Pay Attention

Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer prize winning story from the April 8, 2007 issue of the Washington Post tells about an experiment they conducted that involved the young virtuoso violinist, Joshua Bell, performing in a busy Washington, D.C. subway station during the morning rush. If you haven’t heard about this or read the article, I suggest that after you’re done here, you take a look. The Post asked Bell to dress as a street musician in jeans and baseball cap and play with an open violin case at his feet to see what would happen. When they asked Leonard Slatkin, the conductor of the National Symphony, to imagine what would occur, he predicted that at minimum, a hundred people or so would gather to listen. A pretty humble prediction considering that Bell is arguably the greatest violinist on the planet and that he would be playing a Stradivarius valued at 3.5 million dollars in a place with great acoustics. The article goes on:

“Bell decided to begin with ‘Chaconne’ from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it ‘not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version.’

“Bell didn't say it, but Bach's ‘Chaconne’ is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.”

On the Post’s website (link above) you can watch a couple of minutes of video and listen to the entire audio recording of the 45 minutes that Bell played. In spite of the background train and human noise, I find the music passionate and soulful.

As you might guess by now, a lot fewer than 100 people stopped to listen.

“Seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.”

Reading this catapulted me back to Paris, 1965, when I was seeking maybe not my fortune, but at least a few francs for a meal and a bed by playing traditional blues and fingerpicking folk songs like “Railroad Bill” and “Freight Train.” Before I learned the ropes, I was thoroughly ignored. Like the Bell experiment showed, context is all important. No one paid attention a solitary guy with a guitar on a Left Bank street corner at one in the afternoon no matter how well he played the blues (medium OK, I’d humbly submit). But, find an attractive young woman to pass the hat, work a crowded café at dusk when everyone’s having their apéritif, et voilà, the five franc notes would fall like lovely autumn leaves into the hat. Later, when I hooked up with a Yemenite-Israeli Gospel singer between her bookings with “Big Jones and his Little Sisters,” an American quartet she fronted, passing as African-American, real crowds would gather until a squad of gendarmes would break the party up.

I also thought of the Native American blessing that one may walk in beauty. Years after my street-singing days, when I was going off on a long and arduous tour of Europe with TJT, someone advised me to always look for experiences of beauty as I traveled. It was wonderful advice because it opened my attention to the possibilities that are part of every moment.

In relation to the “Muse,” attention is paramount. Inspiration lurks everywhere, whether it comes in the form of angelic music offered up freely in the unlikeliest of venues, or the faint call of a bird at the edge of morning or an overheard story.

In some forms of Buddhist meditation, the only instruction is to pay attention.You can start with the breath, but you’re told that your mind will, of course, wander, so pay attention to its very wandering. If thoughts start pouring or zooming through your mind, pay attention to the thoughts. Don’t believe them or take them seriously, just pay attention, notice that thoughts are moving through your field of awareness. Or bodily sensations, sounds, memories, emotions.

That same kind of attention, the kind that doesn’t judge or choose or try to change anything is also essential to any kind of improvisation, which is to say, essential to the creative act.

Check my latest newsletter for some related books and some experiments, exercises and games to help wake up your own muse.

photos c corey fischer

Person April 8, 2007

Right click for SmartMenu shortcuts

Originality is overrated.

We don’t exist in a vacuum. Even the most isolated artist has her influences. For some this is a source of anxiety, as the critic Harold Bloom has made much of. He took what seems to me to be a hyper-Freudian stance that creators fear the power of their artistic “fathers” which manifests as “influence.” Bloom put an Oedipal spin on it with “son” killing father by breaking free of his influence.

I take another view, perhaps influenced by sitting on the Jungian side of the aisle. I celebrate those whose work or life – consciously or not – has shaped my own. I see myself as part of a continuum, a community that stretches beyond the boundaries of time, space and culture.

We create our identities from myriad sources. And we who live now have a dizzying abundance of music, literature, performance forms, imagery and story available at the click of the mouse. (a phrase that would have been incomprehensible twenty years ago.) A few minutes ago I wanted to add some links to people I mentioned below with websites related to them and within seconds I was listening to voices of the dead and the music of an old friend I haven’t seen in years.

