Theatre Ideas Newsletter

Thanksgiving Edition

Happy Thanksgiving to you all! I hope you have an opportunity to pause and consider the things in your life, past or present, for which you are grateful. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, mainly because it doesn’t seem to have any songs or movies starring Chevy Chase.

I don’t have much to point to this week. I have been working on organizing the research for The Rooted Stage, which sometimes feels a bit daunting, and other times sorts itself into a clear order. I made a list of the books I have gathered, and it ended up being 37 volumes. Gulp. The challenge of writing this book is figuring out its scope and depth. I often have to remind myself that I’m not writing a scholarly tome, but rather a readable overview describing how the theater became centralized and dominated by businessmen, and as importantly those artists who did their best to resist vagabondage and create a more rooted stage focused on art first. Rebecca Solnit, in her fantastic book Hope in the Dark (eBook currently free!), could be speaking about these artists when she wrote, “Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit." This quotation tempts me to change the title of the book to Unconquered Spirit: The Struggle to Create a Rooted Stage. It’s an inspiring story filled with colorful characters, both villains and visionaries, that often threatens to become one of Dickens lengthier novels!

Speaking of vagabondage, my writing is on the move again. In some ways, it’s my own fault. No, in all ways. When I announced my intentions for my writing back on November 5 (“I’m Back”), I described an elaborate system involving a combination Substack, Blogger, and WordPress. It worked in breaking me out of a writing slump, although I’m writing less than I’d hoped thanks to my book (and any day now I’ll be receiving the edited manuscript of a new edition of Introduction to Play Analysis), but I’m expecting that to change. But in “I’m Back,” I linked to a sentence by Alan Jacobs about his use of micro.blog, which apparently inspired my friend Tom to further explore that platform, and he started trying to convince me that it could do all the things for which I was now using three different platforms. I resisted, but soon I had to admit he was right. And so I have created ScottWalters.micro.blog. Among other things (short micro posts, long form posts, images, podcasts, etc.), it has a newsletter option which I am exploring. It automatically pulls together my week’s writings and send them out to the mailing list, not unlike what I’m doing with this newsletter, except I’m not certain how much personalizing I’m able to do. I’d like for the newsletter to come from me, not some AI. So I won’t ask you to subscribe just yet—I’m planning to do one more Substack newsletter, and I’m also not certain whether I can simply import my Substack subscriber list. More on that later. But suffice to say change is a’comin’. Again.

I have started writing on ScottWalters.micro.blog if you’d like to take a look. I moved a Theatre Ideas post over and added to it. It’s called “Charm vs Charisma,” and is about the difference between the two and my sense that, of the two, I lean toward “charisma.” There are also a few quotations I put there to think about.

I’ve also started reading a biography of Goethe (which in my head I pronounce Goh-thee just because it makes me laugh), and the biographer, Rudiger Safranski, packs a lot of wisdom into four sentences:

“Although Goethe was intimately connected to the social and cultural life of his time, he also knew how to maintain his individuality. His principle was to take in only as much of the world as he could process. Whatever he could not respond to in a productive way he chose to disregard. In other words, he was an expert at ignoring things.”

Noted. The book is Goethe: Life as a Work of Art. So far, I’m liking it a lot.

I’m also reading Danny Katch’s Socialism…Seriously: A Guide to Surviving the 21st Century (Now with 50% More Socialism), which you can get free as an ebook on the publisher’s website, and which is a very funny and very insightful discussion of what socialism really is (rather than the caricature put forward by Republicans and defensive Democrats). Anyway, in the introduction, Katch explains about his comic “tone”:

“It’s possible that there hasn’t been a socialist book with this many jokes since V. I. Lenin’s Big Bathroom Book of Bolshevik Humor. The wisecracks aren’t just sugar to help the political medicine go down— they’re part of the politics. Capitalism is destructive and inhuman, but it’s also ridiculous and mocking its absurdities reminds us that a system this dumb can’t possibly be indestructible…Jokes [he goes on] are a precaution against the negativity that is an occupational hazard for activists who spend their lives organizing against war, climate change, and all the other horrors most people try to avoid contemplating for too long. We’re looking for a positive path for humanity, not trying to add to the relentless chorus of cranks and trolls.”

I’m thinking of making that my screensaver as a reminder not to get too heavy when I write. I suspect you might all appreciate that.

I want to end with a story from Fr. Gregory Boyle’s book Tattoos on the Heart. Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, an organization that works to help gang members who have decided to leave the gang. This is a Christmas story, but since it has a turkey in it, I figured what the heck. Boyle writes:

“I had a twenty-three-year-old homie named Miguel working for me on our graffiti crew. As with a great many of our workers, I had met him years earlier while he was detained. He was an extremely nice kid, whose pleasantness was made all the more remarkable by the fact that he had been completely abandoned by his family. Prior to their rejection of him, they had mistreated, abused, and scarred him plenty. He calls me one New Year’s Day. ‘Happy New Year, G.’

‘Hey, that’s very thoughtful of ya, dog,’ I say. ‘You know, Miguel, I was thinkin’ of ya—you know, on Christmas. So, whad ya do for Christmas?’ I asked knowing that he had no family to welcome him in.

‘Oh, you know, I was right here,’ meaning his tiny little apartment, where he lives alone.

‘All by yourself?’ I ask.

‘O no,’ he quickly says. ‘I invited homeies from the crew—you know, vatos like me who didn’t had no place to go for Christmas.’

He names five homies who came over—all former enemies from rival gangs.

‘Really,’ I tell him, ‘that sure was nice of you.’

But he’s got me revved and curious now. ‘So,’ I ask him, ‘what did you do?’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘you’re not gonna believe this…but…I cooked a turkey.’ You can feel his pride tight through the phone.

‘Wow, you did? Well, how did you prepare it?’

‘You know,’ he says, ‘Ghetto-style.’

I tell him I’m not really familiar with this recipe.

He’s more than happy to give up his secret. ‘Yeah, well, you just rub it with a gang a’ butter, throw a bunch of salt and pepper on it, squeeze a couple of limones over it and put it in the oven. It tasted proper.’

I said, ‘Wow, that’s impressive. What else did you have besides the turkey?’

‘Just that. Just turkey,’ he says. His voice tapers to a hush. ‘Yeah. The six of us, we just sat there. staring at the oven, waiting for the turkey to be done.’

One would be hard-pressed to imagine something more sacred and ordinary than these six orphans staring at an oven together. It is the entire law and prophets, all in one moment, right there, in this humble, holy kitchen.

Again, Happy Thanksgiving!