 I think it's best that you use the mighty ones, also be recorded and so on. So I celebrate the rupture, intellectual and creative practice, rather than try to suggest any kind of relationship between them. And so I'm going to, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to read from this book that I wrote. That is a scholarly book that came out this year, 2017, called Writing in the Modern Stage, Theater Beyond Drama, Cambridge University Press. Costs like $100 copy. So your local library is a great source for this book. And then if the timer's going to go off, then I'm just going to switch and start reading from a play. OK, practice. In his 1999 book, Certain Fragments, director Tim Etchells describes, quote, the spectacle of new playwrights at a 1997 conference in London's Royal Court Theater. The writer's biggest, almost only, topic of conversation seemed to be long quantifications on the understanding of a comma. Hard for me to understand, he continues dryly, having never much cared for punctuation, never cared much for playwrights. Etchells is the founder and artistic director of Forged Entertainment, the United Kingdom's highest profile experimental theater company. He's also a writer, and the essay that contains these remarks on performance writing expands on the kind of text that might ultimately make those pedantic playwrights obsolete. This is theater's newfound, quote, gaveling voice composed of scraps and layers, Fragments, quotations. In this thing, the essay makes a case for the theatrical power of writing, something Etchells's subsequent work has never stopped exploring. And yet he seems to dismiss the playwrights for taking the writing of writing its literary mechanics too much to heart. How directors and actors can't understand a comma these days, the terrible shame of it. The implication, of course, is that directors and actors have more important and exciting things to worry about. If a writer wants to hang with theater's advanced guard, she better put down her MLA guide and jump into the fray. As a fan of Etchells, but a playwright myself, I come back to this passage now and then with mixed feelings. Its relatively good humor dig caps off a century of related gestures, often more evident, for artelal playwrights were human snakes. And a number of other artists and theorists have offered their own variations on the theme of dethroning, demoting, or outwitting the playwright, thereby setting theater free. By the turn of the millennium, this trajectory had collapsed into common sense from the Berlin artistic director rolling her eyes at the text theater to the U.S. grantmaker explaining that putting on plays isn't normally considered an experimental practice. Not that playwrights themselves are an endangered species. In America, they keep on streaming through MFA programs and their work finds appreciative audiences in regional theaters throughout the country and off Broadway. But rightly or wrongly, there's not a theater that often gets called experimental and it's not a theater that tours internationally on the circuit where forced entertainment and other European artists cross paths with downtown New York companies like the Worcester Group Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Well, I don't want to contribute to the reification of this divide and at the risk of aligning some real innovations. I think it is still accurate to say that the theater of big budget American plays is largely though not entirely governed by a realist dramaturgy that evokes the storytelling norms of movies and TV. This means that young artists who feel alienated from mainstream cultural production and deeply attracted to the self-conscious experimentation of the last centuries avant-garde are likely to find themselves drawn to the other fields of theater, even when they are writers. Anyway, that's what happened to me for a while in my 20s in New York and more briefly in Berlin. I tried characterizing the things I was writing and directing as performance pieces, vaguely hoping this would affiliate me with the avant-garde companies I admired, but no one was fooled. Their plays, I still stand by the claim to affiliation, but I stopped pretending not to be a playwright and someone who does care a lot about comments, and I've learned that Gertrude Stein cared a lot about them too. This book is an attempt to understand what it can mean to be an experimental playwright now by investigating what it meant for certain writers at the beginning, middle, and end of the 20th century. More broadly, however, this book is about the relationship between theater and literature. It's my contention that the study of theater today would do well to turn toward the literary, not least because the suggestions sound so perverse. How could this be anything but a critical regression? The recognition that writing is just one of theater's many materials has been getting brought home to us with such force and for so long that it's hard to imagine seriously thinking otherwise. But theater discourse still seems to suffer from its own version of the medial panic Rebecca Schneider has observed among performance artists in the world of visual art who, quote, go out of their way to say that their work is not theater and not dance. Ironically, we in theater keep doing something similar, continuing to reiterate that real theater is not