In 1965 my roommate (who went on to become an accomplished composer and brilliant guitarist, Daniel Maya, left) and I became enchanted by an album called Inventions by American guitarist Sandy Bull. It was the first instance of “fusion” or “world” music that we had ever heard. Bull was perhaps the first western musician working in a popular context to bring Indian and Middle-Eastern musical forms into his music which was equally inspired by American folk and traditional blues. Years before Ry Cooder’s and Paul Simon’s brilliant collaborations with musicians from different cultures, Sandy Bull was learning to play the oud from Hamza Al Din, who was still, at the time, an obscure Nubian oud player. By the time of his death in 2006, he had become the most famous master of his instrument worldwide, had records produced by luminaries like Mickey Hart and was an inspiration to an entire generation of young guitarists.

At the same time that I was listening to Sandy Bull, I was also pursuing my passion for experimental theatre. I came across the writings of Antonin Artaud, early twentieth century prototypical “mad genius” theatre visionary who had an epiphany while seeing performances of Balinese theatre at an exposition in Paris in the 1920s. After several years of theatre-making in Paris, His quest led him to Mexico and Native peyote rituals. Shortly after his return to Paris, he was arrested and incarcerated in a mental hospital. Friends had him transferred to Rodez a facility in unoccupied, Vichy France. (self-portrait, left, done in Rodez) He was released in 1947 and after a spurt of new activity, he died. Artaud ‘s life was mostly a grim struggle against his own demons, opiate addiction, depression, episodes of schizophrenia. For a time he was embraced by the avant-garde, but even then, he couldn’t quite manage to “fit in.” In 1926, he was officially expelled from the Surrealists. Since childhood he had been in and out of mental institutions, had been treated with electroshock and more drugs. Though he never came close to realizing his vision for the theatre during his life, his influence on future artists is incalculable. Without Artaud, we probably would not have had Peter Brook’s groundbreaking production of Marat/Sade. Almost all the experimental theatres of the sixties took something from him. Members of the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, The Wooster Group and many more, had, at one time or another read Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double. One of my most important mentors in theatre, Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theatre, cited Artaud as a formative influence. It was, perhaps, in the early work in Poland by Jerzy Grotowski, that Artaud’s hope for a theatre that made no attempt to imitate “reality” but, rather, created a new language and cracked open the fragile shell of bourgeois societal facades came closest to being realized.

When I started UCLA in 1962, a chain-smoking, intense, slightly older fellow theatre student named Saul introduced me to Artaud and his sufferings. For years, I puzzled over his opaque writings and joined others in a basement below UCLA’s Royce Hall to invent exercises we hoped would crack open our own bourgeois facades. I still feel great affection for the clueless young man I was in my early twenties. Perhaps not so clueless as a matter of fact. After all, he was willing to descend into that basement and hang out in the unknown with something like patient resolve.

(left: Deena Metzger, the writer who first gave me a sense of what that was all about.)

What this says to me about influence is that it need not be literal or direct. The theatre I eventually started making – the work that one day bore fruit in Traveling Jewish Theatre – was not particularly “Artaud-like” in any way, yet had Artaud and his writings not existed, that work would not have been the same. It was in the encounter with his texts that the energy resided.

This, for me, is the most important quality of what we variously call culture, community, even civilization. Or, even better, commons. Commons can mean either land owned by the community (common-union, communion) or the rights to use land owned by another for grazing or fishing. An artist owns his work, but the community has rights to fish for inspiration in her waters. Sometimes one’s influence on another is simply to show that it is possible, it can be done.

I’ve just finished recording a new hybrid spoken-word/song/rap/blues piece that is an unapologetic homage to Bob Dylan, who, along with Leonard Cohen, Walt Whitman, Grace Paley, Phillip Roth, Joni Mitchell, Blake, Shakespeare, Peter Brook, Rilke, Bill Wilson, Laura Simms and hundreds of others, I claim as models, teachers, sources of inspiration and whose works have altered the way I produce mine.

