"The Poetry of Pizza": A Transformational Moment

Poetry of Pizza ran from February to March of 2010 in the Cal Rep Theater.

Hello, fellow seekers of life and truth,

That's a nice opener, isn't it? I think I'll start using that, now. It adds a little more potency to the opening. Anyway, I've got another play-related post for you. This one is multi-dimensional, just like last night's was. Do you remember any moment in your life when things clicked, and your life was taken in a different direction? It may have been a big moment, where some dramatic event turned your life in a 180. Sometimes, though, there are small moments, where you just do one thing, and that one thing changed the way you look at life. After that, everything begins to shift. Two years ago, today, in fact, going to see the play The Poetry of Pizza did that for me.

I remember very clearly the night I went to go see this play, 2 years ago. It was a Wednesday night, March 3, 2010. Yes, I do remember the days of the week that most things happen. Why I know this is a whole different story. Like I was saying, though, I remember that very clearly, because that was the first play I saw as a student in Theater Arts. That evening, I was excited to go down to this theater, located on the permanently-docked Queen Mary. I remember getting going early, having eagerly anticipated this time out. Back then, I lived a much more solitary existence.

Now, I didn't know what to expect from this play. However, it turned out that this play grabbed two parts of me that I didn't know could go together. First off, the action in this play happens in 1998, three years before, well, you know what happened. I remember that time period. Back then, the only people who tweeted were birds, and the only facebook you could find was the one your grandparents were always showing you. Ah, but enough of my waxing nostalgic.

Anyway, Sarah Middleton, who was played by the woman I was studying under, is a 40-something, jaded professor of fine poetic works who has just relocated to Copenhagen. She is under the persistant guidance of her American friends, and the constant eye of a seedy Danish professor. One day, she walks into a pizzeria owned by a colorful group of Kurdish refugees. Sarah finds one in particular, Soran, who is an artist when it comes to these pizzas. When Sarah samples one of these delights, she is taken with this man.

Now, when she talks to him again, she finds out his troubled back story. Even though she is ten years older than he is, as Soran puts it he "feels older than his 34 years." It turns out he and his friends fled from Northern Iraq (an area called "Kurdistan" that encompasses parts of Iraq, Iran and Turkey) when Saddam Hussein began carrying out a murder campaign by poison gas attacks, and many other gruesome methods. This changes Sarah's understanding of Soran's depth. He has not been dragged into the pit of cynicism or nihilism, in spite of the terrible things he has witnessed in life.

As the two grow closer together, a variety of characters, American, Danish, and Kurdish, play out many bizarre antics, Seinfeld-ian in their humor and vulnerability. Sadly, one day, Soran asks Sarah, one day, to shave her, well, bush, as per Kurdish cultural custom. Scared of this, Sarah and Soran mutually decide they are just too different from each other to make it. Their friends are seen telling them to just "let it go." They both feel a hole in their hearts. In the end, Soran and Sarah decide they love each other so much, working through their differences  is worth it to them. In the last scene, the two are getting married in the Kurdish custom, and Sarah samples a very special slice of pizza. All the other characters, and evenly split cast of men and women, discover each other, and none of them are lonely.

Now, normally, this kind of "happy" ending does not work for me. It just leaves some part of the human experience out most of the time. Here, however, it was not blindly overlooking life. It was very life-affirming, and heartwarming. It was something I thought, "Well, that could never happen in real life." Maybe it could, though. People often believe that you need an ending that is as dreary and grey as possible, that takes any hope in your heart, and just squashes it, in order to get people to think. To me, this is not always true. I think The Poetry of Pizza really made that warmth in spite of the darkness and the division apparent.

Now, the woman you see in the photo at the top, was my first teacher at this school that I go to now. She told us that the man who had acted opposite her as Soran had lived in Kosovo back when the War and genocide were still going on in the late '90's. He didn't have to stretch too far to figure out his motivations as a character. Anyway, I only began to realize later how this play had subtly affected me. Theater suddenly became a place of community, of humanity, where you could explore all the pains and heartaches going on in the world, and tell truths in no uncertain terms, but with all the compassion toward a person standing exposed, vulnerable, on the stage. That night, I came to understand what the theater was really about, for me.

I'd like to show you a tribute drawing I did for this play myself, a few months later:

Sarah Middleton boards a flight from the U.S. to Denmark, shortly before the opening of The Poetry of Pizza.

