Grant writing is like having to write your college application essays over and over and over again. Central is the attempt to communicate a deceptively simple idea: I am awesome. I am so awesome that you should just give me everything I want. I have really good plans for the future and have done things in my past to make me ready for those plans. With you help, I can achieve, and in the coming years will bring glory to your organization. This should be simple. This should be easy. And believe you me, as a person who, for a living, helps high schoolers write their college application essays, it is like pulling teeth. Not human teeth. Cat teeth. It's not that the kids can't do it: many of them are excellent writers. It's that writing a few paragraphs about your best qualities and how you came to get them or how you use them to make the world a better place is like being dragged, slowly, face first, through ground glass for these kids. For all of us. Give me a teeth cleaning by a dental assistant with muscle spasms before you put me through the embarrassment of talking about my good points.
I mentioned Sunday in the Park with George in my last entry; there is a line in that musical in which Commander Data (yes, it's Brent Spiner playing a different character, but if you were even a slightly nerdy kid in the late 80s, he is Commander Fucking Data from now until the sun explodes) sings, "Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself." Well, yes and no. Art is work. It is labor. Failing to recognize that is, I think, an inherent problem of our society. Yet it is also work that feels satisfying in a way that nothing else has been in my life. I don't know if that stops it from being work; I think that anyone who owns their own business feels a similar sense of satisfaction. The work is your own: when you see the thing that you made, you know that it is yours. I feel like there's a powerful Marxist analysis to be done here, especially when you think about how many more artisans we used to have making things that have become industrial products, but that would require a lot of time and research and oh, that's right, I have a grant to write.
If you can't tell. I am procrastinating. But rather than doing that, I am going to try to tell a story.
I came back to Austin at the end of 2006 with something inside me barely alive, something that I have left Berkeley in order to save. One of the first things I did was meet up with some old friends who were participating in the First Night Parade for New Year's Eve. They were friends that I had known from my days at the Rhizome Collective, an anarchist community where I had done theatre during my first stint in Austin. It was a place of very happy memories. The first time I had come to Austin, I began doing activist theatre with the Rhizome and had more fun than I had ever expected to have while waiting to go to grad school. I created experimental theatre pieces from scratch, for the most part with people who had no theatre training, and I was hugely proud of what I had done, and made very dear friends doing it. And yet I had left: some awful, horrible, lying, frightened voice inside me said it was time to grow up, that I had to leave that behind and be an adult. So I went to graduate school and was back two and a half years later, trying to get back something of what I had given up.
What I found was giant butterflies. Giant moths. A giant bat with a face like something out of a Jim Henson movie, and if you know me you know that "like something out of a Jim Henson movie" is a pretty huge compliment. I looked at these creations and marveled. I marveled. It so rarely that we get a chance to marvel, particularly at something that we can actually touch. And in my head the vision came. All the people who had been part of this world I'd loved and given up, the radical punks coming out the trees into the big open fields of Zilker Park on dozens of bikes, beating on buckets and cans and other pieces of garbage turned into drums and bells and tambourines, pouring out around a giant monarch on one end of the park, a giant moth on the other. At the helm of the butterfly, a tall, imposing Oberon; on the moth, a wild-haired Titania. And between the two, racing around on a Henson-worthy bat, tumbling and turning cartwheels, I saw Puck. It was a play I had never wanted to do before. It has been done thousands of times, and the story is nowhere near as interesting to me as that of Twelfth Night, or Anthony and Cleopatra, or The Taming of the Shrew or any other Shakespeare plays that I've thought of directing over the years. But the bikes called out for these characters to ride them, or the characters cried out to ride these bikes. I still don't know which of those two is more true, or more important, or if it matters. A Midsummer Night's Dream on a stage still held no interest for me. A Midsummer Night's Dream in a field, in a park, at a huge scale, with the energy that my friends brought to their work and their life, THAT is a play that I wanted to see. That is a play that I wanted to direct.
And then four years passed.
Well, we thought about it a while ago. We even had some sketches going. But then the artistic director said ten magic words to me as she was leaving our meeting: "And then next year we can do Alice in Wonderland." I said, "Wait, what? Sit back down." There are few stories as important to me, as loved, as formative as Alice in Wonderland. It was the first "big" book I read, the first one that didn't have pictures on every page. It was my literary gateway drug. And it made total sense. The giant snake bike could be the Caterpillar. The Caucus Race could happen on bicycles. And the best part was that the structure was episodic: as long as I had a willing Alice, the rest of the cast could commit to smaller rehearsal schedules. For that matter, we could make those episodes into radically different things: dance numbers, comedy pieces, etc. A few months later, we had Wheels of Wonderland. It is one of the things that I am most proud of, not least because I was crying myself to sleep the night before it opened wondering how the fuck we were going to make it work. And yet we did. It was wonderful. We had juggler creating the Rabbit Hole, a silent movie scene for the White Rabbit's house, burlesque dancers for the Garden of Live Flowers, a bike joust between the White and Red Knights and yes, a giant snake for a Caterpillar and a Caucus Race on bikes. More than that, though, we had a story. We had an arc. Alice was an adult, traveling down to Wonderland to try to figure out where she went wrong in her life, trying on the identities of a hero fighting the Jabberwocky, of a predatory Cheshire Cat, of a madwoman at a Tea Party before finally learning how to stand up to--and above, by a good five and a half feet--the world that tries to tell her who she is. People got that. They said so. Without prompting! Pretty good for experimental theatre.
This wasn't just experimental theatre, though: this was experimental theatre for the whole family. Normally, when we think of experimental theatre, we think either of something gritty and raw with lots of sex and violence and cursing, or something so esoteric that no one under the age of 18 would be willing to sit through it, much less understand it. This was neither, and yet it was still unusual, something that pushed the audience even while giving them the familiarity of Lewis Carroll's world. It was, in short, the kind of theatre that I want to do, that I love to do, that I fell for during college and had convinced myself, by the age of 24, that I couldn't do anymore if I wanted to be an adult. Well, if that's what being an adult means, give me my underoos and Go-Gurt, because I am going to go stage a production of Alice in Wonderland on bicycles, and I intend to do so well into the next decade, and hopefully the one after that.
Only now it's A Midsummer Night's Dream, or Midsummer in Motion, as we're calling it. It's been a long time coming. And it needs money. Lots of money. Money from rich people. I am sick of funding my friends' theatre projects and having them fund mine: I want other people to fund us, so that we can have more money. I'm happy to hear that the Austin theatre community is coming together to figure out how we can do that. But until then, it is time for my to put on my biggest smile and tell some rich people all about just how gosh-darn brilliant we all are. It is the work I do for others, and surprisingly enough, it is still art.
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