"...like chords of deep music"

I met a man named Karl Knobler at Deb Fink’s party for the closing of Dead Mother, the recent TJT production I was in. Karl’s a psychologist, about my age, and we immediately began the kind of allusive conversation full of digressions and surprising sudden turns that feels very similar to Jazz. The kind of conversation I take delight in.

As we jumped between a few dozen topics, Karl mentioned the idea of “Affective regulation” (see the work of Dr. Allan Schore, www.allanschore.com) To explain the concept, Karl told me how women, whether they have had children or not, will exhibit dilation of the pupils when hearing a baby cry. Men’s pupils do not dilate under those circumstances unless they have already become fathers.

Reflecting on this later, I was reminded of some lines from a poem by Rilke: “…that harsh hand / that kneaded him as if to change his shape.” (Robert Bly, Tr.) and thought about the ways we are worked upon by the aggregate of experience, time, the natural world, the stories we live until we become utterly transformed.

I remember a moment in Australia, thirteen years ago. I had just come out of the ocean. I’d been swimming for a long time at Bondi Beach, even body surfing a little. When I got out of the water I could still feel the energy of the waves surging inside my body. And I imagined myself as having been reshaped by the water. Could this be the “purpose” of a life: to be transformed – cooked, in a sense, ripened – into something nourishing for some larger being?

Usually, when I think about creativity, I’m the creator. But these notions of being changed on a neuro-cellular level by life, reverse the field. I’m the raw matter, we all are – being sculpted, carved, tuned, plucked, dissolved and reconstituted in new forms.

I welcome another path away from seeing the “Artist” as some isolated, unique, solitary, almost hermetic figure; a controlling, masterful, domineering archetype which the world can maybe do without for a while. Perhaps it was in recognition of being altered by powerful forces that the first “art” emerged in the world. In expressing our creativity we are continuing a dance with Big Life, simultaneously tasting our power and our humility, harmonizing our unique voice with the great chorale.

One more memory. 1987. The Cevennes, hill country of Southern France. My wife has just departed for Poland, where she will join nearly a million Poles on a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, the patron of Poland and symbol of the Solidarity movement. I’m staying on in the Cevennes to continue a very arduous kind of voice work led by a members of the Roy Hart Theatre, a compelling and eccentric theatre company based in a chateau in the region. I spend 5-6 mornings each week in a studio there and, after lunch, ramble around the rivers, streams and gullies of the Cevennes, seeking rumored swimming holes and stumbling over vestiges of old dry stone walls that had been assembled with precision and love in another time. One hot, bright afternoon after finding a perfect swimming hole, big enough to stoke across, deep enough to kick down into numbingly cold water, after hours in and out of the sweet clear water, after drying myself for the last time on a granite slab, I walked back to the village where I was staying in blissful exhaustion, letting my voice roam free, wordlessly singling melodies I’d never heard before. As I walked, my voice opened in all directions and suddenly a sound clearer and richer than I’d ever heard come from my body rang out and at that very moment, a large bright-green lizard, shot into view onto the bone-white stucco wall of a house. In the logical magic of the time and place, I had no doubt the sounds that had been coming out of me had conjured or summoned the Lizard. Its color and my sound were identical.

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke (Tr. Robert Bly)

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

In the current issue of my newsletter, Musing on the Muse, I suggest the following as a response to the idea of “being created” that I explore in a much shorter version of the above writing;

Do a ten minute timed writing experiment. Alternate beginning each sentence with “Once I was….” and “Now I am…” Complete each sentence as you go, writing as quickly as you can, not allowing your hand to ever stop moving on the page until the 10 minutes is up. Let go of any need to “make sense.”

Here’s what happened when I tried it myself:

Once I was sap

Now I am crystallized honey at the bottom of the jar

Once I was heaven

Now I am a water logged plank

Once I was golden tumbling

Now I am reddened patience

Once I was hungry all day

Now I feed wolves

Once I dreamed of a blazing touch

Now I dream of maps

Once I remembered all their names, the color of their thighs and the songs they sang

Now the glue is dried out and the photos have fallen from the album

Once I ran along the shore until the sun was gone

Now I am wrapped in blankets

Once I bit cords of silk

Now I sew dishrags

Once I barked in confusion, circling the city

Now I know how to breathe

Once I slept on the moonlit roof

Now I give my body to the water.

