrative form.  And instead of focusing on the brutal elements, he focuses on the soft, human elements.  He describes all of the different parties of war sleeping.  Reminding us that we are all human.  He even says that Achilles is thinking, beneath his armor, “I’m scared, couldn’t we just get a beer?”.  The poet high lights the miscommunication that often fuels or even starts wars by even in this image of getting a beer instead of fighting, showing two parties disagree on the name for a herron.  Communication is lost because of language.

Overall, I think the script was very effective and engaging.  However, the acting left me wondering what the play might have been had I seen Denis O’Hare instead of Stephen Spinella.  Sit was very clear that Spinella was an accomplished, very trained actor.  However, I caught myself admiring his technique often instead of following the story.  Spinella seemed to repeat the same rhythms over and over again which was somewhat lulling instead of engaging, although this may also have been inherrent in the script.  I think that these rhythms are meant to make us feel the monotony of war, but it did not engage me as much as it could have were it not so lulling.  Also, Spinella played very much to the back of the house.  I was in the front and felt a disconnect between me and the actor.

One very interesting aspect of the performance was the presence of a musician.  He was on a balcony-like platform high above the audience.  He added very much to the images throughout by playing music.  It added to the epic feeling of this epic tale.

Hookman, by Lauren Yee, was not what I expected.  Then again, I don’t know how I could ever have expected the originality and poignancy mixed with horror/dark comedy that is Hookman.  Common themes in Lauren Yee’s body of work include Young people going on a journey, often in pairs, and trying to discover the truth of what has happened in the past.  Both of these elements are present in Hookman.  Yee also tends towards a blurring of reality in her work.  Yee says in an interview with Ilana Brownstein in the program notes, “ I think all my plays tend to dramatize and make funny something that is inherently unfunny”.

Within the first few seconds of the play, the set and the language immediately engaged me.  The set featured a car on a revolving floor, the other side of which is a dorm room.  Already we can gather that the play is about a journey. The car is a liminal space, but it is part of Lexi’s ‘home’ world.  The dorm room is part of her college life, across the country from her home. Homesickness is a large part of Lexi’s struggle to find peace in her new reality; that of being a freshman in college.  Through the set, we are also set up for the bloodiness that ensues, as the edge of the playing space is covered with thick blood.

The play feels incredibly contemporary and this is largely due to the music and language used in the piece.  Loud music is playing and for about the first 30 seconds of the play, we see Lexi and Jess sing along to a song, creating a fun, friendly mood.  I was immediately drawn in as an audience member and indeed I felt the urge to sing along! Their banter is specific and establishes their relationship very quickly.  The opening scene feels like that of a comedy or chick flick; a funny scene between friends until, suddenly Lexi coughs out casually that she may have been raped last week.  I thought that I had misheard this line at first.  My friend who I saw the show with poked me hard when he heard this, and I had a similar feeling of “what?!”.  This odd, disconnected atmosphere of horror/tragedy layered beneath humor and the mundane moments of everyday life is the world in which the play lives.

Repetition and revision is a tool that Yee employs throughout the play.  We see the car scene several times throughout until the objective truth of what actually happened in the car is revealed.  Each time we see it there is a slight change.  Lexi is reliving the scene over and over as it is a source of trauma in her life.  When the scene first happened she was not fully present, which led to her crashing the car.  Jess says in the first scene “You never listen”  Lexi retorts, “Yes I do!”  In a later repetition Jess says “You never listen” and Lexi replies “I guess I don’t, do I?”  She even apologizes for it as she realizes the truth of her statement.

Hookman the character appears throughout the play.  In the first car scene he kills Jess, in the last car scene we come to understand that it was Lexi who crashed the car, killing Jess.  This is very telling; Hookman lives within Lexi.  He is her own projection of fear.  He comes from an urban legend told to her by her brother.  He is clearly of the city, created by people, told to her by a man close to her.  Every man she sees throughout the play is revealed as Hookman, even her RA who she goes to for comfort.  Her own fear prevents her from trusting or having relationships with men in her life.  But where did this fear come from? Lexi has many reasons to be afraid, one is that she was raped; another is that girls around her keep dying.  She is afraid of death.  Because of her fear of death she ends up killing her best friend.  This fear of death is clearly prevalent in Lexi’s (our) culture, as hookman is an urban legend, she doesn’t make him up entirely.

