Blog

Been teaching playwriting for the past few weeks. The Market Theatre Laboratory.

Students great: motivated, smart, huge gaps – sometimes a struggle, creative. It has been a pleasure and I’ve learned a ton.

Final showcase: 12th of September.

Attended a talk today by the famous South African playwright Athol Fugard. Lovely stories – he quit university three months before he got his degree, hitch-hiked throughout Africa, he didn’t want to be seduced into teaching or “good jobs” by the security of being a graduate. He wanted to write, and he did.

Some words of wisdom from his long life.

– In writing begin with stories and words, the politics seeps in but don’t start there
– Writing is cannibalism – you cannibalize people when you put them in your plays
– Every play starts with a secret, guard that secret carefully
– The five stages of death (a beautiful structure for a play)
Fresh, bloat, decay, advanced decay, dry remains

Thoughts from a son of the soil who has come back home as he moves towards his own passing.

I’ve learned some things in these weeks of mourning. Here are my discoveries, many shared by friends who have been through this.

1.  Be around those who love you (sometimes doing nothing) Maybe a lesson for life. I spent Sunday with a friend and his 11 year old son and we played with markers and ate Chinese food and watched cartoons. This helped a lot.

2. Create in the memory of those passed on. Translating the poem, and now writing a film and play honoring Jo’s memory helps. The grief has an outlet, I like the active feel. All that I thought was “her out there” I am claiming as a part of me as I write in her memory.

3. Grieving connects and soften the heart. I understand now why people have periods of mourning: the wearing of black, or rules about food or contact for a period after death. This space of mourning sometimes feels like a sacred space – away, apart, internal. I can feel my heart softening, perhaps this will bring me closer to the suffering of others.

A picture of our beloved Jo.

Four days in Cairo for for a friend’s graduation.

Festivities then roaming the city, including seeking out beer (it takes us two days, and four hours, the windows have plywood nailed over them because in this Muslim city, you don’t want to be seen from the street.)

Then a descent into tombs and Erwan (the brother) is bored and listening to hip-hop on his Iphone and I try to tell him no, these were the first rappers, don’t you see? They made whole rooms to show off their wealth and possessions. He doesn’t really buy it.

Mostly I am amazed by the movement – teaching cows to walk, the geese threatening to take flight.

We come upon the first rounded wall and the first graffiti (c. 1,800 BCE) done by some priests.

In Cairo I feel like I have awoken from a slumber – seeing old friends, back in a family, the pulsing of a city 20 million+, descending into the massive grave of 24 dead bulls with black granite tombs and then emerging to the pale heat of the desert – I just want more.

Don’t believe the hype – it’s all lies, these stories about trees falling in the forest. To fell a tree you don’t hack away at the core, you don’t throw your weight against its large trunk and emerge victorious, you don’t take vicious strokes and then yell “timber . . . “  This is all myth – there is no struggle, no crack, no thud.

Instead when you remove a tree, you do so in parts. You start from the top and you cut away: branches with a chainsaw, side trunks with an axe, ropes and pulleys to guide each falling piece. This is how you take apart a tree, until, in the end, the removal is so clean and so complete, you forget that the tree was even there.

I’ve just completed a five week trip across the USA.  Atlanta, across the south to Texas, up to Kansas and Iowa, through Chicago and Detroit, down through Philly and the Carolinas and back to the South. Stopping on the way with friends, listening to Greek tragedies on tape while driving, watching the signs out my window.  Here are a few.

This morning my aunt Susan, uncle Steve, aunt Julie (my Skype), my mom, and my friend Jim all read through my play “my grandpa’s dead body.”  The play borrows elements and characters from our own family, although mixes them with a darkness and a skewed vision of Iowa different from the one I live. It was a brave and moving experience, art and life co-mingling.

Drove through Selma this am. Shocked at the state of downtown – this was always a magical place to me and now it’s a ghost town. What has happened to one of the birth places of the civil rights movement?