Tag Archives: Charles Deemer

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Theater

Whose play is it, anyway? On authors and interpreters

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Sartre's "No Exit" on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Sartre’s “No Exit” on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Who wrote that play?

I don’t mean, did the modestly talented actor Will Shakespeare really write all those great stageworks, or was he just a convenient front man for Edward de Vere or some other dandy of the ruling class?

I mean, is the production you just saw actually of the play the playwright intended, or did it get reinvented so much in production that it actually became something else?

Charles Deemer has been gnawing on that bone as it relates to Jerry Mouawad’s critically praised production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit at Imago Theatre — a production that places the actors on an intricately balanced platform that shifts with every movement, echoing the tensions and balances among the characters.

Portland playwright Deemer first raised his objections in an Oct. 18 post on his blog, The Writing Life II. “Imago usually does original work, and brilliantly so,” he wrote. “It does original work here — it’s just misnamed. This production needs a little truth in advertising. It’s not Sartre. It’s variations on themes developed by Sartre. It’s interesting. It’s engaging. It just isn’t what the playwright intended and, as a playwright, I think this needs to be said.”

Deemer then followed up with comments on Martha Ullman West’s recent Art Scatter post about No Exit and a clutch of dance performances. “Composers do variations on a theme all the time and own up to it,” he wrote. “… What if someone went to the theater wanting to see the wonderfully grim original? What’s wrong with grim and cynical anyway?”

Then he added:

Let’s say a director resurrects Christmas at the Juniper Tavern and puts all the actors on roller skates because s/he believes it depicts the fluidity of their life journeys. Would I be amused? Guess.

“Edward Albee once closed down a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf because George and Martha were presented as a gay couple.

“I once had the opportunity to ask Arthur Miller what he thought of an all-black version of Death of a Salesman that was done here with Tony Armstrong in the lead. ‘This is not the play I wrote,’ he told me.

“An advantage of the business of playwriting, as opposed to the business of screenwriting, is that playwrights retain ownership of their work. You legally can’t make changes without permission. Consequently I’ve long suspected that many, perhaps most, directors prefer their playwrights dead.”

Theater fans aren’t as volatile as opera fans, and it’s the rage these days in opera circles to boo directors and designers for undermining the music with conceptual approaches. Theater directors have been doing that for years (often, as Charles points out, with the work of dead playwrights who can’t fight back) and are lauded for it.

Interpretation is huge in the theater. But where does interpretation stop and something related but fundamentally different begin? Sometimes it seems like directors and designers use pre-existing works like especially fertile junkyards, discarding what they don’t want and mining them for treasure they can turn into something of their own. Novelists do that sort of thing all the time. But John Gardner didn’t call his book Beowulf. He called it Grendel.

What’s the essence of a play? Is it words? Is it tone? Is it the look of the thing? Or does it shift with every play, according to the play’s own core and elasticity? Putting the actors on roller skates for Christmas at the Juniper Tavern would absolutely change the play into something else. It MIGHT not irrevocably alter The Comedy of Errors.

Continue reading Whose play is it, anyway? On authors and interpreters →

Bob Hicks, Film

Taking it to the Web: Charles Deemer’s new micro-movie

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Art Scatter is on the road, but some things you can appreciate long-distance. Such as Scatter friend Charles Deemer‘s new micro-movie Deconstructing Sally, which the Portland playwright/novelist/essayist/teacher finished a few days ago, shooting it on a Flip minicam and spicing it up with a terrific soundtrack of mostly ’60s songs.

Charles Deemer and museIt’s 30 minutes long, and you can watch it here, in three parts. Charles subtitles it Reflections on Memory and Hallucination, and calls it “a fictional memoir about sex and identity in the 1960s.”

Deemer has long played around with the fuzzy border between fiction and reality. Most writers do; he’s just more open than most about it. And this, he insists, is fiction: Some of the things in the movie really happened, some of them didn’t. Which is which isn’t all that important.

Deconstructing Sally is about his (or the narrator’s) long relationship with the woman he thought was the love of his life, until she came out as a lesbian. However much of her is “real,” she’s been a fruitful muse: She also shows up in Deemer’s play The Half-Life Conspiracy and his novel Kerouac’s Scroll.

The idea of short, relatively inexpensive-to-make films online (but longer and more narrative than the stuff on YouTube) is surely going to explode, even if it’s tough at this point to see how you make money doing it. Sort of like blogging. There are stories everywhere, and people are itching to tell them. Sure, a lot of the stories are inarticulate. But many others are well-told — professional in every sense but economics. And a format like this encourages smart, original thinking, which in Deemer’s case is coupled with long experience in the practical skills of storytelling. Deconstructing Sally has voice: It’s is a good example of how skillful and individualistic democratic filmmaking can be.

This isn’t the first time Deemer’s tackled a new way of doing traditional things. He’s a pioneer of hyperdrama, a kind of exploded form of theater: Think of it as a two-dimensional drawing transformed into a popup book. His hyperdrama version of Chekhov’s The Seagull expands the story by imagining what happens when the characters move offstage and into the wings. That process takes up three-fourths of Deemer’s version; the other quarter is the play as Chekhov wrote it.

