Sideshow’s first rehearsal of Calamity West’s world premiere The Gacy Play started last NIGHT! We are so excited to have such a talented group of artists in the room to make this play a reality. The room was overflowing with energy. It was the most epic thing you’ve ever seen, as you can tell from this single instagram photo documenting the evening:

Ok. Well. It’s really just a bunch of people sitting around a table reading a play. But that’s how it all gets started, my friend! The discoveries, connections, and theatrical magic is all there, but in case it wasn’t exciting enough, I played around with some cool filters that make the lights look like big shiny discs!

We’ll have more exciting photos in the near future, but the more important thing is to mark Monday evening as the first official rehearsal of this wonderful play that Sideshow’s been partnering with Ms. West on for over 18 months now. We cannot wait to see it on its feet!

Until next time,

Ms. Megan

The talented Jeffrey Gardner, Dramaturg for The Gacy Play and also co-creator and Director of the very cool radio drama Our Fair City, blergs directly to discuss the man behind the killer clown, Mr. John Wayne Gacy. Thank you Jeffrey for your contribution to the Sideshow Blerg! The Gacy Play begins rehearsals next Monday!

“Can’t sleep, clown will eat me. Can’t sleep, clown will eat me. Can’t sleep, clown will eat me….”

—Bart Simpson, The Simpsons

“And then the time I was a clown and went to the hospital to visit the children, and I went into a room by myself where a little boy was, and his mother started to cry, and after I visit with the boy I went out and asked the mother if I had did anything wrong.  She said no…it just that her son…had been in there for six weeks and that was the first time she seen him smile.”

—John Wayne Gacy, Letter from Prison, 12-79

I start this entry with a pair of quotes: partially because I find them fascinating, and a bit because they lend a more authoritative and dramaturgical air, but mostly because they help set up a really interesting dichotomy that I’ll come back to later.

I’ve written five or six different introductions to this entry, and have quickly discarded all of them.  Nothing I lead with seems appropriate, or respectful, or to have the proper gravitas for an entry about the nigh-unimaginable horror that was the Gacy Murders. Then I realized–I was avoiding the subject in a very normal way.

I think we have a tendency to head-fake, look away from, distort, or even magnify events like Gacy’s murders in an attempt to take them out of our everyday world. Some serial killers make it easy for us: Manson carves a swastika into his forehead.  The Zodiac killer remains a faceless bogeyman.  Serial Killers are “monsters of the week” on Procedural Dramas: appearing, laughing maniacally, only to be apprehended- or more likely shot heroically while threatening the investigating officer’s love interest.  Gacy is harder- he was well liked by his neighbors, business associates, and showed very few outward signs of his insanity. He was a home-owner, a member of the community. He even, according to some reports, managed to charm some of the officers of his surveillance detail.

Before the murders were uncovered, Gacy was unremarkable: a minor political figure in Chicago, a democratic precinct captain who was known for getting more voters out than anyone else, throwing great outdoor parties, and chairing the Polish Day parade.  He had his picture taken with First Lady Rosalynn Carter…

…and performed as Pogo the Clown for hospitalized Children.

It is the image of the Killer Clown that the larger public has latched onto. 8 out of 15 of the first image searches for “John Wayne Gacy” come back with clown pictures.  The moniker graces the title pages of books and the headlines of newspapers.  An unsurprisingly large portion of the public believes he committed his murders and sexual assaults while dressed as a clown.  If you remember one thing from this blerg entry, I’d like it to be that: Gacy’s clown character was never a component of his killing.

I think Gacy’s  albeit strange hobby was an incredibly important part of his story, but not for the reasons we think: again, he did not wear his clown suit while murdering any of his victims (to our knowledge), nor did he use it to lure them places.  The average age of his victims was 19 (with the youngest being 14, and the oldest confirmed victim being 21 years old)- not the age at which one has a clown at one’s birthday party.

Gacy, in one of his many letters while in prison, talked about all of the things he was proud of, and the things he had done to make the world a better place.  He talked about his parties, and the Polish parade, and of course, Pogo.

So, why do we focus on this aspect?

