the online process of Matt Slaybaugh
NOTE: This is something I wrote almost five years ago. I'm quite fond of it, so I'm adding it here.
About 10 years ago, I had a conversation with one of the great avant garde theatre directors of all time, Anne Bogart. (Hoo boy, not a great way to start a pro wrestling blog post, eh? Better insert a cool photo.)
That’s better.
Welcome! What would you like to talk about?
First, let me just say, thanks so much for this interview. Most artists, I think, just want to be taken seriously, to be given some real consideration and thought. Attention must be paid and all that. So it's a real privilege to get the opportunity to share some of the thought behind my work.
Should we start at the beginning? The Absurdity of Writing Poetry, in 2006. I've heard you refer to that as a manifesto for Available Light.
That was certainly true. If you wanted a one-hour mission statement, that was it, for the company, and for me. It's shamelessly direct sometimes, right there in the end, I just list out my reasons for making art, plain and kinda simple. The show is dumb in that it's just me putting all my issues front and center with very little artifice.
Where did that show come from?
I had left my first grand venture, BlueForms Theatre Group and wandered out into the wilderness of Iowa City, where I hung out with the only dude I knew who was a big a nerd for theatre and rap music as I was, Sean Christopher Lewis. Sean and I were working on his first one-man opus, I Will Make You Orphans, and getting to know each other's ambitions. He had a friend, Jennifer Fawcett, also a playwright, who also had a one-person show. (They're married now. She might even have been his girlfriend then, I don't know.) I spent a week there making work and hanging out in the library and visiting the art museum and wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself.
I was inspired, to say the least, by their willingness to put their own stories onstage and to put themselves on stage. I hadn't really been willing to do that. I was also re-reading a lot of Anne Bogart stuff. Anne had been my mentor, had given me a big push into Starting BlueForms, and the end of her first book (A Director Prepares) gave me another big push. "Don't wait," she says, until you have the right people, the right platform, the right space, the money even until you know what you're doing. I took that very literally.
It was a Vaclav Havel play that set me on my path. I was working on Temptation at the College of Wooster in 1995. Nothing else was going well in my life at that time, but that play was the most exciting art I’d ever been involved in. The theatre turned into my sanctuary and that hasn’t changed since.
If you don’t know who Havel was, his Wikipedia entry will suffice as well as anything. For something with a little more substance, you should read the NY Times obituary.
I’m going to type in most of a letter he wrote to his wife, Olga, during one of his lengthier prison stays. I think of it often.
August 15, 1981
Dear Olga,I’m sitting on a bench in the local micropark, ina good mood and doing what I like best, that is, thinking about what I will do once I’m free again. Therefore I would like to devote today’s letter to several marginal observations of what I assume will be a happier future.
As you know, I’m an inveterate planner and master of ceremonies, and so you can imagine in what incredible detail I construct my sweet fantasies, such as how I’ll go to the sauna, combine it with swimming in the pool and sunbathing, then go home for a snooze, then in the evening put on some nice clothes and go wit you to a good restaurant, and I imagine all the things we’ll eat and drink there etc. etc. When I think about it, all such daydreams have one thing in common: sooner or later, a disturbing question always arises: what then? What next? For the time must come, after all, when – figuratively speaking – I will have swum enough, preened myself enough, eaten enough, slept enough; when I will no longer want to indulge in those delights any more, yet my life will clearly be far from over, and it will be high time – especially after all that – to breathe some meaning and substance into it. All the joys of life – the kind we cling to and look forward to and which ultimately make our lives worth living – occur in time and have a dramatic sequence of their own, from exposition to “catastrophe.” And thus not only do they come to an end, but they do so “catastrophically”: once they are over, one is inevitably overwhelmed by a sensation of vacancy and barrenness; there no longer seems to be anything to look forward to, to cling to, to hope for and therefore, in fact, to live for.