Because of her fear, Lexi is an unreliable narrator. The structure of the play shows that as we vacillate from past to present.  Even when in the present we cannot be sure what is really happening.  Yee takes seemingly mundane moments such as asking for a tissue and turns them into horrific, meaningful interactions.  Yee says in the program notes of ‘mundane moments’, “I find them really potent.  So, I’m taking something that is inherently undramatic and trying to make it dramatic.” Reality is often repeated in a different style, or else grows from naturalistic to exaggerated, often to grotesque and menacing.  It is interesting to think that if exaggerated enough, reality can become terrifying.  Or perhaps it is rather saying that we can project fear and danger into any and all circumstances.

Hookman also explores how fascinated we are as a culture with violence and fear. Urban Myths are abundant.  What role do they serve in our society? Regardless, we often secretly enjoy watching horribly violent things happen. Also, the role of modern social media in dispersing news of violent incidents or tragedy is explored.  Yee says in the program notes in talking about someone she knew peripherally who died,

“ I found out by people’s odd comments posted on her facebook profile…I remember feeling like I deserved to know how she died, because it wasn’t actually revealed.  I found that kind of disturbing because why should I need to know at all?  It really wasn’t any of my business, even though I felt like it was.”

Indeed throughout the play everyone seems to be all up in each other’s business, publicizing private events in a disturbing way, but in a way that rings very true to modern social trends.

Lexi gets stuck in cycles; her traumas haunt her and create new traumas.  It is a cycle that cannot be broken until she faces her fear head on.  I was not sure what exactly hookman represented until the final scene of the play.  In the final scene, which is also the last revision of the car scene, Lexi realizes that it was she who crashed the car.  It was her fault, not hookman’s. This realization makes the scene end differently than it has before. Jess hugs her and is able to leave without Lexi having to re-live the car crash.  Hookman appears and she tells him that she knows that she will die.  This facing of the facts allows her to face him.  They fight.  He ‘kills’ her but she is still ok, she rises again.  It is her admission of her own vulnerability that giver her strength.  Facing her fear head on makes him disappear.

Hookman, while engaging, was a little confusing.  It took me a while to piece together what was happening.  However, it did affect me viscerally and emotionally even when I was not sure what was happening plot-wise.  I think that it accomplished this because of its use of humor and horror side by side.  I felt uncomfortable yet engaged, and I felt that I could absolutely relate to Lexi.  Though I have never been raped, I have had unwanted sexual encounters, and statistically so have the majority of women in America.  This play discussed the violence of rape and sexual violence and how it can transform a person into becoming their own enemy. I think this play is incredibly important because it addresses serious issues in a way that is at the same time accessible, humorous, and deeply disturbing.  The horrific scenes show the antagonists in the play, not only rape, but also death, homesickness, and loneliness, for the devastating and violent things that they really can be.  And it explores how in the end, we can be our own worst antagonist, creating enemies in our minds wherever we go.

Whatever, Heaven Allows is based on Paradise Lost by John Milton, and All That Heaven Allows by Douglas Sirk.  However, the piece is by Radiohole, so it is not your typical traditional theatrical experience.  When I was done watching the piece, I felt completely overwhelmed.  The piece hit me on a visceral level, not an intellectual or emotional one.  I felt strange in my gut.  Although, throughout the piece I was very intellectually engaged, constantly trying to make connections and garner ‘sense’ from the piece.

The piece breaks the fourth wall in its first moments.  An actor walks out and speaks directly to the audience.  At first it seems that he is beginning a melodramatic, intense, existential performance.  However, then he begins to directly address the audience, talking to them about how they can exit the theatre, layering in existential problems onto this literal task.  Using biblical images in a mundane, daily setting, which prepares us for the ridiculousness of the piece.

Then we see a parody of the 1955 ‘All That Heaven allows’ film credits.  Each character is a stereotypical archetype, but ever so slightly, well really ever so blatantly, off.  Already we are prepared for the harsh juxtapositions in this piece:  Heightened, even biblical, versus daily/mundane as well as film/projection versus human action.  We are also now set up for direct address to the audience.  The actors even refer to each other by name, asking if they are ‘ready’.  This meta-theatricality creates a whole new level of ‘realness’, which sharply contrasts with the heightened perfomativity in much of the piece.

