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Show THE FUTURE OF TOMORROW, TODAY: The Library, Salt Lake City's New Cultural Center by Bart Madson really wanted to make fun of the new downtown library. I wanted to criticize it as a wasteful luxury that could have had its resources reallocated to more beneficial of the new effects. (The price-tabuilt have could many other library smaller libraries throughout the county ) I wanted to do all tlvt, but it's just too damn cool. You have probably watched the construction process as you rode by on TRAX or in your car up 400 South. It seemed like it would never get finished, but it was pretty interesting to watch the rnetal skeleton take shape, with the spirahng walkway around the side and the towering cranes overhead. Now it is virtually completed, and it makes the old library look like a dump. The new library is just really fun. I don't think there is a more interesting building in the city. It combines all of the features of a conventional library with a few twists. For example, you can get a non fat. double shot, soy mocha chino at the coffee bar on the main floor and then swing by some of the shops that tastefully fill up the outer ring. There is a comic book store and a game store (I think) and also a magazine store to get on current events. (Although it does lack the vividness you can only find at Bob's Magazine, another cultural center of sorts.) And making it clear that this new library is meant to be more than just a library, there is an auditorium for concerts, plays and readings. It looks like the new library will become a cultural center host ! g An J. Rogers, author of the award- winning plays "White People" and "Seeing the Elephant," who in person turned out to be just as intense in speech as he isn't in demeanor (we could probably get away with using his first name here), agreed to meet with me while in town workshopping a new play, "Madagascar," as part of the Salt Lake Acting Company's New Play Sounding Series. me, the work of J.T. Rogers is an act of faith in language. In his pl.iys, I hear a language that metes out redemption even when it fails, as if its function was precisely that to bring characters right to outermost edges of expression. So Rogers's comment that "we live in a linguistically devolving time" rose over our coffee cups to loom largely and heavily over the rest of the conversation. It struck me as a particular kind of lament, a lament that perhaps explains why Rogers chooses to work through theater, a dying art form and one driven by the spoken word that we don't hear anywhere else anymore. To "7 i, , .... . So, having admitted that the new city library is an architectural marvel and cultural jewel of down- town, my only complaint would be that around every corner found myself consumed by the fear that I was about to to plunge my death. Yes, the place is cool and even worth all the money that has been pumped into it, but it is also a little terrifying for those who view heights from which you could fall and die with a bit of disease. And the strange thing is that I am not really that terrified of heights, but the place became unnerving at times. I am just saying this now so that people don't when they visit completely bug-ou- t have not prepared because they 1 scrotum-tightenin- )J march 6, 2003 I h little of our language is actually used, Rogers continued, and that little is used more and more to obscure than to clarify. He spoke of our "inability to actually talk So about things." For so many of us, our initial, most basic reaction to theater is that "people don't really talk like that." But talking like that saying the things people don't say in words we don't actually use somehow seems to make things more real, rather than less realis- things against prevalent opinion and to not reinforce the status quo. People but not enough people want to hear things said that aren't being said, and movies and books don't do that." Rogers's characters approach themselves through their language. The time structure of "Madagascar" is so fluid, and its plot is so filtered through the characters themselves that the audience is asked to exercise faith in their language after all, it's all we have to go on. THE ANNOYING CRITICS ASK It's rare and wonderful when RED Magazine f iI 1 I: III m t - ' fgir- -- . n I ? ' -- v if : ' Jt: if t it I ' ; ? . . Af , u -- rj;s man, who tesembles a chubby Stephen "Stiif" Coles, is looking up to avoid making you get to actually ask authors themselves for their opinions on their work. You ask a few of the questions that have been nagging at you, forget to ask most of the more important ones, end up sounding less intelligent that you would like and pester the author with the great big stupid question, "What does that mean?" "Why do microeconomists keep making an appearance in your plays?" I asked Rogers. "Economics is one of those professions that shapes the entire 'Weltanschauung', the worldview, of the people who work in it," he explained. Why Rome as a setting? "Because of the weight of all that has been there," Rogers said, "It's sad in a poetic sense." He went on to compare the play to a ghost story, with themes of a haunting punishment preoccu- pying its characters. Could you describe the process of playwriting to me? "I can describe my process," he says, "but I can't tell you about anyone else's." For Rogers, it begins with an image, one line of script, or, as was the case with "Seeing the Elephant," a joke he heard. "Madagascar" started with the feeling evoked by listening to interesting environment with potentially devastating results. Everyone will enjoy the place, from the seasonally unemployed construction worker