Artists I admire: Aretha Franklin

I've known about Aretha Franklin for a long time. How could I not? How could anyone not know about Aretha Franklin???

The Queen of Soul recorded the iconic song "Respect," which I've always loved. And then when I was a teenage, she recorded her hit "Freeway of Love" with a music video to go with it. That song was on MTV's "Top 20 Video Countdown" for any number of weeks, and I remember thinking how cool that a woman who sang what I thought of as an "oldie" had a hit in the 80s. Embarrassing to admit, but true.

A few years ago rumors floated around that Ms. Franklin has cancer, and some of her concert appearances were cancelled as a result. I've subsequently read that the health scare was not as severe as first reported, but I still wondered about what was happening with the Queen of Soul. Thankfully, I found out on Tuesday evening when I watched the taped broadcast of 2015's Kennedy Center Honors.

I love the Kennedy Center Honors to begin with, but then Aretha Franklin came out to honor Carole King by singing "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," and it was all over. Full length fur coat, sparkling purse dropped atop the piano, accompanying herself in the piano to start the song, beaming back-up singers giving her the stage and probably wondering how they were lucky enough to be there with her, and then a downstage stroll that included her coat dropping away, Ms. Franklin shook the Kennedy Center and created an iconic, untouchable performance of a song that was already a classic.

I'm not sure that performance on that evening back in December when the show was taped can ever be topped by anyone. Aretha Franklin performed with humility and grace and complete control. And even though she did something extraordinary, it was still absolutely clear that she knew she was honoring someone by doing it. For me, her performance stands as an amazing example of what it means to be a collaborator and an interpreter, to understand that the writer is the primary artist and gives a gift to the performer. And then it's the performer's job to render it with that in mind. Just watch the reactions of Franklin and King after the song is finished. It tells the entire story.

Because I continue to watch the video of her performance with complete awe, admiration, and respect, Aretha Franklin is the artist I admire for this week, and the first one for 2016!

Aretha Franklin http://amzn.to/1OYuCYU ITunes http://apple.co/1QWU5IN Carole King http://amzn.to/1OrTsjv ITunes http://apple.co/1QWUhYk 1 million views 12-31-2015 2,3,4 million 12-31-2015 5-6 million 1-1-2016

Taking stock of 2015

As we come to the end of another year, I think it's a worthwhile practice to take stock of memorable and important professional and personal experiences from this sometimes turbulent, yet often inspiring 2015. Here's a list of some of the more important things that went down for me this year.

Collaborating with Jenny Macdonald on Enthroned

Skype rehearsing with Jenny, December 30, 2015.

Working as a dramaturg and director on this project has certainly been a highlight of this year, and I can't wait to witness Jenny share her show with audiences in just two weeks! We're doing Skype rehearsals in anticipation of the January 14th opening as part of Dublin's First Fortnight Festival, and scenographer Troy Hourie and producer Michelle Cahill are busy sourcing props back and forth across the Big Pond. Can't wait to get in the room with all the team, including Sorcha Shanahan who holds down the fort there in Ireland when I can't be there in the studio.

We Were All Young Once at the Chapin School

Piecing together the script with Sarah Bellantoni.

This enthnodrama marked my first collaboration with high school students using this form, and it allowed me to collaborate with friends and colleagues Sarah Bellantoni, who co-created and directed the show, and Daryl Embry, who designed the scenic elements for the show. They were students a decade ago, two of my first at NYU. I've been working with Daryl for years, and it's always a great experience. This was my first collaboration with Sarah since our NYU days, and she taught me many lessons as we created this project with her students. I love when the roles reverse, and I'm grateful to Sarah for her patience and generous spirit.

In Real Time at NYU Steinhardt's Program in Educational Theatre

Image of full company by Chianan Yen.

In February and March of this year, I worked with a company of student directors and actors to produce six of my short one act plays under the umbrella title In Real Time. It was a great experience to see the plays come alive on stage, and I had the opportunity to learn from the students and collaborate with some of my favorite theatre professionals: Andy Hall (scenic), Emily Stork (lighting), Márion Talán (costumes), and Talia Krispel (PSM). And I had the great fortune to meet and work with Sam Crawford (sound).

