Inherited Knowledge

Yesterday, at il day jobo, my boss asked me to add up some numbers and attach them to their respective back-up. So I fired up the computer calculator (this in spite of playing

Brain Age

for the Nintendo DS of late), added the numbers and wrote them on post-it notes to afix. When I turned them in to my boss (Me:

Well, she should be impressed with

that

speed-of-return...

) she informed me 'twould not do. She needed to see the calculations. Oh. Okay. I'll do it in Excel. No no, says she, we don't want to attach whole sheets to the papers, just a little slip. Use my

adding machine

. Oh. Okay. That shouldn't be a problem.

My dad's an accountant, and I associate these machines with him. You've seen them, even if you've never had cause to use one. They're like over-sized calculators with a spool of receipt tape atop, that prints out what yer' computin'. They make a very distinctive noise that usually indicates someone who is deep in concentration. When you enter a figure into yer' computin', it prints it with a brief gear-y, scratchy sound, and when you want to pound out the final total, it makes these sounds for considerably longer (having as it generally does more to print at the end) as though to say, "Congratulations! You're one major step closer to whatever you're doing!" Interestingly enough, these machines also have the addition and equation symbols on the same, over-sized button.

Cut to me, twenty minutes after my boss' request, pounding my head in frustration as I try to figure out how to get the adding machine to PRINT the G.D. TOTAL. Every number I enter automatically prints to the paper as I press the big addition/equation button, but when I get to the end of the line . . . what am I supposed to do? When I press the big a/e button again, it simply adds the previous number to the line again, thereby ruining that particular slice of tape. It seemed so convenient and obvious to me before, combining those functions. Every time you hit it, your running total appears on the screen. Now, though, it is my enemy. They should be separate buttons! Does the manufacturer get a deal on

buttons

if he makes one over-sized? WHAT the HELL?! After many minutes of flicking mysterious switches experimentally, trying to interpret all these "M-" buttons and generally doing what I do to figure something out with Microsoft programs, I notice something. In the column of function keys, there is one labeled "x" and one labeled "*". Huh. In my (computerized) mind, those are both symbols for multiplication, so I didn't find either out-of-the-ordinary when regarded individually. When I noticed both were there, I tried pressing "*".

Success! All praise "*"! It even printed a sub-line that illustrated

how many

figures were added together to make the total! I could make-out with my adding machine!

It would not be a lasting relationship, however, infused as it is with such opposing passions, so I relented in my desire.

It reminded me of something I had been reminded of earlier in the weekend as well. I was watching

Elizabeth

for the first time, with

Fiancee

Megan

, a movie I had long intended to see. There's quite a good amount of classical dance in that film, and Megan said she thought it must have been strange, knowing all the same dances. This reminded me of something

Friend David

(Zarko) often laments -- that we don't all know the same dances anymore. Dances. Adding machines. What does it all mean?

Nothing in particular to the nouns, or even all the words of my little meandering story. It's in between those words.

There is something rich and important in passing knowledge from person to person, with no intermediaries or tools involved, and something richer still in passing knowledge between people who have a relationship. That's not to say that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket because you can Google or Wiki world history as you need it (...and why, I ask myself, did I not simply Google adding-machine instructions...); I think the ability to access information instantly and specifically is an amazing boon to human culture. Plus it makes moving easier, what with needing to haul about fewer reference books. The only problem is, when we take a break from correspondence courses and search engines, and even encyclopedias, and engage in someone from whom we learn, something different happens. Something good, and difficult to put into words. I wrote that I probably wouldn't have learned acrobalance as I have if it hadn't been taught to me by

Friend Kate

(see

3/14/08

). Perhaps I'd know more dances --

care

to know more dances -- if I had a community that regularly met in order to share them.

I'm sure a lot of men have had the experience of coming upon a challenge and thinking, "Huh. I'll bet if I paid more attention to my dad when I was young, I'd have this licked." I've also had plenty of experiences which I've come through and thought, "Whoa; glad dad taught me that." (This perhaps most notably the several times I had to save my old computer by fixing things through DOS; also every time I get a compliment on knowing how to tie a full Windsor.)

Friend Todd

is excellent about striking up educational conversations with everyone he meets, a trait I most admire and try to cultivate in myself. In many ways, this is part of what's so important about live theatre. I don't know who's teacher and who's student in that scenario, but I do know we're all there with a little time to get to know each other, and learn to push each others' buttons.

