What is A Killing Game?

Eugene Ionesco wrote Jeux de massacre, which has been translated in English to “Killing Game.” But this apparently loses the nuance of the original French title.  ”Jeu de massacre” is carnival game; one tries to known down weighted dolls with balls. It is connected to “Coconut Shy,” another game found a fairs and festivals, in which one tosses (shy) balls in attempt to knock down coconuts.

How to make a show that’s also a game?  Can audience be both game-player and target?

I’m six months pregnant with my first child and couldn’t be more excited. At this point it’s just starting to sink in what an incredible change we are about to encounter. It’s daunting to think that my husband John and I will be indelibly linked forever through this little genetic blending of the two of us. And what an awesome responsibility we have to raise and nurture this child. It might seem silly, but part of it begins with the naming of the baby – the fear of giving it a name that will cause them to be mercilessly teased, result in a horribly annoying nick-name, or that would influence their personality, earning potential, love life, self-esteem.

From the very beginning of this pregnancy John and I have been thinking of names. It started off very silly at first – John tried to think of all of the words/acronyms that the initials could spell – like PIS, SIS, DIS, ASS…you get the idea. We’d spend nights laying on the couch throwing random, crazy names at one another. Over the Christmas holidays the moms (mine and his) and my sister got in on the action. Mom would look names up while she was at work, taking suggestions from friends and co-workers, and would bring home lists for us to look over. His mom became enamored with the name Miles Austin – which isn’t a bad name at all. And although a fan, I’m not sure I want to name the baby after a Dallas Cowboys player.

When we finally started to get serious about finding names, we started to look at family names. We wanted to honor both our child and our families with the names of loved ones. It was important to us that the name carried a shared history of where we come from and what our family represents. We wanted to imbue the baby with the characteristics that we admired in those that came before. We made lists of names that we liked, looked at family trees, and names that were common in both families.

In the last couple of months I have become determined that our child be named after my father-in-law. He is a man that I respect and admire a tremendous amount, from the way that he loves and takes care of his family, to the hardships that he had to face and overcome, to his outlook on the world – I would be so incredibly proud for my child to carry his name.

We think we now have a few picked out - both male and female (we’re not finding out gender til day of!). I’m curious to see if we’ll have a hard time deciding when the time comes, or if we’ll look at the baby and know right away what the name should be. I’m excited to see the baby’s face, to hold it in my arms and kiss its little head, and to call it by its name and know that it is right and perfect.

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

I’m in Arizona, visiting my parents.
 
There are shelves and shelves of old photo albums here.  When I was going through these albums yesterday, I found pictures of people who no longer count much as family, who’ve left marriages to my siblings or other relatives.
I expunged several of these pictures, with permission. We in the clan are much disposed to love those who love us, and spurn in turn those who have spurned one or another of us.

I’m right down the road from Tucson. Just weeks ago, Latino Studies programs were banned from many schools here. It was ruled that groups which

• Promote the overthrow of the United States government, including any suggestion that any U.S. lands once part of Mexico be returned

• Promote resentment toward a race or class of people
• Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group
• Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals

are now considered to be against the law. The ruling seems to apply at this point only to Latino study groups, and is being contested.
 
Is it right for me to prune these photo albums? Am I re-writing history or promoting resentment towards these ex-laws by excluding them from the center of regard? 

In healthy societies, there is a balance between the in-group and out-group mentality. I can honor membership in my family/religion/regionality/ethnic group and not yours, while benefitting from all kinds of intimate and transformative relationships with everyone else’s. I’m not sure that excessive grumbling about the ex-laws is healthy, but nor does it feel appropriate to have to keep those smiling pics in the family album.
 
When next we Beertonians review the contents of our Time Capsule, will we find that such exclusionary/in-group thinking is part of our decision-making process?
 
Should it be allowed to be?

-Jessica Lefkow (Hereford, AZ)

Picture this: you and a friend go to the theatre one night, and you see a really f@%#ing good play.