And one of the plays from In Real Time, Bromancing the OK, will be produced in a festival of short plays in New York City in April 2016: Mindflood produced by Torrent Theatre. Stay tuned for more information!

Animating the James & Ann Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield

Actors performing in the herb garden behind the James & Ann Whitall House, National Park, NJ.

This site-specific performance project on a Revolutionary War Battlefield in southern New Jersey took three years to come to fruition, but it was one of the most gratifying projects I've ever worked on. A great team of actors and designers (Traci DiGesu and Márion Talán) carried the project to its pilot performances in June 2015, but none of it would have been possible without the amazing contributions of my four primary collaborators, Diane Robinson Macris of the Gloucester County Cultural and Heritage Commission, Sarah Misch, Robert Stevenson, and Liane Tomasetti. Another very important learning experience that helped me to understand where I want to head in 2016.

Ga(y)ze on 14th Street in Manhattan

Learning choreography for ga(y)ze.

Without a doubt, this project represented one of the highlights of my career as a theatre artist, so it certainly tops the list for 2015. A thrilling collaboration with my longtime friend and colleague Troy Hourie and choreographer Caleb Teicher, and continued work with designer Márion Talán and dramaturgs Keith Huff and Sarah Misch. Five great performers took a gigantic risk with us, made this piece in a weekend of workshops, and then shared it with voluntary and involuntary audience members on 14th Street between 3rd Avenue and Irving Place. It was one of the most exciting projects I've ever been a part of, and it taught me that fast and furious can yield deep and profound results. Special thanks to NYU Steinhardt's Forum on Site-Specific Performance for supporting this project!

A website overhaul

I've wanted to do a redesign of my website for quite some time, and I'm so grateful to Christine Carforo for her fantastic work. What a gift!

A PR in my last 15K

2015 started off with my long time running partner Anna Schmidt-MacKenzie moving to Oregon for an exciting new job. I thought that her move might spell the end of my running, but thankfully that was not the case. I miss running with Anna, particularly when it's hot and humid, as we both suffered together through those runs, but I've discovered a new appreciation for the solo run. And that translated into a new PR for me in the Ted Korbitt 15K: 1:11:38. I'll take it!

Developing a writing habit

I've been wanting to get my writing back on track for awhile now, and the relaunch of this blog and some advice from my trainer Jonathan Angelilli have allowed me to do just that. I publish on the blog three times a week, and I write every morning for 30 minutes in a notebook. Sometimes I just ramble, other times I plan my classes, and still other times, I just "work stuff out." I've been at the morning pages for four months and the blog posts for three. Hoping to get the blog posts up to five days a week in 2016. I have a rough draft of a full-length play, and I'm in the throes of writing the next one. I don't know if any of it's good or not, but I don't really care. Writing is something I both dread and look forward to, and I think that's what creation is: hard but gratifying work.

Less is more.

In the spirit of those three words, that's all I'm going to write. Take it for what it's worth.

Confronting my loneliness

The biggest challenge of 2015 is also the hardest to write about, but I think it deserves a shot. Particularly since that challenge created the largest seismic shift in my world that I've experienced in a long time. I realized early on in 2015 that I'd been battling loneliness for years, and I was losing. It was hard to see what I was fighting because from the outside I had no reason to feel lonely. I've got a great relationship with a person who I love and care about very much, loving families (both born into and created), supportive friends and collaborators, a good job, a nice house, a loyal cat, and the list goes on. That said, I felt like I was spending a lot of time by myself, and that alone time was playing tricks in my head. Being by myself has never been easy for me, and more recently I found myself falling into a lot of bad habits to try to combat those lonely feelings. I could see the bad habits, but instead of being able to change them, I just got depressed and they got worse. Thankfully, I eventually encountered a crisis, one that rattled my cage enough to wake me up and help me to see that the glass is actually way more full than it is empty, even when I'm literally by myself. From that moment forward, I've been able to embrace the time alone and put it to far more productive uses, even enjoy it, and I'm happy to say that life looks much better from this vantage point than it did a year ago. I'm grateful that I have patient people in my life, people who understand how to listen, to forgive, and to love. Without them, I'd not be able to write any of this yearly wrap up, much less this part of it. New York City may be a thriving metropolis full of people, but that fullness can also amplify feelings like loneliness. I think it's important to talk about, which is why I'm sharing it as part of this yearly wrap up.

