A Poet’s Theater

Hot Art (plays 1975-77) Play Four (from Dried Apricots), Pecos Bill (KUNM-FM Performance Project 1979)

The language of my plays exists on the exterior of the characters. The language is sympathetically & excitedly delivered over to happen reflexively & suggestively in the heads of the listeners, and sometimes in their bodies.

The characters, by being in sympathy with the language, pretend to be giving birth to it as it is delivered, and in that way, it is inside them, interior to them, but the language is not necessarily connected to the slow-time that is interior self-analysis and cross-analysis as it seems to be in a David Mamet play. There the connection between the reality of possible characters verges into people as you might know them, meet them in the theater. It is possible to read lots of reality in the Mamet lines—or in any other realist-dramatist lines. All that analysis of the realness of the lines — in their relation to possible real people — is totally foreign to my theater people and, as I see it, will never die out, not that it should — heavens where would we be without plots!?

But to me the realist or super-realist theater, as it may conveniently be called now, is not interesting as an innovative art, but is rather, the Mamet approach, often traditional and depressing.

larry goodell / placitas, new mexico
at the Siren Coffeehouse, Albuquerque /20Feb(1980?)

Note: Two of my very short plays (playlets) are Left & Right http://scr.bi/pX2fUT
and and Pumpkin Face: http://scr.bi/qH2h97

DIRECTOR’S NOTES from the Program Notes of Heroic Exposures, New Plays Written & Directed by Larry Goodell & Bill Pearlman, performed at the Vortex Theater, in 1976, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I am interested in a Poets’ Theater here, actualizing the voices of my poetry on the stage, or platform. Post-Yeatsian, Post-Steinian. Simply the excitement of American words in dance, the play and byplay of the poem as it bounces out of my head. The specifics of real actors bodies movements giving me voices. To reach up from the ritual blood and trickster satire and find the pop-farce-exultation-singing voices chanting speaking reciting acting. The return of our words that were there in our language all along, these plays on words.
— Larry Goodell

My part of the program:

ALFALFA by Larry Goodell (a Radio Play written in October 1975 for Marcia, Jim, & Dickson) Jim Burleson, Dickson Newberry, Marcia Latham, Larry Goodell, Recording Engineer: Ned Sublette

BODY PALACE by Larry Goodell (a Play for Two Women) XE’S: Conni Weldon, Sister Method: Terry Boren

A FIFTH APART by Larry Goodell (a Concert Play for Two Leaders and Chorus) Leader 1: Larry Goodell, Leader 2: Ned Sublette, Chorus: Paul Lott, Connie Varola, Jane Wynn, Nick DeBona

THE FOOTBALL GAME by Larry Goodell (a Responsive Reading for Leader & Chorus) Leader: Bill Foster, Chorus: Connie Varola, Paul Lott, Jane Wynn, Larry Goodell