literature. Writing may still have a role to play, but will repeatedly be reminded that the text is no longer in charge. Such accounts of contemporary innovation have met with criticism from scholars who challenged the assumption that dramatic theater or any theater could really have been dominated by text in the first place. In drama between poetry and performance, W.B. Worthen points out that he teaches at Columbia at Barnard, I guess, well, quote. He points out that, quote, this vision of post-traumatic theater, which is to say contemporary experimental theater, begs the question, is a text always or ever staged in this way, translated in some direct manner into speech and depiction, defamation and illustration? In other words, could theater ever have been sort of subordinate to a theater text? And he argues that the answer is no, that a play text can only ever be in an agency, as he says, or tool of performance, and performance will always exceed and support the written word it draws into its event. Dramatic theater was never a fundamentally literary form, so it makes no sense to conceive a post-traumatic break from literature. Worthen reads a series of canonical plays showing how they algebraize the fact that text is something performance uses in this vision. Performance subverts, exceeds, and outpaces text that every turn as a specific kind of doing that lives outside the text and cannot be kept captive to its writ. It's hard to overstate the importance of such interventions amidst a critical discourse that often seems to privilege automatically whatever work does not begin with a writer or take a dramatic text as its basis. One feels that arguments like Worthen still haven't quite been heard as they should. In this book, I'll take a different tack, however, prompted by an equally striking convergence that joins scholars like Worthen and Bennett to other post-traumatic critics that they all emphasize what text doesn't do. Our field now seems to require the gesture of diminishing the script, as if the best reply to complaints like Echols or Artos were something like, don't worry, the playwrights know they aren't really running the show. In order to refute the notion that text theater is inherently outdated or conservative, its scholars assure us that in theater the text does not come out on top. They share a vision of theater as something that inherently eludes or exceeds writing. It's a vision I want to challenge. This book is about writing as a disruptive theatrical force in its own right. In the following chapters, I examine 20th century texts that do theatrical work on the page. I don't just mean that they are especially crafted for performance, although many of them are, or that they engage with the subject of theater, although all of them do. Rather, I'm saying that these words, posit, simulate, and situate themselves in moments of theatrical performance in order to discover the rifts and insufficiencies of those moments. They enact a heightened negativity. A specifically utopian response to the heightened actuality of presentness that has often seemed to distinguish performance from other kinds of art. In doing this, they turn the theater into a place where the determining force of how things are here and now can be confronted and shaken. They do so not by presenting an alternative world, but by variously attacking, exploding, hyperboleizing, and contesting the present as such. This possibility depends on the reference to performance. It's only in relation to the prospect of theatrical enactment in a concrete space and time that the texts can work this way. But in performance, their writtenness is never superseded. It's as writing that they make theater logic a complaint against the here and now. What these texts share is a perception that writing can pollute in the theatrical project of contesting the present as such, wielding a negativity that attacks itself as what is. Space thinks something, something, something, Macwellman writes of theater. Time thinks this will kill that. As we'll see, well, I mean, I probably won't, but as we'll see in James and Stein, Henry James and Bertrand Stein, theatrical space can attack the something, something, something of time too. Such assaults take place in the name of something else. And what will this new sky look like? I told you, I don't know, like a sprig of blossoming mustard. Through their negative theatrics, these texts strain against the world as we have lived it, as we are living in. This study tries to trace their furious blossomings. Oh, great. Got time remaining, so I'm gonna strip ahead to the second half of the book. So the writers that I talk about in this book, Henry James, Bertrand Stein, Sandra Beckett, Susan Lerner Parks, Macwellman, who I just quoted, and then in the middle of that, there's a little passage on the Elevator Repair Service show, Gats, where they performed and read the entirety of the great Gats view, Fitzgerald. So I'll just read from that for a couple of moments, because I think, I feel like the chances are that of the six of you, maybe more of you, have experienced that work than any of the others that I'm writing about, so here we go. The silly word faithfulness, Gats. When ERS performed Gats in Zurich in 2006, a favorable review appeared in the Togges on Sydom. Its headline proclaimed the rebirth of textual fidelity, in the body of the