Oh holy crap, it’s Tuesday and I don’t want to write this because I’m exhausted but I will. I love it but I hate to do it, y’know? You want art to just happen. You want to wake up and discover you’re the prizewinner without having even entered the contest. But it doesn’t work that way.

Instead: Coming back on the bus from San Francisco from a dentist appointment (I get my jollies at a dental school that charges half the price and does great work), I finally make a full worklist for The Tempest: every stage of every job I can predict at this early stage. It’s horrifying. Can’t be done. And I know that for every task I knock off the worklist in the next months, three more will be added.

But that’s normal. The list-making is a way of making it real. And saying this doesn’t start next week or this coming Friday: it starts now. Well actually, tomorrow.

What Did I Do This Week—

Sculpted and cast Trinculo and Stephano; they’re now in their papier mache shells. And finished a tentative working script, incorporating some minor cuts and a lot of the Folio punctuation, which makes no sense to our schooled minds but has its own logic. And the final showings of Rash Acts up in Arcata, four hours north of here, with large, enthusiastic audiences, and then off-loading the van and wondering where we’re going to store all this stuff. And having a few sudden illuminations about Tempest upon waking at 7 a.m., which seems to be the only time I really tune in to my brain. And having some good conversations.

Casting—

This past week was also callbacks for casting The Tempest. Good possibilities. Difficult to audition people when (a) the style is utterly foreign to 99% of the actors auditioning and (b) one needs to blot out all impressions of what they look like, since none of their faces will be seen.

Our style of puppetry requires a much broader and more crafted gestural vocabulary than is normal on stage or in fact in real life. Our culture reduces gesture to nearly zilch, and so a style that requires the gestural fullness of the most vociferous Italians or deaf ALS speakers seems, to most actors, just plain fake. And yet the language of hands is thrilling. So how do you audition this?

We started by working with actors three at a time for 45 minutes. Each had a Shakespearean monolog, and I asked them to take this premise: You’re an actor with a Shakespearean audition monolog; you’ve never been cast; you’ve gone insane and are incarcerated in an asylum, where you do nothing all day but wander around rehearsing your audition monolog; out of desperation, you’ve exaggerated it more and more, vocally and physically, with mad compulsion. So I allow them to wander about for 5 minutes doing this, and then call on each to play that monolog in the style they’ve evolved.

Some people got it, and what resulted was thrilling: why couldn’t theatre revert to this out-moded style of intensity and fullness of expression and extravagance? Why do we accept that only in Kabuki or neo-Grotowski or other exotic experiment? What exactly is wrong with chewing up the scenery and raising the roof—if it’s grounded in truth?

Then I asked them to pick up a puppet—we’d brought a bunch of our old ones—and gave them a five-minute Puppetry 101 intro and asked them to do their monologs again, this time with the puppet. And then to segue into a song, since Tempest has songs. “But it’s not you singing, it’s the puppet singing.” Interesting result. Some of the monologs retained that intensity from the previous round, but unanimously when the songs began, the quality of the puppetry jumped tenfold. Was it that the music induced a fluidity, or that singing was a license to play?

I dunno, but I learned a lot from these auditions about entryways into the craft of puppetry, and I’ll be designing the early rehearsals around those keys to embodiment. Challenge now is working out the casting: eighteen characters played by five actors, and what happens when the whole crew comes together at the end.

New Thought about Caliban—

Catching a breath (in fact while, pardon the image, sitting on the john) after the setup of Rash Acts in Arcata, Caliban came into my head.

How do these little text messages come? Often they come in little pop-up windows upon waking, or as I’m walking down the dirt road on my morning walk. But rarely in late afternoon when my mind is partly on some idiot task I’m doing and partly on my forthcoming 5-o’clock glass of wine.

But I’ve been struggling with the play’s ending. In Caliban, Shakespeare has created a secondary character who demands a developmental arc and a decisive finale. Malvolio’s humiliation ends with his melodramatic trumpet blast, “I’ll be reveng’d on you all!” Falstaff, spurned by Henry, has his pathetic (and deeply satisfying) moment of crushed bravado. Shylock, like Caliban, trickles off the stage, crawling home ill, and one can understand Laurence Olivier’s instinctive desire for a powerful conclusion to this character that led him to add an agonized off-stage cry from the gut the moment after his exit.

So what do we make of Caliban’s weak final speech, promising hereafter be a good boy, to seek for grace, and being sent off to do housework? Some productions let it go at that. Others have shown him remaining lone and forlorn on the island, or shipping out with Prospero as a cabin-boy, or left in the clutches of Ariel as a neocolonialst tyrant. There’s a deep-felt need on the part of directors to “complete” his journey. I have the same impulse, but none of those solutions appeal to me.

So I’m thinking this: Caliban ends when he ends. He has no forward story: he’s a character in a play, after all. After the play, he doesn’t exist. He’s a part of Prospero—“this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”—and as Prospero fades from us, so does Caliban. So this is where the puppet medium becomes metaphoric. Prospero embraces the puppet Caliban—not Caliban, but his empty shell—and at that moment Prospero has made peace with his “inner Caliban” and that creature is no more. His last lines are simply Prospero animating Caliban to give an unimaginative exit speech, and then the puppet will go back into the storage bin.

Will that work? I have no idea. That’s what rehearsal is for, to sift the gold from the idiocy. It’s consistent with the interpretation of The Tempest as “Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage” or as a masque or dream, a quintessentially theatrical vision. While I don’t think that’s the particular thrust of this production, I have to acknowledge that, yes, it’s a puppet show; yes, it’s an artifice; yes, it’s a profound vision of transience, mortality, human existence as air.

And So—

Now into heavy sculpting mode. And Elizabeth’s new (used) audio sampler arrived this morning, a great addition to the instrumentation of the music score. She’s recovering from the flu, just returned from a samba lesson in preparation for a guest role back East in April & May, made me a great dinner, and starting to work on the taxes. No mercy.

Peace & joy—
Conrad