Make your own Art

It has taken me most of my life to begun to understand that one of the greatest shortcomings of our modern western culture is the “professionalization” of art, and creative expression that came along with industrialization. I started writing about this in the current issue of Musing with the Muse and will continue here.

When I was ten, I decided I wanted to be an actor. It had nothing to do with recognizing that I wanted to act. I had never acted in anything. I was claiming an identity: Professional Actor. From then on I acted in any play I could. I hung around the entrance to the old Republic Studios on Radford, in Studio City, at the end of the block where my parents had a dry cleaning store. Some customers were non-celebrity character actors. I was thrilled whenever one of them came into the store when I was helping out after school.

It wasn’t until I was 16 that I had my first taste of what theatre, what acting was really about. I’m eternally grateful to my parents for hustling me off to an arts summer camp every year. I started with the Junior Players, acting out fairy tails the teacher would read to us and went on to High School Drama. At 16 I played Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Quite a leap from “East of the Sun West of the Moon.” Suddenly I was being asked to look at death. To ask questions about an afterlife. To understand what the word soul meant to me.

I hadn’t been the director’s first choice but the kid who had been cast didn’t want to have to memorize so many monologues. Mephistopheles was played by a tall raven-haired girl with whom I fell in unrequited love. For three weeks I lived in a heightened, even altered state inside Marlowe’s incandescent blank verse.

What I experienced had nothing to do with a profession, a career or a livelihood, but the only way to re-enter it was embark on a course of training to become a professional. At least that was the only way anyone seemed to know.

It took me five years to have an experience remotely comparable to Faustus. It was in my last year in the Theatre Department at UCLA. Finally I found a faculty member who seemed to care about theatre as much as I did. He was a self-proclaimed Marxist and a devotee of Brecht but was somehow untainted by doctrine. He cast me in a small role in Brecht’s first play, Baal, an expressionistic paean to polymorphous sexuality unlike any of his more sophisticated, ironic, political, later works. James Kerans, who died not too long after that time, offered no magical key to unlock the mysteries of acting, but he offered a vision of the world he wanted to create on stage. My part was that of a drunken street person Baal encounters on Corpus Christi day. The drunk is obsessed with the trees nailed to doorposts that are a part of the traditional German celebration of that holy day. He sees them as crucified beings and identifies with them. I had been working outside the university with an acting teacher who was the first I ever heard say that acting depended upon the unique experience, body, memory and creativity of each actor. In Baal, I was able, at last, to understand this. Though I was only twenty, I found where that drunk lived inside my own psyche.

It was beginning to dawn on me that I probably wouldn’t be able to do much work like this as a professional actor in the conventional theatre.

The next thirteen years of my life were split between two somewhat conflicting ambitions. One was to work outside the mainstream pursuing visions of forming a theatre collective that would support the approach to acting and creativity I discovered in Baal and one or two other innovative productions. The other was to become a successful actor in film and television.

I felt fortunate when I started making a living in TV and film. But after ten years of it, I had to admit that the work I was being paid for was, mostly, meaningless or worse. It demanded so little of me that it was easy to become cynical and give very little to it. The real energy in that life occurred at the moment of getting the job: being picked, chosen, validated by the powers. Between paying jobs, I would pursue the waning vision of a vital, life-changing theatre. But all of us who shared those dreams were all too willing to abandon them whenever our agents called with an offer of “real” work.

I reached my “bottom” when, out of pure greed and a lot of delusion, I accepted the role of Don Quixote in a really loathsome project that ripped off the images of Quixote and Sancho to make a painfully un-funny cartoon-like, slapstick, salacious and ultimately incomprehensible mess of a film. I was relieved that it never got released, and as far as I know was shown only once or twice on pay TV in a Hawaiian hotel.