review, however, the critic, Toby Müller, who has also worked as a dramaturg at Berlin's Volksbühne, puts the matter differently. The silly word Beck-Toyer, or faithfulness, it doesn't exist, every step on the stage is a step away from the text, this is Müller talking. So the silly word Beck-Toyer, open parentheses, it doesn't exist, every step on the stage is a step away from the text, closed parentheses, is it once slavishly fulfilled and again contested by the production he writes. That Gats could move a reviewer to paradox is perhaps less remarkable than its power to summon the discredited concept of faithfulness to the text at all. Indeed Müller hastens to disavow this Beck with notion before he's even finished the sentence that both invokes and contradicts it. Could it be that his parenthetical self-interruption betrays a certain critical anxiety which undercuts the common sense certainty, which undercuts the common sense certainty as contents would convey, Jesus. Silly word, faithfulness is just a fairy tale proclaims the grown-up critic a little too loudly. So Gats is a staging of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, not a stage adaptation in the familiar sense but a marathon performance in which we hear every word of the novel. The show is set in an anonymous office where a man who can't get his computer to start played by Scott Shepard discovers the novel in his Rolodex. He starts reading it out loud, eventually all 13 performers embody characters from the story and speak those characters' words while Shepard takes the part of the narrator, Nick. Unlike ERS's The Sound and the Fury in which a copy of Faulkner's novel circulates between performers and Gats, Shepard has the paperback through almost all of the show while other performers speak from memory. It's a staple of downtown war, however, that after years of touring, Shepard, quote, actually knows the whole book by heart. A fact the company confirms on its website. The phrase, by heart turns out to have a particular resonance for what seems to be going on in Gats. Multiple reviewers have described the piece as an exercise in love. Did I just say the pizza? What is that? Yeah, it's okay. Alexander Kedves in the Noyos issue at Sightwing refers to the company's, quote, stormy affair with the novel. Jason Xenoman in The New York Times describes the show as, quote, a rather earnest love letter to the book. This critical tendency is all the more remarkable considering that Gats is hardly dominated by Emery's affect. But you'll never know what. So now I'm gonna read from a current play that I'm working on, that we're working on, a company, my theater company, Minor Theater. Whose other members are, Ashtabeni Haas, Sutter, Ben Williams, and Jenny Seastone. We are working on this play, which I am writing. It is an adaptation of Fedra by Rossine and also some other favorite plays. I'm gonna read from some monologues and some scenes, and when scenes occur, I'm gonna be joined by Hannah Novak, herself something of a star in a downtown theater scene. But I'm just gonna start by reading what I think maybe would be the beginning of this play. Oh, I should say it's Fedra, but it's also, it's a teen drama, like Pretty Little Liars. Not like Big Little Lies, but like Pretty Little Liars, or Heathers, maybe, or Hopes, Jesus, that would be cool. All right. So in this early scene, a woman named Rosario, middle-aged woman, sitting on the couch watching a stand-up comedy special on TV, and we hear the comedy special, and this is what we hear. Imagine that I'm a man, like Ben Williams or some other man, okay. So I had to go to a wedding last weekend, the crowd laughs. Wait, wait, I know. So I went to this wedding, guy's wedding, good guy, and it was in a country wedding out on the lawn, very pretty, we all stayed in cabins and scattered laughter from the crowd. I know, okay, but what really got to me was the way everybody was, like, all night long, just talking about their feelings. Why don't you, I just, I don't understand why in some context, you know, normally we kind of have an agreement we keep that stuff under control and it takes us a long time to learn that as children and it's hard work, you know, you can't cry whenever you're disappointed, you can't scream every time you're mad, you just generally don't announce what's in your heart and that's why civilization is possible and that's why diseases get cured and why worry, so sometimes, actually be attracted to each other once in a while because, let me tell you, there's nothing more fucking disgusting than someone laughter. So there they are, this wedding, everyone making speeches and crying and going on and on about how wonderful and how important you are to me and I thought, oh, it'd be my turn, you know? When will it be time for the crowd to attend to this black thing, this melting lobe, this cancer? And I thought, if they think they know love, if they think they've felt the arrow of their respectable careers and their memberships and their friends, if you still have friends, then you're not in love. If you can brush your hair and wash your face and step out into the sunlight and tell everyone that it's not love, you've never known it, you're too good for it and if it comes to you someday, you won't be ready so you'd better hope it never comes. Okay, so this is a scene. So in this play, the kids that