Theban Diary #7

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

Building a play is like building a ship. A ship on the ocean, a ship in the air, a ship surrounded on every side by night. Words for sails, light for wind, wood for the floor becomes the wood of the deck. It shouldn’t float. It shouldn’t fly. Only human will, contained for this purpose, makes it buoyant. A shape. A shape moving across the void.

In a couple of more nights, ANTIGONE opens. I’ve sort of abandoned this whole ‘diary’ project, only so much energy to go around – once we started rehearsing and building and growing, ruminating upon it wasn’t part of the budget. But last night, watching the show, it struck me – maybe I should try to say some of these things. It’s the height of the eclipse – my time with the show is ending as the performances begin. The best directors render themselves extraneous, in my opinion. Strong cast, strong crew – if you’re still somewhere on the boat paddling, you didn’t do your job. Maybe some of this comes from being a performer for a long time before I ever directed anything, but this is the time that I often find sad. A show doesn’t truly live until the first audience, doesn’t truly start to become itself. A whole new journey, but I don’t get to go.

I can say that I am tremendously proud of this production. I can draw a straight line from my earliest experiences with theater, through many experiments and experiences, to right now — and ANTIGONE suddenly sits as a weird spine to the whole thing. Shows are small, rolling nightmares – ‘being strapped to the anxiety train’ as I call it. With so many variables, moving pieces, effects, sound, light, breathing chaotic humans, endless and infinite details from every level of zoom — very often you are still nailing the ship together as the curtain opens, holding the sails together with your hands. Many of my colleagues (lovingly?) have mocked me for my constant quest for sterility – to reduce the variables. Focus on the simple, the essential. Words, space, light, time. I’ve long threatened to do a show that’s just four actors in leotards with no set, two chairs, and a single candle.

I think this is that show.

It’s clean and confident on the page. It borrows from Greek theater, but dismisses it when convenient. It’s poetry, it’s mundane. It’s an argument, a history, an incitement to rebellion. It’s exciting, it’s funny, it’s vicious as a naked blade. It’s a goddamn play.

Our production is warm and human – upsetting and raw, a proper tragedy. I’m so glad that if I did nothing else correctly, I got the right people in the same room and got out of their way as much as possible. I’m so proud of this damn thing that I’m going to force myself to remain visible throughout the run, instead of vanishing into the underbrush as is my preference. I want the credit for all this talent I’ve stolen, I will shove every silver coin down my pants.

If art is a diary, and every show is a page – let this be the one that says ‘fuck you i did it‘. Underlined. Who am I saying this to? I have no idea. I don’t know who this opponent is but let me be clear, I still won.

TICKETS: https://townandgownplayers.org/antigone/

time space light

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

We’re all trapped in time, right? No dog, admit it – you are pinned DOWN in this conceptual morass. You can only pull up memories of the past (and they be dim as shit) or run some hypothetical imaginings of the future (and they be dim as shit). Now is all that you ever really see – but it’s always getting away from you. Humans invented time as a fable to explain and wallpaper over all the perception gaps – and then we did one better, we made the fable physical. We invented stories – which are just little fragments/simulacra of time. You can’t hold your whole life in your head, but you can hold a story. And a book, a movie, a play – we can time travel inside them, jump around, go through them again and again. Listen, you’re forehead is wrinkling you want to say I’m on one, but somewhere inside of you I’m scoring some points. Even the act of reading and writing is a stopgap against all this fucking time that do be devouring us. We got so good at it that we made stories that are so big that they also blow out the top of our brain’s containment. The Iliad, Days of our Lives, One Piece – some brains have seen it all, but none of them are truly holding it all inside the ol’ little gray cells. Yes, I see you saying, there are probably some humans that have existed that HAVE perfect recall and can hold it – but that’s not you or me, now is it? Creating a hypothetical human is just like creating a story – we’re super good at it, but it’s still a lie. Time is a beautiful lie, a trickster, my best friend. But I trust space more than time, I mean there’s just so much of it extending around us forever and ever amen. The distance between my front step and the street is the same, except when my brain bloops over it, but underlying still more trustworthy and the same. Space is impersonal, calming. And even if you want to get freaked out about it, there’s just so dang much of it that most of us just sort of shrug and trod on through it. It’s always new, always showing off strange new shapes of itself – it’s always being coy about it to boot. We’re always on the hunt for a weird new place, a space that feels. But light tho. Light is the only one I love because I will never understand.

