The Road to Baker Street

To Produce a Random Event…

2010-07-22T16:02:00.001-05:00

It takes enormous planning to produce a random event.
--Holmes

I write this on the eve of the sold-out, first preview performance of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure. It is an odd, in-between, sort of time for directors, with the bulk of our work behind us, yet not quite complete. I suppose it’s rather like watching a ship you’ve helped build cast-off for the first time.

I doesn’t help that I’m listening to Barber’s Adagio for Strings as I write this…

My deepest thanks to everyone who has contributed to the production of this “random event” – actors, designers, staff, artists of all crafts, audience, friends and family. It has been a fantastic experience and absolutely every moment has been worth it.

Break a Leg, Everyone

All the Single Ladies

2010-07-04T19:58:00.001-05:00

Yes, that’s a Beyonce reference. Yes, it’s going cost me a little credibility with my Idle Muse colleagues – and no: I couldn’t resist.

A previous post of mine dealt with the ideal of Victorian manhood, which the men in Holmes’ time each had to contend with. This one will take a look at part of the landscape that was facing women.

According to the United Kingdom Census of 1851,* the population of Victorian Britain contained 4% more women than men. Since the same census counted a population of about 18 million, this is a difference of approximately 750,000 individuals. These "superfluous women" would have no chance of ever marrying, due to simple mathematics.

For a very exceptional few, like Doyle’s Irene Adler, the gift of artistic talent provided a means to circumvent these restrictions, finding their own independence as divas and other performers. For others, the inability to hold significant employment or obtain higher education forced them into more desperate professions…

To an actor considering the role of Madge Larrabee and her interactions with the other characters of the play, these are circumstances which must be considered. What choices are left a woman with no resources and nothing to rely on but the schemes of a fallen brother? How must she respond when those schemes attract the notice of one Dr. Moriarty? Finally, what edge will her conversations with Irene Adler carry, knowing that she is speaking to a woman who has sidestepped all the difficult choices and all the moral compromises she herself has been forced to make?

*Ideas and figures in this paragraph summarized from the Wikipedia article “Victorian Era”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_era

Sketching Things Out

2010-04-27T21:36:00.004-05:00

Long before I ever considered it as a career path, Theatre was identified as a “collaborative art.” The composition, which is to say the experience of taking in the performance, isn’t crafted by any one individual artist, but by the intersection of many. These include actors, writers, musicians and designers of all sorts. In this way, the art of the Director is concerned with providing a platform and environment for all of these artists to do their own unique work, while simultaneously acting as a sort of lens that focuses those disparate beams of light into a single, coherent vision that is the production.

This year, Idle Muse Theatre Company is exploring ways of taking this core idea even further and we’ll be ready to start talking about it in detail soon. The below is a sketch by illustrator Tom Kyzivat, inspired by reading Sherlock Holmes and conversations about the text. Check out more of Tom’s work at his site Murderous Automaton and consider the below a “teaser” of things to come.

Found Objects II

2010-04-24T16:57:00.003-05:00

This is one that many readers will likely already be familiar with. I first read it myself back when I discovered my own love for poetry, thumbing through my mother’s old copy of One Hundred and One Famous Poems, which I had discovered on a dusty bookshelf. I have posted it here because so much about Kipling’s work is emblematic of the Victorian mindset and preoccupations – like his total immersion in “orientalism” in Just So Stories and The Jungle Book series, or the distinctly British imperialist perspective touted in works like The White Man’s Burden. I have written before how the societal changes brought on by Victorian industrialization helped give birth to concept of the self-made man – an ideal which each of the characters in Sherlock Holmes must, in part, define themselves in relation to.

Rather than endeavor to expound upon just what I think this ideal means myself, I’ll let Kipling, whose words won him a Nobel Prize for doing so, cover this one:

IF—
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And—which is more—you'll be a Man my son!

What We’re Listening To

2010-03-27T17:59:00.003-05:00

In my last post, I discussed concept material and sense-response work. Another form of this material is playlists – burned CD’s and weblinks to music sites that get passed among the creative team like cigarettes among inmates. Again, these tracks are concept material – most aren’t right or won’t make it into the final production. Their purpose is to inspire…

The below list starts out with the intellectual melancholy of Sting and moves on to the elegant pulp of Vitamin String Quartet. Dwelling there for a while, it drifts into rivers of darker strings and casts-off to explore new frontiers. Trading these tracks with each other is a kind of conversation we’re having about the ways we connect to the play and how we plan to express that on stage. I have posted some of them here so you might have the opportunity to listen in too.