go to high school it's in like the desert Southwest, like El Paso or something. They're doing, they're working on a performance of Phaedra in French class because in all teen dramas there's always a performance of the play. So this is my translation of Russine's text as that thing. Okay, so this is Phaedra and when it's act one, scene three from Phaedra. Stop, oh it's in her stamina, let's six beats per line. Stop, I can't, my eyes. If I take a step I'll be sick, I'll go blind. When I try to throw up, my eyeballs start swelling like crazy, they'll explode. I can't stand these clothes, I smell like a stable. It's nighttime, right? It's dark, but is that because we're indoors? I'd like to stand in the sun one more time before I hang myself. I always thought I'd die in the summer. Why don't you tell me what's bothering you? You'll feel better. You've found that right in my face. Try me, it's too awful. Then I don't know what to do. You're making it impossible. Not just for me, but for everyone who cares about you. They wouldn't care if they knew. If I told you the truth, you'd time my news yourself and take away the chair. Come to think of it, you may need to do those things anyway, I don't have to worry with all. Don't hold your breath. Right, you'd be too busy barfing. It's not nighttime, it's noon, there's the sun, look. Phaedra looks at the sun. She stares at it. Winon gets worried and pulls Phaedra's face away. It's him, he's under my eyelids. Who? My, oh, clever. Clever? I feel like a total fool. The one thing I want in the world is to help you and protect you. It's what I'm good at. Well, things have changed. There's nothing you can do for me now. That's mean. Mean? I don't know, I'm losing track. Winon tries to look up at the sun, she can't. Are you in love? Love? With who? Phaedra looks off across the garden. Winon follows her gaze and gags. Okay, so now we're back to modern times. And the play is a bunch of things that includes a lot of scenes of grownups basically preying on children. I mean, I just sort of gave it away. But anyway, this is an early scene, so not much is gonna happen, don't worry. But this is, I'm Rosario, I'm the grownup woman and Hannah's gonna play a young man named Alan, who's 18 years old. So, we're in a hardware store and Alan works there and I'm a customer and I'm hunting around in my purse. And this is not Xamarin. Oh man, I know they're in here because I put them in this morning. They're in like an envelope. Hang on, how's your day going? Not bad, that's good. She rummages. How's Betsy? Who? I'm sorry, is not your dog's name? I don't have a dog. Oh, oh, that's, it's the other guy, sorry. I think Horny has a doperman. No, no, I was thinking of the kid who works at the Albertsons. He's got a dog named Betsy, nice dog, like a hunting dog, a hound. I don't know him. No, I know him. And I know you, that's the connection. Jesus. He looks like me? Yeah, he does. I mean, you're not twins, but you have a certain, like a similar vitality. Let me see your hands. Why? Just hold them up. Yeah, nice big hands. He's actually not so, he's got one of those uni browns, otherwise good looking kid, but you know, my money's on you. What? It's just an expression. Shouldn't you be in school? I finished last year. Really? Congratulations. Thanks. Did you have a key uni? Yeah, yeah, god damn it. Rosario starts taking things out and putting them on the counter, a bottle of pills, a paperback book, a phone, a small handheld fan. Finally she finds the key inside of all that paper towel and a score. How many? Just one. Actually no, three. He turns around a shriek of the key cutting machine. She watches, he makes the second key, shriek of the machine. Actually, I think just make five. Five? Yeah, because you know, these Connie wants to give them to her friends. He makes three more keys and hands them to her. Thanks. No problem. Have a nice day. Do you want one? What? Do you want one of these pills? I just, they're either relaxing. I mean, not for right now, not for having a machine, but I just got a refill, so there's. What is it? Xanax. Oh, that's okay. What, what did you want? Something else? I have other stuff at the house. Nah, what's it called? Oh, not podium, but it's light podium. Is it fake podium? Oh, what's it called? That's okay, ma'am. I really, yeah, sorry. I don't know what I'm, just, you've been so patient. I wanted to show my appreciation. It's my job. Well, it's good to be good at your job. She gathers up the stuff and puts it back in my purse except the fan, which she forgets. Thanks, Alan. See you next time. Alan turns on a fan, turns it off. Turns it on again and tries touching the blade while it spins. Ow. I hear more ancient stuff and more modern stuff. Raise your hand for ancient. Raise your hand for modern. You like that's modern, okay? We're gonna be modern. So now I'm the same person. Now she's a kind of a mean girl named Clara, who's friends with my daughter. Okay, we're in a car, driving in the desert. Thanks for the ride on Soilo's mom. You can call me Mizzaro. Sorry, the heat's not working. There's a blanket in the back. I'm fine. You sure your parents are okay with you meeting your boyfriend out here? Totally. They know about the Star Map. My mom was gonna drive me herself, but I messed up the scheduling. You can totally call her and ask her. That's okay, my mom kind of scares me. She's