After the Quixote fiasco, the Provisional Theatre, an L.A. company that had grown out of the anti-Vietnam war movement, invited me to work on a new project and to tour with them for two months. I jumped on it. During the six months I spent with this group, I learned that I was capable of more hard work than I had ever imagined. Whether I was schlepping the set or creating a character, performing or driving the van, I was part of a tribe of wandering players in which everyone did everything and everything we did was meant to serve people spiritual and political nourishment.

Even though I chose not to stay with the Provisional as a permanent member for reasons I’ll get into some other time, the experience re-aligned me powerfully. Like Rilke’s statue of Apollo, it told me to change my life.

After two years working in New York with Joe Chaikin (yes, clearly another story) I called two friends and colleagues together to create Traveling Jewish Theatre, now in its 29^th year of existence.

As an actor, I had discovered that I didn’t want to be a “professional” who rarely has any choice of what she will act, who auditions, gets hired (if lucky), and does his best to please the director who hired him. I didn’t want to be a specialist who has permission to only perform one task that is her specialty. Such as acting. Such as acting one certain type of role over and over. I wanted to make theatre: to act, write, direct, explore, question, discover, construct, compose, shape, edit, with people who excited me, at the service of whatever seemed most compelling, most necessary at that moment.

I see no reason why anyone who is willing to do the plain hard work required, should not make theatre in that way or music or painting or dance. As the wise and wonderful Oliver Sachs recently said in a lecture, “There are forms of neurological organization that can only be addressed by art, not by logic or reason or systematic things…The arts are an absolute necessity in life.” (On Cambridge Forum. Download or listen)

Hands

I will soon launch a monthly e-newsletter about creativity called Musing on the Muse. The preparations for this new project have triggered all sorts of images, ideas and memories all related to that central theme. It’s as if I’ve evoked for myself, the kind of “flow” that I hope Musing will trigger for others. I offer the following, from my off-line journal.¹

¹ It may be old-fashioned but I believe that the notion of boundaries between the private and the public are still essential. It’s not a question of propriety, but of letting one’s Muse (or one’s creative unconscious) know that it’s safe, that nothing will be shared unless it agrees.

¹

In my earliest complete memory I ask my father to let me play with the “coughing saw.” I was two. That was what I called the coping saw. A small saw with a frame like a square with one side being a skinny flexible saw blade. I guess my father let me play with it because of the relatively little harm it could do. My father was happiest when he made things. Furniture. Simple pieces done without power tools, inspired by something he read in Popular Mechanics. A bench. A set of Adirondack chairs on which he painted hearts and clubs, diamonds and spades.

I got the message that shaping materials with your hands can either be full of pleasure or fraught with frustration. But I never managed to absorb any of my father’s skill with wood. As I grew, my impatience sabotaged any chance of getting measurements right, and by the time I got to high school woodshop, I hated anything to do with carpentry. I had no faith I could ever get two pieces of wood to fit together. It took me a lot longer to discover that it’s almost impossible to make something satisfying without faith.

Fortunately I went on to other forms. When I was 13 or 14, I discovered ceramics. The potter’s wheel. The first time I succeeded at centering a ball of clay on the spinning wheel, I felt something completely new. Anyone who’s ever thrown a pot knows that almost indescribable sense of sudden alignment, when the awkwardly spinning off-center mass between your hands at last composes itself around the invisible center . I found clay at a summer arts program for kids. I wasn’t much better at it then than I was at woodworking, but my father wasn’t there to have to measure up to. I did as well as any of the other kids, so I was free to explore the process on my own with no one to please.

One summer my father planted tomatoes. Everyone was surprised that this New York Jewish Broadway stage manager had it in him to grow a bumper crop of tomatoes that just kept coming all summer. Looking back, it doesn’t seem so strange. He put his hands to it. And his hands always knew so much more than the rest of him.

Around the same time, during the only three years of my childhood we owned our own house, he built me a playhouse in the half-acre of San Fernando Valley former citrus orchard that was our back yard.

