Dale Dougherty on playwright Charles Mee

BB pal and MAKE: editor/publisher Dale Dougherty just emailed me this excellent commentary on a play he recently saw:

“There is no such thing as an original play,” writes the playwright Charles Mee, who has the text of his plays online at www.charlesmee.org. “Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work.” He encourages others to “pillage his plays” as he has done to the work of other playwrights.

Last week, I saw “Hotel Cassiopeia” by Charles Mee, which was part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. The play was about the American collage artist, Joseph Cornell, a man who lived for most of his life in his parents’ house in Queens, caring for a disabled sibling, and never having an an intimate relationship of his own. The play itself was more about the mind of the artist than the life of the artist, however. In this production, when you walk into the theatre, the actor playing Cornell is already on stage, sitting at a desk with his head in his hands. “Hotel Cassiopeia” is ornate and dream-like, without much of a plot. Real and imagined characters enter, old Hollywood movies are played on the wall and objects are retrieved and added to Cornell’s collection in the drawers of his desk. He wonders whether anything he does has any meaning and is worth doing. He has a certain love of finding and keeping things, which seem as real to him as any relationship might be. Cornell is talking about these things in reverie:

the little store nearby where you can find
star fish
butterflies in little boxes
driftwood
and in the antiques store

the things from Asia
inlaid wood
a thousand little drawers

After the play, I found myself mulling it over, like a dream, strange and beautiful. I went to the Web to look up more information about Joseph Cornell and the play itself. I was delighted to find Mee’s website, “The (re)making Project”, with the full text of the play (and all of his plays.) Intentionally or not, Mee’s thoughts about his own work seem to echo the ideas of Open Source and Creative Commons, viewing his own work as something to be remixed by others.