Embrace the
Poop or
The Little Prop That Could
by Elizabeth Wong
A large tall box, light as a feather but
standing half my height, arrives on my Los Angeles, CA
doorstep. Q’uest
que c’est que cá, Mister Postman? I LOVE
surprises and I LOVE presents, and this was both. An
unexpected sumptin’ sumptin’ from
Honolulu Theatre for Youth!
In all my years as a playwright,
with plenty of professional productions notched on
my playwright’s pencil, this
was the first time ever, EVER, have I received a prop
as a present from one of my own shows. Hardened seasoned
pro,
am I. Don’t ask for mementoes, don’t need
no stinkin’ mementoes.
And yet, aaaargh! In front
of the hunky FedEx guy, I’m
having a Wicked Witch of the West meltdown
moment, a sloppy sentimental blob am I. Très embarrassing!
Tear
into the box. Push past the popcorn, popcorn, popcorn,
popcorn. Lots of popcorn. And then, I see
her. Nestled
there. Her sparkling eyes, her long glittering Tammy
Faye-escque eyelashes, her sweet tapering papier-mâché beak.
It’s
been a month or so since the close of my new musical
for young audiences, The Magical
Bird, a minty
fresh frolicking trade wind of an adaptation, even
if I do say so myself, commissioned by HTY and its
new artistic
director Eric Johnson.
This new musical retells a classic
bedtime story from the Philippines, a folktale largely
unknown to American
audiences,
about a King with a serious ailment, his three boisterous
rambunctious bickering sons Pedro, Diego and Juan,
and their race-against-time quest to find a cure that
will
save their father and their kingdom.
With apologies
to the human actors, the bejeweled beastie in the box
is the mystical star of the show, and the
sought-after elusive cure, the Ibong Adarna, a bird
whose song has mysterious
healing powers. “Ibong” in Tagalog, the
primary dialect—one of many dialects in the Philippines—meaning “bird.”
But
per usual, there’s a hitch! The cure is not
easy to catch. There’s the dangerous journey
outside the imperial palace into a dark scary haunted
forest. There’s
a beautiful but scary secreted Tree of Diamonds to
find. There’s the strange, scary old hermit
guarding the tree to outsmart. And then there’s
the bird with bling herself.
Each boy, by his lonesome,
and in his own unique
way, must figure out a way to defeat the Ibong Adarna’s
effective and fast-acting defenses. Her healing lullaby
causes the
listener to fall sound asleep on the spot! And watch
out if she blasts you with her bursting bowels, because
her
poop can turn you into stone.
Yes, the Adarna, she
poops!
Fitted into a holster in the belly proper of
the Adarna puppet, whose body is shaped like an egret
or heron,
with a bendy-flexy arching neck like a swan, underneath
her
diaphanous flapping wings, there at the very backside
of her—a can of silly string!
And when the
quivering tail of the Adarna slowly lifts up, a
button is depressed, and with some
practice—due
to the unpredictability of the trajectory of the
goo—out
shoots a fair steady gushing stream of silly string
into the audience, and onto the shoulders and top
of the head
of the actor. Gales and howls of laughter, and
dropping jaws of disbelief, ensue.
Silly string!
A brilliant idea that sprung from the ingenious
mind of HTY’s new production manager and
lighting designer Bart McGeehon. Delightful, appropriate,
and utterly
sublime.
Plenty of collaborative back and forth
took place about the puppet’s construction.
Should she have legs like an emu or like a dog?
(She ended up with no legs whatsoever.)
Whether she should have wings like a chicken or
like an eagle. (Eagle.) The most challenging discussions
centered
around one crucial question: should the audience
see the poop coming straight out of the bird, or
should it be hidden
discreetly, coyly, behind a big oriental fan (for
her privacy)? The debate raged on. Can you guess
which choice prevailed?
Truth be told, when I was
in the formative writing stages of the musical,
I didn’t even dare to dream about
poop-ability. I hoped to have a puppet large enough
to be diapered (you have to read the story), but
a prop that
actually could? No way.
Every adaptation presents
its own unique challenges, and early on I decided
a few things. I would deviate
from the
original story to suit a more modern sensibility:
for example, the youngest boy Prince Juan would
not cut
himself and
pour lemon juice on the wounds in order to stay
awake; instead, he uses a more benign but equally
effective
rubber band, which he plucks against his wrist.
More slapstick,
less gruesome, definitely mo’ bettah.
And
more to the point, I would demonstrate the bird’s
lethal bowels with clever use of lights and sound
effects, and the action of the actors to duck and
take cover. I
didn’t dare wish for more. In fact, I didn’t
even imagine more. A concession to budgetary concerns,
yes, but also I did not consider this lack of poop-itude
in any way a compromise in my vision. I saw this
decision as being a rather tasteful and economically
sensible solution.
And depending on the wackiness of the potential
sound effects, the fun quotient it seemed to me
rather high.
In fact, throughout the writing of
the musical, I resisted the urge to make scatological
jokes
or succumb
to even
one doody reference. And while I know how bodily
functions do delight the primary target audiences
of kindergarten
through sixth grade, it’s common knowledge
the doodoo joke is standard and basic. A poop joke
is just your garden-variety
Number Two cheap laugh. In the sitcom writers’ room,
I can attest, the scatological was always the first
impulse. (How constipated, you say? Well worry
not. I purged it
all out of my system, in a first draft which included
a silly song extolling the virtues of a good bowel
movement,
to the horror of some who read it. Oh yeah, I’m
not above writing for cheap laughs.)
So “To
poop or not to poop”? That was the question!
In
answer, I put my sure hands to the keyboard and
typed, “Hot
white lights and wacky sound effects will serve
as a perfect, and potentially funny, euphemism.” But
in practice, when Eric Johnson called me and said
he was all for real
pooping on stage, I clapped a hand over the phone
receiver, and tried to stifle a loud whooopeeeeeee!!!!
I didn’t
think of it, but as soon as I heard it, I knew
it was sooooo right for the play.
This
is what a playwright prays for, this is what a
playwright lives for—collaborators like Eric
and Bart and scenic designer Joe Dodd, who bring
brave and brilliant ideas,
and who execute them beyond the writer’s
own wildest dreams.
To wit: I wrote “pillows
for a bed,” and the
HTY designers built a bed that rotated on its own
axis 360 degrees with a working piano imbedded
in it. I wrote “simple
yellow measuring tape” to serve as a “nut
o’meter” to
measure the sanity or insanity of the king, but
the designers built a contraption that actually
inflated balloons attached
to a helmet, which was also affixed with strobe
light AND an exploding canister of confetti. I
wrote “carabao,
an Asian water buffalo,” and the designers
used an authentic carabao horn to top off the handlebars
of a tricycle
rigged with rear view mirror, working horn, and
lots of colored flags, green grass skirt, assorted
bling AND a
tail that rotated round and round thanks to a hand
crank.
Oh yeah, this was a world premiere production
chockablock with awesome props.
But trust me, I
am neither spoiled nor bedazzled. I still like the
simplicity and theatricality of
my original
choices. Theatres could still give their audiences
a
rockin’ marvelous
good time with just fluffy pillows for a bed,
a yellow tape to measure sanity, and goofy loop-de-loop
sound effects
to signal the launching of Adarna bird’s
dizzying and stonifying bowel movement.
But here’s
the thing, the key: be ready to pounce on good
ideas, even if they aren’t your own; stay
open-minded to other people’s genius. And
most importantly, and wholeheartedly, embrace
the poop! |
