Showing posts with label Lenny Bruce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lenny Bruce. Show all posts

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Woody Allen: Part One

 First of Two Parts

Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man, without bucket hat


“Spielberg has said he makes the kind of pictures he enjoyed as 
a child. I like to make the kind of pictures I enjoy as an adult.”
-- Woody Allen

Deconstructing Heywood Allen:

Manhattan’s Nebbish Gagman

by Jamie Jobb

Born Ashkenazi Jew and raised Brooklyn bohemian in a big extended Midwood family, who could be more “New York” than Heywood “Woody” Allen? As a teenager, Heywood legally changed his birth name – Allan Stewart Konigsberg – to “Woody Allen” and after school began sending jokes under that nom deplume to newspapers, which eventually brought him to the attention of his heroes Bob Hope and Sid Caesar. In those early days of live broadcast television, Woody landed in Manhattan as a gag-writer who would develop into America’s top sanitized stand-up comic, destined to monetize his moniker – while the edgier Lenny Bruce developed his rap sheet on the flip side of comedy’s coin.

No matter what name applies, keep in mind that the guy pictured above – without his trademark tennis-club bucket-hat – just turned eighty-seven years old. And he’s at work on his final film, an untitled French project starring Isabelle Huppert.

Writer-director Woody Allen was productive for half a century. His mother lived to ninety-six; his father lived to be one hundred. “By the time he was sixteen or seventeen, he was making more [income] than his parents … and regularly employed every day of his life since,” said biographer Eric Lax.  Although his film career is winding down, Woody will continue to write short stories on the same German-made Olympia portable typewriter he got when he started sending gags to Broadway columnists. 

Despite his own private turmoil near the end of the Twentieth Century, Woody Allen has been seriously funny in public for seven decades. He was peerless among working cosmopolitan filmmakers. This strange nagging man created some well-respected dramatic works (“Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Interiors,” “Husbands and Wives”) although his thoughtful comedies are what distinguish his long, albeit controversial, career. 

He averaged one-film-a-year after he directed his first picture by himself (“Take the Money and Run”) in 1969, when he was thirty-four and his show-biz name was well established. Woody came to filmmaking a little late in life, after he’d frequently appeared as a guest of Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin … becoming “A Household Name” telling jokes all across America.

He dropped out of a collegiate “motion picture production” course before he was invited to join Caesar’s writers’ room – the center of the universe for gag-writers in the 1950s (see “Reality TV One”).

That was a wise career choice. Wiser still was Allen’s hooking up with managers Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe who had never represented a writer before, but had the vision and resources to mold Woody into an international celebrity. “With the same horn-rims and casual clothes which would become his trademark,” writes biographer Julian Fox, “Woody was ... a universal comic voice, in appearance and complexity so like the audience he was entertaining that, within two years, he was being widely touted as the most popular stand-up comic in America.”

Woody Allen’s transition from famous stage-and-tv act to world-famous filmmaker was more gradual. His “early funny films” were co-written with Mickey Rose or Marshall Brickman, and those performance-based scripts seemed more like Show-of-Show sketches or SNL skits. But as Allen began writing films alone, things changed. He became more cinematic, more “European”. According to Julian Fox, Woody evolved from “hip, neurotic urban successor to Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx Brothers” into a “middle-class Chekhov” or more accurately a lighter version of Sweden’s drama-demon Ingmar Bergman.

Certainly any Woody Allen movie begins like a Bergman film, with the writing. Only a handful of Woody’s films have had co-writers. A prolific Playboy short-story scribe published primarily in The New Yorker and Esquire, Allen knows how well that writing form translates onto the big screen. Of course, the writing is simply the beginning and his investment in the work gets more deeply rooted once he assumes his critical “role” in the production as director on the set.

Woody Allen’s plentiful strengths as a writer/director:

    • evolved visual style 

    • evolved sonic style

    • ridiculous dialogue from 

    • ridiculous characters in

    • ridiculous situations and 

    • ridiculous relationships 

    • jokes embedded into plots

    • surprising story interjections

    • open to actors’ improvisations

    • scenes crafted in master shots

    • note-perfect musical details

    • age-perfect period settings.

Some might argue that Woody Allen is the “most historic American filmmaker” after Ken Burns!  But that’s another story.

Woody’s weaknesses:

    • over-narration

    • too many characters

    • “small-part” cameo-casting 

    • hands-off directing style

    • narration during montage

    • odd cross-generational casting

    • slow pacing, particularly later films

    • lax backstories, particularly later scripts

    • sustained agitating tone, i.e. Woody’s “voice”. 

