Late Edition

Even though the show's over, I can still post, right?

A great story about a spiritual journey to atheism, courtesy of Bitch Ph.d.

Car Dealership Update

So they've apologized for the "sit down and shut up" ad campaign. But much more interesting than that.. read this blog post from someone claiming to be the person who wrote the ad:

... do not condem any American that disagrees with me. You all can stand up and shout, burn flags, gather on a corner and cuss the government, males can marry males, females can marry females you can all buy one of those imports and send the money to Japan if you want, but you do not have the right to force your philosophy on to others. I think that it is time for you to understand this very simple little fact. You are in the minority and as loud as you yell and protest, you will always be in the minority.

Why We Do This Play

From the Consumerist:

Kieffe and Sons, a California Ford dealership, decided for some reason to launch a radio ad attacking non-Christians and people who believe that prayer shouldn't be in public schools.

They have a transcript of the ad up and everything ("But did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Now, since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians who believe in God, we at Kieffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don't just tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up.")

I particularly like how they're claiming that all 86% of people who say they believe in God are Christian. That's some really great deductive reasoning you're displaying there, Kieffe & Sons! You stay classy!

Shaping the Event

So... when does the theatrical event begin?

For many shows I see... it begins right around the announcement to turn off your cell phones. This is particularly true on Broadway, when you are confronted by a big ass curtain and silence. And then the curtain opens and you're supposed to be transported to a whole 'nother world.

I find it far more helpful to think of the event beginning as soon as the audience walks in the door.... you have a prime opportunity to begin shaping their experience immediately. Now, go too far with this and the audience will feel totally oppressed... but if you hit that sweet spot, you'll really draw them in.

So with ...Atheist, how to do this? What should the preshow moment be like?

Well... for one thing... there'll be alcohol served, and it should be a fun, casual atmosphere. How do we do that?

One way is to just have some awesome music, have some members of the company around, say.. hey over there's some alcohol! Get a drink! Hang out with us!... but what if we had a band? Like my favorite subway musicians? Would that be too nuts?  What if we gave out free popcorn?

We have an opportunity to make it clear that this a fun, relaxed show where the audience should feel comfortable and anarchic and like anything can happen. We can use that opening moment to prime them for it. Now it's just a question of how to make it work.

Some Youtube-y Research Goodness

MOUTEBANKS:

RIGHT WING VIEW OF TENURED COLLEGE PROFESSORS:

Glenn Beck and David Horowitz:


More from David Horowitz:



ANGRY ATHEISTS:

Lewis Black:


Bill Hicks:

Research: Costume Design of Vaudeville

I don't know if this'll have any impact on the eventual show, but here we go:

The matching getups worn by Joe and Buster [Keaton] were extremely weird, particularly the skull caps they sported, which had an odd, yarnlike fringe of hair that made the two of them look like Dr. Seuss characters.  Vaudeville comedy (like most comedy since ancient times) derived much of its novelty from its grotesquness. It was frequently close to what we consider "clowning" not only because of all the broad physical action (necessary to fill the big stage), but also thanks to the cartoonish appearance of the performers.  Pants, coats, and vests mismatched-- striped, polka-dotted or plaid, take your pick.  Battered top hats and derbies.  Bodies frequently distorted with padding. And, especially strange by today's standards, the monstrous makeup. Some, to modern eyes, look more disturbing than amusing. Yet it served a purpose. The seasoned vaudeville comedian could get a laugh without uttering a word just by wiggling or flexing an artificially enhanced part of the face; think of Groucho's eyebrows, Chaplin's mustache, and the lips of the mistrels for some well-known examples.

W.C. Fields' makeup as a tramp juggler renders him unrecognizeable. He may as well have become a bank robber. Weber and Fields were virtually spheroid with all their padding. And the added features of the glued-on pointy beards and derby hats, plus the fact that Joe Weber was five-foot-four, made them resemble the town fathers of Munchkinland.

  -- Trav S.D. No Applause, Just Throw Money!

First Week Of Rehearsals

Okay, our first week of rehearsals is done aaaaaand... so is the script!

Let me try to explain this while also honoring Dan's privacy about his writing process... ...Atheist was originally written as part of NaPliWriMo... it was written in a month, and Dan basically used every device he could think of to get from point A to point B.  

When I got that script (approx. 75 pages in length) I thought "hey, this is really awesome and inventive and fun! I'd love to do it! It probably needs to lose 10 pages or so and there are a couple of moments where I'm totally lost, but otherwise, I'm good". But this was not to come to pass.  As Dan went back through the script, he noticed large-scale changes that needed to be made and thus ended up doing a much more major re-write (that also shortened the play by 20 pages including added new material).

The end result is a much more tightly focused (and tightly wound) piece of work.  It relentlessly barrels forward from beginning to end AND the journey we're all going on is a lot clearer.  It's a pretty amazing piece of work.

The play divides into two parts, one largely comic one largely serious, yesterday as we read through the final draft of the script, I saw the second half of the play in my head, moment to moment, how it would look and sound and feel.  Now, the chances that whatever we end up developing will match that vision even 50% of the time is probably 1 in 10, but the point is, my initial impulses towards the material were immediately there, which for me as a director is a sign that I'm connected and ready to work.

We've been doing some character work by focusing on the idea of archetypes. Host desecration plays and vaudeville acts both relied heavily on easily recognizable archetypes, so I'm trying to use our vision of these characters in the popular imagination as a window in to how they should be played. What do we think about when we think about outspoken, angry atheists? Or shady salesmen? Or a female leftist Tenured College Professor?

That last one is particularly interesting, because we're trying to use the Right's idea of a female leftists Tenured College Professor (which is obviously villainous) as opposed to the Left's idea (whihc would be more heroic). Which also goes to show you in a fractured postmodern culture that you have to worry about whose archetypes you're using.

