Charles Mee
It’s also Mee’s fifth play with Actors Theatre’s
Artistic Director, Les Waters, at the helm. Their
work together has been seen at the Humana
Festival, American Repertory Theater and Berkeley
Repertory, among other venues. “I feel as if I’ve
done a hundred things with Les,” Mee says. “When
Les came to the United States, the first living room
he went to was mine. We had a cup of tea, as I
remember, and talked about Pina Bausch.” Waters
and Mee draw from a common pool of inspirations—
Bausch’s expressive dance theatre is one of many.
Over time, their shared interests deepened into
trust for one another’s artistic instincts. Waters
says of Mee, “I’ve learned a lot from him. He taught
me that you can take anything and put it up against
something else to see what the tension is, what the
electricity is between things.”
For playwright Charles Mee, The Glory of the
World is an occasion for reunion. Five of Mee’s
plays—Big Love, Limonade Tous les Jours,
bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia and
Under Construction—first premiered at the Humana
Festival. They have since gone on to productions
in New York, around the country and abroad. Their
scope of inquiry has ranged from ancient classics, to
pop artists, to the city of Paris—and now, includes the
work of local writer Thomas Merton. How does it feel
for Mee to return for his sixth Humana Festival? “I
love Actors and I love Louisville,” Mee says. “It’s like
being with family.”
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Mee’s plays derive their energy from
unexpected juxtapositions. His writing process
can be likened to collage, or remixing, or as Mee
puts it, “re-making.” The text of a single play might
sample from internet flotsam, critical theory
and tabloid headlines. Mee makes all of his work
available online at www.charlesmee.org, or “The
(Re)making Project.” He urges visitors to borrow
at will from his plays, as he has “pillaged the
structures and contents of the plays of Euripides
and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and
the evening news.”
Waters’ and Mee’s first collaboration, Big Love—
also the first production for both at Actors Theatre—
pillaged its plot from Aeschylus’s The Suppliant
Women. “Big Love was written for the millennial
Humana Festival,” Mee recalls. “I thought to myself,
I don’t think I should write some kind of piece of
science fiction about the future, but I can go back to
one of the oldest plays ever written in the Western
world and see if it still speaks to us today.”
Big Love’s updated take on Aeschylus’s story
of fifty runaway brides and their pursuant
grooms explores both the political implications
and the emotional transcendence of love.
The play proved to be a hit and went on to
numerous theatres, including the Brooklyn
Academy of Music.
I love Actors and I love
Louisville. It’s like being
with family.
Mee then wrote bobrauschenbergamerica—a
centerpiece of the 2001 Humana Festival,
staged by Anne Bogart with SITI Company—
in honor of Robert Rauschenberg. In
Rauschenberg’s collages, Mee found an
analogue for his own work. “Rauschenberg
would pick up junk off the sidewalk and then
stick it onto his canvas. He felt that, because
it was all part of the world that he walked
through and lived in, it was coherent—even
if he didn’t know in what way,” Mee explains.
Many of Mee’s Humana Festival plays have
used the work of an artist as their structural
logic. Hotel Cassiopeia (2006) builds itself
around the compositions of Joseph Cornell;
Under Construction (2009) pits the nostalgia
of Norman Rockwell against the provocative
installations of Jason Rhoades. With The Glory
of the World, Mee examines the legacy of a
writer rather than a visual artist. However,
the play still takes inspiration from a singular
thought process—its associative style bears
traces of Merton’s meandering, meditative
path to discovery.
Mee’s contributions to the American theatre
have earned him accolades, including the
Lifetime Achievement Award in Drama from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Coming up for Mee are two premieres, in
addition to revivals of his best-known work.
Daily Life Everlasting will be seen at La
MaMa—one of the Off-Off-Broadway theatres
where Mee first got his start in the 1960s.
His Global Warming debuts in a site-specific
production in the Gowanus Canal, described
by Mee as “one of the ultimate toxic waste
dumps in America.” The play takes place over
the course of an urbane dinner party. As the
diners sip their cocktails, the waters around
them are starting to rise. By the play’s end,
all are drowned. Big Love plays at New York’s
Signature Theatre this spring; meanwhile,
Mee is working on a dance theatre piece with
Broadway musical director Susan Stroman.
“It’s a lot,” he admits. But even after decades
in the theatre, seeing one of his plays produced
is still a delight. “Each time, I’ll be hearing it
almost as if it were brand new,” Mee insists.
“It’s totally weird, but that is where an awful
lot of the pleasure comes from.”
—Ariel Sibert
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