Allen’s narrative inadequacy is particularly odd given that’s often the first topic dramatic writers discuss when evaluating their own works. Who’s telling this story?  Why? And how? 

Many writers believe it’s best to have no narrator at all, but to let characters and situations move the story forward through dialogue and action within scenes. Narrating too many details is insulting to an audience, it belittles screen-writing Rule No. One -- “show, don’t tell.”

Certainly Allen can craft a perfect narration. He wrote one for Sandy Baron in “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984). It’s brilliant: Baron sitting around a table with other comics spinning yarns in flashback. Sandy’s “reminiscence” is the longest story, and main narrative thread of the film. Although Woody does cut back to his table scene, most of Baron’s shaggy-dog monologue is voice-over – and it truly propels the story.

Jump forward twenty years and we find Woody regressing with over-narration seriously bogging down his screenplays. It’s as if he’s channeling his Inner Robert Benchley. The obvious culprit: Woody’s short-story narrative voice occupies too much room in his scripts which should be rejoicing in his dialogue and silly situations, but not muddling through overstated plot-points and I-told-you-so expositions. 

This is the case with his screenplays for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008) and “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” (2010). Curiously, Woody was toying with narration at this time as he had characters turn from dialogue scenes to face the camera and suddenly narrate. That didn’t work for Jason Biggs in “Anything Else” (2003), nor for Larry David in “Whatever Works” (2009). Woody is best when his narratives are embedded.

* * * 

Eventually by playing male leads in his own films, “Woody Allen” transformed himself into a character so world-renowned that his on-screen nervous nebbish seems to have consumed any semblance of the real guy who actually dreamed him up. Unlike, say Benchley or Will Rogers, who left a bit of wiggle-room room between their on-screen characters and their actual selves. 


Or “Seinfeld” writer Larry David who dreamed up the character “Larry David” for his “Curb Your Enthusiasm” HBO tv series. It’s difficult to see Allen’s “Whatever Works” (2009) without having this thought rush through your mind watching Larry David as Boris Yellnikoff channelling HIS Inner Woody Allen to narrate directly into the camera:
Has the filmmaker taken in-your-face New York 
self-expressionism beyond the bounds 
of decent identity theft?!? 

As my speech-therapist wife points out, what truly distinguishes Woody Allen is his peculiar “prosody” … exactly how he talks, the music of his voice. This includes his rhythms, timing, tone, emotional state, syllable-stress patterns and other vocal elements which color his particular style of speech filtered as it is through Flatbush, Tin-Pan Alley, Borscht Belt, Harlem jazz beats and live television. 

One way to clearly hear how a good actor can “channel” Allen’s syncopated speech rhythms is to observe how the distinguished Sir Kenneth Branagh handled “the Woody role” of Lee Simon in “Celebrity”. Close your eyes and hear for yourself:

https://youtu.be/5LJaiQ_YJEs

Anyone who’s tried to do so can verify that directing oneself on screen is difficult at best, particularly with other actors in a complex scene. To act in front of a camera, most actors require another set of eyes. It takes a talented free-thinking thespian to look at a character “objectively” from the inside out – and still be able to tell everyone else what to do in the scene. 

Movies in which Woody-the-director failed to cast Woody-the-actor are among his funniest: “Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994), “Celebrity” (1998).

Allen’s later films in which he reappeared as “the Woody character” directing his own scripts -- “Anything Else” (2003), “Scoop” (2006) -- do not distinguish his acting, his directing nor his writing.

As Woody aged and continued to cast himself as the neurotic love-sick New Yorker, he began to lose his audience. He just isn’t credible as a lallygagged octogenarian wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing Lothario. No wonder younger audiences avoid him, and his old fans long for his “early funny ones”.

Woody Allen’s endurance allowed him to choose among the world’s best actresses and comediennes for his casts. Whatever their generation, he wrote unique roles and scenes for them: Elaine May, Lily Tomlin, Anjelica Huston, Tracey Ullman, Julie Kavner, Olympia Dukakis, Judy Davis, Dianne Wiest, Louise Lasser, Lynn Redgrave, Geraldine Page, Gwen Verdon, Maureen Stapleton, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Samantha Morton, Uma Thurman, Gena Rowlands, Blythe Danner, Jennifer Tilly, Téa Leoni, Carla Bruni, Christina Ricci, Naomi Watts, Winona Ryder, Stockard Channing, Debra Messing, Scarlett Johansson, Patricia Clarkson, Cybill Shepherd, Bernadette Peters, Jessica Harper, Jodie Foster, Carrie Fisher, Sandy Dennis, Mia Farrow, Helen Hunt, Kathy Bates, Demi Moore, Juliette Lewis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Julie Hagerty, Kirstie Alley, Barbara Hershey, Helen Bonham Carter, Rachel McAdams, Penelope Cruz, Freida Pinto, Parker Posey … and this is NOT a comprehensive list!

