Some Long, Hard Knights

So I'll be performing at Britcon this weekend, a brand-spankin'-new convention focused on British popular culture. I'm expecting a lot of Doctor Who and Monty Python quotes, but when I heard about it through the pipeline it was sort of impossible not to angle for it, since I've, y'know, devoted the bulk of my career to adapting British texts.

I'm not sure entirely what to expect -- from what little I've gleaned from social media and correspondence, it looks to be running into the usual first-year chaos and damage control. Which is fun as a spectator, but a tetch nerve-wracking as a performer, insofar as I'm not really sure what I'm preparing for here -- a packed house, or three people?

I've got an hour slot, so I'll be sampling excerpts from the Camelot Cycle. Which is where a good chunk of my creative energy has been going for the past two months -- finding the right pieces, arranging and restructuring them, memorizing, and reblocking (with an emphasis on more casual accessibility -- I'll be in street clothes, chatting up the audience in between sets, et cetera).

Another reason I'm nervous is that I'm really flying in the face of conventional convention wisdom here, in terms of doing something both dense and dramatic. (One of the reasons I think I struggled to sustain a con audience is because I've so rarely brought straight-up comedy. My big geek show has some pretty hefty production values and is a pain in the ass to remount, whereas most of my solo comedy material tends to be pretty racy, confrontational, and riddled with cheap shock humor, so a tough sell for an audience that's not already seeking out that specific thing.)

Still, I've received a lot of the same advice about the Fringe -- to quote Mel Brooks "no matter what you do on the stage/keep it light, keep it bright, keep it gay" -- and over a couple of years I've managed to carve out a space for my more weird, expressionistic stuff, so who knows? I've made my peace with my fate as a niche entertainer -- and if ever I'm going to find a body of people as obsessed with early Brit Lit as I am, it's here.

Speakin' Easy

So I've been devoting some thought cycles lately to the nature of time limits in storytelling. Those limits are a thing that performers of every stripe chafe against, naturally, and I firmly believe them to be both necessary and a Good Thing: we all stumble every now and again, of course, but learning to work within those limits is a necessary part of the discipline of being a writer/performer and ultimately makes us much better at both.

I do think that they pose a unique challenge to storytellers (as opposed to, say, poets or comics) because we depend so heavily on *narrative*. Which is not to say that poets and comics don't, obviously, but arguably to a lesser degree (their chief rewards for the audience lie, I think, in other areas).

Twenty minutes feels to me about the right length for a fully embodied, self-contained story with a complete narrative. Venues that play to this are rare. Certainly I've grown more comfortable with flash fiction, with the number of open-mics that play to three, five, and seven-minute slots, but what I write for those feel to me less like short stories and more like gimmick delivery systems: that's about long enough to set up and punch a clever idea or two, not to deal with things like plot or character to any worthwhile degree. (Particularly for a writer as interested in structural games as I am. Even in the latest Rockstar shows, which typically offer 10-12 minutes, I've found myself excerpting sections of longer pieces that showcase bits of writing I'm pleased with -- giving small moments room to breathe, at the expense of contextualizing them.)

(Which is to say nothing of the discrepancy between lengths on the page and the stage. Lay out all the words spoken in an hour-long Fringe show and that's still only a few manuscript pages, well within short-story length by any publication's definition.)

I was talking with a group of storytellers last week, and this dearth was mentioned -- the fact that there's a plethora of mics where you can flash your best bits at an audience for a few minutes at a time, and there's the hour-long Festival slots, but there's not much room to work out your material in between. Oh, there's a few -- Patrick's Cabaret, for one, or Loren Niemi's Two Chairs Telling for another -- or Speak Easy Twin Cities, which I'll be performing at this Saturday.

Returning after a hiaitus (and it's been missed), the show books 2-4 storytellers in alternative spaces (garages, living rooms, etc.) I was a fan of the series in its original incarnation, and I'm delighted at its return, more delighted still to be a part of it. In true speakeasy fashion, tickets must be reserved in advance to discover its location. Looking forward to the opportunity to give the potboiler room to boil, yo.

