My first book of plays, PLAYS/hauntologies, is out today from Madness Heart Press. I can’t express my gratitude enough for taking this book. I was certain if I were to ever write an entire book of plays, I’d have to put it out myself. It’s less likely any of these will be staged, though it would be amazing if that were to happen as well.
I wanted to talk a little about the origin of this book and how it came to be.
Late to Rehearsal
I was never a theater kid. I didn’t participate in plays in high school or college. I read Shakespeare like every other student, but I didn’t think much about stage or performance works beyond that.
I can’t remember what got me interested in theater, but I’m pretty sure it was watching a recording of The Black Rider musical that was done by Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, and Robert Wilson when I was in college. I’d been a fan of Waits’s music for a while and just discovered Burroughs. Learning they did a collaboration was exciting, but I didn’t think I’d be able to ever see the play until I accidently stumbled across a recording on YouTube.
What struck me was the staging and acting. The actors all moved in unnatural ways, like mannequins, and the backgrounds and props were all distorted like a stripped down version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This led me to look up the director Robert Wilson. Looking over his other works, including his other collaborations with Tom Waits, Alice and Woyzeck. It led me down a rabbit hole.
The problem with developing an interest in avant-garde theater, especially in a place like Iowa, is there’s no real place to watch it outside of recordings online. Because of that, most of my interactions with it have been reading its texts. I wouldn’t say this is a bad thing because reading many of those were light bulb moments for me.
Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller was a major one. A retelling of Hamlet by an East German playwright with references to communist theory, odd and vague staging instructions, and obscene dialogue, it was amazing read. Even at only a few pages. Some who have read my poetry may notice that some of them have references to the play.
Samuel Beckett was another. Waiting for Godot, while pretty great, didn’t strike me as much as his short plays such as Not I, Play, and Krapp’s Last Tape. The unusual settings, the breathless monologues, and deceptively simple staging instructions all made them incredible pieces of emotion to me. I devoured every piece of his I could find online or in the library.
I’ve had more opportunities to see staged plays since college. Not as many avant-garde ones as I would have liked, but it’s given me more appreciation for the form and what could be done with the stage. It also helped convince me that actually pursuing writing them is worthwhile.
Stepping on the Stage
I made a couple attempts to write a musical. It seemed like a good chance to combine my writing and get back into song writing. I didn’t have a title for it, but the plot involved a small number of students and professors at a university dealing with reality collapsing around them. I couldn’t get it to come together. The lyrics I came up with didn’t work and I couldn’t get the plot to progress in a satisfying way.
My first completed attempt at a play was a one-act play called “War Criminal.” I’ve never been fully happy with that title, but it’s stuck with it now. I wrote it all pretty much in one go at 2 o’clock in the morning while drunk. It all came directly from my subconscious, ugly thing that it is. After I got some sleep, I did some editing on it and filed it away as something that would never get published anywhere. It ended up being published in a now-out-of-print anthology, which was definitely encouraging.
Another big inspiration that I discovered around this time were the writings of Yoko Ono and the artists in the movement of Vienna Actionism. Both of them wrote texts for performance art, which I found poetic and striking. I began writing some of my own.
My first serious attempt at incorporating plays and performance pieces in my own work, besides a couple of them being in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Saying Goodbye, was in my collection dr. sodom and mrs. gomorrah. The first half of that book was poetry, with the second half consisting of songs, one-act plays, performance texts, and a treatment for a TV show.
I had put out dr. sodom and mrs. gomorrah myself, because I assumed there was no way any publisher would touch it. I didn’t expect it to sell much either, and for the most part it didn’t. When I got a table at a book festival, however, that ended up being the only book that sold out. Which is a good sign that there’s actually an audience for this sort of thing.
Headlining Act
When I started writing one of the plays in PLAYS/hauntologies, I posted a joke on Facebook that nobody wants to read or publish plays, but I’m writing them anyway. If you want proof that the power of positive thinking is bullshit, this is what started my relationship with Madness Heart Press. John Baltisberger, the founder, messaged me inquiring if I was interested in putting together a collection.
After putting together a sampling of plays to give him an idea of what I was going for, we got the contract in order and it was on. Now, thanks to John and the editors at MHP, the book is now out there in the world.
Curtains Close
While John Baltisberger designed the cover and the interior, the cover art is from Japansese artist Suguru Tanaka. I had admired his work, which reminds me a lot of the apocalyptical visions of Zdzisław Beksiński, having seen it posted in various places online. The piece that graces the book was the inspiration for the play “The Red Tunnel” within it.
My original vision for the cover was a sort of parody of the famous The Society of the Spectacle cover, but with the audience as either skeletons or dead and rotting. However, when I let John know about the art that inspired one of the plays, he was able to get a hold of Tanaka and get his permission to use the piece. I’m very glad he did.
At the moment, you can pick up the ebook at Madness Heart Press and Godless.com. Physical copies can be ordered on Amazon.
Thank you, and no serious applause, please.