However, no other woman on Earth means more to Woody’s film career than his only sister, Letty Aronson, who also functions as his business manager and main organizer.  It could be argued that Letty helped stabilize her older sibling’s career during his tabloid issues of the mid-1990s by keeping him focused on his writing and shooting schedules.  We all should have such a sister!


* * *

In his 2011 documentary Robert B. Weide asked Woody to name “movie star crushes” he had as a kid or young adult, and he listed without hesitation: “Rita Hayworth, Vivien Leigh, Ava Gardner.” Often it seems that Allen creates male leads who get tangled in triangles so he can work with three great female actors all at once! Mise-en-scène et menage-a-trios! Or as a California friend calls it: “Woody porn”.

“The unfathomableness” -- as Allen himself inarticulately states it -- “of desire” is Woody’s primary concern as an artist. Which begs the age-old question: was his a bottomless pit or a dry well? At what point did Woody become too old to pull off such characters of limitless desire?

In “Scoop” (2006), a tabloid-comic murder-mystery, Woody didn’t even bother to come up with any kind of compelling motivation for his lead character, an old stand-up magician, to buddy-up with a vivacious college journalist. Scarlett Johansson, a woman whom Woody calls “a crippler”, plays the student called out of an audience to assist him with a trick. Further muddying that story was the random appearance of an apparition who seems to defy death at will, but appears at all the right narrative moments. The film had a shoddy backstory, poor premise, muddled clues, confused characters and as a result, it’s not very funny.

Recently I asked twenty friends to send me their lists of favorite Woody funny movies.  Almost all of them are seniors or late middle-aged. As expected, “Annie Hall” topped most lists, along with several votes for “Manhattan”. But otherwise there was little agreement, with too many films to choose from – although I’m sure few friends are familiar with Woody’s complete works. Curiously, only two people picked any of his movies from the Twenty-First Century.

One lifelong friend who lives in Southern California and teaches a collegiate class in film history wrote: “I must tell you that today's students do not get ‘Annie Hall’. The New York/Jewish angst for which Mr. Allen is so famous, does not compute. Mexican, Filipino and Vietnamese students are simply not impressed. Mel Brooks, Yes; Woody Allen, No! And then there's the unproven pedophile stuff…female students threatened to boycott my class the night I showed one of his films. I teach 19-20 year-olds and the female students do not like him. There's a new generation out there who’re just not interested in Woody Allen.”

That’s a shame, because the old generation has similar feelings too. A seventy-year-old Florida friend seemed to sum up his generation’s feelings: “My interest in his work waned with the advent of his personal relationship with his adopted daughter … and that’s still the elephant in the room, for me, whenever he appears on screen. Just sayin'.”

Many people agree with these negative personal opinions, and it’s unfortunate that Allen’s private proclivities prevent people from appreciating his films, particularly his later “funny ones”. Certainly, his own personal history is no laughing matter and few of us can relate to its details: Woody married his adopted daughter on Christmas Eve 1997 which caused further public uproar over what seemed vengeful payback for unsubstantiated child-abuse charges several years earlier brought on by a former leading lady and mother of eleven children. Nobody can write such a convoluted family plot.

Curiously the climax of Woody’s Jerry-Springer drama coincided with his most complex work in which he “deconstructs” his life and personal relationships.  “Deconstructing Harry” – released two weeks before Christmas Eve 1997 – is his most fascinating “comedy”, a harshly-funny masterpiece. Fittingly the edgy film is full of jump cuts which dropped Woody’s annoying nervous ticks onto the cutting-room floor.  Still, the picture failed at the box office, losing almost half of it’s twenty-million-dollar budget.

The Telegraph of London was brutal in its review:  “This is Allen’s most scorching anatomy of marital bonds, a film so bitter, witheringly frank and unsentimental he entirely reinvented his style of shooting and editing for it.  Jump cuts abound, straight-to-camera interviews break up the plot, and Carlo Di Palma’s handheld camera whip-pans all over the place, seeming to reel from one accusation or gossip-bomb … ”

He followed that film with “Celebrity” (1998) but curiously Woody-the-actor is absent from that one. Considering the current glut of “reality tv”, perhaps he should have cast himself in the lead instead of Branagh. After all, Woody was writing about a subject with which he had extremely intimate relations … the public follow-spot. 

