Jim Fitzmorris

new orleans' theatrical pugilism

Hail Caesar!

April 27th, 2013

My favorite Buzz Podewell Shakespeare story requires a little set up.

Of all the moments I enjoyed working with Buzz on Shakespeare, his 1998 production of Julius Caesar stands head and shoulders above the rest. It was a clinic in how to create staggering theatre with just under four weeks of rehearsal. He began two years in advance. His cut was a combination of the works of others, most noticeably Orson Welles’ lighting production of 1938, and his own political inclinations. Borrowing from a German staging that put the Roman political class in shirtless suits draped in short togas, Buzz saw the world of Caesar as a battle between a wealthy elite who put very little stock in the comings and goings of the underclass. Unless, of course, that underclass could advance their agenda. He then hit upon the idea of taking role of The Cobbler and expanding it by giving him lines of various crucial citizens throughout the text. By doing this, the voice of the working man would percolate throughout his production. At one moment the shoemaker was a supporter of Caesar, the next he was in love with Brutus. The audience would not only follow the leading men of Rome, but it would also see the impact of their actions and decisions on the city’s ordinary people.

He assembled songs and graffiti from the period. He found a dirty poem from the times and opened his text with a drunken revel singing it to composed music:

Hail Caesar! In Vino Veritas! Hail Caesar! He’s a horse’s ass!

His Rome was a ugly place of scheming jealousies and resentments. He saw pits where Cinna the Poet would be burned alive, proscription lists that ran the length of the stage and contained the actual names of executions waiting to have wine thrown upon them, and a mob the likes of which no New Orleans’ production had seen nor would see again.

Thrusting the stage into the audience and giving no distance from the chaos, Buzz sought to make his world a visually crammed nightmare. The mob was in the audience not because it was a neat theatrical gimmick, but because it had no place else to be. Buzz took painstaking care to invest each person in the space with their own reality to the unfolding forum scene. In fact, over the course of the production, numerous local actors were allowed to put on costumes and join the fun. The only rules were that they had to meet with Buzz, figure out where they would stand, and decide what their relation was to the controlled mayhem. On one occasion, I turned to find the actors playing Romeo and Juliet in our next production, clinging to one another, transformed into a young, expecting couple that hung on to every word of Danny Bowen’s funeral oration over the late Caesar’s body.

It is important to understand that the sort of playful nonsense that happened on that production could only happen, because Buzz had left nothing to chance in his creation of that world. Therefore, the outliers, improvisations and live wires that were injected into the production only sparked it into deeper life and meaning. You only got to cut up, because the architect of the jungle gym had made it a safe place to play.

Even the director himself got in on the fun. And that leads me to my favorite Buzz story. The actor Sean Stewart, playing the roles of Octavius and Trebonius, blew out his knee during the course of the action. And while he could continue to play Caesar’s heir apparent, Stewart was no longer able to fulfill his secondary role. So, Buzz stepped into the part. On the two nights that he did it, he got some of the biggest laughs in the show just by knowing where to put his foot on a step. He walked off stage, and I told him he nailed it. He just smiled and said, Haven’t you figured it out yet, Jimmy? I know where the laughs are.

We’ll now have to find someone else to tell us.

A Few Thoughts From The Airport

April 7th, 2013

For those of you who know my work, you know it is a little obsessed with The City of New Orleans. I am from there, I love her rhythms, and I could spend my life writing about her and never exhaust all the possibilities. I don’t write about her like other people do, so whatever other dramatic work about New Orleans you have seen on television, film or the stage, you won’t feel like you’re watching that world in my work. Sometimes I think I have invented a New Orleans that doesn’t actually exist, because no one else dramatically seems to write about it. And I don’t think theaters around the country believe me when I send them these plays, because they are not interested in their production.

Or maybe I invented a talent I don’t actually have?

The only thing that gives me hope are the New Orleanians that come see my work. Most of them recognize that city. So, with only their encouragement, I piddle on like the neighborhood grocery store, servicing a small but loyal customer base. Taking as much delight in their lives as I hope they do in my work. I have resigned myself that my New Orleans will not be bathed in the stage lights of Lajolla, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, The Guthrie, Orlando Shakes, The Magic or any other theatre outside my own city. This used to kill me a little bit everyday, but I have come to peace about it just as I have accepted I will never be the chief critic of The Times Picayune and that I will never act, direct, or write for Le Petit Theatre. What I do works from the border of New Orleans East all the way out onto Loyola Drive in Kenner.

There are worse fates.

Never Better: Buzz Podewell

March 29th, 2013

Unlike his collaborator and chum Mark Mclaughlin, Buzz Podewell was not a hard man to know. In fact, a friendship with him was an invitation. An invitation to a world that was full of magic tricks, bedtime stories, spooky tales, political dilemmas and lots and lots of Shakespeare. His shows were a consistent mix of old warriors and enthusiastic kids, all of whom he welcomed into his ebullient, biting, and ultimately sentimental worldview. Whether traveling with Pericles, getting caught in the sweep of John Dos Passos, or running away with the trolls from Peer Gynt, his shows gave you the sense you were looking at an invigorated vaudeville troupe, one that was hell bent on using their skills to tell great stories.

