Source Material

Meta, meta, meta ...

So, while exploring evidence of crises developing ten years ago, I am also reading over journal entries from the Dobama's Night Kitchen rehearsal process for The Gulf, a play about the Persian Gulf War, which occurred ten years before that.

On midnight, January 16, 1991 I and a few dozen others participated in a performance art piece called Desert Scream, which took place next to Mem Aud. The director/creator of the project stated he was not commenting on this war (which had not yet begun, but would start the following evening, Eastern Time) but about war in general. When war happens, people die. Lots and lots of people. Horrors occur, people are displaced, there is great confusion and the loss of hope. That was the point.

Hundreds witnessed the event. A small number turned out with American flags to protest the protest, but they stood silently and watched, because there were no words to argue with, just images. And, you know, Peter Gabriel, because at that point in history, anybody staging a movement piece used that soundtrack. Everybody.

When the event was over, we the performers left, and the hippies took over. They started singing Give Peace a Chance and, I don't know, Kumbaya.

Okay, that was trite. They didn't sing Kumbaya. Sorry.

Speeches were made. And words failed.


Desert Scream
1991 Version


Desert Scream
2001 "The Gulf" Version

It's a mystery

There exists a spotty paper trail of our pregnancy with Calvin. Nothing like the weight of evidence of our pregnancy with the girl almost two years later -- we watched that pregnancy with a vengeance, ourselves and our medical team.

No, we have a few "growing belly" photos, and my sporadic journal entries -- nothing like the outpouring of writing that came after. But having never delved into them until now, I am shocked and saddened by what I am finding. There's no magic bullet, no "a-ha" moment. It sounds like a typical pregnancy, if one of the more unpleasant ones.

The AFP blood tests indicated abnormalities -- but couldn't say what they were. The ultrasounds were excellent. And my wife would suddenly take to her bed, in great discomfort and pain and illness, unable to sleep or relax. And I was deeply troubled.

She had pre-eclampsia. That's it. It's vague, but it's true and we didn't know. Re-experiencing it in this day-to-day fashion is disturbing. And sad. It's was a mystery and we had no clue as to what was at stake.

Google Alerts

As years go by I am somewhat interested in how certain things vanish from the Internet. Some things never do, like nude pictures. But articles can, especially when they were published in periodicals that 1) closely guarded their content from the beginning or 2) go out of business.

Perhaps they have seriously revamped their website, and everything before 20xx has been deleted from the server. That seemed to be the case for nytheatre.com, which had deleted the review of I HATE THIS from their database. Google alerts let me know this morning that it has been restored. Huzzah!

I had a very moving, though at the time, somewhat distressing encounter with the reviewer following that particular performances. She asked me, somewhat tremulously, if it gets better. I told her it gets different.

New book

They Were Still Born: Personal Stories about Stillbirth

Product Description
Stillbirth, defined as the death of an infant between 20 weeks gestation and birth, is a tragedy repeated 30,000 times every year in the United States. That means more than 80 mothers a day feel their babies slip silently from their bodies, the only sound in the delivery room their own sobs. Eighty stillborn babies a day means heartbroken families mourn the death of children who will never breathe, gurgle, learn to walk or go to school.

In 2006, Atlas became one of those mothers who left the hospital with empty arms; her second daughter, Beatrice Dianne, was stillborn at 36 weeks. Reaching out for comfort, she realized a dire need shared by so many others like her and so was born a collection of new essays by writers each sharing their firsthand experiences with stillbirth. Not limited to mothers, she has selected mothers, fathers, and grandparents, all of whom have first person narratives to offer readers.

Grieving parents will turn to the book for the comfort of knowing they are not alone on this painful path, for validation of their babies' lives, and for guidance from those who have gone before them. Finally, They Were Still Born will inspire readers to write their own stories, as well as show them how to do so. No parent- or grandparent-to-be sets out planning to purchase They Were Still Born. Unfortunately, there will always be readers-devastated, grieving, and searching for voices to help them through-who need it.

About the Author
Janel C. Atlas is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in various regional and national publications. Since her daughter's stillbirth, Atlas has written extensively about pregnancy and infant loss and spoken with many leading researchers in the field. She studied English Literature at Messiah College (PA), and now lives in Delaware with her husband and daughters.

No sh*t.

Always love to see how people will react when the subject pops up. We were watching Sherlock on PBS last night, a modern interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes myth set in 21st century London. It's brilliant.

