Pig Iron's "Isabella"

Today we worked on mumbling. I asked Charles, the actor who plays the mortician, to make his lines border on inaudible, 40% of the time. My work with Charles has been so much about diminishing his expressive qualities as classical actor. Today was a breakthrough in mumbling.

Don't get me wrong. I'm wildly interested in clarity. It's just that articulating every word, as actors are taught to do at mfa programs around the country, can lead to a flatness of expression that is worse than any mumble -- it can make the action, in fact, less clear. Overarticulating kills richness of expression in the human animal. We trade in understanding theater as theater -- as bodies moving and voicing on the stage -- for understanding theater as literature and nothing more, as a writer's expression of ideas through text. And theater can be much more than that.

This Shakespeare-inspired piece (because, no, this isn't Shakespeare's play, not by a long shot) is a revolt against all the "pretty-talking" and plummy British(ish) accents that have come to infect most of the Shakespeare performance I've seen. It's an invitation to experience all the joys of awkward utterances, stumbling, and mumbling.

Right now we're struggling to pitch our mumbles just right in the Ice Box, a concrete former fish freezer that's been converted into a gallery -- and now into a theater for our Live Arts Festival performances. 6 concrete surfaces make for an echo that undoes all our efforts. So the past week has been a combination of efforts on sound designer Nick Kourtides's part to dampen the space with soft goods, curtains and panels, and to create an ingenious way to add subtle amplification into the show. We need the audience to hear clearly when they are supposed to hear words and when they are supposed to hear muddied sounds.

Tomorrow we try the full array of microphone possibilities as we begin technical rehearsals.

People think that artists who make work for international theater festivals lead rarefied and glamorous lives, drinking absinthe and downloading foreign films while dreaming up our next site-specific bacchanal. But no. We are regular people, just like you. We live in South Philly. We eat at Chickie’s Hoagies and at Taqueria Veracruzana. And yes, we go to the movies. To movies like Superbad.

Since I’ve just bought my festival tickets and will be squinting my eyes at cutting-edge performance for 17 nights in a row, I thought I should use my last night of freedom to check out something funny. And a blog seems a good place to offer up a quick take on a movie, right?

My considered opinion: Superbad is a lovely movie, full of finely observed detail and unexpected comic timing. Most important, it has a generosity of spirit that so many focus-group-inspired comedies lack. Bravo, Superbad. I tip my hat to you.

How was rehearsal? Genuinely super-bad. The actors seemed to sag under the weight of all the technical details we threw at them today, and our runthrough was sluggish and out-of-tune. You know this is natural, typical for the first day of technical rehearsals and the last day of a long week filled with new ideas. But it’s not a good feeling.

My girlfriend’s sitting next to me as I type this, and she asks, “Won’t the actors feel bad if they read that?” Nope, I say. They know. I told them.

“Now you sound evil,” she continues.

But don’t worry, I type. They are a strong and seasoned bunch, and they know that I’ve seen them do beautiful work all week. I told them that too.

Off to drink some more absinthe then.

Today our thoughts are all technical and very far from the heart of the play. Sound levels, cues for entrances, maintaining performance-rhythms so that they are repeatable.

I often say to the actors, “You are not a prisoner of your choreography” – that is, we work as ensemble to make a world, not just an interconnected set of movements. So if something falls differently, you adjust, you acknowledge, you play with it. I urge them to awaken their sensitivities to everything that’s happening in the moment, rather than stick to established routines.

But today it’s time to go the other direction, make some decisions, make sure that people can be heard when they are supposed to be heard, seen when seen.

I’ve been struggling with what-to-blog these past two days, because all of our attention right now is on covering things up. On things that we are going to distract you from. Or, to put in another way, on things that we hope to “zero out” – that you’ll take them as the ‘zero point’ from which all the action emerges.

Because everything is contextual, of course. Even the color white. Especially the color white, and especially in theater. That’s what that “white balance” knob is on a digital camera, a way of telling the camera “what is white today?.” If we put a lot of blue light on a white stage, as we do in Isabella, eventually you acclimate to the blue light and think of it as just normal light, as a kind of zero point. When we bring up a whiter light, it will appear deeply amber. It’s not amber, it’s just less blue. But in relation to what’s been zero, it will read as autumnal and sweet.

This set is bright white. It’s often hard to make human beings appear bright enough against a white set, because brightness is contextual too. Human skin is darker than bright white paint. The more light we throw at the stage, the brighter the people get, but the background gets brighter too. Eventually the lights are at full and the people still seem dingy, because they’re never going to get brighter than that white set just behind them.

Fortunately, in this case a lot of the skin is fairly white as well, because the actors in Isabella play corpses, and corpses suffer from pallor mortis, the pallor of death. We achieve this the old-fashioned way: lots of make-up. And that would be one of those things I’d rather you didn’t think about when you come to the space. In this case, I’d like you to think “She is dead” rather than “she is made-up to look like she is dead.”

