creativity

What I Liked about Ghostlighting & The Woman in Black

/ Steve Patterson / Leave a comment

When I sat down to write Ghostlighting (GL), I neither knew of the extraordinary success of The Woman in Black (TWIB) nor had I read or seen it. When I did find out about it, I avoided exposure to it so it wouldn’t influence me. Though I had no idea how difficult it would be, I wanted to grow an original flower in a well-ploughed field (and I still ended up echoing Henry James and Shirley Jackson).

On our recent trip to Ireland and the UK, we saw TWIB at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. It was brilliant and we had a wonderful time. Afterwards, for reasons that will become apparent, we celebrated in a bar around the corner from the theatre. Thank you, Hennessy.

Afterwards, I jotted down a few thoughts about the plays—specifically, where and why I liked one play over the other.

Note: There may be the slightest possibility that I could I could be a teeeentsy bit biased in my perceptions.

GHOSTLIGHTING

Though both plays use meta elements, GL revolves around a writer and a director, rather than around a writer and an actor, yet all the characters are integral to GL, as is the theatre itself.

Though it may have been the production or because I was distracted by analyzing things, the ending of TWIB seems slightly muddled and the theatrical framework only really serves the final line (though it does so extremely well).

GL screws more with the audiences’ minds, I think, making their environment part of the story and upping their anxiety. That is, GL is more immersive. (Still, at TWIB, they had to help an elderly woman outside at the interval because she fainted.)

Excepting for the opening and closing framework, TWIB is a period piece. GL has period elements, but is contemporary.

People leave TWIB laughing and chattering; people leave GL murmuring and looking over their shoulders.

GL doesn’t milk the audience by implying the endangerment of children or animals.

GL has a cast of four women and two men, though it’s built so productions can play with gender. TWIB primarily has a cast of two men. The only main female character in TWIB is vindictive and malevolent.

Both plays have their humor, but, to my ear, GL is funnier. In TWIB, some people laughed at the haunting moments (probably from releasing tension). This did not happen in GL. More often, they gasped.

GL draws upon a multitude of “true accounts” as I want those in the paranormal community to go, yeah, that feels right. I doubt that was a concern for the authors of TWIB.

Both plays are about haunted houses, but, in GL, “house” has multiple meanings.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

The fog effect is fantastic!

Requires less tech (though the sets are equally complex).

Uses fewer actors.

The play ran for 27 years on London’s West End, making it the second-longest running play in West End history.

Apparently, there’s an audience for ghost stories or something.

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned….

/ Steve Patterson / Leave a comment

That’s kind of what it feels like, cracking open the blog after a protracted absence. “And why is that, son?”

“Uh…I’ve been writing a play?”

Yeah, mostly. The thing’s called “An Actively Unoccupied House,” and it’s a two-act ghost story that I like a lot, and I hope is both funny and spooky. We shall see.

I would address politics, but the thought of it makes me want to slam my head in a dresser drawer. The bottom one. I can’t address the culture because I’ve been AWOL while writing a play. The thing I have been doing, besides scribbling, is taking pictures. Sometimes, I think I’m actually somewhat kinda sorta decent at it, or at least it’s pleasing me. It’s also been something to do while walking the dog (Dooley, our Shetland Sheepdog).

In fact, Deb and I will sometimes pick out part of the city, leash up the dog, and go on an “expedition,” checking out neighborhoods for pictures–in my case, mostly photographing old houses and buildings. (If you have any suggestions, let me know. The period that fascinates me runs from about 1850 to 1910 in Portland. I’ve been shooting a lot on the eastside, not as much in the west, excepting Downtown and Northwest Portland.) In a broad way, I am working on a series addressing Portland’s history, but it’s rather nebulous right now.

Anyway, here’s a picture taken on one of our expeditions. People seem to enjoy when I write about a photo and present it, so I’m going to go with that for awhile. You can see my portfolio, such as it is, a flickr (see the link below). Continue reading →

Put Down the Weston, and No One Gets Hurt

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SometimEmpty Buildinges, before a photo shoot, I’ll grab something like B&W Magazine and just look at the photographs: randomly turn the pages and let my gaze float. Away from the house, I might arrive a little early and look through photo.net on the phone. It’s kind of like a runner doing stretches or a musician playing scales. I sometimes think of it as “tuning up the eye.” I start seeing regular life as images. Maybe it lights up the brain’s photo neuron pathways.

For one thing, you start seeing the world in shapes—a triangle here, a rectangle there—and the relationships between them. The empty space becomes a shape of its own. Like Miles Davis, you start playing the space between the notes. And you start to see tones. You look at scenes to spot that 18% gray for the camera’s meter to latch onto—especially important if you’re using a spotmeter. (I find that my Canons read more like 12% gray.) A frame begins drawing itself around the everyday. Once you begin seeing that way, it’s sometimes hard to shake.