I'll cut to the chase ...

SPOILER ALERT

One of the victims tried to scrawl the word "Rachel" into the wooden floor with her fingernails as she was dying. The police do a little research and find that she had a stillborn child fourteen years ago named Rachel. Lestrade, Holmes and Watson are at the crime scene, trying to deduce the significance of this clue, and how it relates to the murder suspect, who has been somehow driving people to kill themselves.

Watson: Maybe he talks to them, maybe he used the death of her daughter somehow....

Sherlock: That was ages ago, why would she still be upset?

(Everyone in the room is shocked into silence, which takes Holmes a brief moment to comprehend. He walks over to Watson.)

Sherlock: (quietly) Not good?

Watson: A bit not good, yeah.

Brilliant.

Whining

Saw Don't Call Me Fat at CPT last weekend, I am looking forward to Kill Will next weekend (it opens this Saturday.) Next Spring I will be presenting IHT and ATYD in the storefront space. There is a lot of work to do.

Josh needs to redesign the video for this show, and brush up the running play video. We have talked over a few things but really, he and Kelly have had their hands full with their own show. I have been happy to make notes and wait for my time. In the meanwhile I have been looking over my journals from 2000 and 2001.

Remember when you kept a journal? Man. So much spare time to sit, reflect and bitch. Children are a blessing, they teach you someone else's problems really are more important than yours. If that sounds snarky, it's not. It is true.

So this blog, my oldest blog, is over seven years old. It used to begin with the Minnesota Fringe, but now you can read edits from when we were pregnant with Calvin.

I have been posting these as they appear in "ten years ago today" increments on my Facebook page. I was surprised to find a comment left from someone (a fan?) in response to one of these:

are you whining? What's the problem? Puh-lease be finally happy- Shit-

It left me a little confused. Did she mean, am I still whining now about what happened then? Or did she think I wrote this now about then? Or is it a response left in ignorance of what was about the happen and why these little notes may be significant?

If they even are, I don't know. Puh-lease.

Looking backward

In April 2011, I HATE THIS will be produced at Cleveland Public Theatre. These will be the first public performances in Cleveland since 2004, and the first time I have performed the show at all since 2007.

The events described in the play occurred ten years ago, and at the time I kept a journal. I will be providing edited version of these journal entries on this blog through next Spring. You can read the first one here.

Cleveland Public Theatre Announces 10-11 Season

I Hate This and And Then You Die in repertory by David Hansen
Directed by Alison Garrigan
Storefront Studio
April 7 - 23

David Hansen performs his two award winning solo shows in rep. One is an exploration of personal loss and recovery, while the other is about obsession and victory. Both shows were developed in CPT's Big [Box] and have gone on to successful runs at the New York Fringe.

CPT's Entire 2010-11 Season

Spring 2011

"Applause" (2006)

The Final Performance

... and you missed it. My last live performance of I HATE THIS was Friday, June 22, 2007 in Plymouth, England. A large hall, an intimate crowd, an anti-climactic end to this important work.

I have been in negotiations with certain people about presenting it one more time in Cleveland Heights. This would have been nice if only because there has not been a public performance of the show in four years. And oddly enough, in the last week two different individuals have asked if there are any upcoming performances, or if the show is available on video (it's not, it won't be.)

But when I think of putting it all together one more time, I can't imagine it. It makes me tired. It fills me with dread. I don't want Calvin's play to fill me with dread. It's not the fear of plunging back into these feelings, of ripping open scabs, but rather the horror of playing, of impersonating, of not keeping it real. I have never done that before, and I don't want to risk it ever happening, ever.

I'm done. It took a year to make that decision, but it's made. The show still exists as a radio drama. The WCPN link is down, but WBEZ still has it archived here. And you can buy the script from SANDS UK.

I'm leaving the blog up, there's too much history here, but I won't be posting on it anymore. If you must must must know what's going on in Dave's head, you'll just have to check out my running blog and my cartoon blog.

Thank you. For everything.

P.S. Happy Father's Day.

Boxes

For a little over five years, I have been collecting things that have to do with this show I wrote called I Hate This. I just dropped them into a box in my office, "to be filed later."

It's "later".

