Painted Pants, Parenting & Playwriting
In 2008 I decided to make a pair of jeans. That is to say I bought an old pair of jeans; spent two days manipulating family photos, printing iron-on transfers, (ruining a perfectly good iron to transfer them onto the jeans) then finally painting every inch; legs, bum, pockets and crotch; with a less than subtle palette of indigo, violet, grass green, blood red, sunflower yellow and wild orange. At first the kids thought I’d lost my mind but caught on fast; joining in the fun and adding their own touches of artistry; all the while making me feel like a seed planted deep in the garden of love.
Wearing those pants reminded me I could be an artist and a decent father; even when I was feeling like a selfish bastard. Then, a little while after I made them, I unearthed a sky blue faux-leather jacket in the local opportunity shop. Priced at fifty dollars, it was lined with sheepskin and had a single cigarette butt on the right hand sleeve. Fifty dollars was a lot considering I’d just thrown in my job and was still waiting for the freelance phone to ring — so when I saw it across a crowded room of old tweed suits, I reconciled myself to unrequited love. That afternoon Cate told me I was an idiot and sent me straight back to propose.#
It’s coming up to three weeks in Ridgewood and I still haven’t worn the pants. The jacket, yes, it’s the warmest I have. Cate still worries it will attract the wrong kind of attention; but I assure her it takes all kinds to make a city like New York and I’m just another part of the scenery. Besides, I need the boost its bright color injects into my weary psyche. The distraction of Ridgewood and Declan’s illness have kept darker preoccupations at bay — but today I can’t stop thinking that it’s only seven-thirty in the morning; my mood is as blue as my coat and the kids are already glued to the television.
Back home in Australia, Children’s programming runs on a tight schedule where episodes of their favorite shows occur once a day, sometimes as little as three times a week. Not so in the land of the free. Nickelodeon runs a channel twenty-four seven like a virtual witch with a gingerbread house made of cartoons. Callum in particular has become a Dora The Explorer addict; and while I applaud its educational content and ability to teach him Spanish at the age of three, there’s no way I’m going to let him indulge his habit for any longer than a couple of hours a day. Unfortunately he knows Dora is still there even when the TV is off; fifty million other children all enjoying her sweet jungle juice while his own dad is choking off the supply.
Rather than risk a tantrum I let them indulge a bit longer. Then I notice it’s colder than usual and the heating has stopped working. Fuck. I start obsessing about the boiler in the basement before catching wind of a foul smell permeating the apartment. Some days are worse than others and today my nostrils are full of it rancidness. Cate notes it too, but the source is inexplicable.
The smell lingers even though I have opened every window in the apartment. Cate and the kids have gone shopping while I turn blue with the cold, feeling blue, huddled in blue and reading the play Blackbird by Adam Rapp, having previously devoured Oleanna by David Mamet. I find both works vaguely misogynist, but at least one of the authors is wrestling with real characters and there’s something about the story that’s cathartic. The other play feels contrived and cynical. I love theatre that leaves me with more questions than answers; where the characters are so vivid they live on in my imagination long after the curtain comes down. But that takes more than just a great play — it takes a great production of the play.
I’ll always remember seeing the brilliant Irish actor Gabriel Byrne in a version of Eugene O’Neil’s A Touch Of The Poet. Directed by Doug Hughes and produced by the Round About Theatre Company; this classic American drama concerns an Irish Immigrant –Cornelius Melody (Byrne) who, having fought with the British in the Napoleonic Wars, lives with delusions of his own grandeur in Massachusetts. Penniless and vile tempered, he struts about in his weathered uniform and appears to be nothing more than a nasty drunk intent on milking his future son-in-law for all he can get.
Thirty minutes into the play I wanted to stab my eye out with a knitting needle just to experience something other than the torture I was receiving at the hands of O’Neil and his artistic collaborators. The staging felt flat, the actors flat-footed, the setting drab and the tones of brown and olive green might have been authentic, but they did nothing to keep me from wishing I was anywhere else. There’s nothing quite as excruciating as a bad night in the theatre. In a movie the pain can be acute, but there’s something about real live people boring you to death with the expertise of Chinese water torture, that really grates beyond Satan and all his pitchforks.
Interval arrived and I wanted to run; but, as always, the good manners my mum instilled in me barked like a drill sergeant and I girded my loins. One more act had to be endured out of respect for the actors, not to mention theatrical karma (let he who would like the audience stampeding out of his own production be the first to leave someone else’s). Lights down. Curtain up. Act Two.
The feeling that I’d been a complete idiot began slowly, like a worm creeping along my spine. Turns out the first act had only primed the gun. When Cornelius Melody’s potential son-in-law shunned both he and his daughter — the fuse was lit. The same actors were on stage; Gabriel Byrne was still striding about full of bluster and ruin; the lights, the set the costumes; none of them had altered and yet there was a palpable electricity in the air; like a storm brewing, only you couldn’t see it, you could only smell a change in the wind and sense the ions in the atmosphere.
Could it be that O’Neil had been preparing us all night for this one moment? Here was this drunken, intolerable fool of a man with his foul mouth and disgusting habits; his pathetic self-aggrandizing and selfish buffoonery and pride; a man whom the audience had grown as tired of as his family and yet — out of nowhere — his façade was falling away; and as it fell, our fascination grew. We watched in horror as the man beneath the posturing emerged like a grotesque flower blooming in real time. Byrne had measured the performance with utter perfection. Cornelius Melody’s self-loathing, his hatred of the British, his hollowness and self-degradation — every quality we had despised him for were turning, one by one, into failings for which we now felt compassion. The genius of O’Neil, thundered through our souls as he brought back the shadow of the Napoleonic war, then finally, the war within Cornelius Melody himself; a man who had given his soul to a country that would never accept him as ‘one of its own’. “I stood among them but not one of them”.
In the space of a heartbeat; the character quotes Lord Byron; Gabriel Byrne reaches deep into his psyche and Eugene O’Neil’s genius creates the prefect symmetry where story, character and dialogue collide with the force of the planets. “Among them but not one of them”. Melody had been repeating this phrase the entire play; yet suddenly it had landed a blow of such magnitude, the floor seemed to open beneath my seat. All night had been a journey to this one moment of catharsis and recognition — wrenching, mysterious, aggravating yet utterly rewarding and enlightening.
Only someone of O’Neil’s extraordinary vision and craft would have the balls to take an audience on a ride like that and make it pay off. Only an actor of Gabriel Byrne’s integrity would have the courage to let us hate him for so long — and wait all night for one moment in which to share with us the purest distillation of the human spirit in all its beautiful ugliness.
Which taught me something I’ve tried never to forget. Good theatre is like life. It takes time to reveal itself. You need patience, you need to invest and you have to trust. Not always easy and I fail as much as I succeed; as an artist, as a human being and by extension, as a parent. A play you can always re-write or start over. Not so a child. If the relationship between parent and progeny is like clay, then I suppose we try to mould it a little every day. Everyday the clay dries out a little. Eventually you’re left with the sum of your love and shortcomings mixed in with the strength and character of your son or daughter. But clay is just clay. There’s nothing more challenging than flesh and blood.