ArtSake

In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.

Here, Eric Henry Sanders (Playwriting Fellow ‘09) discusses the evolution of his play Reservoir.

Listen to a scene from Reservoir, performed by Company One Theatre. Directed by Shawn LaCount, with Fedna Jacquet as Psychiatrist and Brett Marks as Hasek:

INSPIRATION

My inspiration for Reservoir grew out of the chance confluence of several sources: media coverage of the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Georg Büchner’s 1837 expressionistic masterpiece Woyzeck, and scholarly texts that fused readings of classic Greek theatre with the psychological impact of war on returning veterans, including Bob Meagher’s Herakles Gone Mad (2006) and Jonathan Shay’s Odysseus in America (2002).

Büchner’s play is the story of a soldier abused and dominated by authority figures – Captain, Doctor, Drum Major – as he strives to support Marie, the mother of his child. At its heart the plot is a classic tale of jealous love; when Woyzeck correctly suspects that Marie is having an affair, his tenuous grasp on reality severs and he drifts into murderous madness.

In its treatment of Woyzeck as a soldier, the plot bears sad and striking resemblance to several reports of veterans returning from Afghanistan. In July 2002, in four separate instances, veterans murdered their spouses at Fort Bragg. Those murders are emblematic of a rise in domestic violence by returning veterans, and as subsequent scandals over the care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center have made clear, the military is woefully unprepared to deal with the thousands of personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical and psychological wounds. It is a tragic irony that with the latest advances in battlefield medicine a wounded US soldier has a better chance of surviving a physical injury than ever before, only to suffer a greater likelihood of psychological trauma, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), when returning to civilian life. Symptoms of PTSD such as hypervigilance, rage, and restlessness – which can be useful as survival adaptations – can under conditions of extreme or prolonged stress change the chemical make-up of the brain, making the adjustment to coming home unbearable.

My initial thought, then, was to write a contemporary adaptation of Woyzeck which would acknowledge these struggles by depicting the eponymous protagonist as a soldier suffering from the psychological strains of active duty in a foreign war.

CREATION

As I began to write, however, I found myself moving further and further away from a strict adaptation of the original text.

Considering Woyzeck, I was struck by the parallels in Büchner’s portrayal of his soldier protagonist with descriptions of PTSD in returning veterans. In this light, the tormenting secondary characters in the original play may be read as the malevolent and possessive manifestations of an injured mind. The carnival-mirror world which Büchner creates is, if read in these terms, starkly recognizable.

Were I a director, I would have chosen to take that idea and direct the original play as if all its actions were being viewed through the distorted lens of Woyzeck’s interior vision. But as a writer, I did not see the need to retread the same ground as Büchner.

Instead of following an experimental rendering of Woyzeck’s first-person narrative, I wanted to discover both how Woyzeck (since renamed Frank Hasek in my play) came to the condition he was in, and, by shifting to a traditional third-person point-of-view, to fully render the motivations and humanity of the secondary characters. This inclination became particularly acute as I began a correspondence with several veterans – a doctor who served in Baghdad, a young air force pilot waiting to be deployed to Afghanistan, and an infantry soldier who served in Vietnam – to get a sense of their actual wartime experiences and the difficulty they faced (where applicable) of returning home. This research, in particular, was vital to creating all the characters as fully dimensional and understandable (if not, for dramatic purposes, always sympathetic).

With this new challenge in mind, the key then was to contemplate and depict the circumstances leading to the play’s inevitable conclusion. While the broad outline of the plot is still in place, I found it necessary to rewrite and reconceptualize the entire story, giving life to the desires, motivations, and obstacles facing each of the five characters on stage. Here, Hasek is trying to get well in order to provide for Marisa and their baby, but as he struggles through the symptoms of his condition, his ability to stay focused on his work and maintain a healthy relationship is increasingly strained. In turn, Marisa’s affair is motivated by the stability and normality of the Sergeant. And the doctor, rather than being a malevolent presence bent on experimenting on Woyzeck, developed into a therapist treating Hasek for PTSD, while struggling with her own burden of having far too many patients and far too little time to treat them all properly.