to the millionaire philanthropist to even the financially comfortable chiropractor. No one will be turned aside and all will be able to check out the free stuff. Watching people Jeave, enthusiastically walking out to their cars with grocery bags loaded to the upper-middle-cla- Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Rogers wanted to capture that "grippingly sad" feeling with the play. The second stage of the process, for Rogers, consists of free association on paper. It's about making connections between characters and playing with those connections. Then, what Rogers termed the "verbal architecture" of the play is built. What audiences don't realize, Rogers said, is that plot is just a vehicle for arriving at certain "nuggets," certain speeches. The plot is there because "audiences need to realize what's at stake for a character," he said. And as for the big question What does it mean? Rogers, like most artists, doesn't know. When asked what something "means," he replies that "It means the audience should feel the hair rise the back of their neck." But Rogers doesn't consider the audience when writing. In many ways, the audience only begins to intrude in the process at the reading of a draft. At on "Madagascar's" first reading at SLAC, Rogers was able to ask the audience questions, mainly about how well people followed the story after his toying with r the structure. In regard to the experience of having a play read aloud for the first time in front of an audience, Rogers quoted Albee, saying, "You watch audiences to see not whether they approve, but what's non-linea- allowed." : ! 'itf iiai. I - .1 1 . iu ... others! Glass! I really think public buildings should be idiotchildfool-proof- . Barring the installation of protective netting like they have in circuses under the trapeze act, it's only a matter of time before the inevitable happens. But I guess it doesn't make sense to get all squeamish about it. After all, we knew that eventually people would die when they put in TRAX lines. It was only a matter of time before someone got hit and died, and I can recall at least two fatalities from TRAX acci : iritis . dents. Oh well, such is life, public progress must go forth. The library is a really cool place, though. It has something for everyone. I even envision it becoming a gathering place for those who wish to ingest psychotropic drugs in an it! ! III) V V. has in fact been built in the new library, but made even more terrifying by making the sides out of glass, with handrails that appear in some places and then disappear at as i ' g themselves...the new city library is the bane of the acrophobic. Why do I say such a thing? Well, first off, are glass elevators really necessary? Did Willie Wonka design the new library? Glass elevators belong in chocolate factories and Las Vegas hotels. Some people don't need to stand on a platform with only glass surrounding them as they ascend 150 feet into the air. Second, I am convinced that someone has gone into my subconscious and copied the image I had from a really bizarre nightmare in which I was running in slow motion from people wearing black sunglasses down a hellish, spiraled, staircase with no visible supports holding it up. Imagine my amazement when I discover that the staircase indeed exists and QUESTIONS i;r Hill r Mi - 4- If theater has a future, it will come through its unique ability to "actually talk about things," Rogers said. "The future of theater is to say THE ROLE OF THEATER I f this month. tic. R8 ! Interview With Playwright J.T. Rogers Rachael Sawyer By ing all sorts of events, like the upcoming author signing by Neil Gaiman, who will be in town later r his scrotum even tighter. brim with books and DVDs reminded me of looting, and alsS that a library is the epitome of community. Everyone shares the financial burden through taxes, and then they get to come in and look at all the cool stuff and borrow it for a while if they really like it. It's a great idea and our library is the e, state-of-the-a- rt badass of public libraries. Here's to you, new downtown city library...long may you serve as a center of culture and community, and hopefully few will be the people who either (a) fall to their deaths or (b) have complete psychological collapses because of your e design. frightening death-trap-lik- bartred-mag.co- m THE BIG APPLE ANDTHE BRINY LAKE Rogers initially had reservations about staging his plays in Salt Lake City. But he considers SLAC's production of "Seeing the Elephant" to be his best experience ever staging any of his work. After that, he said he told himself "You know, you shouldn't be such a cretinous New York snob." Rogers described New York City as "the best and the worst." He said that the opinions of the head theater critic of the New York Times dictate the theatrical landscape of the entire country for years after they are published. In the theater world, "If it doesn't happen in New York, it doesn't exist." But unlike most theater companies, "SLAC is almost freakishly without an agenda," Rogers said. Most companies will only stage whatever plays got rave reviews in the Times, but SLAC stages world premieres and avant-gardplays that never get produced e elsewhere. The thing Salt Lake City as an artistic environment offers, said Rogers, is "an advantageous springboard for creativity and art, is opposition pressure. It's having something that works against you to push back against." And what SLAC offers is a forum for those unique Utah voices, with productions like last year's "Cowboys, Cabbies, and the Tree of the Weeping Virgin." Who knows? Theater may still be alive and well outside New York City after all. rachael red-- nag .com 1 |