What makes a really f@%#ing good play, you ask?

For the sake of argument, let’s define a really f@%#ing good play as anything with people in it that makes you care. A lot. A play that absorbs you so completely, that engages your emotions so deeply, that when the curtain comes down, the lights go up, and you and your friend (let’s call him Bob) stumble out to your car, the following exchange could potentially take place:

Bob thinks that Susan became completely irredeemable as soon as she did such-and-such. You disagree. You think that if only George hadn’t been so stubborn as to refuse this-and-that, Susan would never have been put into a situation in which such-and-such was even on the table. Besides which, I’m sorry, how could you POSSIBLY be siding with George after what he—Well, what would YOU have done?—Me? Well, obviously, I would have told Kathy everything! Who cares about Jimmy’s stupid pride? That would’ve prevented—You’re telling me you have no sympathy for—No, none at all. And frankly, Bob, it makes me a little sick to my stomach to hear you—

And Bob decides he’d rather walk. In the rain.

I’m not suggesting that the point of theatre is to make you fight with your friends, only that if you’re emotionally invested enough in what you’ve just seen that you’re willing to risk hypothermia because you feel so strongly about the actions of people who do not exist, that play clearly had an effect.

But. What if.

What if, instead of all this drama between you and Bob taking place in the parking lot across the street, what if it went down in the theatre? What if it was actually part of the play? Imagine: You walk into the theatre knowing nothing about these people or their problems. But after an hour and a half, Susan and George and Kathy and Jimmy are your friends, your closest friends, and your argument with Bob about them not only occurs in public but furthers the plot.

Is this possible? Can you get an audience so invested in a story that they feel they have enough of a stake in its outcome to want to shape it themselves? And at the same time, can you make them feel empowered enough to try to actually do it?

I have no idea. But I’m dying to try.

-Max

PHASE ONE

The process of creating Beertown is happening in several stages.  We are currently beginning phase two and so are taking some time to look back at what we have done so far.

The jumping off point for the project was the question, “What does it mean to be from a small town in America today?”  I won’t take you through all the twists and turns in the process, but that original question sparked many avenues of thought, including the overlap and potential conflict between individual and community identity and the collective formation of memory and myth.

The first phase of the process was all about collecting inspiration, investigating ideas, and finding themes.  One major branch of this was exploring the group’s own childhoods and experiences with small towns.

One of the other major tools that we used was what we called The Dramaturgical Parking Lot, a continually updated list of related source materials that group members thought it might be useful to explore. 

We came back to these materials in three main ways.

Collectively Watching Movies and Shows - Dogville, A Christmas Story, The Laramie Project, other friends’ theatre pieces

Collectively Reading Novels - Winesburg, Ohio and Everything is Illuminated

Individual Presentations - on books, people, scholarly ideas, Radiolab and This American Life stories, anything that seemed related

We used these materials in a number of ways.  Some things led to discussion, others to scene work, games, and writing exercises.  With everything we asked the question, what can we learn from this, both thematically and structurally?

END RESULT

Here is where we seem to be at the end of phase one.

Positives: 

1. We have A LOT of ideas.
2. Those ideas are complex and overlap and intertwine in interesting ways.
3. We have common reference points.
4. We have begun to develop some productive methods of collaboration.

Questions that remain: 

1. Do we have too many ideas?  Will some have to be jettisoned for clarity’s sake and will feelings get hurt because of this?
2. Will we be able to express theatrically what we are able to discuss philosophically?
3. Will we be able to transition into more familiar actor-writer-dramaturg-designer roles after being in reader-viewer-thinker mode for so long? 
4. Will we be able to create something original after looking at so many works of art that deal with similar concepts?

COMING UP NEXT

In the past few weeks, we have moved into Phase Two of the process, where we are focusing more on creating actual material for the show.  To accomplish this, we have broken up into two groups:  one that is working on overall narrative and structure and the other on creating character. Reports from the field on that will be coming in soon.

