On the eve of the rapture

TrueBelievers, in anticipation of the end of the world-as-we-know-it tonight at midnight (just 5 minutes from now) are running up their credit cards, enjoying last meals, driving fast and furious on interstates in order to do everything they’ve ever wanted to do in life on this planet. And the thoughtful ones have been urged to seek non-True-Believers (ie, anyone not Christian) to take care of their pets, once they have ascended. Animals are apparently not welcome in the world-to-come.

I am just back to LA from Pittsburgh, where I helped my dad pack up all his worldly belongings (that is, what was left after a minority successful estate sale, a massive donation to Goodwill, and the divvying up of the kingdom amongst his three daughters) into a huge truck headed towards Northern California.

My mother, who died in November of 2002, was a masterful shopper and she loved antiques, so the house was full of dark wood in evocative styles. My father got rid of it all, except the Chinese bar. After all, a man needs a bar. He says he’s “going modern.” After a long career as a physicist with an expertise in detonation and explosion, he’s shopping for a new bed, high thread-count bedding and towels, and a glass table and chairs for his new digs in San Rafael, California.

He got the idea for the move late last year, got himself a new knee in December, and set about making it happen. Five months later, he’s just this hour landed in San Francisco. It’s pretty stunning what he’s accomplished: a whole new life.

Meanwhile, if the world does not end tonight at midnight, my plan, now that my role in Project Bob has come to a happy ending, is to spend the summer reading, writing, dancing, and getting The Dig ready for production in the fall or winter of 2012.

And if the world does end and all the True Believers go on to the world they’ve been promised, me and others like me will spend most of our time feeding, petting, walking, grooming tons of grief-striken guinea pigs, iguanas, cats and dogs. Not to mention all those wailing geckos.

My dad Bob watching the movers load the last box into the van.

VIDEO: Next Year in Jerusalem – April 14, 2011

Okay, I jumped in …

Click on image to enlarge

My last post was about sitting on the edge of this huge Holocaust & Genocide Research Collection, having been commissioned to write a performance piece for an event on April 14, and that date getting nearer and nearer and not having any idea how to get in.

So, I got in, and the event is this week, on Thursday, and I hope you can come. Here are some thoughts I wanted to share with you:

As you know, my focus for many years – in my own work and in teaching — has been creating the bridge between personal story and artistic expression.

Last year, I was commissioned to create a performance piece based once again on personal story, but not my own. This performance piece was to be based on first-person testimony from the new Holocaust & Genocide Research Collection at the USC Library.

How do we shine light into inexplicable horror? How do we find something to say (story) in accounts of events in the face of which we can barely breathe?

That’s what we’re looking at this week at USC.

Thursday night is my performance, with a panel response and open inquiry into the interaction between artists and first-person testimony, specifically accounts of trauma or catastrophe.

Friday is a lunchtime forum for creative artists with fiction writer and Holocaust scholar Cliff Spargo (including lunch).

I am proud to be a part of next weeks’ events, an unveiling for the community ofl the Holocaust & Genocide Collection which — along with the Shoah Foundation, also housed at USC — is the foundation of what they call a research cluster in Resistance to Genocide, intended to draw scholars and students from around the world.

Genocide has been perpetrated, continues to be perpetrated.

Artists — writers, performers, visual artists, all of us — wield tools that allow us to give voice to the unspeakable. Here we meet and we ask, How we can mirror what no one wants to see, no one wants to know, in a way that opens eyes to the possibility of action?

If you’re in LA, please join us. If you’re far, far away, we’ll post video from both the Thursday performance/discussion and the Friday forum on the web. I’ll put the link on my home page.

And for more info, click here

Peering over the edge of the abyss

April 14, at the Ray Stark Family Theatre at USC School of Theatre

A year ago I was asked to create a short performance piece, based on materials housed in the new Holocaust & Genocide Research Collection in the basement of Doheny Library at USC. Acquired with funds from Wolf Gruner’s endowed Chair in the History Department, the USC Libraries and the College of Letters & Sciences, this archive is intended to be the foundation, along with the Shoah Foundation—also housed at USC—for an international “research cluster” for the resistance of genocide. I can get behind that.

