At Work Again

I spent most of October spinning my wheels. I meant to finish the first draft of Helen. I meant to send out cover letters and resumes to Shakespeare festivals across the country, in search of future employment. I planned to draft the press release for Cressida. The list went on. Instead, I read books, went to the gym, and watched more episodes of soapy television dramas and bubbly sitcoms than I care to admit. So when the temp agency called to offer me work on a corporate audit, I decided to take it. And so far, going back to work has helped me get back to the work.

The work right now involves three plays: Cressida, for which rehearsals begin today, Helen, the play I am writing, and Feral by Bruce Hostetler, a new play that Compass Works hired me to direct in January. Feral is a poetic account, moving between “reality and symphony,” of a newly homeless father’s first night on the streets. The source material for the show are interviews with over 500 people who are, or who have lived homeless. The stories are alternately heart breaking, terrifying, and life affirming. These are characters who need and want work in a way that I am fortunate enough to just barely comprehend.

The next three months will be grueling: writing, directing, and producing while holding down this other job. Luckily the office job is a place where I can work on things at a subconscious level, where ideas can percolate as I focus on thousands of lines of data. The other way that the office job is helpful is that it forces me back into relying on the public transit system to get around. Buses and trains teach you a city in a deeper way than driving does. You cross streets you may not otherwise. And the people. You get to watch so many people and wonder about their various walks of life as they come and go.

Reflecting on my month of idleness and this new month of productivity: there are a few things I hope I will remember after the shows close and my corporate contract is up. One is that as hard as I fight it, I do not want to work all the time, I do need rest, and a month of idleness is not the worst thing in the world. Second is that creative work requires a good deal of time not being directly stared at, next time I am working from home, I have to find my equivalent of thousands of lines of data. (Ibsen apparently spent the first year of work on a new play, taking long walks to just think through it’s structure. He didn’t write until the second year. Or at least, so says Fiona Shaw in an interview on “Downstage Center.”) And third, I am someone who needs to get out into the world, who needs the hustle and bustle of a crowd, and the chatter of life around her.

Final thought: One of the best meditations on work is Phillip Levine’s poem “What Work Is.”

The Blue Line, this past summer during idler and warmer times.

Drive, Girl, and Women's Rights

In April, I participated in “Wear All White for Women’s Rights,” a visibility protest. I own almost no white so I borrowed a lacey white sun dress from my roommate for the occasion. That morning, I taught my introduction to drama class and enjoyed seeing some of my students decked out in all white as well. I had rehearsal that evening for a feminist fairytale production of All’s Well That Ends Well (directed by that same roommate). First, however, she and I along with several members of the cast spent the half hour before call at a meet-up for the event, walking around downtown Staunton, following one of the event organizers as she spoke with a news crew about women's rights and recent threats to those rights such as the Virginia ultrasound mandate. 

Back then, I had no idea that I would choose How I Learned to Drive as my first show to produce and direct when returning to Portland, and I had not even read the play What Every Girl Should Know, which I’m holding a reading of this Thursday. I just knew that I was tired of the politics of reproductive rights and the persistence of sexual abuse and violence. Wearing all white was a small way of expressing those feelings in a public forum. Choosing Drive and Girl as projects for this fall has been a way of carrying those feelings into my work. 

Both How I Learned to Drive and What Every Girl Should Know deal with sexual abuse and sexual education. One of my favorite scenes in How I Learned to Drive is where Li’l Bit asks her mother whether sex hurts. She makes the mistake, however, of asking in front of her grandmother, sparking a fight between the women over just what a mother should teach her daughter about “the facts of life.” In What Every Girl Should Know, the mother of one of the girls, Joan, has been arrested for distributing illicit material, pamphlets about contraception written by Margaret Sanger. Joan and Li’l Bit are both smart girls. Vogel and Byrne, their respective authors, are wise in showing that intelligence is both a strength and a vulnerability.

While How I Learned to Drive is the story of one girl growing up in Maryland in the 1960s, What Every Girl Should Know is the story of four girls living at a Catholic reformatory school in New York City. The year is 1914. Women are agitating for the right to vote. Margaret Sanger - faced with obscenity charges in violation of the Comstack Laws - has fled to Europe. Although curious about the world around them, Theresa, Anne, Lucy, and Joan retreat into their own communal fantasy life in which they travel the world, take lovers, and assassinate their enemies. They seem safe within the confines of their friendship, until one of them becomes pregnant and the fantasy begins to crumble.  At the end of the play, the four girls have to make a decision about how they want to live their lives and about who their teachers are going to be. While How I Learned to Drive puts sexual abuse in the foreground, What Every Girl Should Know lets it be a backdrop to the girls struggles for self determination.

