plum six
chicago, illinois, re: horror, hearts, mismatch
Okay, to be clear, here’s what I remember: it was a party in high school. It was the birthday of somebody I didn’t really know. I don’t think I brought a gift with me, which felt bad. Jeepers Creepers 21 was put on the TV. This was the beginning of the trouble.
I could recognize, even in high-art-starved-teenagehood, that this movie was trash — it shouldn’t be able to work its filmic magic on me. And, what’s more! The setting was wrong. An offwhite midwestern paint job provides a merciful verfremdungseffekt, isn’t the right context to feel, like, actually scared.
But reader, I’m a wimp. Jeepers Creepers 2 got me.
It’s not like this movie changed my life. But it was a very real thing on my mind for months and months, and to be honest, I’ve never told anyone this before.
What did this do in the real world? Well, mostly it means: my little heart would flutter while I ran down to the basement to get, I don’t know, a DVD of Adam Sandler or something. Skittish around dark rooms. Some mild rumination about batcreatures while lying awake in bed. A suspicion towards heavily reverbed jazz standards. All there in my head like earwax. I was afraid of scary movies then, like I’m scared of scary movies now. This makes me a bad choice for being in charge of a haunted house.
And yet.
It’s often useful to consider what things do in the real world. For instance, we are in the closing weekend of House of the Exquisite Corpse. It is a piece of theater and also a haunted house kind of. In the real world, there is now, right this very moment in the Steppenwolf’s garage space: a bunch of fabric hanging from the ceiling, six temporary walls screwed into the floor, three giant paper-mache heads, two puppet babies getting blood transfusions, one giant crochet artery system, and all the tickets are sold out(!!) And, what’s more, yours truly is credited as the “Co-Director.”
Here’s the pitch: six teams of artists. Each team gets commissioned to make a short horror puppet show, to be performed to an audience behind a wall, looking in through cracks in said wall. Once the theatrical action concludes, the audience gets up and moves on to the next wall with holes in it to see another show, and then the next, and then the next, etc, etc, etc.
It’s a peep show! It’s a puppet show! It’s an Exquisite Corpse, sort of, in that the artists don’t coordinate per se, but there is a little line that takes you between pieces. The line spanning the fold this year is “BLOOD.”
That’s what we did, us co-directors, we went to the artists and said “BLOOD”2 and they went “sure,” and now we’ve got a spooky puppet show about blood.
All of my gigs are funny gigs, but this one has a particularly interesting flavor — it’s a high-profile position within the production (“director?!”3) and still, it’s not a show that feels very aesthetically “me.” Narrative puppet works that have stories and well-crafted objects and stuff, that’s not exactly my wheelhouse (although I have been proximate to things like this for a while now). And then there is the Jeepers Creepers 2 problem, where I avoid scary like the plague.
This is a curious artistic conundrum. The position doesn’t line up precisely with my aesthetic POV. What does one do?!
My approach to directing such a production was more or less what I do at the School of the Art Institute — largely stay the hell out of the way. Artists know what they are doing,4 they just need the time and space to do it. I think that’s true from the moment somebody claims the title of “artist,” regardless of experience, age, whatever.
I’m not saying that there aren’t genuine things to learn from others — there are, of course: techniques, histories, stylistic devices, all manner of Very Important Human Things. And still, it is my fervent belief that the only way to get better at making art is to make art. And, by its nature, “being told what to do by a director” isn’t making art. It’s following instructions. Sorry to Robert Wilson.5
Other news concerns a microcassette recorder that has been in my possession for at least a year and a half now. My mother gave it to me forever ago and said it was broken, but the tape inside has a recording of your fetal heartbeat, and could you digitize it for me?
I thought this would be easier. After a bunch of emails to various libraries and one deeply underwhelming quote from “Chicago’s premium photo & video transfer service,” I eventually gave up my search for a free option and instead simply acquiesced to eBay. $30 and suddenly, just like that, I have more electronic junk, but I also have a digitization of my fetal heartbeat!
An enticing idea, right? Some sound of you before you ever took a breath? Let’s listen.