 

That was a year ago. Now the performance is exactly a month away—on April 14—and all the writing I have been doing in search of whatever story I can pull from the morass of information in the archive is clearly not dramatic or performative. It is process writing, and since so much of this exercise is an inquiry into the creative process in response to testimony of trauma or catastrophe, I figured I would start posting it here, as a chronicle of the process.

Here goes:

January 19, 2011

Thinking about death a lot and grieving. Deeply grieving the loss of Martin Luther King because at the end of his life, what he was doing–and why he was even in fucking Memphis–was working for jobs. Job equality. Economic equality. And even though some may consider the election of half-black Barack (don’t get me wrong: i worked my ass off to get the guy elected, and pray for him every day) to be president of the US, I consider where we are economically a big back-step from where we were in 1968, in terms of consciousness about economic issues, which are at the center of civil rights, from my point of view.

Grieving MLK. Grieving Bobby Kennedy, who I was in love with as a very little girl, and whose loss tore my heart out even before I found out a couple of years ago about his flatbed speech in a black community of Indianapolis, where he actually had to tell people that Martin was dead. And he quoted Aeschulis! And all I could think of was do you think any of these goons in the Senate even know who Aeschulis is?

And then there’s the frigging Holocaust. I mean you can say “the frigging–or even fucking–Holocaust.” You can’t really say “the fucking Shoah.” Or I can’t. Maybe someone can. But what better thing to modify with that modifier.

Fuck. You can’t get away from it, no matter how hard you try. My family came here at the turn of the twentieth century. I have a record of my Dad’s dad coming in with his mother, brother, and older sister from Liverpool (they were living in Manchester) on March 5, 1904. The husband came earlier. The manifest says he met them at the boat. Okay! We’re clear. That’s long before any world war. Pogroms, maybe they had to deal with, which were horrid, I’m sure, but not the bloody Holocaust.

But what about the husband’s family? I know nothing about them. From somewhere near Kiev. Did they get out? What was their life like? I have no idea. His wife, my grandfather’s mother, had her family here. Here mother was here, her brothers.

All of us have links to someone who was lost.

So. I think a lot about death and cruelty and horror and what choices we have about how closely we wish to dance with them. Sometimes we have no choice about the closeness. My mother got some grotesque cancerous aberration in the cartilage of her left ear when she was so young. Barely forty. They cut it out, along with anything else they thought might be touched by it. Muscle, bone, nodes. Her ear. Five years later the familial predisposition to malignancy of the gut raised it’s ugly head. Inoperable. Yes, there was what they believed to be a miracle, but fear of death, and loss of body parts great and small loomed large in my mother’s life. And that was her life and collaterally my own. And how we do that dance, and what we do with our partners in that dance are what I’m interested in now, in this, our cave.

How do we as artists handle–I often use the word “metabolize”–the raw material of catastrophe, in our own experience, or as recounted in the personal testimony of others?

Victims of trauma who are able to, in some sense, move on, carve from the morass of information that is their experience some “story” that makes some sense, even if the story is that it makes no sense: Evil exists. Or simply chaos. There is no one in charge.

It is not recommended in most current therapeutic approaches that victims of trauma–sexual violation, domestic violence, battlefield scars, etc.–relive those experiences. The reliving does not set the monsters to rest. The reliving does not give any reason for a tomorrow.

Rather people are encouraged to “storify”, just as we artists make stories.

Victims have no choice whether to walk in those waters. They are the waters they had to walk in. We–you and I–have a choice. Holocaust? Fuck that shit. No way!

Or, like the masochists we are, we choose to stick our feet in. And we train our bodies to breathe, where most sane folks know to stop. Because if you stop breathing, you stop feeling. For a time. You can’t not breathe forever. But you can take only little bitty breaths, and get enough oxygen to be barely alive. But you can’t run or sing or dance, which is what we aim to do in the face of this stuff.

Because when we run and sing and breath in its face, we say, “No. You can kill my body, but you cannot take away what is was always will be me. My human right to be now and forever to have been, to have taken up whatever space I took up, to have touched whomever I touched, whatever I touched. I was here. And I will always be here.” Cleopatra’s bath water. My pee. You drink me, and you will always drink me, just as I drink you. Hah!

That may be it for today.

