Da Capo:Selected Writings 1967-2004: Selected Writings 1967-2004

By Tom Bissinger

Da Capo is a collection of stories, plays, poems and journals in which Tom Bissinger takes on his world, whether reading Shakespeare to a blind bag lady, observing three playwrights comically vying to destroy each others career amidst the bustle of a Korean deli, or meditating on his father in a Sao Paulo swimming pool. Part autobiography, part story telling, part poetic explorations of dream world, and part social satire, Bissinger conveys the theatricality of so called ordinary existence by pulling his life towards him, hungering for the nuggets of mirth and meaning, ultimately owning it in original, daring prose. He takes on the challenge of staying awake in a troubled, violent world, while addressing his yearning for reverie and revelation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 3, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465331878

Tom Bissinger

Tom Bissinger grew up in San Francisco, attended Phillips Academy and Stanford University, and after military service, moved to New York, where in the 1960s, he directed plays Off- and Off-Off-Broadway as well as in theaters throughout the United States and Europe. He began writing plays and short fiction in the 1970s when he moved to the Pennsylvania countryside. His plays include the tragic comedy The Big Kephresh, Descartes’ Blues (a play about the life and loves of Rene Descartes), and his latest (coauthored with Dance Wareham) The Bus, which was performed on a forty-foot bus. He has held a variety of jobs in teaching, publishing, and performing. His book Da Capo: Selected Writings 1967–2004, edited by Philip Beitchman, PhD, was published in 2008. Since 1987, Bissinger has studied with Joseph Rael, an American Indian visionary. Bissinger is married with two children and many grandchildren.

Book preview

DA CAPO:

SELECTED WRITINGS 1967-2004

TOM BISSINGER

edited and introduced by Philip Beitchman, Ph.D.

with an afterword by the author

45134-BISS-layout.pdf

Copyright © 2008 by Tom Bissinger.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

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45134

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

WORDPLAY— THE EIGHTIES

JOURNAL

DREAM

PART TWO

WHAT TO DO ABOUT LOVE

OCTOBER NOVEMBER

YOU CAME OUT TONIGHT

JUST WHAT IS

THE PROGRESS OF THE ANCESTORS

PART THREE

DREAMS, MOTHERS, AND DEATH

CALL ME JAK-L

THREE PLAYWRIGHTS

PART FOUR

THE RETURN

SAINT FRANKIE AND THE BOY

COOL FIRE STORIES

ONCE

DANCERS

COOL FIRE

SWIMMING

PART FIVE

ACT ONE

ACT TWO

AFTERWORD, AFTERWARD, AFTER WORDS

TRACK RECORD

"This is how I sum up for myself what I wish to convey to those who work with me:

I am dead because I lack desire;

I lack desire because I think I possess;

I think I possess because I do not try to give;

In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;

Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;

Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing;

Seeing you are nothing, you desire to become;

In desiring to become, you begin to live."

One of the last letters of René Daumal

INTRODUCTION

There is No Walking in This Play

"an empty hall with a metallic railing hanging from the ceiling; nets attached to this railing are on the floor. Electronic music instruments in the middle of the hall, amplifiers all around, on the floor and hanging from the ceiling. There are no seats. The spectators can stand or sit [on the floor?] if they want. Projected everywhere in the hall are a montage of information and non figurative images. Everything, including intense beams of light projected across it, is meant to disturb the public, so once in a while the bright lights even suddenly go off.

The actors enter in gym clothes. They run around the hall; there’s no walking in this play. They suspend the nets from the ceiling then start moving, grasping, balancing, hanging on them. The nets finally drop around them and the audience, which is separated thereby into little separate groups

 . . . . [Every performance will be different, since] every night (or day) will convey a set of circumstance unique to itself alone, in the hope that discoveries will be made by the spectators as well as the actors."

—Tom Bissinger, 1968

I

Such was the wild setting for Tom Bissinger’s idea for what he was calling at the time, late 1960’s, An Environmental Happening for Eight Actors, as limned by him in an essay he published, in French, in the premier, certainly most radical, experimental and iconoclastic theatre review of the time (or maybe any time), Le Théâtre—edited by F. Arrabal, distinguished neo-surrealist and absurdist, hardened (in Franco’s Spain) anarchist-communist revolutionary, author of by now classic masterpieces like Picnic on the Battlefield and The Automobile Graveyard.