Our Amazing Postcard Image

Some Vaudeville Thoughts

I'm reading Trav S.D.'s No Applause-- Just Throw Money to get more in touch with the vaudeville aspects of the play.

Two things just within the first ten pages of the book are relevant to The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist

First: Medicine Shows. Medicine Shows were a precursor to vaudeville in which companies would travel around doing sketch comedy and songs to help hawk alcohol based remedies and... um... morphine. ... Atheist is a medicine show on two fronts, selling both black-market viagra and the very concept of "belief" as cures to what ails ya. (If you're interested, here be some amazing pictures of medicine show performers including-- consider yourself warned if such things offend you-- a blackface artist)

Second: The idea of variety . Vaudeville shows were first and foremost variety shows. Or, as Trav puts it:

Over the course of a couple of hours the vaudeville audience might encounter singers, comedians, musicians, dancers, trained animals, female-impersonators, acrobats, magicians, hypnotists, jugglers, contortionists, mind readers, and a wide variety of strange, uncategorizable performers usually lumped into the category of "nuts".

In ...Atheist the audience witnesses a variety show except the variety is all kept within the confines of the play itself. The variety is in the genres and rules that the play constantly adjusts (one moment it's a goofy musical, the next it's a serious act of story telling, there's a magic trick that goes awry etc.)

One of my main jobs as director on this thing to help give the play enough concreteness that it's not bewildering to the performers and audience, and maybe this idea of a succession of variety acts (that's still always the same performers telling the same story! yikes!!) is a helpful way of doing that.

Casualty of War

RIP this dialogue from the play:

* * *

ABE
There’s a Latino airport groundskeeper, Guillermo.

GUILLERMO
I took this job as a front, to sell drugs for my gang!

ABE
No he was the other kind.

GUILLERMO
I send every penny to my starving family in an impoverished Latin American country, while I live in cramped tidy squalor, carving small native crafts and teaching myself English from poetry.

SIGHING LADY GUARD
Guillermo.

GUILLERMO
An American woman. They are all erotic goddesses waiting to be released from the prison of their insufficient bourgeois husbands.

SIGHING LADY GUARD
Do you want this body?

GUILLERMO
I was struck by the lightning of love. If only our racist society would let us show it in the open.

SIGHING LADY GUARD
Have sex with me on top of this 747.

My enemy lost his toe

He was my enemy. He made noxious fumes in the direction of my desk. He mocked my glasses, and the style of my doodles. He lost his toe in a car accident. Because he was my enemy.

Some Vaudeville

Approaching the Play

We're going into our first rehearsal in exactly seven days. Dan is furiously doing rewrites and I'm trying to get caught up on a lot of producing stuff (getting our postcard and press release together etc.) But it's important to remember that my primary job on this play is to direct it. Time to start thinking more about the approach.

How does The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist work? What does it need from me as a director? What do I have to give it? What muscles do I need to stretch and develop for this show? (For those of you out there who don't read my other blog, I find it helpful to think of a play as an entity distinct from the people and facets that make it up. The play is the sum of the script, performance, blocking, design, audience context etc. but it has its own interests and needs, I think of myself as serving those needs rather than necessarily serving just the text's needs.)

In the past couple of years, I have spent a good deal of time developing certain muscles that had to do with translating the text to the stage. An easy term for this (perhaps) is my compositional sense. Many friends and colleagues have complimented me on this and commented on this, the way I arrange bodies in space to tell the story, the way I mix music and image and spoken word etc. It's a strength of mine, and I'm very proud of it, and I think it reached its climax in the VCU production of volume of smoke. I composed the shit out of that play, and it was my first time working on something of that scale ($50K budget, 300 seat house, 3/4 thrust space, 10 person cast etc.). I'm very proud of this aspect of myself as an artist.

I say all of this because this particular aspect is not what ....Atheist needs from me. In fact, if a production of ...Atheist had too much visual elegance to it, the play would fall on its ass, all the life suffocated out of it.

...Atheist is about spontaneity and about making a connecting with the audience. It's about storytelling. The story is the spectacle. The play's genius is in its raw-ness, its digressiveness, the appearance that it could veer off in any direction at any point (and frequently does). Reading it, the play feels *this close* to going off the rails, and that's part of what is so very exciting about it.

This was unlocked for me in a recent interview I did with monologist Mike Daisey and his director Jean-Michele Gregory. In it he said:

“The act of telling a story, if you’re truly telling it, has an automatic subtext. The automatic subtext is: Holy shit, I’m telling you a story, what am I going to say next? I really have to tell you this story. And that creates an automatic depth and texturing that has to be imposed if you’re acting.”

...Atheist is all about this. Three people appear in front of us and say "Hey, we got this story to tell you". Their action over the course of the play is to try to convince you of the story's truth even as they struggle with believing it that tension leads to the play exploding in many directions and then imploding on itself before eventually coming to its conclusion.

We associate a certain amount of dishonesty with spectacle, just as if something is too fine-tuned we're not going to believe it's spontaneous, which will rob the play of its delightful suspense... the suspense of "holy shit! where is this going?!"

So it's time to exercise some different muscles. To try to create a sense of rawness, of newness, of spontaneity. Time to use improvisation more in rehearsal (and perhaps in performance). Time to talk frankly with the collaborators about what is in our bag of tricks so we can pull it out and use it effectively.

This may mean the show is not eventually blocked as tightly as I normally like, and that some things change every night, or that there's more room for the actors to take impulses than directors are normally comfortable with. But that's really exciting. Getting back to the basics: Actor + Audience + Words. That's what this play is about, and what this play needs. It needs me to help the performers give it immediacy, risk, to know how it manipulates its audience and revel in it. And it needs to be charming. Really charming. Charming like the Carny who is about to bilk you out of a fiver...