 

 

 

 

 

Hotel Colorado

Three days now into our great cross-country-and-back adventure in my little red VW Golf, with our dog Billie. We had planned to save money by camping out along the way, but after ten hours of putting everything we’d need for the next five weeks into bags and three hours of strategizing the packing of the Golf, it was clear that the camping stuff would not fit. The air mattress, the tent and stakes, the camp stove, the propane, the hatchet, the minus-30-degree sleeping bags, the bear-proof box and ropes and all the rest are in piles in our loft. “We’ll camp some other time,” Marty promised, as we schlepped it all back upstairs. “Or maybe we’ll just keep it for our earthquake kit.”

I had waked the morning before the morning before we were supposed to leave with nightmares about Billie hearing the bears outside the tent and barking and the bears tearing through the walls of the tent, and all of us getting eaten. It was all my friend Babette’s fault: When I came up with the camping scheme, I didn’t think about bears.

Why would I? I’m a Jew from New York, raised in Southern California. Marty’s a Jew from Detroit. We don’t worry about bears until someone tells us there are bears, and now all we think about is bears.

That’s not entirely true. When I was living n New York, I would come to LA occasionally to work so I would cut these articles out of the New York Times about mountain lions and bears attacking people while they were out biking or jogging and they would have useful advice about all the things you’re supposed to do. For example, if you run into one of them you’re supposed to hold your jacket over your head, make yourself really big and look them right in the eyes, so they see you’re bigger and stronger than they are. For the other, you make yourself as little as possible and avoid their gaze, in order to appear submissive. The only problem is I can’t remember which you do for which.

My friend Amelia and I hiked Will Rogers State Park a few weeks ago. We went up about three and a half miles, turned around to walk back and came upon a rattlesnake sunning itself on the path we had crossed maybe five minutes earlier. We literally threw our arms around one another like in the movies and screamed. “It’s a snake! It’s a snake!” There was a man approaching from below and we screamed, “There’s a snake! There’s a snake! What do we do?” He was not from New York or Montreal like us, so he knew something about snakes. Yes, he confirmed, it is a rattlesnake. He threw big rocks at it so it woud move from the path, but it didn’t so much as flinch. So he went off to find a stick to what? maybe pick it up? As soon as he turned away, it slithered off into the grass by the side of the trail.

Sticks and stones. Fangs and venom.

Now the question was did it retreat straight into the grass, or was it coiled up, just out of sight, ready to pounce as we continued our trek down the hill? We didn’t know, so we leapt as high as we could over the place where it had been, and continued to run down the path as fast as we could, making as much ruckus as we could, telling the snakes to stay away.

At some point, we relaxed—I guess the path got wider and it seemed less likely that some snake would dart out of the overgrown grass and strike our naked ankles as we passed. We warned everyone we met on their way up the hill about the rattlesnake. One guy on a dirt bike said, yeah, he sees them all the time. And, he said, he didn’t want to scare us, but the day before, he had run into a mountain lion.

We had spent the entire hike up breathing in the beauty of nature and green and the trees and the wide sky above us, as we climbed to summit after summit. We should live up here, in remote places like these beautiful hills, away from civilization. On the way down, fleeing our snake, Downtown LA started looking really good to me.

Hotel Colorado, in Glenwood Springs is old-school: Across the way from the railway station, big old healing hot-springs pools still simmer across the street. There’s a huge lobby with sofas and fireplaces and wireless internet (slow as molasses, but wireless). Ann at the desk gave us an upgrade when we came in last night to a suite on the fifth floor (penthouse) and we slept til nearly noon and decided to stay an extra day. We walked Two Rivers Park, got caught in the rain and came back in to warm up in front of the fire.

This is our kind of place: Low-key, dog-friendly. Billie rules the lobby off-leash, letting any other dog who enters the place know who is queen, and then coming back to curl up at our feet in front of the fire.

We are set up in cozy armchairs with scotch and water from the Coleman flask Marty bought at Target when we were shopping for the camping stuff, before Babette offered to loan us hers. We have laptops and iPhones and a video camera.

Civilized. No snakes. No bears.

Billie and me by the fire, May 21, 2010

Arts in the One World at Brown University (a post in progress)

The day before I got there—I took the red-eye Thursday night, arrived early Friday—was devoted to an inquiry into the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. The conference is co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Genocide Study Center in Rwanda. Erik Ehn, who assembled the extraordinary conference at Brown, his academic home as of last fall, takes a group of undergraduate students to Rwanda every summer. My friend Brent Blair, who is the force behind the creation of the new graduate program in Applied Theatre at USC, traveled with Erik a few summers ago. I want to go, but first, I need to finish The Dig and find it a home. Then I’ll go to Rwanda.

