Category Archives: Creativity

Essay Section: Creativity

Wigged out

Probably the most frequent question I got after playing Madame in VTC’s production of Jean Genet’s The Maid, was why I didn’t wear a wig.   The early publicity photos showed me with a frumpy blond wig that we ditched at a dress rehearsal, instead opting for my bald head in all its glory.

Whether we fully succeeded or not isn’t for me to say, but what we were going for was a Madame who clearly a male playing a woman, but not pretending to be a woman.   We thus presented three very different sexual images on stage:  Claire as an attractive female female, Solange as a male transformed into a female, and Madame as a male woman.

Madame, as I played her, is not a transvestite in the popular understanding of that word.   No one, not even for a moment, would wonder if I were really a man or a woman.   You wouldn’t need to look at my Adam’s apple.   Nor, again at least what we were trying for, would it be a wolf-in-grandma’s clothes or J. Edgar Hoover in a dress kind of fake.   It was just a direct man playing out this bizarre woman’s role.   She had to come through for herself.   And the man in Madame as himself.

Playing absurd theater — my personal favorite genre — means bringing forward extreme contrasts.   The audience is confronted repeatedly by jarring contradictions.  But it is these very contradictions that make absurd theater emotionally real, psychologically accurate.   Real life is full, for example, of words of hate spoken as though they were love.  Disgust and desire, hope and despair, fear and fearlessness do not exist in separate universes, but mingle and intertwine.   Our rage at ourselves turns outwards and our rage at others turns inwards.   Our desire to show ourselves honestly and our desire to hide everything beneath an impenetrable facade co-exist.

So I/we chose Madame to be strong and vulnerable, determined and utterly dependent, cruel master and, at the same time, victim of the same system that enslaves her maids.      Addicted to her clothes and to her domination, she has lost her humanity yet is all the more human, even if a rather despicable human.

Oh, what fun!  Fun, because Madame is also a laughable exaggeration of a “woman of society.”   I consider myself truly blessed to have a had a chance to stand on the “catwalk” the set designer built into the cave known as the Hooker-Dunham Theater and declare, gesturing wildly with my French manicured nails, how “Outrageously happy!” I was because my lover’s imprisonment had “only made me aware of my attachment to him.”   And equally happy that I managed to clomp my way off that platform without breaking my goddamn neck!

 

Madame and her faithful MaidsMy heart will beat with this terrible intensity

Howard Wagner’s real identity

In an odd and delightful twist of fate, I have gone from being Howard Wagner, the “business is business” boss who fires Willie Loman in Death of Salesman to playing  “Madame”in Jean Genet’s The Maids.

So I’ve gone from backstage at Next Stage/Apron Theater with “Charlie”, learning, for the first time in our lives how to tie a bow tie, to Madame, by far and wide the strangest role I have ever played in my life.

Charlie (Ray Mahoney) ties his bow tie
Charlie (Ray Mahoney) ties his bow tie
Put it down, I'll drink it presently
Madame

Playing Sidney Bruhl in Deathtrap by Ira Levin

Ira Levin was an amazingly creative writer.   I knew nothing about him until recently,when I took on the role of Sidney Bruhl in Deathtrap, but he reminds of  Stanley Kubrick, in a way, because of his ability to tackle multiple “genres.” It’s more than just genre.  Marlboro, where I taught psychology for a couple years, had Gender Bender dances.  Levin and Kubrick have genre-bending styles.  

There is something else that ties them together, a kind of self-reflection that their works have.   They turn in on themselves like an Escher drawing.   Deathtrap is particularly self-reflective, continually turning back to look at itself.   The play, Deathtrap — “a five character, one set thriller”  is about a play Deathtrap, that is described bas the holy grail of theatre:  “a five character, one set money-maker.”   (The actual play, Deathtrap, did in fact, become an enormous money-maker.  The longest running thriller in Broadway history to this day and still making tons of money on the amateur rights, exactly as described in the script, feeding and clothing generations of its author’s family.)  All five characters, in one way or another, all more or less normal people, if a  bit strange, but basically normal, transform into people who are willing to kill for the chance to have a five-character, one set money-maker.