Why Vaudeville 2

Singing and dancing.

Because we're humans, and we have to sing and dance. Song and dance is reason enough to sing and dance. We do it when we wish. We delight in it. We need it.

Principle of the Con

Always make the mark think they're on to you.

Why Vaudeville?

The subtitle of this play is (was ) an unfair vaudeville. I'll get to the unfair part later. For now, why vaudeville.

Not because I want to imitate the tropes of vaudeville. No footlights and baggy pants, please.

First, and most important, because of belief. Vaudeville never asks you to suspend your disbelief. You're exactly where you are. The performers are who they are. Abbott and Costello may say they're a reporter and a baseball team manager, but they never ask us to believe it. They're still friggin Abbott and Costello.

In Vaudeville, the performers are honestly trying to entertain, move, or con you. Yes, even the charlatans and illusionists have the dignity of honesty.

More later.

Question 1

When someone says they're not lying, do you believe them?

The Problem of Bad Atheists Etc.

UPDATE: A commenter points out that for some odd reason, I don't discuss anti-semitism (and its long historical legacy in Germany and Austria) when discussing the Holocaust. This was because German Nationalism was deeply anti-semitic so I felt when discussing one, I was discussing the other, it's important to remember that German Nationalists did not consider German Jews to be Germans, but rather to be Jews. This is because of the deeply racist nature of German Nationalism at the time... and, it should probably be noted, of nationalism in general, whether it be Right Wing parties in Scandinavia or Zionsim.

Thought I'd leap right into the secularist-religious debate that gets me riled up the most, what David Aikman called "The Problem of Bad Atheists", which is interrelated with the idea of "if your ethics and morals don't come from religion, where do they come from?" a question that is almost always asked rhetorically. I usually get to a point where I'm like "If I have to hear about Hitler and Stalin as a way of invalidated atheism one more f*ing time..." I'm pretty sure religious people get tired of being hit over the head with The Crusades and the Inquisition and global terrorism as if those are the inevitable end points of their belief systems.

This is because both sides are engaging in an intellectually dishonest mode of argument that has taken over many discussions in our public sphere today: comparing the worst of one system with the best of another. A great example of this is Michael Moore's Sicko which, while entertaining and informative, is totally intellectually lazy and somewhat dishonest. He makes one really smart move at the beginning of the movie-- covering people with health insurance and showing the flaws and dishonesty of the health insurance system rather than showing people without health insurance. But there's still a really strong case to be made taking the best of US Health Care and comparing it to Single Payer systems elsewhere (amongst other things, the best of US Health Care isn't an option for most people etc.). This is the case that Ezra Klein has been making on his blog for the last year, and it's a stronger case because it is comparing gourmet apples to gourmet oranges.

But anyway, that's a little beside the point. I want to address the Atheism = Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao argument a bit. The way this argument usually goes is this:

(1) There are these bad atheists (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao). They had atheistic governmental systems, and combined did far more harm than religious people have ever done (just look at the body count).

(2) This is not to say that all atheists are like this. Of course not, there are plenty of great Atheists.

(3) But atheism leads inexorably to death camps because without God, where does moral order come from?

There's more nuance in the argument most of the time, but that's what it boils down to. I want to address it in a few ways.

First off, it's important to note that Hitler's purported "atheism" is in dispute. But even assuming he were an atheist, can the atheism of these four Very Bad Men be blamed for their actions?

I don't believe so, for a number of reasons. The crimes against humanity that these four men led didn't exist in a vacuum. Correlation is not causation. Stalin didn't wake up one day and decide that since God didn't exist, he should institute the Gulag. Stalin was a secular leader who sought absolute power and destroyed any threats to that. Religion was a big threat to that, so was any office who got too accomplished at his Court. It's far easier to make a case that the Holocaust was the inevitable end-product of nationalism (which had a rich-- and richly violent-- tradition in Germany) rather than atheism (which had neither). Hitler's theoretical forbears were Austrian Nationalists and racists in pre-WWI Vienna like Georg Ritten Von Schonerer and Karl Luger (both Christians) along with Nietzche.

Hitler also did not create the Holocaust on his own, nor was he the sole person to carry it out. The genocide happened because a lot of people (including religion people) participated in it. To give one example: Pope Pius XII who, amongst other things, didn't do anything to stop 1,000 Jews from being deported from Rome to Birkenau in 1943, where all but 15 of them were gassed and gave tacit permission to the euthanization campaign in hospitals that predated the extermination of the Jews (for some more on this, and the Catholic Church's complicated WWII legacy, check out Mak, Geert, In Europe pages 515-518). Pius XII didn't want to anger the Germans because he viewed the Communists as the real threat to his power.

Anyway, my point is that these things are complicated... was Stalin motivated by his atheism or his hostility to anything that might rival his own power? (Certainly his executions of his own high ranking officers had to do with the latter not the former). Stalin certainly used atheism as a way of justifying the Gulag in a way that Hitler didn't use atheism in justifying the Holocaust... About Mao and Pol Pot I do not feel anywhere near remotely qualified to talk about, but if anyone in the comments was to address these two, please, have at it.

So... yes... it's complex... Which brings us back to another point... one of the reasons why its hard to pin the blame on atheism is that it's not a belief system. All it denotes is someone not believing in God. It does NOT denote militant hatred of organized religion. That's a totally separate thing. Which is why we must come to... without God, all else is chaos or the Positive Social Control theory of religion.