Shape Of My Heart
Sting

Yellow
Vitamin String Quartet

Heroes (String Quartet Tribute to David Bowie)
Vitamin String Quartet

All I Want Is You (String Quartet Tribute to U2)
Vitamin String Quartet

Time After Time
Vitamin String Quartet

Clocks
Vitamin String Quartet

Hallelujah
Vitamin String Quartet

Fast Fall (Original Composition Inspired by the Music of Paramore)
Vitamin String Quartet

Dark Waltz
Hayley Westenra

Adagio For Strings, Op. 11
Barber

Into Dust
Mazzy Star

Devil's Dance Floor
Flogging Molly

Come Here Boy
Imogen Heap

Ghost Story
Sting

In Time
Mark Collie

Heroes
Peter Gabriel

Games Without Frontiers
Massive Attack feat. Peter Gabriel

Symphony 10 Mov. 1
Shostakovich

Klingon Battle
Jerry Goldsmith

Found Objects

2010-03-07T20:46:00.001-06:00

When directors are cobbling together the massive looseleaf tomes we live by in production, affectionately termed “Directors Books,” among the various pages of script notes, photocopied research and design drawings, we often keep a number of what might seem like unrelated or extraneous pages. These are sense-responses: collected art, literature and material that if not directly related to the play, somehow resonate with the text for us. We don’t always know how or why, and they may never translate into something rationally perceivable on stage, but somehow, they just go.

Here is one such item:

ULYSSES
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

On the Relevance of Punk II

2010-02-27T20:17:00.001-06:00

In my last post, I explored the concept of punk as it relates to certain genres of pulp literature. In the dystopian futures depicted in Cyberpunk stories, it is the criminals and hackers who have learned to master technology and manipulate the system for their own ends who are made heroes. In a world where the system is the engine of dehumanization, the rebels becomes the image and champion of the human.

To understand how these science fiction concepts are relevant to to a Victorian Gentleman like Sherlock Holmes, let’s take a look at his greatest nemesis – a man Holmes describes together with himself in the play as “two men who share a shadow”…I am speaking, of course, of the notorious Dr. Moriarty.

Doyle based Moriarty off of real-world criminal masterminds like Adam Worth and Jonathan Wild – men who in their respective times both recognized that the rapidly evolving complexity of their world presented unique opportunities for profit. A contemporary of Doyle, Worth was a “bounty jumper,” collecting income by enlisting in military regiments under false names and deserting after receiving pay – a trick he likely learned after he was mistakenly listed as killed-in-action after the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pursued by the Pinkertons, Worth moved to New York City and eventually Europe, founding criminal networks which thrived on large-scale robberies and forgery scams.

Jonathan Wilde, a career criminal in 17th Century London, managed to portray himself in the public eye as a master “thief taker,” or private detective. He used this position to claim rewards on “recovered” stolen goods which his own gang had made off with in the first place – men and women he frequently betrayed and turned over to the law for his own profit.

In effect, both of these men learned to “hack the system” and manipulate it for their own ends. They were able to look at the machine-like workings of society and exploit that knowledge for a desirable result.

As I’ve written before, the Victorian Age, like the modern Information Age, was a time of rapidly increasing complexity and innovation. Even as technology revolutionized production and created prosperity for some, these advancements vastly outpaced social and political change. The men, women and children who labored along side that same technology had almost no legal protection and were themselves reduced to little more than cogs in the giant machine of Victorian industry.

The Victorian Age is, in fact, the beginning of the same post-humanism that Cyberpunk literature explores: the fear that as our world becomes increasingly complex, we’re going lose the very things that make us who we are. The prevalence of these ideas has even given rise to an offshoot of Cyberpunk literature that takes place during the Victorian Age and explores the same themes.

This is called Steampunk.

I want to be clear here that I don’t mean to say Idle Muse is presenting Sherlock Holmes as a Cyberpunk – or even a proper Steampunk – play. But these concepts are fascinating to me. If we focus only on the archetypical and surface-level details we’re familiar with from other portrayals of Holmes, like the deerstalker cap and the curved pipe, these ideas might slip by us entirely. Living in the shadow of the factories and the black smog of the coal mines, however, they are forces that would have been present and very immediate to Doyle’s audience. They are fears that would have permeated the Victorian subconscious as they watched Holmes navigate the seedy underbelly of London’s criminal underworld and aristocracy with equal aplomb.

