Everything Is Already Something Week 51: What Collaboration Does For Me

Allison Page, collaborating.

I used to be a loner. Picture a grouchy old bearded man in a sweater, hunkered down in an armchair, scribbling away on a stack of paper, occasionally shaking his fist at the sky. Possibly at some point he throws half a glass of bourbon in the face of his wife. That was me, but not a man with a beard. You know, but bearded on the INSIDE. Often, I think people have this idea of what a writer is and immediately they think of Ernest Hemingway. And that’s how you’re supposed to be a good writer, isn’t it? All the geniuses and masters toil away in their own well-crafted solitary confinement – crouched down in their pillow forts where all the pillows are barbed wire, and we tell ourselves that’s how you get to be a writer. That’s how you get to be an artist. AN ARTISTE. That suffering makes your art better is a long held idea. I admit to buying into that at some point. I think we all have – especially when young and impressionable. Anyone who caught the bug of wanting to write books or plays or poems (DEFINITELY POEMS) or to act or dance or paint or sculpt or…I don’t know, whatever you guys are doing – puppetry? Anyone who had that impulse at a young age probably started identifying their artistic heroes and began to define what they wanted to be by taking note of what created the artists they connected to most. That was a hell of a sentence.

Misery worked pretty well for Alanis. Teenage girls of the 90s, can ya feel me?

Let’s take young, pink-haired, angry Allison for example.

I’ve known I wanted to be an actor since I was probably 5 years old. At that age I was mostly inspired by cartoon characters – let’s be real, cartoons are fucking great. Actually, I remained inspired by cartoons for a while. Actually actually, I still am. I was the only little girl I knew who wanted to be The Genie from Aladdin instead of Jasmine. Animaniacs was a big deal in my life. I mean, it still is. It holds up. (Garfield and Friends does not. Don’t bother.) Once we start getting into the real people I looked up to, though, it doesn’t take long to start finding the darkness. (If we’re being honest The Genie isn’t actually that happy a character, he just deflects his sorrow with jokes. So I guess the darkness crept in even earlier than I thought.)

By the time I was 14, I was already very into old movies. Yes, I was very cool and popular (lies). It was at that age that I first watched a little movie called Der Blaue Engel, or The Blue Angel. It’s a little German tragicomedy about a teacher who falls in love with a cabaret performer. IT DOESN’T GO WELL. It ends with Emil Jannings dying while regretfully clutching the desk from which he used to teach before the succubus Marlene Dietrich ruined his life because he loved her so much that it turned him into a literal sad clown. SO FUN. And that’s the actual movie that made me want to be an actor. Isn’t that wild? Sorry, spoilers in case you haven’t had time to catch this movie since it came out in 1930. But really, it’s beautiful and cruel, you should see it. That was sort of a sidebar because I’m really talking about writers, but I was an actor first so there ya go. When I was 16 I decided I finally had a favorite play. It’s still my favorite play. What is it?

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Yikes.

Quite a choice for a teenage mind. But just because something is dark, does that necessarily mean it came from a person who is feeling dark? When you look at comedies, they certainly don’t necessarily come from people who are feeling fun and light. I’m meandering a little on the topic at hand. Let’s get back to it.

Here’s a sampling of some writerly heroes of mine:
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dawn Powell
Dorothy Parker
Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett
Clare Booth Luce
Robert Benchley

Go ahead and google how many of them were lonely writers and avid drinkers. Just as a sample group. Get ready to be sad!

Robert Benchley: absolutely hilarious and definitely died slowly of cirrhosis of the liver because he loved sad/alone drinking. YAYYYY.

I’m not saying I’m as gloomy as any of those people or that they were alcoholics because they were writers, but I think writing can breed loneliness or at least nudge it along. You so often do it alone. I mean, in the end you have to do it alone, right? You can’t have 20 fingers typing on your keyboard or writing with your pencil. Well, you could, but it would take forever. As much as I am alone when I write, I try to spend an equal amount of time either writing WITH other people – like, actually collaborating on something, or writing NEAR other people. I think if you’re in the business of writing about people, that it’s good to maintain connections to people as opposed to doing the opposite of that.

When I write sketch comedy, I do that in a super fun writers room scenario. There are something like 10 – 15 of us (some writers, some actors) throwing out ideas, talking about possibilities, and laughing really hard. It is AMAZING. It feels like magic should feel. So much so, that when I’m executing all those ideas, it still feels collaborative even when I’m alone. Weird, right?

Clearly that’s kind of specific to sketch. When you’re writing a novel, or a play, or whatever else you’re writing, you’re not always looking for that level of collaboration. But that doesn’t mean you have to stew alone all the time. I like to be alone together. I can sit and work on what I’m working on, and a friend can sit across from me or next to me at the table to my left, and we work in silence sipping coffee as long as we can, then turn to each other when we kind of can’t bear it for a minute. We’ll gossip about something, or talk about the trouble we’re having with a particular section, or even *gasp* read a bit we’re particularly proud of to the other person. Or if we’re really struggling, just talk about the coffee we’re drinking. Sometimes if I’m working on something particularly draining, chatter about coffee might be the most I’m able to think about. It’s been good for me, this process.