What can I say?

I wanted to come into the office first-thing this morning and write about the conference. My experience there—and remember, I missed the first day and a half, and part of Sunday—was so full, so rich. I met so many extraordinary students and artists in all disciplines, who are doing fascinating, courageous work, world-wide. Of course, I arrived here in the morning and immediately got captured by the hundreds of emails which needed answers, and students’ work which needed responses. So now I sit down to write with only a few minutes before I head off to teach Theatre 101: Fundamentals of Acting.

I arrived on Friday morning to hear a presentation by a Turkish architect, Aslihan Demirtas, who was paired with an Armenian architect, Silva Ajemian, by an organization I can’t find on Google called “Blind Date,” which brings artists together to invite collaboration. In this instance, they were presented with a photo of the ruins of a bridge at the old capitol of Ani, which spans a river, one side of which is Turkey and one Armenia. It was given to these two women, of clashing ancestries, both of whom work as architects in New York City, the task of creating an artistic interrogation of this bridge—all of which remains are the (what do you call them? the things that anchor a bridge to the ground?) ends. The span across the river that would actually link the two countries is long gone, destroyed, like most of the rest of the city of Ani.

Something that struck me, a non-Turk, non-Armenia, with a tiny knowledge of Hebrew (ktsat ivrit), is that ani is the Hebrew word for I or me.

Manifesto – performing identity

Okay, so the idea of posting every single day is a bit unrealistic, as is limiting the amount of time I write to 30 to 60 minutes. I’ll warm into it, but I got to the office at 10:30, and have been working on this “manifesto” for tomorrow’s panel for four hours. Except for the five minutes I spent opening and plugging in my new baby fridge.

Erik Ehn has asked Laura Zam and me to create a two-hour panel which he calls “Performing Identity” tomorrow at the Arts in the One World Conference at Brown University. Laura and I are both solo-performers—writer-performers who also teach others who are wrestling with personal story. She based in Washington, DC, and me in Los Angeles. We have spent time together at conferences about Jewish theatre, Oral History, the NoPassport conferences in New York, and this is our first co-creation. We started by assigning each other the task of writing a manifesto.

When I was in grad school, I was steeped in the jargon of “performance studies” or “performance theory,” I am no longer. Apparently “performing identity” is a broad term, used by sociologists and anthropologists to define how a culture or identity is defined or created, based on “doing” or performative something or other. I think maybe this means, basically,  “what you do is who you are,” so let’s study (modify?) the doing.

When I was googling, I did find a guy, Chaim Noy,  in Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who is using the term in a way that is quite interesting to me: the potential for self-change while listening to a narrative, although I’m not that interested in narrative, per se, except where it serves “story,” or meaning, or intent.

I write solo plays, based on personal material. I am careful about how I use the words narrative and story, mainly because they are often used interchangeably, and I don’t find that particularly helpful. For me, narrative is what happened; story is what we choose to make of our experience of what happened, which may or may not include the narration of those events. There is the narrative, and then there is how we, metabolize that narrative (for the artist, raw material), which is story.

In the context of What’s the Story? workshop, I guide others who are wrestling with personal material. I started out working with people who, like me, were aiming to create solo plays. The group has expended to include people who are working for the stage, the page and, occasionally, the screen. Sometimes people are not sure what genre they are aiming to express in, and it doesn’t matter, because the first part of the process is the same: We need to invite or dig up the raw material of personal experience, with no conscious sorting mechanism in place, in order to have the full array of material before us, from which to select.

I say “no conscious sorting mechanism,” because there are many unconscious ones in place, some of them helpful, some not. I find it in my own work: I am currently reworking The Dig, a play that I was commissioned to write about my experience in Israel, over the course of nearly two years performing, teaching, doing research, from 2003 to 2005. I traveled in the wake of my own mother’s death after a long illness. There are lots of things about her and my relationship with her, my relationship with Israeli men at the time, and who I am (or who I think I am), that I have in the past unconsciously deemed to be not part of the story. It turns out, of course, that the are very much part of—if not central to—the story. Yuck. And onwards.