You may notice I have a lot of aircraft and flying machines as subjects in my art. When I was younger, I was simply fascinated by air travel, and dedicated many a visual work to airplanes, helicopters, and such. Anyway, Sarah's looking out into the plane is meant to connote the beginning of a journey into the unknown. It is supposed to be slightly dated-looking, but close to our time, and reminiscent of memories I had of that period.

So my question is this: do works of art (especially plays, books, and movies) have to be dark in tone to convey a meaningful message? Or could it be (at the risk of asking a rhetorical question) that some happy discoveries in plays and films can change our understanding of life, and shift our sense of what is possible to do? I want to finish this post on that note. I'm sorry it took longer to get done than I anticipated; I was fighting off a fever yesterday and today. I will be back up to speed soon, and hopefully, I'll get some time to blog. Thanks for listening.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!

"Quills" and Violence in the Media

(Photo Courtesy of The Daily 49er)

Hello, fellow seekers of life and truth,

Sorry I haven't blogged in over a week, but this week, in particular, has been a hectic one. You'll see why over the course of this post. As you know, I have become more involved in theater and play productions over the last year, year and a half. This discovery has been life-changing for me, although I still don't know where I will go from here. Thus, talk about the theater and the stage is something I use a lot on this blog.

Anyway, the reason I have been busy is that I have been rehearsing and preparing this week. Not for a production, mind you, but for an in-depth scene to be done in class. I had been rehearsing this for a few weeks, but this week we did a rehearsal sunday, monday, and tuesday night, to perform the scene Wednesday afternoon.

The scene comes from a play called Quills. The play is set in 19th Century France, when Napoleon was still in power. It presents a melodramatic, chaotic, bizarrely dark and moving fantasy account of the last days of the Marquis de Sade, who died in 1814. For the last decade of his life, he was detained at Charenton Asylum in Saint-Maurice. He was under the care of Dr. Royer Collard, the chief medical officer there, and the Abbe de Coulmier, the main administrator at the asylum.

The latter, as a minister, attempts to change the Marquis, curing him of his sin, and stopping his prolific writings. The asylum leadership is embarrassed by the Marquis's ability to circulate graphic vignettes of debauchery and vice, which are written with eloquent, lyrical verbage. These stories are of people who engage in pedophilia, abduction, rape, bestiality, and necrophilia. As per the Doctor's demands, Coulmier resorts to progressively more drastic measures, ultimately gouging out the Marquis's tongue, dismembering and killing him. Coulmier himself becomes quite deranged, and, to his horror, takes thrill in the Marquis's death. This is the most horrifying revelation of all: that a monster lies even in the most noble of men.

Anyway, in this scene, my role was as this Coulmier, and my "given circumstances" (to borrow a term from actor-speak) were that I had just taken away the Marquis's quill, his writing utensil, and I believed I was on the way to "curing" him. Here, I was being told the Marquis had used the wine he was given to write another story. The doctor was that I step up the physical pressure on the Marquis to stop writing, and I, being the charitable healer, had to defy him, to heal the Marquis my way. The scene involved a flashback to a conversation, and then another flashback to the Marquis writing. My main challenge was to stay reactive, but still, while all these flashbacks were going on.

Luckily, the director had this vision that the girl playing the Marquis using us all as life-size action figures, arranging us all in her liking. It made it fun to be part of her desires, and just go with it, in a way. The best ideas for this came in the last few days. Fortunately, it all ended up coming together well in the scene. Some people though parts of it didn't work, for other people, they really clicked. To a certain extent, that is just part of art: it will click for some people, but not for others. People seemed to think our scene was well-thought-out enough to constitute a worthwhile scene.

Now, when I went to see it the other night, that took the scene and the play to a whole new level. The actors, all grad students and professors of Theater, many of whom I had learned from or am now, had researched it much more meticulously than even I did for this. They pronounced all the French phrases deftly, while we had to go through them a few times to learn how they were really pronounced. Of course, they were able to go all out with the period dress, and they really hammed up the effects of their characters, the broken sadness, the chilling, frightening malevolence, as is the custom in the melodrama in which the play is written.

The playwright, Doug Wright, said that he played up the division between the good and the bad characters, that they were "either kissed by God or yoked in Satan's merciless employ." Even so, I was able to detect qualities in the Marquis, the diabolical one, that were positive, as well as ones in the Doctor, even in Coulmier, that were less than Godly. In spite of the Marquis's resistance to Coulmier, the two actually form a dialectic, in that one's existence actually gives meaning to the other's. There is actually a bond of sorts that connects them, which makes Coulmier's final act all the more painful to behold. All in all, the play pulled out all the stops, and it had more going for it than against it.