Theban Diary #6

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

when

the gods

are listening

i take great care

prayers are not demands

just empty air that perhaps

can be filled with their poisoned gifts

so i pray for luck

not skill or strength or wisdom or joy

just luck

the turn of the die that cannot be denied

faster than death – braver than steel

a tiny curse that glows and breaks walls and sings the impossible into the tapestry

the unfair and the undeserved

just luck

i pray for luck

please let me again

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

they say

i would love you in every lifetime

find you in every world

i say

rookie numbers

i say

i’ll hate you in some worlds

i’ll be the man who sells you coffee

i’ll be a stone a tree, a yapping dog

again and again around the wheel

and even those horrible turns

where we never meet

just to be sure that i’m always there

looking and finding

(and sometimes hiding true)

they say

love like its the accomplishment

i say

only the beginning, you peasants

please give me the honor of being a stone you toss into the river and never name

please let me play the villain, black cloak stitched with gold

as you hurl me down from the tower

singed by your sunfire

i’m already on my way

back

Theban Diary #5

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

Just over a month until auditions. Or, as any aging director will tell you, the most important 48-72 hours of the entire process.

There are things you can affect as a director. Notice I did not say control. Control is an illusion and the sooner you rid yourself of any belief in its existence, the better. Much like God, it probably does exist in some sort of quantum / impossible to perceive by our feeble brains type way – but! You are not going to encounter it/them in the few weeks you have directing the show, so cut yourself some slack, my dude.

What was I talking about.

There are things you can affect as a director. Just about any text is flexible to some degree, ways to shade emphasis, focus the attention of the audience. A whole panoply of theater language, dirty tricks, blocking riddles, and vibes manipulation. I like the director chair because you have a lot of weapons in your arsenal – and the whole structure of your crew and the inherent leadership dynamic are built to aid the director in getting the show across the finish line. You might even accomplish some of your more esoteric aesthetic or artistic visions! Directing is about making choices (hopefully quickly) – and I often view each choice as increasing or decreasing the percentage chance of the show working – of the show being ‘good’ — because it’s still a dice roll at the end. You can have worked your way up to a solid 80% chance – and still the show may not work. That phantom, Control, again. Plays are organisms and they grow and mutate while you watch – so much of it is just not up to you. Which can be paralyzing — you can only influence so little of the bones, you want to make sure you are making the most of the choices you make. The best one, the best possible one, or maybe just the second-worst decision.

Casting is the most influential and borderline permanent decision you will make. Especially in amateur theater where you’re working with volunteers. I’m sure it’s difficult to replace a cast member in professional theater – but with the reduced timeframe and magnified social repercussions of local dirtbag theater, it becomes exponentially more complicated and fraught. Effectively, the cast you select after auditions is the one you’re closing the show with – barring illness or a family emergency. There are noted and juicy exceptions to this locked away in my memory, available for the low price of a few drinks and some chili-cheese fries to any who are curious.

But once you’ve picked a cast, you are stuck with them. And with all the tools the director may have – fixing an actor that is just wrong is not something you will ever truly succeed at. Most crucially if they are a load-bearing part of the production, one of your leads.

They may be completely lovely people. They may be working their ass off for you. You might be dating them. (don’t do this)

But they’re wrong. You saw something in them at auditions. Or maybe you’ve seen them perform dozens of times, across many roles. They seemed perfect, everyone on your production team enthusiastically agreed. But as rehearsals go on and the show gets on its feet, they’re sitting in the center of it and it is not working. And there is nothing you can do to direct your way out of it. Some chemistry, some alchemy, some gutter sorcery is absolutely misfiring and you as the director are going to be the one to realize it waaaaay before anyone else. The ceiling of your show’s success just crashed down and there’s no repairing it and you still have three more weeks before the show opens.

I’m being hyperbolic, sure. But this is what keeps you up at night, roaming the darkened halls of your manor. And you have to be reasonable with yourself – this is amateur theater after all. Plenty of times the best course is to just say ‘They are doing the best they can and they are doing everything the show and I ask of them. And I can live with that – and I can even celebrate that.’ Not everyone gets the same thing out of an artform. For them, this performance that is making your stomach eat itself, is perhaps deeply important to them – maybe even meaningful in the grand sense, something they will look back on for the rest of their life with affection and pride.

Which is great.

So great.

I don’t want that for Antigone or ANTIGONE. I want the right people to walk through the door and I want to recognize them and put them in the right places with the right support. I zig and zag at just the right times, I dodge the mistakes and catch the perfect moments. The dice are already rolling. The dice are already rolling. The dice are already rolling.

I started these diaries as an experiment – a companion piece to the production itself. And just to get back in the habit of typing more often – writing is a diagnostic for the brain. I want to keep an eye on how bad it is in there. Little surprise these turned into just documents about anxiety. Well not just. But you get it.

