Daniel Fish a Radical Reinterpretation of Supposedly Funny Things Iã¢â‚¬â„¢ll Never Do Again
When the Vocalisation in Your Head Just Keeps Talking
Ardent, even obsessive, fans of the novelist David Foster Wallace most rival their idol in the torrents of words they use to detail their devotion. And if there is one constant within this torrent, it'southward the extent to which readers see their own consciousness reflected in his novels and essays. Writing in 2008, presently after Wallace hanged himself at 46, A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times of Wallace's phenomenal vocalization: "Hyperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, nearly pathologically cocky-aware (and nigh incommunicable to quote in increments smaller than a thousand words) — it was something you instantly recognized even hearing it for the first fourth dimension. It was — is — the vocalism in your own head."
It was only a thing of fourth dimension until ane of these fans decided to accept that sentiment and run with it. Meet Daniel Fish. On Thursday this director's new cosmos, "A (radically condensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN (afterwards David Foster Wallace)" will open at the interdisciplinary Chocolate Factory theater in Long Island City, Queens. This is no accommodation or biopic: the script, which changes every functioning, as manipulated by Mr. Fish, is Wallace'southward voice itself, reading his work and giving interviews. Only audiences never hear that phonation straight: instead it pours, literally, into the heads of the five performers, who labor mightily to channel word for discussion the relentless blitz streaming into their headphones. (Wallace would no doubtfulness accept recognized this kind of contemporary theater tactic; y'all can imagine him giving it the "po-mo" label.)
"Information technology's really physical," said Jenny Seastone Stern, one of the performers (and, she added, a "pretty obsessive" Wallace fan). "Y'all're not trying to interpret anything he's saying in his words, yous're trying to let it come up through yous. It's pretty incredible the power his voice has — his words and his actual vocalization."
You could come across this power surging through Ms. Seastone Stern and her colleagues at a recent rehearsal, their first in the Chocolate Factory'south inviting white-brick theater. As their mouths raced to go on upwardly with Wallace'due south words, they moved through constricted, strangled poses. There was lots of kneeling and lunging and the scrunching shut of eyes as bodies moved in ways that seemed unbidden and somehow individual.
"Ane of the things I'g interested in is getting at a kind of intimacy," Mr. Fish wrote in an email, the day after that rehearsal. "DFW talks about this equally 'the erection of the heart' that certain pieces of music or writing requite the listener or reader. That the aesthetic experience is erotic and that this has to do with an intimacy with the person who made it. This is one of the things, peradventure the main thing, I'one thousand after hither."
Mr. Fish, a slender 44-twelvemonth-one-time with a tangle of night curls and a beard, discovered Wallace virtually five years ago and was immediately struck, he said, by how addictive he found the writing. He began thinking almost a Wallace-related projection during a residency at the University of Rochester in 2010 and came across audio recordings of Wallace while researching his idea.
Epitome
"I got actually, really taken with his vox and was surprised by how gentle it was," Mr. Fish said. "I didn't want to do something where there would exist characters or somebody would be playing David Foster Wallace. I really wanted to stay away from that and wanted to, for lack of a amend discussion, have a pure engagement with his words. The recordings became a way to do that. I loved them."
Mr. Fish is inappreciably solitary in his desire to engage artistically with Wallace'south words.
"A surprisingly large amount of people do contact u.s.," said Bonnie Nadell, Wallace's longtime agent and, along with his widow, the artist Karen Greenish, a trustee of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. She estimated that the trust receives at least one request a calendar week. "David Wallace'southward work seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people," Ms. Nadell said. "Everyone from college students who desire to perform something to people who want to do short films to theater people who want to direct something."
She said that she and Ms. Green agreed to nearly half of these proposals, trying to err on the side of generosity when they feel people'southward hearts are in the right place. (In Mr. Fish'south case a very long, very sincere letter and an intriguing concept did the trick.) "In a lot of ways we rely on our instincts," she said. "I feel like we're letting people try. And I sure hope information technology'southward skillful."
Brian Rogers, the Chocolate Factory'due south artistic director, who calls Wallace "the most important author of my adult life," had the reward of knowing Mr. Fish's previous work, which includes flick and video projects and runs from contemporary productions of classical works to nowadays-24-hour interval plays with an accent on linguistic communication and disparate source cloth. Mr. Fish received a Top x nod past Time Out New York last yr for the amazingly titled "Tom Ryan Thinks He's James Mason Starring in a Moving picture by Nicholas Ray in Which a Man'due south Affliction Provides an Escape from the Pain, Pressure level and Loneliness of Trying to Exist the Ultimate American Begetter, Simply to Bulldoze Him Farther Into the More Thrilling Though Possibly Lonelier Roles of Aficionado and Misunderstood Visionary."
"It's actually a loftier-wire act of a dissimilar kind," Mr. Rogers said, describing his feel of seeing a workshop of "A (radically condensed and expanded)" at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in October. Mr. Fish is asking his performers "to utilise their focus in a different style, that isn't nigh making the words sound elegant or eloquent," Mr. Rogers said. "He's letting the words simply exist as words."
He added: "I found it really emotional. The corporeality of empathy I developed for the whole act of information technology unfolding."
Knowing that the words Mr. Rogers is referring to are Wallace's it'south hard to avoid recalling what the novelist said about the whole point of books: to combat loneliness. One could, of course, brand the aforementioned claim for theater.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/theater/daniel-fishs-take-on-david-foster-wallace.html
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