There are, or were, two boxes, overflowing with script drafts, programs, posters, postcards, letters, articles, newsletters, photographs, and more. The first box was filled after the New York Fringe in 2004, the other this past year.


invitation to the staged reading, 2002

There's another box, too, set high on a shelf in our hallway, the one we bought in 2001 at the art museum. That one was for all the things we had collected of Calvin's. They needed a place to go once we were through having them sit around what was to be his nursery. Zelda has expressed interest in it in the past, and we had no time to go through it last March 20, much to Toni's chagrin. I want to make sure we can open it and look inside next week.


much too late "apology" from Gerber, 2003
(click on to enlarge)

As for the FIle box I am putting together now, it is breathtaking. I had forgotten some of these items. It brought a sense of nostalgia to touch the small, ticket-sized flyers we used in Minneapolis and NYC. The most startling thing was how neatly the two boxes were divided. The 2002-2004 box has been in the attic, out of the way. The 2005-2007 box has been in my office where I glance at it all the time.


letter from Sherrod Brown following Writers & Their Friends reading, 2004
(click on to enlarge)

The newer box is about SANDS UK, medical conferences, perinatal bereavement organizations. The older one is about theater festivals. That box is about crafting, presenting, promoting a theater piece. The newer box is about using what I had made to help others.

I think I can condense both boxes into one. I don't need 100 extra flyers from each performance, or all the posters and programs. Maybe a dozen or two. I can save pages from newspapers, not entire papers. What I don't know is where I will put the whole thing when I am through with it.

Am I through with it?

Chalk

We received an unsigned package today, addressed to "Calvin Thayer Hansen." Inside? 12 sticks of colored chalk.









Thank you, whoever you are.

Seven? * Sigh *

Viktor Schreckengost

Thanks for adding so much beauty to our part of the world.

The World Without Us (book)

From The World Without Us by Alan Weisman:

Les Knight is the founder of VHMET - the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement - is thoughtful, soft-spoken, and quite serious.

"Suppose ... that one virus that would truly be effective strikes, and all human sperm loses viability. The first to notice would be crisis-pregnancy centers, because no one would be coming in. Happily, in a few months abortion providers would be out of business. It would be tragic for people who kept trying to conceive. But in five years, there would be no more children under five dying horribly."

The lot of all living children would improve, he says, as they became more valuable rather than more disposable. No orphan would go unadopted.

"In 21 years, there would be, by definition, no juvenile delinquency." By then, as resignation sinks in, Knight predicts that spiritual awakening would replace panic, because of a dawning realization that as human life drew toward a close, it was improving. There would be more than enough to eat, resources would be plentiful, including water, The seas would replenish. Because new housing wouldn't be necessary, so would forests and wetlands.

"With no more resource conflicts, I doubt we'd be wasting each other's lives in combat. Like retired business executives who suddenly find serenity by tending a garden, Knight envisions us spending our remaining time helping rid an increasingly natural world of unsightly and now useless clutter, in pursuit of which we'd once swapped something alive and lovely.

"The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible to the Garden of Eden."

"Children of Men" (2006)
Alfonso Cuarón, director

Now, I know that's a lot to dump here out of context. The book I took that from is one I am enjoying, if you can call it that, one which postulates in a number of ways how the planet would respond if humans suddenly, one day and for no particular reason, either ceased to exist or simply dropped dead. So it is a book filled with all types of extreme theories about how resilient, or not, nature truly is to our overwhelming effect on it.

And yet, in spite of spectacular descriptions of New York City reverting to a wildness or my house disintegrating (in detail) I found the previous passage to be the most disturbingly shocking idea in the entire book, and the stupidest, least intuitive or well-reasoned concept I have been exposed to in some time.

"It would be tragic for people who kept trying to conceive."

You think? And by "people" Knight seems to suggest there would only be a few of them, people who can't see reason, and keep trying.

"But in five years, there would be no more children under five dying horribly."

 Oh well, I can certainly understand — buh,what?! That's like the joke about the guy who dies and his doctor tells the family that at least his condition has stabilized.

But of course, Knight's point is that humans are nothing special. I'm an open-minded guy. Maybe we aren't. But his theory, like a lot of collective society theories, assume everyone thinks the exact same way, and want the exact same things. 

When would resignation sink in, exactly? Ever? Those people who can't accept human extinction, which is to say most of them, won't go away, leaving behind those few who are okay with it. And wars aren't always started for "good" reasons (like resources) but sometimes for hateful and murderous reasons.

Maybe it's because I'm such a fan of the movie Children of Men which suggests a human race on the brink would be morose, helpless and vicious, and nothing like peaceful "retired business executives."