And I’m happy to talk about the process or processes I use to expand, open into, bust out of that unconscious sorting or censorship, but not now.

A stab at a manifesto:

I believe that live theatre, in general, has tremendous power because it is live, because we are all in the room together, our hearts beating together. My variety of solo performance, where I am right there in direct contact with the audience, has even greater power, to my thinking, because there is nowhere to hide. You can fall asleep or walk out, but you can’t do it without it effecting me and everyone else, and I am committed to letting you effect me. We’re stuck with each other. And in that intimate exchange, here’s the equation: There is the story I devise with my content, and there is the story that gets told via the whole gestalt of the event, over which I have much less control.

In creating a text, it’s important to me to leave plenty of room for each person in the audience — who I see as my scene partner(s) — to make their own connections, put the pieces I offer together for themself. That way I leave room for the material dredged from my own personal experience to re-sort itself in the light of another’s lens.

We’re talking universality, obviously. We’re talking “commonality,” but only kind of.

I don’t think commonality is particularly useful for artists. It’s general: We are all human; we have the same organs, mostly. Mostly blood flows through our veins. Some of us have instincts that are maternal, some not. Some of us value human life, some clearly not. I think it’s a mistake to dumb down or wipe out any iota of specificity in the telling of personal experience. Case in point, my favorite TV show of all time, and I am not a TV watcher, or was not til now, is Dexter. I am Dexter. He is me. I have never killed anyone or cut them up, and didn’t really want to particularly, til now, I guess. That’s not my thing. Impotence in the face of injustice is my thing. And I am Dexter. I know him, I love that part of me that is him; I hate that part of me that is him.

In the face of personal experience—identity, who we think we are—I want address the issue of what is truly, deeply accessible. I learned more viscerally, I have to say, about Ukrainian pogroms where quote-my people-unquote were actually targeted (from which they flew at the turn of the twentieth century) in January at the Arts in the One World Conference at CalArts, when one of the students who had traveled to Rwanda read a piece that in here-and-now-first-person gave an account troops coming into a home there, where part of the family was Tutsi, part Hutu, and they were forced to give their own family up, to watch them killed, in their own home.

In the face of that performed work, I had no inclination or mechanism to hold away from me the immediacy of that experience, and I intuitively, unconsciously filled in my own family, then, for hers, now.

I’ve been asked to create a performed response to materials from this vast Holocaust (I prefer the Hebrew word Shoah, which people use to talk specifically about the death of Jews at Nazi hands. Nazi murders during World War II were not limited to Jewish people, and the word holocaust has as part of its etymology the implication of ritual sacrifice, which doesn’t feel particularly useful.)

As I was saying, I’ve been asked to create a performed response to materials from this vast Holocaust Research Collection recently acquired by the library at USC, where I teach in the School of Theatre. Originally, the German guy, Wolf Gruner, who is the new Chair of Jewish Studies, asked me to assemble a group of actors to read first-person testimony from the collection. I said no. Basically, he didn’t need me or  anyone like me to do that. I also am not that interested in the giving voice to that kind of material, without some sort of edit or selection or I like to say metabolization by an artist who develops an intent in relationship with an audience. Who has something she wants to say.

Gruner wanted to involve a writer, someone who would make something out of raw material from his archive, and he wanted me to perform it. I had to think about who I wanted to work with. I chose a beautiful poet and playwright who runs the Professional Writing Program at USC, Brighde Mullens, who is utterly Irish, not Jewish. Intentionally, because she brings a new light, new prism, an new lens, a new foot-hold to the historic catastrophe the collection commemorates.

I hate the Holocaust. (I’ll use the word Holocaust here, because I like “h’s.”) I can’t bear it. I can’t breathe into it, I don’t understand it. I don’t want to understand it. I don’t want to be in the same room, much less be on the same planet where it occurred

Okay. Manifesto. I believe that live theatre, whether it’s at its best or not, is an event that we live through together, that transforms us. I prefer it to be really good, if I have to live though it. I am not a patient person. I am not extremely tolerant, but I am not a serial killer (see  above: Dexter).

