I Believe in This Stuff
Posted by Michael Patrick Thornton on 3/30/2009I have never encountered a book so slight in size which consistently provides a seemingly bottomless well of conversation, implications, virtue, ethics, poetry, tragedy, humour, frustration, and reward than John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. This “simple little thing”[1] is anything but. I wish I had months with this cast to talk and Viewpoint our way through this territory whose story takes place in Soledad but whose themes (loneliness, identity, objective versus subjective morality, age & utility, longing, love, lust, disability, sexuality, capitalism) take us to deep inside the human heart, mind, and imagination.
Soledad, in Spanish, means solitude or loneliness, and this process—which began with my week-long seclusion in southern Wisconsin with the script and books on Steinbeck—has felt exquisitely lonely. I spend mornings re-reading the script and thinking about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, benthamian & Millian utilitarianism, and Kantian ‘oughts’[2], my afternoons rehearsing, and evenings exploring more Steinbeck and potential music for the production, judiciously interspersed with the occasional Lifetime movie[3] or Playstation 3 game[4].
First day of work: surprisingly calm, considering it was my first day ever directing at Steppenwolf, let alone directing actors I admire so much, let alone directing a play that holds a special place in the Steppenwolf story[5], and whose ensemble members have left indelible impressions in the American psyche because of their portrayals of Steinbeck’s characters on stage and on film. If you think about any of these things too long, you’ll throw up in your brain and your butt will fall off.
The honor and privilege of working here? Yes, yes, God yes. But then you have to roll up your sleeves and simply get to work on what can only be our Mice & Men.
And what I sense right now is that it’s going to be a beautiful production: designers Courtney O’Neill, Miles Polaski, Branimira Ivanova, and Charlie Cooper are creating a sensorial feast for our audience: an impressionistic and expressionistic production[6] that puts you behind Lennie’s eyes. I’m always amazed by what the designers who work for SYA are able to accomplish given the unique challenges and limitations of their assignment: they’re charged with designing a production on top of an existing production[7], so you’ve got to harmonize two potentially discordant worlds, reshaping what could have been a very traditional, realist production of M & M[8] into something that gels with the Tempest set. I think we’ve come up with something beautiful, a simple and powerful metaphor that reaches a devastating conclusion. So hats off to these designers. As Frank Lloyd Wright told his students: “limits are an artist’s best friend,” and indeed our limitations have delivered us to some exhilarating places.[9]
At rehearsal, we gather around the table and talk. Context, themes, implications[10], ethics, backstory. We play Viola Spolin games and we Viewpoint. I try to treat this process the same as my process at The Gift and elsewhere, since it’s that process that got me here in the first place, so why apologize for/dilute it? I’m a hopeless Romantic who believes in love and tablework and Viewpoints and Spolin. Art keeps me alive.
We stage a scene a day, on pace to have a handful of solid run-throughs under our belt before tech. That’s the battle plan. And our stage manager Kathleen and ASM Cynthia are awesome, incredibly good humored and professional women. I shudder to think of leaving them with all these grubby Steinbeck men, but oh well.
Rehearsal room: We make discoveries, we laugh a lot. We break the big pieces into smaller pieces into smaller pieces into smaller pieces and then put them back together. I’m adjusting to directing on a much larger spatial canvas. We have plenty of time and no time at all.
Here’s Steinbeck writing about life and art: “Try to understand men. If you understand each other you’ll be kind to each other. Try to understand each other.”[11] So we show up and through our conversations and playing together, maybe all of us in the rehearsal room understand each other more. And maybe you watch us and we understand each other. And maybe we change the world a bit one performance at a time?
I believe in this stuff.
“We’re all in this together,” President Obama told us recently in his bazillionth economic address.
It’s a sentiment Steinbeck would applaud.
Goodnight.