In Moriarty, Doyle presents an adversary who is a perfect machine – like Holmes, he understands the system so well he works in perfect concert with it, predicting results and manipulating outcomes. At the same time, he is hindered by none of Holmes’ human traits, like empathy or compassion. What sort of man must Holmes become to match and defeat such an opponent? What happens when that man meets a woman who offers an alternative to that battle and the prospect of the most fundamental of human experiences?

On the Relevance of Punk

2010-02-17T18:24:00.001-06:00

I guess I’ve been partial to “pulp” plays for a long time now…ever since I first saw Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman’s Cyberpunk adaptation, William Gibson’s Burning Chrome, at The Next Theatre in Evanston. I was still an undergraduate at the time, and in love with all things that seemed to challenge traditional ideas of what art should be. As a card-carrying sci-fi geek, the prospect of presenting an icon of pop-culture as high art was just too great a temptation to pass up.

The Poor Players’ Guild, the campus predecessor of what would one day become Idle Muse Theatre Company, acquired the rights to and performed Burning Chrome in the Spring of 2000. Three years later I would stage that same play again as my graduate thesis, using the production as a sort of personal barometer to gauge how much I had learned in the interim.

I like pulp literature, like Sherlock Holmes, because it serves as sort of modern mythology. To borrow a bit from my thesis, Cyberpunk stories, like Burning Chrome, Blade Runner (adapted from Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and The Matrix take place in a dystopian future—a sort of out-of-control information age, in which nations and economies have faded away in favor of the only true remaining currency: data.

Generally, in Cyberpunk, these forces give rise to some sort of all-encompassing social and technological system that is in direct conflict with the human.

In any narrative, relationships are a kind of mirror in which various aspects of the protagonist are reflected. But when those relationships become so numerous and complex as to be overwhelming, one cannot be distinguished from another. One’s sense of self is lost in the maelstrom of collective identity. There is no self distinct from the group, no unique identity, only a machine-like producer-consumer of the master system.

The fact that Cyberpunk characters are criminals makes them rebels against the rules of their society, which is the force of dehumanization. Humans in Cyberpunk are turning, metaphorically and literally, into machines. Against this setting, the punk becomes a symbol of the human struggle against the forces of dehumanization that we fear exist even in our own information-driven world today.

So, why all these words about Cyberpunk in a blog dedicated to a play about Sherlock Holmes? More on that in the next post…and a look at something called Steampunk…

The Old Order Changeth

2010-02-06T11:02:00.003-06:00

Longtime Idle Muse fans who saw Bloody Poetry (2008) already know that we have an interest in the Romantic Poets. At the same time, I’ve also always been partial to Alfred Lord Tennyson. I’ve always seen him as something of a transition poet, straddling the divide between the Romantic and Victorian Era’s.

In the literary timeline I posted a few days ago, I dated Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in 1885, because that’s when the epic poem was completed. He actually began composing it in 1834, just prior to Victoria’s taking the throne. It was published over time in sections (idylls) and is considered by many to be something of an ongoing commentary on the era in which the poet lived.

The Victorians found in the myth of King Arthur an image of themselves. Throughout the period, there was a resurgence of Arthurian themes depicted in art and literature. The tale of the legendary British king’s emergence, rise and death provided a ready metaphor for the changing nature of their times – and they were indeed full of change.

Victoria’s reign oversaw the Industrial Revolution in England, and with it urbanization, overpopulation and widespread poverty. Simultaneously, this occurred at the height of the British Empire, a period called the Pax Britannica, during which British colonial interests and trade power were unmatched throughout the world. Meanwhile, science and technology were blossoming: gasworks and sanitation systems improved the quality of life in major cities, soap and antiseptics gained widespread use, and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species rocked the world.

Underscoring all of this, a strict moral code sought to suppress the expression of emotion and rampant libertinism of previous ages – in a society that was becoming more and more deeply influenced by “oriental” ideas from abroad, even as it was reshaped by new technologies.

A side note: I love Wikipedia.