In almost any art, it’s vital to experience the work of others. If you write plays, read plays (or reread favorites). Play guitar? Listen, even if the guitarist works in a form that leaves you a bit cold. The country Telecaster picker can teach the Ibanez-wielding shredder a few things and vice versa. Take photographs? Look at pictures. Lots of pictures. All the time.

A point comes, however, to put down the book or magazine or close the website. Obviously, if everything you shoot comes out looking a bit too much like your favorites, it’s at least best to look at someone else’s work. Sometimes, though, it’s best not to look at anyone at all. The tank fills. In fact, particularly if you’re feeling stuck, it’s best not only to put away the big Weston collection but to stop looking at photographs altogether. Just for a stretch. Do something else. Anything else. Maybe not go to the movies (as they’re moving photographs), but go for a drive. Listen to music. Dig in the garden. Go for a walk and leave the camera home. Let the photo brain take a rest. The same goes for whatever art you’re engaged in.

A few art forms lead themselves to this. One of the things I like about writing for theatre is that it takes two forms. The first comes when you’re composing, whether that means conducting research or actually putting down words. The second comes when you have a production or reading, and you collaborate with a director and actors. You get the introvert and extrovert time. Even so, really making a concerted effort to stop thinking about your form, much less practicing it, not only can make you happy—it can keep you sane.

That is, we kind of get locked into our art. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially when you’re facing a deadline. Other times, it’s a symptom of the artist’s obsessive side. People often ask me how I can write every morning before work. They praise my discipline, but, really, it’s a mixture of habit and bloody-mindedness: I can’t think of anything else. And my brain’s become so conditioned that it starts coughing up ideas around 6:00 and won’t let go until I shake some words loose. (It’s worth noting that some of those dedicated writing hours are spent staring into space and sipping coffee to kick the brain into working order; other mornings, I just give up and read something: the brain’s hung up its gone fishing sign.)

This won’t necessarily be easy, especially if you’re locked in deep. If you practice multiple arts, whether professionally or as a hobby, working in another form can distract the mind—shiny, shiny!—and give your overworked gray areas a breather without going into total withdrawals.

Strangely enough, the tension you may feel not working on your chosen art may be a good thing. It’s a sign that your unconscious mind is throwing its weight around, churning under the surface. Because, realistically, you’ll never stop working. It’s just not going to happen. You’ll start dreaming about it. You’ll experience intrusive thoughts that will make you want to run to the pen or the camera. But if you can get to the point, where you’re not in acute discomfort and you’re enjoying something else…like life…finally returning to your form can bring more than relief. You might find that you’ve improved. That you’ve been able to do something that, previously, you could not, whether it’s automatically spotting that 18% gray or playing a guitar riff that’s been eluding you.

Though a seeming paradox, sometimes you have stop to progress. You have to give your unconscious time to run. Often, it’ll surprise you. If nothing else, you’ve had a break, a little vacation from the Effort That Never Ends. And that’s never a bad thing.

Photography: Chasing the Light

/ Steve Patterson / 1 Comment

End of a DayI’m riding the bus home, after an especially long day at work. Pretty beat. Listening to music, Jeff Beck or Radiohead probably, and I’m watching the light get sweeter and sweeter. High, scattered clouds diffusing winter sunlight and becoming increasingly warm as the sun goes down. The sky’s still a rich blue, but it won’t last: the light’s rapidly fading. There’s maybe 15 good minutes left.

Finally, about ten blocks from home, I pull the buzzer. I just have to get out to see what I can find. I shoot a couple of pictures of a church. They don’t amount to much–really, to make it work, I need a graduated filter to balance out the sky and building, and I don’t have one with me. So I turn to walk towards home and see this. Right there, waiting. Just as I raise the camera, two figures enter the frame. I don’t even think–I just hit the shutter. I shoot a couple more in quick succession, but I know somehow–assuming I caught what I saw–that the first one would be the pick. It was.

Winter in the Northwest can be a drag. We joke about it, but we do get an awful lot of rain, and the steady overcast can get to you. A gray stretch can really help you appreciate a little sun. And, given the light’s always at a lower angle, you can shoot all day long with interesting light (unlike summer, where you might as well put the camera away between 11:00 to 6:00, unless you’re shooting an event). The overcast also can be excellent for shooting details–plants can turn out especially nice in monochrome–but the clear light–it can keep you going.

I snagged a couple other decent shots on the walk home, but this was the one I looked forward to downloading. Sometimes, you can just feel it.

The Modular Play: An Act of Faith

/ Steve Patterson / 1 Comment

19442In 25 years of writing plays, I’ve generally worked from beginning to end. I may have a final scene in mind—sometimes an image that spurs the play’s creation. Sometimes, for tightly plotted stories, I work from an outline. Even so, when actually writing the piece, the process opens with “lights rise” and closes with “end of play.”