This piece explores gender performativity by going to extremes.  The main character has time with her ‘lady friends’ in a heightened, stereotypical but exploded way.  Interestingly, it is the men in the piece who present this time with ‘lady friends’ to the audience.  We therefore know that we are seeing not necessarily how women behave, but how they are meant to behave from the male perspective.  The men in the piece are also heightened according to gender stereotypes.  They prance around in plaid with guns.  But it is not only traditional gender roles that are satirized tin this piece, but also feminism and coming out.  All of our roles are attacked and held up to the light.

In this piece patriarchal, constructed reality, as seen through the lens of All That heaven Allows, and Paradise Lost, is exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness and ridiculousness.  The entire piece, although experimental in nature, feels very modern and of this world.  There were times watching the piece that I would feel lost but I would always again be grounded by a moment of connection to something familiar to me.  Even in moments when I did not recognize the action of the character(s), I always felt like I knew what was happening on some level.  I think that this is because each character and each scene touched on personas and scenarios deeply ingrained in western culture.  Although he language was often deconstructed and the physicality extreme, I still resonated with all of the images because they touched on something that I know inherently; ideas and roles sewn deep into the fabric of western civilization.  By exploring western culture in such an exploded way, the piece makes the viewers uncomfortable seeing what they know, and forces them think again about what they know of their own culture.  The piece exposes ‘truths’ that we take for granted, to be ridiculous, harmful, and threatening.

The piece uses humor to do this.  Which is a good thing because if it didn’t it would be utterly impossible to watch. Or it would simply turn into a melodrama instead of a deconstructed satire. At any rate, it would be as effective.  Through making us laugh at these strange scenarios (which really are not so foreign to us), we can express together as an audience our uncomfortability. We have a release of energy valve built in so that we can alleviate some pressure and then continue to watch the show.  Also, we can have fun before we realize how uncomfortable we are.  It sneaks up on us.

The themes in Paradise Lost and All That Heaven Allows are very present in the piece. In discussing Paradise Lost, Critic Julia M. Walker argues that because Eve “neither recognizes nor names herself … she can know herself only in relation to Adam.”  This concept is explored in the piece.  The heroine is constantly in relationship to a male figure.  Either hoping for one to come, falling in love, grieving for the loss of her husband, or falling in love with her new lover.  Both Eve in Paradise Lost and the widow in All that Heaven Allows are defined by the men in their life.  And so too with the heroine in Whatever, Heaven Allows. The tropes of sin and codependence explored in the inspirational works are still incredibly present and indeed shape us as a society today as Radiohole’s piece shows.

Radiohole’s piece seems to contain many realities which all blur together.  Each actor plays several different roles.  We follow the basic plot of All That Heaven Allows, but we also see other stories interspersed throughout.  One of the scenes that has stayed with me most clearly is a scene in which all the characters are drinking, throwing back drinks, excessively, clearly to get drunk.  They start to miss their mouths, throwing the contents of their cups onto their faces.  We see that it is not alcohol in the cups, but brown and red goo.  It looks like blood and mud.  All the while all the participants are laughing and chatting.  This image of consumption that we so recognize as part of our culture is literally dirtying us.  We are killing ourselves by consuming.   We idolize consumption.

Idolatry is a huge theme in Paradise Lost and Radiohole’s piece explores what we idolize as a culture, and often it is not very pretty.  One of these things is technology.  Another is traditional gender roles.  Another seems to be alcohol.  There is one sequence in which all of the actors chug a PBR to classical music in old-fashioned poses.  This kind of juxtapositions isolates that which we idolize and holds it up clearly for us to see

