Making My Way
Posted by Melinda Lopez on 7/19/2007I studied piano for twelve years, but I can’t play. I mean, I can read music. If you put music in front of me, I can read it — I know how to get it to sound like music, but I can’t create music. I can’t play. I can’t cook. I am great with a recipe, even adventurous if I have one to follow. I’m great at following directions. But I can’t cook. I always follow maps. I check off the signposts, and always get to where I am supposed to — the waterfall, the landmark, the city. But I don’t explore, and I don’t make my way.
I love adventurers. I married one. My husband has been known to pull the map out of my hand and shout — “Look around! See where you are! Read the landscape.” Once he told a forest ranger in Yosemite, “I don’t need a guide book. I’ll write the guidebook.” He isn’t afraid of making his way. He isn’t afraid of anything. Not being lost, not cooking a bad meal. He listens to the land; he smells the spices. He creates something new.
I write plays though. When I start a play, I don’t know where it’s going. I may know a character, or I may hear language, or I may get really interested in a historical period and then I wonder, “what would happen if?” And I plunge ahead without a map or recipe. I read the landscape. I add spices that seem like they would be interesting. I trust that at the top of this mountain, I’ll see where I need to go next. I don’t mind not knowing when I’m writing. It’s the only time I feel brave.
We’re rehearsing Gary. There’s a lot I don’t know. “Why do people keep secrets? What does he say that makes her trust him? Why do we love the people who hurt us?” There is no recipe. This is a play with music. I said I can’t write music, and it’s true. But I wrote some lyrics. And a wonderful composer Rick Sims is adding soul. The actors are throwing themselves into it—they aren’t musicians, but they aren’t afraid. My director, Jon, is walking off the edge of the map. We’re just going to try and read the landscape, look for the signs — read human nature. We’re making something brand new. Something that hasn’t ever been done before.
I’ll never go to Yosemite without a map, but I’m really lucky to know someone who will, and I’ll follow him anywhere. Here at Steppenwolf, I’m the one who’s writing the map. Let’s see where this trail goes.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
A mentor of mine - who happens to direct big plays in the building next door to the Garage space - says that, while directing, you have to see the play from the parking lot. It’s a metaphor, sure, but it is apt. It means that you have to step back and see the whole thing, how all the parts are working, or aren’t working, and then objectively look at the piece in total and make your informed decisions on how next to proceed from there - the vantage point of the parking lot, looking from a distance at the work.
So It seems appropriate then to finally look a bit at this process from the vantage point of post-opening. Three weeks of run still to occur, but finally a touch of perspective, and an opportunity to look at the process and my response to it. And it being the 21st century, why not make it public in the form of a blog?….
When I first read the play - giddy with the butterflies of my first “hiring” call from this organization that I have deeply loved and respected and worked for off and on over the past 9 years - the butterflies about the job quickly transformed themselves into the far more beautiful and exotic butterflies that alight in your stomach when you read something thrilling - something that evokes memory and future and passion and tears - a great play, a thrilling voice, and one that without question spoke to me clearly.
I know, when I’m reading, that I should direct something when images begin insisting themselves into my brain - and here they were - these girls who I hadn’t thought of in years. The 4 Beyer sisters, who lived next to me growing up. Teenagers to my toddler, they were the go to baby sitters who, in 1978, when the play takes place, were living fully that life. They filled the driveway with Boyfriend’s Camaros, and their hair with aqua net and the air with Queen and Meatloaf, and probably yes some Boston. Their whispered voices drifted in my window late on a summer night, trying not to wake their passed out father and overworked mother. Small town Michigan. Cans of beer. Sneaking to swim naked at night beneath a full moon. I know, cause I did it 12 years later - but they blazed the trail and were both known and unknown - people who seemed so much more keyed in with the impossible knowledge of cool - but there was the darkness underneath as well - the struggle of not enough money, and the limited possibilities afforded these girls. I didn’t see it then, but with hindsight, those boyfriends, their fast cars, the cigarettes, the blaring music - it was all a defiant insistence for “more” - a rage against the dealt hand. This play conjured them again - brought them back from the discard pile of memory and demanded for them, recognition.
You hope when something like that happens, that the team of people that you surround yourself with will share that passion - that sense of dedicating the work at hand to something more than just an evening of entertainment - that the work will, by becoming deeply personal, reach somehow the universal.
How lucky I am, to have worked with this palywright. Melinda Lopez is everything that her play is - an incongruous, complex cacophony of competing ideas that, when put all together, make some kind of perfect impossible sense. On first meeting, there is a shyness, not apologetic necessarily, but certainly something that the untrained eye might misdiagnose as uncertainty. Don’t be fooled. The best and greatest gift to this process is the clarity with which Melinda knew this play and these people. If it was, occasionally hard to articulate, (the play is wickedly complex in its emotional journey) we were always blessed with the divining rod that was her intuition. She knew it, she felt it and on more than one occasion, we had to communicate not through words, but through gesture and inarticulate sounds - guttural and animalistic- to represent the feeling of the moment.
She, like her play, is fierce and full of love - she is passionate and joyful - always the first to “woo” at the band and the last to put down her lighter at the end of the song, even though it burned the thumb tip - she knows when to fight for something, and when to leave space for the stumble of inspiration- and above all, always made it feel like everyone in the room was an equal partner - handing over her new and precious work to others to leap from with total trust and faith in the process. That trust is rare. I am grateful.
So we are running now. The play in front of an audience. The actors are on board and committed and fighting as fiercely as they are loving - they’ve committed to the idea that this play is a punk song - hard and fast and unrelenting - a tough truth exposed violently and without apology or remorse - its thrilling to see an audience experience it. Pulled in by the impossible life and laughter of the first scenes, and then growing more and more silent and leaning more and more forward as the truths are revealed. It is a hard play to watch, in what I hope is a good way - something you can’t take your eyes off of, even though you may want to. A love story. A survival story. A story of life insisting, in the bleakest of circumstances, on being lived. A flower that pushes through the concrete and reaches for the sky.
I feel, at the end, here in the parking lot, above all else - grateful. Grateful for the experience. Grateful for the opportunity to work on this play with all of these amazing people. Grateful for the challenge that is inherent in the play, and for the universal support from the organization to pursue those challenges. And grateful for the opportunity to honor and dignify the small town hopes and dreams of these people by sharing this story with an audience. There will be new voices and new ideas added to this play, as it should be. That is the mark of a good play - that there is always room for someone else to enter it - but while I am still here, looking at what we have wrought - I already know that I am better for my time spent in GARY.