What I mean by really good has to do with honesty in acknowledging the meeting of the creators with me, their audience. I prefer not to be lied to, or pretended at, I prefer to be respected and spoken to as an equal. I prefer to be cared about. I like having the sense that the performers are longing to meet me, move me, invite me to some adventure, in some way. Just laughter—in and of itself—is respiration, inspiration. We laugh and we are renewed. Make me laugh, and I am happy. I want creators/performers to be open to being met, moved, changed by me. I want that exchange.

Okay. Honesty. Identity. Who I am in relationship with an audience.

I think what I do as a solo performer, in relationship with an audience, is deeply subversive. Is that honest? I don’t know. Does it matter? I don’t know.

In my work, I talk to you. I ask you questions, and really want answers. I intentionally blur the boundary between just being me and “performing,” between the simple vernacular of an honest greeting and a relatively elaborate, languagy text. I honestly want you to join me on this journey, this adventure, because I believe it’s important.

I never liked Tom Stoppard that much as a playwright until I saw Arcadia. He was always brilliant, always created fascinating structures, and tickled the intellect, but it never came together for me. And then he turned 50 and he wrote a play that had all the same wicked intricacy, but had at its center the shimmering character of Hannah. What happens in the play? Lots of stuff happens, but the important thing is that Hannah changes. Nobody ever says “I’m changing” or “I see you have changed.” She just changes. She learns something, meets the subject of her heretofore arms-length fascination in flesh, meets him in his vulnerability and loss, and opens to new possibility for herself.

The play doesn’t always work. It takes a really smart director to pave the way, and a brilliant actress to pull it off. Thanks to Stoppard, here’s usually enough brilliant going-ons to make most people reasonably happy, or so much going on that it pisses some people off, if they can’t track it all. But when it does work, and the actress playing Hannah does get it, we feel it, and the event of the whole is oh so much greater than the sum of the many many parts.

Arcadia is a big honking play, shifting back and forth between two moments in time, with many luscious characters. I make solo plays. The guy who made me believe that there could be richness equivalent to that of Arcadia in solo work was Ken Campbell, a Brit, who I met when I was studying in London and spent almost a month on tour with.

Ken said hello to his audience, and proceeded almost imperceptibly to weave threads of story that were seemingly unconnected: the novels of Philip K. Dick, pygmies of the South Sea Islands, Prince Charles, false teeth he had made for a role he played on TV. He would go on for an hour or two or three (I watched him build one show which was eternal at that point in its gestation). And then, suddenly, in a whirlwind of wizardry, he would spin the strands together in a stunning, heart-stopping revelation.

Sadly, we lost Ken Campbell in August of 2008, and I will never forget him or his work. He was intellectually demanding, utterly accessible, gracious, so present and patient and curious about his audiences—if they were with him, how they were putting things together—whether they were ticketholders at the National, or picnickers who happened to run across this strange guy under a tent with his weird table of props, in a park somewhere in the north.

That’s what I like: That’s what I aim to create.

In my work, there’s the text, there’s usually a narrative, because I love the ride of a good narrative, and there’s the big story—the fish I want to fry—which, I hope, gets told via your empathic involvement with me (the created me, because I never play me).

Our meeting is an event, a ritual, where we change one another, where you are given an active role, so it belongs to you, or to us. But never just to me.

That’s the paradox of this stuff: It’s so much me me me, me naked in front of you, and yet I aim to hand it over to you, to become you, to blur the lines between us, just like me and Dexter.

It’s shameless. It’s trickery. Hopefully, it’s really fun. And if it’s not fun, there’s nowhere to hide: I want to leave; you do leave. It’s really horrible.

My office at Sunset-Gower, with shades of Larry, Curly & Mo.

A room of my own – with ghosts

Day One in my new office at Sunset-Gower Studios in Hollywood, California. Everywhere you turn, there are signs saying so-and-so shot such-and-such here. My building, Number 22, is apparently the former home of the Three Stooges. I am neither a fan nor do I know much about them. We weren’t allowed to watch them as children, which made me think they were probably cool. Once I was a creature of freer will, I tasted Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and  had no patience for their broad brand of slapstick.

Now, of course, I am once again curious, wondering what the shades of those Three might whisper to me, through the cracks between sublime and ridiculous during my midday musings.

I didn’t know it was their building til Cleve came to set up the internet last week. All I knew was it was one of the few on the lot I could afford. It has a big glass door and window out onto a fire escape/balcony, looking out on a stucco wall over an alley-way, which makes it feel much bigger than the 10-by-10 it actually measures. And it’s right next door to Stage 8, where they shoot Dexter.