About a year ago, an idea came to me arising from images and voices I’d carried around for almost aa decade: American soldiers during World War II basically trying to talk themselves calm the night before a battle.

The time and locale fluctuated. D-Day seemed a natural, but also had been extensively covered, from The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan. I considered the Anzio or North African landings, but those required explanation—and exposition. More and more, I thought of the lousy winter of ’44 and ’45, when war’s end loomed but hadn’t yet arrived.

Then an actor friend suggested I write a Christmas play, which made me laugh at first. No one would immediately associate my dark, sometimes sardonic plays with presents and cheery lights. Plus, could anything new be said of Christmas? Still, I liked the idea of writing a non-sentimental Christmas play for adults. All too often, between Scrooge, nutcrackers, and elves, the holidays seemed a reason to stay home from the theatre. Not because the existing plays were bad—simply because they were tired.

Then somehow the long-smoldering World War II play latched onto the Christmas Eve, finding the German-besieged town of Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. I’d long been fascinated by the town’s heroic effort to stave off Panzers as ammo, food, and medical supplies ran low.* And another image came to mind: a wounded civilian, a woman, in the midst of men trying not to fall apart. And If the Fates Allow took shape.

Or rather, it took shapes. I didn’t have an ending or a beginning. All I had were voices and a setting. The play stalled. I couldn’t find a way into it. I figured, what the hell, I’d write what I had—little scenes, snapshots, snippets of conversation. I had no idea where it was going. All I could do was rely on faith that I’d written a bunch of plays—too many maybe—and I could write another, hoping a piece would find its form as had happened so many times before.

It didn’t. A nervy process ensued, where, at any time, the play might go sideways. Plays do sometimes. You get into them and find out they have an unfixable flaw or they run dry. But increasingly, I began to feel comfortable with the characters. I could feel them pushing to have their stories told. So I started thinking of scenes—some so brief as to be blackouts—as pieces of a mosaic. I’d just keep writing until I exhausted the time and place, or until the play’s form revealed itself. No matter how it turned out, I was having a great time writing it. I liked hanging out with the characters and you couldn’t beat the circumstance for drama.

Siege plays—where a penultimate event shapes the action—have a form all their own. You just keep moving forward, and they get increasingly tense. The possibility of disaster colors everything, lending weight and urgency to otherwise ordinary conversation. If a character speaks of missing home, the question hang as to whether he’ll ever see it again. Sharing a cigarette carries a sense of communion—a rite to stave off emotional collapse.

Then, as if illuminated in a camera flash, the ending appeared to me, and it completely startled me—as I hope it will the audience, and I found most of the material written previously supported the resolution. Though my conscious mind seemed to float from place to place, my unconscious had been doing its job. I still needed to properly sequence the pieces and build transitions, which essentially meant rewriting the play from beginning to end, but a great deal of the original material survived the rework, and the beginning found itself. It said: start here. I’d just been warming up to that point.

I can’t say it’s the most relaxing way to work, but it wasn’t boring, and the results worked. I think.

Would I used the “modular play” technique again? Maybe. Plays have a way of telling you how they want to be written, and there’s something satisfying in taking your hands off the wheel and letting your instincts do the driving. In a way, it’s what writers do anyhow. Even when you’re carefully laying out a piece using an outline, you have to step back and let the imagination run. We’re never much more than nominally in control of a first draft. The rewrites demand all the writer’s craft and cunning.

Putting pen to paper is always an act of faith—faith in one’s self, in your intuition, and your need for discovery. Whether you leave the diving board with your eyes open or closed, you’re still going to hit the water. And you still have to clear the rocks.

*Despite my efforts to find a fresh World War II event to write about, after completing the play, I discovered that Band of Brothers had explored the same time and place, although they looked at if from a very different angle.

(At noon, January 26, “If the Fates Allow” meets the public as a concert reading at Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre, produced by Playwrights West as part of the Fertile Ground New Works Festival.)

Becoming a Photographer Again

/ Steve Patterson / 1 Comment

Like many, I take pictures. Or, more precisely, I make pictures: a photograph begins with capture of the image–the point at which you bring your vision (as such), your camera equipment, and your knowledge together to freeze a moment. A whole other process takes over following that.

Since I’ve been around awhile, I started out with film. It’s both a glorious and inflexible medium. For one thing, it inserts a lag: from the time you take the pictures to the time you develop them or get them back from the lab. That excepts Polaroid, which develops in your hand–which is why commercial photographers Continue reading →

Revisiting “The Twilight Zone”

/ Steve Patterson / 1 Comment

Zen PathReading, of late, about one Rod Serling. Writer. Producer. Creator. A man who seemed to have everything going for him. And then….