the one with the really good nails, right? Yeah, I just messed up the scheduling. You girls have a lot on your minds. No joke. Those teachers have you running around like Mexicans. Yeah. Your parents bugging you all the time about college? Not really. Well, kind of. They want me to do activities. Like volleyball? No, that's Millie. My surf fucking sucks. Sorry. Well, activities, you know, it's not a bad idea. Not just for college, but for your own mental hygiene. I like Sudoku. Oh, wait, the numbers? I know, it's really dorky. My grandma got me into it. She was real good at it. She's dead. That's sweet. You're right. Well, thanks for the ride. No problem, any time. I'll just wait until your boyfriend shows up. I don't want to keep you. You've been really nice, Rosario. I don't feel right leaving you out here alone. It's okay, no one ever comes here. There's mountain lines. Oh, I don't know. I think there's like one and it hangs out by the kindergarten. There's never just one of anything, but I think you've learned about that in bio. Bio's next year. What's his name? Ted. He's in your year. He know. Yeah, but he goes to Los Anizos. The girls there all like bleach their hair, which is super dumb, I think. Like, no one thinks that's your natural hair. You look like a whore or have some self-respect. So we like, he was like, I like your hair. And that was before I cut it. I think it looks good short, you know, guys like long hair because they can grab you or whatever. But he was like, I think it's cool that you're proud of who you are naturally. This family is really religious. That sucks. Ha ha, yeah. But it's nice too, because he's like gentle. My last boyfriend, I don't know if you met him. He was not. But Miss, Ted, he's an artist. He does creative nonfiction. What's that? Writing about yourself, but it's like poetic. Well, whatever you're into, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. It's a personal choice. I know, yeah. Consuelo's really lucky. Why? Oh, thanks, Millie. I'm Clara. Of course, of course, I'm sorry. Guess I'm a little stressed out too. It's okay. I'm sorry about your husband being in jail and stuff. Does Tony talk to you about that? Well, we're really close. She never brings it up at home. I figured she must have more interesting things to think about. She seemed really freaked out when she told me. You never know what that one. Where's this Ted? Hey, do you ever do like rituals? Come again? Oh, just like invocations, pottery should. Do I do invocations? What made you ask that? It's just something I think is interesting. Do you do it? Oh no, I don't know how to make anything happen or whatever. That is very powerful stuff you're messing with. I'm not really. I was just curious, just asking. I don't ever do it. Well, that's good because you shouldn't. It's incredibly dangerous. How did you learn? Everyone knows that. I don't, I ask. I'm sorry. Don't apologize. It's not your fault. It's this place. You've grown up flanked by fucking degenerates. Ha ha, yeah. That's what Mr. Goder thinks. Who? Ted. I mean, no, someone else. Does Ted make you call him Mr.? No, it's someone else. Clara, is Ted a teacher? No. Oh gross. I said no in your howl. I turned 16 already. It's the age of content. We looked it up. You're not pregnant, are you? No. Because if you are, he'll probably try to kill you. God, I'm not pregnant. Damn. I don't know. Please don't tell. I should just take him home. What? No. No. He'd be really worried and freaked out if I'm not here. He really cares about me. He's really nice. That's great for you. What about me? Um, what? What do I get if I don't tell? What? What do you want? Ha ha ha. I have one minute. Is that corresponding? No. I'm going to read a little monologue that is adapted from the play again. This is favor talking. Oh yes. And I still burn for him. But not the way he is. Now that he's been through hell and lost his hair and fucked his way through the staff of TGI Fridays. No. But how he was before, a dog at his side, gun in his hand, eyes done empty except for the thing they seek, the way a shark swims after a newborn whale all night, a wolf chases a rabbit through the snow. You're like that, a perfect hunter. Everyone who sees you wants you or wants to be you. How you find it, how you run, how your back is straight when you stand, how your eyes get colorless, how the things you say are simple and hard. Where were you when we showed up on our shores that night? Why weren't you standing next to him then, holding the leash? You would have whispered a joke in my ear and pulled me aside and shown me the map of the stars that you keep in your pocket, holding it up against the sky. I wouldn't have let my sister go to the movies with you. I would have broken her nose if she'd come anywhere near to you. I would have made it easy. You can have me, I'd say, or you can have no one. Thanks. Best of all this year. Thank you so much to Julia for being here and sharing some of her work with us. That was great. If you want to talk to her about it, I think she's working on it. You might find her out and about. Right now, we actually need to do a very quick change of her in this space for the next piece. We're running a little behind. But if you want to wait outside the El Vashlabi for just a few minutes, you can do that. And we'll be back with you in about 15 minutes. Thank you so much.