Sharp Theater Bulletin

SHARP THEATER BULLETIN IN THIS ISSUE PAGE 3 PAGE 4 PAGE 5 PLAYWRIGHT’S PERSPECTIVE THE X-FACTOR NOT-KNOWING Kirk Lynn on fatherhood and how it impacted Let's talk about sex. “If nothing was true, everything was possible.” the writing of the play. Adam Greenfield on the work of Kirk Lynn. FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR DEAR FRIENDS, How honest are we about sex? The Kama Sutra of Vtsyyana is a sacred Hindu text composed about eighteen hundred years ago. It was first published privately in English by an erotophile named Sir Richard Burton in 1883 and began to appear in pirated publications around the same time that Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. When Burton died, his wife reportedly burned most of his private erotic literature collection. As the most recent translator of The Kama Sutra, Aditya N. D. Haksarhas, points out, most English-speakers only know this ancient text via marketed “Illustrated” publications that highlight the notori- ous descriptions of copulatory positions that actually comprise only about one twentieth of the original work. A fairer summary would characterize it as a broad survey of sexual and social relationships between men and women. I lay out this bit of world literary history for you to come clean about my own way into Kirk Lynn’s fascinating, insightful, and moving story of a man’s messy journey from marriage to fatherhood. I didn’t know much about Kirk’s play when we did a Superlab reading of it last year. Frankly, I didn’t know much about the ac- tual Kama Sutra either, not that this ancient text has anything to do with the play, really, other than to orient us. So when the first scene started off with a bit of smartly rendered sexual role-playing, I will confess, I found myself pleasantly titillated (and intrigued). But I soon understood I was in the hands of a playwright wise and brave enough to understand that titillation is only the entry point into sex. The premise behind the role-playing Carla and Reggie undertake asks them to reenact scenes from their sexual histories. And their motive is not just to get off, but to expose themselves, to share their deepest fears, shame and pas- sions with each other. We see the unnerving, liberating effects of their courtship indirectly in the friendship that Carla is able to form with Reggie’s audacious, ex-flame friend, Tony. Honesty turns out to be the great leveler. Midway through the first act, the play introduces a parallel story about Reggie’s rebellious daughter Bernie and her new boy- friend, Sean. Reggie seems helpless in the face of her anger and recklessness. And where is Carla? In the second act, this story takes over and the once-fearless, impetuous Reggie turns into a stereotype of an autocratic father in the face of his daughter’s sexual awakening. Tony re-enters the scene and the emotional undercurrents of the two acts and the two time periods collide. Sex opened up gateways between Reggie and Carla, but has shut the locks between Reggie and Bernie. Or has it? Once tongues are unloosed, it becomes clear that sex hasn’t been the issue at all. What has been missing has been honesty and time: the time both Reggie and Bernie have lost with Carla. And as the play reaches its climax, maybe it merits a somewhat humorous comparison to that ancient Hindu text: the search for truth assumes many positions. And the over-arching principle that guides both the search for truth and for pleasure is mutuality: "Whatever things may be done by one of the lovers to the other, the same should be returned by the other." I have barely touched on one of the most remarkable aspects of the play, and the most palpable evidence of the sure-handed skill and experience of its author. The two time frames of the play live side by side so naturally and it makes its shifts clearly and theatrically, without fuss. But in the process it also emphatically dramatizes how alive time is for these characters. All time seems fully present in the play, and hence all truth too. We ache for the characters to discover this too, we know it hovers just there for them, like the ghosts of characters that haunt their memories. And when they begin to, it feels inevitable yet still sur- prisingly affecting. TIM SANFORD ARTISTIC DIRECTOR The Sharp Theater Bulletin is generously Special thanks to the funded, in part, by the PETER JAY SHARP FOUNDATION LIMAN FOUNDATION. for its generous support of this production. 2 PLAYWRIGHT’S PERSPECTIVE I’m a member of the writer’s cult that craves early mornings. The more I thought about the possibilities and dangers of 5:00 AM, 4:30 in my most maniacal phases. 4:00 is too early this performance, the vulnerabilities and intimacies, the more for me, but I only know because I tried. I wanted to move this warm-up exercise into my day’s main work. I decided to write a play about a couple attempting to Quiet. Solitude. Discipline. Darkness. Stubbornness. Stillness. share this experience with one another as a means of binding themselves together in intimate knowledge. There are lots of ways to wake up. I love strong, French-press coffee, an ice cube in it so I don’t have to wait for it to cool. Then, pretty quickly after that idea, my daughter was born. And I usually wake up my writing with some small project or The mornings went right out the window. My wife and I exercise I can noodle around with in the first 5, 10, 15 minutes entered a world of perpetual morning. Everyday was 5AM it takes to get my brain cooking. The Austrian writer Thomas all day long. Everything was just beginning. Everyone was Bernhard, who trained as a pianist, called these small projects always just waking up all the time. All we all wanted to do ‘finger exercises.’ was lay around and cuddle with one another. It was heaven. For a while I kept a list of everything I ever believed in my That goes on for a while. life. Cats were girls and dogs were boys. I would grow up to become a barber like my father and marry my mother. There Then, when my daughter was just approaching her first is one solitary sin listed as unforgivable in the Holy Bible and birthday, as a finalist or a runner-up for the Herb Alpert I had committed it. Award in the Arts, I was given some time at the MacDowell artist colony. I didn’t want to be away from my daughter for More recently I started trying to write the smallest and too long. My wife, Carrie Fountain, is a poet. She deserves simplest recipes possible that would create some kind of to write as much as I do. Maybe more. So I have to balance performance. I call these recipes, “Plays without Words, my travel against our family and her work. I decided to without Actors, without Anything,” in imitation of Louis- go to MacDowell for just a week. The rest of the writers at Ferdinand Céline’s “Ballets without Music, Without Dancers, MacDowell thought I was crazy! But in that very intense week, without Anything.” Here’s one: newly motivated to make my time away matter, I drafted Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra. It was not quite the play I A Simple Room had imagined writing before my daughter was born. Instead it came to contain a lot of my thoughts about being the father of a daughter. Empty out one room of your house, if you have more than one room. If not, use a large cardboard box. This will be People say crazy shit to the father of a daughter. They say your simple room. Spend as much time as you can in the different crazy shit to the mom. But over and over again, men simple room. You may do anything you normally do, but and women both expressed to me that when my daughter if you do it in the simple room you may only bring in one was a teenager I should want to lock her up. To protect her? To item at a time. You may bring a chair into the simple room protect me? To protect her future partners from me? It got me for sitting. You may read a book in the simple room, but thinking about how a grown man should talk to his daughter then no chair, no lamp. Read only during the day. You may about sex and intimacy. What had I learned from my wife and eat in the simple room, but no plates, no cutlery. Spend as all the women who had in some sense helped me grow up? much time as you can in the simple room. You may write in the simple room. Bring a pencil, the walls will have to be Now my daughter’s three years old, and I have a six month the paper. You can bring a camera into the simple room to old son, too, who’s just starting to sleep through the night. take pictures of the walls and to get your writing out of the My mornings are coming back to me. I can’t wait. I almost simple room. You can perform a play in the simple room. always want to be home. And when I’m there, I want to go to If your play has no set and no costumes and no props you bed early, in anticipation of an early rise and an hour or two can invite in an audience, one person at a time.

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