So, last weekend I took a three-day workshop in Buffoon, at the Center for Movement Theatre, taught by the wonderful Dody DiSanto. And now I’m seeing things. Specifically, I see the grotesque. Everywhere.

Dody teaches Buffoon as it was developed by Jacques Lecoq, the late great teacher of movement and physical theater in Paris. Lecoq’s buffoons literally embody the grotesque. Huge balls? Check. Six foot arms? Check. Big puffy body on tiny feet? Check. All limbs and no head? You get the idea.

Buffoons are outcasts. We don’t like to look at their grotesque-ness, but they love to watch us. They watch society from the outside, and from that perspective they see truths that the rest of us can’t. But once you investigate the world of buffoons, walk a mile in their size-17 (or maybe size 2) shoes, you start to see them everywhere.

Yesterday, at a stoplight, I watched a magnificent one shuffle across the street right in front of me. She had a tiny head, an unruly shock of Einstein hair, and an impossibly stocky body, thanks to a thick, royal blue down coat a few sizes too large for her little frame. The coat descended almost to the pavement, stopping just short enough to reveal a pair of stick thin ankles attached to small sneakered feet. If I had to guess, she was about 85. She waddled over the crosswalk with the gait of a wind-up toy robot.

In Winesburg, Ohio, long before Lecoq began his work, Sherwood Anderson foreshadows the birth of the buffoon in chapter one, “The Book of the Grotesque.” In it, an old writer dreams a procession of figures worthy of a buffoon parade:

They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.

The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. 

Anderson goes on to explain the old writer’s theory regarding the origin of these grotesques:

…in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old mad had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds of truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

It’s not the truths that distort; it’s the individual folly that someone can claim a universal truth for him/herself. The truth of Fatherhood, say, will encompass all that a father could possibly be. We can aspire to the truth of Fatherhood, but we can never live up to all it entails. 

If a man tries to cram the universal truth of Fatherhood into his limited self, he will distort. He may say, “I am a Father, and everything I do is for the sake of Fatherhood.”  But personal beliefs, prejudices and a limited world view twist him into a grotesque of Fatherhood. His real truth, perhaps, is that he has turned into a tyrant, or an overprotective doter, or a workaholic provider. Whatever he does, he is certainly not living the ideal he imagines Fatherhood to be.

For the rest of the book, Anderson’s characters appear normal on the outside; the grotesque distortion is to their souls. But imagine if you could see the distortion that comes from cramming a universal truth into an individual body. If we could, it might look something like Leqoc’s buffoon. 

Buffoons are the inverse of Anderson’s characters: grotesque on the outside, and rejected from society because of their appearance and behavior; but all truth on the inside. They do not aspire to ideals. Their needs and interests are base, primitive. Buffoons are like innocent children – brutally honest in their needs and desires, heedless of social constraint. They only repeat what they hear, and act out what they see. 

In recent Beertown meetings, we’ve been talking about the idea of the grotesque, and how it might serve us. How do we bring life to the grotesque of these small-town American archetypes? How can we gain the buffoon’s perspective? How can we see the grotesque in ourselves, and perhaps even change it?

One possibility we‘ve talked about is that Beertown is a show-within-a-show: a fourth-wall look at our Beertonian’s inner grotesques, and a chance for the show to step through the fourth wall, where characters turn inside out and become more like their buffoon selves.

I can’t help but think there’s something to this dichotomy between the grotesque and the buffoon, something worth exploring further. Perhaps as we keep turning these buffoons and grotesques inside out, we’ll find some truth of our own.

-Reynolds

I have a virtual stickie note on my laptop of performance ideas. It has been there for years. It’s not long — maybe 5 or 6 things. A few things get added or subtracted each year. Some things are actually realized and created, which is the best part of having a theatre company. A few things have stuck for a long time.  The longest one has been there since 1995. I’m going to do that one—I think it’s coming soon even. It’s an odd little albatross I carry. It will probably be my masterpiece if I ever make it.