With his tabloid turmoil and his Bergman period now far behind him, Woody finally took his own advice – offered by his character David Dobel, a writing mentor in “Anything Else” (2003): 

“I would stick to the jokes if I were you. That’s where the money is.” 

Although his old typewriter will now only hammer out jokes in short-story form, it’s now time to revisit Woody’s movies as his filmmaking career winds down. We’ve looked at a dozen of those works – particularly his top bananas, the very funny ones – in Part Two, here: 

http://jamiejobbbackstagepass.blogspot.com/2022/12/woody-allen-part-two.html

* * *

WOODY AS WRITER-DIRECTOR – ALL THE FILMS:


Take the Money and Run (1969)

Bananas (1971)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know … (1972)

Sleeper (1973)

Love and Death (1975)

Annie Hall (1977)

Interiors (1978)

Manhattan (1979)

Stardust Memories (1980)

Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982)

Zelig (1983)

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Radio Days (1987)

September (1987)

King Lear (1987)

Another Woman (1988)

New York Stories (1989)

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

Alice (1990)

Scenes from a Mall (1991)

Shadows and Fog (1991)

Husbands and Wives (1992) 

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Bullets over Broadway (1994) 

Mighty Aphrodite (1995)

Everyone Says I Love You )1996)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Celebrity (1998)

Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

Small Time Crooks (2000)

Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

Hollywood Ending (2002)

Anything Else (2003)

Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Match Point (2005)

Scoop (2006)

Cassandra’s Dream (2007)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Whatever Works (2009)

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Midnight in Paris (2011)

To Rome with Love (2012)

Blue Jasmine (2013)

Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

Irrational Man (2015)

Cafe Society (2016)

Wonder Wheel (2017)

A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

Rifkin’s Festival (2020)

UNTITLED (2022)


“I’m having trouble because I’m a Hollywood hack
who never gave actual literature a real shot, until now.”
-- Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) in “Midnight in Paris”

* * *


FURTHERMORE

You Tube’s computer-generated video-bot for all things Woody:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCliU4pi7c3yUDL 0KtOEOaSg

The Woody Allen Pages, probably the best resource on line:
http://www.woodyallenpages.com/

Current filmography with gross earnings:

London Telegraph ranks every Woody film from worst to best:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/what-to-watch/woody-allen-movies-best-worst-ranked/
Woody’s “official” website with not much to offer:
http://woodyallen.com/

Very funny clip, Woody boxing “Australian Light Heavyweight Champ” (2:13):
https://youtu.be/dPqvqPIGFts

Tabloid Sensation: “Woody and Mia: A Greek Tragedy”
http://nypost.com/2014/02/08/woody-mia-a-greek-tragedy/

“Woody: Movies from Manhattan” - biography by Julian Fox (1997)
http://www.worldcat.org/title/woody-movies-from-manhattan/oclc/34731246?loc=

“Woody Allen: A Biography” (1992) - biography by Eric Lax (1992)
http://www.worldcat.org/title/woody-allen-a-biography/oclc/606437930

(Thanks to Contra Costa Library for its help in researching this posting.)

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Monday, July 1, 2019

Stand-Up Drama: Writing On Our Feet


The Marsh Studio Theater, San Francisco
photo by Marilyn Berg Cooper


Stand-Up Drama:

Writing On Our Feet

by Jamie Jobb

“Don’t make the audience fear for your safety!”

When a director delivers such a rehearsal note to an actor on stage, the performer must do more than merely “pause”. That moment also demands the thespian question his very occupation of the role at hand. Especially since I’m the Fearsome Actor who also functions as the Fearless Playwright – the one who wrote those very words which now can’t be spoken without risk of audience trepidation.

While “stage fright” might be a problem at certain times for uncertain performers, it’s NOT my problem here at all. I’m simply too dizzy to stand and deliver my lines. My rhythmic momentum gets muddled by this constant spinning inside my head.

I’ve been diagnosed with Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV), which becomes pronounced in the dim dramatic light we find ourselves hereunder. My affliction is caused by floating calcium carbonate crystals disrupting the fluid-dynamics of my inner ear, falsely perturbing my balance. BPPV is a natural result of aging, and one main reason old folks like me move so slowly.

It doesn’t help my mind to know that the story my mouth is trying to tell is all about vertigo. In fact, my short one-man play is called “Vertigo Blues or Gravity’s Got Me Down”. Perhaps the title is too prophetic for earthquake-prone San Francisco? Just thinking about vertigo makes me dizzy. And the fact that I’ve suffered a pair of concussions over the years also compounds my performance problem.

