Last month, I worked with Gunfighter Nation on LA History Project: Pio Pico, Sam Yorty, and the Secret Procession of Los Angeles, a collectively written evening of theatre. Some of my writing ended up in the evening, and I did a bit of acting as well. Today, I want to talk about the writing, and tomorrow, I will talk about the acting. 

Gunfighter Nation is a new Los Angeles theatre company of actors and writers who want to take theatrical possibility to the edge and beyond. It is a multigenerational company with members ranging in age from twenties to seventies. Playwright John Steppling is the artistic director. 

When I arrived on the scene in July, half of the writers in the company had already written pieces for the evening, and I felt myself playing a bit of research catch-up. The task was to write about Pio Pico, Sam Yorty, and the history of Los Angeles as a dark mass (which appealed to my Catholic upbringing).

For me, the hardest part of the whole process was the beginning. I was working with a company I didn’t know and an artistic director whose work I knew but I didn’t know his process. Because only half of the pieces had been written, I didn’t know exactly what the aesthetic was and felt a little lost in the dark.

However, lost in the dark is not a bad place to start writing.

I looked at my empty yellow pad, and my first thought was Pico and Yorty in a bar in hell. The bar is my fall back location. If I’m stuck, I go to the bar in my head. I can move through it with ease. By the way, I no longer go to an actual bar if I’m stuck while writing.

I also started to think about what Los Angeles meant to me. What is the Los Angeles I see? Then, I stumbled into something I had been thinking about for awhile. In Los Angeles, we are a city of millions, yet we hate crowds. We drive around in cars that separate us from each other. We collectively fear contact with strangers.

One could take this fear of crowd contact into a bigger American context and into an American obesity—we need lots of fat around ourselves in order to protect ourselves from cruel human dangers.

I started writing a monologue for a heavy woman. Like many in Los Angeles urbanites, she hates crowds and doesn’t want people around her. She also can’t breathe because the air in Los Angeles is bad. She just kept talking and talking. Her talk became a song of fear and non-contact. Stay Back! Stay Back! she shouts at the audience and the world.

I am not a monologue writer, but this woman was singing out. What can I do? I’m just the writer.

I brought the pieces into our next meeting. The Pico and Yorty piece didn’t feel right to me. It was sketchy, and there was no idea to it except putting Pico and Yorty together onstage in a bar.

Then, I passed the monologue to Tina Preston, an actress in the group, and told her that she was afraid and couldn’t breathe. Tina read the monologue cold out-loud. She got into a rhythm with it. She read and read, and when she was finished, I yelped. Yes, I actually yelped.

As a writer, I sometimes have moments which confirm to me why I do what I do and remind me that I’ve still got some juice in my brain. Such moments are rare and gold. This was such a moment.

As the whole evening started to form, I thought it would be cool if the monologue was cut up and served as a transition between longer pieces. The woman could run into characters entering for the next play. I also figured that if I kept the monologues short, I would leave the audience wanting more.

Working with Tina was a true writer/actor collaboration. Tina worked extremely hard to take my conceit and turn it into something human. In the course of our working, our character who was very vulnerable and afraid became powerful and present.

As we moved closer to opening, I realized that I wasn’t feeling the usual writer nerves because I didn’t have to carry all the ideas. The ideas belonged to all the writers. The pressure was off. What did I have lose? When you have nothing to lose, the work gets better.

As writers we are taught to write plays which are complete unto themselves. They can be short or long, but they must complete themselves. The idea must reach a conclusion.

 But

 When writing collectively, the goal is not to write to completion but to write to incompletion. It’s about the whole idea of the evening.   

 When we Americans hear words like collective or socialism, we get very scared. We don’t want to lose our American individualism. We want to be our lone ranger selves.

 But, in a collective where originality is prized, I found myself pushing the originality envelope because I was inspired by the writing around me. It’s like jazz. We were all playing a theme, but when we could break out and solo, ohhh we got hot.

 Because we writers had shared artistic ownership of the evening, I felt myself losing ego about the whole experience. It was going through me, but it wasn’t about me. It was about the group. And the result was work I am extremely proud of with a group of nonconformist artists who make sweet sweet jazz together.

 Gunfighter Nation has a collectively written Christmas Show in the works, and yes, I’m writing for that one too.

It’s summer movie time. Ahh summer. I remember hot and sticky summers in New York when I’d escape the heat by going to the movies. In the cool darkness, I could watch the pretty things on the screen float by like colorful snowflakes.

This summer, I have two movies to recommend highly. They’re chick flicks but not in the conventional sense, and I’ll try to give you my impressions of them unconventionally. 

One Sunday, I walked to a cheap movie theatre to catch Winter’s Bone directed by Debra Granik. Yes, I walk in LA. 

Ree, the 17 year old heroine of Winter’s Bone, walks a lot. Her quest to find her father before the family home is taken is not an adventure to distant lands filled with fantastical robots. She walks in a winter Missouri landscape to the houses of her distant cousins. Occasionally, she might get into a truck, but only occasionally. 

Not much is said in Winter’s Bone except the essentials, and Ree is smart enough to not talk too much. Even when she’s showing her younger siblings how to fire a gun, she says only what she needs to. 

The universe of Winter’s Bone is divided by gender. There is a definite man’s world and a definite woman’s world. The men won’t talk to Ree, but the women do. However, the women aren’t the archetypical nurturing home bodies. They are not earth mothers. They have their own problems and issues. 

They can help Ree, but they can also hurt Ree. When Ree goes where she shouldn’t, it is the women who beat her down—not the men. When Uncle Teardrop shows up to rescue her, he faces the men—not the women. 

However, it is the same women who also bring resolution to Ree’s quest and make her take part in a ritual both gruesome and necessary. Through this act, Ree moves from girl to woman in the tribe. Even though Ree and the women will never be on the same side, there is a respect for Ree as a woman and not a girl. 

I like that the film shows us powerful women without getting all you-go-girl Oprah about it. Among the women there is a tribal hierarchy where loyalty is prized along with an ability of knowing when to talk and when not to. The brutality of hierarchies among women is rarely shown. 

The men can have their meth labs and their guns and axes, but the women are the ones who keep the world going and always, eventually, get their way.

 As I walked home from the cheap movie theatre, I wondered if I would see another movie this summer as good as Winter Bone. 

Then Tilda Swinton showed up in Luca Guadagnino’s Lo Sono L’amore (I am Love). Julia Roberts might want to learn Italian, but Tilda Swinton owns Italian. 

Language is important in I am Love. What are the words we use and how do they conflict with the appropriate words to use? How is changing places and languages like putting on a different set of clothes? 

Tilda Swinton’s Emma is a master transformer. She doesn’t just act a part. She becomes what she needs to be. Her first transformation happens before the film begins. She is Russian born, but she becomes Italian when she marries her husband. Her second transformation is complete at the end of the film in a moment that reminds us that great actors and directors can move beyond words. 

Why does one transform? Why does one change? Necessity? Love? How does one escape the beautiful prisons one builds around one’s self? How does one not just love but become love?