During a production meeting for How I Learned to Drive, my music director (who is also a clinical psychologist) shared how brilliant he finds Vogel’s choice to ground her play in the 1960s, a time just before America began to deal legislatively with child sexual abuse (see Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974), a time when the revelation that public figures like Marilyn Monroe had been sexually abused was shifting the notion that sexual abuse was something to shame women for (see review of “Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox). That context made me think about how I hope we are undergoing another cultural shift in which attention turns toward educating potential assailants not to abuse or rape (see "Men Can Stop Rape" campaign as an example).

My hope with How I Learned to Drive is that audiences leave and have conversations with friends and loved ones about sexual abuse and the family dynamics and cultural contexts in which it occurs. My hope with this reading of What Every Girl Should Know is to inspire discussion about sexual education, access to contraception, unplanned pregancies, and the way girlhood has changed since the beginning of the last century. 

How I Learned to Drive runs one more weekend. Friday & Saturday at 8 pm. Sunday at 2 pm at Backdoor Theater 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, Oregon. Show runs 95 minutes with no intermission. Buy tickets here.

What Every Girl Should Know is one night only, this Thursday September 13th at 8 pm, also at Backdoor Theater. The reading is free to How I Learned to Drive ticket holders, otherwise it is $5. See you there! 

On a final note, I am independently producing both How I Learned to Drive and What Every Girl Should Know. You can contribute to How I Learned to Drive here, to all of my ongoing work here, and to the work of What Every Girl Should Know author, Monica Byrne, here. Thanks! 

Love Stories: Lolita and How I Learned to Drive

Li'l Bit and Peck
Photo Credit: Ari Grey

How I Learned to Drive is a love story, a tale of sexual molestation, a family portrait, and a coming of age tale. Paula Vogel has packed a lot of material into this relentless little play. My music director observed after our first run that the play is constantly in transition. How I Learned to Drive never stays in one place or even one year for very long. Instead the play invites the audience to take a road trip with narrator and protagonist Li’l Bit as she revisits memories of an affair with her uncle, Peck, and processes not just how he and the rest of the family shaped her but the choices she made and a time when she had no choice.

Lolita, the novel that How I Learned to Drive pays homage to, spends a lot of time on the road. Humbert uses road trips as a means of distracting and disorienting Lolita. Unlike Peck, Humbert does not teach the object of his affection how to drive. Lolita, however, does get behind the wheel. Humbert observes:

“I could make out Lo ludicrously at the wheel, and the engine was certainly running – though I remembered I had cut it but had not applied the emergency brake; and during the brief space of throb-time that it took me to reach the croaking machine which came to a standstill at last, it dawned upon me that during the last two years little Lo had had ample time to pick up the rudiments of driving” (228-29).

Humbert’s deepest fear that Lolita will leave him is about to come true. He fights tooth and nail to stop her. Peck shares Humbert’s fear. Peck, however, teaches Li’l Bit to drive. He encourages her to go to college. Paula Vogel points out “the thing that I find noble about” Peck is “he taught his niece how to reject him. I think he’s given her the tools and ego development to destroy him.” (1997 Interview)  

It is not that Peck is a good pedophile and Humbert a bad one. Comparing Peck and Humbert is more akin to comparing the murderers, Othello and Iago. Othello and Peck succumb to demons that they cannot disentangle from their angels while Humbert and Iago worship their demons.

Both Lolita and How I Learned to Drive contain a devastating proposal scene near their conclusion. Humbert wants Lolita to leave her husband and come away with him forever. Peck wants to leave his wife and marry Li’l Bit. Lolita rejects Humbert. She stumbles to explain that she would sooner go back to an abusive ex-boyfriend. Humbert imagines her meaning:

“She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life”).

Nabokov does not give the reader much hope for Lolita. She is a pregnant teenager dependent on her husband for fulfillment. Of course, we are seeing her through Humbert’s less than objective eyes. This is the end of the road for her. Lolita may have star billing as the novel’s titular character but the story belongs to Humbert.