I know elder stage actors who’ve been forced to quit because vertigo makes them feel unsafe awaiting cues in dramatic backstage darkness. Now that my awful truth has exposed itself in rehearsal, I dare not scare my audience in performance. So it seems my script needs complete revision, if not total removal from the playbill.

*
“The light in this place is so bad,
It’s makin’ me sick in the head.”
– Bob Dylan

*
I’m one of eight “performing playwrights” each working through our own material in this workshop on the mainstage at The Marsh, an incubator of lively black-box theater in San Francisco’s vibrant Mission District. The Marsh is a creative breeding ground where individual writers like us can stand upon our own Truths in a solitary-yet-safe performance setting. Our audience understands our one-person shows are works-in-progress. Our director prefaces performances with that caveat, so everyone knows what to expect from us: original unfinished works.

We’re two weeks from showtime and next week is our “final dress” rehearsal. I’ve been shaping my script for three months in a pair of workshops led by two of The Marsh’s foremost solo performers – first with Dan Hoyle in December, then with Charlie Varon in spring.

Stephanie Weisman, David Ford and others who operate The Marsh were wise enough to buy the building in 1996 before San Francisco’s 21st Century real estate boom negated establishment of any such 12,000 square-foot art center in this now upscale neighborhood.

Begun thirty years ago as a casual Monday night storytellers gathering at the Hotel Utah and various North Beach haunts, The Marsh slowly evolved into a non-profit organization eventually settling into its residency on Valencia Street – a huge two-story space consisting of three stages, a comedy club, cafe, youth theater and dance studio – all within the San Francisco facility alone.

In the East Bay, The Berkeley Marsh has plentiful space for events and conferences with its own cabaret, cafe and mainstage one block from UC Berkeley. Both venues are supported by an active and savvy audience, many of whom also are writers and performers themselves. Monday Night Marsh continues to run in San Francisco while Berkeley offers “Tell It On Tuesday”.

The Truth I’m seeking to tell here all alone on the San Francisco mainstage involves a life-and-death tale about a balance-challenged septuagenarian walking his geriatric dog in the tall hills above their small town. The climax comes when the senior recalls falling backward, heels-over-head, down a steep embankment … while living to tell his story.

*

“Theater is rhythm.”
– Dario Fo

*

Vertigo hits me the moment I walk onto the mainstage in Hoyle’s winter class and it continues to confront me in Varon’s spring workshop. Whether that’s intuition or coincidence, it doesn’t really matter. From the perspective of improvisational playwriting, we take our impulses and run them into plots.

My problem is I’m trying to act like I have vertigo while I actually do suffer that debilitating affliction – and it’s not a condition or emotion the actor in me can control like say, being “drunk”. No eye-movement or warm-up exercises I try seem to abate the sustained dizziness rattling around my head.

Jamie Jobb as Ray Rogers, Team Roper
videograph by Terry Porter


An actor who stumbles onto a stage after consuming two pints of Jack Daniels can act so drunk he won’t be able to perform drunk at all. Likewise, an actor experiencing vertigo on stage can’t be expected to hit marks and land punchlines with any semblance of coherent timing. This becomes obvious when I study rehearsal video, where I can objectively see myself missing cues and baffling my lines. The Truth, indeed. As Varon points out: “Verite is tough.” Yes, and vertigo feels, from the inside out, like being drunk without the alcohol.

*

“Whenever I’m acting, I’m not necessarily clowning.
But whenever I’m clowning, I’m always acting.”
– Geoff Hoyle

*

Dan Hoyle doesn’t teach frequently but when he has time to offer his pop-up workshop, his one-week notice is short and sweet: “I'm teaching a short four-week class on my process starting next week. Info and Details here. Feel free to reach out with any questions. All best, Dan”.

Luckily I got into Dan’s San Francisco workshop both times he offered it with such abrupt announcement. His performance schedule doesn’t allow him much time to teach. In sixteen short years with Varon as his director, Hoyle has crafted an astonishing dramatic career with seven full-length works all based upon people he meets in his travels. His titles reflect his wanderlust: “Circumnavigator”, “Florida 2004: The Big Bummer”, “Tings de Happen”, “The Real Americans”, “Each and Every Thing”, “Border People”. I’ve seen each-and-every one of those incredible solo shows, so I know Dan’s The Man when it comes to capturing compelling stories.

