5

TA, Old Paper Houses

OLD PAPER HOUSES

Tara Ahmadinejad

Submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements

for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

in the Theatre Arts Program of the School of the Arts

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

05/05/2014

Belief is Leaning In, Doubt is Leaning Back

Old Paper Houses addresses the relationship between faith and doubt, in life and art. This play asks whether it is possible to sustain faith and community, whether one can sustain faith in a utopian pursuit, and what constitutes the failure of such a pursuit. The community of artists who created this play did so in response to shared personal struggles and a shared perspective about the immediate world around us. This community began as a group of five artists, all members of our theater company Piehole, including our core group (dramaturg/producer, Elliot B. Quick, performer/creators Jeff Wood, Allison LaPlatney, Alexandra Panzer, and me, the director), and our associate member Kathryn Wallem.

On a personal level, we all shared a struggle with faith in ideas and art, specifically the ability to sustain conviction while also making room for doubt, and making room for doubt without losing the will to keep pursuing a goal. Related to this struggle is how one can combat cynicism while still allowing for doubt and criticism. On the one hand, we face this struggle as young artists in New York City, where the dramatic rises in the cost of living make the life of an artist who is not independently wealthy unsustainable, and the artistic landscape suffers from the barriers to entry. On the other hand, some of us identify strongly with a sense of being part of a generation who has been able to combat cynicism and experience hope, seeing potential for change through various avenues, be it the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the start of the Arab Spring in 2010, or the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. After each of these events, which galvanized the spirits of young people in particular, the air filled with a sense of failure or chaos, a sense that the revolutions abroad have only led to power vacuums, intensifying conflicts in the region; that our domestic movement fizzled out due to a lack of organization and the doomed state of our democratic ideals in the reality of capitalism; and that our own hero of a president is susceptible to even culpable in the complex political machinery that limits change and progress. Hope, change and stagnation occur in phases and cycles, but we felt that we hit our late 20s at a point in the cycle of change and upheaval when hope easily sours into cynicism.

The temptation to give up on imagining a better world is clear. One can start to feel foolish, one can be reminded of a time when she thought her activism could improve the world, only to find that the media has declared the end of the movement, framing it as a failure. The truth is, Occupy may not have been so simply a failure. It drew attention to issues with capitalism and particularly with the financial sector, forcing politicians to at least discuss them, now that they are in the consciousness. However, at the same time, Occupy became co-opted, like everything else, by the market, much like the hippie inspired Coca Cola ads from the early 1970s. We started to see the word Occupy in front of a wide range of ideas, goods, and services, as businesses started to cash in on the momentum of the movement. These are nuanced, subtle impacts that a group of otherwise powerless individuals created, but there was no clear, specific result that came from the movement that could be clearly identified as a major achievement. Since there is not room for nuance in the media, the movement gets boiled down to being a failure. If we were able to dig into the complexities of movements such of these more regularly, we would be better armed against cynicism, because we could continue to believe that our collective actions have consequences. Pieholes own utopian pursuit is to create a space for community and complexity, and at the same time to contend with, rather than ignore, dominant modes of communication and media. As individuals, we have conjured a rare breed of intentional community: one in which we are allowed to fully believe and fully doubt all at the same time. For us, this complexity embodies the beauty of a collective artistic pursuit, which we aim to extend to our audience.

Artistically speaking, for better or for worse, about a year ago I started to parse out two tendencies in the work that we have done as a company, to point to an inner artistic struggle I was experiencing. One direction of our work comes from our background in puppetry. This is a less language-based aspect of our work, and usually relates to the pursuit of transcendence in theater, one that is achieved through the transformation of physical presence into something otherworldly. I consider this to be the kind of Artaudian side of our work where we create a world, often dreamlike or surreal, to draw in an audience. The other aspect is much more language-based and often contains a critique or dialectic, and I think of this as the Brechtian aspect of our work. It often involves a sort of rupture within a performance, and asks the audience to keep track and then lose track of several frames, invariably pointing to the concrete reality of the theatrical encounter.

When I further consider these two sides I realize that the two are inextricably linked. This becomes particularly evident when I consider object performance or puppetry. While a performing object can draw an audience member into a different realm of reality, in the eyes of the viewer that object cannot help but vibrate back and forth between its newfound subjectivity (as a performer) and its everyday objectness. This internal rupture, which occurs in the perception of the audience member, is both Brechtian and Artaudian in a sense, and contains both sides of these aspects that I have discussed. The goal with the work we make as a company is to allow for both aspects. One encourages transcendence, and might be associated with faith, as it can galvanize a community in this spirit. The other encourages criticism, and might be associated with doubt and complexity, because it presents contradictions. Creating a piece about faith and doubt allowed for a closer examination of these formal concerns. Although we discussed these underpinnings in our early meetings when we searched for source material, they became more background considerations as we continued to develop the piece.

JANUARY APRIL 2013

Initial Search for Material

These collective thematic and artistic concerns surfaced as we began to search for content for our next piece. In January 2013 the group mentioned above met several times, bringing different texts and materials to the table, and giving each other reading assignments each week. As we gathered sources we discovered common themes, which would guide the remainder of our research. We read short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, many of them simple allegories for the American dream, laced with Spiritualism and phantasmagoria. We read Rip Van Winkle, as well as a childrens book called Ronia the Robbers Daughter, a fairy tale about a girl who runs away from home and inevitably finds vestiges of the adult world even in her off-the-grid life in the woods. We discussed The Artists Way, a kind of self-help book for artists, in which art becomes a spiritual path toward fulfillment. One day, Allison brought in The Golden Book of Words by Bernadette Mayer, and shared Essay with us. Essay draws together the themes of utopia and art-making. It allows poetry and farming to be both real pursuits and metaphors. Each line in the poem moves steadily toward greater complexity and nuance. The voice in the poem seems to steady itself as the ideas and sentence structure become increasingly complex. This poem also posits poetry as a utopian pursuit and ultimately acknowledged the mundane reality of such a pursuit the day to day work involved in maintaining a space which upholds ones ideals, as boring as any office job! We were all instinctively drawn to this text, and it became clear that while we were excited about the ideas in certain other texts, this was the first text whose language we felt sure we wanted to include in our piece.

Approaching Mayer and Hawthorne in Spring 2013

Mayer mentions Hawthorne in The Golden Book of Words, and she references Brook Farm in Essay. We read interviews with Mayer in which she discussed her appreciation of Hawthorne. She describes how Hawthorne, at a time when all other novelists were copying British writing, rigorously translated human thought into writing, which made him, Mayer argues, the first distinctively American voice in fiction. We soon discovered that Hawthorne had spent time at the Transcendentalist commune Brook Farm. Ten years later, while living in Lenox, MAwhere Bernadette Mayer wrote The Golden Book of Wordshe wrote The Blithedale Romance, a satirical novel based on his experiences there. The combination of real and imagined connections between Mayer and Hawthorne became our obsession last spring as we began to create a piece based on four poems by Mayer, Hawthornes The Blithedale Romance, and a handful of letters that Hawthorne wrote to his fianc while at Brook Farm.

We chose the four Mayer poems (see Appendix) based on the structure they provided us, and their focus on place (specifically New England) and point of view. The first poem, Lookin Like Areas of Kansas, is preceded by a Hawthorne quote We had our first cucumber today, which we took to be ironic on Mayers part, as a way of memorializing a relatively mundane utterance. The poem begins New England is awful and continues with short, humorous, negative generalizations