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Getting to Know Mee
"I never think of writing as something that I put down on paper," says Charles Mee, Signature's 2007-2008 Playwright-in-Residence. "Before I start to write something I first have to see it completely in three dimensions. Once I see it on stage moving it begins to speak to me and I write it down. It's like daydreaming. And a lot of those daydreams are stuff that happens to you in the world. You begin by something you saw on television, that you read in a book, or that your neighbor just said to you."
In Charles Mee's dream-like world characters work themselves from philosophical musing into emotional frenzies that culminate in the crooning of a torch song, the smashing of plates, or angry stripteases. His plays are collage-like blends of theatrical styles and genres encompassing tragedy, romance, and farce, and incorporating music, dance, and video. Mee often assembles his dialogue from existing texts - the lost plays of Sophocles, transcripts from the Menendez brothers' trial, or tips from fashion magazines. His plays are inspired by Greek tragedies, Shakespearean comedies, Eastern folk tales, contemporary film, and the visual arts. Mee compares his plays' constructions to the collages of surrealist painter Max Ernst and contemporary artist Robert Rauschenberg, who created their work from found objects and mixed media - in the case of Rauschenberg what others might even consider junk. This unlimited scope of material and influences lends an "anything goes" style to Mee's work, resulting in a world in which anything can, and often will, happen.
Signature Founding Artistic Director James Houghton is ready for the challenges and rewards inherent in a season of Charles Mee. "When Chuck sets a goal for himself and discovers a particular theme in his work he is relentless in his pursuit of it and is willing to explore any means to get there," he says. "Various elements can be contradictory to each other, but they can still exist in the piece. I think it will require quite a bit of discipline in an audience to walk into the theatre and put expectations to the side as to what theatre is. It's not traditional, and we find that exciting."
Charles Mee was born in 1938 in Evanston, Illinois. After graduating from Harvard University in 1960, Mee moved to New York City, intent on writing for the theatre. He secured a place in the burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement and his plays appeared at iconic pioneer theatre companies Caffé Cino and La Mama Ensemble Theatre Company. Soon he found his attention diverted from theatre by the anti-Vietnam War movement, which led him to activism, journalism, and finally, writing books about American foreign policy. "I stumbled into it by writing things like op-ed pieces and polemics," Mee said in an interview with Signature Edition. "And then it seemed to me that writing books got those arguments out across the whole country to Middle America, where I came from, in a way that theatre might not have as readily or as quickly. I guess I was obsessed with writing about the facts of these matters rather than my response to them as a maker of imaginary worlds."
Mee became an editor for the arts magazine Horizon and authored over a dozen books on American history and international relations, many of which went on to become national best sellers. Despite this success, Mee began to find the work restrictive. "The assumption of history as a discipline (which I think is a great discipline), is that it's possible to frame dispassionate, rational remarks that are an accurate reflection of the world you live in," he explained. "And the world I lived in made me want to scream and cry out and not frame rational, dispassionate remarks. One of the reasons I went back to the theatre was that theatre wants you to use your heart as well as your head when you talk about life. I thought I was writing history to be real and not imaginary. Bizarrely enough, I came to feel that the dispassionate pose of history was imaginary and the theatre was more real."
Although he ultimately did not settle in history, the tools and wealth of knowledge Mee accumulated as a historian had an immeasurable impact on his theatre work. He approaches playwriting from the perspective of a historian, one who believes that human beings are not shaped by psychology alone, but also by their history, culture, and circumstances. "The tradition of theatre in the West since Ibsen, certainly since Freud, has been one that assumes that if you want to know human beings and who they are, you refer to the psychodynamics of early childhood," he says. "But the Greeks always thought that if you want to know what it was to be a human being you had to refer to the gods, fortune, destiny, history, and culture. We don't come into the world fully formed the way we are, we're made that way by the world we live in. And that's a bigger, more complicated story than the story of human psychology alone."
According to Mee, people "speak through the culture"; therefore his characters express themselves with the words of a variety of voices - from literary critics Elaine Scarry and Roland Barthes to The National Enquirer and the guests on "The Jerry Springer Show." "I'm just completely promiscuous in the places I go to find these voices," says Mee of his eclectic source material. "I go on the internet and rip off blogs and chat groups. I'm an insane, avid, magazine reader, I rip stuff out of Vogue, Soap Opera Digest, Field and Stream, The Economist. I wander around a lot; I'm likely to find images in museums and galleries. I'm almost always on the lookout for things I can steal. I remember years ago I went to the theatre with [director and choreographer] Martha Clarke. We got to the end of act one and Martha turned to me and said, 'Well nothing to steal here, shall we leave?' That's the kind of the person I've become."
