Works draw on classics, politics

Famous for making his plays available for the public to adapt,
playwright Charles Mee is quickly becoming a household name. The
saying that Mee’s plays are everywhere ““ not least at
UCLA ““ is becoming a bit of a cliché. Mee spoke with dB
Magazine about life and his philosophy on writing.
“¢bull;”¢bull;”¢bull; dB Magazine: How did you get
involved with the world of the theater and playwriting? The
upcoming festival will attract many new initiates here at UCLA.
People will be asking: “Who is Charles Mee?”

Charles Mee: When I was a teenager, my mother took me to see the
musical “South Pacific.” And what made a permanent,
vivid impression on me was one actor who had a tattoo on his belly
of an ocean-going sailing ship on the waves
““ and he could make his belly dance so that the
ship rocked on the waves. I think that’s when I fell in love
with the theater. I came out of college writing plays in the early
’60s and then I got caught up in anti-Vietnam War activities,
which led to writing about it, which led to writing about politics,
and history, and American foreign policy. So I spent 20 or 25 years
writing political history. I never meant to do it. I got caught up
in an argument and couldn’t get out of it. I am not writing
for anyone else’s tastes. I am writing to please myself. And
then it may be, because I am not from Mars, that it will be
pleasing to someone else too. But the key is to make it exactly
pleasing to me ““ so whether it stays in my bottom drawer or
it is produced on a stage, I will be happy to have it exactly as it
is. I’ve never written for anyone but myself, to capture my
thoughts and feelings and things that please me or trouble me as
clearly as I can ““ for the sake of my own memory of my life.
And anyway, I don’t know what other people like, whereas I am
the world’s leading expert in what I like.

dB: What about working in other media ““ a Charles Mee
screenplay perhaps?

CM: What I’m doing is what I love to do. I hope to keep
doing it forever. I don’t have any interest in writing a
screenplay.

dB: You’ve written a quite wonderful autobiography,
“An Almost Normal Life.” What is life to the
playwright? What’s your “philosophy” or
“world-view,” so to speak? Is there one, and if so, is
that what you’re trying to communicate through your
plays?

CM: My work begins with the belief that human beings are, as
Aristotle said, social creatures — that we are the product not
just of psychology, but also of history and culture. That we often
express our histories and cultures in ways even we are not
conscious of ““ that the culture speaks through us, grabs us,
and throws us to the ground, cries out, silences us. So, I try in
my work to move or crash past traditional forms of psychological
realism to bring into the frame of my pieces material from history,
philosophy, insanity, inattention, distractedness, judicial theory,
sudden violent passion, lyricism, The National Enquirer, nostalgia,
longing, aspiration, literary criticism, anguish, confusion,
inability. I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too
presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges,
filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other,
smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It
feels like my life. It feels like the world. And then I like to put
this — with some sense of struggle remaining — into a classical
form, a Greek form, or a beautiful dance theater piece, or some
other effort at civilization.

dB: Tell us a bit about the availability of your plays on
your Web site (www.charlesmee.org). You’ve done a fair bit of
reworking many of the classical Greek plays, and you seem to be
encouraging writers to do the same with your plays. So, is Charles
Mee the bard for the new millennium?

CM: I’ve spent my life hearing people say the greatest
playwrights in the Western world are the Greeks and Shakespeare.
And so I think, right, why don’t I try to do things the way
they did? And, of course, none of them ever wrote an original play.
They took the stories and plays of others and remade them. So
that’s what I do. And then, having done that, it seems only
right to me that I should make my plays available for others to
mine for their work, just as I’ve mined other work to make my
own. And so my plays are downloaded all over the world. Someone did
a play of mine a few months ago in Trivandrum, India. One is
playing right now in Istanbul. People take stuff from my plays,
write their own very different work, and send me the results. I
love it.   dB: Any encouraging last words for the
budding playwrights of the world?

CM: Do what you love and you can’t go wrong. You are the
world’s leading expert in what you love. No one can tell you
better than yourself what is the most wonderful movie or play
you’ve ever seen — or what movie or play you would most like
to see if you wrote it yourself.

Interview conducted by Alex Wen, dB Magazine
reporter.