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The First Time I Directed
Nov. 20th, 2017 10:03 pmThis is a story about "Principia Discordia: An Entertainment for Coffeehouse Theatre." It is a play in one strange and interrupted act that was performed once, and only once, at Something Special Coffeehouse on Main Street in Laurel Maryland, and it was produced by Theatre 7, a community theater group that did wonderful and challenging plays in the late 1990s, before I had ever heard of The Rude Mechanicals. Like the Rudes, Theatre 7 took acting seriously and deliberately wanted to hone their tradecraft to professional levels. I learned to appreciate all of this hard work when I later participated as an actor in professional shows. And because of this, or maybe despite this, Theatre 7 was who inspired me to write, get approved, direct, and perform with others in a play of my own creation.
T7 had already done several successful coffeehouse nights at Something Special, nights of reader's theatre with small audiences and wonderfully challenging material. I had participated in most of these in 1997, and was thrilled that they were willing to participate in something I had written. I had been inspired by Robert Anton Wilson to seek out the Principia Discordia a few years previous, completely delighted that it was in fact a real book, one that had inspired a real counter-cultural religious movement, though of course not real in the same sense or religious in a conventional sense.
Theatre 7 barely knew what they were getting into. Neither did I, but I felt somewhat braced for it with my knowledge of theater people and attitudes: My script itself lampooned some of those attitudes. I got several friends from work to agree to participate, along with some members of the theater group who auditioned as well. I stuck in a great many portions of "Principia Discordia" verbatim, as it is by design and intent a freely-reproducible, non-copyrighted work, but the arrangement and presentation of the material, along with original scenes and situations, were written by me.
There was at least one strict direction the Theatre 7 board gave me to follow. I had made the script somewhat recursive and self-referential, and the T7 board members actually appeared as characters in my script. I was even going to have them play themselves. The Theatre 7 board said they would not do this, and if I did not change the names, they would not participate in or approve of the play. I figured that was a small price to pay on my part, changed the names, and got other actors to play the now-fictional board members. That was good. The other board members stayed on, and some of them actually performed that one night.
The rest of the cast was largely made up of friends from my workplace. This made for an interesting dynamic. At one point, the T7 board members, all very experienced performers, were over in a corner of our rehearsal space muttering to each other. A friend of mine who was playing the fictional part of the director of the play came to me with deep concern on his face. "They're over there tearing your play apart!" he told me gravely. "They think it's stupid."
"Do they want to quit?" I said. "Do they not want to be in it?"
"No, but they're making fun of it," said my friend.
"That's fine with me," I said, to that friend's astonishment. I may or may not have told him how gratified I felt at that moment, or for what reason. I was remembering watching a documentary about Frank Zappa's "200 Motels," a very innovatively uneven and self-referential piece that had contributed quite a bit to my inspiration for the "Principia Discordia" play. Zappa himself noted that at some point in the production, every single performer had thought it was a stupid idea. I smiled at this anecdote now, thinking myself in good company.
My best friend at the time played Malaclypse the Younger. I'm still in touch with him, and I admire him greatly for his willingness to do this, among other wonderful blessings his friendship has brought me. The night we performed the Entertainment at Something Special, he had just come back to Maryland from travels to New York, and he was sick as a dog. He had a high fever, and he used the opportunity of his character getting shot (I was playing on the whole "If you see the Buddha, kill him" concept) to enjoy the cool floor of the performance space and rest for a bit.
It was an amazing time of growth as a theatre person, an experience I an so privileged to have had, though few saw it, and almost nobody with whom I am in touch now would remember it.
And it's on my resumé.
T7 had already done several successful coffeehouse nights at Something Special, nights of reader's theatre with small audiences and wonderfully challenging material. I had participated in most of these in 1997, and was thrilled that they were willing to participate in something I had written. I had been inspired by Robert Anton Wilson to seek out the Principia Discordia a few years previous, completely delighted that it was in fact a real book, one that had inspired a real counter-cultural religious movement, though of course not real in the same sense or religious in a conventional sense.
Theatre 7 barely knew what they were getting into. Neither did I, but I felt somewhat braced for it with my knowledge of theater people and attitudes: My script itself lampooned some of those attitudes. I got several friends from work to agree to participate, along with some members of the theater group who auditioned as well. I stuck in a great many portions of "Principia Discordia" verbatim, as it is by design and intent a freely-reproducible, non-copyrighted work, but the arrangement and presentation of the material, along with original scenes and situations, were written by me.
There was at least one strict direction the Theatre 7 board gave me to follow. I had made the script somewhat recursive and self-referential, and the T7 board members actually appeared as characters in my script. I was even going to have them play themselves. The Theatre 7 board said they would not do this, and if I did not change the names, they would not participate in or approve of the play. I figured that was a small price to pay on my part, changed the names, and got other actors to play the now-fictional board members. That was good. The other board members stayed on, and some of them actually performed that one night.
The rest of the cast was largely made up of friends from my workplace. This made for an interesting dynamic. At one point, the T7 board members, all very experienced performers, were over in a corner of our rehearsal space muttering to each other. A friend of mine who was playing the fictional part of the director of the play came to me with deep concern on his face. "They're over there tearing your play apart!" he told me gravely. "They think it's stupid."
"Do they want to quit?" I said. "Do they not want to be in it?"
"No, but they're making fun of it," said my friend.
"That's fine with me," I said, to that friend's astonishment. I may or may not have told him how gratified I felt at that moment, or for what reason. I was remembering watching a documentary about Frank Zappa's "200 Motels," a very innovatively uneven and self-referential piece that had contributed quite a bit to my inspiration for the "Principia Discordia" play. Zappa himself noted that at some point in the production, every single performer had thought it was a stupid idea. I smiled at this anecdote now, thinking myself in good company.
My best friend at the time played Malaclypse the Younger. I'm still in touch with him, and I admire him greatly for his willingness to do this, among other wonderful blessings his friendship has brought me. The night we performed the Entertainment at Something Special, he had just come back to Maryland from travels to New York, and he was sick as a dog. He had a high fever, and he used the opportunity of his character getting shot (I was playing on the whole "If you see the Buddha, kill him" concept) to enjoy the cool floor of the performance space and rest for a bit.
It was an amazing time of growth as a theatre person, an experience I an so privileged to have had, though few saw it, and almost nobody with whom I am in touch now would remember it.
And it's on my resumé.
