Whammy! Experiments with dreams, self help and theatre at SIUE
Paul Peters | Nov 30, 2009 | Comments 0
by Paul Peters
It seems like an dangerous thing to say, especially in the day and age when marketing determines what entertainment gets produced, but Chuck Harper says proudly of his play, Whammy! The Seven Secrets to a Sane Self, “There is no story involved.”
Harper, who is a theatre professor at SIUE, says, “I know from experience that audiences get very tense at the theatre if there is no story.”
So he’s telling everyone he knows, and literally putting warnings on the door and in the program that there is not a story. When audiences know in advance that there isn’t going to be a story, he says, they stop looking for what isn’t there, and start seeing what is.
When he created Whammy! this past summer, Harper himself didn’t necessarily start off with a story, just the idea that he wanted to do something about the self help book industry in the U.S. He knew he wanted the play to feel like a dream, and sort of like the 1963 classic comedy film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
He went into production last summer without a conventional script, just this idea and the help of SIUE student actors and Baltimore choreographer Mikey Thomas.
When pushed by anyone to describe what the play was about, Harper tells a story about a very depressed individual who comes home one night and decides he’s going to take a large amount of pain medication and drink a bottle of Jack Daniels, essentially flipping a coin to see if he lives or not. As the drugs and booze take hold, the man lies on the couch and puts on his favorite movie, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Soon he slips out of consciousness, and wakes up later to find the movie has ended, and a self help infomercial is playing.
“And then he goes to sleep again,” says Harper, “and Whammy! is the dream he has just then.”
What ultimately became Whammy! is literally part dream and part self help book, with the spirit of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
To get the self help part, Harper has actors delivering lines directly from the self help books, and books related to them.
Harper says he had his first run in with self help several years ago, when a Tony Robbins book ultimately helped him to become a successful director.
These days, Harper says he’s a little more skeptical of what has become an enormously profitable branch of the publishing world.
“I know that it works, but I just don’t quite trust the people selling it,” he says. “If you go into Borders, the wall of self help books is just stunning. So there’s a part of me that was like, ‘This is just bullshit. This is so much bullshit.’”
He says Whammy! started off as a satire piece, poking fun at “self help, and all the nut jobs that are involved.”
But when he started researching, reading self help books, and “books about self help, books about books about self help, parodies of self help, critiques of self help,” he became more and more fascinated with the people who seek self help. The books, he says, often have personal stories of forlorn people, searching for ways out of desperate situations.
“Why,” Harper says he asked himself, “are so many people in the most affluent society in the history of the world so unhappy?”
Harper says that when using text that involved stories of hurt people seeking help, he was gentle with the stage presentation. But he was more playful when having the actors deliver the platitudes many self help books are based on.
“Sometimes,” he says, “we’ve taken them and put them in context. And sometimes they’re saying these words from these books in completely absurd contexts. In that way, it kind of messes with those texts a little bit.”
Harper felt like this material had the potential to be a bit heavy, if not dull. So, before the actors began working on the play with him, they all got together with popcorn and candy, and watched It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
“Not a lot of the movie left in the final play,” he says, but he feels the wacky spirit of the comedy worked its way into the core of the play.
Finally, Harper says, “I wanted the play to feel like you’re in somebody’s dream.”
So he had his actors journal their dreams for six weeks.
From their journals he pulled lines and images, then gave them actors assignments to build vignettes out of the dreams.
“The play really goes back and forth wildly between very, very sad stories that the actors are just delivering the words of this event from this person’s life, back and forth between that and these totally wacky dances,” he says. “If I didn’t tell people that it was about self help, I’m not sure they’d know that’s what it’s about. You would know from watching it that it’s sort of a happy joyful wacky celebration of really, really, really messed up people.”
“For some people,” he says, “it’s going to be a nightmare, that’s for sure, for other people it may be a very happy dream.”
The SIUE Theatre and Dance Department presents Whammy! The Seven Secrets to a Sane Self on December 2 -5, 11, and 12 at 7:30 pm, or at 2 pm on the December 6 and 13. Tickets are $10, $8 for seniors, non-SIUE students, SIUE alumni, faculty and staff. SIUE students get in FREE with student ID. Call (618) 650-2774 for info. Show is at the Metcalf Theatre.
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