Which is funny, because so much of what animates us to make work in Pig Iron is to show what’s happening, to revel in the theatricality of theater. Most of our plays have no black-outs. That’s because I have waged a decade-long battle against the convention of dimming the lights and having stage crew come move the scenery around. Characters move scenery in Pig Iron pieces, and they do it for theatrical reasons. We’ve assiduously avoided this convention, the convention of the stage hand, because it seems like such a terrible betrayal of the audience’s act of bringing their gaze to bear on the stage. It seems like the least we can do: make the theater event work to a degree that you never receive this signal from us – “Don’t look at this, let’s all pretend this isn’t happening right now.” Not even for a moment.

But this piece begins with a black-out. With lights dimmed and actors then set in place. I couldn’t find another way to begin the piece. Yes, there is only one other black-out, at the very end, and I’ll keep pondering it. But this seems like the simplest way to begin Isabella. Other circumnavigations would be too heavy.

This piece breaks a lot of our “house rules,” and I imagine that’s a good thing. I think the conundrum for us stems from trying to make a piece that, on the one hand, is about the concreteness, and banality, of death, while our materials -- live performers -- are decidely not-dead. “What’s real” goes out the window, so we’ve had to stop using the term.

The idea to set MEASURE in a morgue came, in fact, from the number of characters in Shakespeare’s original script who demand a blunt take on reality, who say “cut the crap and get to the point.” An odd attitude for Shakespearean comedy. It happens four or five times: “Let me know the point,” says Claudio; “Make me not your story,” says Isabella; and my favorite, so very anti-lyrical, from Angelo: “Your sense pursues not mine. Either you are ignorant, or else seem so, crafty. And that’s not good.”

And what could be more matter-of-fact, more get-to-the-point, than a morgue? Than naked bodies treated as objects?

But while Shakespeare’s characters may say, “Enough metaphor, get to the real story,” where to draw that line, between the real and the artificial, has only become more puzzling to us. Which objects should be real, and which essential? Which details of deadness can be real, and which need to be translated into a new theatrical language?

There’s a lovely line in MEASURE about death:

Thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn'st toward him still.

It seems that it’s the same with artifice. The faster we run from it, the closer we approach it.

Time is running out and my collaborators and I have to pick a title. Not for Isabella. But for an upcoming collaboration with Teater Slava on a piece about labor activist, Swedish immigrant, and martyred songwriter Joe Hill.

This should be an easier one than usual. Historical material, the wealth of song titles to choose from. Easier than Love Unpunished, an elliptical piece with our most elliptical title, which ended up a meditation on the stairs of the World Trade Center.

Titles have to have strong shoulders. On the one hand, you want something that piques the interest of even the uninitiated. Too clear and it's already boring, too obscure and it's annoying. Clearly there's a music to titles, too. For the piece we're making for this year's festival, I liked the chunky music of "Isabella Pygmalion Frankenstein," and I liked the idea of all those archetypes jostling around in the audience's head as they do in the play. But in the end we chose the simpler and more elegant title: Isabella. The 3-word title would have given people too much to chew on before they got into the space.

The best titles smell good when you encounter them and take on an unexpected beauty after you've seen the work. Spring Awakening. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

People have asked me why we didn't just call our current creation MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Well, there isn't that much of Measure for Measure left in Isabella, first of all, and much as I love selling the audience on one set of notions and then serving up something else, it seemed perverse in this case to pretend this was, in fact, a Shakespeare play, rather than a crumbled collage of Shakespeareana piled up in a morgue. We did toy with "William Shakespeare's ISABELLA" as a title, which would send the Anglophiles running to their concordances ("Can I have missed one of the 37 works attributed to the undisputed master of the English language?") But in the end - why be a wise-acre? That's what blogs are for, not titles.

So, back to Joe Hill. We're down to two. I vetoed the title the project's originator proposed: "Mourning and Organizing." These, I protested, are two things that nobody much wants to do, so why would they see a play about it? (In originator Daniel Rudholm's defense, Joe Hill did say "Don't mourn, Organize!" when he learned he would be executed. But I think you need to know that fact to enjoy the title.)

On the table are the prosaic, folksy "Joe Hill Where'd You Go," which I think has the feel of one of Joe Hill's songs, recalls but doesn't repeat the popular ballad "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," and could be a song that, say, Pogo might sing.

On the other hand there is "Sweet By-and-By," which comes from the Joe Hill tune "Pie in the Sky" (he invented that phrase) -- the preachers assure the poor and the hungry that they will "eat in the sweet by-and-by." And since the play is very much concerned with Joe Hill's wondering where he goes when he dies, I think "Sweet By-and-By" has a kind of ironic beauty to it.

OK then. Sweet By-and-By it is. For now.

First performance was tonight. So much to learn about the rhythm of the piece. So interesting to hear the audience laugh, hold its breath. The laughter in particular creates new markers, new 'ends of a phrase,' since the piece is so spare, sonically. We needed this first performance in order to begin to calibrate the rhythm.

More on this tomorrow.