I mean, wasn't everyone who started the Iraq War a retired business executive? Honestly.

(Oh, Happy Thanksgiving.)

UPDATE: Playhouse Square presents the premiere of the video adaptation of "I Hate This (A Play Without the Baby)" by David Hansen, directed by Chennelle Bryant-Harris and performed by James Alexander Rankin, in the Westfield Studio Theatre on Saturday, October 15, 2022. 

Coping with pregnancy loss

Cleveland Jewish News, September 27, 2007

Ernest Hemingway once boasted he could write a novel that was only six words long. Asked to prove it, he took a napkin and wrote, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

The anecdote may be apocryphal, but the sentiment speaks volumes about pregnancy loss, an emotionally devastating phenomenon that afflicts hundreds of thousands of American women yearly.

These are Clevelanders’ stories ... (more)

Everything for his boys.

While at college (ironically enough, I am spending the weekend in Athens) I took a seminar my junior year on Arthur Miller. It's where I learned to dislike him. A few gems notwithstanding, by being forced to read most of his plays, I discovered (at the age of 20) a man of marginal talent with a penchant for unrealistic dialogue who said the same thing over and over again.

Then there's that thing about self-flagellation.

In addition, I was exposed to reams and reams of paper spent - by the playwright - defending whatever it was he intended to say in his works that most of the public hadn't understood.

For the past six years, my time as an actor-teacher for Great Lakes has included dedicated study to two of Miller's works, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. In that time I have decided that his "greatest" work - Salesman - is about as unwatchable as I ever thought it was, and that Crucible will not only stand the test of time, but is possibly one of the best American works ever produced. Salesman is lucky to have made it sixty years, Crucible will still be performed in five hundred.

In preparartion for this season's production of Crucible at GLTF, I read Miller's autobiography Timebends which my boss, Daniel, gave me last Christmas. And I enjoyed it. Walking around in his shoes, understanding the entire expanse of his life, I had a better understanding for the worlds of his plays, the worlds of his essays, the world of him.

Because I believe it is inevitable, if you have the facts, when you know what a person has lived through, you can so much better understand the decisions they make and their personal philosophy - even if you do not agree with it. Understanding is key.

Unless they lie.

On Thursday I read this in the New York Times:

"Arthur Miller, who died in February 2005, and his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, had a son born with Down syndrome in 1966. Soon after, they made the painful decision to put the child, Miller’s youngest, in an institution for the mentally retarded before Miller essentially cut him out of his life.

"... Miller rarely, if ever, accompanied his wife on weekly visits to see (his son), almost never mentioned him to shocked friends and didn’t mention him in his memoir, “Timebends.”

Now, see, I don't know what to do with that information. It is not merely that I find that appalling, but it means that once again I need to reverse-engineer what I think of Arthur Miller.

Daniel and I were having a conversation in the lobby last spring about Crucible and he was sharing how a professor his his was just so frustrated with Miller in the work. The argument was that if only there was no adultery in it, this piece would be universally accepted as a masterpiece. But Miller ruins it, and all of his work, by making his heroes so deeply flawed.

Maybe Miller just couldn't see how anyone could be any different.

The machine starts ...

So this radio version of Eric Coble's adaptation of E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops has been gestating for almost two years.

Eric had written the script as a stage play several years ago - and I said damn! I wanted to do that! But I hadn't not in the almost twenty years since I first read it, so it's just as well that he did. And that he did it better than I could have, which goes without saying.

The radio version of IHT wasn't in the can for a day when DeOreo asks me, so what do we do next? And instead of volunteering some new work of mine, because I didn't have one, I suggested TMS because, when I'd read it, with all the voices coming through The Machine, I thought it would make a great audio piece.

But why performed live in front of an audience, instead of in the safety of the booth? I have no idea. Because it sounded cool.

Last year they got a benefactor in the Hiram College Center for Literature, Medicine and the Biomedical Humanities - who had originally produced two staged readings of the piece - things started to move ... slowly. I spoke to Martin K. at Hiram last fall. There were a few production meetings. A cast was assembled. We had a read-through in May. Two rehearsals during the last two weeks. Today we set up the tech in the Westfield Insurance Studio at Idea Center ... and tomorrow we record in front of a crowd of about fifty.

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
How did I get here?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
My god! What have I done?

Since 1997 there has been a special moment when it all makes sense, and it all becomes real, and I know everything will be all right with the world. It's not first read-through. And it's not the first curtain.