Overseas, Hoyle has entertained audiences in Ireland at the Samuel Beckett Theater-Dublin, in Wales at the Taliesin Art Center-Swansea, in India at The Park-Kolkata, and throughout Nigeria at Abuja, Bauchi, Calabar, Lagos, and Jos. Beyond The Marsh mainstages, Dan has performed at Berkeley Rep, Aurora Theatre, Joe’s Pub, Culture Project, Portland Center Stage, Playmakers Repertory Company, Baltimore Center Stage, Cleveland Playhouse, Mosaic Theater Company (D.C.) and Painted Bride Art Center (Philadelphia).

Dan calls his craft “The Journalism of Hanging Out” (see “Tale of Two Sport Writers” previously in this space). Hoyle bases all his stage characters on actual folks he meets and interviews. His working process is a serious matter of spending the necessary time with these potential subjects of his dramas.

Dan’s Dad, Geoff Hoyle, grew up in England so he was influenced by the UK’s music-hall tradition (see Funny Bones - 1995). Geoff also went to Paris, to study Corporeal Mime with Étienne Decroux in the 1960s.

*

“If you shoot a mime, should you use a silencer?”
– Steven Wright

*

Corporeal Mime closely follows the footsteps of commedia dell'arte where loose improvisational “scripts” were devised by actors on foot to be recalled later in performance as “lazzi”: situations, dialogues, circumstances, recurring characters, rhymes, gags, plots, subplots.

Luckily for San Francisco, Geoff Hoyle relocated here after his Paris studies. And he helped spread mimecraft among those active in The City’s bustling “guerrilla theater” scene at that time. San Francisco Mime Troupe had been a lone outpost for “silent” stagework in 1975 when Geoff joined the Pickle Family Circus and fellow world-class clowns Bill Irwin and Larry Pisoni.

From the Mime Troupe’s portable stage and the Pickles’ solitary sawdust ring, physical comedy went viral on outdoor stages in the Bay Area ... exerting its influence on Theater of Man, Antenna Theater, Trenchmouth Productions, Video Free America, Theatre Makers, Teatro Califas, Mundial Sisters, Campo Santo, Lunatique Fantastique, as well as famous Union Square busking mimes Shields and Yarnell.


San Francisco’s sensational soloist Dan Hoyle

Dan Hoyle studied theater with a civic twist at Northwestern’s famous drama department, where classically attuned playwright Mary Zimmerman helped fine-tune young dramatists. Following his father’s career track, Dan Hoyle adapted commedia and Decroux techniques, particularly public gait recognition as his departure point for character development.

A forensic law enforcement tool, “Gait Recognition” considers a person’s footwork as individually unique as her fingerprints. Hanging out in plazas and coffee shops, Dan observes how people walk and otherwise move in public, before he ever attempts to occupy that character’s voice and story. Both Hoyles tap into characters by observational mimicry focused on footwork.

*

“I work off of people I meet. Start with a voice or a walk
or a gesture or a speech tic, a phrase used frequently.
At some point, I take over as an actor and writer
and I let those characters live inside my imagination,
But first I have to become them and believe
that I am them to write in their voice.”
– Dan Hoyle

*

Dan’s first class involves a lot of performing like ballerinas reflected in the mirrors of The Marsh’s upstairs dance studio. This is where Dan discusses his process of working in front of his own reflection and standing up as he “writes”. His classes always begin with a series of standard actor’s warmup routines focused on centering, relaxation, breathing and gravity.

Improvisation is commonly understood to mean two or more actors mixing it up in the moment, making up situations in their heads, a dialogue of “Yes, and … ” But what if only one person is on stage? For the solo performer, improv is something else: a way of writing that taps into an actor’s currency of the moment. All alone with whatever amuses the author, like a stand-up comic working up “bits”.

Hollywood’s first writer/director, Preston Sturges, wrote his screenplays on his feet, improvising dialogue in character voices while a secretary furiously transcribed. Lenny Bruce also wrote while standing (more on him below). Hoyle follows that time-honored ad lib tradition.

Also, Dan helps those of us who have trouble getting “off book” (remembering our lines!) by introducing us to his technique of “pseudo-memory” … If we know our Story better than our Text, we won’t have trouble “remembering” it on stage.

“Vertigo Blues” is developed during a dozen weekly workshops on The Marsh mainstage. Those of us who’ve had the privilege of standing here know this is hallowed ground. Our feet can’t miss feeling the aroused pulse of past performances by singular talents Geoff Hoyle, Marga Gomez, Josh Kornbluth, Robin Williams, Don Reed, Brian Copeland, Lori Holt, Mark Kenward, Merle Kessler, Wayne Harris, Rick Reynolds, Sebastian Boswell III ... in addition to our workshop leaders, Dan and Charlie.