Born in 1939 and certainly fast out of the starting gate for a career (actor-director, man of theatre) that normally requires years of study and training, by the middle 1960’s and his mid 20’s Bissinger was already nationally and internationally active and influentially so, in his chosen field, or rather one he seems to have been elected for—having directed plays in Europe and on both coasts of America. Already in the early 1960’s Bissinger had cut his classical teeth by directing Molière and lots of Shakespeare, but by the late 60’s he had hit his stride, really more of a sprint: Wherever the action was the fiercest and the stakes highest, most controversial and subversive there Bissinger could be found, directing for instance some of the most provocative plays of the decade: Barbara Garson’s Macbird, a scathing satire of the Johnson era, in L.A., New York and Belgium; and Jean-Claude Van Itallie’s slashing send-up of America and everything it stands for; America Hurrah, in Boston and also Europe; while his recent (2003) 9 week stint as director of Lou Shaw’s Worse than Murder: The Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg shows that for him theatre still has a lot to do with protest . . . But back in the ’60’s Bissinger seems to be in the middle of just about anything cutting edge, modernist, avant-garde, experimental and unorthodox; the kind of thing that Peter Handke was to call in the title of one of his plays, Insulting the Audience. For example, after, arguably, the most important, certainly the most political theatrical company of the second half of the 20th century, Julian Beck’s and Judith Malina’s The Living Theater, were harassed out of the country by IRS bureaucrats, subsequent to their bold onslaught on military ‘justice’ in Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, Bissinger was in the middle of the foray, in a New York production of 1965, The Trial of Judith Malina and Julian Beck.

Pinter, Beckett, Malina and Beck, Grotowski, Artaud, Brecht, Jodorowsky,—and with Pirandello being very much still of an inspiration—these were the some of the iconoclasts whose names, writing and productions come up most often in the pages of Arrabal’s radical review whom Bissinger, not yet 30, was keeping pace with.

Times of great social disruption, insecurity and change, as nobody can dispute the decade of the ’60’s were, can indeed be times of great suffering, loss and dismay, but they tend to be also times that are very fertile for creativity in general and certainly for theatre in particular, being the social art par excellence. This is a point made, not coincidentally, by another ‘madman of the stage’ in the same review where Bissinger’s radical manifesto appeared:

"Theatre in its great inventive periods (Greek tragedy, Elizabethan theatre, Spanish Golden Age [17th century: Lope de Vega, Calderon etc . . . ]) was a phenomenon of cultural collapse. New theatrical forms can develop only when prevailing value systems and norms are put into perspective by the advent of new mentalities and new lifestyles, themselves linked to a collapse of social equilibrium. In these situations of anomie new roles are handed out in the rapports between social groups through structural mutations of society, whereby the equilibrium between the mentality, the aspirations and the expectations of particular groups and social-economic structures has been badly compromised, then theatre communicates to distraught humanity the symbolic image of a liberty suddenly become available in the gap opening before the joining of two cultural systems."¹

A new kind of theatre for these times of collapse creates a new kind of man, with a new kind of program, defined by Alexandro Jodorowsky, of El Topo notoriety, writing in the same review, as that of panicked ephemerality:

"Three ingredients in panic: euphoria, humor, terror . . . . Panicked man ‘owns nothing’, ‘hides nothing’, ‘saves nothing’; makes no plans . . . [sic] Panic motto: I am the festival and I am We . . . .

Traditional theater, under the influence of literature and other ‘august’ arts, with their ingrained desire to last and to look good, denies its very essence. THEATRE IS PURE EPHEMERALITY; no representation can be like any other. Theatre is an art that dissolves into a distant past at the very moment of its creation."²

Such a conception of theatre was based also on a whole new concept of the rapport of the public to spectacle, or the actor to audience, as separations crumble between rehearsal and opening night, play and reality, actor and acted-upon:

The two greatest revolutions in theatre today are, firstly: the direct participation of the public with the action, that is to say the end of the corporal separation between the public and the action; then, secondly, the discovery and the application of pure, veritable theatrical shock, that is to say its communication of a message or an idea through its true real action.³

After that broadside of a manifesto was published abroad, where much of his theatrical inspiration very evidently lay, in 1968, Bissinger then went about bringing it all back home, so let’s let him describe in his own words the wild rides he took us on in the 1970’s, after the explosions of the 60’s had cleared so much of the terrain for the adventures of this new theatre of panicked ephemerality, of Jodorowsky and the anarchist tribe.