I loved the playhouse. Mine! All mine. One day I decided to make something. I found an old radio some one had abandoned. I moved its tubes around and discarded some to make room for one of my several broken clocks in the innards of the half taken-apart radio. It was a Time Machine and boy, did I want it to work. Now, for some reason, my father had wired the playhouse with electricity and I felt compelled to plug in my Time Machine. Electricity was a kind of magic and plugging it in would have to make something happen.

It did. The radio started smoking and gave off an awful smell that burned my nostrils. At least I had sense enough to pull the plug.

After ceramics came oil painting and pen and ink drawing at the same camp. Then the making of things took a turn. I started playing guitar and what I made now was incorporeal: music. But still, it came from my hands. My father never touched a musical instrument, though he had sung parodic ditties in vaudeville amateur shows and stage-managed two or three Broadway musicals with Fred Astaire. So the guitar, like the clay and the paints, was all mine. Part of the world I made to which my parents could not gain entry. To have this world was terribly important. It was important to listen to music they couldn’t understand. Well before rock ‘n’ roll and the generation gap, when I was 14, in 1959, I discovered the Folkways series of archival recordings of Mississippi Delta Blues artists. The oldest, funkiest, blackest ones were the best, as far as I was concerned. Blind Lemon. Bukka White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Hurt. The funny thing was that I really didn’t like the music all that much back then, but I learned to love it. I tried to play it on guitar. In the summers I’d learn Lightnin’ Hopkins riffs from L.A. kids who came to the same camp. One summer, Brownie McGee and Blind Sonny Terry taught at the place and, of course, I was in Brownie’s guitar workshop. By then I was 16 or so and had thick calluses on my fingers. As much as I loved the guitar and clay and paint though, I had no real ambition to ever make a living by making music or bowls or dark landscapes.

I have managed to make my living through my creativity, though. As an actor, or a writer or a teacher or director, I’ve been blessed to have experienced enormous satisfaction, surprise, awe, validation, appreciation and love as well as frustration, stasis, emptiness and grief, but that’s another story. The point is, only a very few aspects of that work involve making things with my hands but I still have a nearly constant powerful desire to do just that. These days I only take out the guitar once or twice a year and then I become lost in trying to remember the old riffs, the licks, the finger-picking patterns, the songs. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I go onto the back porch and draw, with pencil, stump and kneadable eraser, what I see – plants, flowers, a piece of weathered wood, it doesn’t matter. A familiar, clear trance over takes me and my hand’s movements themselves are a kind of seeing.

Death of a Salesman closed on June 10 It was the longest, hardest and most satisfying role I've ever done and it's been hard to let go. Next up, 2 X Malamud, which consists of his two greatest stories, The Magic Barrel and The Jewbird performed in the "Word for Word" style. Both stories were hugely successful when first produced by TJT, The Jewbird in 2000 and The Magic Barrel last year. I've had the fantasy of doing an all-Malamud evening for a while now. And now I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew, swallow and digest. The characters I play in each story -- Saltzman the marriage broker and Schwartz the "Jewbird" -- could, arguably, be thought of as the same archetype in different manifestations. I'd call this archetype the Jewish Trickster. He has much in common with the "Holy Fools" that show up in various cultures. He can be irreverent and annoying but also a purveyor of spiritual teachings, often experiential ones. In Jewish folklore, the prophet, Elijah, often takes on this role when he appears as any number of unsavory characters to test people's real level of compassion, surprising them with his transformation into the powerful figure of the prophet.

I'll be fleshing out this idea on the TJT Blog in the weeks to come. Stay tuned, and if you live anywhere near Mountain View, please come see 2 X Malamud in August!

Death of a Salesman

I'm in the middle of rehearsals for TJT's upcoming: Death of a Salesman (Opens April 8, previews start April 5, 2007), in which I play WIlly Loman.

For schedule and tickets, click here.

Here's what I wrote about the reasons TJT is taking on this formidable challenge:

In February, 2007, TJT begins work on a breakthrough production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman that will reclaim the Jewish context that Miller, writing in 1949, felt constrained to “censor out,” attempting to create an ethnically unmarked family whose struggles would have “universal” appeal.

