Indy Theatre Habit

It has been about a year since I began my life as a theatre writer and about five months since I started this blog.  Each week I learn a little more about how to do it.  I also learn a little bit more each week about how to keep my theatre habit in balance with the rest of my life.

A few days ago, on May 28, 2008, I drove downtown to the American Cabaret Theatre (ACT) for the “IndyFringe Fabulous Fringe Fundraiser.”  It featured a performance of “The Slip Knot: a One-Person Show,” by Canadian writer/director/storyteller T. J. Dawe.

Dawe has spent the past several years figuring out how to make a living as a Fringe artist.  He writes a new show for himself every year and often directs other performers in their shows.  I got to chat with him a little bit after his performance in Indy.  I was, and am, intrigued by how he shapes and balances his life as he travels from Fringe festival to Fringe festival around the world.

But before I tell you about our conversation, I want to tell you about Dawe’s show.  It was such a treat!  He wove three hilarious, language-rich stories about the hell of working at low-paying jobs into one brilliantly unexpected and delightfully satisfying whole about life, love, and generosity.

It was a tight weave, too, expertly timed.  Sometimes he spoke so quickly, intensely, and precisely that I found myself listening with my mouth open in a half-smile and forgetting to breathe.  It was almost as if he were channeling the stories rather than merely sharing them.  I loved that his powers of observation in his daily life were so great and that he had incorporated his observations - especially his observations of word use - into his stories.

Dawe began the show by walking onto the vast ACT stage in the near dark and standing between two small light stands.  He turned on one of three small lights that had been clamped to the stands and started to tell one story in a sort of traditional way: “So at this point in the story I’d just moved to Toronto.  I was crashing on a friend’s couch.  Winter was coming.  I was looking for a job and a place to live.”  (P.3 in the published script.)  He told about finding a job as a “merchandiser” at a drugstore for minimum wage.

As he turned on the other two clip lights, however, and moved to slightly different locations in relation to the stands, he jumped into the other two stories a little more abruptly.  As we followed him back and forth with our eyes among the three locations, we gradually figured out that when he was standing in the middle, he was telling a story about when he had worked over the phone at a mail tracing place.  When he was standing at the other side, he was telling about when he had worked as a truck driver.  Each of the stories had its own vocabulary, its own plot, and its own cast, although Dawe never stopped being himself, the storyteller.

After all three story balls were smoothly up in the air, the stage lights came up more brightly, but the three clip lights and the two small stands on stage continued to help focus our attention and help us understand the juggling-like structure of the piece.

Occasionally, there were recorded sound embellishments - some bits of music to establish mood, maybe a sound effect or two to help us understand something.  What it was like to be on acid, for example.

(I know.  I was surprised, too.  “You did WHAT?!” I wanted to shout.  “Are you crazy?”  But as I said earlier, the piece was more than just three interwoven stories about working at low-paying jobs.  It was about all kinds of experiences.)

Dawe told me later that the sound and light crew members at the ACT were great: he had just given them a CD and a copy of the script, and explained what he wanted.  They ran through the show’s cues once or twice in the afternoon and were perfect that evening.

Yet it was far from a canned performance.  For example, at one point in one of the stories, when Dawe referred to what flight attendants say, he said, “Welcome to Indianapolis.”  The house lights were up a bit so that he could watch the faces of his audience and connect with us.  He also listened to our laughter, and tweaked his timing accordingly.  When someone sneezed loudly, he said, “Bless you!”   I felt fully present and engaged because he was.

Dawe writes all of his pieces as well as performing them.  This piece, “The Slip Knot,” is one he has performed over 200 times to various audiences.  When he told me this, I was reminded of the Irish storytellers’ saying: “You never really know a story until you have shared it with audiences a hundred times.”

Dawe knows this piece!

I asked him about his process.  He said that this particular piece gestated while he was actually working at a drugstore and feeling drained by it.  He set himself a writing goal: minimum five pages, maximum ten pages each day.    But then he wrote the whole first draft in eight days. 

He took two months to memorize the piece.  He revised as he memorized.  Then, as he began performing it in 2001, he revised it further.  “It grows even more in 25-performance increments,” he told me.

I bought a copy of the one-man “Slip-Knot” script as published by Brindle & Glass in 2003.  I am curious to read it and see how the piece has changed over the past five years.  One of the things I love about live storytelling (and I do think that Dawe’s work is storytelling, even though he ”memorizes” rather than “learns” his stories) is that the stories are meant to evolve as the teller deepens his or her understanding of how to tell them.

