Speaking in Tongues

Photo By Bret Brookshire

To get a really good feel for the kind of theatre artist Dan Dietz is, it helps to have a sense of the material in his next project, the Salvage Vanguard Theater production of Mac Wellman's Terminal Hip:

"Which Pandas has pants?

Which Pandas pushes the not wings?

Which Pandas have plural endings?

Which Panjandrums put out eyes, seek fire, hogtie hockey sticks on information overload?

Pure the Panda nation."

Dietz has to speak these lines and a lot more like them. And make them make sense. For an hour and a half. By himself.

If you're reading this and thinking there's no way to take that load of gobbledygook about pandas -- gobbledygook which isn't just nonsensical, but which blithely flouts rules of English grammar to boot -- and make some kind of sense out of it, and that there's really no way to turn that malarkey into anything resembling dramatically compelling stage material, well, you're right on Dietz's wavelength. After sitting down and reading the play for the first time, he says, "I closed the book, and the first thought in my head was, This play is absolutely impossible. There's no way it could be done. The second thought in my head was, I really have to do this play."

That second thought is the key to where Dietz the artist is coming from. He can tell when a play is difficult, challenging, outright insane. He can even be frightened of or intimidated by it because of that. It's just that that won't stop him from doing the play. On the contrary, the more demanding or outrageous the script, the more incentive Dietz has to do it. Case in point: his first major theatrical project in Austin, The Battle of San Jacinto, Ruth Margraff's 1997 "barroom brawl" of a drama based on the Texas Revolution. When Salvage Vanguard artistic director Jason Neulander was looking for someone to play the play's opium-sucking, skirt-chasing Santa Anna, he approached Dietz. Margraff's deep rivers of poetry, dense thickets of symbolism, and mountains of unconventional style scared Dietz -- so he took the part (and won a B. Iden Payne Award nomination and a Theatre Critics Table Award for his intense, electric performance).

In the three years since, Dietz has also managed to direct a production despite a lack of directorial experience (Scavengers, 1997), write a short play on the idea of "holiday" despite having the theme assigned to him and only seven days to finish the script (The Best Salvage Vanguard Holiday Ever, 1997); and find a way to blend the Hindenburg, The Brady Bunch, Sam Spade, and Georges Seurat's Pointillist masterpiece Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte into a single dramatic entity (his play Dirigible, 1999, which was named "Outstanding New Script" by the Theatre Critics Table), all the while pursuing a master's in playwriting from UT (Blind Horses, his drama about Frank and Jesse James, was produced by the Department of Theatre & Dance last fall) and appearing in such Salvage Vanguard vehicles as Altamont Now and When You Know What It Is You're Doing. In short, he's proven himself to be something like the figure in the old Carl Sigman/Bob Russell standard "Crazy He Calls Me": "The difficult things I'll do right now/ The impossible will take a little while."

In the case of Terminal Hip, the impossible took Dietz about two years. That's roughly the period of time from his first reading of the script to this week's opening of the production at The Hideout. It might have taken longer, but the 11th-hour postponement of another company project -- a new staging of Ruth Margraff's avant-garde opera Wallpaper Psalm -- meant Salvage needed a show for its spring slot and one it could produce relatively simply. What could be simpler to produce than a solo show like Terminal Hip? Well, aside from the fact that there are no solo shows like Terminal Hip, many plays -- perhaps even most plays -- could be simpler to stage. The script is pages of nonstop nonsense. The author provides no context for the nonsense; he doesn't include any stage directions (save for one pause right in the middle of the play) or even a name for the character who's speaking. He just gives you this big amorphous mass of words that allegedly constitute a play. A musical adaptation of the Bible could arguably be simpler to stage (at least it has a narrative). Still, Terminal Hip was a piece that Dietz was hot to do, and Neulander believed the timing was right to do it, so the show was hastily added to the schedule.