Recovery

This morning I received an email from the playwright UnCommon Cause Theatre had been collaborating with to create

As Far As We Know

, informing those of us who did not yet know that the remains of Staff Sergeant Keith "Matt" Maupin had been recovered and identified. For those of you who don't know, the events resulting from the disappearance of Matt -- in 2004 -- were the inspiration for that show. For years, in spite of a video purportedly exhibiting his execution, his status remained active as far as the military was concerned, and his family kept faith that it could be true. That was the real subject of our play, what really kept our interest in it: keeping that faith and what we may have to lose by keeping it.

I had decided at some point in the process that most likely Sgt. Maupin had died. I had no details, and vacillated frequently on this position, but ultimately it was the idea I came to embrace. He was gone. That was my luxury, that perception. If I learned nothing else working on

As Far As We Know

, I learned that the perspective I was afforded by my distance from the situation was absolutely a luxury. No one who knew Matt, none of his family or the people living in his hometown, no one who had loved ones involved in this war could afford that luxury. I could. I had the distance to decide for myself, regardless of the hopes of others, that the best thing for all involved would be to grieve now, to try to say goodbye.

What I've discovered, with the arrival of this official news, is that my decision to say goodbye never reached my heart. It was just a decision. Now, this morning, I discover that all this comfortable time of mine I had been keeping a candle of faith going in my heart for Matt and his family. I've discovered that I wasn't comforted by my perspective at all. My

perspective

merely quieted my mind. What gave me comfort was that unconscious lick of flame, that nearly unjustifiable hope, which is now just as quietly extinguished. Matt is gone now. He has been missing, potentially and finally actually deceased for years, but now he is truly gone.

I can't compare my grief to his parents', his brother's, his friends'. I can't even compare my grief to my fellow players' and collaborators', some of whom have been to Matt's home and met the people there. It would be ridiculous to conceive of it. I'm just a guy who followed the news, studied the situation and tried to imagine the lives inside it. Yet I'm in tears to learn that he is gone. What was Matt to me? I'm not sure. Probably, figuring that out for myself will be what allows me to let him go. He represented a lot for me -- patriotism, ambition, discipline, the commingling of faith and love -- but representation doesn't tear at emotion this way. No, in some way, without ever meeting him, I came to love Matt for myself. And there is nothing right in this, in his death. No matter what peace it brings, no matter the resolution. His death is wrong.

In one of the introductory classes we were required to take as freshmen in the BFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University they tried to help us understand the nature of tragedy. Actually, of capital-t Tragedy. That is to say, as a form, not simply a vocabulary word. One more colorful teacher asked us, "What is it when a busload of nuns dies?" Someone naturally responded, "A tragedy." (That someone: probably a young guy with a bit of something to prove who valued very highly his own ability to know the "right" answer, and obviously in no way was that someone, nor could he ever have been, me.) "Wrong. When a busload of nuns arbitrarily kicks it, that's a travesty. Now, if it's a king, and we can see it coming from a mile off, but nothing we say or do can change it, and we just have to watch it unfurl into its ultimate conclusion ... that, my friends, is Tragedy."

The circumstances of Staff Sgt. Keith "Matt" Maupin's capture, torment and murder add up to a travesty. Even accepting that Arthur Miller made us see the possibility of a salesman experiencing a tragedy normally reserved for kings, there's too much that's arbitrary about Maupin's story to leave it room in the parameters of tragic action. He was not in combat, but escorting fuel trucks, and they weren't meant to be on the route they took when he was captured. He lied about his personal details on the hostage video that was released, presumably because he felt he had to, and even now news agencies are reporting those, misunderstood as facts. The government had to do everything they could to avoid looking like they were flailing helplessly, owing to how little they knew. It's a travesty.

But. But. Part of what makes Tragedy work is the way in which we come to resist the inevitable outcome. The tragic hero could be someone we would never get along with in life, yet through the journey of the story we come to intimately identify with a commonality: the will to live. "Rage against the dying of the light." We do. We always will, be that light our life or hope for others'. Ultimately, Matt's situation would not turn out well. The more time that passed, the more certain his fate became. We would have been smart to let our hope go, to will it to pass. And yet. And yet.

I -- little me -- will miss you, Matt Maupin. I wish I could hold you and your family up. I hope you all find peace and the space of breath to grieve. The tragedy of this outcome devastates me, but the years of your faith . . . our faith . . . inspire me. May you never lay down, may you always believe.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas

Learing Glances

I was walking down the street the other day, on my way to il dayjobo, when I noticed a woman wearing boots with the kind of impossibly narrow and tall heel I see in anime, and believe to be a physical impossibility. She was having no trouble with them, and I considered asking her if she'd stilt with me some time, but then I noticed that the boots were black leather and patterned somewhere between a musketeer's and some kind of glam paratrooper. Aggressive boots. Which got me thinking.

Generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of concept-heavy theatre. There's a great temptation to do it with Shakespeare, and many arguments for and against such approaches. I like my concepts light, and with little-to-no discernible influence on the dramatic action of the play, especially when it comes to The Bard. After all, the play's the thing. Don't change the ending of

Hamlet

. Face my wrath. That having been said, and in honor of beginning work on a clown version of the

Romeo & Juliet

story, I decided to share what this woman's boots got me thinking on.

A lot's been done with

King Lear

. I was in a Suzuki-styled production set in a sanitarium (molto originale), there was a recent movie called

A Thousand Acres

that set the story in rural America of the 90s, and of course there's

Ran

, Akiro Kurosawa's feudal-Japan take on the thing. It's been done to death. Still, these things get done to death because they resonate. It's a play about the anguish of youthful ambition and oncoming mortality, and that don't ever go away for we humans. So it may be done to death, and my ideas may fall far short of being original, but a strong idea benefits from expression.

I wonder how the play would change if it were the love of sons rather than daughters that incited the action?

Lear

has so many family relationships through it that in many ways it's all about family, so I got to wondering about that. Suppose Cordelia, Regan and Goneril were -- I don't know -- Corey, Ronald and Gary. They act completely the same, but have wives (or an imagined future bride, in Corey's case) they involve, and their possession of the inheritance is more assured. Not sure if Lear should be a father or mother in this case, and not sure if that altogether matters.

Once I'm imagining the story this way, I immediately want to set it in an urban, contemporary environment. Perhaps amongst some entitled New York family. There is a film version of

Hamlet

that does this (with Ethan Hawke) and, in my opinion, fails spectacularly to play past the adaptation, but I feel the idea can be done well. In this environment, the sons can be fairly underspoken, manipulative and cruel and it seems quite normal to us; masterminds of business, or media. Their wives take more direct action, but this is fitting in a contemporary environment as well. I can also see Lear (be he or she) as descended to a homeless state very clearly in this setting, and wonder how all the nature imagery might translate to an urban environment.

From here I wonder what else I can alter without getting in the way of the story. Suppose Corey is gay, and that contributes to his estrangement from Lear. It would have to be done without issue; the idea would be to avoid making a statement not found in the original story, to just have it proceed as you expect, but this son is gay. Suppose, too, that Edgar and Edmund are the same person.

WHAT?! I know. I start to doubt myself here, too, but I want to play it out; to play

with

it. So deal.

Without having read the text in years, I wonder if it could be played in such a way that the E.s are one guy with a personality disorder. I imagine him vaguely as a guy taking prescription medication, young and volatile, freshly returned from treatment. Gloucester, his father, is thereby a bit more justified in his ineffectiveness. He's been through a lot with this kid, who has his good days and his bad, and Gloucester finds him, on his bad days, to be a different sort of bastard. Gloucester also must humor E. in his dual personas, in the hopes of bringing him through to sanity, but everyone around him doesn't know how to respond to this, because it isn't clear how much is his humoring and how much he's come to believe his son is divided in two.

If you're still with me now: Let's go produce, because you are a rare creature.

Gloucester, of course, has his eyes dashed out for him by Cornwall, Regan's husband. Or Caroline, Ronald's wife, in this case. It was the glimpse of those boots that got me thinking about it all. In the production I participated in, I played Cornwall, and we stamped out Gloucester's eyes with my heel. Those boots would make that choice far more ... shall we say, effective. The rest of the ideas rolled out from there.

Violence. Such a potent aphrodisiac for romancing the id.

By this point, of course, I have to imagine the show out of the context of the language. You can subvert some lines here and there to justify cross-casting genders, but combining two characters into one? Introducing contemporary psychological understanding to Mr. Bill Shake-Off-Subtext? No, no. I imagine it now as a contemporary retelling, rest assured. Still and all, William had some unshakable lines. There's no escaping, in the end:

"Howl howl howl howl howl! Oh, you are men of stones! Had I your tongues and eyes I should use them so the heaven's vaults should crack! She is gone, forever..."

I Never Kid About My Work

Jeff Wills

is generally more friendly and easier to remember than

Jeffrey Wills

which reminds me of my mother and my day job, unlike

Jeffrey Allen Wills

which reminds me solely of my mother, at particular times of distress.

Jeffrey A. Wills

was what I used to designate my writing, until I realized it didn't really matter.

Allen

is what I went by for a whole year in elementary school, thinking

Jeffrey

, which means roughly "bringer of peace" (though it's descended from

God-a-Feared

Godfrey

and

Geoffrey

) and

Jeff

-- which presumably means the same, only less so -- were somehow childish.

Wills

is used by itself in sarcasm and in gym classes, which are not mutually exclusive concepts.

