My graduate school directing thesis project, way back in 2012, was a play called Vilna’s Got A Golem by Ernest Joselovits. The play is about a Yiddish family theater company in Vilna 1899 producing a controversial new play, a violent revenge fantasy about a Golem. The author of the play within the play is their brother, who is deeply traumatized by the murder his wife and child. Everyone in the family wants to support their brother, however, but, the company is split between factions with opposing responses to cycles of violence, revenge. and trauma.
One week before the opening night, there was a flare up of violence in Israel/Palestine. Immediately the metaphor of the play took on an entirely different meaning.
It was “unfortunately relevant”.
I do not know exactly what the meaning of THE BANALITY OF EVIL will be in March 2024 when it reaches the stage. The project might be “unfortunately relevant” in ways I didn’t anticipate, or perhaps in ways I did not anticipate. For example, in rehearsals I shared how THE BANALITY OF EVIL is about the Jewish suffering is “instrumentalised”. Today, we are reflecting on the “weaponization” of Jewish suffering, as the death toll in Gaza approaches 20,000.
I also fear that the project could be completely out of touch with moment.
I believe that a theater artist should reflect long and deeply on their place in history.
This is very different from “responding to the news”. Artistic reflections on the longer arc of history risk being out of step with the current moment or even just wrong. We can’t know which way history will turn, or how fast it will accelerate.
How to adapt a text "like that" for the stage?
This past weekend, another director asked me how I approach adapting “a text like that” for the stage. This was a great question. The text she was asking about is Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and without her having to specify I knew exactly what “like that” qualities she had in mind: Non-theatrical text, fairly dense, written by a philosopher, 300 pages long and probably a bunch of other “like that” qualities I’m not even thinking of.
How do I adapt a text “like that” for the stage?
Regarding the non-theatricality of the book.
Despite not being a play, Eichmann in Jerusalem is actually a very theatrical book. Arendt is a storyteller. Her philosophy is about storytelling and the process of creating meaning through crafting narrative. Additionally, theater is a central metaphor of the book, which is about a show trial, with an audience and was conducted in a theater and on a stage. Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial highlights the courtroom drama of the historic event. The judges, the prosecution, the defense and the accused are characters. While most dense philosophical texts are not exactly low hanging fruit for theatrical adaptation, some already have seeds germinating.
Dealing with the books’ density of language and ideas is actually the easiest quality of a text to deal with for Meta-Phys Ed. You have to figure out “how it moves”. We basically have a formula: Read the text, make a dance and layer the text on top of it. Sometimes the dance will come from a carefully chosen piece of adjacent source material that has gravity with the text, but it can also be inspired more generally by a genre that moves. In this case, we are looking at detective stories and court room drama’s.
How it moves can also be a choreographic idea such as: “the battle for the center”. For Arendt, the conflict of the trial is what should be at the center? She believes that justice demand that Eichmann, the accused, the one who acts should be at the center of the trial. The collapse of the trial was a result of the other forces forcing there way into the center. History, witnesses etc…. “The battle for the center” is a simple choreographic idea that captures an enormous theme of the book in a way that is very tangible.
The length of the book, 300 pages, presents the most challenges to adaptation, and causes me the most anxiety. In the past I have deliberately avoided the problem on editing by choosing texts short enough to be performed in their entirety. The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction is an essay by Walter Benjamin which we presented without edit. This project is deliberately about learning to adapt long texts, so I don’t really have a good answer, but I will try to elaborate on what I’m learning in a separate post.
Where are we when we think....
I just started reading Hannah Arendt’s book The Life of the Mind, a wonderful and challenging book about “thinking” and its relationship to speech and action. There is a chapter in the book I am very much looking forward to reading called “Where Are We When We Think?”.
Most of the performances I create are about “thinking” and take place in “the virtual space of thinking”. The characters can be understood as the minds that do the thinking. The play’s action involves taming the mind that produces a tidal wave of thoughts, organizing them and the challenge of expressing thought thru language.