But religious texts endorses all sorts of things that religious people would find abhorrent. Take slavery, which is endorsed (but regulated) in both the Old and New Testaments in the Bible or the treatment of women outlined in the Koran. By our present day standards, they're barbaric. But this is the thing, in many ways for their own time, there was a certain amount of progressivism involved. The Old Testament didn't outlaw slaves, but it did regulate their treatment. The Koran's rules for inheritance for women etc. were way better than the existing system governing the treatment of women at their time.

Human morals and ethics evolve over time in ways that we probably don't fully understand, but they have certainly changed since the time the Bible was written. So what do believers do? Well, fundamentalists try to insist on a literal following of their ur-texts and liberals and moderates pick and choose which ones to follow and which ones to leave behind, leading to intra-faith debates about how strict one should be. On this debate I (obviously) side with the liberals and moderates. Even fundamentalists cherry pick which parts of their texts to follow. No one in America is going to argue for stoning disobedient children to death, even while they point to the Bible's strictures against homosexuality. And fundamentalist Christians' way of getting around this-- claiming Jesus repudiated parts of The Law they don't like when he did no such thing-- is specious at best, intellectually dishonest at worst.

And those of us who don't believe are part of this evolving too. I guess what I'm trying to say is... It is possible that once you no longer believe in God or follow a religion, you are opening yourself to certain lines of moral and ethical and philosophical inquiry that could go horribly, horribly awry and turn you into an amoral sociopath. But it is also true that if you believe in God and follow a religion you are opening yourself up to a different line of moral, ethical and philosophical inquiry (What of this do I follow? and why? and how?) that can also turn you into an amoral sociopath.

Anti-religious and anti-atheist zealots want to point to the amoral sociopaths and use them as stand ins for the entire population, but it doesn't work that way. Religion has been used to justify horrible things, but it didn't Cause them it was the justification for them. And in the very recent past, atheism was used to justify some horrible unspeakable crimes. But what we should fight against in the enshrinement of power in one individual that allowed the Gulag to happen (which is amongst the reasons why I oppose the Papal hierarchy and am an anti-monarchist), we should oppose the virulent nationalism that enabled the Holocaust (which is one of the reasons why I am for relaxing our immigration rules and am not a Zionist), opposing colonialism (which is why I opposed the war in Iraq) etc. rather than the window dressing that's been used to justify all of the above.

Here is a concern that I as an atheist have about organized religion in general and keep in mind my goal here is not to offend but to speak honestly about my starting point in thinking about religion. I worry (particularly in more dogmatic faiths) about power structures. I worry about power structures which enable human beings to speak for god creating a system where people outsource their moral reasoning to others. And I worry about what happens when that happens. At the same time, I also recognize that individuals have some amount of choice in the matter, which is why I bristle at the depiction of religious people as mindless sheep....

Template for the Host Desecration Story

The medieval host desecration story generally follows this format:

A Jewish man (or sometimes a group of Jewish men) desires to procure a sacred host wafer or wafers, sometimes after having publicly doubted the sancitity of the host or the truth of the transubstantiation. The Jewish man finds a poor Christian woman, or a thief, or a poor priest, and pays him or her to steal the host from the church (sometimes the hired hand employs further stock characters in the plot).

Once he has the host, he takes it to his home, or to a temple, and, usually in a ritualistic manner, defiles the host in one or more ways. These include: stabbing the host, burning it, or tossing it into boiling water or oil. With each attempt, a miraculous incident occurs. This incident can include: songs of angels, strange lights, or the transformation of the host into a Christ-child. The Jewish man will sometimes injure himself in fear, which will later provide further evidence of his crime.

The Jewish man will attempt to hide the wafer, sometimes by breaking it into pieces and sending it to neighboring communities. He can hide it in wells, under floorboards or behind stones, in offal heaps, in rivers or streams, or underground. The wafer makes its location known to nearby Christians through further songs and miracles. Once discovered, the Christians will quickly capture the Jewish man, or his accomplices who will then implicate the Jewish man. The Jewish man will confess to the authorities, usually under torture. The authorities or the Christian community will execute the Jewish man, and sometimes his family, or they will force the family to convert. Very often the authorities, the church or the Christian community will slaughter the Jewish community, or force them to convert, or expel them from the city. The Jewish man (and the Jewish community's) property will be confiscated by the authorities or the church, his home and temple razed, and a chapel will be built at the location of the miracle.

The Comedian

Isaac sent me the link to this video last night of comedian Dane Cook telling a story about an atheist. I’ll warn you, the ecstatic delight in violence and hate at the punchline disturbed me so much that I had trouble falling asleep.



But the story has some important thematic and structural similarities to the medieval host desecration stories told about Jews, which is a central element of Atheist.

Cook begins his story weaving this way and that, but the central thrust is that some jerk sneezed on him. It’s a failure of character we can all agree on: don’t sneeze on people. It’s gross, it’s uncivilized, and most importantly for the story, it shows a disdain for your fellow human beings. It’s crucial to assign the villain in these stories a universally agreed-upon flaw. It’s even more crucial to tie that flaw in the story to the central quality of the villain. In this story, the villain’s disdain is a direct result of his atheism.

In the host desecration story, the Jew is usually given some nasty quality that can be tied to his Jewishness. Avarice is old standard, also disdain, a violent temper, or deviousness. Whatever the flaw is, it has to bullseye the anxiety of the audience about the villain’s stock type. Since Jews in medieval Europe were often in the loan business (as that was the only trade they were allowed to practice), avarice worked neatly. When a Christian heard a story about a Jew paying a poor Christian to steal a host wafer, it fit in with fears of loss of financial control to these yamurkle-sporting fellows. It’s a nice trick that Cook doesn’t reveal his villain is an atheist until almost halfway through his story: it allows his listeners to connect “atheist” to “disdainful.”