The “Killer Clown” archetype shows up all over the place- doubtlessly reinforced by Gacy’s killings, but certainly not invented there.  We see it in Batman’s Joker, or in the later novel “IT” by Stephen King.  The twisting of childish or happy things is a long-standing horror trope.  There is also the Uncanny Vally issue: with pale faces, rictus smiles, and overblown emotions, clowns sometimes confuse basic context clues we use when determining whether someone is living or dead.

It seems to me that Pogo was a detail that turned the events from “horrific and awful” to acts of “Pure Evil,” and the “unimaginable” to the “Impossible.”  Gacy’s crimes were too much for us to comprehend, so we needed to make him something other than Human– otherwise, we might have to admit that the same impulses could be lurking in anyone we know.  Rather than having to ask: “Do any of the people I know murder children?”, we can observe: “None of my friends are creepy, lecherous clowns,’ and sleep well at night. This avoids the central problem, however: despite that fact that his acts were unconscionable, insane, and absolutely inhumane, Gacy was a living, breathing human being.

Go ahead and read the second quote again.  I think we’re better served if we stop thinking of Pogo as a manifestation of Gacy’s “Evil,” and instead wonder how a man who would give his time to making young children smile could turn around and murder adolescent males in such numbers.  I certainly don’t have an answer there, but I do think it should be discussed, rather than ignored.

First things first. A lot of the reason that we make art is that our ability to perceive the world around us is godawful:

We are forced to stumble through our chemically challenged lives in a chemosensory biosphere, relying on sound and vision that evolved primarily for life in the trees. Only through science and technology has humanity penetrated the immense sensory worlds in the rest of the biosphere. With instrumentation, we are able to translate the sensory worlds of the rest of life into our own. And in the process, we have learned to see almost to the end of the universe, and estimated the time of its beginning. We will never orient by feeling Earth’s magnetic field, or sing in pheromone, but we can bring all such information existing into our own little sensory realm.

Science and art are much closer than people think: they’re both ways of figuring out and communicating the world around us. We can’t see in ultraviolet, but we can build instruments to show us what UV light’s impact is, and pick colors and charts and graphs to demonstrate that impact to those around us. We tell stories to account for the stuff that would fall through the cracks, otherwise, and if you think of it like that, is there any difference between the Earth’s magnetic field and a ghost on-stage representing the unknown of the afterlife? (Okay, maybe a small difference, but still.)

Of course, there are ways that art and science do diverge, and as the article states, they come mostly from metaphors and the way that they’re used:

The essential difference between literary and scientific style is the use of metaphor. In scientific reports, metaphor is permissible—provided it is chaste, perhaps with just a touch of irony and self-deprecation…Lyrical expression in literature, on the other hand, is a device to communicate emotional feeling directly from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader.

Hear that? Science can have all the chaste metaphor that it wants, but in the arts, the sluttier the better. Aw yeah, baby. Directly communicate those ideas. Yeah. Right into my brain, that’s the way.

Whether you’re a math geek or a theatre nerd, though, one thing is clear from the article: ants (and, by extension, the animal kingdom) would be terrible writers:

An inevitable result of the mutually offsetting forces of multilevel selection is permanent ambiguity in the individual human mind, leading to countless scenarios among people in the way they bond, love, affiliate, betray, share, sacrifice, steal, deceive, redeem, punish, appeal, and adjudicate. The struggle endemic to each person’s brain, mirrored in the vast superstructure of cultural evolution, is the fountainhead of the humanities. A Shakespeare in the world of ants, untroubled by any such war between honor and treachery, and chained by the rigid commands of instinct to a tiny repertory of feeling, would be able to write only one drama of triumph and one of tragedy. Ordinary people, on the other hand, can invent an endless variety of such stories, and compose an infinite symphony of ambience and mood. (emphasis mine because haha Ant Shakespeare!)

Yeah! Suck it, ants! Humankind’s innately conflicted ideas of consciousness and individuality leave us capable of generating an infinite number of potential narratives whereas you and your little ant-buddies can’t even conceive of diverging from your humdrum anty existence. WE’RE NUMBER ONE! WE’RE NUMBER ONE!

-Walt, insectoidally

Artistic Director Jonathan L. Green and Executive Director Megan A. Smith discuss whose middle initial is better at a recent Ensemble meeting.