The set is very interesting.  In the back is a projection screen, and in the middle is a large podium like structure, hanging off the ground, which looks like the commanding pad of a rocket ship.  It is surrounded by a gold frame and really looks like something out of Star Trek. Jutting out from either side are what appear to be small screens.  On either side there are similar, but smaller structures.  Paradise Lost is about transitional journeys.  It tells the story of Satan’s fall from heaven and decision to go back to earth to interact with mankind, and the story of Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden.  The entire story starts in Hell.  Interestingly, the entire story of our play starts in the theatre, in our society, in this day and age.  It could be said that our starting place is hell in both circumstances.  The other source material though, All That Heaven Allows, starts on earth.  I don’t think that Radiohole is necessarily calling earth a hell, but it is exploring hellish elements of our society.  Regardless, the spacecraft-like center point of the set symbolizes journey and liminal space.  Liminal space is present not only literally in Paradise Lost as the ascent and descent to earth, but also in All That Heaven Allows when the main character is banished from her high class society for falling in love with a lower class man.  All of the stories, both the source material and Radiohole’s piece, examine a fall from grace, gender roles, and what we depend on as a society.

Technology is a huge part of Whatever, Heaven Allows.  Throughout the play we see projections, and screens are attached to many parts of the set.  When the heroine of the play is grieving for her dead husband, she is told that she should get a TV.  TV is pointed out here as an escapist vehicle.  By having so much talk of television and references to screens, we the audience are made aware of our societal dependence on television and how that affects our view of reality.

Throughout the piece there is a woman dressed as a deer.  She chain smokes and at the end she pees.  She is sexy and innocent.  I think that she represents the damsel like traditional female timid energy. But like everything in the piece, this is satirized.  She is dressed up as a deer and transgresses this image by chain smoking.  She gets scared and pees at the end, which very much symbolizes the feeling of fear that I had at the end of the piece.

The piece was challenging, exciting, engaging, uncomfortable, and made me think.  I’m sure the experience would be extremely heightened had I seen it in the theatre and not online.  Also, it is very much the kind of piece that I feel I need to see more than once to catch everything that is going on. The chaos though is part of the point.  I’m glad I saw this piece, and challenging as it was to make sense of from an online viewing, I still took a lot away from it and I’m curious to research Radiohole more!

Bibliography

Walker, Julia M. (1998), Medusa’s Mirrors: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Metamorphosis of the Female Self, University of Delaware Press (pg. 166).

The piece used old classic love songs by the Gershwins in conjunction with modern theatre techniques such as viewpoints, modern dance, and contemporary dialogue by Charles Mee.  This melding of old and new, rather than feeling incongruous, gave the subject matter both a timeless feeling and a specific world in which to live.  We understand that we are in the American Café: a café where anything can happen, where indeed, we expect it to. There were older professional actors in the show side by side with young students, which heightened the multi-generational, timeless landscape of the piece.  Throughout the show I kept wishing that my grandparents could be in the audience with me, and yet I was equally as engaged as I think that they would be.  Part of my great desire for them to be sitting there next to me in the audience, I think was because of the accessibility of this modern, important piece of theatre for their generation. They are used to seeing big musicals, and often I worry that if they were to see one of my shows, they would not relate to it or understand it at all.  Café variations I knew that they would love for its music, but I also felt that through that point of access they would be moved by the viewpoints work at play and the Chuck Mee scenes.  The piece created an appreciation for old and new theatre practices.

I was inspired by the concept of this piece.  Taking a location, a theme, and vocabularies from which to draw creates an exciting playing ground for collaboration.  The company gave itself a very clear container within which to play, and because of this their work was very deep and specific.  The location, a café, the theme love/relationships, and the vocabularies were; movement, Gershwin Music, and Chuck Mee café scenes.  Because of this simple set up, the piece was very easy to access, who hasn’t been in a café?  Felt love?  Heard a Gershwin song?  But it was also very specific because the artists that they are drawing from have very specific vocabularies.  Also using viewpoints as a creation tool gave it a clear, heightened, yet very human movement vocabulary. I admire Charles Mee so much for making his work available, his willingness to share his work makes it possible to have pieces such as this.  His text was re-imagined and re-contextualized, but I felt that it spoke as strongly as ever, and each scene was meaningful in contrast with the others.

The story of the piece was told as a cumulative collection of images.  Several different stories wove together to make one.  I felt very at ease, which put me as the audience member in an open place to receive the work and let the images wash over me, which is how the storytelling of this piece happens. When I reflect back on what stood out to me most, it is a viewpoints movement piece, a scene, a dance, and a song.  Each element of creation was integral and memorable.  Some scenes were pleasant, some shocking, and some heartbreaking. The show follows the general trajectory of a typical relationship.  Meeting, falling in love, heartbreak, and then the search begins again or deepens with that same person.