Giggling and Wiggling

Giggling

Swung by the Smitten Kitten – Uptown’s resident sex-toy shop – to pick up a prop for a comedy bit yesterday. I’ve only been in there once before, for an item for, er, recreational use, and I have nothing but positive things to say about the staff – they’ve been consistently cool, collected, and professional.

Here’s the thing, though – I haven’t been. Not consistently, anyway. When I was there previously, to pick up something fairly innocuous, I reverted to a stammering wreck of a bashful Catholic schoolboy. This time, when I was picking up something much more unusual, I was totally cool and collected – because it was for a professional purpose.

Later that night, I swung by Target to pick up a supplementary item for the bit, and was a stammering wreck again. Because at the Smitten Kitten, they’re prepared for unusual requests! Why, the clerks at Target might think I’m some kind of deviant!

…one of these days I really need to sit down and figure out exactly what social conventions my subconscious is apparently selectively observing.

Wiggling

So most of my energy this week has been going towards a pair of burlesque shows I’m hosting, both a bit out of my usual stomping grounds: one in Rochester, one in St. Paul.

I had the pleasure of meeting Lucky DeLuxe last year in Kansas City. The Festival has a number of hosts they cycle through for their late-night events – I’ve been one for a couple of years – and she was the clear standout in 2012. She’s a crazy skilled lady, with equal parts loquacity and, er, curvacity, and it’s an honor to share a stage with her again.

Particularly because the last time was not exactly a slam-dunk. The venue was less than ideal, taking place in a bar in which the greater portion of the audience was actively disinterested – my impression of the crowd was that of a dull roar which we were often trying to shout over.

She was interviewing me with a series of playful, random questions, one of which was “Do you do any impressions?” I had a split-second of panic (“Fuck no I don’t do impressions, I’m hilariously bad at them”), followed immediately by what I have come to regard as my best and most valuable friend onstage – anger (“Why am I wriggling like a goddamn fish on a goddamn line for a goddamn audience that’s not even paying any goddamn attention?”).

At which point I grabbed the mic and said “Sure, I’ll do an impression for you.” I leapt to my feet and bellowed incoherently at the crowd for several seconds. When they stared at me in bafflement, I concluded “…and that’s my impression of you motherfuckers!”

…anyway, I guess she thrives on audience hostility, because she asked me to warm up the crowd for her. So check out the Wiggle and Giggle Burlesque Comedy Night this Thursday-Friday – we can call it a “professional suicide watch”!

Fearful Productions

A heads-up that I'll be hosting the Word Ninjas open mic again this Tuesday, for the first time in a while. I've written at length about my deep and abiding love for the local open-mic scene -- it was my introduction to performing in the Twin Cities, my first foot in a lot of doors -- I still rely on it heavily, and it's exhilarating to see old friends, as well as first-timers taking their own anxiety-ridden baby steps, week after week.

I don't really think in terms of "contribution to the community" -- I generally find such claims dubious, difficult to quantify, and reeking of self-justification -- but having been a part of establishing Word Ninjas, even in small part, is one of my great points of professional pride.

Also been trying to pick a piece for the upcoming Fear Itself, a collaboration between the Rockstars and Fearless Comedy Productions, a new company founded by some old acquaintances.

I've been doing this long enough to have built up a pretty large library of sets and routines, and I've found that the greater part of success for me these days is picking the right piece for the right audience. This is often complicated by trying to weigh what percentage of any given audience will have seen a piece before.

I'll confess that this is a trend that I acknowledge, but don't fully understand -- the degree to which audiences actively resent hearing a set more than once. I interface with storytelling in much the same way that I interface with music -- if there's a single that I like, I'm happy to listen to it over and over.

Comics don't seem to have this problem, which gives them the luxury of working and polishing their routines at greater length. And as I write that, I think, no, the greater issue is that there's a larger number of comedy-oriented mics in this town. I've often bemoaned the lack of storytelling mics, but the fact is that even the ones that exist tend to have a lot of audience overlap -- I'm likely to keep seeing the same people at most of them.

(This problem is often exacerbated by the fact that when I have a larger gig or a show coming up, I want to work the individual pieces as much as possible. Though it pains me to say it, it's entirely possible that the local audience pool for storytelling is too small to sustain this kind of process.)