You know how I feel about Dexter.

So this morning I arrived at about 9:30 and went to work, aka began to putter. I got on the phone, I attacked the list of people I haven’t called back for the past weeks: I was in New York for NoPassport late February, ran a What’s the Story? weekend intensive March 5-7 (awesome!), and then came back to deal with the logistics of moving in here.

My friend Bianca Bagatourian (more on Bianca tomorrow) has an office here, on the Writer’s Courtyard, and she introduced me to her friend Terri who showed me this place. I loved it, we all said, “Yeah!” I signed the document, handed over the dough. Then I found out about the three million-dollar commercial liability insurance policy that needed to be bought and in place before move-in. Understandable for production companies who roll in massive trucks and employ hundreds of people. Not so understandable for little me in my little room. But okay. Done.

I didn’t used to need an office.

I take that back: I always needed an office. Even when I lived alone, I knew I needed an office to get me away from the dishes and the laundry and the rest of life’s minutiae which become more and more fascinating once the going gets tough in the business of creation. But I lived alone, and I could not justify—much less afford—renting another space, just for my work. Now I live in a big old  loft in the historic Higgins Building in downtown LA, and it is, basically one room. And my husband Marty works at home on his financial reform website Where’s Our Money? and I realized that I can’t afford not to have my own space, just for my own work. So voilà.

The other day, my dad asked how having an office will increase my income. You spend money, you should make money. He’s right; I agree. And I have lots and lots of ideas: I imagine the story of my play The Dig (if I can ever finish it, which is the whole idea of getting an office) can become a major motion picture. I imagine What’s the Story? workshop can become an online global phenomenon. I imagine that once the Dexter people next door catch wind of me and my passion for the difficultly human hero they have created — once they know that I, too, am Dexter — they will hire me to replace the head writer who apparently moved back East to be with his family. (I only know this because I am on the lot. I am in the know.) Because even though Michael C. Hall, who is, thank goodness, in remission from Hodgkins, (I only know this because one of my students told me and then I read it on the Huffington Post) and the rest of the cast are totally great, my heat is for the writers.

Maybe I can be his shrink! Doctors and lawyers are what I used to do on TV. Maybe I’ll do judges now that I’m older. But I don’t want my man Dexter ever to be in front of a judge. He could, however, use a shrink. A shrink like me, who is like him.

But, honestly, I don’t know exactly how spending scads of money to rent and insure and wire for the web an office will increase my income. I do know that the best place from which to create something new is the place of not knowing. And I know that creating a rhythm of work, even when you  may have no idea what you’re making, does eventually, alchemically, pragmatically, bear fruit.

In these times, when who we are and what an artist’s work is worth, are being even more deeply challenged than usual, we need to look closely at how we can make a living doing what we do. We need to define the intrinsic, yes, and the monetary value of what we contribute to our communities and our culture. We can lower rates, as my psychoanalyst friend has told me she must do to accommodate some of her patients’ changing ability — and insurance companies’ changing willingness — to pay. But we must get paid.

All interesting.

My intention is to post to this blog everyday I am in my office, which will be Monday through Friday, when I am in LA. I intend to spend between 30 and 60 minutes writing for the blog, and then to get to my other work.

My time for today is way past done. There’s so much more to talk about.

My friend and fellow writer/solo-performer Laura Zam and I have been asked to present a panel on “Performing Identity” this Friday at the Arts in One World Conference at Brown University. We’ll also be performing there on Saturday night. We promised one another that we would start by writing manifestos about our work, so that’s what I’m off to do. Along with learning some lines from the yet-again re-write of The Dig. I’ll post my manifesto anon.

Wishing you productive days and restful nights. Or vice versa, as you like.

Dexter

I have never had this kind of relationship with a television series in my life.

I watched the first three-plus seasons of Dexter on instant Netflix, then DVD, three at a time, then Video On Demand, which was far more gratifying than having to wait to watch the new one on Sundays, which is the boat I am in, as of last week, when I watched my first one on-air.

[At current posting, things are much worse: I am one of millions who suffer the nine-month wait for the next season's premiere in September! I'm using Tru Blood as a kind of methadone, but it doesn't quench my thirst like the brilliance of the Dexter premise and writing.]