While working on THE TALMUD, I consulted with the academic Talmud scholar Sergey Dolgopolski. In his book The Open Past, he describes the Talmud as “a virtual intelligence.” The Talmud is “a complex dance of thinking in which no persona stands at the center.” In our production of THE TALMUD, the question and answer of talmudic debate was a physical dance on a physical stage.
THE TALMUD, Photo by Jenny Sharp
MACHINE LEARNING HAMLET, Photo by Youn Jung Kim
MACHINE LEARNING HAMLET; OR TEXT LIKE DAGGERS even more literally plays with the idea of a virtual intelligence. The actor portrayed a computer AI playing itself in a game of Hamlet. Like a computer playing itself in chess, our AI was both player and game, challenging and responding to itself, ultimately to maddening results.
The characters in MACHINE LEARNING HAMLET and THE TALMUD all had a great facility with language, unlike the zombies in WAKE…SING…, who all began the play with barely the ability to crawl, let alone speak. Their heads however were filled with thoughts. Each actor wore an in ear monitor which fed them the text of Clifford Odets’ play Awake and Sing. In the beginning of the performance, each actor responded kinesthetically to every sound and rhythm of the text feed. Gradually, they became identified with an individual character in the play, remembering how to walk, speak, and act. In this show, taming the mind and expressing thought thru language was a great struggle. The journey of the performance was to leave the virtual space of the mind, and join the world of action.
WAKE…SING…, Photo by Jenny Sharp
PAISIEU, Photo by
In 2015 I directed a play called PAISIEU by Gertrude Stein for the Target Margin Stein Labs at the Connelly Theater. The play was an extreme example of Stein’s difficult language, often a challenge for actors to speak. When the actors spoke about their experience of speaking the language, they described how their bodies think they are speaking coherent language, but actually they little grasp of the meaning of the sentences they are saying. The play was a marathon of characters competing to present the spoken language of the play with virtuosity and athletic movement. By act three, each character (and actor) was exhausted, mentally and physically, by getting the finish line, which was the last word of the play. One of my favorite moments in this show (and perhaps of any show a I made) is when the incredible actor Tim Craig, sits exhausted on a colorful rehearsal block speaking text into a microphone. He stops speaking, but the sound of spoken text continues to be heard softly through the speakers. The actor slowly places the microphone on his exhausted sweaty forehead so we can hear his thoughts better.
The crack in the wall theory...
I just finished reading the detective novel Pietr The Latvian by Georges Simenon, an author I recently learned Hannah Arendt read. Immediately, I noticed similarities between Simenon’s voice and Arendt’s voice in Eichmann In Jerusalem. I will not claim that Arendt was deliberately influenced by his novels, but its helpful for me to discover the gravity between the two. (Coincidence or Conspiracy?)
This passage from Pietr The Latvian jumped out at me:
”It was a ridiculous situation. The inspector knew there wasn’t once chance in ten that his surveillance would be of any use.
Yet he stuck it out- just because of a vague feeling that didn’t even deserve to be called an intuition. In fact it was a pet theory of his that he’d never worked out in full and remained vague in his mind, but which he dubbed for his own use the theory of the crack in the wall.
Inside every wrong-doer and crook there lives a human being. In addition, of course, there is an opponent in a came, and its the player that the police are inclined to see.
As a rule, that’s what they go after.
Some crime of offense is committed. The match started on the basis of more or less objective facts. it’s a problem with one or more unknowns that a rational mind tries to solve.
Maigret (the inspector) worked like any other policeman. Like everyone else, he used the amazing tools that men like Bertillon, Reiss and Locard have given the police- anthropometry, the principal of trace, and so forth - and that have turned detection into forensic science. But what he sought, what he waited and watched out for, was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes of from behind the opponent. “
The first idea in this quote that appeals to me is “ vague feeling that didn’t even deserve to be called an intuition.” This is how I work, listening to that vague feeling and seeing how it develops. I have a vague feeling about Arendt and detective fiction.