For example, if I imagine that rare and wonderful moment when I get an idea for a play, an idea so fine and so gratifying that it practically knocks me off my chair, and if, in a kind of powerful trance, I imagine actually turning the idea into a play I’m happy with, then having it neatly typed out, reading it to some friends who like it, and even finding theaters that express an interest in putting it on – imagining all that, I must also necessarily imagine the moment when it’s all over and the awful question comes up again: “Well?” “Is that all?” “What next?” I would even venture to say that the more “serious” and time-consuming the activity that lends meaning to life, the more terrifying the emptiness that follows it.
Most people’s lives, it seems to me, are fragmented into individual pleasures and it is precisely these individual pleasures that give people the elementary and essentially spontaneous feeling that life has meaning. To put it another way, such pleasures ensure that the question of what life actually means never comes up. The first, or rather the most frequent occasion for posing this all-important question, only arises, I believe, when one first suffers or experiences, existentially, the “gap,” the abyss that separates the pleasures in life from one another. That, at least, is how I feel it. I have thrown myself enthusiastically into all kinds of things, from serving good dinners to working for a “suprapersonal” cause, yet these joyful activities were always restricted to particular temporal compartments of my life relating to a particular event or constellation of events, and thus I have always experienced them as mere “islands of meaningfulness” floating in an ocean of nothingness.
My description of all this may be rather primitive but perhaps what I’m trying to say is clear: one usually begins to pose the question of the meaning of life and reflect on it in a fundamental way when one is ambushed and overpowered by a painful question, “So what?” It asks not simply what will follow when a certain pleasure is over, but also what meaning a finite pleasure can have. In other words, what is the meaning of that which gives our lives meaning, or, what is the “meta-meaning” of the meaningful? It is only when all those thousands of things that impart meaning (spontaneously) to our lives – that seem to make life worth living, or for which we have simply lived – are thus challenged, that the stage is set for us to pose, in all seriousness, the question about what our lives mean.
Posing it then means, among other things, asking whether those “islands” are really so isolated, so randomly adrift on the ocean as they appear in moments of despair, or are they in fact merely the visible peaks of some coherent undersea mountain range?
Thinking of you and kissing you, Vašek
We capped a week of extremely busy and occasionally frustrating work by driving around the city for an hour, with a video camera pointing out of the passenger-side window. Does that sound un-safe? Well, we wanted a varied and unvarnished look at the city (which we would later edit into a montage for the climax of the show) so we did spend sometime in areas that made us feel … uneasy. [Read more…]
But just a little bit.
The first time I visited Philadelphia, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. (Actually, it was the second time I’d been here, but I was only 12 years old for the first trip, and all I remember is the homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk as people walked over and around him. I have no idea what part of town we visited, we didn’t even see the Liberty Bell up close, as far as I recall.)
We were visiting a dear friend, and though she took us to nice places (including a coffee shop we now pass everyday) it was the dead of a very bitter winter, and no one was on the streets, and it just looked like a desolate kind of urban wasteland. Despite my best efforts, I was not impressed.
Well, this time around it’s quite different. [Read more…]
This is a great time in my life. Isn’t it? Let’s count the ways.
1. I’m in Philadelphia, actually getting paid decent money to direct a show I really, deeply care about (Killadelphia). And while I’m here, Sean Lewis and I are sharing a 3-story house in downtown Philly. (Right by the Italian Market.)
[Read more…]
The New Yorker is more than flush with great critical writing. Well, this is a list of lists (some are decade-spanning, too) from those wonderful writers.
I’m trying to tell you it’s a dream come true. Get over there. Click around. Get lost for a few hours.
In fact, to encourage you, here’s my list of the ten best lists from the New Yorkers Best Of lists: [Read more…]
We’re loading-in today, getting ready for out first Xmas show. We’re hanging lights, throwing chairs, hoisting speakers, and eating poorly.
This is what it looks like when Jason adjusts a light.
I don’t mind telling you, this makes me incredibly proud.