At first, my husband Marty refused to get involved, finding my obsession with a serial killer repulsive and proof that I truly am a rage-aholic sicko. When we got a television and cable last week—we’d been on strike against tv since the end of The Sopranos, except for a brief time during the 2008 primaries—I graduated from DVDs and pirated video with earphones on my laptop to On Demand. Suddenly Dexter was life-size in the living room. That’s when Marty started to get interested.

The story and character of Dexter hook into a deep sense of impotence in the face of all range of injustice: I want to chop up the driver who nearly runs me down in the crosswalk, in a rush to make their turn. I have the right-of-way! I long to take out the principals of a government who took us into a wrong, wrong war and spent eight years lying to us; a banking industry which seems to be getting away with murder.

We need Dexter. I want to be Dexter.

Then there’s that existential thing: We humans share a sense that we are all alone, in hiding. We have secrets no one can hold. We are all monsters. If they knew who I really am, would I have friends, could I be loved?

I find a home in Dexter’s head and heart, and am deeply comforted and, at the same time, deeply disturbed.

The acting is terrific, in general. The phenomenal John Lithgow as the Trinity Killer made my heart pound. What a plunge: I will never see him in the same way again. But the writers are my heros. They are bold and brave. Sometimes there’s a gap or it gets cheesy, but they have bigger fish to fry, and I am completely infected, so I forgive them.

I won’t say anything here about that recent fourth season finale, because if you didn’t see it, you need to.

An Oak Tree … ahhh!

Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree continues at the Odyssey Theatre

I was the Guest Actor with Tim Crouch in An Oak Tree at the Odyssey Theatre on Sunday, January 24. Friends told me afterwards that they had been fearful for me: I was living the Actor’s Nightmare on stage with no idea what I was supposed to say or do. I’ve had those dreams all my life, have waked from them with palpitations, but that was nowhere near my experience on Sunday. Rather, I found the whole thing exhilarating.

I was careful not to read anything about the play before I arrived at the theatre. I didn’t even read the email I sent on from the producers to friends, inviting them to come. Somewhere in my peripheral mind, I had a sense that the story involved the death of a child, but I guess I decided not to consciously dwell on it, so i wouldn’t do what i would normally do: make it real for myself. I wanted to go in not knowing.

After the show, Tim reminded me that when they invite people to be Guest Actors, they suggest that if we have recently experienced anything like the loss of a child, we not accept, since grief tends to breathe all the air out of a room and it is difficult to create from recent, rampant trauma. That is, by the way, all I will say about the story of the play, as I encourage you to see it here in LA before they close on February 14, and I don’t want to ruin it for you. I’ll be seeing it myself on February 4th.

The whole thing was a blast. The bummer is that now that I’ve done the show, I can never do it again, ever.

Some thoughts:

The invitation for the Guest Actor in the play, I think, is to say “yes” to absolutely everything, and run with it.  The structure, as Tim and his cohorts have created it, is completely supportive for the Guest Actor. There were times when I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d been told to do, but I felt safe and very happy committing to doing whatever I thought I might have heard him ask me to do, completely trusting that if I were to veer off the road (and there is a road) I would be directed back on to it. The opportunity for the Guest Actor within that structure is complete freedom to follow one’s instinct. A rare joy, indeed.

It strikes me that it’s all about “suggestibility,” that earned gift of the actor and madman which allows thought to immediately become belief. Tell me that this ring I am wearing, which was actually purchased on 42nd street in June, was given to me by my beloved grandmother on her deathbed, and I will succumb to that suggestion, and “believe” it, exactly like the madman who believes himself to be Louis XIV. I am probably, ultimately, far more dangerous than the madman, but it’s a similar mechanism

I remember when I decided to do a two-year actor training program with Kathryn Gately, a master teacher of the Meisner Technique. I had considered myself a professional actor for several years, and Kathryn informed me that it would take 20 years for me to become an actor. I thought she was, well, exaggerating. Now, I think she was right. It takes that long to build those synapses that allow us to effortlessly transform thought to belief. That’s what Tim’s play not only depends on for the doing of it, but has as its theme: our human suggestibility and the power to create.

I could be wrong. After all, I haven’t seen it yet.

That’s all I have to say. Go see it.