Then more literally, as choir director of my father’s church, my mother was always conducting pageants and performances of some kind, to keep us Sunday Schoolers engaged. She received a Master’s in Dramatic Arts from Cal Berkeley, and when she became the drama teacher at King Junior High School in Oakland, it seemed I spent a lot of my early childhood years wandering around backstage amidst the crude school shop-made fragments of hopeful magic we call props… a Styrofoam dragon’s tail spray painted a lurid green…a tinfoil knight’s wooden broadsword…cardboard gravestones…even a paper moon. I was fascinated and deeply moved.
As I was by the words emerging out of the stage lights, reaching out into the dark. Whether it was two kids up on ladders from a scene from Our Town, or the Jury of the Dead coming forth from The Devil and Daniel Webster, there’s something fundamentally powerful about language performed live. I think no matter how hokey and please-the-parents school plays and summer camp skits may be, there’s still that link back to the dreams and visions of very long ago. For it could well be that “Theater” in its natural inclusiveness of comedy, drama, education, visual art, music, dance, poetry and song, is the oldest art form of all—the river source of all the sub-specialties.
The first play I ever wrote was called The Abombinable Snowman?—an extended sketch for my sixth grade class, performed by me, and my friends Noel, Kim, Jorge and Butler. Not surprisingly, it had to do with a climbing party lost in a snowstorm in the mountains of Nepal/Tibet. Jorge, a fiercely dark and newly arrived kid from Mexico, played the Snowman (by his own insistence) and wore what we would call today a white hoodie and some toy sunglasses with extra large white frames (when I think about that today, it seems very hip and lateral). There wasn’t much to the plot, as you can imagine—certainly nothing original. The arrogance of the climbers gets them hopelessly lost, then the resident monster, which they at first don’t believe in, and then want to attack, actually ends up saving their lives. What I am proud of though is that I managed to work in the one kid in the whole class who hadn’t been cast in any other of the skits. Jeff Crowe wasn’t used to not being picked, because he was a very good athlete and a pretty tough fighter in the pine trees behind the school. But in the classroom, he really struggled. He had both a very bad stammer and a reading problem—and a temper that made both worse. What part could be play? Unlike Jorge, who could bound around with slapstick grace, Jeff froze up the moment he was indoors. Dancing indoors paralyzed him to the same degree of intensity that a fight on the playground or a football game brought him to life. So, I hit on what to this day I think is a fine solution. He became a very special character, which added greatly to the mood of the piece—he was the Voice of the Howling Wind. Along with Jorge’s acrobatic Snowman, he was the best part honestly. I’m still pondering the lesson of that all these years later: how what can be the most important element may not be on the page. It’s easy to see why this is true in the world of theater and film—the script is not the performance. But mysteriously, I believe this lesson applies to not only all forms of writing, but all art in some way. I know this puzzles many people. They honestly go in search of art, and the better it is, the more elusive it seems.
My mother made a lot of potentially interesting dramatic experiences possible in my junior high school years. The trouble is we’re so self-conscious at that time in life. There was one improv course run by a local regional theater that might’ve had a lot to offer—except I was the only male in the class, which is not a good look at that age. Nevertheless, I kept performing in school plays, and I was fortunate to have a drama teacher in high school, who was also one of the assistant football coaches and the head baseball coach. He brought a masculine aura of cool to the theater.
But what I really wanted to do wasn’t recite other people’s lines so much, I wanted to write my own. I won a host of writing prizes in the Scholastic Magazine Award competition, including the overall Best Entry Prize for a one-act play called The Vivarium, which was about two old women, modeled on my grandmother and great aunt, languishing in a suspect nursing home. I received $100 (which seemed a lot back then) and a Smith-Corona typewriter with a gold plate with my name on it. It was a hugely inspiring validation.
A class in Modern Drama opened me to the major Europeans: Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg (who I have a particular affinity with on many levels)…and that decisive psychotectonic shift wrought by Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello, Giraudoux, Sartre—and the highly underrated Ugo Betti (if you aren’t familiar with his Crime on Goat Island, I highly recommend it).
Although I didn’t necessarily verbalize this all that articulately at the time, I was trying to come to terms with an artistic crisis—the schism between the poetic-symbolic, essentially realist tradition of the American theater (O’Neill, Wilder, Williams, Miller and Inge) and the more expressionistic and lyrically brutal work emerging through the European and avant-garde influences. Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story blew me away (I still admire it). I have a great deal of respect for the work of Sam Shepard (especially the early wild pieces). But I was particularly intrigued by Harold Pinter, and his sense of menace and ambiguity. I have a profound admiration to this day for his observation that, “So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken.”
I’d go on to have many experiences with the theater. I played the Laurence Olivier part in Sleuth in high school. I met my oldest and dearest friend at ISOMATA, a summer camp for the arts run by USC in the mountains above Palm Springs. My mother took me to see a world premier of one of Tennessee Williams’ late plays at ACT in San Francisco, and we literally ran into him personally after the show—one of the highlights of my life. Years later, in Australia, I even organized my own experimental guerilla troupe, complete with night fire effigies, masks, pirated equipment, cannibalized machines and industrial noise. I looked to such sources as Greek drama, Noh theater, Cantonese opera, Grand Guignol, marionette performance, religious festivals and mystery plays.
But I never had the skills or the resources to bring the sense of circus I craved to my chief interest—the dark use of language as weapon. I wanted the psychology of confrontation, and to peel back the layers of psychology to find the inner worm inside us. I don’t say by any means that I have achieved that here, or that I will ever achieve it. But I like the notion of interrogating the idea anyway. Interrogation is a word I use a lot. When I was young, and on the surface a good student, I had the strange experience of being interrogated by the FBI in regards to my stepbrother’s criminal activities. It was formative. I was later detained, deposed, questioned and outright beaten by various law enforcement bodies for various alleged misdoings. We’ve all faced the combat of the job interview, and I’ve always had a fixation on the process of the psychiatric evaluation. So, something of all this past boils over here in what you have in your hands. I’d like to believe it offers some interest. It’s the first play I’ve written in twenty years, but I hope it won’t be my last.
I think there’s a case to be made that the complex shifting sands between Modernism and Postmodernism, at least in the literary arts, were navigated most interestingly and expressively by dramatists.
All the world’s a stage is a line of poetry—but it was delivered from a stage, as its author intended. He didn’t say the world’s a poem, a story, or a piece of music. Shakespeare forcefully asserts that the world is theater. I may occasionally view it as some vast theme park or uncontrolled experiment—but a part of me will always agree with his assessment: Theater. Somehow, it seemed time to return to that cave of shadows and voices—of worms and ambiguities—of ambush and interrogation. Of things almost said, and then known all too well.
—Kris Saknussemm
Las Vegas, Nevada
KRIS SAKNUSSEMM is the internationally acclaimed author of the books Zanesville, Private Midnight, Enigmatic Pilot, Reverend America, Sea Monkeys, and the portfolio art books The Colors of Compulsion and Possible Languages. Lazy Fascist Press brought out a collection of his early
short stories entitled Sinister Miniatures.
A native of the Bay Area in California, he is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Washington, and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena. His dramatic works have been presented on ABC Radio National in Australia and in a live theater context in Melbourne, Sydney and New Zealand. His piece Memory Wound won the First Prize in the 10-Minute Play Competition for The Missouri Review.
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