Piehole loves playing with material.  Yes, we love our paper, our cardboard, our felt, and our yarn.  But we also love experimenting with source material of all kinds.  Our rehearsal room is always brimming with source texts drawn from history, literature, and our own pens, as well as heaps of sometimes rigorous, sometimes recklessly shallow dramaturgical research.  We spend much of our time excitedly inventing different ways to share this material with our audience, be it through spoken dialogue, projected text, or the play of shadows across a stretched sheet.  But comes a time in any process when you have to start editing, and some of our most beloved gems end up hacked away from the final piece.

And so, we’re starting up a new segment here on the Pie Roll: THE CHOPPING BLOCK – a space for us to share some of our favorite material that won’t make its way to the Piehole stage.  (Piehole reserves the right to change our minds and use the material anyway.)

For our first installment, check out this letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne to his fiancé Sophia Peabody.  Hawthorne was only at Brook Farm for seven months, and left entirely disgruntled and disillusioned with the entire endeavor.  But on his first days on the farm he was singing quite a different tune.  A small portion of this letter appeared in our April 2013 workshop of Old Paper Houses, but the entire thing is an absolute treat.

I’ve always tried to avoid long, meaningful conversations with authority figures of any kind. Since I either refuse or cannot seem to seek out advice, recommendations, or insight from those who are wiser than I, it’s always a shock of raw, shattering joy when someone smart gives me a tip. I will never forget the day my sophomore year poetry workshop leader (then younger than I am now) looked past my overly earnest, drecky poetry to see the desperately floundering person behind it and said “you should check out Bernadette Mayer. I think you’d like her.” So it happened that the day I managed to sit in a cold marble library reading “The Golden Book of Words,” a chapbook from 1978, was a time of great personal growth. The first thing I noticed about this early work from Bernadette Mayer was that she mentioned beer all the time. Having recently taken an interest in this poetic topic, I thought: “nice.” The second thing I noticed was that I was crying.  It was boundless, and it was boring. I had been given my first piece of truly good advice.

Beginning with a sonnet, written to her then-partner, Lewis, Mayer’s “poems transgress the seasons of two years” of freeing the language and getting cold in late 1970’s New England. In these poems domesticity is a gentle tyrant – shaping the days and the work while creating unique spaces for the mind to wander – can we ever write well whilst waiting for the milk to cool?

We’re gearing up for a good-old-fashion-Piehole-space-storm tomorrow night with set designer Krit Robinson. In the meantime, feeling pretty excited about/inspired by this 1970s utopic vision involving farming…IN SPACE:

Last night we taught our new cast members Dan and Benoit the choreography for “New England is Awful,” which opened the spring workshop of Old Paper Houses, and is based on Bernadette Mayer’s poem “Lookin’ Like Areas of Kansas.” We taught them to drink boilermakers and how to talk about each other, and of course, how “to go out and get cold.” Here, it looks like everybody just got off a spaceship, which is actually appropriate given how alien this perspective on New England can seem! In fact, in creating this choreography, we decided to treat Mayer’s poem as though we are aliens and only have her poem as our guide to New England.

The government shutdown has finally ended, but what was it all about? How did our lawmakers end up in a place of such stark division that they could no longer function?

WELL in rehearsal we’ve been conducting a couple of town meetings surrounding the topic of whether or not the people in the town should time travel back to the 1970s to live on a farm together, and what the charter of their new community should be. To add to the challenge, all decisions needed to be made based on consensus.

I guess, though, I can begin to understand what a difficult job Congresss has – I mean, you have some people who “don’t want to be forced to participate” while others are keen on there being a daily group meditation retreat, early in the morning! What if some people are morning people, and others are late night people? What then? Some people are interested in working hard and feeling connected to the earth, while others fear the draining effort of farming might prevent them from pursuing other interests, like weaving baskets and doing laundry. And worst of all, once you’ve all settled on a plot of land to occupy, if it turns out there are crystals in the ground, how do you reach consensus about what to do with them – do you try to use them for healing purposes, or sell them, as the basis for a new business model?

GOD governing is SO HARD.

“You’ve done all this before
Nothing happens
Let’s go over it again”
-Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day

Last night Piehole began the fall development sessions for Old Paper Houses. We are excited to work with the new performers in our midst, Benoit Johnson and Dan Sterba. We’re back to shoveling snow and chopping wood, and gearing up to create the Big Non-Event.

We spent August and September culling our way through more research on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brook Farm (the 1840s utopian community that Hawthorne briefly attended), and more of Bernadette Mayer’s writing. For the next month and a half we’ll be playing with this material and generating new stuff of our own. AND we’ve asked frequent Pieholer Jessie Renee Hopkins to step into the role of Head Writer, making this Piehole’s first collaboration with a dedicated (living) writer! All this in preparation for our run at the Connelly Theater next March.

During the coming weeks, we will be posting more updates about our process and our various sources and inspirations, so check back in with us soon. As we embark on the second phase of Old Paper Houses, this 1894 quote from a former Brook Farm resident seems particularly relevant:

“It is often asked, ‘Why has no one written a complete history of this queer little Community, giving its bearings and results upon the social problems, and describing the extent to which Fourierism was adopted?’ Perhaps the reason is that it never had any result, except upon the individual lives of those who dwelt there. And perhaps the best way to give an idea of Brook Farm is simply to sketch what one saw and did there. It was a beautiful idyllic life which we led, with plenty of work and play and transcendentalism and it gave place to the Roxbury poorhouse.”

Right, so…nothing happened. Let’s go over it again.