You can’t use it for academic purposes and you can’t blindly trust it – but if you already know a bit about a given subject, it can make for great conversation starters – not to mention dramturgical summaries in actor packets. For those looking to learn more about Victorian England, a couple of Wikipedia articles which, if not comprehensive or academically rigorous, make for good primers on the subject are:

Victorian Morality – short, condensed historical context
Victorian Era – longer and broader in focus

As for Tennyson, named Poet Laureate during this period, he addressed the fast-turning Victorian world in his Idylls through Bedivere’s lament, spoken as his king lay dying:

"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole ROUND TABLE is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world;
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

Facing the harsh realities of the Industrial Revolution and looking back on the Romantic Era, it must have seemed to the Victorians that they might indeed be standing at the end of an ideal age. But Tennyson wanted to offer his readers one more thing…

Hope.

And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

During the Victorian Era, people began looking at society analytically and believing it could be improved. There was a kind of faith that the acquisition and application of knowledge could better the individual and the world. This is the same era that gave birth to John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle – and during which people were reading the ideas of Freud and Nietzsche. This is the era in England that gave birth to the idea of the self-made man, through which a burgeoning middle class won a place at the table among the aristocracy based on the strength of personal success.

This was the idea that an industrial, imperialist society, with all its inherent imperfections and injustices, could be better understood and was constantly evolving, on its way to something better:

Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint,
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb
Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

Where Credit is Due

2010-02-02T19:06:00.001-06:00

More posts on Sherlock soon to come, but first I need to do a quick plug for Paul Holmquist’s Neverwhat? blog. Paul’s directing an adaptation of one of my favorite novels, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, over at Lifeline Theatre that opens April 30 – and it looks like it’s going to be fantastic.

I also need to give Paul credit, because his production blog is the conceptual model I based The Road to Baker Street off of (read: “stole shamelessly from”). Check it out at:

Neverwhat?

Literary Levers

2010-01-31T09:23:00.004-06:00

Directors read. Directors read a lot. One of the first things we do when beginning a new production process is try to immerse ourselves as much as possible in the world of the play. This takes many forms: iPod playlists, collections of art and poetry, handwritten lists of images and sense-responses to the text, and often the reading of a great many books and articles. We go through a lot of highlighters. Knowing the history a story is set against is a critical component of the given circumstances in which the characters operate. Other people’s ideas, whether you find yourself agreeing with them or not, are great levers for prying open the text, tipping you off to angles of analysis and approaches to thinking about the play you may have otherwise missed entirely.

One of the first things that jumped out at me immediately when beginning this work was the incredibly broad range of disparate literary works the period produced – so much so that I found myself stopping everything else to assemble a timeline of when they were published. Arranging them in order is like looking at a fantastic cross-section of the ideas that were at play shaping people’s lives during the reign of Victoria in England.

More on this to come…in the meantime, here’s the list:

Timeline of Victorian Era Literature
1813 – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
1819 – Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
1833 – Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson
1837 – Begin Reign of Queen Victoria
1837 – The French Revolution: A History, Thomas Carlyle
1839 – The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
1841 – On Heroes and Hero Worship, Thomas Carlyle
1843 – A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
1844 – The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels
1845 – Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman
1850 – David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
1854 – The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Lord Tennyson
1854 – Walden, Henry David Thoreau (United States)
1859 – On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
1859 – A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
1859 – Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (trans.), Edward Fitzgerald
1859 – On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
1861 – Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
1864 - Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Newman
1865 – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
1872 – Through the Looking-glass, and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll
1879 – Euclid and his Modern Rivals, Lewis Carroll
1883 – Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
1885 - Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson
1885 – Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
1886 – Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
1887 – A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1888 – A New English Dictionary (OED), Vol 1
1890 – Gunga Din, Rudyard Kipling
1891 – A Scandal in Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1891 – Rerum Novarum “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor” – Pope Leo XIII, influenced by Henry Edward Cardinal Manning
1893 – The Final Problem, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1894 – The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
1895 – The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
1897 – Dracula, Bram Stoker
1899 – Rudyard Kipling
1901 – End Reign of Queen Victoria
1902 – The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1923 – Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw

Broad as Nature

2010-01-30T22:12:00.004-06:00

Welcome to The Road to Baker Street, an online diary of my research for Idle Muse Theatre Company’s upcoming production of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure, adapted by Steven Dietz (based on the original 1899 play by William Gillette and Arthur Conan Doyle). Sherlock is scheduled to open in August of 2010, but evoking the Victorian world Holmes and company will inhabit on the stage is actually a journey that begins months before the first rehearsal or the play is even cast. Over the coming months, I will endeavor to share some the of experiences and insights we discover along the way.

"Steel True, Blade Straight"