He said that people often ask him how he “memorizes all that.”  I knew exactly what he meant when he said that memorizing is not the hardest part.  Creating the piece in the first place, and developing it, is the hardest part.

But learning the lines is not exactly easy.  When he comes back to “The Slip-Knot,” for example, after not having performed it in a while, he has to review it very thoroughly.   “It is boring to rehearse the show,” he told me, “but I have to do it.  It is hard, intricate language.  But then when I’m doing it with the audience again, it’s fun.”

“Have you ever forgotten a line?” I asked him.

“Oh, sure, but when that happens, or when anything distracting happens, I just try to make a joke out of it.  One time, I forgot completely where I was in the story.  I stopped, left the stage, and came back with a copy of the script.  I held it up and told everyone it would be for sale after the show.

“People love that it’s live,” he said.  “Whatever happens, I try to incorporate it into the show, make it unique.  Each performance has the potential to be one-of-a-kind.  The audience is part of the show.”

That is definitely why I love live storytelling and live theatre: anything can happen and no performance of a show is exactly like any other.  I am not the artist, but I am helping to create the artistic experience by being a “juicy-faced listener” (storyteller Pam McGrath’s expression) in the audience.

Dawe said that one of the reasons he loves Fringe audiences is because they are “looking to walk on the wild side for a week or so.  Shows are shorter, admission per show is cheaper, so audiences at the Fringe, even if they are people who are conservative about what they want when they go to the regular theatres, don’t mind solo performances at the Fringe.  They don’t mind shows with no sets, shows that are new,” (shows they’ve never heard of) “or shows that are Canadian.”

I asked him what else he likes about earning his living as a Fringe performer.

“After five months on the Fringe circuit, you don’t have to go back to a job you hate!  You don’t have to go back to working at the Shoppers’ Drug Mart.”  He said that you can only really make a living as a Fringe performer if you do one-person, minimalist shows, but he is artistically inclined towards doing that anyway.  By working the Fringe circuit fulltime for five months of the year, he is able to earn enough to keep him going the rest of the year.

He also loves arriving in a new location armed with his own special list of “to do and find out” bullet points.  This list includes not only things like where to buy groceries or mail a letter but also where to find the best bookstore and where to find information and stories about the things that interest him about that particular location.  In Indianapolis, for example, he knew that he would be in the hometown of one of his favorite authors: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.   He showed me photocopies of a photograph and a piece of writing that someone from the ACT had given him after learning of his interest.  The ACT person’s mother had dated Vonnegut at one time!

On the other hand, earning one’s living as a Fringe performer takes an enormous amount of energy.  He performs nonstop for five full months, traveling from Fringe festival to Fringe festival and living out of a suitcase.  “You’re always ‘on’ at a festival,” he said.  “You become a kind of famous and so people want to talk to you and you want to make time for everyone.”   It is not as if he is “just” doing five one-man shows a week.

And it’s not as if he gets to kick back and do nothing the rest of the year.  He spends the other seven months writing, learning, and mounting one new show of his own per year, plus reviewing his other shows (he now has ten in his repertory), plus directing other performers in one- or two-person shows.  This year, for example, he is directing four(!) new shows.

“I have no interest in doing an already-published play,” he said.  “But I am the child of two teachers, so I like seeing what’s inside of someone else and helping them bring it out.  I like directing other one-person shows.”

One of the most popular shows that Dawe has directed is the “One Man Star Wars Trilogy,” written and performed by Charles Ross, a friend of Dawe’s from university.  This show has toured the world and is wildly popular not only at Fringe festivals but at science fiction conventions.

Dawe’s newest show, “Totem Figures,” is about the bonding that people do over their favorite authors and other artists,  about how people’s lives are shaped by the writers they read, and about how their own personal epic myths develop.  “Imagine if everyone had their own Mount Rushmore or their own Sgt. Pepper album cover,” Dawes said.  “Who would be on yours?”

Dawe and I bonded a bit over the fact that we both like Canadian author Margaret Atwood.  He promised to send me a copy of the as-yet-unpublished “Totem Figures.”  I am looking forward to reading it!  I am glad that even though Dawe is unable to perform at the Indy Fringe Festival this year, he was able to perform at the Indy Fringe Fundraiser.

To read more about the money his performance helped to raise, and to learn about volunteer opportunities at the Indy Fringe Festival, please see the Festival’s website.  The Indy Fringe Festival will run August 22-31, 2008.  For tickets or more information, please call 317-822-4386.  In the meantime, the next Fringe Friday event will be June 27, 2008. 

Hope Baugh - www.IndyTheatreHabit.com