[boxhead]. Darren O'Donnell

      Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

      LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

      O’Donnell, Darren, 1965-

      Boxhead / Darren O’Donnell. -- ist ed.

      A play.

      ISBN 978-1-55245-210-3

      I. Title.

      PS8579.D64B69 2008 C812’.6 C2008-906014-8

      SOME OF DARREN’S THOUGHTS ON COLLABORATION

      I’m most proud of the fact that [boxhead] wasn’t my idea; the theatrical challenge of a show entirely about a guy with a box on his head was something that came from director Chris Abraham and actor Paul Fauteux. As far as Chris remembers it, they were working on Peter Handke’s Kaspar, and dealing with language and reason as a kind of prison, game or box for the character. They approached me to work with them on a new project because Chris was curious to see how I would respond to the very actorly Paul. I’m always cranky about representational theatre, so trying to throw stuff that would irritate Paul became a primary motivation for me. I’m proud of all of this because it was the first large-scale collaboration on my part, the first time I had taken someone’s constraints, run with them and come up with something better than any of us could have generated alone.

      But back to irritating Paul. At the time, he was my idea of the worst sort of actor: National Theatre School trained, with a need to understand every line, a desire for every word to make sense; he insisted on comprehending what he was saying at every point, as if this were, somehow, the standard human condition. Which was a problem for me, since I had no clear idea of what the hell the show was about and was defiantly proud of that fact.

      Chris was little help in this matter, searching as he always seems to be for a one-to-one relation between the things that happen in the show and a subconscious rationale that was completely clear, clean and transparent to consciousness. You know, what directors are supposed to do. I thought it was too Freudian an approach, excavating the text for the ‘real’ explanation behind the bizarre things that were happening. I wanted to create a show that would remain outside the grasp of rational thought, that questioned the boxheadedness of this acutely rational approach to life and hovered just outside of the audience’s understanding. It seemed to me, however, that to attempt this while still completely understanding the show myself was impossible. If I could rationally comprehend the show, then, chances were, the audience could too. So the three of us scrapped a lot, while still having a respectful fun; in the end, this collaborative tension between us produced what has become my most successful play.

      Collaboration is a tricky business. One of its exciting paradoxes is that one’s success in a collaborative endeavour is often inversely proportional to the assertion of your own agenda –or, to put it the other way around, it’s directly proportional to your ability to put your agenda on hold and incorporate others’ desires and insights. But there are a lot of personal-issue pitfalls that can interfere with this seemingly easy task:

      1 The narcissism of small differences, Freud’s term for that tendency to dislike those who most remind you of yourself. The only way through this, it seems to me, is a sort of spiritual acceptance that things are the way they are: your current collaborators are the only collaborators you could possibility be working with since they are, in fact, staring at you from across the table.

      2 Rejecting an idea because it’s not yours. That’s a famous one. The better the idea, the more comprehensive the rejection.

      3 The inability to tell someone that his or her idea sucks. This is a basic skill that needs to be mastered, and really good collaborations develop techniques for this. In my previous company, Pow Pow Unbound, we used to have a little song about how stupid the person was.

      4 The inability to propose an idea you know is bad. Bad ideas often contain the seeds of good ideas, so it’s best to blurt them out and enjoy the ridicule.

      5 Thin skin.

      6 The tendency to enjoy compliments over criticism.

      7 Fear of failure. An obvious one, but no less obvious should be the fact that an easy way to raise your success rate is to raise your failure rate. Fail often: take more risks and make more mistakes–eventually you’re bound to succeed at something. It’s a statistical fact.

      As I’ve mentioned, the initial idea for [boxhead] came from Chris and Paul, but another key individual was actor/playwright Alex Poch-Goldin, who gave me a challenging bit of pre-emptive criticism when he poked at me about my anti-racism polemic, White Mice, asking which ‘issue’ I was going to tackle next. This was at the height of Issue Mania, when it was tough to find art that wasn’t engaged with one prefabricated issue or another. White Mice certainly was an issue play, but one that I felt came honestly and had nothing to do with opportunism. Fuck you, Alex, I thought, and I resolved to make sure not only that the next show would not be an issue play, but that I would make an issue of it by writing the stupidest thing I could manage. Without Alex’s collaborative participation, [boxhead] might have ended up being a show about, say, living with the disability of a box on your head. Luckily, Alex intervened, and we ended up with a show that climaxed with a fading god tricking a cloned geneticist into showing his penis to the audience so that the god can siphon off some of the audience’s riveted attention in order to live longer.

      Which brings me to that particular moment in the show. I believe it’s fully rationalized and a logically necessary part of the story, but, in the interest of full disclosure, it began as simply a desire to demonstrate how weak we are when a naked penis is in the room – few people are able to drag their eyes off this slightly stinky tag of flesh. This, it seemed to me, was just another manifestation of humanity’s (or a particular humanity’s) boxheadedness. The magnetic-like attraction of a naked cock might have something to do with cultural phallocentrism or something else, but, whatever it is, it certainly is a sociocultural construction and a really funny one. I’m a bit of an exhibitionist, as any of my friends can tell you – not because it gives me any sexual charge, but because the whole prohibition against public nudity – our natural state – is so funny and puritanical that it requires constant ridicule.

      Anywayyyyy. Collaboration. Theatre is often quite an atomized affair, with various elements of a play being designed in isolation and without the participation of others. This leads to some funny situations. We see fully designed costumes that the actors have to accept with little input, sets that are completed before actors take their first step, and whole conceptual themes that are imposed long before first rehearsal. This lack of faith in the collaborative process is driven by expediency, as time is at a premium and anything that can be nailed down and quantified is, and as soon as possible. A classic scenario is the moment following the first read-through, when the director turns to the stage manager and asks how long the show ran. Stopwatches often direct shows, with the core of the creative team unable to trust their feeling on the pace of the show. If it feels slow, it IS slow – a stopwatch will not be able to change that feeling, no matter what information it provides. It’s common for the stopwatch to take over the role of the director and it can end up dictating adjustments to pace based entirely on some notion of the ideal time the show should occupy.