“Thrilleritis malignis,”  Sidney Bruhl, the semi-demonic thriller-writer cum potential murderer, calls it.  “The fevered pursuit of the five-character, one set, money-maker.”   

It is most certainly not a classic thriller like Gaslight. Again, in mirror upon mirror reflection to infinity, Deathtrap refers repeatedly to Gaslight’s theatrical origin, Angel Street.  The classic thriller has no time for such idle play.   The victim and audience must be terrified from start to the final release in the denouement.   But here we have time to play.  And that, too, lets the audience relax and enjoy itself.

In Deathtrap, Levin plays with dimensionality.  His characters are both two- and three-dimensions simultaneously;  they are caricatures of human nature at the same time as being very real, believable, understandable.

Sidney Bruhl’s character is very dark, and, at the same time, very light, comic-book thin.   We are more apt to laugh at Sidney than to cry at his tragic greed.   We are able to laugh because he is unreal at the same time that we can experience him as completely real, feel his pain and his hatred, his grandiosity and his emptiness.   His utter desperation.   And laugh again at his stupid attempts at humor in the most unlikely situations to be making a joke.

 

 

Imbalanced Balance

In learning to play a musical instrument, I am constantly confronted with the degree to which my mind and body mutually struggle against rhythm.  I don’t find walking all that uncomplicated either.  It’s not just ‘cause I’m old;  I’ve always been clumsy my whole life, though usually causing me no more difficulty than knocking over beer bottles I’ve left in may own path.

So I admit may well err on the far side being of mentally and physically imbalanced,  but I think balance and imbalance are both essential aspects of life.

Science in general errs on the side of balance.  It aims to find order in chaos, not chaos in apparent order.  It wants to seek laws that “underlie” apparent randomness, apparent uniqueness.

To its discredit, the study of human psychology, in its pursuit of being dignified as a science, has primarily sought to reduce human existence to quantifiable, generalizable conclusions, and, in so doing, has sacrificed understanding ourselves as unique individuals.  Only for a brief blip in the middle of the previous century did “modern psychology” pay more than lip service to trying to understand the unique aspects of human experience.

There is an odd paradox here:  because human individual uniqueness is perhaps our most salient shared characteristic.

“Modern” psychology has devoted itself to pattern seeking through “objective” measurement.  This is why “mapping the genome” seems so unlikely to produce a better understanding of who we are as people.  It is like trying to understand a language solely by word-by-word translation.   Taking snippets of DNA may be akin to hearing snatches from a conversation and having no understanding of what the words mean in context.    Even if our strands of DNA were precisely alike, the moment the fertilized egg is formed, the moment the sperm and the ovum become the zygote, the world outside those cells is involved in every moment of our existence, and so no two beings have exactly the same DNA and the same world into which they are emerging.  Even with genetically identical twins and even before one leaves the womb before the other, the impact of their environment differs.

We hear a great deal about how this or that characteristic has had great survival value, yet we do not appreciate, it seems, that our individual uniqueness has proven to be the greatest survival advantage of all.

Music attempts to cross this gap, to merge yin and yang without sacrificing either.  To mix balance with imbalance, harmony with dissonance, theme with variation.   As humans, we imperfectly strive for perfection.   Sometimes the imperfection is a lot more obvious than the perfection, but that’s life, that’s who we are.

If you enjoyed this thought, check out Perfect Imperfect  or Theme and Variations.

 

 

 

l’existence précède l’essence

Sometimes people have asked me what kind of psychologist I am.  I usually end up back with “existentialist” or “humanist,” although believe that there is such a thing as dynamics, both on the interpersonal and the intra-personal level.  I’d go so far as the Freud was right about one very important thing:  We aren’t always aware of what’s going on inside us.

By existentialist and humanist what I mean is the belief in Sartre’s simple statement that is the title of this article:  existence precedes essence.  That we are, that we are aware, conscious beings precedes what we are or why we are.  