J. A. Wills

is what I use on my return-address labels, because it's distinguished and mysterious. I never use

J. Allen Wills

because that's just pretentious and wrong.

J. Wills

isn't so much, but I don't really use it anyway.

J.A.W.

, as was pointed out to me for the first time by a woman (Ms. Rice) who worked in my kindergarten, is an acronym that spells something, which is rad.

Jeffrey

also tends to imply a certain intimacy, and often gets used by folks trying to be more formal, or who like playing status games, or who don't actually know me. I've had many nicknames based on my given name:

Jeffy

Jeffy-Poo

Jeffe

("Hef-feh," or "chief")

J-

etc.

(dawg, bone, luv...); just as I've had quite a few with nothing at all to do with my actual name:

Sukeu

Bruce

Bats

Spoonman

Nuit

Nicknames are casually intimate things, at turns silly and profound, and I dig them. I was very nearly

Grant Allen Wills, Jr.

and think that might have been okay. I could be a Grant.

That's enough of that, I think. This whole thing is actually a bit of an experiment to see if/how it influences web searches for my name in the coming months. When I want to Google myself (not that I do that over-much, mind) I have to enter '"Jeff Wills'+actor" or some such, lest I get a stream of Willsians accomplished in other fields. If I've got this right, technically my name being all over one entry of the 'blog in different forms shouldn't do much, however the more people click on the link to here, the more prominent my standing. So it stands to reason that having an entry with different forms of "Jeff Wills" all over it should, ah, make the...thing...do that thing, where it...erm.... Yeah. I got nothing.

Names are cool.

Inseparable

It has been my intention on this here 'blog to keep the details of my personal life out of it. I go back and forth on this policy, largely due to my feeling that my personal life unavoidably affects my artistic life. Should I be content to tell a partial story? Invariably, however, I return to my policy. Many people love 'blogs for the ultra-personal peek they afford into a given person's inner life. I've got nothing against that, in general. As an actor, however, I'm spending a lot of my time making very specific choices about what of me I'm showing. In my little world, there's something vaguely pornographic about indiscriminately baring everything about myself and my life for the world at large, not to mention recorded human history. Perhaps it's hypocritical of me. After all, actors who are really "in the moment" probably don't really have all that much conscious choice about what they're revealing of themselves. Nevertheless, I choose to make the distinction where I can.

This particular entry is a choice as well, and I choose it as an exception that proves the rule; hypocrisy be damned. In acting, we are taught to choose our moments as well as what we do with them. One tries to earn a dramatic pause through the pace and emotional incidents of moments leading up to it. One often tries to balance a bombastic or tyrannical character with the occasional moment of quiet expression, or vulnerability. I'm going to try to express something very personal, very significant to me, and just hope that a year's worth of holding to my own rule has earned me that luxury.

The only trouble is, someone beat me to the punch and expressed it, in my opinion,

much better than I ever could

.

When I first discovered Taoism, and was most ravenous for information about it, I was especially drawn to the concept of each person's life having a "way," a given direction one could sense. This resolved a lot of mixed feelings I had about concepts such as fate and destiny, which seemed too fixed and divinely bequeathed to me. Taoism seemed to be saying that yes, there was a path that was most right for one's life, but no omniscient force or forces were forcing the individual down that path. When you feel balanced, when less wasted force and effort is required, you are closer to your way. When it's otherwise, you're straying. Maybe you're careening into the jaws of misery or, more likely, you're doing a little exploring. (The Taoists are great about the value of mistakes and youthful error.) I step on and off my path for different periods of time, and I'll tell you this for nothing: It is a whole lot easier to feel when I've stepped back on to the path than when I've taken a step off of it.

Personally, I don't think one's way should ever serve as an excuse. ("I had to kill them hobos. It was part of my

Way

.") We just aren't aware enough of its nature moment-to-moment to load it with blame. Besides, how can we ever know whether we've left the path or been thrown off it, just to teach us a lesson? Just occasionally, however, I believe the path deserves some acclaim.

Last week I asked a woman I love if she'd let me spend the rest of my life with her, and she told me yes. (I have to take her at her word.) All the experiences leading up to my proposal, and the moment of proposing itself, showed me what all those infuriating married people meant when they would answer me, over and over again, "You just know." It's true, and there's not much else to say to describe it. I've had literally years of experience feeling, "Yes, now, this must be it. Right? Right?" That asking was always there, though, at the end. And now somehow, certainty -- of the for-better-or-worse variety -- lit on my heart and shot electrified emails to my body and mind. Surprisingly enough, that sense of certainty grew even stronger when I actually bent my knee(s).

What else can I say? I'm on my Way.