This Parade of Appearances

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 7 March 2015.



Most of my recent thinking is the contemporary "Concert for Iceland": the attempt to give Arthur closure on this final chapter in his pre-turbulent reversals life. After that moment, any linear notions like "chapters" are no longer applicable. This is the contemporary Arthur who lives in the psychiatric hospital and is turning into a stylite.

I think Brand New Life is going to be a lot more of your music, like "Selling My Gold," "Helen of Troy," "Retire the Empire," "We Won't Give Up the Fight," and others of yours that I want to start working on after Concert for Iceland is "in the books" (whatever that means). I think I'm going to allow myself to be Billy Pilgrim about the whole thing, because I don't know where one era starts and the other finishes. As you know, I've found some freedom in the idea that this is what post-turbulent reversals life is like.

I also like the idea that, even once we start doing those more chronologically based shows, the project will always have an overriding sense that "time is out of joint." After all, we could be working on a Will and the 5 Wits project 15 years from now as 56 year olds! The actual passing of time plays a critical role in the project's views on time and memory. How potentially poignant to be exploring Arthur's happy early days of marriage in our late 60's! Incidentally, think it might be neat to allow ourselves to age but to continually get young actors and actresses who are not "out of joint." Or is it they that are out of joint? We interact with an "eternal" memory that never grows old, even as we ourselves age.

Of course in our case, it's not memory, it's fantasy. It's that dream of rock 'n' roll stardom that was never real but that hung there in the ether, haunting us. These songs that come from some vaguely earlier era, these young bodies and faces that populate our stages...these are all a shadow's shadow. These dreams, which live on eternally to shame us, have beggared us in this life. And this is a very Death of a Salesman conception of the American Dream in general. We invest everything in our fantasy world--buying it new stockings while the real world grows frayed and threadbare from neglect.

From this standpoint, we could even go one step further than allowing ourselves to age while continuing to have young actors and actresses. Have me (and potentially you) dress "normally" and have everyone else dress era-appropriate. That might help the audience better comprehend this idea of fantasy. In Death of a Salesman, it's the older Willy, dressed as he is in his current life, that interacts with The Woman, who is considerably younger.

The problem becomes what is that "actual" identity? How close does it come to my actual identity? And what is my actual identity?

Because ultimately, the play is about you and I interacting with this Gen-X fantasy, where we collectively lived in this idealized Back to the Future of the 60's and 70's until maybe Nevermind. But even after that point, many of us continued to prefer that culture and music to any of our own generation's offerings. One problem is that there isn't really any uniform that would be recognized as "default" for a person of our generation. I could maybe wear my "casual Friday" attire, but even that has gone from parachute pants to skinny jeans over the span of 10 years.

That's why I think the straitjacket and maybe the thrift-store hodgepodge underneath (nothing cool) might express the idea best.

Instead of being a blank slate, be the parti-colored motley of the Russian Sailor. Maybe I've got on a pair of Bugle Boy jeans, a Cosby Sweater, a basketball jersey, Docksiders. Having one or more of these things not fit well just drives home the point further. Our generation, and perhaps every generation since, has failed or refused to define itself, preferring instead to rehash and remix an idealized past. Even rap, arguably our generation's most novel musical offering, involves the curation and celebration of earlier music through sampling.

It is from this standpoint of not knowing ourselves that we seek answers from an earlier generation's experience, willfully ignorant of the fact that this past led directly to the confused present--that this past was once itself the confused present. And in this we become just another member of the audience. We feel the weight of dramatic irony because we know how it played out, but we still want to replay it all over again rather than live out our own tragedies and comedies, sing our own songs, etc.

Maybe the turbulent reversals began when commercial culture overtook and fully appropriated counterculture.

Maybe at that point it became nearly impossible for the apparel to "proclaim the man." Do we have "that within that passeth show"? Or are we but a "painting of sorrow, a face without a heart?" And maybe it's a good thing that we need to confront these questions.

Maybe the questions were always there and we just didn't know it, distracted by this parade of appearances.