Nathan Joe - Journal Entry #1
Journaling
I’m meant to be writing these journal entries every fortnight. Journal keeping of any kind has always been something I’ve aspired to, but often failed or struggled with. In practice, I find it too pressure-inducing. Who is this journal for? Is it intended to be read? What am I trying to prove? It feels strange to simply write without anyone in mind - like making theatre for an empty house.
When revisiting a play you wrote at age 21, particularly one dealing with the issues of race and sexuality, I find myself asking questions about myself I haven’t had to ask in a long time. I find myself drifting into strange speculations about how I thought my life would turn out.
That’s why we love stories, right? To understand things through a proxy. Characters let us experience things through them, without having to go through the journey ourselves, step by painful step. I don’t need to fall in love with a stranger in Vienna over the course of a fateful day and then have to say goodbye to them because Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have done it for me [1].
All That Hudson Allows
And then there’s Rock Hudson. 1950s Hollywood moviestar Rock Hudson. Infamously closeted Rock Hudson. Rock Hudson who shocked the world when he died of AIDS. Rock Hudson who has recently returned to the public consciousness all thanks to Ryan Murphy’s Netflix drama Hollywood. In it, Murphy gives Hudson the Hollywood ending he never had, ripping him out of the celluloid closet and celebrating his gayness. While it comes across as somewhat self-congratulating wish fulfilment, as a fan of Hudson I find it moving in some respects. Less for the quality of the writing, and more as concept.
Rock Hudson, whose real name was Roy Harold Scherer Jr had little choice in regards to the closet(s) he was forced into. Groomed to be a straight leading man by casting agent Henry Wilson, he was doomed.
My favourite Rock Hudson film is All that Heaven Allows. In it, a widowed woman falls in love with her hunky younger gardener (shades of Desperate Housewives?) despite the disapproval of her family and community. Hudson plays the gardener - ennobling the character with a charming, rustic dignity. He’s a man’s man. A man of nature. But also a man of deep and spiritual thought. A Thoreau-reading, sensitive man.
It’s a beautiful film - accompanied by swooning music and technicolour cinematography - and the reality of Hudon’s sexuality does nothing to break the illusion of the story. Though some critics argue that there is a level of irony in play - but that is surely a retrospective element brought only in knowing what we know now (a retcon).
Mark Rappaport’s film essay Rock Hudson’s Home Movies [2] is a seminal example of repurposing Hudson’s body of work to create a hall of mirrors made of allusions and creating subtext. A revisionist work of pop culture, part homage, part parody. But a prime example of how postmodernism can be a playful rather than academic exercise.
With all this in consideration, the weight of coming out seems less of a hot topic these days. It’s 2020 and it’s okay to be gay, so they say. Western coming out narratives seem old-fashioned and passé, even sentimental. But I think maybe we forget how hard it is. Or, for those in the club, how hard it was. And, yet, the shockwaves coming out can have on one’s life are deeply significant. Irreversible, I think, for better or worse. It is one of the great rites of passage for any openly queer person. I think about how, despite spending my adult life mostly out, treating being out like a given, that there are still some corners of my life that I’m not out. That - all in all - I’ve still spent more than half of my life in the closet. What does it mean to be in the closet until the day you die? How do you hold that? And is it even a big deal for some? I think if this were an essay rather than a journal entry (I don’t really understand what the difference is - except perhaps giving myself permission to write badly or without purpose, to be messy or inelegant) that it would be entitled: in defence of coming out narratives.
On Trolling
My dramaturge, Jane Yonge, loves to use the term ‘trolling’ in relation to theatre work. While it’s typically associated with the likes of internet pranksters or the alt-right, deeply negative associations, there’s something about its chaotic and subversive nature that feels appropriate when thinking about making live theatre. As if somehow asking a theatre-maker to think of themselves as an agent of disruption. As if reclaiming an often regressive tactic and turning it upside down. To constantly question everything and leave nothing sacred.
So… how can a play troll itself? What does that even mean? It’s this application of two ordinarily unrelated concepts that I find fascinating. Like a dancer trying to embody narrative in a single movement.
The function of a dramaturge in many ways - seems to me - to inspire new ways of thinking. Jane does this well. Her brain is curious and she isn’t afraid to digress. It’s a natural fit for my own sense of directionlessness, I suppose. But we somehow keep circling back to the same few central themes or topics inevitably. This fascination with trolling or what trolling looks like in theatrical form is a fascinating shared interest.
Two plays that channel a trolling dramaturgy are Slave Play and Straight White Men. Avoiding spoilers, I’m more interested in the ways these plays set up a conceit that invites suspicion. Both plays use simple, boldly provocative titles. Titles that explicitly refer to the central subject or subjects of the play. Both subjects with immediate associations, very politicised ones at that. To troll something is to prank something or, even, punk something. To upend expectations. But to upend expectations you have to set up expectations.
In Straight White Men, playwright Young Jean Lee trolls her own body of work by writing an ostensibly naturalistic drama of the most tired fashion. It’s complete lack of trolling sensibilities - despite a tame brechtian framing device - is what makes it somewhat subversive in relation to her previous work.
With A Slave Play, Jeremy O’Harris is immediately provocative. The title and setting, a slave plantation, is one big troll in and of itself. Not to mention how the play actually unfolds.
I suppose to troll an audience could be simply referred to as tricking them.
Some attempts at naming examples of theatrical trolling in New Zealand:
● The entirety of Silo’s Perplex.
● Or the panda pit in ATC’s A Doll’s House.
● The Jack Buchanan pizza delivery service in The Basement Tapes (AKL season).
● The opening of Madhan/Croft/Frankovich collaboration Medusa.
● Declan Greene spoiling the ending of Silo’s Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography.
● The girls tearing Foreskin’s Lament a new one in Eleanor Bishop and Julia Croft’s BOYS.
There is good trolling and there is bad trolling. I’m sure there’s a Susan Sontag style essay waiting to be written on the subject.
Whether it feels like a twisting of the knife or a tickle, trolling is a welcome trick - as long as it doesn't involve the audience feeling short changed. A commitment to the gambit is key.
[1] Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) has become the pop culture/artistic benchmark I compare all my relationships to more than anything else. I find myself returning to it - comparing myself to the age of the characters - finding the gaps in our experiences as well as the parallels. At age 28, I have now surpassed the age of the characters in Before Sunrise, and I am getting closer and closer to their lives in Before Sunset. Like Matthew Mconaughay on High School Girls in Dazed and Confused: “I get older, they stay the same age.” But the same three ages. Growing older off screen, and returning in 9 year intervals.
[2] You can watch it here on Vimeo. It’s a fascinating experiment in bastardisation, editing footage and reworking its context to shift new readings of not only the films but a man’s entire life. Not a stodgy piece of academia but an exercise in high kitsch/camp and revisionist history.