In the end, I hope that the play remains engaging on a dramatic level. And though the tragedy of the story remains, I hope that by focusing on these issues I can expose the relevance of problems faced by returning veterans in today’s world, and in so doing gesture towards a hopeful future.

REALIZATION

After completing a first “final” draft of the play I decided to do something I’d never done with any of my seven previous full-length plays. Rather than sending the script out immediately, I waited several months so that I could reread it with fresh eyes, thinking that I would make changes and then it would be perfect without the need for a huge development process. So I put it aside, waited, and after three months I was delighted to see that I knew exactly what it needed. Great. Perfect. I made the changes, and then arranged a table reading with Ian Morgan at the New Group in New York.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but after hearing it aloud for the first time, I was shocked to realize how much work the play still needed. My sympathies for the secondary characters had clouded my eyes to the necessity of keeping the drama as tense as possible. In short, there was no antagonist. Deepening the dramatic conflict formed the basis of my next revision.

Two subsequent readings – with the Astoria Performing Arts Center (NY), directed by Tom Wojtunik, and at the Drilling Company (NY), directed by Joe Clancy – and several subsequent revisions later, I was fortunate enough to work with Company One on an audio recording for the Massachusetts Cultural Council blog.

That recording – directed by Shawn LaCount (Artistic Director, Company One), starring Fedna Jacquet (Psychiatrist) and Brett Marks (Hasek), and organized by Anne Morgan (Literary Manager, Company One) – was a pleasure to work on and one of the most satisfying expressions of the play thus far. Though we were only recording one scene, it is a testament to the skill and talent of all who participated that Shawn was able to coax the abundant gifts of the two actors into characterizations that were immediately believable and nuanced.

Finally, with this draft completed and a production scheduled at the Drilling Company November 4th – 24th, 2010, I hope that I have accomplished what I set out to achieve with the script. Of course, anything can – and probably will – change in rehearsals.

Special thanks to Company One Theatre. Don’t miss Company One’s next play, GRIMM, a world premiere evening of short plays that re-imagine classic fairy tales. July 16-August 14, 2010, at the Roberts Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion, in Boston.

Images: Eric Henry Sanders; Georg Büchner; promotional image from early version of RESERVIOR (then known as WOYZECK: HOMECOMING); Company One Theatre reads RESERVOIR; Company One Artistic Director Shawn LaCount offers direction to actress Fedna Jacquet.

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.

Here, writer and editor Tara L. Masih takes us through the writing process that produced the upcoming story collection Where the Dog Star Never Glows (Press 53, 2010).

Tara will read from the collection at Brookline Booksmith on February 23.

INSPIRATION

Inspiration for the stories in my debut collection came from many places: snippets of conversation shared and overheard; newspaper stories; and personal experiences, especially during travel. I look for stories in landscapes, in unusual facts, in the absurd, in research. But there are those special, all-too-rare stories that find me. I wish I could control that process, that sudden, electric realization that I have a story to write, a character to listen to, and something of import to translate from nebulous stirrings into coherent language. Louisa May Alcott had a Glory Cloak that she would wear, sewn by her mother, to inspire her to finish writing her books. I don’t have props, just drive. But I love that image of the writer cloaked in “glory” as she created one of our most enduring classics.

In the end, necessity is the most important part of inspiration for me. What made each story good enough to appear in this book was a feeling that it was necessary in some way that I start writing it, finish it, polish it as best I could, and then send it out into the world.

CHALLENGE

Sylvia Plath said that the worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Inspiration is the fun step, the addictive step I keep looking for. The challenge, once I start writing, is to keep self-doubt from interfering. It can be depressing when the brilliant passage I wrote in my half-sleep the night before turns out to be clichéd garbage the next morning. It can be a challenge to not get distracted with life to the point where inspiration turns into heavy responsibility or duty. The goal is to keep writing and finish the story even though it does now feel like duty and the early adrenaline rush is gone. Only in a few rare occurrences has inspiration carried me all the way through an instant first draft, even in the briefer flash form. More often than not, work intervenes, child and family interrupts, and I have to look to those obligations I’d rather ignore, like food and water and sleep!