Theban Diary #4

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

This summer’s production marks the third time my life and this script have intersected. Today, let’s talk about the first time.

CAVEAT EMPTOR : I’m about to tell a story from when I was in high school, circa 1997. My memory is dogshit. If anyone else who was actually there somehow reads this and remembers it differently, they are probably right.

Photo: Matt Hardy / Model: Lily Medlock

If you’ve ever wondered why I am like this about theater, it would probably be important context to know that I was exposed to Bertolt Brecht before I was seventeen. In Troup County, GA – before the turn of the millennium, my peapod little brain already knew who Thespis was, the power of the triangle, all of the words of ‘No Diggity’, and that Neil Simon is for the squares. Much of this is because my high school was blessed with absolutely aberrant teachers running the Drama Department. The same year we put on Anouilh’s ANTIGONE, we also did The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Yes, if you want to be truly pretentious you need to get a big head start in your formative years. I think our director was working on an MFA during the summers, so he used our productions for class credit. I only remember that because he -unwisely- told us his professors were coming to see our production of Chalk Circle. I had this bit of stage business where I was supposed to open a giant book and blow a small amount of flour off the page to sell that it was old and dusty. The effect hadn’t really worked that well during rehearsal, so I decided to put probably ten times as much flour as normal so that the performance he was being graded on would have some extra juice. I blew so much flour into the air that it covered me and my scene partner and I ad-libbed a completely unnecessary ‘WHEW! DUSTY!’. The look of pure hate he shot me as I came off stage is something I’ll carry with me to my grave. Later on, he told me that Brechtian theater does like to over emphasize the stage effects to make them transparent and artificial, so he was probably not going to be penalized too much for my help.

In my defense, I have no idea why I did any of that. Impossible to reconstruct this far down the time stream.

But, back to ANTIGONE.

Our production was staged outside. Platforms and acting blocks, a couple of ramps – all painted black. (some of you are pointing at the screen like Dicaprio right now) The whole cast wore black pants and white dress shirts – except for a few additional costume pieces here and there. We wore no shoes. It was a long time ago, the dawn of the internet, so people being into feet was something we were, as yet, blissfully unaware of. Our director had taken the Chorus monologues and chopped them up, splitting lines among the ensemble, pulling that role closer to a more traditional Greek chorus. He also, I learned weeks later, cut out big chunks of Creon’s speeches for time. I played Creon. These two facts have no connection.

This was probably my first exposure to a play where the props and costuming was purposefully representative. These are not the literal clothes, these wooden swords are not the real swords. It’s just a symbol. Something in my peapod brain cracked a little bit. The SYMBOL is more than the THING. Instead of this specific object, this is ALL POSSIBLE VERSIONS OF IT.

This is to say I thought it was super clever when I found a piece of nylon rope and spray painted it gold to wear as a CROWN. Someone in the audience, a younger sibling of one of the cast, audibly asked ‘why does he have a snake on his head?’.

Why indeed.

I remember:

  • the actress playing the Nurse had a Scottish accent, I think just because she could kind of do an okay one?
  • the actor playing Haemon, my friend Nick, was something of a hot commodity in those days and him kissing an UPPERCLASSMAN was a bit of a scandal, she briefly caught feelings, it was a whole thing
  • the actress playing Antigone was a legendarily good on-stage cryer
  • The climactic ‘Take away the stones!!!’ fell a little flat when we all just had to sort of walk a few feet away from the playing space and then awkwardly turn around and walk back on for bows

I don’t remember — having any sort of thought about the play itself or any sort of larger meaning it might have. I was a Drama kid, I was in all the plays, this was another one. But a fair amount of the words stuck with me.

You are like dogs that lick at everything they smell.

Antigone finally gets to be herself.

TAKE AWAY THE STONES.

It is strange to look back, nigh on 30 years later. It didn’t have meaning for me then. It was just something I did. As a person who has been involved in theater my entire adult life, it is interesting how rare repeats are. When I was younger, each play was its own singular event, here and gone and never again. But now, I’ve had shows that I’ve been in multiple productions – I’ve directed the same show more than once. I think I talked about it a good bit years ago when I directed OKLAHOMA! – that the great works are always connected, cheating time or at least circumventing it. I’m here, I’m there, I’m 17, I’m 46, I’m 10, I’m a thousand years old.

So, that was the first time. I’m not planning on any direct homage or reference to this ancient production – except for maybe that gold rope crown. Maybe the audience just wasn’t ready for it yet.