There were late night breakfasts, early morning script sessions, and a clear sense of galvanizing purpose bonded to an absolute sense of fun. Fun is word you rarely hear about rehearsal from most people. But ask anyone who ever worked with him if they ever dreaded walking into a rehearsal where Buzzy was the head honcho. Ask anyone who ever did a run through for him if there was anything more joyous than looking out and seeing him leaning in with a rapturous smile on his face. He let himself get swept away, and in doing so, he let the tide take you as well.

The amount of joy he gave children of all ages is unmeasurable. He delighted in theatre and all its tricks. To try to list my favorite directorial flourishes from the man would be nigh impossible. Fools vanishing into thunderstorms, vanity screens turning into magic boxes from which house madams emerged, Caesar suddenly appearing on a battlefield, the transformation of Generalissimo Franco into Bernada Alba, and the epic story of Eugene Debs told only with a narrator, a banjo and an old union song are the tip of a lengthy list of breathtaking devices he used to tell classic tales.

But it was in the telling where he really shined. A lot of people have neat ideas and clever concepts. But Buzzy’s were always in the service of the greater story, taking an audience from point A to B. The tale was everything. He cut back the shrubs, pruned the weeds, and kept only those things that helped the audience follow the action. He never imposed upon a script, his preparation work was the finest in town, and woe to the actor who had not done his or her homework before locking horns with the man with the legal pad.

He was one of the best people I ever knew. If you weren’t invited, it was only because you never met him.

Catch the Wall

March 22nd, 2013

There is so much infuriating and thrilling going on around Gabrielle Reisman’s Catch the Wall that it is hard to know where to begin.

So, let’s start from the beginning.

Ms. Reisman has written a play that is both a celebration of bounce music and a look inside the New Orleans public school system. It is a multiple story narrative that tracks the struggles of parents, teachers, and, ultimately, students in one of the country’s great educational petri dishes. Incorporating song, dance, and a touch of the supernatural, The NOLA Project production, under the guidance of director Chris Kaminstein, has set off a bit of a concussive grenade over issues of identity, race and authorial privilege. In others words, questions have been raised of not only whether Ms. Reisman has gotten it right, but also whether she has any right to tell the story at all. She, and members of her company, have been called misguided, uninformed, insensitive and, on more than one occasion, outright racist. If you join the Facebook post-show discussion group, you’ll get the sense of what is going on with the show.

If you decide to wade in, there are some compelling and challenging ideas to parse over, and you should maintain an open spirit. However, keep this in mind: you will feel provoked. A number of the respondents will attempt to put you into either the defensive position of arguing against your being a racist or force you to establish your credentials to join the conversation. If you do the first, your defensiveness will then be used as evidence of your racism. If you do the second, you will be met with sanctimonious bromides about ways to educate yourself in things you already know a great deal about. Nothing is worse for people in the theatre to be educated by non-practitioners about subjects likes story circles and The Free Southern Theatre. If you find that some of the “dialogue” feels like it came straight out a re-education camp, a show trial, or a Maoist cell, you are not going crazy, because those shadows are there. Part of that strategy is to keep people out the action by holding the fear of accusation nearby. Do not let silence or acquiescence be your only options. Get in the game.

As engaging as the discussion on social media is, the more important, and more thought provoking, response comes from Rachel Lee whose essay/review In The Shadow of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Responding to The NOLA Project and Catch the Wall is a painstakingly fair and incredibly nuanced analysis of the show. Essentially, Lee, while praising both Reisman’s action of writing itself and a great deal of the artistry of the piece, is highly problematized by issues of accuracy, the authority of the writer, and a number of images and scenes that she feels cross the line into enculturated, albeit subtle, racism.

I do not take issue with Lee for her opinions of interpretation. Disappointment with staging choices, the questions she raises about performance motifs, and even her troubled reception of images that she felt called back to ghostings of racist tropes from the 19th Century are all fair game. After all, she saw the show she saw. To allude to Herbert Blau, the audience is what happens. Therefore, for her, that was the show that happened. However, where I do take issue are in her prescriptive suggestions for scope and her assertions of facts that are simply not so. To put it another way, much of her writing is musing about a show she would have liked to have seen rather than the one that was, and there are assertions she makes about the structure of public schools, much of it pulled from Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope, that are not true.

Let’s start with the first. It is the more practical. Lee talks of exploring “racial landscapes”, agonizes over the absence of a police presence, muses aloud about Reisman’s failure to tell the story of the lack of black males in the schools, and on other occasions looks to have the story expanded and deepened. Those are all good threads worth investigating in numerous future works, but Reisman and company have just over two hours to move through the time and space of an entire semester. Catch the Wall is not a HBO series nor a compendium of novels. It is a compact, ensemble exploration of the life of a school. On these occasions, Lee’s notes move away from genuine criticism and dangerously close to the mentality of a dramaturgical workshop where a teacher tells their student a radical idea how to fix their play.