Here's to an amazing 2016 with lots of exciting projects and opportunities for learning!

Happy New Year! 

At Capacity--Scene 4: Another perspective

Scene 4

(Lights up on Steve in the dining room, surrounded by boxes. The three caroling dolls are set up in the corner of the room (downstage), and they are glowing. Steve is asleep, his head down on the table. He has on a knit hat and scarf. The clock on the wall reads about 3:30am. He is snoring lightly and sleeping pretty soundly. It doesn’t look comfortable to be sleeping that way, but he seems to be at peace and in a deep sleep. Outside in the distance, a dog starts to bark, a car door slams, the dog continues to bark, the car starts, its engine revs and then races past the house with squealing tires. Steve sits up with a start.)

STEVE
Jesus Christ!  What the--?

(He looks around the room as the car speeds away and there are more tire squeals as it rounds a corner and moves away, the sound fading in the distance. The dog continues to bark for a few moments and then quiets down. Steve looks around, sees what time it is, and groans. He drops his head back down to the table and tries to fall back asleep. The snowflake tree topper is under some tissue paper on the table, and it begins to glow, like the caroling dolls, except that the snowflake has more of a pulsing quality. There’s also a slight humming that accompanies the glowing, very low pitched, but growing in intensity. As the humming becomes more prominent, Steve stirs at the table. He changes position with his head turned away from the snowflake. The light coming from it gets brighter and the humming sound gets more intense. Steven sits up quickly and everything stops: humming and glowing. It’s dark in the room, other than the light coming in from the streetlight outside.

Steve sits up in his chair and looks around the room again. He gets up and goes to the window, looks outside to see if there’s anyone out there. Walks back to his chair, sits down, and notices the snowflake for the first time. He picks up the tissue paper on top of it, sees what it is, and a smile spreads across his face. He picks it up and it glints in the little bit of light coming through the window.)

STEVE
After all these years, they finally found you. (He looks up, like he did out in the park before.) Well played.

(As he continues to turn the snowflake over in his hands, the caroling dolls begin to glow ever so slightly, not as strong as at the top of the scene, but noticeable for the audience. He sets the snowflake back down on the table, and looks up.)

STEVE
Uh . . . I don’t know whether you can hear me or not? I don’t really believe there’s a heaven or anything like that, but my shrink told me that it would be OK if I talked to you. He said even if you’re not there, like you can’t hear me, it’s good for me to talk. Say what I need to say. (He waits for an answer. He doesn’t notice, but the caroling dolls have gotten a little brighter.) My shrink says it’ll help me either way, so uh . . . yeah . . .  (He looks up again for an answer. Nothing.)

(Steve takes off his hat and scarf. He’s got major hat head. He starts to pace around the room a little, looking up as he talks.)

STEVE
You know . . . . uh . . . how’s mom? Is she there with you? Are you together? (Again, he waits for a response.) My shrink said this would happen. That asking questions, trying to get answers wasn’t gonna work. That instead I should say things I felt. That I wanted to say. Needed to say.  And didn’t get the chance . . . But I just have a lot of questions. And that’s not helpful cause I’m not gonna get any answers. (He pauses, frustrated, confused about what he’s even doing.) My shrink is into all this “verbalizing my thoughts” stuff. He says it keeps me from getting too anxious, and when I saw him last, he said that you dying like this, like so suddenly and all? That it can make it really hard to get any closure. Like if you had died slowly, like over time, I could have said a bunch of stuff.  You could have said a bunch of stuff too, and like maybe we’d have said a bunch of stuff that needed to be said. And there’d be kinda some peace. (He pauses here and looks around the room. The caroling dolls have gone dark.) But the fact that you all up and died so fast you know, no one had a chance to say anything. Like nothing. So that leaves us with a lot of questions. Or me with a lot of questions. My shrink says that I should speak for myself and not for Julia or Claire or anyone else. So correction. I have a lot of questions.