Cook shows his Christian charity by restraining his anger and saying, “God bless you.” The villainous Atheist then reveals himself, showing contempt for the storyteller (and by extension, the audience). In the desecration stories, the reasoning behind the Jew’s theft of the host and violent acts upon it is often summed up in an overt statement about the credulity of Christians that believe the wafer to be Christ’s flesh. It allied the Christian listener to the teller (“Jews think you’re a fool”), making the later miracles and travesties plausible and acceptable. Cook allies the audience with himself in a similar manner through the “God Bless You” section. (“We all say, God Bless You! Atheists think you’re a fool!”).

As a side note, it’s at this point in the story where I suspect it’s, at best, a collection of different incidents collected into one story; or, at worst, a lie. Storytellers work in both manners, and that’s legit, except when the lie is offered as a true anecdote that we should act on. And I do think Cook is encouraging action, if not directly. But the story is suspect, if you think about it: Notice there’s no location given? It’s somewhere where the Atheist has the time and comfort level to get into a theological argument? And honestly, I don’t believe any atheist would declare their atheism every time someone says “God bless you.” Who has time for that? All that said, even if the story is true, his telling of it follows the pattern of desecration stories, even when it turns into a fantasy.

Cook and the Atheist get into a theological argument where the Atheist mocks Cook’s Catholicism and declares his own version of the afterlife, where the Atheist will die into the ground and come back as a tree. Normally that would define the Atheist as not really an atheist. He’s a nature-centered, Mother-Earth, reincarnation-based, hippie-dippy-ist. This is important, though. In host desecration stories, the Jew has to confirm certain fundamental aspects of the Christian worldview. The desecration of the host is often ritualistic (confirming that the host really is sacred). Sometimes the Jew directly challenges the Christian God, rather than addressing the Old Testament God he would actually believe in. In Cook’s story, the Atheist accepts the premise that he has a soul, which many if not most atheists do not believe. It confirms the worldview of the listener: the Atheist has anxieties about death, and faith in the unverifiable, but he’s too mule-headed to accept Christianity. And it’s not like Cook isn’t aware of atheism’s fundamental rejection of the soul and the afterlife. He makes a joke about it. But for the purposes of Cook’s story, the Atheist has to paradoxically have faith in a soul, otherwise the story can’t work. In desecration stories, the Jew has to paradoxically believe the Christian host is holy. Again, the function of this is to create alliance between storyteller and audience in their worldview, so that the later violence is acceptable and just.

Speaking of violence, when Cook engages in the fantasy of chopping the reincarnated Atheist-tree down with an axe, dragging him through the mud, grinding him up in a woodchipper, turning him into paper and printing the Bible on him, it’s a fair distinction that he’s not commiting actual violence. But his violent imaginings follow the same pattern as the results of the desecration stories, so I take no comfort in that. In the host desecration stories, after the guilty Jew is caught, he’s killed, sometimes with his family and neighbors; and the site of the desecration, usually the Jew’s home or temple, is converted into a chapel. This reconfiguring of the villain’s property (or flesh) to serve the faith is more than in the service of irony. It’s a deliberate threat of postmortem aggression against every Jew (or Atheist) that steps out of line: not only will I destroy you, but everything you own will be made mine. The ecstatic screams and howls of Cook’s audience leave no room for doubt as to the delight they take in such an idea. I wonder, if Cook had followed his punchline with the suggestion, would the audience have gone out and made their rage plain to the next atheist they met? The notion was certainly hanging in the arena he played. To me, Cook's macho swagger as he relays the story feeds the fire of violence in the listeners, perhaps not inciting them directly, but certainly in their private minds. I have trouble believing that a person could walk out of that show, having engaged in that bloodlust, and not be changed.

You could defend Cook’s story by claiming it’s not atheists he’s attacking, but condescending people. But if that were true, the final punchline (turning the corpse into a Bible) wouldn’t make any sense. This illustrates the importance of first painting the Atheist or Jew with a common character flaw: it provides the storyteller and listener a psychological defense if confronted with their bigotry.

In the end though, it’s not Cook’s story but the rapturous reaction of his audience that’s frightening. Part of what I want to get to in this play are the reasons why we believe implausible stories. The righteous joy in the voices of that audience show how Cook provided them with something they all desperately wanted: justification to hate. Cook makes a joke that he doesn’t like to say “Gesundheidt” because he feels like it’s a tribute to Hitler. I think his bit is very much a tribute to Der Fürhrer’s method of crowd control.

Also... Atheist is the Greatest Danger to Humanity

apparently:

How To Convert an Atheist

Some Terminology Clarification

What is an Atheist?   

 Right now I have finished reading Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation and am almost finished with a book titled The Delusion of Disbelief: How The New Atheism is a Threat to your Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness.  One thing that Harris raises is the idea of what an atheist is. I find this idea powerful because it demands that we be more precise with our language.

What is an Atheist?

An atheist is someone who does not believe in the Divine (whether that be a God, multiple Gods or some kind of spiritual force) and also does not belong to an organized religion. Or as Dictionary.com would have it: a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.

It is not a belief system. I want to be very very clear about this: It is not a belief system. It is not a philosophy, it is a lack of belief in something. It is only because of the prominence of religious thought in our cultural heritage (and present day life) that a word like "Atheist" is necessary.  