I meet the challenge when I ignore self-doubt and give birth to that first complete draft, which in some cases is within hours, in other cases, years. But the challenge continues as I rework the draft, looking for all the ways I can show that “glint of light on broken glass,” as Chekhov advises.

COMPLETION

I know when a story is complete when I simply cannot think of a way to improve it anymore, or know I’m incapable of taking it to any other place than where it ends. Feedback is crucial, because it’s hard to be objective about your own work, particularly fiction. I find trust is the final step in completion - trusting you’ve learned to separate the bad advice from the good, trusting your publisher to make insightful edits, trusting your decision to make it public, and then trusting readers with your creation. It’s not an easy thing, putting your work out there. It’s a very naked feeling, in fact. In retrospect, I suppose challenge appears at every stage. It can’t be compartmentalized into one area of the creative process. It continues, on to the next project that inspires.

Read about Where the Dog Star Never Glows in NewPages, where it is listed as a new & noteworthy fiction book.

On Feb. 23, 6:30 PM, there will be a launch party for the collection at Brookline Booksmith. This will be a party to celebrate the book’s launch and the local writers/mentors/teachers who helped it come to fruition. Come for champagne, wine, juice, chocolate-covered strawberries, and more. Reading and Q&A, with a prize for best question. 279 Harvard St., Brookline, MA.

Tara L. Masih grew up in the small harbor town of Northport, situated along the Long Island Sound. Much of her time was spent on the beaches and in the woods, and as a result her writing is often set within the framework of nature and place. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in numerous literary magazines, including Confrontation, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, New Millennium Writings, Red River Review, Night Train, and The Caribbean Writer, as well as in many anthologies. Several limited edition, illustrated chapbooks featuring her flash fiction have been published by The Feral Press. Awards for her work include first place in The Ledge Magazine’s fiction contest, a finalist fiction grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and Best of the Web nominations. Tara judges the intercultural essay prize for the annual Soul-Making Literary Contest, and is editor of the acclaimed Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (2009). C. W. Post College presented her with the Lou P. Bunce Creative Writing Award upon graduation, and Emerson College, where she received her MA in Writing and Publishing, awarded her with a Bookbuilders of Boston Scholarship. Tara now works as a freelance book editor in Andover, Massachusetts.

Images (top to bottom): author photo, Tara L. Masih; quote from the story “The Burnings;” quote from the story “Delight;” quote from the story “The Guide, the Tourist, and the Animal Doctor;” quote from the story “Bird Man;” cover image from Tara L. Masih’s story collection WHERE THE DOG STAR NEVER GLOWS (Press 53, 2010).

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.

Here, 2008 Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow Tracy Winn takes us through the writing process that produced the upcoming story collection Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Southern Methodist University Press 2009).

INSPIRATION

The best part of writing a story is probably the rush of thinking I’ve finished - that sizzle up the spine that comes with believing I have accomplished something. A closing sentence announces itself. I type. I see the circle of the story come around to meet itself. I hear closure in the rhythm of the final sentence slowing the pace of words, coming to a stop, coming into the station like a train, finding its long-anticipated point of rest.

For a couple of days, I’ll walk around propped up by my secret success - there is a new story written and I’m the clever one who wrote it. I marvel at the characters I’ve brought to life in the story, savor the metaphors, and affectionately retrace the connections that bind it as a whole. In re-reading it, I might strengthen a phrase or two. However, I’m not really working to improve it, just hoping to feel again the tingle of accomplishment - the congratulatory pat to the ego - that goes with re-realizing I’ve made something new.