I want to be a good writer. I think I’m an okay one. I want to be good, but not at the expense of my grip on reality and connections to other people. I don’t need to be Fitzgerald or Parker or Powell, I just want to be the best writer I can be while not falling into the gloom. If that means I don’t go down in history, I’m okay with that. Since allowing myself the possibility of collaborating or writing alone together, everything seems like a little bit less of a struggle. I mean, geez, writing is already not so easy. If you can find a way to make it a little bit easier, I don’t see how that can be bad. I still have my grouchy-old-man-in-a-cardigan moments, but I have fewer of them. And there’s a nice space of happiness in between: the comfort of knowing that the person next to you is dealing with the same thing you are. Or, if you’re competitive, the knowledge that you may be kicking their ass in the number-of-pages-typed-in-a-day department.

I’m not going to say collaboration will kick your depression. What am I, a doctor? No. I’m not a doctor. Don’t ever let me tell you otherwise. But what I am saying is that while hell may be other people, it is also probably a lack of other people. We need each other a little bit. Maybe even just for an occasional reality check.

There isn’t one way to be a successful/good/happy writer. Just like there isn’t one way to be nearly anything. Don’t try to fit yourself into a dangerous mould. Make your own mould. Hell, BE the mould.

Me? I get by with a little help from my friends.

Not actually Allison’s friends, but let’s pretend.

Allison Page is a writer/actor/comedian. Her new play HILARITY, about a comedian struggling with alcoholism and jokes, is being produced by DIVAfest and has its world premiere at The EXIT Theatre in San Francisco. Previews start March 5th. Tickets at hilarity.bpt.me

Theater Around The Bay: Creative Vilification

Our series of guest writers continues with Jeremy Cole telling us to tell it like it is- and then maybe twist the knife some more.

When I lived in Denver, I had a mutual admiration society going on with Joanne Greenberg, author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, In This Sign, and others. I would read all her books (The King’s Persons is my favorite), and she came to see all the plays I directed (I think Death of a Salesman was her favorite). I remember traveling a LONG way by bus to watch her tell stories in Gullah dialect (long story I’ll tell you some time) at a local charter school. I learned that she had sent her sons to that very school, and – dismayed by the prevalence of the F-word she kept hearing in the hallways – she offered to teach a class on creative vilification. What a delicious idea, I thought. Why simply drop an F-bomb on someone, she said, when you could zing them with “I should live long enough to bury you,” or better yet, “a hundred houses you should have, in every house a hundred rooms and in every room twenty beds, and may a delirious fever drive you from bed to bed.” These are Yiddish curses, and Joanne is a firm believer in Yiddish as the language of insult (q.v., my particular favorite: Er zol kakn mit blit un mit ayter – “He should crap blood and pus.”)

I’ll never forget Joanne on Merchant of Venice: “I hate that play. ‘Hath a Jew not eyes?’ Oh, please: hath a DOG not eyes? Stupid play.” (Joanne once memorized Hamlet, however, in its entirety.)

I have to agree. We’ve become so banal in our criticisms, nowadays, that they hardly even register on our critical Richter scales. Political correctness, anger management and sensitivity training may all have their place, but at what cost? What happened to the days of the withering remark? The snarky aperçu? Where are our modern-day Alexander Woollcotts and Dorothy Parkers? He who once wrote “Number 7 opened last night. It was misnamed by five.” She, who once wrote of the play Give Me Yesterday: “Me, I should have given him twenty years to life.”

Do we hear such things today? Sadly, no. Not since 1986, when the New Yorker printed a one sentence review of Brighton Beach Memoirs that said “If you’ll believe Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey are Jewish, you’ll believe anything.” No, instead, we get pabulum: “Well…” (we hem, we haw) “It wasn’t to my taste” we say, or “I suppose it could have been better…” Balls. These are cop-outs. Case in point: I have no trouble admitting that I LOATHED the play Ghost Light. To say it wasn’t “my taste” would be disingenuous. I don’t merely want back the time I spent watching that travesty, I want all memory of it eradicated from my brain. I want restored to me the gray cells that committed suicide rather than take even one more minute of it. That is much closer to how I actually feel than simply saying “it needed work.” Please. The Autobahn needed work. The Pyramids needed work. That play needed a good paper shredder. So let’s get creative with our disdain. I don’t want someone to pull their punches when they don’t care for a performance, I want to hear their pain grow wings and take flight. If theater is meant to be an art-form, shouldn’t our discussion of it be an art, as well?

3 Jewish characters, 1 Jewish actor. I’ll give you three guesses…

Let us put as much effort into our condemnations as we purport to put into our own work. If one’s problem with a given play is that the director didn’t understand the text, how can the complaint be taken seriously if it is uttered in a series of monosyllabic grunts? One of my favorite playwrights, Megan Cohen, never ceases to delight me with her originality. I honestly never know what’s coming next in her plays because she eschews formulas. She’s too smart for that, too uncompromising. Let us take a page out of her script the next time we have an unsatisfactory experience at the theater. Get out your thesaurus! Don’t say “bad” if “putrid” is nearer the mark. Don’t settle for “tepid” when “so boring I thought I was slipping into a coma” is more appropriate. Let us compare a plot riddled with gaping holes to the streets of San Francisco (no, not the old TV series, but the disastrous pot-holed nightmares that are this city’s streets). Next time we see lousy choreography, let us compare it to the chaos that is Critical Mass, or regale our rapt audience with tales of our first disastrous junior high dance. We are artists, dammit, and that should be apparent in every aspect of our lives. Not merely on our resumes, Facebook pages and blogs.

And speaking of blogs, have you been reading that one about Bay Area Theater? Child, you better turn your Hoover on, ‘cause I’ve got some dirt!