There are many groups that, were we to draw a venn diagram, many atheists would fall into.  One would be secularists: people who advocate for the building of secular institutions and who try to separate political institutions from religious ones.  There are many religious people who are also secularists (including the guy who runs Citizens United for a Separation of Church and State, members of many minority religions and several founding fathers).  Another group would be what I call anti-religionists which is to say atheists who actively seek the destruction of organized religion and have a vested interest in convincing religious people to become atheists.  I am not one of these people.  I will full vocally articulate my skepticism about faith and my opinions on the actions of various organized religions and why I am an atheist if it is relevant to a conversation, but I have many friends and family members who are deeply religious and members of various faiths. I have really serious problems with organized religion, but I also recognize that being part of a religious faith has done considerable good for many people I know. So I guess I would say I'm too deeply conflicted about organized religion to actively seek to destroy it.   I would say that, for the most part, the men called "The Four Horsemen" (Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett and Harris) are anti-religionists.

This being said, it aids extremists on both sides of the religion/atheism debate to try to elide these categories as much as possible.  For the Four Horsemen, it is useful to conflate secularism, atheism and anti-religionism into one category, because that way it is easier to convince members of one group that they are in fact members of all of the others.  For outspoken anti-atheist religious people. it is necessary because it helps indict one group with the other.  So you can say to your fellow religious people "all atheists seek to destroy organized religion" or even "secularism is a mask for destroying organized religion".

Once this is done, pro-religion writers can then claim that atheism is a philosophy or belief system, which allows them to blame atheism for Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler and Stalin.  I'll address that issue in a later post. (It's worth noting that the characters in the play for the most part conflate the various categories into "atheism" and then ascribe "The Atheist" with familiar stereotypical characteristics)

Crossposted to Parabasis.

Today in Atheism News

Interesting article from New York Magazine about Atheism as a social movement.

Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh sense of mission. The
fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith at all. The Pew Forum on
Religion & Public Life released the results of its “Religious Landscape”
survey in February and found that 16 percent of Americans have no religious
affiliation. The number is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18- to
29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in a similar
survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has existed as a kind of
civil-rights movement. Groups like American Atheists have functioned primarily
as litigants in the fight for church-state separation, not as atheist social
clubs. “Atheists are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don’t
feel like they need an organization,” says Ellen Johnson, president of American
Atheists for the past thirteen years. “They’re so independent that if they want
to get involved, they usually don’t join an organization—they start their
own.”

The quartet of best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of
New Atheism—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the
Four Horsemen, as they are now known)—has succeeded in mainstreaming atheism in
a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the process, catalyzed a
reexamination of atheistic raison d’être. But for some atheist foot soldiers,
this current groundswell is just a consciousness-raising stop on the
evolutionary train, the atheist equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these
people, the Four Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism’s great
awakening is in need of a doctrine. “People perceive us as only rejecting
things,” says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York City
Atheists. “Everybody wants to know, ‘Okay, you’re an atheist, now what?’”

So some atheists are taking seriously the idea that atheism needs to
stand for things, like evolution and ethics, not just against things, like God.
The most successful movements in history, after all—Christianity, Islam,
Hinduism, etc.—all have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals,
money, clerics, and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs,
goes the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build communities.
“Science and reason are important,” says Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain of
Harvard University. “But science and reason won’t visit you in the
hospital.”

Many atheist sects are experimenting with building new, human-centered
quasi-religious organizations, much like Ethical Culture. They aim to remove God
from the church, while leaving the church, at least large parts of it, standing.
But this impulse is fueling a growing schism among atheists. Many of them see
churches as part of the problem. They want to throw out the baby and the
bathwater—or at least they don’t see the need for the bathwater once the baby is
gone.

Interesting article that goes longer and more in depth. Check it out.

Compare, Contrast

From Atheist Viagra:

JEN: Then the stories started coming out

DARYL: Atheists working in schools.

ABE: Atheists working in day cares.

JEN: Didn't want to believe it. Didn't want to believe that someone I saw every day could be capable of that.

...[jump to]

JEN: I mean, it wasn't their constitutional right to work in child care.

ABE: Right. It's not in the Constitution. I checked.

DARYL: Then when you start finding out how extensive their network was.

JEN: Right. I mean, atheists working in the police?

ABE: The military?

DARYL: At truly surprising levels of Government...

From today' NYTIMES:

Soldier Sues Army, Saying His Atheism Led To Threats

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.... In November, [Hall] was sent home early from Iraq because of threats from fellow soldiers.

... It is unclear how widespread religious discrimination or proselytizing is in the armed forces, constitutional law experts and leaders of veterans’ groups said. No one has independently studied the issue, and service members are reluctant to come forward because of possible backlash, those experts said.

RTWT here. My favorite part is actually a minor thing, a grammatical screw up on the part of Major Welborn who says “I’d love to tell my side of the story because it’s such a false story.” Obviously, he means because Hall's story is false, not his own, but still...

Response to Mark Ravenhill on Religion and Art

Maybe it's because I'm American and not British (and thus don't know the arugments happening in British culture) but the lack of a single quote, citation or hyperlink leads me to believer there might be some serious straw manning going on in this Mark Ravenhill column. There's also some rather dishonest elliding of seveal arguments that makes it seem like agnosticism means something it doesn't. Here's the graph where the arugment is laid out:

Christianity is a myth. But it's a myth that has helped us - and continues to
help us - ask searching moral and philosophical questions. Ours is an age in
which a lack of belief, at least in secular Europe, is prized. Before, having
one overarching belief was central to life, guiding our choices. But now we're
all supposed to travel light, be supple, so that we can swap jobs, partners or
political allegiances at a moment's notice. But this perpetual state of
agnosticism, this lack of commitment, must surely be corrosive. Those who are
able to locate, and to explore intelligently, a system of belief, be that
religious or political, are surely making a valuable contribution to our times.
We may not share their beliefs, but we should treasure them.

