Inreflection

I’m having trouble remembering why I thought it would be a good idea to have T.S. Eliot host “The Wasteland Comedy Hour.”  Originally I tagged “...with T.S. Eliot!” onto the title as a joke, and to skew the perception of the show towards a weird late-night program.  As a title, and an advertising mechanism, it totally works.  As an idea I now have to follow through on, it’s presenting some challenges.

There was a time when the producers discussed the idea of abandoning the Eliot-as-host idea altogether.  I resisted dropping him from the show, because I felt our material—mostly 2-3 minute sketches, films, and songs—is too diverse in tone to bind into a cohesive hour.  This is still true, and for that I’m glad we have Eliot facilitating the evening.  His role is pretty well-defined now: he’s Kermit the Frog.  Kermit hosted The Muppet Show, but the character was never imposed on bits that didn’t have anything to do with him—and once the program got rolling you never really missed poor Kermit.  He popped in here and there to tell a joke, move things along, and buffer other pieces.

So, Eliot is our Kermit, and of course I wanted to tackle the challenge of playing Eliot, because it sounded fun, and hosting in character definitely falls outside of my performance comfort-zone.  Here are a few of the hurdles I’m stumbling over.

Several sketches which take place in the meta-world of Eliot’s variety show have lines written for Eliot himself—naturally.  Unfortunately, they were written long before I stepped into Eliot’s shoes, and so his dialog in these bits feels functional at best, forced at worst.  I need to rewrite his lines to fit his voice, or improvise around the scripted beats.  This is not the fault or responsibility of the original writers, just a hiccup in how we’ve developed the show and material.

T.S. Eliot is notorious amongst anybody who’s studied lit (and many who haven’t).  This is part of why I chose “him” to be our host—his dry cadence, his stuffy reputation, his canonical criticism and dense poetry—he’s already a character, and that he would never host a comedy show is all the more reason to force the role.  Plus, I strongly dislike his scholarly writing, even though “The New Criticism” paved the path to some of my favorite practices in Critical Theory.  I am also divided on his poetry—I empathize with and pity Prufrock down to the muscle of my heart, but “The Waste Land” leaves me cold.  I’ve read all his other work but confess that none of it really sticks unless I’m deeply committed to taking the time to read and re-read.  So, what does this mean for me, playing the character?  Just that my WICKED HILARIOUS New Criticism jokes have to be cut.

Eliot’s voice and cadence are distinctive, but not conducive to high-energy late-night antics.  Here are some recordings of the man himself:

T.S. Eliot reads The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot reads The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I mean, I would love to talk like that for the whole night, but I’d end up doubling our show’s running time.

In walking the line between faux-pretension and lit-nerd-masturbation, the only real metric is how many laughs a joke/bit gets.  But because I’m only doing each joke/monologue/bit once, I’ll never have the opportunity to revise, tweak, perfect—I’m flying in the dark.  I suspect the monologues for the first three shows will be a bit strained as I figure out (along with the audience, in real time), just what’s so damn funny about T.S. Eliot.  I’m writing the monologues out fully, but I won’t have the mental bandwidth to memorize their exact phrasing, so there’ll be some improv and some dropped jokes and some gibberish as I stumble to get comfortable in a new character, in a new show, in front of a new audience, for a window of ~7 minutes.  If I fuck it up or the stuff I wrote just isn’t funny, the opportunity to make that beat work will be gone forever. Much like improv, but with the added sting of having conceived and prepared for that moment of failure for several weeks.