That's why getting booked at places like Patrick's and Sample Night Live is such good fun -- because I perform there more rarely, it's an audience that hasn't seen most of my material.

So have I chosen wisely? Find out next week -- different Verbosity-Time (Wednesday March 13th at 7:30pm), different Verbosity Channel (at Honey. Honey? Seriously? Just "Honey? I'm both bewildered and vaguely aroused).

Reverse-Engineering Comedy

A six-month sabbatical from blogging? Hardly suspenseful at all.

My professional life lately has revolved around time management. In the good way, id est I've been getting hired a lot. Currently doing script work for four Fringe shows, and been developing four more outside of that.

One of those scripts is titled Missed Connections, a Theatre Arlo project that's had one of the more bizarre development processes I've been a part of in recent memory: I showed up for a bunch of rehearsals that turned into script workshops and ended up walking away with a co-director credit.

The thing is, through a convoluted series of events, we found ourselves putting up a remount of a show that none of us had ever seen -- a show that was clearly collaboratively developed by an existing ensemble. A show which, by all accounts, was hysterically funny -- but what we received wasn't so much a script as it was a collection of notes for the performers. Here's a sample:

*JEN*

jap eeko 217 - woman4man

*LAUREN* (Play off the audience: This post could literally last for 30+ seconds with the right crowd)

(unintelligible language)

LAUREN sits. JAKE to mic.

...buh?

I mean, I get the basic idea here -- it's a prolonged, vocal playing-with-the-audience type deal (with a race joke in there somewhere? I guess? Maybe?) -- but it's clearly built around a comic's existing schtick/persona, and I have no idea how to play this. It's like trying to do a retelling of the Aristocrats joke based on a written description.

Likewise, the company is clearly more improv-based than we are -- many passages call for ad-libbed banter. I've spent enough time onstage to be comfortable riffing with an audience when the occasion arises, and I often do -- but improv and I have always been uneasy bedfellows, and I'm dubious of my ability to play a text that relies upon "Insert spontaneous hilarity here!" passages. (And, in my experience, this kind of schtick tends to rely upon a cast that knows each other well -- and, while our cast consists of many fine individual comics, many of us hadn't worked together before. Until, like, opening night. My point is that building a show around snarky ensemble riffing probably wasn't going to fly.)

So...what to do? Whip out the red pens and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Develop new schtick that's built around our particular styles and personae. Chop out the jokes that are hopelessly opaque. Pair off the actors with a history of working with each other. Give the improv routines to the comics who actively desire them. Raid the prop closet and load the script up with sight gags. Slather whatever accents and voices we have in our collective back pocket across the top, and voila! Functional punch lines!

No one is more stunned than I am that this actually seems to have worked -- the show's ended up being a pretty effective laugh machine. What were able to piece together of the underlying script appears to have had some solidly constructed structure and text, and I'd be genuinely fascinated to see the original production. I wonder how much our shows have ended up having in common.

In any case, you've got one opportunity left to catch ours: this Friday, March 1st, 7pm at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. Doors open at 6pm if you want to grab a drink. Alcohol was a critical part of our process -- why shouldn't it be a critical part of yours?

Fear and Trembling: Reflections

Looks like the coffee shop I typically write these things in just shut down. Depressing.

"The last show I saw this year was Fear and Trembling. It struck me that here, in the very last slot, I was seeing the first "fringe" show of the festival: raw and uncomfortable (and I mean that in the best possible sense), it mixes observation stories from his own life with some very dark fiction. I've seen several of low's shows (spoiler alert: he's another friend of mine), and this was very different from the adaptations of Arthurian myths (his geeky obsession) and lightly fictionalized autobiographical pieces. He was doing something different. He was pushing himself, and the audience...

...I think I need to take advantage of that. To step outside my comfort zone. To do something because I wonder if it will work on stage rather than because I know it will."

- Bill Stiteler, Minnesota Playlist

I'm hugely grateful to anyone who takes the time to write something so thoughtful and generous, and I'm honored at the suggestion that something I made inspires someone else to make something of their own. Which is why I hope that it doesn't come off as dismissive when I say that the reaction I find myself struggling with is my sense that I didn't push myself nearly hard enough this year. I feel like I achieved most of my goals, and I'm wondering if that's not a bad thing.