Disregarding the sentiment of the first sentence (which is sort-of accurate maybe about some people) the conflation of "agnosticism" with the idea of "lack of commitment" is inaccurate. Agnosticism- literally the idea that the truth is not knowable- is a philosophic way of living built around the idea of asking searching moral and philosophical questions. Agnosticism is built around quesitoning everything, whereas Christianity- when it does question- questions in very specific ways that largely revolve around the incompatibility of Jesus' teachings with leading a regular life in today's society.

This conflation leads to the contention that it is somehow secularism that is to blame for people feeling compelled to "swap jobs, partners of political allegiences at a moment's notice," is a lazy Christianist talking point. It returns us to the old religious trope that without religion (and specifically Christianity, Judaism apparently isn't worth talking about for Ravenhill), life has no meaning. The secularist answers this by saying without the oppresive strictures of meaning imposed by giant multinational institutions, people are free to create meaning themselves, and by keeping religion out of public and governmental institutions, we allow people to be free to choose their own paths, including religious ones. I would also note that as someone who isn't religious, I doubt Ravenhill actually believes his lack of commitment line, it's just a cheap shot to get in at those who might disagree with him to try to minimize the validity of their viewpoint.
I agree with Ravenhill's basic point that the Bible is an important work of literature (I studied the Bible as ur-text in my very-secular High School) and that the religious influence on great works of art is undeniable. Also, I agree with him when he talks about the frequently positive impacts churches are still having on the arts in Britain.

To make this argument, however, Ravenhill resorts to more strawmanning:

...we like to tell ourselves that their creators were covert humanists, who
wanted to make art and had no choice other than to make it within the confines
of a church that held all the power and money.

This idea that all artists are essentially humanists is a comforting myth
for an agnostic age. There is little evidence to support it. It is, if you like,
the agnostic's delusion - because the very opposite is true. The greatest
artists, from Matthias Grünewald in the 15th century to Benjamin Britten in the
20th, had a genuine Christian faith: complicated, questioning, agonised at
times, as any intelligent faith should be, but a very real faith all the
same.

What you mean we, Kemosabe? Who is making these ahistorical and innacurate claims about the secularist leanings of certain artists and works of art (he also mentions the Sistene Chapel)? I cCan't Ravenhill find one quote to support his claim that this is a big strain in cultural thought? (Again, perhaps it is so common in Britain that one needs not offer any supporting evidence, but I'm not so sure). And are the people who claim these things representatives of a wide spread mainstream cultural consensus? Or are they outliers in public cultural thought?

Where Ravenhill and I fundamnetally disagree, however, is in his column's conclusion:

Our Christian tradition is very different. We should celebrate the Christian
legacy in western art and society - and stop the Dawkins army from denying us
the possibility of drawing inspiration from faith to create the art of the
future.

I believe we need to work towards a complex reading of religion's influence on society that recognizes the good (which Ravenhill acknoweledges here) as well as the ills which people like Hitchens and Dawkins describe. One may outweigh the other, but that doesn't mean that the rather complex thousands-years-long history of religion in the world should be rendered simplistically, even if it does make us feel better or more certain in our views. Ravenhill, on the other hand, will brook no complexity. Despite the very dubious history of the Church of England- which includes oppresion and murder of Catholics and ethnic cleansing of Jews- Ravenhill only wants a celebration of the Christian legacy in western art and society. Can't we have both? Isn't there room for an acknolwedgement of the ills and the positives? Apparently not.

(crossposted to Parabasis)

Title Wanted.

We need a new title for the play. Atheist Viagra, while awesome, brings certain legal concerns into play. So we need a new title. We're compiling a list here. AV participants, leave your suggestions and note your favorites in the comments.

So far we have:

THE PLAY ABOUT THE ATHEIST

THE TRUE STORY OF THE ATHEIST

ATHEIST WOODYPILL

THE DESECRATION OF A PLASTIC BABY JESUS BY THE NEFARIOUS ATHEIST

And, although inappropriate, my personal favorite:

ATHEIST TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT

Seriously, a couple of books

Okay, I'm not messing around this time. There's many books responsible for this travesty of a vaudeville that is Atheist Viagra. Here's two of them:

1. Miriam Rubin's Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jewry. This is the book that planted the vicious seed of this play. I've always been fascinated by the function that stories play in both society and the individual psyche. In medieval Catholic Europe, stories of host desecrations were used to rouse the populace to massacre Jewish communities and steal their property. The stories are full of what we would call stereotypes: the conniving Jew, of course, but also the weak woman, the penitent thief, and the truthful child. The stories are consistently cast with these characters. Part of Rubin's point is that the stories depended on these caricatures, agreed upon by the population, in order to work their magic. This struck me right in the grey matter. We artists often concern themselves with the avoidance of stereotype, the search for truthful characters; but perhaps there are there fundamental agreements we make with our audience about types of people in the world? What are they, and how do we manipulate them?

Rubin never uses her historical distance to point up the absurdities of the story that seem obvious to us in the twenty-first century. But she does look at the reasons why the stories were found so acceptable and rarely resisted. In thinking about this, I wondered about stories that gain popular credence in contemporary society that are nevertheless demonstrably false: urban myths (more on these later). What function do they serve both in our society and in ourselves?

One thing the author also does is place one of the only extant contemporary responses from the Jewish community to the massacres, a verse lament, smack dab in the middle of the book. This takes the book out of the realm of scholarly publication and into something more artistic accessible, at least to a spongehead playwright like me.

But what was really awkward was explaining to my five-year old why they were cooking a child on the cover.

2. How to Have a Soul-Winning Church by Gene Edwards. This is a "how-to" guide for, well, winning souls. It mixes sales techniques with evangelism in a way that I think is at the heart of American Christian Fundamentalism. Edwards has a lot of practical advice, as well as thoughts on what the function of Christianity should be in our country (printed in 1962, he advocates the church as an "assassin of communism").