Once Terminal Hip was committed to a date, Dietz understood the meaning of the phrase, "Be careful what you wish for." Now that massive pulsating blob of text was his, all his, to commit to memory and present to an audience. "I just looked at it and couldn't imagine how to start," he admits. Though Dietz had read the play many times over since that first time two years ago, it hadn't really been with the intent of performing it, memorizing it. Ultimately, Dietz says, "the play is divided into 24 little sections that are broken off by white space, kind of like a long poem, and I just started with the first section."

As it turned out, beginning at the beginning of Terminal Hip was not at all a bad decision for Dietz. It led him to discover a rhythm to these strange lines, "something like Shakespeare ... a really strange sort of rhythm" that makes the lines "sort of feed into one another, sometimes in a completely non-logical way, sometimes in a logical way. You can tell Wellman worked on this for, what, 10 years? He really has worked to link things together; some sections, it just comes one after the other and you're just, Wow, I don't know how he's written it so that it stays in your mind. So I discovered that the lines are easier to memorize than I ever expected them to be. I mean, it was still a really huge task, but it wasn't the almost insurmountable task that I thought it was gonna be. You can kind of let go and just let the rhythm carry you."

Let go. The phrase sounds slightly odd coming from Dietz, an actor so firmly associated with onstage intensity. The serenity of the sentiment is at odds with its speaker's dynamic persona, in the same way that it would be to hear a mellow "have a nice day" come out of the mouth of Al Pacino's Scarface. But it's a mistake to confuse Dietz himself with the fury he sometimes plays onstage. In person -- at least in casual conversation -- he is relaxed and easygoing. He speaks with enthusiasm about his art and is upbeat and generous in a way that almost belongs to another era. An explosive intensity may be the end product of his acting journey, but the path to it is through considerably less volatile and more open territory: that of a focused mind and a trusting spirit. It can be glimpsed in Dietz's set eyes and only becomes more evident as he describes the rehearsal process for Terminal Hip.

Photo By Bret Brookshire

In their initial approach to the script, Dietz and Neulander toyed with discarding the idea that Wellman's nonsense was anything but nonsense. All that stuff about pandas and 'x' and "the mendicant riddle" -- What if it didn't mean anything and they could simply make up whatever they wanted? So when rehearsals started the two experimented with that, and "after a day of working that way, we realized that didn't work," Dietz recalls. "It became very obvious that there was some logic at work that was resisting any random interpretation of these words. Once we ran up against that wall, we just started to play guessing games at what the structure was. Jason and I pored over the script and we took each section and said, 'If we could name this section, what would it be?' So one section we named 'The Bill of Rights.' And one section we named 'Preacher.' And one section we named 'Money.' So we used that as our starting point, just trying to get in the most basic terms we could what each section was about. Once we had that, we were able to approach each section of the text and work our way through it. Part of it was just trusting it enough to speak it aloud with some kind of intention. And off the page, it started to make much more sense than it did on the page.

"When you look on the page, they're all swimming around, all these made-up words, and you have no idea what's going on. But when you start to speak them, all of a sudden it's making sense in your mouth and your ear. And the repetition ... It really was like the play itself was teaching us what we wanted it to be. By the time we got through working a section -- which could take an hour, two hours, three hours -- a lot of times we had to throw away our old name for it and come up with a new name because we realized we were totally on the wrong track before. We just had to approach it with some kind of intention, enough of an intention where I could get up and say the lines and then feel my way through, hitting a roadblock and saying, 'Okay, I think we have the wrong idea about what this word means. Let's rethink it.'

"Like 'Pandas.' Pandas are the huge thing in the play, the big Other. Man, we spent weeks trying to figure it out. Finally, finally, after three weeks of rehearsal, we figured out the whole 'Pandas' thing. And once you figure out one or two of the references or words, you discover that that is connected to another reference in another part of the script, and all of a sudden that opens up. Now that you have the right intention, a whole other section where you mention pandas makes sense. And then, because of the stuff that makes sense in that section, other sections start to make sense, too. I have to say, it has to be one of the most brilliantly constructed scripts I've ever seen. You can tell that Mac must have labored over the placement of every single word."

