I am a child of the 1980’s. My first memories of national and international events are surrounded by Reagan’s sweep into power carrying the mantle of American Exceptionalism. From the dominance of the US in the LA Olympics to Nike’s “just do it” and Apple’s personal computers to the fall of the Berlin Wall marking the U.S. victory in the Cold War, just about everything in the outer shell of my childhood taught me that America is number one, no doubt about it, not even a second place country anywhere in our sight.

And what vaulted us to this lofty place? As far as Reagan’s American Exceptionalism is concerned, it’s the magic formula of democracy, capitalism, and the power of the individual to use both of these to achieve his own greatest potential. Today, it’s fascinating to me that culture, religion, and community are only a secondary part of this formula, if they’re a part of it at all. American Exceptionalism is about the singular, and the group plays absolutely no role in this.

Fast-forward to 1992, when I left this country for the first significant period of time, spending a few weeks living with a French family outside of Bordeaux in a cultural exchange program. Here, as a sixteen-year-old, my ingrained sense of American Exceptionalism was confronted head-on by a much more refined and centuries’ old French Exceptionalism. The family with which I stayed had a modest respect for democracy and capitalism, but they out-and-out mocked my lack of cultural identity as an American – from my description of a typical American dinner with my nuclear family to the trumped-up but ultimately shallow purpose of religion in our lives and (worst of all) my description of an American mall and its food courts – the French whom I met were incredulous at the absolute lack of any redeemable cultural quality to American life. And quite frankly, after eating several meals with these people, shopping at the markets before making the family’s dinner, and visiting the historic chateaux from which they bought their wine, my sixteen-year-old self couldn’t really challenge their claim to cultural superiority.

Now fast-forward to 2011, when many media outlets are describing the “French-style labor protests” surrounding the budget battles in Madison and other of our nation’s state capitols. This is certainly not the first time in this nation’s history that The People have risen up to protest a perceived wrong against the masses. But this time the protesters seem older, more solidly educated and middle class. These protesters are closer than ever to losing the manifestation of the long-held ideal of middle-class comfort in the form of lifetime pensions and healthcare. These protesters, in both their focus and the sense of loss that they fear greets them just over the horizon, are more a unified community moving as a single mass than a group of individuals with a common cause.

A new nation’s identity and growth is often metaphorically tied to the growth of the human being; so it is true with the United States. Our infancy at the end of the 18th century was full of unabashed hope; our childhood full of foibles, and our adolescence in the middle and late 19th century fraught with tears and nearly tore us apart from the inside. Our teenage years of the twentieth century showed the world our strength, our emerging personality, and our immense potential. But as we as a nation become adults, we realize that despite the importance of the individual in our history thus far, we’re much closer to “We the People” than we’ve been in a long time. These Gallic protests might just be the indication of our growing up.

The Beertown that we’ve created in the last few weeks is full of founding individuals, whose singular visions combined to create a town with a history that parallels the growth of the Nation. The town as we’ve imagined it is now undergoing exactly such a sea change from this adolescent individualism to adult inclusivity. Certainly the changes that Beertown faces as it ponders its future will bring its singular past into account. But its citizens also must face the fact that such individualism is no longer viable for the town to grow. It must come together as a community to achieve its greatest potential.

-Colin

The Story of America is a story of epic journeys. From the Pilgrims to the Oregon Trail to Mexican border crossings, we thrive on and mythologize these heroic travels to find a better life on this Nation’s soil.

In Season Three of Mad Men, Peggy Olsen sends her mother into conniptions when she announces her decision to move from Brooklyn to Manhattan. There is comic value in this of course, but it makes the point that small stories of emigration are just as important to our identity as Americans. In the personal stories we’ve shared throughout the Beertown rehearsal process, we’ve seen this. For all of us, our identities are clearly shaped by the fact that we’ve left a place, and whatever the distance of the emigration – just like Peggy Olson and the Pilgrims – that place we left still shapes us every day. The need to leave, whether across a river or across an ocean, is bound tightly with our sense of self, and indeed with our sense of relevance. We leave our homes to find our true selves, to discover our true callings. And in the process we naturally find that our homes are just as much a part of the fabric of our identity as anything. I, for instance, will always be a Northern Midwestern Suburban Cubs Fan despite the fact that I have begun to develop certain Mid-Atlantic speech patterns such as the flat glottal “o” that changes the word “snow” to “snew”. From a dramatic point of view, small changes like this are potentially much more interesting – more room for comedy, more nuance in the emotion, and room to see ourselves as straddling the line between grotesques and true beings, to see ourselves balancing our identities as selves rooted to both one place and to another. And certainly, it tells a more personal story.

As I write, the story of Beertown is beginning to take a similar shape. While a community can’t simply uproot its buildings and its people to move somewhere else (or can it?), it can certainly find ways to reinvent itself. It might choose to rewrite its history by accentuating certain stories in favor of others. It might choose to invite a Wal-Mart into its midst, or to block industrial development in favor of a revitalized “historic downtown”. The town may choose to reincorporate itself as a city or to dissolve itself entirely. Regardless, the Beertown that we’re creating is on the brink of audacious reinvention, a reinvention that will be rooted just as much in Beertown’s past as in its future.  

-CKB

Why We Map

Our good friend wikipedia tells us that a map “is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes.”

Funny how this also sounds like a definition of theatre. 

Maybe it is not surprising that the Beertown conspirators have developed (to varying degrees) what I’d call a “healthy obsession” with mapping. In early October, on the second day of the group’s assembly, Mitch and Colin began drawing a map of the United States—free hand and from memory. This was the first time maps appeared on the Beertown scene. That weekend, my mother told me about an exhibit by the Hand Drawn Map Association (http://www.handmaps.org/), and of course – they have a website. I spent hours looking through the website and sending various friends and associates links through email and Facebook to maps from the website. (“No wait - look at this one!”) Only a few days later, Wyckham bought Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas by Dennis Wood (http://www.sigliopress.com/books/atlas.htm), which many of us knew about from our long-time NPR friend This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/110/mapping). And then the Beertown conspirators began mapping and mapping and mapping.

Mapping has taken a variety of forms now: in grappling with source material, we drew maps of the different narrative threads of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (see photos above); in exploring shared personal “landmarks,” we strung overlapping maps of twine that crisscrossed the rehearsal room. There is a book of maps being circulated throughout the group in which we map our physical positions in rehearsal, evolution of ideas, or events in our daily lives. The so-called obsession seems to link with the big idea we’ve begun wrestling as of late: where is the overlap between personal myth and myth of place? Maps naturally fit into the answer because they are a human tool and start with a delineation of space. And they are symbols that result in story. Even if a narrative is not intended by a map or its maker, a narrative is created in the end by the map’s user. (A basic example: consider the story a world map tells about power.) 

Maps are symbols that humans embrace and adopt into actuality – the real thing. So as we move forward in building a larger story of place (“Beertown: the town that’s barely there”) we map layers of abstraction on our geographic and generative reality.

-Rachel

Beertown Song Devising (Rachel Grossman (vocals), Jon Reynolds (ukulele, vocals), Lorraine Ressegger (vocals), J. Argyl Plath (piano), Max Freedman (vocals, tambourine), Colin K. Bills (vocals))

Beertown Song Devising (Colin K. Bills on vocals, Max Freedman on piano)