sticking it out
A couple weeks back, we were standing looking out the second floor lobby windows at the Goodman right after seeing Revolutions (which was great and oh so timely...) I was staring at the alley across the way, the doomed Couch Place, aka the Oriental Theatre alley..scene of one of the deadliest theater fires and reported home to many ghosts. In 2005, I went on a haunted Chicago tour and we visited there. That night, like other nights when there is a show at the Niederlander, which sits in the same spot as the doomed theater, the alley is lively and well-lit. The night we were there, it was not, and the shadows did interesting things as I listened to the tour guide tell us the story I was already quite familiar with in my Chicago hauntings obsessions. Later, I dreamed that a woman was shouting a name from very far away. Like in and out as my dreams played out in their ordinary fashion. I no longer remember the name, only that I felt like it was somehow connected to that alley somehow. Sure enough,, when I looked up the first name, it coincided with the theater's house manager, that had perished in the fire. I don't know if it was my only identifiable ghost encounter. And the name, though I have weird amnesia about it now, fairly common for that time. But maybe. I also cannot find that name on any lists since.
That ghost, however, is not the ghost I have spending time with the past few weeks. That autumn in 2005, I was doing research for my archer avenue project, which was actually a class project for an MFA seminar called "Writing Chicago Poems." I knew about the tale of the city's famous Resurrection Mary long before I landed in Chicago, likely though reading ghost story books I checked out from the library in stacks. It was something I thought about, and would casually mention aloud, every time we saw someone along the road (this included Mary, but also Resurrection Harry and Larry who my mom liked to joke about.) It seemed natural that my poem project would center on this story, since it had a lot to say about girls and transgression, and also class and local labor history. The result was what I felt was the tightest and most cohesive series I had yet written. I published it as a free giveaway chapbook I handed out at readings, then later included the poems in IN THE BIRD MUSEUM, my second collection. By the early aughts, Mary wasn't really glimpsed roadside much anymore, despite the cars that flock to Archer yearly get chased away by police around Halloween. But anyone who knows the story well knows Mary liked winter and the time around Christmas best to make her appearances. She was apparently more active as a haunting from the 40s to the 70s...A few years back since , one of her favorite spots to appear in and around, the Willowbrook Ballroom, burned to the ground.
So when I was thinking of possible play script subject matter, the story seemed like something that could be wielded dramatically (limited sets, possibilities for eerie lighting), especially as I was coming off of seeing a whole lot of great horror pieces on stage during October and early November. What resulted is what I am calling "Graveyards of Chicago"--named after one of the poems in that original series. The play takes place in dual timelines--the late 1930s and the early 1970s. The scenes roadside and in parking lots, but also in a taxi dispatch station, the famous dive bar, Chet's Melody Lounge, and a dressing room at Marshall Fields.
Even though I throw my hat in and try to write fiction every once in a while amid the poems, drama is a new creature. I've certainly read enough of it (multiple classes in undergrad and grad school.) Seen enough of it (between the theater habit we are in the midst of now and all those shows I saw in the 90s. ) It's strange to have most of your focus on dialogue when its not your usual tools of the trade. I am not too shabby at it, but at the same time, being a poet sometimes makes ordinary language (the sort one uses to communicate in a short story or in a piece of drama) always seems lackluster and faulty. This s one of the reasons I am much less interested in publishing my prose exploits than I am the poetry ones. Which, of course, means I have, every couple of days, decided to quit trying to write for the stage and go back to poemish things. Then I spend the whole next day trying to talk myself back into it.
It's a little surreal to be stomping though the various versions of the local lore, like I was exactly two decades, even still now, reading some of the same accounts and making new notes. I am nearing the final couple of scenes, which I would love to finish before taking a couple days off this week for the holiday. At least the first preliminary draft, which give me a better idea of what I actually have when I get back to work on it in December.
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