Mee returned to the stage in 1986 when he wrote the libretto for Clarke's dance-theatre piece, Vienna: Lusthaus, a meditation on turn-of-the-century Vienna which incorporated text from the case studies of Freud, the letters of the Austro-Hungarian imperial family, the diaries of Arthur Schnitzler, an undertaker's manual, and Mee's own dreams. The play was performed at The New York Shakespeare Festival and went on to win an OBIE for Best Play in 1986.
Mee's next play, The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador, surreally skewered American foreign policy in Central America. The play opened at New York Theatre Workshop in 1989. He followed it with a trilogy he called The American Century Plays: The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem, The War to End War, and The Constitutional Convention: A Sequel, which were produced at The Public Theater, the Home for Contemporary Theater and Art, and the Sledgehammer Theatre in San Diego. Inspired by history, politics, and popular culture, these plays were wildly vaudevillean and anarchic funhouses that parodied hip performance art and the intellectual elite. Mee found a theatrical home with site-specific theatre company En Garde Arts who produced Another Person is a Foreign Country in 1991 and his first Greek adaptations, Orestes in 1993 and Trojan Women a Love Story in 1996. Time to Burn, inspired by Maxim Gorky's Lower Depths, premiered at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1997, followed by 1998's Berlin Circle, an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. The play was re-named Full Circle and opened in 2000 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Despite the growing attention toward his playwriting, Mee still found himself writing and editing history to support himself and his family. In 1998 he became a full-time playwright resulting from the patronage of his friend, former Morgan Stanley Chairman and philanthropist Richard B. Fisher and his wife, Jeanne Donovan Fisher. Although Richard B. Fisher passed away in 2004, Jeanne Donovan Fisher continues to support Mee, who has remained unabashedly prolific and adventurous, writing and seeing several plays produced a year. They are available on his website, The Remaking Project, at www.charlesmee.org, where one can download over thirty of his plays free of charge. Mee decided to make his work public after he wrote Orestes, which incorporated military and C.I.A. files, texts from NBC news, and Soap Opera Digest. "I thought: I can't take things from the public domain and turn around and copyright them under my name. I can't just steal public property and claim it as private property," he says.
But Mee went a step further by encouraging people to pillage and adapt his work as ruthlessly as he had others', a practice to whom he credits the ancient Greeks and William Shakespeare. "None of them ever wrote an original play: they all took stories and other material around them and made their plays out of those things," he explains. "So I should do the same - and then deal with the texts as they did, as things that couldn't then be treated as their exclusive property." Each year over one hundred thousand copies of his plays are downloaded from Mee's website and produced all over the world. "What started out to be an unselfish enterprise has turned out to be selfishly rewarding for me: it gets the plays out into the world. And that feels good to me."
As the millennium approached, Mee began to depart from his political and historically-themed re-tellings and venture into new, though no less complex, territory: love. His 2000 play Big Love, was a romantic comedy based on one of the oldest extant plays in history, Aeschylus's The Suppliant Women, in which fifty brides flee the fifty bridegrooms they have been forced to marry. Big Love swept the country with productions at several renowned regional theatres before landing in New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, earning Mee his second OBIE Award.
Mee's other "comedies and romances," which include Summertime, First Love, True Love, Wintertime, Fetes de la Nuit, and A Perfect Wedding, take their inspirations from Greek tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare, Moliere, Anton Chekhov, René Magritte paintings, and Bollywood musicals. Mee deconstructs love with the same passion and rigor that he applies to war and politics, questioning ideas and perceptions of fidelity, age, gender roles, sexual identity, and what it means to love and be loved in return. Mee is also the resident playwright of the ensemble theatre collective, SITI Company, with whom he is collaborating on the American Museum Cycle, a series of plays that explore twentieth-century American history and culture through the points-of-view of contemporary visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, James Castle, Jason Rhoades, and Norman Rockwell. The first of the cycle, bobrauschenbergamerica, opened at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2001 and has since toured the United States and abroad. Hotel Cassiopeia, inspired by the life and work of assemblage sculptor Joseph Cornell, premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2006 and will open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the fall of 2007.
Signature Theatre Company is excited to embark on a new season with Charles Mee, a vibrant and extraordinary writer. Please join us on what will surely be a surprising and unforgettable journey.
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