luctor et emergo

Dr. Stump,

It may be best to call Playwriting off tomorrow as I don’t think I’ll be done with anything worth reading. All around me I am beset with ideas but none of them have enough weight. I’m not invested in them, frankly it’s very hard for me to invest in anything for 60 pages without feeling presumptuous. I’ve tried writing about that as well, but again, the question “Why?” rears it’s ugly head. I’m having a hard time drawing upon personal experience, and when I do, I have a hard time justifying placing it upon stage as it seems to cheapen it. It’s incredibly frustrating looking at a work and feeling that it has been contrived, not created, and everything I have done so far feels that way to me. I understand that these are works in progress, however I see no progress between what I have created now and what I created four years ago.

Perhaps I need experience. To spend time searching for value in things around me and try to find a way to transform that into something that would work on stage. Perhaps it will come to me, eventually, in a year or ten. Know I am not discouraged, but rather now have an imperative need to search for value in the world and in my life. I think that now is the time to listen and not to talk.

I apologize, as this must be disappointing to you and I can assure you I am disappointed as well: Shelagh Delaney wrote “A Taste of Honey” at age eighteen and you cannot know how aggravating that fact is to me.

Hope all remains well. I’ll see you in class, and look forward to studying in London with you.

Sincerely,

Ian Carlsen

PS: I am fine if this affects my grade negatively. I understand that if I really wanted to I could turn in a very quick, trite, hackneyed work and receive a mediocre grade, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

I am frustrated with academia right now, perhaps I don’t fit in. I can’t seem to separate the body of my work in school from work that I want to remain relevant in the rest of my life. My school mind from my artistic mind. I know however that I must. I am required to create and receive deadlines to do so by. With my other classes this works well: In Prof. Zhao’s Modern East Asia I am doing well, I take notes and write papers, which are critically thought-out answers to questions she poses. This is an example of when academia works.

In theater on a university level, the format is different. We are expected to rigorously churn out examples. There are no questions posed. The object is simply to demonstrate an understanding without asking critical artistic questions or allowing the process to evolve from a natural or real place. Perhaps the only aspect this works well in is tech/design. When applied to performance, the result is cleverly-disguised indicative acting, a series of hat tricks designed to create an example in the quickest most efficient manner thought of. The professor of a scene study class says a character must cry, the class disbands and a week later the actor comes in and pretends to cry, leaving himself at the mercy of the professor to see if his ruse has passed. Acting becomes an inorganic formula, a mechanical response. With writing for the theater the same happens: a formula is given and followed out, but with no place or imperative to write other than the sake of a deadline what results are hollow representations of art with little lasting power. As if someone was going to build a house by ear.

I often wonder if acting, or most art for that point would be best taught in a conservatory or an apprenticeship, after one has had a few years of general education.

If so, then, what am I doing?

Just saw a final dress rehearsal of Doubt, A Parable at PSC. Good, a quality play. Might go to pay what you can night on Tuesday to say it again. The play is a good example Father Flynn’s sentiments on parables, they need to be fictional, real life is to fraught with moral uncertainty for any lesson to be revealed simply, and in the case of the play itself, there is no good parable to be found. I walked in expecting a preachy show, but came out doing a lot of thinking but with no clear answers. This is what I look for in good theater. Brecht and his sentiments make me want to fortify my viewpoints and engage in trench warfare. This was a simple argument with no solution.

Talking with Maureen today after the Sunday matinee of Philadelphia, Here I Come! about telling stories about old friends: “It’s like after someone leaves your life for a year or two they become fiction,” she said. “You want to say to someone that they were real people, that they walked down the street just like you and I but for all other people know it seems like they might have never existed.”

I think that’s part of what I look for in people, I want to share in the personal narrative. Life in the end is so transitory that in response there’s the need for someone to be able to recollect these experiences with to prevent them from becoming fiction. Old friends become, characters you aren’t sure you didn’t just imagine if there’s no one there to say they remember them.

One of my friends keeps an intensely cross-referenced, hand-written diary of most every day of his life, it extends several volumes now. He does this out of fear that he might one day forget what has happened to him, to lose respect for the sheer weight of history which has pushed him to the current moment. It’s something I respect greatly though I am more lax and willing to let things slip. I’ll admit, it’s one of the reasons why I blog, the past is so fleeting and our memory so easily mistaken.

In the end all we will have to talk about is what happened to us, and what is going on now, but what if there’s no one there to remember with?

Walking up to my apartment, I saw three girls in jilbabs pass under a street light as they walked to an apartment across the street. Their silhouettes were so alien and yet so beautiful, they looked like a race of new creatures come to populate our empty world.

It makes me happy to live on the hill.

“So when are you moving to Europe?” was the question asked by one Matt Joyce in the street outside of the White Heart after coming from a rehearsal and a free beer.

Matty Joyce. Matthew Joyce. The man-in-himself. After three years hiatus and a car crash that should have killed him, the former roommate and one of my best friends in high school is back in Portland, walking around drunk on wine and slamming at the North Star. We talk, walk back inside. He pays for a celebratory whiskey shot and we talk a little more. A bit of Maine humor: he’s now living in The Big House, my old roommate Nate Amadon’s former apartment, a place I didn’t know he had any connection with. Small state.

But then the goodbyes and the talk about Europe. Consensus has it amongst those people I’ve fallen out of contact with that I’m moving to Europe soon, no one knows for how long or where exactly but everyone in their turn points to the eastern sea and says that I am going.

So there it is, stark and obvious. If you act in a paradigm long enough it will become you. The little boy who cried Europe. I’ve got to do something big now. I’ve talked a great deal about all of this. Time to start the gears in motion. Who knows how soon, but I feel I need to make it soon, while the time is right. I’m not going to blow all this that I have here and take off, but I cannot renege on this now. I’ve got to start working.

Vanesa always said that I made the most of my time when I could set myself a goal.

I’ve got to leave.