Getting to this point of completion has challenged me deeply. My process is messy and slow and inefficient. It usually begins when I notice a quirk of reality like a blind man hitchhiking, or a small child in expensive clothes giving the finger to passersby in a park, or a solar eclipse reproduced precisely, in miniature on the sidewalk a hundred times through holes in the leaves of a sickly little tree. The wind shakes the leaves and all the tiny eclipses projected on the ground, dance, igniting in me a sense of wonder, attracting my imagination and inspiring me to begin something. I write little blocks of a story - a paragraph or a scene to each block - not knowing the story’s shape or where they will fit into the flow of the piece. I move them around to discover what their proximity provokes. Then I write in my notebook about what I see in front of me, naming the possibilities of what happens in what order, adding new blocks and discarding those that seem less vital.

My process resembles what my great grandmother did when her edema was bad. She’d take up residence in her rocker, crochet hook in hand, her ankles swelling over the tops of her lace-up heels. She’d pile completed afghan squares at her feet. Each square had its own color scheme and logic, but eventually it would need to connect to its abutters, need to be sewn in so the assemblage would make a sensible and pleasing whole. Similarly, the blocks of my story must be hooked in and smoothed until seamless. So when that ultimate sentence arrives for me, my relief and delight at having finished overwhelms my better judgment. The fox of forgetfulness steals in and pilfers all memory of other times I’ve “finished” a story.

CHALLENGE

The illusion of completion can last for quite a while, during which the story sits on my desk. Or, even worse, the story gets sent to some journal with a contest deadline approaching. You’ll notice the passive voice in the last sentence - as if I play no part in acting on the assumption that the story is finished. But written work demands an audience as fervently as the visual or performing arts. The story needs to create a reaction in someone other than its writer. So begins the second stage in the process of creation. I share the work with a trusted reader or two. They challenge my assumptions. They ask questions that reveal their misunderstanding of a key component of the story. I rewrite. Time passes. I get to know the story a little better. I collect a few rapid rejections from periodicals. Eventually, the reasons cited for rejection, the passage of time, and the questions asked by my writer friends crack the illusion that the story has arrived.

Time passing allows for a certain distance from the work. I begin to see only everything wrong with it. Before you can say “solar eclipse,” the story has become a poor limp thing, dead in the water, an embarrassment to its maker, and I wonder how I could ever have been so thoroughly deluded as to show it to anybody, never mind sending it off to garner praise and awards. If I am lucky and smart at this point, I will hear my former teacher, Tracy Daugherty saying, “You have a beautiful problem.” His words remind me that the reactions the piece has elicited from my trusted readers are not all bad. They’ve recognized something vital in there that might still be released. If I climb back into the story, sharpening images, clarifying the shape and intent - those intangibles that have begun to reveal themselves more clearly to me - I might still rescue it.

COMPLETION

I am thinking now of the title story in Mrs. Somebody Somebody, my book of linked stories to be published by SMU Press in April ‘09. That story was once an eighteen-page piece called “Lucy’s Notes.” It now spans sixty pages and doesn’t include a single one of Lucy’s notes. The re-write required a concentrated time of dreaming, which was afforded by a stay at the MacDowell Colony where my characters tugged on me, even as I slept, insisting that I plunge back in and re-work. When the next version of the ultimate sentence presented itself, I suspected it was an impostor, and knew that only time would tell. I let time pass as the story sat in a drawer, doing whatever stories do in their secret lives, gestating, fermenting, aging, ripening. Whatever I call it, time seems an integral requirement to the process, as important to finishing a story as the close re-writing that results from the annealing questions from trusted readers.

I forget every time that the real ending - the final sentence that replaces all impostors - won’t make its appearance until the story has been tempered like glass or steel by readers’ reactions, by time, and by revision. Inspiration must be followed by challenge. And the story can’t really be completed until after time has passed - long enough for me to know the story so well that I can solve my “beautiful problem.”

Images (top to bottom): Tracy Winn; quote from the story “Mrs. Somebody Somebody;” quote from the story “Blue Tango;” cover image from Tracy Winn’s story collection Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Southern Methodist University Press 2009).

Tracy Winn’s short stories have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Calyx, New Orleans Review, Western Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and others.

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.

The first artist to take the challenge is the inventive, widely accomplished choreographer and dancer Christian Burns, who received a 2008 Artist Fellowship in Choreography. He discusses the work Beneath Your Sheltering Hand through Creation, Challenge, and Culmination.