It's when Dennis shows up with the music.

The Vampyres, Sin, Lysistrata, Cloud 9, I Hate This ... it's always the music. I love the stuff he's come up with for this piece. Very ... mechanical.

Fringed Off

Following a few fringe-heavy years I have been sitting on the sidelines, "lurking" the sites for the MN and NY fringes, and paying a little attention to the feedback and fallout. I'd like to get back to one of those eventually, but you need to have a show first.

Actually, that's not true, a great deal of shows accepted by the MN Fringe during the lottery in February share the title TBA.

Because I was a PR Director for a local theater, once upon a time, I am more interested than most in what kind of free attention theater organizations can squeeze out of the media. Non-critical articles, as well as the reviews that may (or may not) come later on. As we have a daily subscription to the NY Times, every year at this time I use that to clock what's going on at the NY Fringe.

When Toni's show Angst:84 went in 2001, I noticed about a dozen reviews over the course of the festival's two week run. Of these, only one was scathingly negative. Then Urinetown opened that fall, a show which had its originas at the NY Fringe, and in 2002 there were maybe twenty Fringe reviews. That year they were almost universally negative.

In 2003 there were no individual reviews, only longer, week-end articles which pointed out some of the more interesting, "worth your while" productions. So I began to get the impression that the NY Times doles out attention to this famously hit-and-miss, yet difficult-to-ignore-based-on-its-size festival based on how good last year's festival was.

Lucky me, 2003 must have been a good year, because I got a write-up in 2004. If my theory is correct, however, 2006 must have sucked big yahoodies. The festival is half over, and the only mention the largest fringes festival in America has garnered in the nation's largest newspaper (it is still the biggest, isn't it?) was an advance piece in last Sunday's paper, which was mostly about Elena K. Holy, executive director and extremely nervous person.

In fact, as if to add insult to insult, the Times has written not one, but two long pieces about how things are going - and going so much bigger and better - at the Edinburg Fringe this month. In fact, it's the guy who wrote the IHT review - Jason Zinoman - who is cabling these reports back from Scotland.

Compared to Edinburgh, he says the NY Fringe is a lemonade stand. Ouch. Sour.

The frozen chosen

Finished reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union a few mornings ago. Love to say I polihed the entire thing off on my Chicag trip, but I didn't. That's two novels in less than a month. Way too much fiction for me, Krakauer needs to write another epic about stupid people doing stupid things in nature.

I don't know what to say about Chabon's novel without giving too much away, so stop reading if you plan on reading that any time soon. Or ever. I was looking forward to getting into this book - some are surprised I've never read Kavalier and Clay because of my reputation as some kind of comic book geek, I guess, thought I haven't been one for a long time now, but anyway.

The New Play is, in it's way, historical fiction, and so is this. What if a) a zone was established around Sitka, Alaska in the late 30s as a refuge for displaced Jews and b) the war that established Israel in 1948 was lost? That's the premise for what is otherwise a detective novel, which takes place in 2007 in the "District of Sitka." The New Play is about improv comedy in the 1950s, and that's all I'll say about that. But reading someone else play fast and loose with reality as we know it was awfully liberating.

{{{ SPOILER }}}

Our main character, Meyer Landsman, divorced, living in a flophouse, and a detective for the District Police. He and his ex-wife, a police administrator, were expecting their first child, a boy named Django (and that was on our list) who was tested to possibly have an additional chromosone. Possibly an "unviable pregnancy." They chose to terminate the pregnancy, and it has tormented Landsman ever since.

It was impossible to read this without recalling the tests, all the confusing tests, about Calvin, whether he had spina bifida, why he was smaller than he should have been for his age, and my wondering what the point of no return was - not legally, but emotionally, morally, ethically, practically, humanely, you get the picture.

After the abortion, he approaches a doctor who bluntly tells him there didn't appear to be anything abnormal about the fetus. "Not that there wasn't anything wrong with it," he added.

I am not what some choose to call "Pro-Life." But I am a strong believer in potential and how life is imbued by hope, and promise. At first I thought the novel was just kind of cheeky - it's hard to take this northern refuge district seriosuly, it's like a two million person Cicely, and everyone is Joel. Nu? And yet there was a deep sadness, this fragility, everything about to crack and collapse - leavened by irreverent humor.

Which, I guess, from what I have witnessed in my life, must be what it's like to be Jewish.