There is passion in Deconstructing Sally (Deemer self-administers an R rating) but with an attempt at a long vision. The film, which is tightly edited visually, is carried by the narration, which looks back after many years, trying to put into perspective something that was extremely intense.

This is very much a visual short story, told by a “hero” (I use quotes because the storyteller speaks ruefully of himself and his own missteps in life) with a distinct point of view and a desire to bring the clarity of understanding to the muddle of emotion. At the film’s beginning Charles quotes T.S. Eliot from Tradition and the Individual Talent:

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Does Deemer escape? There’s a flareup or two of possibly still raw emotion here. We learn a lot about the narrator and a little about the mythic Sally and a little more about the difficulties in ever truly knowing another person, let alone ourselves.

But it’s time to look back on the 1960s with a clear observant eye, shucking the myth and trying to figure out what the times meant personally, politically, and culturally. A made-up 1960s gets in the way: newly minted AARP members revel in thir rearranged memories of high times; right-wing demagogues exploit the period for its fear factor: This is where America went wrong. Somewhere between is an amazing variety of actualities, waiting to be reconsidered. Deconstructing Sally is one of those reconsiderations. Give it a look.

Bob Hicks, Cities, Food, General, Journalism, Theater, Visual Art

Sunday links: Art garden and a wild and crazy quote

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A quick Sunday scatter of good stuff in other places:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Summer," 1573, Louvre/Paris. Wikimedia Commons*************************

FEED THE BODY, FEED THE MIND: Under the headline Philbrook Museum of Art Trades Tulips for Tomatoes, artdaily.org reports that Tulsa’s Philbrook — the museum that Brian Ferriso left to become executive director of the Portland Art Museum — is replacing its 3,600-square-foot south formal garden with a vegetable garden and will give the veggies to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma to help Oklahomans get through the economic crisis. Now, there’s a conceptual art project we can get behind. Bravo. Too often when times get tough, culture and shelter (and schools, for that matter) get tossed into an either/or funding game, turning natural allies into competing animals at a shrinking watering hole. As this project reveals, it doesn’t have to be that way.

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STEVE MARTIN UNLEASHED: The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has a good report in Sunday’s O! section on how things turned out when students from the local high school finally got to put on their production of Steve Martin‘s stage comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile. They performed it at Eastern Oregon University instead of at the high school because the school board, after receiving parental complaints about the play’s purported immorality, called the thing off.

Martin then stepped in and paid for the production himself, and in a letter to the local paper he came up with this gem, which Hughley quotes:

“I have heard that some in your community have characterized the play as ‘people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.’ With apologies to William Shakespeare, this is like calling Hamlet a play about a castle.”

Yes, Xenophobia, there is an Oregon. But the good news to take from Marty’s story is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

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IN SWITZERLAND, A SWING TO THE RIGHT: A few art insiders complained when Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times’ chief art critic, decamped to Europe for a year instead of paying attention to what was happening on the art scene stateside. Not me. I’ve enjoyed his Abroad reports. They’ve helped an already top-notch critic broaden his knowledge even further, and they’ve given readers a lot of good stories they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

One of the best is last week’s report from Zurich, In Quiet Switzerland, Outspoken Rapper Takes on the Far Right, about an Estonian-born Swiss rapper stage-named Stress who’s stirred up some welcome controversy by tackling directly in his lyrics chemicals tycoon Christoph Blocher, powerful head of the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party, who is one scary dude. Like Hitler and Stalin before him, Blocher uses his own sanitized vision of cultural purity in the arts to push his ideal of the perfect, and perfectly xenophobic, homeland. Kimmelman writes:

Mr. Blocher used his own collection of works by 19th-century painters like Albert Anker and Ferdinand Hodler in shows he organized to illustrate what he has said represent wholesome Swiss ideals: women in the home, farmers milking cows, a nation historically separated from outsiders by more than just mountains.

Steve Martin, the good people of Switzerland need you. Now.

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A CREATIVE WAKE-UP CALL IN PORTLAND?: Also in Sunday’s O! section of The Oregonian, visual arts critic D.K. Row files this intriguing report on how the flap over City Hall’s recent push to bulldoze Portland’s Memorial Coliseum has lit an activist fire under at least a slice of the city’s creative class. D.K. quotes architect/activist Stuart Emmons:

“We’ve just said, ‘Enough.’ We need to speak out for what we believe in and quit allowing politics to keep us from what’s right. This goes way beyond Memorial Coliseum.”

This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase “the art of politics.” Stay tuned. Let’s see where this thing heads.

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ON ART AND THE CRITICS: A recent Art Scatter post about Rocco Landesman’s appointment to run the National Endowment for the Arts sparked a heady and rambunctious round of comments that went off in all sorts of directions. I hope to get back to some of those issues, notably the meaning of “local” in the arts and the role of failure in creativity: Is it a necessary element of discovery, or a cult of self-absorption that ignore the needs and rights of the audience? Then there was this note from playwright, filmmaker, novelist and teacher Charles Deemer:

“At their best, critics are mediators between the artist and the society that doesn’t quite get it yet. At their worst, critics themselves don’t get it and go on to say it’s therefore not worth trying to figure out.”

Can’t argue with that. But if you’d like to, hit that comment button.