What’s On Jim’s Mind (Issue #139)

The original home of the famed Provincetown Players

Great change is what is on my mind today.

My mind and body have shifted into full transition mode, both physically and mentally.

This weekend marks the beginning of the longest time that Barbara and I will be apart since the beginning of the covid epidemic when I pretty much relocated full time to Pittsburgh. For nearly forty years prior to this, we had occupied our own unique calendar-nine months often or mostly apart followed by long summers tin which we were together for three months, mostly in Pittsburgh, interspersed with some travel visiting Coco, Barbara’s sister on her farm in North Carolina and maybe a few days in the suburbs of Chicago catching up with my family and Barbara’s brother George. We worked on the house here in Pittsburgh and our ever-evolving garden which threatens to swallow up the whole of the property surrounding the house here on Hastings Street. And we traveled and traveled, mostly on busman’s holidays, first to London and then London and Berlin, where we saw and studied so much theatre, made new friends some of whom became great colleagues who have also had an enormous impact on our work and how we saw the world.

Then that world changed enormously, and we went through a big transition. Now for the last few years we have spent more time together that we probably did in the entire thirty-five years or so prior. We lived together, as most couples do, full-time more or less and in one place. Brooklyn became a beloved and exciting outpost on the road more than a second home, and my books for my research and my boxes of music and assorted banjos came to occupy so much space up on our third floor in Mac’s old bedroom that I find myself, as I’m sitting here, wondering with just a touch of panic quickening my breath, how I’m going to get all this needed stuff that i have accumulated over the course of the preliminary work on our new Irondale project American Century, packed up and ready for my return to Brooklyn four days from now.

Yes, the new Irondale Project, American Century. That’s what we christened it, and that brings me staring face to face with uncertainty, like a little kid about to go off the three-meter diving board. This is a big project, perhaps the biggest we’ve ever undertaken. American Century traces the development of theatre in our country for the last hundred years. (It’s hard to believe that prior to 1915 and the birth of the Provincetown Playhouse there was no real American theatre and that less than forty years later the American theatre would produce such milestones as Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Crucible and A Raisin in the Sun. These plays, and a few others, heralded in that unlikeliest of occurrences a theatrical Golden Age. How did this happen? The easy answer: One step at a time going all the way back to the Greeks and then progressing through the Elizabethans, the Restoration, the nineteenth century continental playwrights. Nothing came into being from one mind or from whole cloth, each writer and each new cultural advancement grew out of what had preceded it through, its use of language, its sophistication and complexity of storytelling.

And now we find ourselves perhaps standing on the precipice of a new age, poised on that three-meter board. New kinds of people are making theatre, seeing it, helping it find its own style. At least that seems to be what today’s theatre wants to do. With this piece we hope to put all the kind of changes that have taken place in just one country-the USA and put them on display in one place so that we can come to a common understanding of how this last theatrical golden age came about in The American Century and how we can use this knowledge to better grapple with the new plays and the new theatre of today.

“And what is the theatre,” said jesting Pilate and did not wait for an answer.

My very unbaked answer right now, my own “Jesting Pilate” comment about what I am discovering from our work this far, is that one of the things that sets these great plays apart is the importance of “uncertainty” in their art, of not taking sides , The danger we must overcome it seems today is an Art that seems to be obsessed with morality, that reduces complexity to slogans, and that is too often too black and white in its approach, its thinking, and its values.

And that’s my big “aha moment,” where I am coming down this morning. The most important thing I’ve discovered over the course of developing this piece thus far: art is not interested in telling us how to think or what the artist wants you to believe she or he means “A poem (or a painting or a song or a novel) should not mean but be.” Said Archibald MacLeish.

But then again… to be consistent with my own artistic uncertainty, all this could be just my inner Miranda talking. You know the passage. It’s what she says at the end of The Tempest:

“O, brave new world that has such people in ’t”

(To which her father replies without pause):

“‘Tis new to thee.”

Do I quibble or mince around the edges here? Of course, I do– because I am uncertain.

And so, on Monday next the whole Irondale circus will gather together for the first time in person at 85 South Oxford Street in Ft Greene, Brooklyn, to start making a challenging, interesting, funny, death-defying piece about all this. You know, “ A little song, a little dance and a little seltzer….”

— Jim Niesen

Write to me directly at jim@irondale.org