Li'l Bit
Photo Credit: Ari Grey

How I Learned to Drive is more of a duet. Li’l Bit’s rejection of Peck is not the end of her story but rather a beginning. The play is a portrait of a woman processing her past and moving beyond it. To do that though, she must not only share the terrible thing Peck did to her, she has to share how he loved her and she loved him. At the end of the day it is that love story that makes How I Learned to Drive so beautiful and unnerving. Sadly most stories of abuse, assault, molestation, and rape do not involve strangers but people who we once loved, people who were supposed to love us. How I Learned to Drive is a fictional reflection of that reality.

Li’l Bit is not broken. As dark and tragic a play as How I Learned to Drive is, it is also full of hope. And humor. If you are in Portland, I hope you will come see it.

How I Learned to Drive opens Friday and shows for six performances: Fridays & Saturdays September 7^th, 8^th, 14^th & 15^th at 8 pm and Sundays September 9^th & 16^th at 2pm at the Backdoor Theater 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Tickets available online. Cast is David M. Brown, Elizabeth Garrett, and Melanie Moseley as The Greek Chorus, Natalie Stringer as Li’l Bit, and Tommy Harrington as Peck.

P.S. I am producing How I Learned to Drive in collaboration with Patrick J. Cox and Tobias Ryan. We are trying to raise about a third of the total production costs through donor contributions. Please visit our campaign page and consider donating. 

Going There: Rehearsals Begin

Rehearsals for How I Learned to Drive begin tonight and my car is in the shop. It should be ready in just enough time for me to drive straight from the garage to rehearsal. How I Learned to Drive takes an accepted rite of passage – learning to drive – and uses that experience to anchor a coming of age story that centers on an incestuous relationship between Li’l Bit and her uncle, Peck. The play frames that relationship along a continuum from a dalliance between a young woman and an older married man to a pedophile’s assault of a young girl. Sound intense? It is. It is also extremely thoughtful and very funny.

In a quixotic embrace of How I Learned to Drive’s dominant motif, I have two drives to tell you about. First, a little more background: Paula Vogel wrote How I Learned to Drive as a response to Nabokov’s Lolita. If you have never read Lolita, the book absolutely lives up to its’ reputation. I plan to devote a whole post to the way the book affected my reading of the play in the next few weeks. For now though, I want to share a bit of trivia I have come to treasure. Nabokov wrote part of Lolita in Ashland, Oregon. You can bet I thought about that on my road trip down to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this weekend.

There is something liberating and romantic about road trips. Even when they go wrong, which leads me back to my car in the shop. To keep the story short, my car broke down in Ashland. It broke down next to my motel, a place with all the charm of a jail-house in a country-western song. Luckily, that motel was immediately adjacent to a garage. Two of the nicest mechanics in the history of automotive-maintenance diagnosed it as in need of repairs, that could keep me in the Valley for days. Or they could do a temporary fix and I would make it home safe and sound, so long as I drove slow, did not stop, and kept the air conditioning turned off. I pride myself on being a self-reliant woman, a feminist, however faced with a broken down car it was comforting to have a mechanic call me ‘sweet-heart’ as he taught me how to feather the throttle. (Yes, I realize how that sounds, but that is the actual term for a technique that involves working the brake and accelerator pedal to get a car to not stall out as you shift gears. I did not master this technique, by the way, they ended up having to make another adjustment to help me home.) The experience was a good reminder of why driving is such a potent metaphor: cars offer an illusion of independence and yet the roads we drive on and the help we have (some more than others) in maintaining our cars is testament to our interdependence.

Almost a year ago, I took another road-trip. I did not have a car, but I really needed to get out of Staunton. Two of the finest folks I know agreed to deliver me to another friend’s place in West Virginia. The three of us share a love of bluegrass and country music: Hank Williams, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, you get the idea. Somehow on the drive we ended up listening to Conway Twitty’s You’ve Never Been This Far Before. The reassuring rhythm of that song offers a counterpoint to the lyrics’ more than slightly sinister story a sexual encounter. The song stuck with me and resurfaced when I began work on How I Learned to Drive.

