Finally started writing the play I've got to perform in February. A friend and I are working on it and will perform the whole thing, a Kaufmanesque adaptation of Ibsen's "Enemy of the People."
Yeah, right, like the world needs more Charlie Kaufman. But you've got to trust me on this. Months ago, when Julian first mentioned this to me, we both wanted to map on current events to Ibsen's play, but we kept stumbling on the awkwardness of matching up the analogs. Mass media and terrorism; information and authority; a water contamination scandal from a few years ago; none felt genuine when we began laying the groundwork. The question that kept coming up was, why are we bothering to change these elements in the first place? Why can't we just stage this play?
Look, if you're going to present an audience today with Ibsen it's either got to be as a museum piece in which you attempt to simulate theatre of 100 years ago, or you highlight the themes because you believe they're relevant. Museum pieces can be entertaining, but you've won the audience before the play even begins. The challenge to the artist is to replicate an imagined experience for the audience; that of attending theatre in the 19th century. But if you go the other way and highlight the themes, either with the staging alluding to contemporary parallels or substantial alterations to the text to map current events onto the play, as if it were some kind of stencil, then you've undercut your own point by suggesting that Ibsen needs alteration in order to say what you need him to say. Why Ibsen? Why this play? If you need to change anything, why not change everything? Why start with someone else's play if it doesn't say the right things? It's not art once the agenda of scoring ideological points (even if the end result is "balanced", whatever that means) takes hold as a creative factor, it's propaganda. If you're as clumsy as Julian and I are, finding yourself unable to mesh an alternate matrix of symbols into the structure of Ibsen's play, you soon realize that the only honest thing to do is to integrate into the adaptation the reasons you have for undertaking it. Drop the veil. Come clean. Fess up to what you're up to, and then free yourself to play.
So that's what we're doing. Writing a play about two brothers who disagree about the value of Truth, and can't see eye to eye on Ibsen either.
Of course it's a comedy.
Yeah, right, like the world needs more Charlie Kaufman. But you've got to trust me on this. Months ago, when Julian first mentioned this to me, we both wanted to map on current events to Ibsen's play, but we kept stumbling on the awkwardness of matching up the analogs. Mass media and terrorism; information and authority; a water contamination scandal from a few years ago; none felt genuine when we began laying the groundwork. The question that kept coming up was, why are we bothering to change these elements in the first place? Why can't we just stage this play?
Look, if you're going to present an audience today with Ibsen it's either got to be as a museum piece in which you attempt to simulate theatre of 100 years ago, or you highlight the themes because you believe they're relevant. Museum pieces can be entertaining, but you've won the audience before the play even begins. The challenge to the artist is to replicate an imagined experience for the audience; that of attending theatre in the 19th century. But if you go the other way and highlight the themes, either with the staging alluding to contemporary parallels or substantial alterations to the text to map current events onto the play, as if it were some kind of stencil, then you've undercut your own point by suggesting that Ibsen needs alteration in order to say what you need him to say. Why Ibsen? Why this play? If you need to change anything, why not change everything? Why start with someone else's play if it doesn't say the right things? It's not art once the agenda of scoring ideological points (even if the end result is "balanced", whatever that means) takes hold as a creative factor, it's propaganda. If you're as clumsy as Julian and I are, finding yourself unable to mesh an alternate matrix of symbols into the structure of Ibsen's play, you soon realize that the only honest thing to do is to integrate into the adaptation the reasons you have for undertaking it. Drop the veil. Come clean. Fess up to what you're up to, and then free yourself to play.
So that's what we're doing. Writing a play about two brothers who disagree about the value of Truth, and can't see eye to eye on Ibsen either.
Of course it's a comedy.
VIEW 14 of 14 COMMENTS
thistle:
There is nothing I enjoy more than deconstructing (and I mean this word in the layman's sense, not in reference to the school of theory) the ideas and artistic motivations of a piece, whether it be theatre, fine art, or literature. I wish I could see your play.
sprat:
How goes the playwrighting?