Yeah, well…and then shit happens. Apparently, he pretty much worked and smoked himself to death, and he died early. Just like his father. A fate that always haunted him. There’s an object lesson for you: sometimes you can’t see the obvious because you don’t want to see the obvious. Or because it scares you too much. And, because you can’t see it, you doom yourself to it. The kind of thing that happens in…the Twilight Zone.

Man. That’s one hell of a voice the guy had. Every writer follows a different process, but, once I hear a character’s voice, a door opens into the story. I can’t explain it—that’s just how it happens for me. And if you hear Serling or watch his work, that voice sticks to you. Pretty soon it won’t let you go. And then people wonder why you’re talking so weird. So ironically. Snapping off every word. Holding for dramatic effect. Like…this.

Which is a kind of genius. It’s a brand. If you like Rod Serling and the strange world he became associated with through his remarkable television show The Twilight Zone, then you know what you get when you hear that voice. The poignant side? With time, that’s all anyone wants to hear. You’re stuck with it. They won’t let you change it and grow. It can also become cruel when your audience tires of that voice. If it becomes too familiar. Some in the audience just wait for Dylan’s old songs. Some won’t listen to the Stones because they don’t sound as good as they used to. Why? They repeat themselves. And because the listeners themselves aren’t as young as their memories.

It’s a tough choice: give people what they want or risk repeating yourself and burning them out. It seems the artists who transcend that operate with very good compasses: they know who they are, and part of their brand is trying new stuff. You like them because you don’t know what you’ll get, but it’s likely to be good. It’s said Picasso could own anything he wanted if he could paint it, but he continually tried new forms, excelling at them and putting his “Picasso” stamp on them. Part of Tom Waits’ genius seems lie in the continual search for new sounds. It doesn’t always work, but, a lot of times, it’s very, very good. And there’s always that little bit of that Tom Waits DNA that keeps you coming back. There’s magic, and there’s tragic magic, and you have to risk one to achieve the other.

The Twilight Zone was wondrous. I don’t even think we knew how good it was at the time. I was too young to remember its debut seasons, but I grew up with it in syndication. I was not, however, too young for Night Gallery, Serling’s kind of reboot of The Twilight Zone. By the time that came out in the Seventies, Serling’s outlook had darkened, and the show reflected that darkness. He wasn’t entirely in charge of the program, as he was with The Twilight Zone, and sometimes it slipped into camp. But I can’t tell you how much I looked forward to Night Gallery evenings. (They always seemed to be rainy.) You didn’t know where you would go, and sometimes you went to very dark places indeed. Very dark. Which, to me were the coolest, most mysterious places to be, and very different than…than being a geeky kid in a small town. In the Pacific Northwest. Where it seemed some winters that the sun never made it all the way across the sky. Where the rain and the fog blurred the edge of everything. Blunted the colors. You didn’t realize how fabulously beautiful everything around you was until the sun came out, but sun didn’t last long. I came to like images with a little blur to them. Where you couldn’t quite be sure of what you were seeing. You had to guess, relying on your imagination to complete the picture.

What did the Night Gallery look like? Like an actual gallery, it varied. They hung a lot of paintings in three years. Sometimes, they didn’t turn out that well, and, looking at them now, you kind of shrug, shake your head. Yeah…well, they tried. And they were on deadline. Sometimes they retain their power and mystery. If that sort of darkness interests you (and it’s okay if it does), take a look.

Somewhere in there, Night Gallery stamped me with its mark, and I came to enjoy diving into that deep place where it really gets strange and frightening. I don’t give a damn about slasher pics or much of the stuff that passes for horror. But the fantastic, the uncomfortable, the…haunted, where the hero doesn’t always walk out in the sunshine at the end: it took ahold of me. In some ways, I’ve been writing about ever since. A writer friend says my work is haunted. (Maybe it’s me that’s haunted.) But that darkness, that blur, seems to distinguish my writing and photographs. Maybe that’s my brand.

To me, it just feels like beneath the surface of ordinary life, things remain hidden. Jung called it the unconscious—he was a scientist; so that’s kind of antiseptic. But there’s nothing clean or classifiable about the genuine intersection of the hidden and the ordinary, between dreams and reality. Some pretty good stories happen there. And maybe they show us that the world is not only more complex than we know, but more complex than we can know.

That’s paraphrasing Einstein, whose brand became synonymous with genius. He died four years before The Twilight Zone went on the air. Would he have watched it? I like to think he would have. Marking Twilight Zone nights on his calendar. We’ve come to find that when you take apart the smallest operating particles of reality, they don’t always act as suspected. Sometimes they’re here, but only for the briefest moments, and, in those nanoseconds, they don’t play by the rules. It appears that a twilight zone occurs within every thing. Within all of us. All the time.

There’s something to walk away with…Serling. You did good.