You’ve Never Been This Far Before is from a male perspective and the description of his conquest revolves around the inexperience and clear nervousness the woman or girl feels about the “chance” that they are “taking.” The situation is vague, leaving it to the listener to fill in the details to determine what to make of the singer saying he “doesn’t know” and “doesn’t care” what made her tell some third party that she doesn’t “love him anymore.” What is clear to the man is that she “hasn’t been this far before.” Songs like this one haunt seemingly wholesome music catalogues. The easy-listening sixties sound of Gary Puckett& The Union Gap contains two such titles: Young Girl and This Girl is a Woman Now. (Vogel lists these and others in her script.) These songs work a lot like How I Learned to Drive, using the comfortable and familiar as a counterpoint to the common but dangerous ground they cover.

Going there, exploring uncomfortable parts of human experience, and offering a fictional touchstone that may offer some solace as we stare down a subject in real life, or provoke us to think about a subject before that day comes is one of the main ways that I believe art serves us. And tonight I have my first meeting with the artists who have agreed to go on this journey with me. I am so grateful to them and so excited to dig in. 

Helen: In the Company of Women

Cressida is a very isolated young woman. Her lack of female companions distinguishes her from other Shakespearean ingénues: Juliet has both a mother and a Nurse, Cleopatra has Charmian and Isis, Rosalind has Celia, and so forth. Cressida is in the company of Ophelia and Miranda. Of course, Ophelia and Miranda have access to their fathers, whereas Cressida’s dad has turned traitor and fled the country. Cressida is so alone.

Helen is not. She is surrounded by women. Helen has a mother, a sister, and a daughter. Part of the joy of writing Helen is digging into the stories of the women who surround Helen and figuring out how their narratives intersect with hers – and what use they make of each other’s narratives.

In in the interest of keeping this post from becoming a novella, I am going to just profile Helen’s mother, and leave her sister and daughter for later posts. Helen’s mother is the legendary Leda, whom Jove either seduced or raped. It would be nice if the sources could agree on this point, but they do not. I guess I should not be surprised that the sources are ambiguous. They are the works of ancient poets and playwrights and it is not as though either lawyers or artists have resolved the problem of proving or representing rape in the intervening centuries. Sigh. Deep, deep sigh.

Did I mention that Jove was a swan at the time? That’s right. A Swan. Leda hatched Helen and her siblings. Or at least, that’s what both Cesare Sesto (left) and Leda Melzi (right) depict in Leda and the Swan after a lost original by none other than Leonardo da Vinci.

Jove apparently had a penchant for this sort of thing. He transformed Io, a nymph and his mistress, into a cow to hide her from his wife. Ellen McLaughlin includes poor, sweet Io in her terrific adaptation of Euripides’ Helen. Before I started writing my own Helen, I was dying to do McLaughlin’s. One day.

If the tale of Leda and the Swan strikes you as a bit incredible, you are not alone. Margaret Atwood exploits the incredulity of the whole swan business in the fabulous poem Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing. My favorite take on the business of Leda and the Swan, though, is William Butler Yeats’ poem of that title.

Yeats’ vivid description accomplishes that alchemy of great art: turning the fantastic into fact. Jove is a swan, and he is raping Leda, and it is terrible. The question Yeats ends with is whether Leda might have had at that moment a prophetic vision of the fall of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon. Through this suggestion, Yeats marks the beginning of the end at the moment of Helen’s conception. It is a horrifying thought; one that would surely torture Leda and her family, if any of them believed it.

Leda will appear in Helen and like Yeats, I am accepting both that Jove turned into a swan and asserting that he raped Leda. She is an awesome character: a rape survivor, a mother, a wife, and a stateswoman. The way these identities affect each other is complicated, and I think the play is going to be infinitely enriched by Leda’s presence. Now back to, you know, writing the play. 


There is an amazing gallery of Leda and The Swan art over on the Visions of Whimsy blog. 

Dear Helen

These days find me in Portland, writing a new play. The play is Helen, a companion piece for Cressida, a prequel that starts after Helen, having been abducted by Theseus, returns to Sparta and ends with the dawning of the Trojan war. 

The impetus behind Helen was a nagging sense of guilt, supplied by my inner feminist, during rehearsals for Cressida. When workshopping the play, the cast and I discovered the utility of bashing Helen of Troy. We needed some spark for the affair between Cressida and Diomedes. She loves Troilus deeply and he has no reason to trust her. Both, however, have a rebellious side. They question the war and they hate, hate, HATE Helen. 

