Pig Iron's "Isabella"

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.