TA, Old Paper Houses

5

TA, Old Paper Houses

OLD PAPER HOUSES

Tara Ahmadinejad

Submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements

for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

in the Theatre Arts Program of the School of the Arts

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

05/05/2014

Belief is Leaning In, Doubt is Leaning Back

Old Paper Houses addresses the relationship between faith and doubt, in life and art. This play asks whether it is possible to sustain faith and community, whether one can sustain faith in a utopian pursuit, and what constitutes the failure of such a pursuit. The community of artists who created this play did so in response to shared personal struggles and a shared perspective about the immediate world around us. This community began as a group of five artists, all members of our theater company Piehole, including our “core group” (dramaturg/producer, Elliot B. Quick, performer/creators Jeff Wood, Allison LaPlatney, Alexandra Panzer, and me, the director), and our associate member Kathryn Wallem.

On a personal level, we all shared a struggle with faith in ideas and art, specifically the ability to sustain conviction while also making room for doubt, and making room for doubt without losing the will to keep pursuing a goal. Related to this struggle is how one can combat cynicism while still allowing for doubt and criticism. On the one hand, we face this struggle as young artists in New York City, where the dramatic rises in the cost of living make the life of an artist who is not independently wealthy unsustainable, and the artistic landscape suffers from the barriers to entry. On the other hand, some of us identify strongly with a sense of being part of a generation who has been able to combat cynicism and experience hope, seeing potential for change through various avenues, be it the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the start of the Arab Spring in 2010, or the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. After each of these events, which galvanized the spirits of young people in particular, the air filled with a sense of failure or chaos, a sense that the revolutions abroad have only led to power vacuums, intensifying conflicts in the region; that our domestic movement fizzled out due to a lack of organization and the doomed state of our democratic ideals in the reality of capitalism; and that our own hero of a president is susceptible to even culpable in the complex political machinery that limits change and progress. Hope, change and stagnation occur in phases and cycles, but we felt that we hit our late 20s at a point in the cycle of change and upheaval when hope easily sours into cynicism.

The temptation to give up on imagining a better world is clear. One can start to feel foolish, one can be reminded of a time when she thought her activism could improve the world, only to find that the media has declared the end of the movement, framing it as a failure. The truth is, Occupy may not have been so simply a failure. It drew attention to issues with capitalism and particularly with the financial sector, forcing politicians to at least discuss them, now that they are in the consciousness. However, at the same time, “Occupy” became co-opted, like everything else, by the market, much like the hippie inspired Coca Cola ads from the early 1970s. We started to see the word “Occupy” in front of a wide range of ideas, goods, and services, as businesses started to cash in on the momentum of the movement. These are nuanced, subtle impacts that a group of otherwise powerless individuals created, but there was no clear, specific result that came from the movement that could be clearly identified as a major achievement. Since there is not room for nuance in the media, the movement gets boiled down to being a failure. If we were able to dig into the complexities of movements such of these more regularly, we would be better armed against cynicism, because we could continue to believe that our collective actions have consequences. Piehole’s own utopian pursuit is to create a space for community and complexity, and at the same time to contend with, rather than ignore, dominant modes of communication and media. As individuals, we have conjured a rare breed of intentional community: one in which we are allowed to fully believe and fully doubt all at the same time. For us, this complexity embodies the beauty of a collective artistic pursuit, which we aim to extend to our audience.

Artistically speaking, for better or for worse, about a year ago I started to parse out two tendencies in the work that we have done as a company, to point to an inner artistic struggle I was experiencing. One direction of our work comes from our background in puppetry. This is a less language-based aspect of our work, and usually relates to the pursuit of transcendence in theater, one that is achieved through the transformation of physical presence into something otherworldly. I consider this to be the kind of Artaudian side of our work where we create a world, often dreamlike or surreal, to draw in an audience. The other aspect is much more language-based and often contains a critique or dialectic, and I think of this as the Brechtian aspect of our work. It often involves a sort of rupture within a performance, and asks the audience to keep track and then lose track of several frames, invariably pointing to the concrete reality of the theatrical encounter.

When I further consider these “two sides” I realize that the two are inextricably linked. This becomes particularly evident when I consider object performance or puppetry. While a performing object can draw an audience member into a different realm of reality, in the eyes of the viewer that object cannot help but vibrate back and forth between its newfound subjectivity (as a “performer”) and its everyday ‘objectness.’ This internal rupture, which occurs in the perception of the audience member, is both Brechtian and Artaudian in a sense, and contains both sides of these “aspects” that I have discussed. The goal with the work we make as a company is to allow for both aspects. One encourages transcendence, and might be associated with faith, as it can galvanize a community in this spirit. The other encourages criticism, and might be associated with doubt and complexity, because it presents contradictions. Creating a piece about faith and doubt allowed for a closer examination of these formal concerns. Although we discussed these underpinnings in our early meetings when we searched for source material, they became more background considerations as we continued to develop the piece.

JANUARY – APRIL 2013

Initial Search for Material

These collective thematic and artistic concerns surfaced as we began to search for content for our next piece. In January 2013 the group mentioned above met several times, bringing different texts and materials to the table, and giving each other reading assignments each week. As we gathered sources we discovered common themes, which would guide the remainder of our research. We read short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, many of them simple allegories for the American dream, laced with Spiritualism and phantasmagoria. We read Rip Van Winkle, as well as a children’s book called Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, a fairy tale about a girl who runs away from home and inevitably finds vestiges of the adult world even in her ‘off-the-grid’ life in the woods. We discussed The Artist’s Way, a kind of self-help book for artists, in which art becomes a spiritual path toward fulfillment. One day, Allison brought in The Golden Book of Words by Bernadette Mayer, and shared “Essay” with us. “Essay” draws together the themes of utopia and art-making. It allows “poetry” and “farming” to be both real pursuits and metaphors. Each line in the poem moves steadily toward greater complexity and nuance. The voice in the poem seems to steady itself as the ideas and sentence structure become increasingly complex. This poem also posits poetry as a utopian pursuit and ultimately acknowledged the mundane reality of such a pursuit – the day to day work involved in maintaining a space which upholds one’s ideals, as boring as any office job! We were all instinctively drawn to this text, and it became clear that while we were excited about the ideas in certain other texts, this was the first text whose language we felt sure we wanted to include in our piece.