This is the first Fringe show I've done since shutting down ensemble work last year, and if I had a primary goal it was to re-establish myself as a storyteller -- to say that, yes, the bulk of my work has been as a playwright and an actor and a director and a producer but damn it, I can still do this thing on my own.

So the great guiding note that I gave myself for this show was "simple": after coming off of a series of technically demanding shows, I kind of just wanted to grab a mike and talk for a while.

This isn't to say that I didn't work as hard as -- or harder than -- I always do, in terms of the raw investment of time and energy -- Lord knows I spent my share of time rewriting and working material and booking myself at every show that would take me -- but -- well -- it's an anthology show. An anthology show with a throughline, yes, and recurring ideas and phrases, and arranged in such a way that the individual stories balance and comment on each other, but an anthology show nonetheless, a collection of smaller pieces, and consequently can't help feeling like a step backwards from the sprawling, ambitious epics.

There's a folk belief I stumbled across during some research a few years back -- I can't recall the source now, but I'm pretty sure it was Hebrew -- that asserted that, at birth, God gives every child a limited number of words to use, and once they're all spoken, that person's life ends. It may be a bit ironic for that idea to haunt someone who pounds through words as recklessly as I do, but I often find myself wondering how many more shows I get before I die -- and was the latest a worthy use of one of them?

Which should also not be interpreted as being necessarily dismissive of this one, either -- I love this show, and each of its component stories, particularly my often-orphaned "Cable Guy" -- it contains some of my favorite bits of prose, and it's pretty rare for me to find a venue that's friendly to splatter. Just that, while it required plenty of hours of investment, the nature of the show didn't push me to much in the way of formal invention, and that always feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to me.

In any case, audience numbers were low to middling, but it seemed to be highly regarded by colleagues and critics alike. (Including, finally, the Pioneer Press, which has typically excoriated my stuff. Particularly ironic, since this is the show in which I kind of excoriate them.) Which is all par for the course for one of my shows, really.

Thus end two milestones: my twentieth Fringe Festival, and my one hundredth essay on this blog. Feel free to take a look back at some previous entries, arbitrarily spaced ten posts apart:

Thursday, February 13th, 2007: welcome, bienvenue, welcome
Wheee-ha-ha. First post. Don't mind my dust.

Thursday, May 24th, 2007: The Graveyards of Culture
Poor Dad -- travelling with me inevitably means getting dragged to any number of museums. (I am, predictably, less interested in geography than I am in the human response to it.) These places are like kryptonite to his hyper-accelerated attention span.

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007: Touring
Currently staying at the apartment of a friend in Ames. The Festival takes place in Des Moines, about a half-hour away, but my check-in time isn't until 3pm.

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007: Descendant of Dragons: Reviews and Reflections
Fringe blogger Matthew Everett gave the show a five-star rating, placing it in his "Life-Altering Experience" category. 

Sunday, December 3rd, 2007: Picture Post
We survived -- er, completed -- a full-cast run-through a while back. To paraphrase the King of Hearts, we were successfully able to begin at the beginning, go on till we came to the end, then stop, which is a pretty fucking amazing achievement considering the eclectic mix of what we're doing, and the constraints that we're trying to do it in. Our stage manager, Erika Loen, also happens to be one of those transient photographers-about-town, and snapped a number of photographs. 

Thursday, July 24th, 2008: Ribs, Royals, and Rednecks
I don’t consider myself someone who needs a lot of flash when it comes to lodging – but it would really be a pleasant luxury to wake up in the morning and not have to scrape insect carcasses out of every moist surface in the Motel 6. I’m just saying. I’ve ended up sharing a room with our tech guy (also named Phil), which prompted the following exchange: 

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009: July 4-6: Illinois
I’ve ended up driving through about a dozen small Illinois towns as part of my effort to avoid toll roads. Thanks, Tomtom.

