I’ll Make it My Way, Thanks

I think it’s particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you’re not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you’re going because you’ve never been there before. That’s what creativity is — you have to be allowed to build.”

John Cleese

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A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.

Michael Polanyi

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Art is great. It is necessary and life-giving. But we shouldn’t confuse it with scholarship or journalism.

Alice Dreger

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We are definitely in a moment right now. Righteous thinkers abound–on social and online media, in our circle of friends, in every type of organization we encounter—with opinions about, well, everything.

The call out culture is carving up the social landscape with its virtue signaling and vigilantism. While identifying injustices is part of any healthy culture, the best tools for reaching a deeper sense of things–conversation, dialogue, open discussion—are not being used well. adrienne maree brown, author and advocate, sums it up succinctly: “we must learn to do this before there is no one left to call out, or call we, or call us.”

So, yet another jeremiad about this complex and tiresome topic? No. That’s not something anyone needs right now. The thoughts that follow are more of an update on themes that has been roiling around on Slow Muse for many years: art and art making happen in an alternative dimension. Art comes about when mastery is dismantled and something new can appear. Creativity is deviant, unpredictable, quirky. Unexpected elements of our lives show up and weave a new outcome. The whole process of bringing something new into form is mysterious and uncertain, and it taps into something much larger than our singular, individual selves.

This whole undertaking of creativity is a kind of sacred ritual every artist knows well. It is however one that is in synch with the vitriol and polemics taking place on the social commons. In the words of Jeannette Winterson:

Art…is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. No-one is surprised to find that a foreign city follows its own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the artist and the art.

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We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

So here’s a few nods to creatives who have been doing their work regardless of sacrosanct orthodoxies or the mumbling of dissemblers. Their efforts have touched me and they have helped me align with what theater advocate Jill Dolan calls militant optimism. (She devotes an entire chapter to it in her book, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater.) Surrounded as we are by the strife of suffering, it is easy to disengage and slide into cynicism. I value art that can help shift us out of that rut and put us more closely in touch with compassion, curiosity, generosity, hope.

Carrie Cracknell

The Austenites and literary intelligentsia were not happy with the British director’s recent version on Persuasion. Her film, a modern take of a 19^th century novel that is well known and deeply loved, is a freewheeling blend of trends in popular television, literature and feminism. She has created a mashup around the themes we know so well in Austen books, but she has done it with a contemporaneity that I find light and fun. Few of my friends agreed with me on this (I may have an abundance of purists in my friend circles) but film critic Christy Lemire has a view similar to my own:

If anything, director Carrie Cracknell’s “Persuasion” achieves an intriguing pop-culture full-circle moment. Austen influenced “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” and now Bridget herself seems to have influenced Dakota Johnson’s thoroughly charming portrayal of Anne Elliot. There’s lots of drinking red wine straight from the bottle, crying in the tub and lying around in bed, narrating her romantic woes with a familiar, self-effacing wit. She also repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, “Fleabag”-style, with an amusingly dry aside or a well-timed eye roll.

Gabrielle Zevin

The recent inundation of books and films exposing the dark and harsh underbelly of technology startups, young charismatic visionaries and enterprising entrepreneurialism has been steady. Think Bad Blood, Dropout, the Fyre Festival and WeWork documentaries, Inventing Anna.

Zevin’s latest novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, takes place in the gaming world. Rather than probe that industry’s reputation for misogyny, discrimination and the elevation of adolescence into a life style, her narrative is a beautiful fairy tale. In this adventure in coming of age, it is creativity and the friendships built around a common passion that are the romantic leads holding my rapt attention.

Megan Sandberg-Zakian

Sandberg-Zakian is the first woman to direct a play through Free Shakespeare on the Common (Commonwealth Shakespeare Company.) Her production of Much Ado About Nothing is a rich mingle-mangle of 20^th and 21^st century approaches and themes: veterans returning home from Operation Desert Storm, the bright colored fashions and big hair of the 1980’s and 90’s, hip hop, grunge, camp, queer theory, color and gender blind casting. It all comes together into a full bodied, totally pleasurable wild romp through a storyline that could be, if considered too carefully, terribly offensive (the view of women as chattel and the personal property of an alpha male, while familiar, is still intensely offensive.)  The cast is a roster of pros: Tia James plays Benedick, Rachel Warren as Beatrice, the ever engaging Remo Airaldi as Leonato, and the comically brilliant Debra Wise as Dogberry. The production is well designed for an audience that appreciates having Shakespeare feel accessible, entertaining and memorable. Great set. Colorful costumes. Fast moving pace. Music-rich score. (The play ends with a rousing choral rendition of Now That We Found Love!) And no intermission which, for audiences sitting on the grass, is actually an act of true thoughtfulness.

Clearly Sandberg Zakian is also an advocate of militant optimism. Her recent book is titled, There Must be Happy Endings: On a Theater of Optimism and Honesty. One more reason to admire her.

Note: Much Ado About Nothing will be playing free on Boston Common through August 7.

Cast of Much Ado About Nothing, Boston Common (Photo: Nile Scott Studios)