Not much more to say about this book. It has to be read (or at least leafed through) to be appreciated. I'll quote from the introduction, Edwards' argument of purpose:

This book is for the minister who desires to have the most effective Christian witnesses and soul winning church possible -- for the church that wants to see men come to Christ every week.

The goal of this book is to show you how a church can witness to, and seek to win, every human being in the city. This book is for the Christian who, more than anything else in all the world, wants to be a soul winner.

This is for the minister who wants to grow laymen in his church, who do nothing but talk soul winning, eat soul winning, dream soul winning, and do soul winning.

I rephrase this in purely functional terms: an organization whose entire function is to grow the organization.

More books later

Welcome. Now Here's the Required Reading List.

Seriously, get to work. As the playwight of Atheist Viagra, it's important to me that my audience is at least as smart as I am. In order to understand one-tenth of Atheist Viagra you absolutely must be familiar with the following: medieval Europe, the history of jazz concerts, Homicide: Life on the Streets, Marcel Duchamp, Host theology, vintner methods, polling data from Pennsylvanian hamsters, early Sesame Street, the largest three moons of Jupiter (excluding Ganymede), the back side of water, Swiffers, and Uncle Bruce.

If you don't know at least that, you will never understand the dick jokes.

Two Researchy Things

Both of these came up in my first meeting with Sydney (costume designer) and I think are worth looking at:

1) Host Desecration. Host Desecration plays were these little sketches performed in churches to help whip up pogroms against Jews. The idea was that, since the host was the literal body of Christ, stories started up about Jews torturing and desecrating the host. These Medieval answers to the urban legend would be recited from the pulpit (and, at times, acted out). And then the popular anger that arose would be directed at the nearby Jewish populations. In some ways, Atheist Viagra is an oddly-skewed Atheist Host Desecration Play.

2) The other thing that came up was stage magic particularly the idea of stage magic in the 19th century. This came up because formally the play works in very similar ways. Someone comes forward and essentially says "I am going to trick you" and then, even though you know it is coming you (hopefully) get suckered into it. I find thinking about this play as a stage magic trick very helpful. Perhaps we should all watch The Prestige again...

Hey Guess What?

I'm an atheist! It's true. Want to find out more about my personal relationship to atheism? Sure you do! Why not start with this three part series I wrote for my main blog about why I am an atheist, and what it's like to be an atheist on Christmas in America.

For the record, Dan Trujillo, writer of Atheist Viagra is not, as far as I know, an atheist. This is because Atheist Viagra isn't so much about Atheism as it is attitudes about atheism (amongst other things). Atheist Viagra is a secular humanist play, rather than an atheist play. When I was growing up, the phrase "secular humanism" came up a lot. It was a fairly broad category that even religious people could be a part of!

Now that we are in the midst of the Third Great Awakening, I almost never hear the term "secular humanist" anymore. I hear a lot about atheism. I hear a lot about religious people. I hear "secularist" sometimes (always disparagingly). But I rarely hear the phrase secular humanism. I think this is because the reinjection of religious furvor into American Life has polarized us to the point where this common ground is less desired by people on all sides of the issue. This is a minor cultural calamity, and I think it is one of the things that the play addresses.

So... What is "Atheist Viagra"?

In the summary of the play, Dan calls Atheist Viagra a game of three-card-monte played with the audience, with the truth hiding under a face card. Except the game is rigged and the truth can't be known. That's pretty accurate.

Three actors appear before an audience and tell them that they have a story to tell. The story is patently ludicrous and yet, through the magic of storytelling, they get you to-- if not believe-- than at least be compelled by it. And then every few minutes or so, the rules of the play change.  It shifts genres, uses songs, dances, direct address, playing multiple characters etc. Sometimes the actors believe what they're saying, sometimes they disagree about the veracity of their accounts etc. etc.

So how, as a director, do I want to approach this play?

Atheist Viagra resists a lot of the normal ways one might approach the script. It's a slippery con-game of a play, and it's not set anywhere other than in the theatre you're currently sitting in.  It's not like I can just go do visual research into 19th century theaters again, or whatever.

So what are the starting points?

There are several.  The first piece of outside research I'm looking into are Chick Tracts.  Luckily, knowing the playwright, I happen to know that Dan has read quite a few of them (and he passed me off a magazine from the late 1990s about Jack Chick).  Chick Tracts are small ultra-right-wing Christian comic books, that really must be seen to be believed. Trust me.

Second is my own autobiography as a formerly-devout-christian-cum-atheist with a secular Jew for a mother.  And what that's taught me about religion and secularism in America. Also, the fascination its given me with those issues. I'm sure I'll be discussing more of that eventually.

The third is to progress in a more grassroots fashion with the script.  Instead of reading it and seeing how to conceptualize it, I've been reading and re-reading the script to figure out what it's rules are.  Today, I divided into scenes, with each "scene" denoting a change of the rules.  The play has 25 scenes in 79 pages.  Next step is to break down each scene. What happens? What are the rules? Who is in it? Who are they playing? etc. and then give each scene a title. And then I'll start working through scene by scene with the designers to learn as much about this play as possible by breaking it down into its component parts.

I have yet to be super inspired in a visual / sonic direction. Yet.  Often by this point some switch flips in my mind and I'm like ah yes, Anselm Kiefer and The Decemberists come to mind....  But I think via investigating each section these will come to us. Perhaps different ones for each bit.  Who knows?

Welcome!

Welcome one and all to Atheist Viagra a blog that will chronicle the research and producing process of the play by the same name! My name is Isaac Butler, I am a director and blogger.  I look forward to giving you an inside peak into the play and putting it up!