Now, onto the implications of Quills. This play had a lot to do with censorship of viciously sexual and violent content in literature. Our instructor asked us to consider why the playwright might have written a play in a given era. Now the play Quills debuted off Broadway on November 3, 1995. In 1989, a homoerotic photo exhibit, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, prompted fears that such expression would degrade society itself. The pressure on the N.E.A. in the ensuing years became an event known as the Mapplethorpe Controversy (after photographer Robert Mapplethorpe).

In the years to come, the debate over what should and shouldn't be seen in art and entertainment became more urgent, and had more dire consequences. On April 20, 1999, two juvenile delinquents in Littleton, Colorado decided to bomb their high school's cafeteria, and then turn guns on the other kids. 13 people were killed, including a teacher, and the two assailants themselves. In the wake of that event, people became concerned about the increasingly violent video games, movies and music that were cropping up. Now art was no longer violent for a purpose, it was violent just for the sake of gorging itself on the gore.

In a 2001 interview with the Advocate, after the movie Quills was released, Doug Wright was interviewed about violent lyrics, specifically in Eminem's music, for which he won an award the previous year. His lyrics were violently homophobic, "My words are like a dagger...that'll stab you in the head-whether you're a fag or a lez." Wright, who is gay, stated concern without scapegoating Eminem or anyone else. He believed that the words in question were a diatribe that had the potential to help move our lives forward. Quoting him,

"Look at something like the Columbine incident, and you see that volatile teenage minds will express themselves with the tools that they are given. Give them a paintbrush, and you might get a painting; give them a handgun, and you might get a massacre. What's really troubling about someone like Eminem is the very purgative nature of art. If he purges his own demons by creating this kind of rhetoric, then it has a certain societal value, you could argue. And yet how can we as a society educate him sufficiently so that the ultimate result doesn't defile us all, collectively?"

I grew up thinking that violent television, movies, and games were not a problem. Sometimes, it hit me wrong, and really bothered me, but I thought it was cool to watch action-packed sci-fi and superhero movies. I thought it was cool to listen to rappers like 50 Cent and Eminem, just for the sake of seeing what it was like. As I got in to my later teens, I got more and more bothered by the violence, the cruelty, of the words. When I was a teenager, if you didn't act like the other guys, you would get called a "fag," a "retard," and all insults were designed to trap you in gay-looking situations. That banter grew to bother me, once I passed the age of about 14 or 15.

I was disgusted by all the gory, horrible movies, video games, and such that other people seemed to think was a game. Seeing people hurt has always bothered me, but as I grew up, I felt like sticking to this drove me apart from everyone else. That said, though, I do not believe in not showing violence or sex to people in art, or literature, or music. Like I said, there is indulgence and gorging in the gore, and horror, and what not. That has an addictive, druglike quality to many people. However, there are some very violent works of art, film, and literature that have lots of artistic merit, and insight into the human condition.

The reason I chose to show the photo from Taxi Driver above is that I believe it is one such example. It was my favorite film when I was about 14. Travis, the hero, becomes raw, violent, and brutal, throughout the course of the film. However, there is this quality about him that strikes you like a boy of about 12 or 13. With an increasing violent or unstable streak in him, and yet, there is still a childlike, earnest quality to the way he acts.

Also, violent artworks are not necessarily supportive of it, or condemning of it. Quills itself offers actions that support both freedom of expression and suppression thereof. Though the Marquis is lionized as a hero of freedom of expression, when he passes a story of his through the asylum, a madman decides to act its content out on Madeleine, a 16-year-old maiden who is taken with the Marquis, and for whom he secretly feels smitten.

I wanted to show you this work of mine because it has to do with a horrible act of violence against the girl in this picture, who is dying, but because it is reminiscent of the fate of Madeleine in Quills. This comes from an idea I had that was about crime, justice, and the victim. To me, neither art glorifying the criminal nor the law is totally correct. Wright himself said that what makes this debate so potent is that "there is truth on all sides of it." I believe what good art does is show the truth on two opposing sides, in two opposing people.

I think Quills definitely succeeds at this. At the same time, it made me laugh with perverted amusement, made my nerves tingle with the creeps, and cringe with sadness and pain for the people involved. This kind of multi-layered reaction is connection to the human condition. For that, Quills is definitely worth reading or seeing. I'll have more material for you tomorrow. Thanks.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!