Is that me? It’s funny to hear because it seems SO far away from me — buried more than 33 years ago in an obsolete medium and kissed with its requisite hiss. Is my heartbeat even “my” sound? I hardly have anything to do with it! Or is it the only sound that is ever truly mine?!
This has got me thinking about the other rhyme between my mother and me. Like my heartbeat was the same as my mother’s, so too the hormones that she takes daily (“menopausal HRT”) and I take daily (“gender affirming HRT,” although officially coded as “endocrine disorder”) are the same. “I live in my mother again, which is creepy,” is a line from my favorite poem. And then there is this:
“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”
It’s a nice pair of lines, appropriately pithy and awestruck and scared of the BUH-BUH you’ve been coasting on your entire life. I’m not sure where I first encountered this text, but it has stuck with me in a Jeepers Creepers way. TBH, listening back to my fetal heartbeat on Halloween, these sentences do what I want art to do — a sense of being seen, some catharsis, some recognition of myself in another.
The snag is the credit. This quote is misattributed everywhere on the internet to Edgar Allan Poe. Confusingly, the real source is a 53-second-long track from the artist named Poe.
But then you listen and hear it’s missing that last word. Here’s the real thing:
Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart
Of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants
The way it stops...
Somewhere along the internet memetic digestive track, these few lines added a bit of hope to them. “Starts” is way way way more uplifting than “…”. But, listen to your own heartbeat and try to find the mystery6 in it. It’s in the stopping.
Once at Christmas, my aunt started crying because of the image of a cardinal on a Starbucks gift card. Through her tears, she said it reminded her of her mom, recently passed, and that the cardinal was a way of the dead visiting the living.
Visitation through a Starbucks gift card! Ugh! The worst way to tell yourself you must change your life! But we are small, hungry, hopeless creatures. We find meaning in anything that offers it to us.
My aunt’s aesthetics aren’t mine. They are pretty irredeemable, honestly. Taxidermied ticky tacky Targét. But also, more and more, aesthetics feel like they are fleeting and contextual. Aesthetics are systems of relationships! Change one part of the system and everything changes. Just imagine! A Starbucks gift card doing more emotional work than all of the paintings in the Art Institute! An eye stretching a little too far!7
Back in the real world at the Steppenwolf we are celebrating a wonderful run8 of a very complicated show, and I’m wandering the halls like a lost dog.9 What does a director do once the show is up? Generally, they stay the hell out of the way.
And then the magic of strike. ALL of it will go away on Monday, like it was never ever there. Which is honestly the thing that feels like “me” in this show. The way it stops.
much love,
c
Roger Ebert, on Jeepers Creepers 2: “a first-class creature, a fourth-rate story, and dialogue possibly created by feeding the screenplay into a pasta maker.”
Well, there were a few stipulations for the purposes of liability. “No gore” is what we said, thinking that it was a useful way to encourage our artists to think outside of the blood packet. And then later, upon realizing the fainting risk, we scrambled and added “no needles.” But other than those admittedly flimsy guardrails, the world was their red goopy oyster.
I’ve had the job of “theater director” a handful of times now, and I like the job a lot, although I do feel confused about its continuity as a concept. It’s just so different depending on the room. Two summers ago, I spent a few weeks in Brooklyn working on The Precipice with my friend Karl, and honestly the gig was mostly blocking.
Compare to House of the Exquisite Corpse, which was more or less a bunch of planning emails and a few studio visits. I don’t think one of these approaches is better than the other, but it does speak to the way each show dictates its own methodology.
I suspect that not seeing myself in HofEC is a sign of having done a decent job. May we all haunt our work like that.
Oh man that’s a bold claim! Do I really think that? I mean…yes? I think I think that!
For something more puppety, here, let mystery = horror.
See also:
We got features from American Theatre and the Trib AND a shout-out from WBEZ. That last one will let me die happy.
It’s WILD to walk around the theater when House of the Exquisite Corpse is running. The show’s sound operates through headphones at each peephole, meaning that when the performances are happening, it’s almost dead silent in the room. There are occasional grunts from the puppeteers and a teeny tiny spooky drone from the overhead speakers. The audience is in hyper-focused-voyeurism mode, so you can walk around in the dark behind them like a ghost. No one sees you and no one notices and it’s the most extraordinary feeling in the world.