For an instant, Dietz's eyes flash with admiration for the craft of the playwright, but that inevitably leads him back to the process of decoding the playwright's work, and he reiterates the need for boldness in that task. "You really do have to jump off the cliff and say, 'I'm just gonna make a choice as far as what my intention is with this section,'" he says. "Leap off there and see what happens. Sometimes you're totally wrong. But if you trust the language, it will teach you what you need to know."

If you trust ... Dietz has circled back to that idea of openness in approaching one's art. You have to be aware, he seems to be saying, of your attitude toward the work because the wrong attitude -- a sense that it is absolutely impossible to stage, fear about making a choice (or making the wrong choice), anxiety over just not getting what the damn thing is about -- can separate you from the work and block your ability to connect with it, to build on it.

"It's funny," Dietz comments, developing the idea with another illustration, "we hit midpoint in the rehearsal process, and we were panicked. Jason and I had been feeling these doubts -- like, 'We kind of know what's going on in this play, but we don't know entirely what it wants to be' -- but we hadn't confessed them to one another. We were going crazy and finally, finally we broke down. I flat out told him in the middle of rehearsal, 'Listen, Jason, I am scared to death. I just don't know what this is gonna be.' And he said, 'Good. I am so scared, too.' And it was amazing. Once we admitted that to each other, it was like we were able to let go of it and all of a sudden the whole play opened up, and the links in the different sections of text started to make sense, and the ideas just started coming. We just had to reach that point where we were willing to admit that we had no idea what was going on. But now we do. It's really crazy."

Let go. There it is again, a phrase that recurs repeatedly in Dietz's conversation, like the 'x,' the 'y,' the 'o' of Terminal Hip. It's the thing you do once you've acknowledged and accepted that thing that's separating you from the art: the abyss of apprehension at the edge of the cliff, the raging river of text, the doubt that has become the Enemy, the Pandas, for god's sake! You let go. That opens you to the art and in return the art opens itself to you.

Dietz is familiar with this creative phenomenon, this opening up of the art, from his work as a playwright, too. When he describes the typical genesis for one of his scripts, he talks of random images that come to him and "start to weave together" until "a character's voice emerges." From that, he incrementally discovers some conflict that is affecting that character, and the story "sort of springs out from there," he says. The process for him, he has learned, is rooted in his willingness to give over his creative control of the story to the characters or the play itself or the Muse or whatever.

"It's like this level of trust," says Dietz, "where you're placing your trust in these characters or whatever other entity it is, saying, 'I'm just gonna let go and let you teach me.' Sometimes even before I have characters, I'll be flipping through a magazine and all of a sudden I'll see a picture of something or a particular phrase, and a little bell goes off in the back of my head and I go, 'Oh, that's part of this somehow, isn't it? I'd better set that aside.' With Dirigible, the whole Hindenburg thing came very late in the process of writing the play. I had characters and knew basically what was going on with them, but there was something missing and I didn't know what it was. It was interesting -- these balloons kept popping up in the script for some reason. I have no idea why. They were threatening, but I didn't know why they were there. So one day I said, 'I'm just going to go to the online encyclopedia and look up balloons.' And I did and I went to a link and eventually it led me to the Hindenburg, and it just blew my mind. It just blew my mind. Talk about a bell going off ... Alarms started going off in my head. It was the missing piece that the play needed to express itself. It was the glue that wound up tying up all these other things in the play together. So it's funny how you have to almost place your trust in something outside yourself and just say, 'I'm not going to try and talk to these characters. I'm going to shut up and let them do the talking.' Yeah, so much art winds up being just a letting go. Letting whatever it is just take you over. Speaking in tongues as opposed to giving a speech."

Watching Dietz rehearse a section of Terminal Hip with Neulander on a weekday morning, you can see how he has let go of the enemy Pandas that dogged him earlier in the process. Even this early in the day, in a drab classroom, Wellman's loopy non sequiturs flow from his mouth like neighborly felicitations, like a Sunday sermon, like the top story on the nightly news. That famous onstage intensity is present now, and it helps propel that babble toward our ears with purpose and meaning, the gleam in his sharp gaze informing us that he knows we understand what he's saying. And the funny thing is, his commitment to these words is such that you start to feel as if you do understand what he's saying.

