today’s audio is “taps on glass” - a working title for a piece of music i made in the summer of 2020. like many folks, i was processing the death of george floyd. i tried to find a few appropriate collaborators to finish or help the piece along to its next iteration, but thankfully my invitations were declined. i say thankfully because that summer no one needed another thought from another well-meaning white liberal.
parts of this piece now live in my work-in-progress memoir. that’s a good place for them, in a new context. sometimes art isn’t ahead of its time, it is behind its time. in this case, i am deliberately making it so.
this weekend i saw a pair of off-broadway shows, each dealing in their own ways with the tangled relationship between history and the present moment.
sarah ruhl’s adaptation of the virginia woolf book, “orlando”, takes a story that was ahead of its time and places it unchanged in our present moment, where it thrives as much as anything written today. written in the 1920s, “orlando” tells the story of a forrest gump-like figure who traverses the big events of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries all the way to the early 20th, along the way transitioning genders and attempting to become a writer. this from the imagination of a woman a hundred years ago! the production i saw leans hard into our current conceptualizations of non-binary and queer-ness, using the history that woolf created to show the very real lineage and roots of queerness. we have always been here.
playwright suzan-lori parks’s “sally and tom” does something even more complicated and fruitful. it tells the story of a show within a show - a play about sally hemings and thomas jefferson being put on by a contemporary theater troupe. the parallels and resonances abound. we watch a historical interracial couple - couple being a shorthand for a coerced, complicated power dynamic- being portrayed by a contemporary interracial couple, who have their own complications and coercions.
to be honest, i didn’t totally get the project as i watched it saturday afternoon. i wasn’t sure what part of the play to take as real and which as contrived - what was actors pretending to be actors acting and what was actors in a play that i was watching in 2024. if i’m this confused, why make a play within a play? i felt unsettled and unsure about what i was seeing. after, though, i listened to an interview suzan-lori did with kara swisher.
hey yall - spring is in full force here in western massachusetts and with it comes days of hiking, family picnics, barbecues, and hopefully some good old fashioned concert going.
i’m doing a special run of shows with my favorite band in the world SPOUSE as we re-open northampton MA’s iron horse on may 17 then head to woodstock for a show may 19.
the first weekend of june, i am leading another hiking concert, this time at world’s end park on the massachusetts shore. the show is almost sold out, so get your tickets asap.
speaking of hiking concerts, we’ve just announced our first concert in another state. join me sept 7 in richmond virginia’s bryan park for a hike and concert.
if you’d like to organize a hiking concert where you live, please drop me a line erin@erinmckeown.com. and i’m also looking for shows of any kind september 5 and 6 in north carolina. let’s put something together!
i’ve decided that Fax of Life will be a 5 season project. we’re currently in the middle of season 3, so if there are topics you think would turn me on, songs you want to hear, people i should have as guests please let me know!!
meantime, thanks everyone for listening!
barreling home on the late night curves of the merritt parkway, listening to suzan-lori explain her show, i suddenly understood the project of her play. sometimes theater makes sense only afterward, and sometimes we need a little help to understand something. i don’t mind when this happens at all! this is partly why i hate reviews - receiving art is personal and happens in its own time. to assign a binary to it the minute the curtain comes down - like, dislike, hate, love - sells short the richness and long tail of the experience.
now what i understood parks to be doing, was underscoring the proposal that while history may initially be written by the victors, it doesn’t have to, in fact shouldn’t, remain the “victors’” domain. in fact, the job of theater, of performance, of making performance is always and must be the job of re-making. in this way, those who didn’t win - didn’t have a voice at the time, whose subjectivity was ignored or actively subjugated- get the chance to weigh in.
we often think of re-telling as dilution, as a simplification, as an erosion of nuance and detail, like the childhood game of telephone with the absurd phrase that comes out the other side, bearing no resemblance to the input. but what if this process is the corrective? what if the links in the telephone aren’t distorting the input signal, but are enriching it with their unique experiences? the details the “winners” couldn’t and wouldn’t hear?
underneath a heavy frosting of bro, this is the disney-fied project of HAMILTON. but here, parks is going a step further and saying more explicitly that theater is the ideal tool for this. and she is forcefully charging the audience to realize the re-making is as much their responsibility as hers.
in theater we are animating in real-time. we are making and re-making right in front of you. sometimes an actor turns to the audience and reminds you of this. playfully or not, it’s usually an uncomfortable surprise. hey! you! we know you are watching, but are you paying attention?
i remember the first time i saw “fleabag”. i was watching on my phone in an airport. someone had recommended the show, and i was finally getting around to it. spoiler alert, in the first 5 minutes of the series, fleabag turns to the camera and busts us viewers for our complacency. we watch differently afterward. in that moment, the airport lounge suddenly turned into a stage, and people-watching got infinitely more interesting.
in the last few years, i’ve been acutely conscious of living through big historical events thinking about the art that will inevitably come from them. i am waiting for the movies, plays, novels and paintings that come from DACA dreamers, from children who were separated from their families at the border, who lost parents to covid. i am waiting for the viewpoints of the people of gaza, of the artists who are living through the news items i read on my couch. what will they make? what history will they remake?
and then i remember what it takes to make art - first, you have to survive, which is not a given for any of us. then you have to have a moment to reflect - this requires some measure of quiet and safety and economic stability. next, you have to have the resources to develop your art and the access to collaborators to support you. and you need an audience, which requires a group of people who have to survive, have leisure and stability. the requirements sometimes feel impossible. no wonder we often get silence from the voices most needed to write the truth.
on the afternoon i saw “sally and tom”, the audience members on all sides of me were elderly and white. the typical matinee crowd. though sprinkled throughout the theater were the beautiful presences of younger people, people of color, theater-goers who were happy to call-out thomas jefferson when the actor playing him turned to the audience, in character, and invited their thoughts. he was appropriately impervious and imperial, but it still felt so good to let that outrage out into the air.
meanwhile, on both sides of me the elderly folks were asleep, heads nodded forward, breathing softly. when the show was over, my row-mate woke up and sent a text via voice.
“just saw ‘sally and tom’”, she said into her phone. “it was very good.”
x erin
ps - AI AI AI weighs in and this is the result :/
¡ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS!
viking diet! (no, not that kind of diet)
one of my fave instagrams reminds us the healing animals offer
your caesar salad is changing
judi dench being legendary and charming and and and
interior secretary deb haaland is totally amazing
the new annie baker film, janet planet, is set very very near to my house
UPCOMING SHOWS
May 17, 2024 - Northampton MA
Iron Horse (with SPOUSE)
TICKETS
May 19, 2024 - Woodstock NY
Colony (with SPOUSE)
TICKETS
May 25, 2024 - Kents Store VA
Virginia Women’s Music Festival
TICKETS
June 1, 2024 - Hingham MA
World’s End Hiking Concert
TICKETS
September 7, 2024 - Richmond VA
Bryan Park Hiking Concert
TICKETS
If you have further questions or concerns about COVID protocols, please contact the venues directly.
Reminder, Erin does not appear in productions of Miss You Like Hell
re-making history