There were no gay relationships clearly included until about three quarters of the way through the piece.  For a while I thought that no LGBTQ couples were going to be portrayed and I was getting a little sad and angry in my seat.  I didn’t want to believe that this beautiful work could fail so blatantly to reflect the American experience.  However, right when I was feeling that most strongly, a gay couple appeared and listened to a classic Gershwin song, sharing a beautiful, intimate moment with only them onstage being serenaded by the singer.  They were in formal attire as all the characters had been thus far, suits, looking classy.  Shortly after a crossing happened with a woman and man both in drag.  And I could breathe a sigh of relief.   Queer experience was not discounted from this show!  They just saved it up to near the end.  I think for many audience members this served to ease these themes in, normalizing them as part of love.  At this point the piece had already won them over, so it’s safe to introduce more controversial themes into this upper class, old-fashioned café world. By putting gay love in this world, is acknowledges that it too is tieless, not a ‘modern issue’. And for audience members like me, it made their absence very noticeable up until that point.  Calling attention to their lack of representation perhaps tells the story of how gay couples could maybe not be so out in the Gershwin early 40s period as they can be today.

The play uses all songs from ‘The American Songbook’, with the exception of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, also by Gershwin, which underscores much of the piece in the spaces between the musical numbers.  In talking about how he composed ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ to his first biographer, Isaac Goldberg, in 1931, he said,

“It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer – I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise… And there I suddenly heard, and even saw on paper – the complete construction of the Rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.^” (Cowen, Ron (1998), “George Gershwin: He Got Rhythm” The Washington Post Online).

One can feel in the piece the underpinnings of this idea of America as a vast, quickly moving, melting pot. Indeed Café Variations as a whole is a melting pot of different artists and styles, and there is something about it that feels very American.  It is a kaleidoscope of its own, through which we see the American Experience.  A huge part of which is waiting for or actively seeking love and relationships. Perhaps it is this “metropolitan madness” that George describes that comes through so stunningly in the piece.  It is an urban piece. It is interesting to me that he composed this on a train.  A train is a liminal space, a vehicle of transportation from one place to another, the same way that any good play is.  Cafés are also liminal spaces, and the piece shows us how they can be incredibly transportive, particularly in that the potential for a life changing relationship is waiting there.  And relationships, we all know, are incredibly transformative.  Love is a journey.  All of the elements of the play come together to make it a carrying vehicle, an exploration of how we become ourselves, often through our relationships with others.

The set was incredibly elegant, an homage to old timey America as is the Music and the whole piece in general.  The costumes too supported this vision. However, the work still felt modern and relevant.  Much of the movement in the piece was very lyrical, in line with that old time America feel, but many numbers in the piece broke that feeling, with percussive movement and literal physical fighting.  The piece to me did not feel dated but rather, timeless.  It was a crowd pleaser, but that does not necessarily mean it was not at all challenging.  While it perhaps did not inspire me to revolution, it did bring me joy and make me think about what it is to be American.  It was very entertaining. When I came to BU four years ago, I tended to look down on a piece if it was not a call to action of some kind or if it was merely ‘entertaining’.  I still sometimes do this. However, I am beginning to see that entertaining work is as necessary as intensely moving or thought provoking work and indeed one does not exclude the other.  Theatre that is ‘entertaining’ and does not then present controversial material is still valid.  It still fosters collaboration and community, and smiling is not such a bad thing!  Also Café Variations was revolutionary to me because it showed me how one can so flawlessly and beautifully blend styles to create a new, clear, and exciting world.  I thoroughly enjoyed watching it and was very moved by its sheer beauty upon exiting the theatre.  I was changed chemically; I saw beauty and grace everywhere as I left.

In a ‘Behind the scenes’ video that documented the making of Café Variations, an Emerson student involved in the piece said of Anne’s Direction that it was like she was “painting a picture instead of directing a piece of theatre”.  The images are indeed what stayed with me most.