Varon’s “Rush Limbaugh In Night School” set the standard for solo performance on the West Coast when it opened in 1995. Charlie followed up with “People’s Violin”, “Soup of the Day”, “Rabbi Sam”, “Feisty Old Jew”, “Life Gone Viral” … as well as his prank lecture known as “The Visiting Professor of Pessimism.” (Hear his work here)


Marsh Theater mentor Charlie Varon
videograph by Jamie Jobb

Luckily for performing writers like us, Varon has been offering his seasoned advice for three decades in these eight-week workshops which culminate in a public performance at The Marsh, each performer allotted 15 minutes alone on stage. Hoyle’s pop-up class has yet to include a performance night.

*

“Trouble is our friend.”
– Charlie Varon

*
Throughout our weekly workshops, Charlie and Dan reiterate these rules/reminders for solo performers, who tend to forget them wandering in moments of improvisation. Effective solo performers must remember to:

    • Slow down; don’t rush,
    • Turn out to face audience,
    • Jump cut; don’t force transitions,
    • Move downstage; get close to audience,
    • Be loud enough,
    • Say more with less,
    • Pause at proper points,
    • Let punchlines land,
    • Trust that humor will expose itself,
    • Pick Four Spots to stop on stage,
    • Set our feet,
    • Stand and deliver.
Varon’s assistant director Kenny Yun also reminds us to maintain our narrative voices in present tense to give our stories currency. Also, Kenny prompts me to break out of my tendency toward “logical” or linear writing – replacing my lists of “topics” within a scene with more surprising delivery choices, gestures and sounds instead of spoken words.

*

The goal of a playwright should be to make
a paragraph a sentence, a sentence a phrase,
a phrase a word, a word a gesture … and a gesture a look.”
– Dan Hoyle

*

In “Vertigo Blues” I’m attempting to portray a female doctor, a burial insurance salesman, “my wife”, “myself” and a dog … the story being a fiction based on current facts of my BPPV and our aging Tibetan Terrier. In tonight’s workshop, we’re two weeks out from our Monday night performance. Now, after five months work on my difficult story – with lots of help from both Charlie and Dan – I have to face facts: my script won’t work for me as an actor in service of myself as the “performing playwright.”

Much of my allotted workshop time has been spent discussing how my Actor could “occupy” vertigo without having it completely undermine my Playwright’s intention. Unfortunately, we know “The Judgment of Solomon” – my “baby” can’t be cut in half to separate performer from playwright. The only way to “disguise” my vertigo is to prevent it – I must NOT move around so much on stage.

But here’s where matters get tricky for the vertigo-impaired performer: Getting up. Getting down. Bending over. Moving my head around. Turning. Crossing stage … any quick reorientation of my head aggravates my vertigo.

Finally, I realize the only way I’m going to be able to perform in two weeks is to sit down on stage and act like Mike Daisey or Spalding Gray. Although I know to perform my story while seated will remove, quite literally, The Legs from my show. Recall that old Broadway boast: “That Show Had Legs!” Thus it had “A Good Run”, despite The Actor’s Blessing: “Break a leg!”  Hell, I just wanna "Shake a leg, not break it!"

Performing while seated runs counter to the Decroux/commedia movement-based approach to theater which started me wandering this path in the first place. My piece is based on the movement, but I can’t do it justice!

Too dizzy to perform “Vertigo Blues", I’m forced to resort to an old script I developed in a 1998 Varon workshop, “Hitched Up Real Tight”, about a rodeo team roper who picks up a famous hitchhiker in Big Sur.

I had performed the piece two decades ago, so it involves extensive rewiring to bring the facts forward to match current political events. Originally the bit involved a satirical road trip and a sendup of Bill Clinton, who faced an embarrassing Impeachment Inquiry at the time. Our audience is unaware of that fact, so it assumes my work involves a current Impeachment Inquiry. View that final twelve-minute performance clip here: https://youtu.be/P-NhaU8bogU

*

“Say nothing, and plenty of it.”
– Perry Mason

*


Lenny Bruce mugging for the cops


The Solitary Soloist

and Lenny Bruce

Anyone who listens to Lenny Bruce long enough can become convinced that the humor of the 1950s “sick comedian” was a stark harbinger that aroused the following decade’s protest movement. But ears attuned to theater cadences may hear a stronger statement from Bruce’s bombastic stage presence. It’s no stretch to consider him The Absolutely Modern Forerunner of Solo Performance, the first author to step on stage into a soloist’s shoes with total commitment to his own truths.

