Carl Hancock Rux and Jocelyn Clarke

SEASON PREVIEW CONVERSATIONS

If You Knew Archer Like I Knew Archer…
Three years ago Melanie Joseph, producer of New York’s Foundry Theatre, invited New York–based poet, spoken-word artist and musician Carl Hancock Rux to create a “unique theatrical experience” and to premiere it this winter. Somewhat later she hired Dublin-based dramaturg Jocelyn Clarke to assist in shaping Rux’s composition. It took shape as an exploration of celebrity, identity, history and memory, and Rux called it Talk. During a recent workshop at the Sundance Theatre Lab, the Rux-and-Clarke team discovered the dramatic shape and impact of the play, a re-membering ritual for the fictitious author, filmmaker and underground icon Archer Aymes.

(Jocelyn is smoking a cigarette as he flips through the pages of Carl’s script, scribbling dramaturgical notes and drawing huge circles and lines on the pages with a red magic marker.)

Jocelyn Clarke: Carl, your play, Talk, is structured as a contemporary panel discussion during which six people re-member an absent seventh—the obscure writer and artist Archer Aymes. The young Moderator convenes the conference, and invites four people who knew Aymes to discuss his life and work; a fifth joins the panel at the last minute and disrupts the panel with her unusual knowledge of Aymes. Each panelist brings a part of Aymes to the panel—his celebrity, his identity, his artistry, his memory, etc.—confusing the Moderator until he is returned to “ignorance.” The play eventually evolves into a Greek ritual of death and re-birth. Correct?

(Releasing a deep sigh, Carl rolls his eyes back into his head, pours himself a stiff drink.)

Carl Hancock Rux: That’s the gist of it, Jocelyn—but when I first sat down to write this play, I was looking at postmodernism and questioning whether there was such a thing as post-postmodernism. I wanted to research the progression of artistic invention in America and its impact on identity formation. There were a million things I felt compelled to re-read, and I started interviewing people. Eventually the play—like those interviews—became an opera of communication and miscommunication centered around an anthropological dig. I was engaging in a discourse about art, attempting to unearth a mystery. The landscape of this mystery is about art in America—and the artifacts of it.

The Moderator is conflicted. In one hand he holds some art that he loves. In the other hand he holds the artist and the artist’s theory regarding the death of art. Which does the Moderator inherit? Without art or the opportunity to make art (without replicating what has already been done or adhering to strict guidelines of form) what purpose does life on earth hold for him? He is overwhelmed, because he is born in a time when he is able to look back at hundreds of years of great artistic invention—but he does not feel empowered to be an inventor or have confidence in the future landscape of invention. He inhabits that zone of non-being where authentic upheaval can be born—and it is the upheaval that is key. What will an authentic upheaval be for the Moderator? What was it for Archer? What will it produce? The only way for him to know the answer to his questions is to be led by the panelists into a milieu de memoire—an environment of memory.

(Jocelyn flicks an ash into Carl’s eye, proceeds to use scissors and glue on the script.)

Clarke: If the panel is a milieu de memoire, and the Moderator returns to the past to re-discover Aymes, then is it important for you that each presentation be a complete articulation of an idea?

(Carl splashes his drink into Jocelyn’s lap.)

Rux: Yes. The panelists are authority figures. Keepers of records. They own their past, but they are not necessarily creative forces at present. They carry film, music, literature, television and theatre in their back pockets. They are landlords of eras long gone.

They each believe that they own the body of Archer Aymes—because they’ve all known him at one time or another, at different periods of his life—so the relevance of Aymes is contingent upon their recollection of him. Each character’s thesis—no matter how much authority it is imbued with—falls short. Thus, we learn that there is no such thing as a complete idea, really, because ideas are subjective expressions, and the limitations of language already make for incomplete ideas. Once the idea is articulated, it’s already fallible.

(Jocelyn laughs out loud, dries his eyes, chucks Carl’s script into the fireplace.)

Clarke: The Moderator is the only one whose knowledge evolves. The “journey” of the panelists is the articulation of their ideas (identity and authenticity, tradition and interpretation, etc.) with digressions and variations. To paraphrase Socrates, Talk’s presiding genius, “We’re born knowing everything. It’s just the uncovering of the knowledge that is the learning process.”

(Carl grips Jocelyn’s throat.)

Rux: True learning has to involve unlearning—we all have to “forget what we think we know” in order to arrive at the next relevant idea. And this is extremely dangerous, because knowledge means death. It would be too dangerous to know or aspire to know something else. To further quote the play’s presiding genius, “When a man aspires for wisdom he is already practicing dying.”

(Jocelyn wrestles Carl to the ground, holds the scissors to his throat.)

Clarke: I think our task, as we work on the final draft of this play is to review and chart each panelist’s presentation, not just as it affects/effects the Moderator but also as it underlies the dramaturgical structure of each Module (or Act). How the panelists shape their presentations with their several digressions and interruptions will shape and inform the dramatic and theatrical rhythm of each scene. More importantly, it will enable the audience to navigate more clearly through the ideas, allowing them to arrive at the dramatic pulse of each moment…from moment to moment.

(Carl flips Jocelyn over his shoulder, hurling him out of an open window.)

Rux: I agree—but you’ll have to allow me to resist too much clarity. Too much clarity can be a trap. Ideas and language, when they are spontaneous—are never linear. When you really engage in the dialogue of art, and time and space and structure and society, you find yourself a little lost, and that is also what this play is really about—the collective unconscious among contemporary artists. I believe this conflict in us to inherit as well as reject our artistic heritage leaves us feeling a little lost.

(As Carl leans out of window to view Jocelyn splayed on the sidewalk, he loses his balance and falls out of window. Playwright and dramaturg lay entangled on the pavement.)

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