Sunday, March 04, 2007

Glory to the Builders of Stalin's Balloons

I realize this is now the second of my very few posts to deal with Burnt by the Sun, but I would just like to thank Lynn for showing us that incomparable piece of Russkie cinema, mainly for the phrase you can see in the title line above. Random, yes. Delectable, certainly.
You may not know this, but during TASP, inspired by that line, I started sketching out a play. I changed the pertinent quote to "Glory to the Crew of Nixon's Airship," which is both slightly more American and slightly less sensible, and the plot of the piece is in no way related to good ol' Burnty, but the impetus for the production remains firmly in the hands of Soviet cinematographers.
Two days ago was the premiere of my play. (Ruben - these were the rehearsals I was mumbling about.) Below, my program notes (the names you see below are all my friends/actors).

"Nixon’s Airship" is an extraordinarily adequate play. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly situates the piece in the blessed domain of the palatable, but most would venture to say that the stunning competency on display here is largely the result of vaguely committed efforts by (in imprecisely alphabetical order) the tolerable Finn (as the Official), the satisfactory Kaplan (as the Owner), the sufficient MacPherson (as the Detective), the acceptable Thrailkill (as the Newspaperman), and the somewhat disappointing but inexplicably erotic McClure (the Friend), who also would like to halfheartedly apologize for having directed the show in much the same way that an obese badger might ride a bicycle, as well as for having written all of the words you will hear tonight (with the arguable exception of “Ha!” on page 12).
Incidentally, it is these words, or “palabras,” as writers tend to refer to them, that pose Nixon’s greatest problem. After all, the play has so many of them, several of which are different, or at least spelled differently (e.g.: “cat” and “methamphetamines”). What do they all mean? Fortunately, very little, as it turns out.
The play is, on the surface, an absurdist slapstick centered around the real-life Alien Hand Syndrome, which causes one of the patient’s hands to take on a mind of its own. This is an admittedly horrifying condition that fortunately remains amusing because you’ve more than likely lost your capacity for empathy after accidentally tuning into C-SPAN at 2:00 in the morning while hurriedly searching for that one infomercial with the knives (try channel 21). However, much like a razorblade in an apple, Nixon has at its core a fractal exposition of Wittgenstein’s later linguistic theories, which state that words have no inherent meaning, but instead are defined communally by common usage. This is in itself the point of the play, and now that you’ve read it, you might as well go and boozhe menkatalovkerebgen purnka hopjedwaflip kogadurkeh bedajibbachep klamkin meschkintod waydelee.

In conclusion, all glory be to Lynn.

2 Comments:

At 4:32 PM, Blogger Tracy said...

Wow, Max. Just, wow. You are amazing!!

Wish I could see this.

 
At 2:18 PM, Blogger Breanna said...

impressive!

 

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