Theban Diary #3

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

Several people have sent me the excellent NYT article about all the current ANTIGONE productions happening in the city. It’s well worth reading, exploring the various versions/adaptations – with a passing nod to our own Anouilh’s script.

Let’s all pause to have me admit that I never EVER spell his name correctly on the first try. He’s the sitiuation of French playwrights.

The article has two perhaps unforeseen effects.

  1. Making me feel very hip and savvy to have tapped into the cultural winds that have brought so many adaptations of ANTIGONE to the Big Apple, all the way from my chair in Athens, GA on the absolute bottom rung of THEATRICAL ART.
  2. Drawing my attention to the Greek word ‘deinos’. *ominous rumble of thunder sound clip / specifically the Sesame Street – Count von Count one*

Antigone can be an extreme character. The word used to describe her, and many Sophoclean protagonists, is deinos. It means “strange” or “uncanny,” describing a world-breaking stubbornness that is simultaneously unyielding, magnificent and frightening. Even when her sister, Ismene, is trying to comfort her, Antigone throws herself in harm’s way. Her unreasonable righteousness is indistinguishable from self-destruction. Antigone never tries to save herself, or operate in secret. Instead, she speaks out, placing her beyond Creon’s ability to forgive — and also giving her qualities beyond the human. “I follow death, alive,” she says.

Antigone, deinos to the max, created the model for a particular kind of (anti)heroine: the “bad girl.” She is disruptive, a total pain, unpliable and correct. Sometimes this figure is interpreted as a kind of punky riot grrl, or a protofeminist, or a mentally troubled woman. Thanks to Sophocles, who was writing in a time when women didn’t rate as citizens, “girl” is now another word for “courage.” Imagine one, arms akimbo, ponytail flying, and you automatically picture her facing down the world. – Helen Shaw / NYT / Who is Antigone? The 2500- Year Old Greek Heroine Who’s Story Never Gets Old

Reading this passage – I felt a nice little LEGO block snapping together type feeling. Finally, a perfect Greek word for this woman coursing with electricity, something for my brain to hang all sorts of thoughts on. I’ve been trying to describe her to friends and actors interested in our production and the best I’d managed so far was “Antigone has a knife. She always has a knife. Everyone in the scene knows she has a knife but no-one knows if she’s going to stab them, herself, or nobody at all. She will never put down the knife. Sometimes, she hides the knife…poorly.”

Photo: Matt Hardy Photography / Model : Lily Medlock

It also doesn’t hurt that ‘deinos’ is the root from which DINOSAUR was created.

I find it deeply interesting how much Anouilh’s script focuses on this strange otherness in her — and how much the character grapples with it herself. She seems desperately to want to be any other person, to have any other destiny. The lines about how she dressed herself in Ismene’s style in an attempt to please Haemon, or perhaps to just squeeze out from under her appointed role for a few hours are pathetic. But unfortunately she is ‘fucked by fate’ as that modernized version of Beowulf said of Grendel. The few breaths of relief when she almost leaves the stage under Creon’s advice, almost to be merely human. But, as the Chorus reminds us, there is no escape in tragedy – that is the majesty of it.

Theban Diary #2

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

Photo shoot this weekend! I love directing a photo shoot, boy howdy. Mainly because I wish I could take actually good photos – so instead I point my friend Matt’s actual talent at what I’m vaguely gesticulating towards. An image can be a perfect expression of an idea – or maybe several – evoking an entire world of feeling, frozen in a moment. Or if nothing else, just looking rad as hell. People often forget that the majority of the purpose of art is just to rule.

We’ll be shooting in my beloved’s theater at UGA Dance Department, so of course I’m simply salivating about being to have some real goddamn negative space to play with. BIG EMPTY pleases this little peapod brain of mine – and it is especially satisfying as an environment to consider the character of Antigone. So much of the script focuses on her isolation – on being separate and cut-off – by bloodline, by destiny – almost to the point of treating her as non-human. I enjoy the ambivalence. The script has a bent towards deifying her – but also so many images of the unnatural, bordering on paranormal.

You come from a people for whom the human vestment is a kind of straitjacket: it cracks at the seams. You spend your lives wriggling to get out of it. Nothing less than a cosy tea party with death and destiny will quench your thirst. / CREON

The overtly theatrical tone of the play also lends itself to this – the image of her being pushed on stage to play a part. A role that she chooses, but also is desperate to deny. Deny what it means to be Oedipus’ daughter, to be Jocasta’s daughter, to be Antigone. A whole section of the photo shoot is putting an Oedipus mask, complete with bloody tears, on our model – in wide, in closeup.