But Winesburg, Ohio arrived on the list relatively recently. It is a book I had forgotten about. Every once in a while I browse the Project Gutenberg site to see what books I can download for free. Winesburg showed up on the available list one day and I was immediately drawn to it.  I first read it in my mid-twenties and loved it and then didn’t think about it again. That happened a lot in graduate school. I was reading so many things at that time and non-theatre books were very low priority.  In my twenties I think I reveled in Sherwood Anderson’s scathing exposure of the secrets of small town life. Growing up in the quintessential New England small town felt suffocating and restrictive and here was this anti-Our Town that wasn’t this drab grey picture of my hometown. I was drawn to the anti-anything at that time though. The structure of the book fascinates me the most. All of these disconnected stories and characters reveal common threads and land on the character of George Willard. Looking out at his town, he sees, “as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness.”

So I read Winesburg, Ohio again about a year ago. Re-reading books in a later phase of life always brings that fascinating new perspective. Now, of course, I look back fondly on quaint community life and long for that same feeling of belonging that is so hard to find in this city. Now, the book reminds me of my history (now that I have one) and how I create my history or the myth of myself. So in this initial work for ”Beertown,” we have landed on this question: where and what is the overlap between the myth of self and the myth of place? Each myth is inextricably tied to the other.

This struggle of a small town girl living in a big city has been with me most of my life. In this summer’s dog & pony dc show, ”Separated at Birth,” we investigated what it means to find a connection in this city. We are always hoping to find something current, alive and tangible. “Beertown” is more about the past. It’s still about connections, but about how we connect with the ghosts of where we are from, and how that creates who we are now.

-Wyckham

Hi loyal readers, Jon Reynolds here. About 10 days ago the Beertown, USA ensemble got together for our first meeting. The energy and excitement in the room was electric! Or maybe that was just the three cups of coffee I had. In any case, there we were, bagels in hand, ready to get to work.

Our show is partly inspired by Winesburg, OH, Sherwood Anderson’s seminal novel of small town America (that I’d never heard of until now). At our first meeting, after getting some business and scheduling stuff out of the way, we talked at length about what “small town America” means. We made lists of themes we hope to incorporate. We discussed what imagery defines our ideas of small towns. We mulled over the kinds of experiences that can be unique to living far away from a big city, and we identified some of the archetypes that might populate this place we’re creating.

I actually found that discussion we had the first day kind of hard for me. I grew up right next to the nation’s capital and I’ve always thought of myself as being fairly urban. What do I know about small town America? But as I thought about it more, I realized how my little neighborhood in Alexandria was a pretty unusual place when I was growing up in the early 80’s. Back then Del Ray was far from the sheik and trendy little suburb that it is now. Sometimes it sure felt like a small southern town. I dimly remember that the people who lived across the street would sit out on their porch and drink till the wee hours, with shotguns by their side. Once, when they were drunk and having a particularly loud argument, my Dad called the police and told us to stay low until they arrived. Our next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, was bitten by a black widow (or maybe it was a brown recluse) while he was rummaging through the woodpile once. He told us that the doctor said he would’ve died had he not drunk two quarts of moonshine earlier in the day.

But even then, the character of the place was changing fast. My parents were among the first of a new wave of families moving in. There were lots of academics like my parents, young civil servants, and NGO workers. Del Ray was the place where they could afford to live and raise a family. Pretty soon many of the folks who’d lived there for decades had moved away. New houses were built. New shops and restaurants opened. Property values went up, and the whole area started to feel a little more urbane.

I wonder now how it felt for my former neighbors to see the place they’d lived in for so long transformed so completely. It was a “nicer” neighborhood to be sure, but very different (and I’m sure more expensive) than the one they had known.

Changing. I think that’s the theme that I’m most interested in exploring with this show.

Every time I start work on a new show I always have a moment when I look around the room and I try and imagine where we’ll end up in two or three months when the show reaches the end of it’s run. I wonder how much my impressions of the people involved will be different. Most of all, how will I be different?

With Beertown we’re starting a process that will take fifteen months to complete! I can’t imagine where this road is going to lead, what I’m going to learn, or how it will change me, but I know it’s going to be one hell of a road trip.