Falling and Loving

Original text by Charles Mee 

Adapted by Laura Standley

The play is performed in two acts, with a 15-minute intermission

Note from the Producers

Hello, and welcome back to Venable Theatre.  When last we were able to meet here for live performance, it was early March, 2020, and we were presenting Topdog/Underdog.  As the play headed into opening weekend, we began to hear rumbles that the pandemic that had seemed so far away was getting worse and getting closer.  By the last performance, the plan was to take an extra spring break week to “get through it,” then get back to normal life.  Of course that’s not what happened.  Life did not, still has not, returned to “normal.” We’ve also faced profound questions about how deeply unjust “normal” is for so many people.  And, of course, all too many people didn’t get through it at all. We would be callous for failing to note that in even getting to tonight, we have survived what many millions of people did not.  In presenting this play, we must acknowledge our privilege in being able to do so.

Of course we have not been idle during the pandemic.  Last year, during the year of “full Covid” as one of our students recently called it, we were still able to push on, to keep making plays.  Not in person, of course, which presented supreme challenges, difficulties that were logistical, technical, and philosophical.  We met the moment by embracing experimentation.  What is this Zoom, we asked, and how can we use it to be together in some meaningful way?  We are both tremendously proud of our students’ efforts during this year of great hardship, and grateful for the profound artistic lessons and deep human truths we learned from and alongside them.

Chief among what we learned last year, what we experienced last year, has to do with Love, with Togetherness.  And so, for our first show back in person, we have chosen a play that explores these themes, in ways that are mostly joyful, sometimes sad, and full of all the messiness and warts that come with choosing to be with other people.

Also, we would like to celebrate the renovation of the theatre itself.  The new seats you’re sitting in now, as well as the new lighting equipment over the stage, have been made possible by a generous gift from the Jane and Jack Fitzpatrick Trust.  It is because of their great generosity that we are able to welcome you back in such style. We extend our deep and abiding gratitude to the Fitzpatrick Trust.  We would also like to thank MCLA administration for their belief in our vision for the theatre and their work in making it a reality, and for their support in returning to live theatre this year.

Finally, we thank you, for choosing to return to the theatre.  Welcome back, and enjoy the show!

- Michaela Petrovich, Laura Standley, and Jeremy Winchester

About The Playwright

Charles Mee (or Chuck, as many of his friends call him) is a post-modern playwright whose background is in the American avant-garde, Off-Broadway dance theatre, and performance art movements of the 60s. He writes plays about the complex nature of human relationships and is fascinated with the American experience. His creative approach is more like a collagist than a playwright. Two of his big influences are the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Max Ernst who both practice a kind of creative sourcing from the historical record. He says, “there is no such thing as an original play,” and readily describes his work (which he named ‘the (re)making project’) as ’stealing.’ He views cultural expression as a kind of group salvage project where we all sort through historical artifacts to make something new. His plays are subversive and celebratory and incorporate a variety of styles and forms all juxtaposed against each other. He pulls structures, texts, conversations, speeches, and images from all kinds of sources - from the ancient Greeks to Brecht, to children’s books, to popular magazines like Soap Opera Digest, to famous news interviews, and random things from internet chat rooms. One of the special things about him is that he wants other artists to re-make his plays. He says, "I invite anyone who would like to, to take things from any of my plays, make their own piece, and then put their own name to what they’ve made.”

His work is also known for being incredibly physical. Having come down with Polio when he was fourteen, Mee still walks with a cane and a crutch. He was deeply affected by his recovery experience and writes plays where people onstage do things he could never imagine himself doing. He says that polio "broke down a lot of the distinctions” he made "between the real world and the dream world.”  When he moved to New York after undergraduate school he was introduced to Judson Dance Theatre and the work of Pina Bausch, which were big influences. His first play was a collaboration with the choreographer, Martha Clarke. He writes plays for everyone of every ability that challenge our traditional thinking of what theatre can be. He says he wants to make plays that “are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges” because that reminds him more of his own life. He rejects realism and linear plot structure and makes plays made up of music and movement as well as text that are beautiful and hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking - that remind you more of a contemporary dance concert than a play. And his plays are famous for their outrageous stage directions. Things like people randomly crossing the stage in chicken suits, or roller skates, or riding around in bathtubs, or golf carts.. people descending from the ceiling like astronauts or scaling the walls like rock climbers, or throwing themselves to the ground over and over… smashing things and breaking things, and lots of dancing.. dancing with people and piles of laundry or ashes or buckets of water, and sometimes breaking into song. They are about what it is to live life as a human... in all its sublime randomness and fragility. About his process, he says:

“I find, when I write, that I really don't want to write well-made sentences and paragraphs, narratives that flow, structures that have a sense of wholeness and balance, books that feel intact. Intact people should write intact books with sound narratives built of sound paragraphs that unfold with a sense of wholeness and balance, books that feel intact. That is not my experience of the world. I like a book that feels like a crystal goblet that has been thrown to the floor and shattered, so that its pieces, when they are picked up and arranged on a table, still describe a whole glass, but the glass itself lies in shards ... .If a writer's writings constitute a "body of work," then my body of work, to feel true to me, must feel fragmented. And then, too, if you find it hard to walk down the sidewalk, you like, in the freedom of your mind, to make a sentence that leaps and dances now and then before it comes to a sudden stop.” (Mee, Charles ‘A Nearly Normal Life’ 40-41)

You can read more about Charles Mee, his plays, and his (re)making philosophy here: https://www.charlesmee.org/about.shtml.

Note from the Director

The play you’re getting ready to see is not like any other. For months, we scoured plays that were flexible enough to manage a pivot online if we needed to because of the pandemic. At the same time, I was looking for something physical because lock-down and the shift to online learning had us all stuck in front of our computers for so long that I was SICK OF SITTING and wanted to GET UP AND DO SOMETHING!!! Something playful that offered the best of what live theatre can do. Something unlike TV or film - something special - that forced us to get up and move away from our desks and be with each other again. And I wanted to find something that provided us the kind of catharsis we needed after 18 months of national trauma. And that got me thinking about the plays of Charles Mee. I directed a piece of his some years back and was profoundly changed by it. If you know me, you know my work often begins from a place of movement, and much of that is because of the impact of Charles Mee.

I was attracted to Charles Mee’s play Falling and Loving for these reasons: first, it's a play about love (something I think we really need right now!). Second, it's different from the rest of his plays in one particular way: it doesn't have any stage directions, which is out of the ordinary for him. It’s just a collection of dialogue and monologues grouped according to the four seasons where nothing specific happens, which means the play is flexible. Also intriguingly, it includes a bunch of my favorite scenes and speeches from his other plays. Beautiful stuff. Mee wants people to adapt his plays. He makes them freely available on the internet and encourages people to “take things” from them. He also typically writes outrageous stage directions knowing they might be entirely impossible to achieve. He wants artists to reach out of their comfort zone. He said, "I write stage directions, and then everyone ignores them,” and I thought, what if we don’t ignore them? What if we follow Mee’s invitation to take things from his other plays and do that? What if we make our own play using the text of Falling and Loving as a starting point with stage directions sourced from all his other plays? We could literally make anything we wanted.

You couldn’t buy the play we’re doing today if you wanted to read it. You couldn’t borrow it from the library or even get it from one of the cast members because the play we’re doing is completely unique. A group of Theatre Program dramaturgy students worked with me all last spring to adapt the play. If we tried to adapt the play again next semester, it wouldn’t be the same either; we couldn’t recreate all that we’ve been through. We went through everything he wrote, catalogued all the things we liked, and made something new. We got to know Charles Mee’s creative process and his influences, especially Rauschenberg, Ernst, and Bausch and let that research lead us. We developed a structure based on everything we learned and hung things we liked on it. What emerged is our own personal reaction to this moment that we hope also honors Charles Mee’s body of work. This version of Falling and Loving is a personal exploration of the feeling of joy.. and the feeling of finding love and losing it and finding it again… while experiencing the passing of the seasons. It’s a love story with a spring-like awakening and the discovery of “delight long-term.”