I have a pack of extra masks, maybe throw some on whatever bodies I have to put in the background, out of focus – looming, judging, demanding. Weird photos are the best, boy howdy.

Sometimes I think I should just do weird photo shoots and skip the attached play, podcast, other media, etc.

Theban Diary #1

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

Now I lay me down to show prep, may my course be blessed by Hermes Threewizards. The future is unclear and storms unpredictable, but still I can put extra caulk between the boards of my hull and lay in as many oranges and packs of Buldak as this craft will allow. Preparing to direct a play is basically just an emotional exercise as nothing you plan will survive the first encounter with the enemy — the enemy is basically every component of the thing. Cast, crew, set, costumes, illness, cowardice, caprice, and Capri Sun.

To catch you up: I am directing a production of Antigone (Jean Anouillh/ translated by Lewis Galantiere) this summer. Auditions are in June, show opens in August. This is my 14th time in the director’s chair with this company, stretched over a couple of decades. I’m a goddamn warhorse at this point. The days of directing out of social pressure, vague artistic yearning, or purely atavistic conviction are behind me. Basically I only direct these days when I’m legitimately excited about a project and have every intention to get real weird with it. Or, more to the point, I work on projects when the ceaseless alarm clock in my mind sounds that I haven’t done something sufficiently cool to justify this entire plasma-type personality matrix I’ve been rocking.

I was chatting with some other theater people recently and I dropped some questionably sage wisdoms over pancakes. Maturity is just accepting what truly motivates you – boiling away all of the vague trappings of success, art, and progress. For me, everything I do ties back to wanting cute girls to think I’m funny. That’s the real engine all this creative activity has been running on – moments of beauty and truth are completely unplanned and are more by-product than goal. Wild to think the lengths I have gone to make things of ever-increasing difficulty and complexity using nothing more than a 12 year old’s survival strategy – the forge of all that I have made is nothing more than a hastily assembled Easy Bake Oven with racing flames painted on the side.

And this show appeared early in that juvenile charlatan’s development. My high school performed this script, way way back in the late 90’s. (WAY BACK) What artistic style or proclivities I have in theater can almost be traced 1:1 back to this production specifically – and generally everything my high school drama teacher laid down as first principles in my peapod brain. He was getting his MFA in Theatrical Direction, so our high school productions were purposefully academic – I was exposed to Bertolt Brecht far too early to every truly recover. By it’s very nature high school theater – and community theater(!) – are art forms of limitation — usually financial. Leaning into the more imaginative and primal language of the stage has an immediate advantage when you can’t afford much more than a couple of flats and some chairs. But, don’t worry, I learned absolutely the wrong lesson as usual. A chair on an empty stage is IT, girl. A voice, two voices, three voices. The darkness. The light. The space that can be anything, can be everything, can be nothing. My artistic colleagues roll their eyes at my sets made of boxes and benches and empty air, much as I sneer at the door that needs a doorknob on BOTH SIDES.

I’ve also had the rare opportunity to have a trial run at directing this before. A few years ago I stumbled upon a copy of the script in a used bookstore and felt compelled (enticed by fate?) to put together a staged reading. I’ve been thinking about this show for years before, and the more I think about it (and the reading confirmed) – is that it doesn’t need any help. It doesn’t need to be set in Aghanistan or even Paris during the occupation. It’s always now. Every time I come back, it’s more topical – more to the point. Maybe just the years of watching fascism rise here, inarguable – impossible to not recognize – have made the script hit harder and harder. It doesn’t ask the audience to imagine a world without fascism — that is a pure impossibility. It’s asking how will you choose to live with it. Or perhaps die under it.

This is a play about sound, about voices. The little human moments before the machinery of it pull the god in Antigone to the fore. And then the goddamn bars when Creon and she argue. What a strange thing to recognize as familiar, the curse in the blood, the glorious idiocy of revolt.

I know more now, I have more tricks up my sleeve. This time I’ll catch it, this time it won’t get away from me. Maybe.

A chorus is a weapon built to assault heaven. Human energy brought together, bound by time, focused and sharp. Let’s point a gun at god and demand that they dance.

drunk on seawater

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

There’s so many wrong ways to write it, so many blank alleys. The rain falls and the buildings are blind, windows with no lights. It is a wonder that anything exists at all, the rights and lefts of the mind that brought them to being so improbable. Only raw infinity makes them so, the dice are always rolling, the game always rigged. Sing with me, O Muse, just for a moment and I’ll find the way after that. Do me a solid, O Muse, your favorite paramour drunk on sea water and scorched by lightning.