It’s a big scary world out there. And sometimes you need explanations. Sometimes things happen, and they just don’t make sense, be they the sickness of a loved one or the disappearance of honey bees or the sinking of the Titanic. (Ha! Just kidding. The Titanic sank because icebergs love irony.) With so many things happening every day, it can be easy to feel lost in a swirl of activity, with every new event as nonsensical as the last.

But that’s where Sideshow comes in. As theatre artists, it often falls upon us to explain the unexplainable. To process the deeper meanings of seemingly incoherent events, and ensure that our audiences can rest at night under a cozy blanket of Deep Meaning. And so, when something like Buzzfeed’s 50 Unexplainable Black & White Photos list gets posted,well, let’s just say that we here at Sideshow feel like a gauntlet has been thrown. Unexplainable, you say? Balderdash! There’s a perfectly clear explanation for each of those photos! Allow us to elucidate on a few:

This picture was taken shortly after Professor Trontonium completed his Human-Mosquito hybrid experiment in a quest for world domination. As suspected, mosquitos are jerks, and this one stole the Professor’s bicycle.

Here we see a college course teaching a dark variant of Calculus, developed by Sir Isaac Newton’s evil twin, Jeff. Jeff was something of a drinker.

Pandas are terrible at soccer.

This was taken moments after the beginning of the First Annual Ride-a-Barrell-Over-Niagara-Falls Derby. For the Second Annual derby, the rules were rewritten and contestants were allowed to begin with their barrels in the water, rather than dragging them overland for five miles first.

In matters of the heart, bears are surprisingly adroit listeners.

These penguins are going to eat that girl.

And there you have it, folks. What’d I tell you? For every picture is a story, and for every story, well, there’s Sideshow. Except the boring stories. Those we don’t do so much. Maybe try somebody else if you want to be bored. Like this guy:

God Gunther ENOUGH ABOUT YOUR STAMP COLLECTION ALREADY WE GET IT

I have been trying to write for at least a quarter of a century, and I can say very firmly that in my experience, suffering is largely of no bloody use to anyone, and definitely not a prerequisite for creation. If an artist has managed to take something appalling and make it into art, that’s because the artist is an artist, not because something appalling is naturally art.

A lot of artists have a hard time of it. It’s a fact of life. It comes with choosing a career with no particularly defined path, no guarantee of financial success, and a value system based largely on subjective judgments by people you’ve never met. These do not necessarily lead to a life of comfort, luxury, or good dental plans. But there’s nothing inherent in the lifestyle that requires the exclusion of happiness: misery does not breed better art, or more effective art, or more “legitimate” art. Like Kennedy says: good artists make good art because they are good, not because of the particular circumstances that they live in.

We here at Sideshow know this pretty well. Our entire staff is made up of incredible volunteers who dedicate huge amounts of time and energy to keeping the company running and producing the work that we love. We do pay the artists we work with, but believe us when we tell you that nobody’s getting rich off their production stipends. This is the way that it is for Sideshow, but we don’t do it because we feel like it’s better that way. It is not an ascetic ideal to which we are aspiring. It is, instead, the way that things currently are by necessity, and as we develop and grow as a company our aim is to make it less and less necessary with each passing season. Nothing about a volunteer staff is intrinsic to the work that we do: we do what we do because of passion and commitment, and the artistic products we create are an immense reward. As we keep growing and are able to support more and more of those we work with financially, it will only help further express our passion and commitment, because everyone involved will be able to commit even more time and energy to what they do and making it as awesome as they can.

Again: artists should not go into their fields expecting to live comfortable lifestyles, or feeling necessarily entitled to one. Nothing is owed to you in the arts until you have earned it, just like as in any other profession. You have to work at it, and you have to commit, and yes, you probably have to do a lot of things for free off the bat and just because you commit and are excited and good does not mean you will be immediately met with riches. But you should also not expect to live unhappily. You shouldn’t seek out situations that are make you that way. Instead, find the art and the process and the people that make you happy, and inspire you, and assist you in the creation of the best art possible. Because then you’ll be the best artist you can be, and chances are good that you’ll be happy to be that way.