WordWorkers

ANOTHER BEST-SELLER!

(By 2030, maybe.)

CHEMO ia our seventh published novel, not counting plays, stories, flashes, and memoirs. It’s a cross-pollination of spy, science fiction, and character comedy.

Eddie Funstion, after 41 years with a murderous Federal agency, learns that retired agents die fast. He exchanges identity with Victor Otis, an ancient hippie with a smelly dog in a small California town, and crosses paths with Judith, whose multiple identities are a result of alien abduction. With her gritty humor, her teenage son Josh, and her lover Moshe, she’s managed a life, but the Feds target her as an enemy sympathizer.

The aliens are actually very nice folks, sending emissaries to heal the traumas they’ve caused. But seeing our r**e of Planet Earth, they are simultaneously planning to kill us as the cancer we are. It’s black, funny, and vaguely hopeful.

You can order from us at DamnedFool.com or IndependentEye.org. Be the first on your block!

Careers in the theater don’t normally result in your boxing up your actors after every show, but that’s been a challenge I’ve faced.

It started way back when, when we first discovered the merits of puppetry. Our first ensemble, Theatre X of Milwaukee, produced several agitprop plays with puppets, but then took a huge chomp of the pumpkin with ALICE IN WONDER, an adaptation of the Lewis Carroll books. Fortunately, those puppets disappeared over the years, but the urge did not.

Only a small fraction of the 60-70 plays we’ve produced have been with puppets, so we haven’t made a name in the puppet realm. I’m not an unbiased judge, but I think we’ve done damned good work in that realm.

Our MACBETH was revived twice and played on tour for years. INANNA went through many changes, finally getting it right. THE TEMPEST and KING LEAR were heart-breaking, and our short pieces in RASH ACTS and HANDS UP! I’d stack up with anything that’s out there, though our work has always been more verbal than visual.

But that’s been a lot of puppets. 23 bins in our shop at last count. We’re in our 80’s: what happens to our creatures when we croak? Our kids don’t have room for these dozens, perhaps hundreds of souls: one’s in Italy, one’s in an apartment in SF, the size of a SF apartment. Tchokschkes you can get rid of at yard sales, books ditto, but people? You surely don’t want to bequeath them to your kids to have to cart to the dump.

So we spread them out in the studio, wall to wall, and allowed the kids first dibs. The rest we offered to OCA, Occidental Center for the Arts, in a tiny town where we’ve done a few things. They’ll do an exhibit (through the month of May), and all revenue from sales will go to OCA.

It’s a trip. I’ve never remotely thought of myself as a visual artist, though I’ve sculpted hundreds of puppets and designed many sets & posters, not to mention stage pictures that any director composes—but all in service of the story told. But here’s a card-carrying art gallery exhibiting my friends for a month!

Same anxieties as opening a play: the impossible worklist, the sudden jolt in the night when you realize that something vital isn’t on the worklist, the possibility—born of long years—that a few people come, see they’re the only ones, and wander out, or that someone will turn away bellowing a loud “Ick!” All those things happen. They’re unwelcome, though they’re survivable.

Meantime, the life of humankind goes on.

Tapdancer is our eleventh novel, based on a play that we wrote and produced in 1992. It started as an horrific dream: a dear friend was convicted of defacing an obnoxious billboard and sentenced to death: I saw him die and woke up weeping.

But it fueled a week’s workshop with a theatre in Seattle, working with actors on improvisations during the day, writing all night. In the odd process, it transformed into a comedy. It was given a reading at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a workshop staging at Mark Taper Forum. Produced by us in Philadelphia and Lancaster PA, later staged by Fulton Opera House.

After about about ten drafts, it’s become a novel. This is the end result, and we’re very proud of it. Certainly it’s dystopian, but a comic, user-friendly dystopia. The world hasn’t gotten less crazy over the course of time, and if you can listen to the evening news without throwing a fit, you’d actually enjoy it.

We don’t want you to waste your time when you could be mouthing ridiculous words to your pet or your spouse. It takes a long time to read a novel if you’re as slow as me (CB).

We think it’s entertaining, funny, profound—but tastes differ. So we’re making this offer. Send us your email ([email protected]) with a request: Send a Tapdancer packet. We’ll send you the first chapter. If you don’t like it, you’ve spent only a few minutes of your life when you could have indulged in something more injurious to your health. If it appeals to you, buy it.

Or just take a chance: go to damnedfool.com or independenteye.org/print and buy the paperbound what-am-I-letting-myself-in-for. It’s $15.95 plus $3 shipping.

