LOUISVILLE, KY. — Charles L. Mee's Hotel Cassiopeia is one of six new full-length plays premiering at Actors Theatre of Louisville's 30th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, which runs March 7-April 8. It's Mee's fourth work to be presented there, following Big Love (2000), bobrauschenbergamerica (2001), and Limonade Tous les Jours (2002). It's also his second Louisville project with innovative director Anne Bogart and her SITI (Saratoga International Theatre Institute) Company; previously they developed the 2001 work about artist Robert Rauschenberg.
According to Mee — who tells anyone who talks with him to call him Chuck — Hotel Cassiopeia is another artist-inspired play. Several years ago, the late Dick Fisher purchased one of artist Joseph Cornell's evocative wooden collage boxes, entitled "Cassiopeia." Mee quickly acknowledges Fisher as his patron: Fisher and his wife, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, have supported him for many years.
That support began when Mee approached Fisher, a longtime friend who had become chairman of the investment firm Morgan Stanley ("He went into moneymaking," Mee observes, "while I was into money losing"). "I can't afford to do this," Mee told Fisher, referring to his playwriting. "How about if you put in the money and I'll write the plays?" Since then, Mee says gratefully, the Fishers "have supported me completely to do anything I want to do with total freedom."
When Fisher purchased his Cornell box, it sparked a connection with Mee, who earlier in life had edited Horizon, a magazine about art and literature. "We wrote about [Max] Ernst and Rauschenberg and about Cornell, who especially fascinated me. I love collage. It comes close to what I do as a playwright. Cornell has been my dramaturge for many years."
Cornell (1903-72) was an idiosyncratic loner who made wooden boxes filled with pocket watches, coiled springs, maps of the stars, thimbles, parrots, seashells, broken glass, children's alphabet blocks, brightly colored balls, soap bubbles, whales' teeth, and starfish, among other things. "How would it be if those boxes could speak?" Mee wondered. Hotel Cassiopeia is his response.
"Cornell's works offer a remarkable dreamscape," Mee says. "They put you in some place between waking and dreaming, which is where I live my whole life. Blue sand, a white clay pipe, a map of the Milky Way, an orange rubber ball — see where it settles. It can be a terrifically moving and beautiful place. It fills you with a sense of loneliness, of longing, of heartbreak and beauty. In this play, I've tried to enter that world from the stage and see what it looked like."
Given his means of financial support and the inspiration for his plays, it is perhaps unsurprising that Mee does not develop his work through the process used by most playwrights. "Typically, a playwright writes and writes, then workshops his script and is told how to rewrite it," he says. Hotel Cassiopeia was workshopped at the Flea Theater in New York City about two years ago; some elements were developed collaboratively at that point, Mee says, but not since: "I love the idea of gathering all these people in the room at the beginning of the process. I like to get all the ideas at first and then select what I like. That way, people make suggestions when they can be important."
Working with Bogart is also a process beyond the norm. "No theatre is as collaborative as the way Anne's company does stuff," he says. "You sit in a room and everybody makes suggestions about everything — actors, sound designers, lighting designers, musical contributors. It's collaboration cubed. It's not like most rehearsals with a director placing a text on stage. Anne creates a three-dimensional event in which text is only one part because she's figuring out the physical choreography at the same time."
In the case of Hotel Cassiopeia, however, Mee's text is not evolving: "Anne has immense respect for the script. In this case, collaboration means 'Let's all bring in what we do,' not 'Let's change the script.' "
In fact, Mee makes his scripts available on his website (www.charlesmee.org), where the text of Hotel Cassiopeia is available even as it premieres in Louisville. On the website he writes, "Please feel free to take the plays...and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don't just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or rearrange them or put in a few texts that you like better...." Instead, he urges readers and directors to "pillage the plays" in the same manner he has treated his own source material, which ranges from Greek tragedy and Brecht to Soap Opera Digest and the evening news. (He does warn those performing his plays as he wrote them that the works are copyrighted and that performance rights must be granted.)
"I thought this show was about Cornell," Mee says. "But as I wrote, I realized, 'Oh my God, this is my autobiography.' I identify with Cornell in a way I didn't actually know. He had an odd life, a terrifically interior life inside his own mind and emotions. The richest, most vivid part of his life was inside his own imagination. My play is about his inner life."
Hotel Cassiopeia is being staged in Actors Theatre's intimate Victory Jory Theatre with a cast of seven. "We have a gorgeous set design," Mee says, "a star chart on a deep blue sky."
Working with the SITI Company "is a different way of making plays," he adds. "It's like creating a Cornell box. This kind of work puts characters in the middle of a solar system..." He pauses to search for an example, and then says, "With music by Tupac Shakur playing. It's a set of juxtapositions. It feels good when you juxtapose another place in the cosmos that's not usually found in the theatre." Unless Chuck Mee is around.