Sunday, September 27th, 2009: Note From Melbourne
Tonight, I showed up at my venue to find a sign out front claiming that all shows had been canceled due to illness -- our venue manager was in the hospital, and unable to let anybody into the space. Because I have the most awesome tech ever, she immediately made a series of phone calls and secured us a performance space above a nearby coffee shop. Since all of my props, costume, and (perhaps most importantly) script were locked inside, the show would have to go forth without any of those things. My tech spent several minutes frantically scribbling all of her cues onto a sheet of paper so that I could use her tech script (in ten-point Times New Roman, squint) as my reference material. All of this happened in the space of approximately half an hour.

Thursday, March 1st, 2012: New York, or a New Low
So I'm sitting on an airplane again, which means that it's time to write, to try to extract some sense out of the events of the past week (or to impose a narrative upon them, depending on one's perspective.)

Thursday, May 17th, 2012: In Defense of Pulp and Splatter
So I was getting into makeup in the green room when a member of the crew came down, absolutely livid. She'd just been to the movies, and seen a trailer that offended her: a horror movie set near Chernobyl. And I was very good and kept my mouth shut (no mean trick, for someone as in love with the sound of his own voice as I am), but by the end of the rant my interest in the movie had leapt from exactly zero percent to well over fifty.

...thanks for reading, and looking forward to the next hundred posts.

Fringe, Fantasy, and Fable

"I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book."

-Lewis Carroll

One of the late-night showcases last weekend was hosted by Tim Mooney. After I’d performed my set, rather than interviewing me, he elected to interview the audience, asking “What the hell was *that* about?” He collected answers– both sincere and snarky – then asked me to point to the correct interpretation. Doing my best to keep a straight face, I asserted the most ridiculous one – something to do with air conditioners – to be my explicit authorial intent.

The story I was performing was “The Girl Who Was Frightened of Nothing,” and, like most of my fantasy stories, it usually receives the same response: at least a handful of audience members coming up to me afterwards and asking “What the hell was *that* about?” which I typically deflect with a joke. When I don’t answer, they’ll start presenting theories, watching my face closely to see if their thesis is right: if they figured it out.

I get that that can be frustrating for an audience: to have the sense that I somehow wrote this code that I’m smugly concealing from them. But my reticence has more to do with the fact that there’s a pretty fundamental difference between how they view the stories, and how I do.

Tolkien expressed a profound dislike – which I share – for allegory: for the Aesop’s-Fables style, one-to-one connections that break stories down into clear, obvious lessons (e.g. ideas like: “The One Ring represents nuclear power!” and “Saruman represents industrialization!” – and in fact, I find myself wondering if so many people don’t continue to regard the Lord of the Rings as being a childish and simplistic work because they’re trying to break it down into childish and simplistic terms).

The hope – at least for me – when I write fantasy isn’t to create a single obvious analogy; it’s to build an internally consistent world in which *multiple* parallels can be found – and in which those parallels can then balance and comment on each other in unique ways. Tolkien termed this phenomenon “applicability”, and in my view it’s one of the things that fantasy is extraordinarily good at.

(That’s not to say that I’m in the camp that believes that all interpretations are equally correct, or that authorial intent wholly ceases to be relevant – to cite one example among many, I remember one of my script readers suggesting that The Rise of General Arthur was intended to be an expression of love for the Obama administration, which I distanced myself from pretty quickly.)

I’m fond of puzzle plays, shows that require thought and reflection and analysis. Not because I believe that these kinds of shows are in any way superior – but because for me, they’re more *fun*. I tend to find work that lays everything out on the surface tedious.

(Of course, in order to be able to engage with shows that way, they can’t be haphazardly constructed – it’s only satisfying for me if I have the sense that the writer put more time and thought into the story than I did.)

So, yes, I have some very clear ideas and intentions in the way that my fantasy stories are constructed, in the images that I use, in the recurring words and phrases – but knowing that process isn’t some kind of Rosetta Stone that unlocks the hidden meaning. So I apologize if I seem at all glib or dismissive. My ambition is to craft worlds and characters of sufficient complexity that they have more to say than a single thesis sentence – and any answers that I give will necessarily narrow the possibilities of those stories, which I’m loathe to do.