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Victory Gardens Theater is having its new plays festival Ignition this weekend. Today I attended two readings, missing Friday evening’s opening with #Newslaves by Keelay Gipson. I would have liked to stay for a third (this evening’s The Tasters by Meghan Brown), but two plays consecutive is about my limit.

This morning’s performance of They Could Give No Name by Exal Iraheta was topical and well-acted. As with Inching Towards Yeolha by Sam-Shik Pai, it contained a supernatural element which held the story together. Plays about immigration—in this case deaths at the southern border—seem hackneyed by now; but with the United States government having established detention camps (mirroring some of the worst of colonialism’s endemic disease-and-abuse-ridden concentration camps) and a mass shooting this morning at an El Paso Walmart with the white gunman apparently denouncing Hispanic “invaders” of formerly Mexican territory, the subject and its themes could not be more pressing. (The play failed to address either reasons for migration or the terrorist response by white males who claim to feel threatened by it.)

Reckoning: Furies from a New Queer Nation by Geraldine Inoa, although seeming to be in a less-finished state than the previous play, was nevertheless more powerful. The two main protagonists were an interracial (black/white) homosexual couple, and the trials (and ultimate dissolution) of their relationship due to structural racism and unexamined privilege on the part of the white partner the central storyline. Some of the acting was phenomenal, and one would hope to see the play mounted with nearly the exact cast. With two strong, sympathetic leads, deficiencies in the script fell by the wayside. The first half felt well-wrought and just about perfect; the second half fell into disorder almost immediately, consisting largely of harangues against the audience either direct or indirect. The feeling was of getting lectured—lectures that no doubt need to be heard—in lieu of tight drama; however the strong connecting thread of the main relationship held the disparate themes loosely together.

Inevitably I questioned my own activities in theater. With impending climate catastrophe, if topical themes be addressed, I want them to include today’s existential peril. My playwriting career effectively ended with the last presidential election and what it portended. If given the chance, I doubt that I could adequately manage the themes of this younger generation of playwrights. I doubt the value of drama—writing plays or playgoing. Even posting here, one is torn between the striving for normalcy despite crisis conditions (oftentimes a laudable endeavor) and a single-focused devotion to the politics of climate destruction.

Here at Rescripted is a new, and nice, review of Strange Heart Beating which I saw on the 28th July. I was noting it, not aiming for a review. If I were capable of such, I would want my review to be like Elon Sloan’s. It conveys precisely what I felt about the show but was unable to express.

Too bad that the show is getting such a review days after it has already closed; still, I suppose, a review is useful so as to “register” in the public eye, something extraordinary that has happened. “Extraordinary” here in the sense that it is not usual; heaping effusive and unmodulated praise is not the point.

Last night we saw the last night of a good production, Strange Heart Beating at Cloudgate Theatre. This tiny company is new to me—unrelated to Chicago’s well-known Anish Kapoor sculpture that goes by the name “The Bean” but was christened “Cloud Gate” though that may have been an inspiration, and also (presumably) unrelated to Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan which comes to Chicago from time to time.

The play was mounted in Jackalope’s space on Thorndale (near the el) which Jackalope Theatre itself never seems to use, preferring the Broadway Armory a stone’s throw away from that. The space is matchbox size; yet the set filled it well, was perfectly designed to the play, and allowed for an imaginative versatility that was unexpected.

Kristin Idaszak’s play was not flawless—certain plot points passed credibility, yet those transgressions were excused by the medium itself—but held its own as far as showcasing a moral and thematic integrity ripe for our times (the Anthropocene). Upon reflection plot elements did not hold together, but they carried the story forward in the moment and sustained the theme’s high seriousness.

In a sense the script was the weakest link of the performance—that is to say, it lacked the polish of all the other facets of a good production on display (tempered, mind you, with the understanding that this was theater-by-shoestring, making up for a frugal budget with fully-engaged imaginative effects). But more broadly, the play was “the thing” as Shakespeare would have it, and all the polished technique could only have existed to serve such a play.

I haven’t taken an inventory of who we have writing for theater in Chicago today, but at this moment I would have to put Idaszak’s name to the fore of rising talent to watch. My intent is not that of reviewer, so delving into the script as such doesn’t suit my purpose—I, long past any direct involvement in the Chicago theater scene except that of playgoer—but it seemed important enough to take note of.

Yesterday a Facebook post reminded me of something I had posted here—in this “News” section that effectively became a blog—and I sought to find it. The page or pages were no longer registered with Google, though they used to be (for I have searched and found before).

Recently there have been frantic messages from Google about re-certifying my site (or something). I tried to do what I could. But I am not especially web-literate, barely savvy, and I question how much time I want to devote to this.

So, in the process of searching for that page (which pertained to James J.Y. Liu on Chinese poetry), I noticed that next month will be the five-year anniversary of establishing this website. The exact day escapes me, but the blog feature started on the 31st. I was fishing around for content, most of it incidental.
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Do I want to still bother with it? The url is not due to expire immediately; but my need to “put myself out there” is not what it was to begin with. Gradually the impetus toward self-promotion has died with me; the need for feedback from the world “That never wrote to me”.

This is the Anthropocene.

Poetry notoriously does not change everything. That is not why we speak. (Exceptionally, it can provide a rallying cry, but that is not expected here.)

These times are nothing but a continuation of previous ones, most markedly in my time the invasion and destruction of Iraq. But before that even.

Then I wrote—no small portion of my writing at my peak was directly responding to global events (“my wars/ Were global from the start”)—in order to stake out a claim to uncorrupt territory (if only in the mind) against the onslaught of perceived injustice. We write, not for posterity, but for ourselves in the moment; however, if we are lucky, we created a personal monument or reference point to refer back to. In this environs of centrifugal chaos, I have a map to previously covered ground. (At my site you can read the essay about my efforts against said military, criminal, and tactically obnoxious action, "Introduction to War for Peace”.)

It is not well to live one's life with regrets of “If only I had said…” or “If only I had done…".

I compose (and compile) a lot of bad poetry, in times like these. Not because I can alter the course of events; but so that I might stand apart without getting sucked into the vortex. Ultimately, the body may (and perchance will) succumb to the thresher; one labors in order that the spirit survive, though it too may break.

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I felt a twinge of joy and glee
    On hearing that you died,
Such execrations hurled at me
    From your lips must subside.

How so much bile, invective, hate
    In one man’s heart took anchor
I could not guess, nor obviate,
    How much uncouth, vile rancor.

The paths behind us we have trod
    Get covered by new grasses,
And you—farewell to meet your God— 
    Commit no more trespasses.

I mourn as much as man may do
    Newly escaping malice:
Surely there was a charm to you
    Beneath the crude and callous.

Rudeness beseemed to you a strength,
    Superb self-estimation
As drove your thoughts in breadth and length,
    Life one long execration.

Had you but learned to breath a while,
    To lessen the invective— 
To randomly let loose a smile
    Nor seldom nor selective— 

The news which came to me a shock
    Might have produced more grieving,
But I must mourn while taking stock:
    Some pain with you is leaving.