Now the rest of existentialism, particularly existentialist psychology goes on in directions that I don’t care to follow.  From Sartre’s bleak visions, like No Exit (“Hell is other people.”), to some German weltanshlang (yeh, I know that’s not the actual word, but you’ve gotta admit it has a nice ring to it!) etc., it’s all too dense for my poor head, but I do believe that human consciousness is the starting point of everything.  Everything.  God, nuclear physics, love.  Everything.

I think most modern psychology has given up on understanding human beings from the inside out.  Today’s psychology objectifies everything.  It requires that everything be turned into measurable, quantifiable entities.  But the assumption that the objective reality is a perfect equivalent of the subjective experience is fatally flawed.

If you talk to nearly any intelligent, informed, alert adult for any length of time about psychology and psychological problems, they will nearly inevitably bring it around to the advances in neurological mapping.  They will speak with reasonable skepticism about prescription psychotropic drugs (that now treat everything from schizophrenia to early-stage head scratching), they will nevertheless see them as the state-of-the-art of psychology.

How often does anyone talk about the human factors any more?  By human factors I mean two things: influence and choice.  They may seem contradictory, but they’re not.  Influence is what brought you to this moment, choice is what you do now.   We define ourselves, by what we do.

It also matters that your father abused you as a child, if he did.  It also matters if you told on a friend to get the friend into trouble; or if you what you did made a positive difference in a person’s life.   What happened to you and what you chose to do bring you to where you are now, with new choices.

And how conscious we are of who we are and why we are the way we are is something that varies, that isn’t the same for everyone and can also change within a person.  This premise of psychoanalysis has always made sense to me:  The more conscious you are of what’s made you who you are, the more consciously you can chose to be who you want to be.

Rather than being a paradox, this as a meeting point of the existentialist-humanistic and psychodynamic.   By getting to know ourselves better, by letting ourselves be more conscious of both past and present, we can get more out of our lives.

This is the promise of psychotherapy, but psychotherapy has had a very bumpy road from Dr. Freud’s time to ours. There’s no real way to control the fact that anyone, essentially, can become a therapist.  There are hurdles, to be sure, but plenty of manipulative sons-of-bitches nevertheless become shrinks:  People who know  little about the complexities of human nature and people who know how to keep coming and paying for something that isn’t doing them any good; and it may be doing them a lot of harm.

I know that there are good shrinks out there:  people who really do listen to their patients and know something about how to be helpful to them.   My point is that there’s not been any solid way devised in my lifetime to determine which is which.  Which is going to a person who is ultimately quite helpful to have talked with over time, and which is the blood-sucking manipulator?   Certainly graduate program or state licensing agency aren’t able to make that determination.  It’s not even their job.  It’s no one’s job.  And no one’s worked out a clear way to tell the difference.

But this does not mean that psychological causation is hooey.  Far from it.  Someone who will honestly listen and knows how to turn what they hear into something useful for the patient or client to hear can be extremely helpful.  This shows how powerful relationships can be:  They can heal as well as tear apart.

Sometimes friendship also heals.  The ability to have someone, whether partner or friend in another part of the world, with whom one can let out aspects of oneself painfully held within, is invaluable.

Meanwhile, take your pills like a good child, especially if the pills make you feel better or people tell you you’re a lot easier to be around now that your on them.  Take them, but don’t put too much stock in them.  You still have to think about your life, you still have to figure out what will make you a happier person and those around you happier to know you.

And forget about the little electrical currents flowing through your neurons that you can sometimes see pretty pictures of on television or the internet.   Think about them this way:  Without all the intricate electro-chemical wiring and chips and all the rest inside the computer you’re reading this on, these words would not exist.  But does the all the electro-chemical wing and chips and all the rest know what the words on the page mean?  Of course not.  Let the neurobiologists worry about their pathways and genome sequences and biochemical reactions, psychologists and psychologically-minded people should focus on the meaning of the words, the thoughts and choices that make us human.