The modern Poetry slam movement began in Chicago in 1986.  It is a fringe movement, driven by activists and artists.  I was surprised to learn from my friend who is deeply immersed in the slam community that it is a very male driven art form and there is a lot of sexual abuse of women within the slam community.  I was shocked to hear this because I’ve always thought of slam as a tool through which the oppressed can attack the oppressors.  Apparently though, recently in New York, in St. Paul, and in Vancouver, there have been accusations of rape within these slam communities.  Each community is handling these allegation in a different way.  I have not been able to support these facts, as there is not information about this available online as far as I can find, so I report this with my source being word of mouth from my friend.  The perpetrator in New York has been banned from competing in New York and has been prosecuted legally, but could not be proven guilty.  In St. Paul, the offender was banned from the slam community for two years and I don’t know if he was prosecuted legally or not.  In Vancouver, the abuser was not prosecuted legally or excommunicated, but rather dealt with in a very honor/shame system way.  Once the women that he had raped spoke out, the slam community supported them, told the offender’s parents and friends what had happened, and required him to go into treatment for anger management.  I find this approach interesting and very reflective of the poetry slam community.  To me this shows that the slam community is one that is so tight-knit that a transgression of this kind can be handled more effectively by the community than by turning the case over to the police.  Feeling as if one has hurt one’s own community is awful, and he is now also in treatment programs that he might not be in were he in jail.

At the slam that I attended, there was a very powerful poem about sexual assault.  All of the poems were incredibly moving. As I sat in my seat and watched, I found myself observing the audience.  There were young, middle aged, and older people sitting side by side, of all different colors and sizes.  There was an older African-American woman sitting and watching in what looked like her Sunday best.  I suddenly had such a strong image of church.  She could be sitting in the pew and looking up at the minister, or rabbi, or officiator with the same expression of awe, joy, and rapture.  Instead she was looking at a young white boy slam about his loss of virginity with an older man.  She was clearly enthralled and moved by his story which he shared with sharp images and vulnerability. Slam is the religion of this community, the Cantab their temple, and I could feel the energy present, which left me in no doubt that here there was a higher power, flowing through each poet who got up to speak.  Each poem was a gift, a generous expression of self, a call to action, and each applause was the audience answering with “Thank you, we see ourselves in you”.  As I walked home in the cold spring night, streetlamps illuminating the beautiful trees of Cambridge Port,  I felt incredibly lucky to be an artist.

Arianda talks about how when she was auditioning for ‘Venus’, she knew that she had almost no shot at getting the role and that liberated her because she was doing her preparation work for her own enjoyment and deepening, not for others’ approval.  She says, “I just didn’t care…about anyone’s opinion.”  She also talks about how she wore a specific scent for Vanda to the audition and about how she wears a different perfume for each character she plays.  I think that this is very interesting, including scent in ones’ character development is an option I’ve never really thought much about.  The article goes on to describe Arianda’s unique, masterful qualities as an actor.  These descriptions interested me less than specific quotes from Arianda herself and from those who she trained with.

One of her professors at NYU, Janet Zarish, said, in describing Arianda that, “She has a sort of creative restlessness…underneath is this cauldron of feeling…she has something always moving through her mind and her body.  I almost feel like acting for her organizes something inside herself.”  I really relate to this quote and I would guess that many of us do as theatre artists.  There is an energy, a need to speak, that is focused and harnessed in performance.  Arianda also says, of playing Billie Dawn, a ditzy woman often labeled as ‘studpid’ in “Born Yesteday, “I never approach a character from a negative place…Being stupid is not active, I thought she was incredibly smart, in a way”.  I find this inspiring because not only do I believe that one must play positives, but because it demonstrates how theatre makes us appreciate each character’s diverse talents and downfalls, creating empathy and even admiration for characters like Billie who may otherwise be labeled as ‘less than’.