The other idea, more related to Eichmann In Jerusalem , is how Inspector Maigret waits and watches the criminal until the the human being is revealed. This is how Arendt listens to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, waiting and watching the the criminal mastermind, the monster, until the human being appears.
Detective Novels
Why Detective novels:
Hannah Arendt is writing Eichmann in Jerusalem, not as a philosopher, but as an investigative reporter. At several points in the book, she repeats she is writing “a report” and that her task is to report on the facts.
Of course, Arendt is also having some fun with her writing, using an ironic tone and comparing various versions of stories and comparing conflicting accounts of events that happened in 1937…or was it in 1938! I get the sense that for her, reporting the facts is also about playing detective.
Like Detective Joe Friday from the TV Show Dragnet: “Just the Facts”.
In a biography of Arendt I recently read, I was delighted to find out that she read detective novels. In several accounts, Arendt would go on vacation reading Hegel and Agatha Christie or George Simenon.
But I think there is actually something more signifiant about the relationship of her voice in the book and to the detective character or genre. Arendt philosophical work is about “THINKING”, as a human activity, and, as a political activity. The action of the detective novel is also “thinking”: the thoughts of the detective and their ability to piece together bits of information into whole story. For Arendt, the human activity of thinking involved taking the data and phenomena of our lives, the facts, and crafting them into a story (Mythos). To apply this thinking to the web of human relations was also the political work of a philosopher or theorist.
Arendt’s diagnosis of Adolf Eichmann was that he "had “lost his ability to think”. If Arendt sincerely believes that thinking is the antidote to fascism, then why can’t the detective be the hero of democratic society.
Editing Strategies
Arendt’s book is about “a mountain of evidence”.
Her book is 250 pages, but the thousands of pages transcripts and documents presented in the trial, which she reviewed, are present in her writing. The mountain of evidence is an important part of her account of the trial, so that needs to be represented in our show somehow, without being too boring or longer than 90 minutes.
I had the idea for an editing strategy I’m calling “Mountain of Evidence poems”.
It’s a stack of folders, “Madagascar”, “Nisko”, “Theresienstadt”. You don’t have to hear what’s in that folder, but you know there its filled with damning evidence.
Sharing about Process
Project: The blog
The purpose of this blog is to share with friends a more intimate story of the work in progress. I will be speaking in draft. The story will be told in rough strokes, from my point of view, as the work happens. Sometimes it will be told in words, sometimes in pictures, and probably with spelling errors.
The difference between this blog and the content that will appear on social media is that this blog will share more questions, half-baked ideas, proposals I will not hold myself accountable to, and mistakes. Some of these entries will be the first draft of a social media post, but most will remain private for whoever chooses to read this blog.
This past year I started to develop a practice of sharing this type of process narrative on my personal Instagram page by posting about a woodworking project. I’m not sure how many followers I have, and I don’t care. Whoever follows me, is my friend, so it seemed like a good low stakes way to develop a way to share about process. Similarly, I don’t really care what people think about my woodworking, because it’s a hobby. I do it only for myself and I’m not precious about it. For better or worse, I’m deeply precious about my theater practice (and insecure about my writing) so developing a process sharing practice thru instagramming about woodworking seemed like a great way to get going.
I spent the next month posting updates every day about what I did. The descriptions were longer than advised by influencers. I used technical wood working jargon without concern for who would understand it. I posted about stupid mistakes and screw ups. Sometimes I would post boring photos that looked exactly the same. A before photo of a stack of boards and and after photo of the boards sawed in half. To most people they looked exactly the same. The next day I would post an almost identical photo, because that day I sawed more boards.
I felt like was trolling Instagram by doing it, but it felt good.
And yup, people read them and really liked. So this is going to be a little like that. But just for you.