I have a friend who’s an artist. He does wonderful abstract drawings and paintings, but also some monumentally brilliant funny stuff. Some years ago, he did a very wise thing: he split his identity. The abstracts are billed under his own name. The nutty-monkey work is the creation of an artist named Unique Fredrique.

The reason is obvious. Like our hamburgers, we need our artists, our singers, or our writers “branded”—i.e. constituting an unique brand. We want to know what we’re getting, and more: we want an image of the artist. If he/she changes, it needs to be in gradual increments or, like a comedian in a serious role, something that recognizes the norm through the contrast.

Certainly artists go through phases: one decade of Picasso isn’t like the last, ditto Dylan, even ditto Andy Warhol. But they tend to be consistent within that phase. If not, they adopt a pseudonym for the “inconsistent” work, e.g. Unique Fredrique.

To our disadvantage, we’ve never done that in our writing or staging. A transparent comedy sketch is followed by opaque myth or kitchen-sink realism. When we ran “subscription seasons” at our theatres in Philadelphia or Lancaster PA, they were perhaps the most unbalanced seasons in American theatre history. It was a standing joke in the office about the guy who was so enamored of a lightweight dance piece we staged that he’d call up regularly for a reservation, inquiring if there were any barefoot women in Waiting for Godot. To his credit, he came anyway.

We’ve added the further complication, since 1982, of claiming dual authorship. That has different forms depending on the piece, but above all it means that we both sign off on the result, acknowledging joint parenthood. But while joint authorship is commonplace with filmscripts or TV comedy, plays and novels (unless pure genre) lose value in the public mind unless we can see them as the unsullied emanations of solo genius.

It struck me as odd, though predictable, that the revelation that John LeCarre’s novels were written in heavy collaboration with his wife was headline news. It contradicts the tradition of the genius working solo, as friends and family offer, at most, a grim patience. Bertolt Brecht at least had the virtue of publishing his plays listing all his collaborators, but the gears grind and we only know his name and certainly not that of Elisabeth Hauptmann. That doesn’t affect the quality of the plays; it only reflects the nature of the fame machine.

We need our heroes, and the corollary is that their fall can be mighty swift. If a politician’s views change over the span of 30 years, he’s labeled either a “waffler” or a hypocrite. If popular novelists’ political views don’t match ours, they’re seen not only as traitors but retroactively as bad writers. The baby and the bathwater are one and the same.

For myself, I don’t feel contaminated by reading Knut Hamsun’s novels despite his N**i sympathies or by appreciating the virtues of a friend despite his despicable flaws or idiotic moments. I don’t reject Michelangelo’s Pieta or Bach’s music because of the millennia of perverse crimes of the Christianity that inspired them. But that’s just me: your mileage may vary.

What does concern me is the realization that my friend is following the only practical path in separating his “serious artist” name from his Unique Fredrique persona. But personally I see his great value in having those seemingly contradictory dimensions.

# # #

I’m writing a novel, fourth draft now, and one of the characters is based a lot on me. Great thing about writing, you can rewrite. Revisions are rarely allowed in life, but in fiction, it’s fiction.

I don’t find myself the most interesting character, but I’m convenient. On the page, I tend to talk very strangely, coming up with lots of stuff that gets cut by the second draft. In reality, I tend to cut it on the first draft. In reality, I think myself worth listening to, but I’m pretty convinced that no one else does, with the exception of Elizabeth most of the time.

Michael, my newest incarnation, is a technical writer, a born cynic who’s been dragged kicking and screaming into a non-traditional lifestyle—but he’s found that these are the people he’d like to kick and scream with. Somewhat to his chagrin, he’s not the main focus of the novel—the characters are like a pizza that’s divided pretty evenly around the table, and only the cat fails to get its own chapter.

In fact, I’d like to get away from this tight-assed type, who’s appeared in past incarnations as a substitute teacher, a tap-dancing investment broker, an ER physician, an aged farmer, and probably in a dozen comedy sketches, including a weatherman and a recent retiree who’s presented himself with his own retirement plaque. Still, he keeps crawling out from under a rock and into the scenario. I’m not sure why. He’d surely be more comfortable out of the limelight. He’s pretty shy.

But perhaps it’s because of his yearning. Just as the cats meow at their cat gate at dawn, he wants to be seen, and there’s both comedy and drama in his howl. I guess it’s more the comedy that attracts me. I’ve done a lot of sad, grim, obsessive stories because in this world I can’t help it, but I’ve come to realize that comedy is a survival tool. Escapist, maybe, but it gives you a sharper sight of the onrushing ogre and better vision to read the map for an escape route.