CREATION

I create dances because I want to learn something new.

I start without any single idea directing the final outcome. It’s a mix of knowing and not-knowing. On one hand I bring clear initiation to the creative process and on the other hand I have to maintain keeping no expectations about where it will lead. Then I respond to the energy and flow of those initiations and hopefully arrive at a work that can speak to me, not only me speaking out through the work.

Within Beneath Your Sheltering Hand, I had absolutely no idea what the work would become. Initially the creation emerged because I was invited to create a new work for the West Wave Festival in San Francisco. As a former resident of San Francisco, I was lucky enough to be considered for this curation, which required me to collaborate with a California resident. Oakland based video artist Tony Discenza and I are old friends and this opportunity seemed like a great chance to make a new work together.

We started with one conceptual jumping off-point. We had an interest in exploring relationships between media and our consumer behavior and the American mythologies that drive such behavior.

From an early emailed discourse attempting to articulate this point, Tony Discenza offered, “The oppressive nature of the media and the burden of living in a constant flux of dense, highly mediated information, in such quantities, that no real sense can be made of it. The implication being that the media thinks of itself as somehow benevolent (i.e. sheltering) but really it’s more like we’re crushed beneath its force.”

Tony was working with appropriated photo and audio samples - pictures of exotic vacation destinations, SkyMall product descriptions being read by a canned computer voice and high-end real-estate promotional animations as well as other material. All perverted references to the good life - to the American dream. These elements that are supposed to be our desires, but they all are flat, empty and deceptive - ultimately reinforcing an addiction to being someplace else.

Choreographically, I knew I would create and perform a solo. The solo form is something that I have continued to return to over the years. My connection to dance and dance making still comes from my research rooted in the experience of dancing, rather than the objectification of the craft of step-based sequencing. It is the ephemeral experience of dance that I am most drawn to. And for Sheltering Hand I knew I wanted to experience the states that would emerge from physically pushing my body in this way.

I was interested in the moments when impulse becomes action. I wanted to see if I could isolate those moments, in order to subvert and redirect the course of those actions. I wanted to create a textural pallet where I would never be settled within any singular direction. I would always be caught between the moment of initiating an action and cutting off that initiation before it finished it’s following through never settling.

CHALLENGE

The ongoing challenge of creating Sheltering Hand lay in the fact that we had a limited amount of time to create it and prepare it for stage. We had about a month of long distance discussions where the conceptual elements and title were defined and then we had only about ten days in person to create the work. I was working daily on the choreographic material and we conducted about a half dozen shared rehearsals where we defined the length of the sections and ultimate shape of the piece. The experience of performing the work was an absolutely challenging event for me. It was as much of an athletic sprint as I have ever had in a dance. And as is usually the case, we weren’t going to know how the piece would read to the audience until it was performed. As was the logistic reality of the festival programming, we had only one performance for Beneath Your Sheltering Hand to see what we had.

CULMINATION

I am very pleased with how this work turned out. It felt on many levels, Beneath Your Sheltering Hand will be a much larger work needing to be fleshed out, in a future time. I was pleased with the balance that the elements found together, the projected and recorded media and the live performance. We found many unexpected layers where the two states of live and mediation overlapped and created new lines of narrative. And perhaps most pleasing of all was how well it was received by the audience. There were audible hysterics heard from the house (not just the laughs from the audio recording), genuine bursts of emotion. For Tony and me, we always hoped the satirical elements would be read loud and clear, but again, one never knows how it will play out until it is performed for a real audience.

Although we have not defined a timeline for the future, it is the intention of Tony and myself to revisit Beneath Your Sheltering Hand and rework it for future performances.

Click on the image to see an excerpt of Beneath Your Sheltering Hand

Christian Burns is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher who has worked with companies, schools and art centers around the United States, Europe and Asia. He received an MCC Artist Fellowship in Choreography in 2008.

Images: Christian Burns, care of the artist’s website; stills from Beneath Your Sheltering Hand (2007).

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