"After that piece was written, 1968, I assumed [the position of] artistic director of the TLA [Theatre of the Living Arts]-Phila and there I was able to put some of my theories into practice. To wit: I started the season with Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, which I rearranged, shifting scenes to suit my ‘thesis’ which was definitely anti-war. I also added a bunch of songs that were written and played by Michael Bacon and Larry Gold who were hidden under the raked stage. (Actors included Morgan Freeman, Judd Hirsch, and Sally Kirkland) Among other inspirations, I started the second act in the lobby with one of the actors, Larry Bloch, haranguing the audience about Vietnam, and then two of the leads started the scene in the lobby, of course seen by only those who were in that area, and they carried on, carrying the audience into the theatre as they moved onto the stage. It was a rousing success.

I then took over an abandoned warehouse next to the TLA and cleaned out the second floor. We performed Michael McClure’s Gargoyle Cartoons. I remember each play was set in a different part of the room, (there were four or five playlets we did)—no chairs—and for the last play, The Cherub, we had this huge sheet which covered the entire audience. As McClure wrote it, the actors’ heads were sticking thru the ceiling. I put us all together in space, looking down or up through enough holes for each member of the audience to stick his/her head thru the canvas/scrim/sheet which had stars projected on it. Then the actors moved under the sheets, I think there were little platforms for them, and popped their heads thru as they spoke their lines. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.

I’ve been reading Michael Caine (the actor’s) autobiography. He writes of London in the sixties as that magic time when anything was possible and everyone was doing something. Same in New York. It was a special time, revolutionary, yes, but not destined to last. Those times are as much about overthrowing the old order as attempting to establish the new. Even Peter Brook, the grand old man of the theatre and theatrical experimenter par excellence, puts people behind a proscenium. It’s very hard to reinvent the theatre every night, nor does one necessarily want to.

The environmental happening was never accomplished in that form, but I am reminded that when I dropped out of theatre (legit) in 1970 I embraced a kind of street theatre/happenings on the streets of Philly. I and cohorts put on a series of events involving public and several times, large inflatable devices. Our best known one, or most audacious, took place around 1973 and we inflated a large ‘bubble’ on the triangle that divides Fifth St and Passyunk, pretty much across from where you and M used to live. We installed a rock band inside, handed spray cans to the 5th and south street gang and let them initialize the plastic (shades of jak’l?4) while anyone who wanted came inside and boogies: hippies, society ladies, drunks, gang members, kids, innocent passer-by. It was all quite amazing and done without any city permits.

We also pulled one off inside The Art Museum on a day when we had a celebration going on the Parkway but we brought in a theatre company, The Bird and the Dirt, and talked our way past the guards and mucky mucks, assuring them that this was part of ‘the day’ and at the foot of the grand steps inside, did this strange play with one of the characters video taping the event as part of the event and again, no permits, just chutzpah. Jonas Santos was one of the creators of that piece and his partner Link Wray the other. Link died recently I think, Jonas is still around.

We (WPCP) an organization I founded and funded, and my associates got into video big time in those early South Street days and videod everything and feeding it back asap. We had many other stunts on smaller scales, so that was my guerilla theatre in early seventies.

I think my trip around the world with Kristen and Zak, age 2, in 1977, traveling with 3 round the world tix and no itinerary, was a change of life situation, an exploration of ‘living theatre’ in the tropical southern hemisphere. Upon our return, the city no longer held the pull for me it had previously. I now sought to raise my family in a way I could more directly be related to the earth, living in countryside, and so my directorial career, shaping the theatre I suggested, became more a part time thing."⁵