- Jess Holman 

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

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

Uncles. Given babysitting duty, they’d sit us down and make us learn all the latest Beatles lyrics. I can still sing all those songs. I still believe in my heart of hearts that my father’s hunky little brothers are BFF with the Fab Four. And I still feel in my bones how the true discipleship of rock-and-roll is made up of two parts memorization, one part idolatry.

Queueing up for the phone at my parent’s house, (we were 6; all teenagers at once). I spent hours tying up the line, shooting the shit with my crew.  Sexually charged sessions with boys. Dissecting these conversations afterwards with girlfriends. Games we played on Ma Bell included; ‘Didjuhearthats/he?’. Pithy Retort Table-Tennis. Solve the Problems Of The World, (Love, War, and Clothing editions). Breathe, Heart In Your Mouth. Tell Me Something Meaningless About Your Day, And I Will Glean You From It.

Reading the paper, to find out what was happening in the world. The morning paper: The Washington Post, (a force, and home to three pages of lazily large comics, with elegant prose, to boot, in those days). The afternoon paper: The Washington Star (gritty, spunky, pugnacious - or maybe that was just the way I was feeling my young oats as I read about the latest from Viet Nam and the Watergate scandals). Reading, with the radio for baseball and Top 40, and the 5 o’clock news.

Penpals. I had some. Distant cousins. Impossible crushes. Girls from the rental next door at the beach. My grandfather, who would answer my sorry poetry with beautiful verses of his own, written in an ambidextrous hand informed by the draconian rote teaching methods of Imperial & Weimar Germany (beating will set you free). I learned to compose my thoughts into language that could be expressed without too much erasure, too many crushed leaves of stationery.

My siblings, (little sister, I). From them I  learned to read, to dance, to listen to Hendrix, to curse like a sailor. To bide my tongue where they had not, stupid fools, in the face of parental wrath. To keep my sins away from the house, or hidden in my head. To compete. To be mean but never cruel. To take care of each other. To suffer foolishness. To see the world as a village, all of it just for me.

My church. There I first learned to separate piety from pomposity. To sense pervs. To value acts over bombast. To suffer the misery and indignity of having parents who believed in standing up for justice. To accept as basic human endeavor the acquisition and practice of skills with no earthly reward. To be ashamed of my body. To have the tools to revolt. To use the myths of Christianity as a baseline for interpreting experience. To stand with a crowd and sit with a crowd and speak with a crowd and kneel with a crowd. To genuflect.

My schoolyard. There I learned to play Red Rover. And to never let it show when words stung. That being smart was for losers. That my parents were weirdos. That my uniform was hopelessly out of fashion. That when I went to public school next year, I’d be raped by black people. Next year, not having been raped, I learned that I had a tongue like a lash, that could win friends and influence people until the day when a critical mass of victims had been cut. Then I learned what it was to be cut loose, that Social Limbo waits for the chronically indiscreet. I LEARNED THE POWER OF INFORMATION PASSED AND INFORMATION WITHHELD.

My schoolyard, continued (this was a grapevine of beanstalk proportions!). I learned what it felt like to be hopelessly aflame for David S, then Jem C, then…oh, never mind. I learned to smoke Marlboro Reds, and wear shit-kickers from Sears, and to expect that rush of pleasure when Julio would slip his arm around my waist. I learned to pass the doobie, because I couldn’t stay awake in class if I got wasted first. I learned that theater was a great way to stay late after school instead of doing my homework. I learned that theater was in my bones, and wa-aaay harder than any homework ever tossed my way.

And all this time I was taking, I was giving.

From and to the uncles, the phone, the papers, the penpals, the siblings, the choir, the schoolyards and back halls and back seats and dance floors and street courts. I was learning the ropes for being in the world, so that once in the world, I just kept on learning.

Now, there’s facebook.  

And, aside from the genuflecting, this works pretty well for me these days.

-Lefkow