In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Diomedes dares to say the following to Paris about Helen:

For every false drop in her bawdy veins

A Grecian life hath sunk; for every scruple

Of her contaminated weight

A Trojan hath been slain. Since she could speak

She hath not given so many good words breath

As, for her, Greeks and Trojans suffered death. (4.1.71-6)

In Cressida, I had Diomedes speak these words to Cressida in response to her raging at the futility of the only two recourses available to Trojan women, prayers and tears. In this new context, Diomedes' lines are meant as proof that Grecians and Trojans, men and women, alike are in the same figurative terrible boat, (they are actually on a literal boat, at the time) and Helen is to blame. The irony that on Cressida - a project whose mission was moving a woman from the margins to the center - so thoroughly disparaged another woman was not lost on me. I joked that the only proper penance was to write a play for Helen.

I am not sure when Helen went from an intriguing joke or fanciful daydream to an artistic mission. Once again, I am starting with Shakespeare and tracing the literary heritage forward and backwards from there. Helen has precious few lines in Troilus and Cressida: however, one of them goes to the heart of the ambiguity of Helen's story. She tells Pandarus, "Let thy song be love: this love will undo us all" (3.1.100). What love is Helen referring to? Does she predict (or, after seven years of warfare, concede) that Paris' love for her spells the downfall of Troy? Or is it her love for him? Or is she thinking of Menelaus' love for her? How does she feel about her estranged husband? Does it matter? Love is a plague on both their houses.

Such a conclusion may feel mature even as it cheats the reader of Helen's story. In Troilus and Cressida  that is alright. That play is not Helen's story. The more I worked on Cressida, the more I came to respect the way Shakespeare interrogates perpetual warfare and the sexual double standard. Someday I'll direct his play. For now though, I want another play. I want Helen's story: a tale of love, adultery, religious visions, rape, and growing up the prettiest girl of all. Helen is a complicated character. Helen will be an apology to her, not for her. 

Head of Helen by Sculptor Antonio Canova

Leaving Staunton

Sometimes you discover a piece of poetry at the perfect moment when your world aligns with the concerns of the poem in such a way that you experience that delicious delusion that the author wrote this particular poem just for you. I had that serendipitous pleasure the other night when reading Allen Ginsberg’s My Sad Self.

Ginsberg opens the poem with a recollection of observing New York City from the roof top of the RCA building through eyes ostensibly made red from weeping. The sorrow comes from the loss of treasured eras in one’s life – and – the inevitability of those losses. The poem is remarkable. Ginsberg’s typography reinforces a sense of an inner eye meandering down city streets and memories of love affairs and friendship. I find myself, of late, indulging the same sort of exquisite nostalgia that permeates My Sad Self. I am about to graduate with my Masters of Fine Arts and leave the town of Staunton, Virginia.

Staunton is a beautiful little town filled with old Victorian homes in various states of repair. The skyline is littered with steeples. Church bells pronounce the hour. Trains whistle through the night. Yes, there is a troubadour. A chalk graffiti artist has tagged the underpass in my favorite park with the word “LOVE.”

I have experienced a lot of love in Staunton. I directed five plays here. I assisted in some capacity on a half dozen others. I found a handful of kindred spirits: the kinds of collaborators who will fight you because they are going to stand by you over the long haul. It is here that my ear has begun to tune itself to the music of Shakespeare’s meter; that I wrote my first soliloquy. 

And now it is time to go. Another poem comes to mind: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 110. –“Alas, tis true, I have gone here and there / And made myself a motley to the view.” – The arts make for a nomadic existence. Sometimes literally. More than that though, the ephemeral nature of the work means a constant cycle of love and loss. Of course, that is part of the pleasure, the opportunity for reinvention. You have to be willing to start over. But sometimes that requires a mourning period, a time to retrace your steps, to reread the poem that Ginsberg may have written just for you. 

Photo from one of my sentimental walks

P.S. I was going to link to My Sad Self, however, none of the various poetry places on the web do the text justice in terms of the poem's layout. Find it in print.

Also, Staunton has gotten some press lately for its charm. Travel and Leisure listed it as having one of the "Greatest Main Streets in America" and the Smithsonian listed it as one of "The 20 Best Small Towns in America." Just sayin'.