II

Paradoxically Bissinger the writer does not emerge until around the end of the 1970’s, or until this theatre we’re calling, after Jodorowsky, that of the panic-ephemeral, along with the insurrectionary, volcanic movements of social unrest and dislocation it grew out of, was very largely in abeyance; while continuing to act in, produce and direct, and now write plays, Bissinger obviously turns inward, towards the more private and more personal genres of journal, dream-recounting, poem and story, where the first person narrator, or main character, is most often a more or less thinly disguised persona of the author, while family, friends and others obviously occupy both major and minor roles; family history, siblings, parents, uncles and aunts, long lost or not, and grandparents, a wife, a girlfriend (or a friend’s girlfriend), among a host of others, populate this world of Bissinger, a theatre all of its own, which he turns, as a matter of fact, at one point, into a play about his past, Dreams, Mothers, and Death, when he performed himself growing up at various ages and had other family members filling various relational roles.⁶

Periods of radical, extroverted idealism have frequently, maybe always, been followed by times of disillusionment, introversion and withdrawal. M.H. Abrams characterized these phases as Romanticism I and Romanticism II in order to explain why a first generation of English Romantics (Coleridge and Wordsworth) were radical politically, for instance enthusiastic for The French Revolution, while a later generation tended to be apolitical (Keats) or to have turned even reactionary (Coleridge and especially Wordsworth—Shelley and Byron, however remaining radical, perhaps because they died relatively young). The disillusioned generation turns inward, becomes personal, while not forgetting to look for a job or after its financial portfolio, interested in autobiography, marriage (making adultery, even more personal, possible), novels, journal; religion is revived, God and even King reappear; spirituality, reincarnation, family, love, friendship, inwardness, mysticism.

Let’s not exaggerate, however, this turning from the public to the private, from the outer to the inner, the political to the personal; the theatre which Bissinger continues to create is intrinsically public, maybe even intrinsically political; Abie’s Last Stand, his first play, of 1979, for example, about a fruit-seller being run out of a neighborhood by the forces of gentrification, was certainly political, but Bissinger, whether here or in the other plays he’s written since, was not trying to change the world thereby, just point out, maybe, that a little corner of it could use some improvement; and certainly he was no longer about changing the nature of theatre itself or (over) challenging or (overly) disturbing his audience—goals insisted on in his earlier career, as his approach (and that of anarchist colleagues, many of whose statements could be interchangeable with Bissinger’s) in his Le Théâtre manifesto, of 1968 demonstrated very clearly. Likewise in the emphasis on Abie’s character strengths: wisdom, wit, courage, love, stubbornness etc. there’s an explicit message that the individual can and should withstand the assaults of fate and society; and that the person himself is what can, should and does matter. This stance, characteristic of much of Bissinger’s theatre, for instance The Moon Princess and Life is Sweat, of 1993, and also I think Descartes’ Blues, of 2003, is far from hegemonic; for other plays of his, as a matter of fact the ones included in this collection, present a far starker, more absurd and despairing (however hilarious and funny, in a painful way, sometimes) and starkly existential image of the world. So even in this structurally public forum of theatre, Bissinger is being personal, in the sense of framing and contextualizing action according to whatever mood or ‘inner’ necessity he was working out of or trying to work out; for better or worse, no manifesto is possible for such a ‘private’ theatre, meant not to change the world but to change the self; and the self’s needs change according to its changing needs: one day it wants God, love, sex, cigarettes, drugs; the next day none of the above, or only some not others . . .

Perhaps what we are dealing with here is some strange, maybe unique mixture of the public and the personal, for if his conception and certainly practice of theatre, consciously or not, has taken a personal turn, unquestionably I think his, strictly speaking personal writings, like journal, dream narration and story are theatrical and therefore (kind of) public; in such writings he is always grappling with problems, conundrums and situations of absolutely urgent importance not only to himself but to humanity generally, such as have always been staged in theatre. Let’s say his consciousness has been theatralized: in his texts it’s always a matter, as on the stage of critically important issues that need to be resolved immediately or sooner: matters of life and death (for who can postpone living, or for that matter dying?), love (for who can put off loving, being loved till tomorrow?), social justice, corruption, pollution, health—mental, physical, social—and above all creativity (has anybody ever written a poem, composed a song, tomorrow?)—how to stay alert, inventive, original, daring in a world become so dangerous for its artist, not to mention the challenges, duels, conflicts, doubly-bound stresses emanating from the artist’s own unconscious or a collective one, in the form, for instance of the many dreams haunting Bissinger’s text, which cut through