Arianda is a good listener onstage.  Arianda says, ” I believe in magic…Actors who don’t listen aren’t serving the magic.  There is no play.  There is no story. There is no character. They just get into their own wonder.  Hate watching that.  It’s pointless.”  The article also talks about how Arianda has different pre-show rituals for each show that she does, many of them based on superstition, on this belief in magic.  She does not want to specify what they are, but she does say that she gets to the theatre early every night and spends time onstage alone before each performance.  She says “Everyone who was on that stage is there…You leave a part of yourself on every stage you’re on.  How could you not live in the air somehow?  There is a great comfort in knowing there is something bigger.  That gives me a great deal of surrender.”  I find this quote particularly moving because it is something that I feel deeply but have never put those words to.  Theatre is ritual, theatre is magic, and theatre has a legacy.  Whether we are carrying on what has come before or reacting to it by creating something entirely new, we are a part of a history of theatre makers.  We are harnessing the energy of what has come before, the energy of the universe which is far greater than ourselves, to tell the story of what is.  Reading this article brought out the passionate, excited, young girl in me.  I remember walking onstage for the first time and feeling that same sense of wonder, of power, of gratitude, and of magic.

From the Mixed Blood website: http://www.mixedblood.com/radical-hospitality:

“By revolutionizing access, Mixed Blood believes audiences will grow to be truly inclusive and reflective of the entire community. With that growth, Mixed Blood believes that audiences and supporters will embrace the egalitarian core value of the company, providing support in return. Simply put, instead of charging for tickets, audiences will be asked, subsequent to attendance, to voluntarily become supporters of a vision that ensures access for all…”

This theatre company trusts that human beings are good at heart.  That we are communal creatures who want to support each other, who value diversity, who care about the arts and who know that theatre is vital.  Mixed blood trusts that if you give, you will be given to.  It is operating on a giving ideology rather than a taking one, and this truly is radical in our society today.  Which brings me to the name.  Radical Hospitality. That is so cool!!  Often I feel that in order to be radical one must be loud, big, and rebelling against something.  I suppose Radical Hospitality is rebelling against charging for tickets, but it is creating something positive in response.  It is being the change it wishes to see, not just speaking out against something.  I think being Radically open, radically hospitable, radically kind is amazing because it is using positivity as an assertive tool. It is showing that giving is more powerful than taking.  It is showing that kindness can be just as strong and insistent of a tool as violence.

Radical Hospitality trusts the community it creates.  And it is completely non discriminatory.  It is truly egalitarian as everyone can get free tickets regardless of socio-economic position.  This is not charity to the poor, but a vision and fostering of a new reality.  I want to carry this spirit of creating change with revolutionary, radical acts of generosity with me into my last months at BU and beyond into my professional life!

The it gets better campaign focuses on hope as it’s central message.  By telling LGBT youth who are going through a hard time that “it gets better,” one is effectively giving them hope.  This is very resonant to me as right now I am in a production of Execution of Justice by Emily Mann.  The play tells the story of the trial of Daniel James White, the city supervisor who killed both George R. Moscone and Harvey Milk in November of 1978.  It is a very intense play that has sparked many audience questions and debates, which is very exciting and really makes me believe in the power of theatre all over again!  The second act opens with a recording of Harvey Milk’s campaign speech, Harvey’s central campaign message was hope. He says:

“Two days after I was elected I got a phone call and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said “Thanks”. And you’ve got to elect gay people, so that the thousand upon thousands like that child know that there is hope for a better world; there is hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s: without hope the us’s give up. I know that you can’t live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, and you have got to give them hope.”

I have been thinking a lot lately about what would have happened if Harvey Milk had not been killed, and if Dan white had not merely received a seven years and eight month prison sentence because of the Twinkie defense.  There is part of me that feels incredibly cheated, that feels like if Harvey Milk had lived LGBT people would have full equal rights today.  Of course we can never know that for sure. But for me it is easy to become upset that gay marriage is not legal in the majority of U.S. states, that homophobia is so rampant, and that in many places job discrimination is still legal based on sexual orientation, as is the ability to deny hospital visitation rights. Perhaps because I was not alive during Harvey Milk’s time and before, it is easy for me to forget how far we really have come (And it is far!  If you are interested in knowing more of the history around Harvey Milk’s time and before, read The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shiltz). It gives me hope that the ‘it gets better’ campaign is in existence.  It feels like Harvey’s Milk message is still very much alive, even if we have work yet to do.  I do believe that It does get better and I know it will. I believe that sharing our stories as a society and individuals, through plays like Execution of Justice and projects like the ‘It gets better campaign’ we can and will create change.

\’It Gets Better\’ documentary trailer