(Steve walks back to the chair, sits down, and picks up the snowflake.)

STEVE
I remember the night this happened. Gone missing. Claire called from the road and said she was almost home. We were eating dinner. Roast beef and mashed potatoes. . . . Mom told youto get the boxes of decorations down from the attic so we could decorate the tree. You told me to hurry up and finish my food so I could help. I shoved the rest of my potatoes in all at once, and Julia was like “That’s gross” and then she got up and stamped up to her room and slammed the door. I followed you up to the attic and watched you pull out the boxes. I carried three of them down to the living room, and when I came back up, you had the last one pulled out and opened up. When I came up the steps, you looked at me a little like I caught you doing something wrong. Like you didn’t expect me back so soon. The snowflake topper was next to the box, wrapped up in tissue. This tissue. It’s how we always put it back in the box after each Christmas, and there it was. I asked you why it was out of the box, and you told me to sit down on the attic steps. You told me that you hated that goddamned snowflake topper, hated it for 25 years, and that you’d had enough. That you didn’t want the goddamned snowflake on your goddamned Christmas tree and that I better keep my goddamned mouth shut or you were going to beat my goddamned ass silly. Then you asked me if I understood. And all I could do was nod my head because at that point I was so scared of you that I didn’t know what else to do. You handed me the box and told me to remember what you said and to go downstairs. And that’s what I did.  And later that night when you and Mom started to fight about the snowflake, I just kept my goddamned mouth shut like you told me to. And at breakfast the next day, when Mom was on the phone with Gram, carrying on about the missing snowflake, I just ate my cereal and kept my goddamned mouth shut. Year after year I kept my goddamned mouth shut, and then here it is. After all these years. To think that it took you both dying for the girls to find the goddamned snowflake. Priceless. It’s been up there all this time, and nobody else ever looked hard enough for it. You knew no one would. We all hated that goddamned snowflake. Except for Mom. (Steve picks up the snowflake and lets it catch the light.)  Except for Mom.

(Steve sits down and puts the snowflake to his heart and starts to cry. As he does, the snowflake begins to glow in his hands and humming begins again. He notices none of it. The caroling dolls glow as well. All lights fade to black and the humming follows into the darkness then fades during the next transition. End of scene.)

Artists I admire: Charles M. Schulz

When I was a kid, our local library had a large number of Peanuts books, collections of comic strips that appeared in syndication and were then collected and anthologized in these books. I loved reading those books because I learned more about the characters, their pasts, and why they behaved in the comic strip I would see each week in the Sunday newspaper.

I also religiously watched A Charlie Brown Christmas special on television every year. At that point in time it was barely a decade old. This year that special show celebrated its 50th anniversary. Each year I still try to watch the show, but I own it in DVD and watch when it's convenient for me. This year, that was this past Wednesday evening, the night before I traveled down to my family for our Christmas celebrations. I sat down with my cat Buster, some dinner, and a cocktail, and watched the saga of Charlie Brown and his friends as they tried to navigate the growing commercialism of Christmas. As I took in all the familiar scenes, I couldn't help but notice that we're still dealing with so many of the same questions now, 50 years later.

At that famous moment when Charlie Brown stands on stage and yells, "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?", Linus steps forward and offers his explanation, only after asking, "Lights, please?" And then he proceeds to tell us what we need to hear. When the bustle takes it out of our hustle, we need to remember Linus and his message. Not because it's a religious message, but rather because it illustrates just how far removed we've gotten from the intentions of Christmas.