Our production will be directed by our Artistic Director, Aaron Davidman. Corey Fischer and TJT Associate Artist Jeri Lynn Cohen will play Willy and Linda. Scenic design will be done by Giulio Cesare Perrone (designer of our productions Opening to You and Isaac). Jess Ivry, whom TJT audiences will remember from The Bright River, will perform her original, solo cello score live throughout the run.

Why a Jewish Death of a Salesman?

TJT has always held, as a working principle, that universality can only come from specificity. We’re certainly not alone in this view; more and more late 20^th and 21^st century writers, artists and thinkers have moved beyond the notion that specific ethnic or cultural markers needed to be jettisoned in order to create works of a truly universal value. This mid-century notion may have been a reaction of second generation immigrants to the limitations of the “old world.” What I find fascinating is that, almost in spite of himself, Miller created a character (Willy Loman) who is caught is that very struggle to assimilate, to re-invent himself as an American free of the poverty, backwardness and isolation of the shtetl or the ghetto. But Miller, in 1949, was perhaps – as a writer, anyway – caught in that struggle himself and felt bound to make Willy a generic American.

Willy Loman was recognized as a crypto-Jew as far back as 1951, when one of the most accomplished actors of the Yiddish theatre, Joseph Buloff, translated the play into Yiddish and played the role of Willy. The production was a huge success in New York and on tour. George Ross wrote, in a review of the Yiddish Death of a Salesman:

“The great success of Joseph Buloff's production is that it brings the play "home." The effect is remarkable. Buloff has caught Miller, as it were, in the act of changing his name…”

And just last year, the contemporary Jewish playwright Karen Hartman wrote,

“Death of a Salesman suggests but does not explain an immigrant anxiety, the fallout from Anatevka with all clues removed. The Lomans seem alone in the world, or at least in Brooklyn. The sense of them as a displaced family comes through the absence of any other relatives (Willy, the son of an unnamed Midwestern peddler, has lost his only brother two weeks before the play begins) or history, rather than culturally specific referents—no pogroms, no old country yarns, no particular cause for feeling "kind of temporary" about oneself. The play's Judaism, like that of its characters, lies in its not being anything else—not rooted New England, not a sweetly rotting South. Details have been erased, leaving a sparse, attenuated world that is universal and also incomplete.

I'd suggest that the psychically fluid structure of Salesman tends to stick for contemporary playwrights, while its resistance to naming Jewish content has changed for now. For example, it's impossible to envision the shifting structure of Angels in America without Death of a Salesman, but equally difficult to imagine Tony Kushner holding back cultural detail.” (http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=131)

So the intention behind our production is to restore those missing “clues.” Unlike the infamous production of The Crucible by New York’s Wooster Group (it was subject to a cease and desist order initiated by Arthur Miller) TJT will take no liberties with the text, but will, rather, explore it from its own particular perspective and esthetic – that of a contemporary Jewish ensemble theatre.

As Karen Hartman points out, Miller was not entirely successful in purging all yiddishkeit from his play. It reveals itself in the monitory cadence of a line like “Attention must be paid..” Ross, referring to this line, writes: “Here, and in many places, one felt in the English version as if Miller were thinking in Yiddish and unconsciously translating…and sometimes when his English filters through the density of his background, it succeeds in picking up flavor on the way.”

For a company who has based its 28 year-old reputation on the creation of original work and the development of new plays across a variety of forms, engaging with an iconic American play can be seen as a radical new direction. Likewise, realizing that the largest part of its work has looked toward the Eastern European Jewish Diaspora, the Shoah, the Middle-East for inspiration, we want to explore the American Jewish experience of the last few decades; the period in which American Jewish identity went through such surprising transformations.

An interesting side note to the 1951 Yiddish production by Joseph Buloff can be found at: http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=331. Chloe Veltman interviewed Luba Kadison, Buloff’s widow and an important yiddish theatre performer in her own right. Veltman says:

“Arthur Miller was delighted with her portrayal of Linda in a Yiddish version of Death of a Salesman at the Parkway Theatre in Brooklyn in 1951, as was the scholar Harold Bloom, who wrote to Kadison just a few weeks before her death, saying her Salesman was the most moving he'd ever seen.”