Monday, December 10, 2007
Recap: Aggression
In the words of our newest catch-phrase:
Nailed it.
I think every risk we took in “My Thing Is Bigger” was paid off in full. We recreated the war on terror in unicorn costumes and got away with it. The audience rewarded our efforts with laughter, applause, and contemplative silence (in equal measure, always where appropriate). As the tone of the show shifted from silly to satirical to serious, even the simplest of jokes benefited from the larger context of our presentation: a quiet understanding that we danced on difficult subjects, and trusted our crowd to trust us in turn.
After the show we hit the Thirsty Scholar, and were surprised at how little we missed Bukowski’s thumping music and overcrowded aisles, currently buried under layers of construction material. The Thirsty Scholar doesn’t have the patented Bukowski beer or pub grub, but for a change of pace, we could have done worse. Several of our friends in the audience inquired after the linkage between our show’s opener and closer: respectively, an excerpt of Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,“ and a performance of Billy Bragg’s “Between the Wars.“
Billy Bragg’s Between the Wars:
19_Between_the_Wars.mp3
Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” (excerpt):
These are our strength, who strike against history.
These who corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness
to our diseases;
these carrying light for safety on their foreheads
descended deeper for richer faults of ore,
drilling their death.
These touching radium and the luminous poison,
carried their death on their lips and with their warning
glow in their graves.
These weave and their eyes water and rust away,
these stand at wheels until their brains corrode,
these farm and starve,
all these men cry their doom across the world,
meeting avoidable death, fight against madness,
find every war.
I haven’t been able to locate the full text online, unfortunately. It’s a long discourse on the Hawk’s Nest Incident, a mining tragedy that would be lost to history if it weren’t for Rukeyser’s odd hybrid of investigative journalism, activism, and poetry.
Tucker had pitched “Between the Wars” as our show closer, a kind of protest and peace offering, long before we had a macroscopic view of the show’s tone. We were worried that it would seem didactic without any direct tie-ins to the… you know… comedy. But after listening to the song a few times I began catching wisps of “The Book of the Dead,“ and dug the poem out of one of my college textbooks. It was perfect. Both pieces tackle the issue of war from the perspective of those it hits hardest—the working class (here, miners). As if by magic our show could come full circle, and in Eliot’s shoes I could set the expectation of the evening by sprinkling a little melancholy into my opening monologue. Tucker and Pope nailed the Bragg song, start to finish, and I will not second-guess Tucker’s instincts again.
Of the material besides our closing song, I heard the most comments about this little mock recruitment ad I created:
It was super-fun to make, and lest I seem insensitive to all those young men in the Scouts: I am only familiar with the BSA’s hideous inner workings because I am an Eagle Scout myself. My time in the scouts was great, but I have completely dissociated myself from them over the years as spotlights continue to illuminate the larger machinations of the organization.
I spent most of Friday night in the wings, watching our videos and listening to the crowd. It rivaled some of my most visceral experiences on stage, and I left the theater with a rare sense of accomplishment.