In his book Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, the French theatre director Michel Saint-Denis wrote about how when a play has style, it transcends age and time because it has quality. He used this description of style to explain why we still produce Shakespeare's plays 400 years after they were first written. I venture to say that we continue to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas and read the comic for the same reason. Charles M. Schulz found some way of showing us something about ourselves that truly resonated all those years ago and continues to resonate today. The questions he raised in the television special and in the syndicated comic strip won't go away. Even when they're specific, about something like Christmas, we still find a way to relate that experience to the larger world, regardless of religious practice. Specificity leads to universality, not the other way around.

For reminding us what Christmas is all about for 50 years and for allowing children to be the ones to say what we all really needs to know, through their innocence and their learning, Charles M. Schulz is the artist I admire this week.

On my Christmas list: A fraction of His humanity

Ever since I was a kid, I've appreciated Christmas as a holiday, largely because my parents have always made it an event of epic proportions. Lots of food, lost of music, lots of gifts, lots of generosity. It doesn't hurt that they also brought me home from the hospital on Christmas Day, 1971, three days after I was born. So I think there's something about "home" and the "holiday" that rings true for me in a very deep way.

Flash forward some years, and suddenly I was old enough to understand that Christmas had more to do with celebrating the birth of a very important child than it did about Santa Claus and getting presents. The evolution of my understanding of giving and receiving catalyzed largely through the exposure I had to the story of Jesus and his very humble birth. While I don't practice Catholicism anymore, I can't deny that much of my way of interacting with other people in the world has roots in the teachings of Jesus. And I don't mean the literal words of the Bible, but rather the interpretations of what this person had to offer through His stories and parables. If I take the Bible at face value, as a chronicle of Jesus' time on Earth, then He was one of the very best storytellers to ever live. He found ways to teach people by telling stories, and those lessons have influenced the world for generations. The very best kind of theatre artist.

Now, if you're reading this and you know me, you may be wondering what in the hell I'm going on and on about. I go to church once year, on Christmas Eve, I never talk about Jesus, I'm gay, I get offended by conservative Christian rhetoric around my so called "life choice," and the list about negative connotations I have about organized religion goes on and on. However, as I reflect this holiday season about my life and the state of the world, I can't help but feel an immense gratitude to this person, Jesus.

This Jesus and the people who chose to tell His stories after He passed away have left an indelible mark, and for me to deny that I've also been marked by His teachings would be silly. I don't believe that all of the stories that He told or are told about Him actually happened or are true in a literal sense. However, I believe in their messages: that human beings should treat each other how they themselves want to be treated; that a person born from humble beginnings can actually change the world; that goodness and humanity live inside all of us.

Those ideas are the key takeaways for me about Jesus and Christianity. All of the other rhetoric that accompanies Jesus, coming from the mouths of people who claim to speak for Him, to have studied Him and His book, it's just smoke and mirrors to cover the human need for status, power, prestige, influence, land, goods, services, etc.

"Let me tell you why everyone else is bad, but I'm good.  And here's how you can be like me. But to do that, you have to look down on other people, make them less than you. Then you'll be on top."

I'm no Bible scholar, but I don't think that Jesus ever said anything like that. Nor did He demand that people be like Him. Jesus was not about "Me Me Me." He asked people to be good to one another. Which I think is why we give gifts to honor His presumed birthday, to literally exhibit goodness to one another. It's also why people are asked to lay down their differences at Christmas, to cease fire, to come together as families, to forgive past wrongs.

Honestly, I'm tired of only asking for these "acts of goodness" to happen at Christmas. Maybe if the people proclaiming that they understood Jesus really paid attention to some of the things they think He said, we'd have a lot better world on our hands right now.  So that's what I'm reflecting on as we prepare once again to ritualize and celebrate His birth. How can I allow the teachings of Jesus, that I know are inside of me whether I like it or not, find their way to my surface? I'm not headed back to church, and I'm not searching for my salvation. I'm just trying to tap into a fraction of the humanity that this man Jesus somehow exhibited and articulated to those around him.  And then somehow changed the world for ages to follow. A fraction of His humanity. How can I find that?