Bruce often talked about writing on his feet, developing ad-libbed comedy routines through repeat performance before an ever-changing live audience. Bruce stood there alone and proved one person could craft compelling stage stories with impressionistic voices, authentic characterizations, guttural sound effects, sudden jump cuts – the full onomatopoetics of theatrical improvisation.

“First place, I don’t write.” said Bruce. “I create everything that I do, you know. I never actually sit down ... but I’ll ad lib things on the floor and then they’ll become bits, right?”

Of course, Bruce was not performing stand-up drama – his shows reckoned with no dramatic arcs. However, by stand-up comedy standards, Lenny’s monologues were quite impressionistic compositions of word jazz. Listeners today may marvel at how easily Bruce brought his scatological one-man dialogues – often in conflicting ethnic voices – into his “sick humor” on stage.  

Singular raconteurs of the time – particularly Danny Kaye and Victor Borge – also could command an audience alone, but they were song-and-dance men, while Bruce was the glib hipster who wisecracked alone before opening new pasture for fantastical funny folks like Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and every other solitary soloist who stretched the limits of “stand up” comedy as on-going discipline-in-progress.

YouTube offers plentiful postings of Lenny Bruce “in performance”, but they’re mostly audio recordings of live concerts with no running video. Those are certainly worth a long listen, particularly while netsurfing. But here are a few rare video clips where we can actually see Lenny’s lightning-rod “foul mouth” in action:

Lenny Bruce on stage in concert (six parts)
(9:56)
(9:16)
(9:20)
(9:35)
(9:16)
(9:53)

Steve Allen Show appearance (April 5, 1959):
(13:04)

Another Steve Allen appearance (date unknown):
(15:08)

Hugh Hefner interview on Playboy Penthouse (1959)
(22:55)

*

“Comedians often talk about getting punchlines down
to as few syllables as possible. But the best punchlines
are often no syllables. They are just looks and gestures.”
– Dan Hoyle

*

Some Very Funny Stand-Up Dramatists

Solo performance assumes myriad forms. In eight decades of singular showmanship after World War II, many individual actors/writers/comedians/impressionists/dancers/musicians/monologists have stretched the edges of performing alone on stage Note that many folks listed below do not perform material in dramatic arcs, but offer more episodic fare. They are included here to inspire solo performers working in various dramatic forms before a live audience.








































Mike Daisey: “Invincible Summer” (incredible clip about “thinking on your feet”!)




































*
“I don’t do sketches from memory.”
– Bob Dylan

*
San Francisco Soloists

These talented folks often perform alone, primarily on stages in and around San Francisco which has developed its own unique brand of monologue storytelling:




















Monodrama Resources

New York: Rutledge. 1987.

Paris: Mime Journal. 1985

London: Routledge. 2008

New York: Simon & Schuster. 2003.

by Charna Halpern, Del Close and Kim “Howard” Johnson
Colorado Springs: Meriwether Publishing. 1994.

by Ron Jenkins. New York: Theatre Communications Group. 1988.

San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 1986.

Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 1999.

New York: Routledge. 2015.

London: Red Globe Press. 2018.

Long Grove, Illinois: Waveband Press. 2000.

Amazon Create Space: 2017.

by Jo Bonney. New York: Theatre Communications Group. 1999.

New York: Star Publishers. 2004.

New York: Theatre Communications Group. 1993.

Orange, Ca: Past Times Publishing. 1989.

New York: Grove Press. 1998.

London: Samuel French. 2005.

Berkeley: University of California Press. 2008.

Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. 2011.

Boston: Allyn & Bacon. 2012.

New York: Holt. 1990.

New York: Ballantine Books. 1967.

New York: Random House. 2000.

New York: Random House. 2000.

New York: Random House. 2006.

Berkeley: Ten Speed Press. 1990.

San Francisco: Micro Pro Litera Press. 1986.
[NOTE: This book is silent on significant San Francisco theater history regarding M.B. Curtis and The Marsh, which postdates this publication)

Other links:








Dario Fo talks about his work … (turn on English subtitles in Closed Caption setting)
(9:19)
“Dance Hall Racket” (1954) starring Lenny Bruce, who also wrote story and screenplay.


SPECIAL THANKS

Terry Porter,
Iumi Ross Crow,
Marilyn Berg Cooper,
Harlan Bailey
Scott Hildula
Dexter Young
Jon Paul Tilleman
Evelyn Jean Pine
Nina Sacco
Jeff Hanson
David Steinore
J. Raoul Brody
Dena Zachariah
Jana Russon
Steven Russon
Davey Towers
Johana De Brauwere 
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)