Thank You For Listening: Notes From Steve Danziger, Playwright of MOONS OF JUPITER / TALES FROM THE SCHMINKE TUB
[#FromTheArchive: 2014]
These notes were originally published in Steve Danziger’s MOONS OF JUPITER / TALES FROM THE SCHMINKE TUB in 2014 — now available to download for free or by donation from the OS Open Access library. This project put into public print circulation a pair of short plays for a single actor, originally performed by Haskell King at Center Stage, NY, in 2004–05, as a production of the TerraNOVA Collective. Haskell returned as our special guest for the release performance of these works at VON on Bleecker Street in New York City, on December 6, 2014.
Also available on the OS Medium from this original publication (and referenced in these notes) is Elæ Moss’s essay on its production, “All the World’s a Page: Editorial Notes on Orality in Translation.”
I came to writing late, and not knowing what to write, I figured I would write for theater, because I had always loved listening to people speak. The problem with this was, aside from a production of Peter Pan I was forced to endure on a grade school class trip, and a production of Bye, Bye Birdie I was forced to endure in a high school assembly, I knew nothing about theater.
Looking for models, I read a lot of plays. But I didn’t understand how to recalibrate my reading, how to make the transition from prose, with its inconspicuous formatting, to the published play, with its constant clarifying intrusions, and, my memory still tainted by the abominations of the Allaire State Park players and the Marlboro High School student body, I thought maybe to consider another genre. But then I read Glengarry Glen Ross. On the page, Mamet’s plays are so stark as to read more like concrete poetry than exchanges between humans; I had no idea what was going on (and I had yet to read Pinter), but I loved the urgency of the characters, and the ambiguity created by everything not said. So, I thought this was how you format an intriguing play: you note only what’s necessary, you let your characters speak the way they speak, and stay out of their way as much as you can. Then the actors and the directors make their choices, everyone involved takes collaborative ownership, and hopefully, the thing comes alive when it’s performed.
The approach worked fine for the productions of Moons of Jupiter and Tales from the Schminke Tub, but what I never considered was how my formatting choices might transfer to a context where the plays would be presented as work to be read, not necessarily performed.
So when this publication became a possibility, and I suggested that Lynne just print them as is, her response was kind, patient, and tonally reminiscent of how one might speak to a benign imbecile that you know means well.
Lynne [Elæ Moss] is much more articulate about our resulting collaboration, the mechanics of reading, and the art and craft of publishing in general, so I’ll direct you to her essay, and hope it will suffice for me to just offer this:
I have always loved the kind of people that laugh at their own jokes, especially jokes that no one else understands, strangers who come up next to you at a bar, or on a train, or on a line, and talk endlessly about themselves with great urgency, who evidently have something terribly important to share with you, though you can’t exactly understand what it is, whose psyches seem to originate from the fourth dimension, and at some point, in the middle of the maelstrom, make you wonder, where did this person come from? And why in the world am I being told these things?
Thank you for listening.
Steve Danziger is the pen name of Steve Rosenstein. He has no idea why this is a big deal, but his friends find it endlessly confusing. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, the land of his birth, but grew up in Marlboro, NJ, where his arrest record included (in unrelated incidents) inciting a riot and urinating on a clown. Renouncing gainful employment, he received his MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York, and is currently a PhD student at Binghamton University. His work has appeared in Fiction, The Coffin Factory, Word Riot, The Brooklyner, Anemone Sidecar, Locust Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Florida Studies, and The Wall Street Journal. His reviews and essays can be read online at Open Letters Monthly, where he is a contributing editor.