On the issue of accuracy, I will use Lee’s own words to frame my counter:

The production misses the mark in other key ways, particularly in its characterization of the racialized and gendered dynamics of education in New Orleans. In the play we see the following power hierarchy: poor Black students answer to young, middle class teachers (both Black and white) who are newcomers to the city; these teachers are under the supervision of a female Black veteran principal who bemoans the death of the teachers’ union to her supervisor, a Black male charter company CEO (Martin Bradford) who in turn submits to an unidentified white woman in a suit (Kristin Witterschein) who appears to represent the state department of education. It is true that there is a rigid hierarchy in place, but it is not accurately personified in Catch the Wall. In Hope Against Hope, Carr explains:

“The vast majority of Recovery School District charter schools are overseen by either white male or black female principals, with a comparatively small number of black male or white female school leaders (which in and of itself sends an interesting message to New Orleans schoolchildren about who has authority in their community––and who does not). The black female principals tend to hire veteran New Orleans teachers, while the white male administrators rely more on younger teachers brought to the city through alternative recruitment programs.”

Thus the depiction of a Black veteran educator running a school staffed by TFA recruits and adhering to KIPP style discipline and culture policies does not quite ring true when it is much more likely that she would be running a school staffed by the few remaining veteran teachers (such as the embattled O. Perry Walker on the West Bank or Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School in the 9th Ward). Neither does the casting of a Black man as the embodiment of authority in the charter hierarchy. This ignores the conspicuous absence of men of color in school leadership and obscures the racialized power dynamics at play. Placing some of the most heated ideological conversations in the play in the mouths of people of color dilutes the natures of these debates, feeding into the myth of a “colorblind” education system and letting white reformers off the hook…

This runs counter to my own experience of working in public schools. Because of my position, I had access to four schools structures over the course of any given day. In those schools, I encountered a middle school principal who was a veteran African-American teacher and that, for reasons both ideological and financial, cleaned house of fellow veteran teachers and stocked her pond with TFA members. Just down the road a male African-American high school principal sought a mix of the young and old and was beloved by both. Finally, the majority of my time was spent in another middle school hallway where three African-American men presided over their own classrooms, another was the head counselor, and a fifth was the dean of students. I simply cannot believe that I happened to find the three exceptions to Carr and Lee’s rules.

My counter to her, and Ms. Carr by association, is that each school is an independent entity created by its diverse mix of neighborhoods, socio-economic forces, cultural traditions, and day-to-day life. To suggest otherwise, is to fall prey to the reductive thinking that dominates corporate organizations that either turn the population of every single school into a monolithic entity that operates under uniform guidelines or creates a binary of grizzled, wise veterans versus eager, bustling reformers. Just as no city is alike, no school has the same energies. Given my understanding of school organization, Ms. Reisman’s fictional place of learning is completely believable and all too sad. If you are genuinely interested in how such a place could come into existence, just ask, it can be explained in a paragraph.

All that being said, I will once again encourage you to not only attend Catch the Wall in its last weekend but also read Lee’s essay. Both are worth it.

Ringing Our Bell

March 20th, 2013

Something big is brewing in New Orleans’ theatre. It seems we’re ahead of the curve. We even managed to beat reality television to the punch. You see, The NOLA Project’s own Gabrielle Reisman’s Catch the Wall premiered last week at Dillard University, and that means, when you couple it with my own Urban Education Smackdown, New Orleans’ theatre addressed a hot topic issue in the city in a way it never has before…

The topic is still hot.
Artistically, we got there first.
Our take is different from mainstream consensus.

Both shows were conceived and created before Blackboard Wars was even a rumble. Furthermore, both shows point to systemic administrative dysfunction as the problem rather than laying the blame at teachers’ feet.

The mainstream opinion (with the notable exception of Bill Maher) has been tough on teachers. They have been betrayed by people who should have been their allies like Michelle Rhee and the creators of Waiting for Superman, and they have been out-and-out called the villains in contemptible trash like Won’t Back Down. I am proud to say that New Orleans’ theatre has not only avoided piling on, it has called foul. Both theatrical offerings roar back at those who would seek to absolve parents, administrators and government officials while laying blame on the overworked and the underpaid.

It seems that we’ve moved so far ahead of the curve that the press hasn’t noticed. The coverage has been spotty and the trend has been missed. I had hoped I could avoid ringing my own bell, and I was willing to do so. After all, I had a very nice preview piece written about me in Gambit Weekly. However, after seeing the production over at Dillard, I decided not keep silent on this. Guided by its hyper-gifted director Chris Kaminstein, Catch the Wall is a rather stunning multi-media production that moves seamlessly from projection to intimacy to song to outright celebration. The work is at times infuriating, misses the jugular on more than one occasion, and loses narrative control from time to time. However, it’s voice feels genuine, alive, and will fill more than one teacher with an awful sense of recoil bordering on PTSD. Most importantly, it feels like New Orleans both inside and out. If you know me, you know what a compliment that is.

How many times do you have a theatrical insurgency of original work that pits itself against the general consensus? In New Orleans no less. This is a national story. So, I beg you, local press, tell people what’s going down. We’ve earned it.