As you sit down to watch our first live performance since the beginning of coronavirus lockdowns, you should know this process has been a labor of love. If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that gathering matters to humans. It is a privilege intrinsic to theatre making that I will never take for granted again. Our goal has been to relish each moment we were able to be together and to think of rehearsal as a chance to care. From the moment we crossed the threshold, we tried to care for each other, listen to each other, and be fully present to each other in the moment.

Taking cues from what I learned about Pina Bausch’s process with her company Tanztheater Wuppertal, I asked questions like:

What do you like about theatre?

What performance changed everything for you?

What’s the difference between dance and theatre?

What’s your experience with love?

Where does love sit in your body?

Do you welcome it or is it an uninvited guest?

What’s something special you can do that you’re proud of?

What can you tell me about being different?

What is realism and how do we do it or not do it?

What did a holiday dinner look like at your house?

What’s something you used to do as a child that you no longer do or maybe just can’t do anymore?

How do you feel about dresses?

How do you feel about suits and ties?

What do people do when they’re at war?

What’s the point of a line dance?

What do you do when you feel afraid?

How do you react to physical pain?

How do you protect yourself?

We took time to write and reflect on these things and share our stories. This allowed us to be deeply aware of each other’s and the playwright’s experience. Then we used this knowledge as a place to get up and move. We used techniques developed by modern dance choreographer, Mary Overly, to explore our body’s relationship to space and time. We created lines and circles and changes of direction. We dug things out of the closet and borrowed things from the neighbors and the gym and learned how to play with them. We researched our favorite dances and brought in ideas from classic Hollywood romantic movies, and Broadway musicals, and movies from the 70s, and famous Pina Bausch dances, and dances we felt connected us to the Berkshires (like traditional Shaker worship dances) and found things like processions and marches, looped and repeated movements, counterpoints and canons, grand gestures, sudden moves in unison, random solos, jokes and poems, fights and face-offs, falls and flops, back-bends, lifts, twirls and spins. And what we learned was then adapted, incorporated, and threaded throughout the piece.

What you see onstage is a reflection of all of us. You couldn’t buy a copy of this version of Charles Mee’s Falling and Loving because it’s a true collaboration. In some ways it’s more like a big city, or a pot-luck meal; no two are the same. In some ways, it’s like the promise of America that’s far more frequently alluded to these days than found, where diversity and all our differences meet, bound by a shared purpose, making us stronger and more creative. Some of us took sections of the play and shaped them. Others worked on gestures or moves or floor patterns or words. Some of us made clothes or helmets. Some of us hung lights or took notes or built round green platforms or glued pink plastic milkshakes. Each of us brought ideas, and stories, and music, and feelings that were woven throughout. It’s a good soup. It’s an auto-biography of all of us - the company, Charles Mee, his influences, everything. Coming together was no easy feat. Sometimes it felt like it might be impossible. But we made it. And I am so incredibly grateful.

— L.S.

Note from the Designers

For our return to live, physical production, we sought to emphasize theatricality itself. Thematically, this is a joyfully messy play, full of love and togetherness, and also its counterparts of heartbreak and loneliness.  Both sets of truths are in there, just as both are in life.  And yet because we, as people, keep choosing love despite its risks, as a design team we decided to lean in to love, to fun, to “aggressive joyfulness.”  Even now, especially now, we find meaning in whimsy, take comfort in goofy, revel in ridiculous. 

Charles Mee’s text is a pastiche built from his earlier works, and so we have followed suit in the design.  Deep cut and non sequitur references to his oeuvre abound in what you see with the staging and props, and what you hear in the sound.  With scenery, costumes and lighting, we sought to surround and ground it all in a circus-infused, Technicolor, bubble-wrap dream.  It is our great pleasure to let this dream off its leash here with you today.

- Jeremy Winchester, Michaela Petrovich, Anthony Simon, and Laura Standley

MCLA Theatre is a liberal arts theatre program.  Please visit mcla.edu/theatre for more information.