That response doesn't surprise Dietz. He encountered it with his first audience. "When we had our first run-through, our designers were there, so I got to play off them as an audience," he says. "It's amazing. They learn it. And they stop questioning it. I'm like, Wow. If I'm able to do this with a nonsense language, my god, what have people been doing to me for however many years that I don't even know about? You reference something, and people immediately say, 'Oh, I know what you're talking about.' But no you don't! It's all made up! It's amazing how far people will go if you are rock-solid about the words coming out of your mouth. Even if those words on the page are gibberish, if you speak them with an intention -- a rock-solid intention -- people's defenses fall away, and this amazing trust happens. When you read history, you say, 'How could they not recognize that Hitler was totally manipulating them?' But you begin to see how charismatic personalities can sweep people up into doing things that they never would."

Like Ronald Reagan? I suggest.

"Exactly!" Dietz affirms. "Is 'morning in America' that much different? You read the speeches now, they kind of look ridiculous, but then you watch a videotape of something like Ronald Reagan debating Jimmy Carter, and people are thrilled with what Reagan is saying, they're hungering for it. If you capture the zeitgeist at the right moment, if you can tap into what people want, you can say whatever you want, you can use language to incite people."

Dietz is nothing if not sensitive to words and what they can do. "I've always had a real love of language," he says. "I've really had a passion for the written word. And the spoken word. So my plays are always very language-driven, very ... wordy." He laughs. Working on Terminal Hip has only heightened that sensitivity, making him acutely conscious of the absurd abuse to which English is subjected in marketing. "I was reading the back of a bag of chips on Saturday, and it blew my mind," he says, shaking his head. "That language didn't make any more sense than Mac Wellman's language. It was completely ridiculous. The basic argument was that the new Ruffles chips had more flavor because there's more flavor on the new Ruffles chips. I couldn't believe it. And then you look at political advertising. ... The timing [of this production] couldn't be more perfect with the primaries and the elections this year. You listen to the politicians talk and it's ridiculous. They'll say, 'A vote for me is a vote for leadership.' But if we're electing a leader, then whoever we vote for is a vote for leadership."

A moment from rehearsal drifts back to mind: Dietz, looking every bit as determined as John McCain, as authoritative as Al Gore, intoning insistently, "Xerox your face, cold-war America!" Somehow he has invested this Wonderland slogan with more substance than "A vote for me is a vote for leadership." Its heft is greater than "Where's the beef?" or "There you go again." It resonates more deeply than "A reformer with results." Perhaps Dietz's example of letting go has sunk in, and this audience of one has opened himself to the art and allowed it to connect. If so, then Dietz has fulfilled what he sees as his mission as a theatre artist. And to get a really good feel for the kind of mission Dan Dietz pursues as a theatre artist, it helps to hear him talk about a show with a title so nonsensical it might have been lifted from Terminal Hip: Dress Me Blue, Window Me Sky.

This performance piece written and performed by Lisa D'Amour and directed by Katie Pearl for FronteraFest '98 was modest in its production values -- newspaper on the floor, handmade drawings on the wall, a plastic bird, a papier-mché eye -- yet to Dietz it was "the most amazing thing I saw that year. I was in tears at the end of it." What moved him about the work was not the quality of the set or props, but "the communion of the people there and the willingness and Lisa's amazing openness and vulnerability. And the hospitality, the idea of the performer making a deal with you, saying, 'Here, I'm going to open myself up to you completely. Please respect that and open yourselves up, too.' That's it. The power of that. It really gets you back to the heart of the art form. There's less between you and the art. And you start to believe in the idea that you as the audience are part of the raw material that makes the art form instead of being a viewer. You are part of the materials that are making this performance just as surely as the lines that the writer wrote or the actor's voice and body are, as any kind of lighting, any kind of sound. You are the necessary ingredient. Not the consumer of an end product but the final ingredient. That is what really speaks to me: Giving the audience the responsibility -- and joy -- of joining in with you. It seems like all the theatre that really affects me leaves room for that and says, 'Come in, come in.' The bottom line is: That's what you're after. I think that's the connection."