Approaching Mayer and Hawthorne in Spring 2013

Mayer mentions Hawthorne in The Golden Book of Words, and she references Brook Farm in “Essay.” We read interviews with Mayer in which she discussed her appreciation of Hawthorne. She describes how Hawthorne, at a time when all other novelists were copying British writing, rigorously translated human thought into writing, which made him, Mayer argues, the first distinctively American voice in fiction. We soon discovered that Hawthorne had spent time at the Transcendentalist commune Brook Farm. Ten years later, while living in Lenox, MA—where Bernadette Mayer wrote The Golden Book of Words—he wrote The Blithedale Romance, a satirical novel based on his experiences there. The combination of real and imagined connections between Mayer and Hawthorne became our obsession last spring as we began to create a piece based on four poems by Mayer, Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and a handful of letters that Hawthorne wrote to his fiancé while at Brook Farm.

We chose the four Mayer poems (see Appendix) based on the structure they provided us, and their focus on place (specifically New England) and point of view. The first poem, “Lookin’ Like Areas of Kansas,” is preceded by a Hawthorne quote “We had our first cucumber today,” which we took to be ironic on Mayer’s part, as a way of memorializing a relatively mundane utterance. The poem begins “New England is awful” and continues with short, humorous, negative generalizations about New England. The second poem, “1977,” begins “New England is interesting” and presents a list of less obviously judgmental observations, almost like newspaper sub-headlines, about the town. It became clear that Mayer had spent more time in Lenox when she wrote this poem, and she mentions herself, her partner Lewis, and her daughter Marie, in her observations. The third poem, “1978,” begins “New England is beautiful” and does not necessarily paint a rosier picture of New England, but rather a much more complex and rich picture, which is more difficult to decipher through language than the previous poems. Content-wise it also describes positive and negative aspects of her life in New England, from a more insider perspective, with much more use of “I” and proper names. This poem is also longer than the previous two. These three poems all mark a movement toward nuance, as the poet (Mayer) spends more time in one place and thus grows closer to it. The fourth poem, “Essay,” captures this movement in a single poem, as described above. We decided to structure our piece around the first three poems, with “Essay” acting as a coda, as well as the underlying anchor for the whole piece.

We approached The Blithedale Romance selectively, discarding many threads and themes in the novel in order to focus on the role of faith and doubt in the community. We limited ourselves to the text preceding the narrator Coverdale’s departure from Blithedale (which is the name Hawthorne uses for the utopian community based on Brook Farm). This portion includes Coverdale’s initial arrival at Blithedale with a “knot of dreamers,” his increased abilities as a laborer, and eventually his preoccupation with two women (Zenobia and Priscilla) and one man (a philanthropist named Hollingsworth). He creates repeated dramas in his head around these figures, before eventually breaking with the community, largely in protest to the philanthropist’s ideology and increasing influence on the community, and on the two women in particular.

In structuring the spring version of the piece, we considered Coverdale’s experience at Blithedale to have an opposite trajectory to Mayer’s experience in Lenox, as conveyed by the poems we chose. Coverdale seemed to become increasingly distant from the community, as the characters in the world became increasingly exaggerated in his head, until his eventual departure. Mayer began her journey from a judgmental, distanced point of view, and eventually discovered nuance, finding herself inside of this world. Our attempt last spring was to intertwine these two parallel worlds, by using formal tactics for making the poems feel decreasingly distant, and gradually revealing the narrator Coverdale in the Blithedale world. The show opens with an abstracted, permanently cold 1970s New England, containing neutral people who move through the world without desire. They then transform into hopeful 19th Century intellectuals who set off to start Blithedale. Eventually, Blithedale ends in failure, as Coverdale emerges and speaks to the audience. This ending note of failure in the Blithedale world transitions into the ending note of nuance and belonging in the 1970s world of ‘New England is Beautiful,’ which Coverdale discovers with a camera offstage in a suddenly hyper-realistic room full of details and people spending time together in a place. But is it actually utopia? Someone in the party feels uncomfortable and steps outside for a cigarette break. She speaks “Essay,” which provides an indirect throughline for all that we have just seen.

Creating ‘New England is Awful’

During the spring 2013 process, we spent about half of our rehearsals working on the first 10-15 minutes of our eventual 90-minute piece. I will describe the approach to this material in greater detail as much of this work ended up in the 2014 version of the piece. We call this section ‘New England is Awful,’ which is the first line of the poem, “Lookin’ like Areas of Kansas.” In making it, we initially focused on the distance between the speaker and the object she describes, New England. We aimed to set up a similar relationship with the audience in creating this world. I had two initial reference points for how these worlds would unfold. One was a scene from the Jacques Tati film Mon Oncle, which involves a fixed shot on an elaborately inefficient apartment building, at the top of which lives the main character (played by Tati). As he climbs up, we see him disappear and reappear in unexpected places, sometimes disappearing behind windows. The other reference point I had was a video game from the 1980s called Ducks Ahoy! that I played on a Commodore 64 when I was little. This video game is very similar to the Tati film, as ducks move through buildings at different rates and in certain patterns, sometimes coming out of one door, sometimes out of another. Both of these images provide an outsider/voyeuristic view of a world, as its inhabitants move through it.