(It’s from here.)
Killadelphia…or the City of Numbers is an epic piece of theatre, with dozens of characters, multiple locations, and dramatic material to rival the excoriating journey of any country’s fortunes linked to a Greek king or Danish prince. With unflinching honesty, Sean Christopher Lewis’s play explores the tragic underpinnings of inner-city violence, as well as the unexpected epilogues of lives cut short and verdicts rendered. Killadelphia offers a theatrical megaphone to voices oft not heard above the din of stereotype and assumption, including those of wardens, victims, survivors, children on the edge of the world yet in the center of the country, and the many, many inmates of Graterford Prison. What makes Killadelphia a must-see evening of theatre, however, is that Lewis—with ease and remarkable versatility—plays each of the characters himself, in a satisfying one-man symphony that clocks in at well under 90 minutes.
In the summer of 2008, Philadelphia experienced a spike in violent crime unmatched historically or geographically; known as “The City of Numbers,” it was said that Philadelphia had “more bodies than days.” Killadelphia serves as a theatrical snapshot of the city itself, offering not judgment but analysis by way of observation. Lewis’s show journeys from burned-out slums—where the families of murder victims are taunted by their own neighbors not to “snitch”—to the airwaves of conservative talk radio, where pundits opine as to why the City of Brotherly Love seems filled with so many Cains and Abels. Killadelphia features trauma surgeons who graphically describe the injuries they’ve treated for repeat visitors to the ER (patients whose wounds, over time, inevitably escalate from beatings to knifings to gunshot wounds to the head), and local rappers who attempt to convey and cauterize through song their community’s Job-like suffering.
And then there are the inmates of Graterford Prison. Serving out life sentences (and, in instances, multiple sentences; some handed down to felons when they were barely teenagers), they speak frankly about their crimes, their victims, and the day-to-day realities of a life lived in penitentiary, as well as the unique arts program that found inmates painting murals for the purpose of beautifying Philadelphia. This is not the grit-porn of Oz or the romance of The Shawshank Redemption: Killadelphia offers an unvarnished look at life inside of Graterford. Sometimes that look is threatening, but often it is surprisingly mundane, and in that mundaneness Lewis discovers a thrilling narrative of acceptance and regret.
Interwoven through the various narratives of Killadelphia is the tragic, true story of Beau Zabel, a 23-year-old teaching fellow who was murdered in June of 2008. Shot in the neck as he walked home from work, Zabel was apparently killed in a robbery attempt; his iPod was stolen, though his wallet was left unturned. Zabel’s neighbors were shocked at his violent death, as they had always assumed their neighborhood to be safely removed from the uncivil carnage found elsewhere in the city.
Commissioned by the Mural Arts Project of Philadelphia and InterAct Theatre, Killadelphia is the result of multiple interviews conducted by Lewis. Appearing as a character in the work himself, Lewis describes meeting with the killers and the surviving family of murdered Philadelphians (his descriptive recreation of his first steps along the halls of Graterford Prison is a tense, unexpected highlight of the evening). This unique documentary technique is what allows Lewis and Killadelphia the particular intimacy and insights on display, and—in an instance of the reporter becoming the story, or of art imitating life imitating art—becomes an arresting element of the play.
Lewis and director Matt Slaybaugh have crafted an outstanding piece of theatre, brilliantly conceived to both educate and entertain. Directed by Slaybaugh with efficiency and briskness, Killadelphia is performed on a bare stage with minimal props; there are projected images and prerecorded songs, but Slaybaugh employs a stripped-down, no-frills approach that brilliantly places the focus on Lewis and his tour-de-force performance. Lewis is currently traveling the country, playing Killadelphia in major cities with crime rates that, while overshadowed by that of Philadelphia’s Summer of 2008, are disturbingly on the rise. Lewis next investigative work will take him to a Detroit factory, soon to be shuttered; one wishes him all the success with that project that he has found with Killadelphia.
