Eric Bogosian
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Solo
May 23, 2000.
It's late, I'm alone in the office. Just cranked out another show at the Jane Street. Afterwards I rode my bike back through the rain and lightening on the bike track along the Hudson down to Ararat Productions Inc. headquarters.
It's a trip doing this thing eight times a week. I sleep a lot so I can get it up for the ninety minutes of sweat and holler. Audiences have been good - a mixture of people who are hip to what this is about and what I like to think of as the "deer in the headlights" audience. I look out at them and they look confused.
I get to the theater about three hours before the show, eat, nap (to clear my mind more than anything), do a voice warm-up, shave, stretch, drink coffee, run lines, dress. Just in case you were interested. Because my throat gets a little whack, I have to stay quiet most of the day. And then when I'm wide awake around midnight I do constructive things like this. Or not.
Anyway, before I do anything else, I'd like to say a few words about solo performance. I get tons of e-mail asking for advice about making solos. If you're not interested in making solos, skip down a few paragraphs. But if you are, first, buy Jo Bonney's book, "Extreme Exposure" and get hip to the tradition, which is a long one, going all the way back to the beginning of human existence on this planet.
Secondly, see some solos, not just the ones your friends are making, but anything that involves a solo performer, musicians, comedians, dancers, whatever. If you want to make solo performance, then get hip to what you like and don't like to see and hear. Then I would recommend making the kind of thing you would like to see yourself. (As simplistically stupid as this sounds, it's obvious many people don't follow the dictum. They make what they think the audience wants to see. And you have to have ESP to know that.)
And ask yourself, why am I making solo work? WHY WHY WHY? Myself, I started doing this stuff for two reasons. A) I wanted to write plays and couldn't afford to produce them myself (after a number of attempts, "the early plays": "Sheer Heaven", "The New World", "Garden", etc.). I figured, I would make a play with one person in it. B)Around the end of the seventies, I was performing in clubs on the same stages that punk bands would perform. I dug the intensity and the malevolence. But I didn't like playing one obnoxious asshole all the time (Ricky Paul), so I decided to create a bunch of obnoxious "men inside" and that was how I started making solos.
I didn't do it to get gigs. I didn't do it to make money. I didn't do it to be seen. I did it because I wanted to do it. I liked doing it. Partly because it scared me. And as far as I'm concerned, that fear and the intensity of throwing myself around onstage is something real. And I like that.
Maybe you want to make solos because you want to be discovered? Maybe you want to make solos because you have a crying need to tell your life's story to an audience? Maybe you just want people to like you. If that's the case, any of the above, I'm not your guy.
I just saw a documentary about the Sex Pistols called "The Filth and the Fury". Wow. It made me so happy. Because here I am, slugging away onstage every night, with producers and critics breathing down my neck and sometimes I forget why I'm doing it in the first place. Which is that I need to scream, I need to say lots of words about things that are crammed in my head, I need to perform in front of people. I need to act. I saw that film, with Johnny Rotten drenching people with words and spit, and I thought, he's my hero.
I mean, I'm obviously a guy in a theater, not some music lunatic who changed the way people around the world think. But still, I guess there's an attempt at a degree of authenticity. I guess that's a kind of Romanticism. That anyone is really doing what they say they're doing. And I guess walking some kind of freak line and at the same time seducing an audience, well, that's art isn't it? Seducing people to follow you down your own internal mental plumbing?
And in fact, nothing's pure. One aspect of my performance that may go unnoticed is that in New York anyway, these shows are "commercial", that is to say, there are producers who put them up. This is not "non-profit." Why do I do commercial runs? (I've done tons of non-commercial shows.) Because that way I can stay in one theater for awhile and we can have a box office and sell advance tix and be easy to find and all that stuff. It sucks when you've worked hard on a show and then it comes and goes and people stop you on the street and say "Oh, were you doing a show? I'm sorry I missed it." This run keeps me in one place for awhile so I can be found. Or not.
Plus, if the show is making money, I think I should get some of it, since I'm doing all the work. (Not to disparage, say PS 122 who pay me very well. Although they've invited me for long runs, I personally don't think I should be taking up four months of a non-profit theater's time/space.)
So anyway, producers means investors, means there's an investment here. And depending on what happens, the money is made or lost. I'm working with the same guys who have put up three other commercial runs of my solos, namely Fred Zollo and Nick Paleologus. They drive me crazy sometimes, but look at it this way: on the first show, "FunHouse", they lost money. On "Sex, Drugs Rock & Roll" they made money. They broke even on "Pounding Nails" so it's hard for me to think of them as money-grubbing or anything like that. They put the shows up at risk, because they like them (and as I write this, they probably won't make much on this one.)
By the way, if you find the tickets too expensive (me and the producers have many "conversations" about this), there are always seats in the balcony, which are actually bar stools, that are more than excellent. And late on Friday nights, it's $25 bucks. Or e-mail us here at Ararat and if there's any other kind of discount, like a special code or something, we'll tell you what it is. So come on down. Besides, I went to the record store yesterday and bought the "Slipknot" and "System of a Down" albums and it cost me forty bucks. SO FUCK IT, just spend the money.
Where were we? Oh yeah, so the thing is, I get caught up in all this PRESSURE. And all I really care about is what happens from the time I step on stage until the time I walk off seventy-five minutes later. The critics throw in their two cents, the "average theater goer" sits there pissed-off and I just want to HOOK UP. And I do, and it's good.
[Oh and could I say one thing about critics? Why don't they just answer one simple question, Are you happy you saw this show? Were you bored? Did you laugh? That's actually three questions. They get so wound up trying to shove things into pigeon holes. Analyzing! As in "ANAL". Here's the deal, if you dick around too much in your review, people can't tell if YOU liked it. I remember when I was interviewed by Bryant Gumbel on the Today Show when we released "Talk Radio." We're on air and he's giving me this really hard time about how "dark" the material is, and what am I saying and all this shit and then we go to commercial and he tells me he loved the movie. WHY DOESN'T HE JUST SAY THAT? I'll tell you why, because he thinks he's got to interpret things for the masses. WHO ASKED? That's all I want to say right now on this subject.]
I get lonely. If I were in a theater company, there would be people to talk to in the dressing rooms. All that stuff. Instead I have to spend a lot of time alone. Because the show is a strain on my vocal chords, I can't really talk much during the day. And I get so wound up doing the show, I sort of bounce around in my head for about four hours after the show. ( Surf that internet! Bikinibabes.com! ) I'm the writer, so the writer doesn't stop by to visit. Jo Bonney is the director and she sees me all the time anyway. So it's kind of twilight zone-esque.
All the same, the show being fun and hard to do, I stay focused on it. It's like having hardcore sex every night at eight. You've got to have a taste for it. And I do. But I don't do much else when I'm doing the show.
I hope you can make it by. I will tour this show next year. But I don't think I'm writing another solo after this. The dog is done. Time for the couch. I'll just do "Worst of" shows after this.
