“We rarely allow ourselves the psychic detachment from habit that would allow us to perceive the impulse as it rises inside us, unconnected to the objects we desire. But it’s impulse that’s primary, not the object we’ve been trained to fix it upon. It is the impulse that is your deep truth, not the object that seems to call it forth. The impulse is the vibrating, lively thing that you really are. And that is what I want to return to: the very thing you really are.”
“It can take twenty years to create an overnight success but what you don’t hear is that that is the exact same amount of time it takes to create a bitter failure.”
Marc Maron, Attempting Normal
I made these posters for The Catastrophic Theatre‘s production of Richard Foreman‘s Eddie Goes to Poetry City , which I directed and designed in 2023. They were small details adding to the visual overload of the set, but I’m fond of them, and wanted them to have a life outside the fading memory of as theater audience.
During the half-assed lockdown in the early days of COVID-19, when the theaters were shut down, and live performances were cancelled, I had the good fortune to be asked to make a short film for The Catastrophic Theatre.
I submitted a short screenplay I had written some ten years earlier, and further proposed that I’d direct, design, and star in it, like some low-rent, Gulf Coast Orson Welles.
Inspired by both black and white film comedies of the 1930s and a 14-line dramatic fragment by the late East German playwright Heiner Müller’s, HERZSTÜCK is what might be pulled from the wreckage were Müller to fatally collide with the Three Stooges.
The film follows a pair of doltish musicians as they attempt to perform a duet for violin and piano. A series of accidents, distractions and interruptions leads to slaps, pratfalls, eye-pokes, and gruesome do-it-yourself amateur surgery. A bleak, slapstick meditation on the futility of love and, indeed, all human endeavor, HERZSTÜCK suggests a Laurel and Hardy short written and directed by Lars von Trier.
Anyway, the full movie is available to watch for free on YouTube.
Christmas is around the corner, and everyone’s favorite singing mechanical fish is back, and he’s performing the beloved William Basinski hit, The Disintegration Loops.
“. . . my experience has been, continually, an outsider experience. A fortunate outsider, never really bereft of resources and comfort, but nevertheless an outsider. A man of few friends, who does not find it easy to associate with other people. Such a man chose the theater, years ago . . . because it was a pretend life.”
Richard Foreman, Love and Science
(Jeff Miller as Beethoven, and myself as Quasimodo in The Catastrophic Theatre’s 2015 production of Mickle Maher’s The Hunchback Variations. All photos by Anthony Rathbun)
I wore multiple hats on this one (director, scene designer, props guy, and performer) and it was some incredible fun. We received some good reviews, and I was named Best Actor at the Houston Press Theater Awards. A film of the full production can be seen here.
“Oh, I know I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store. That makes me happy, often now my murmur falters and dies and I weep for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine.”
Samuel Beckett
wolveroon 