Conquering Surrender: The Dainty Cadaver Backstory
An introduction by Jeff Lewonczyk

As playwrights, many of us cherish the illusion of control. It only stands to reason: in the “normal” way of doing things, we create a vivid, vital, breathing world in our minds – and then give it to another person, who interprets and reimagines that world in her own image. That person then tells a group of people, each with their own diverse backgrounds and idiosyncrasies, how to embody that interpretation. Those performers, in turn, stand in an environment that bears little relation to the imagined world in question and, generally bereft of all but the most minimal resources, attempt to communicate their embodiment of this interpretation to (if we’re lucky) a crowd of people who are steeped in all the physical details of their compromised reality – temperature, hardness of seats, what they had to eat, how much they slept the night before, what sort of problems they’re having at work, their feelings about the lover or stranger sitting next to them….

In sum, the playwright can end up feeling like her original world is being viewed through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, in a fog, while riding a bumpy jeep on an unpaved road through the jungle, chased by angry militiamen with guns. No wonder we cling tightly to what little control we feel we have.

The natural impulse is to fight against all these factors—why do we put words on a page in the first place if not to carve out a little clearing of order in the wilderness? But what if, occasionally, we say “Fuck it” and throw ourselves upon the turbulent mercy of the unknown? Might this not be a beneficial—maybe even an awesome—thing? To learn how to actually write from the backseat of that racing jeep, bullets flying past our ears, clutching our precious cargo as we cling to the side bar to avoid certain death during the treacherous curves?

Piper McKenzie’s Dainty Cadaver is an attempt to embrace this surrender. Taking a cue from the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpses, it’s a collaborative method of writing a play in the form of a game. Player One writes the opening scene of a play—10 minutes or so of stage time. Player Two reads that scene and writes a continuation of the same length. Player Three reads Player Two’s scene—but not, crucially, Player One’s—and writes a continuation. And so on, until Player Six wraps the whole thing up. With each writer seeing only what immediately preceded her scene, there’s no way of knowing what brought things to this point. The goal is to move things forward, without worrying too much about the past.

For our first Dainty Cadaver outing, we did this three times, with three “teams” of six playwrights each. Through various stratagems, the playwrights kept in the dark as much as possible, to preserve their bewilderment. Adding to the tightrope effect, the resulting plays were fully staged, in one week, with no budget.

The idea was to create narrative plays, however fragmented. In order to ensure that the finished products were actual plays, rather than just disparate series of scenes (which wouldn’t be nearly as fun), there were a few ground rules:

Each scene must contain at least one character from the previous scene.

Each scene must refer to at least three additional elements—settings, plot points, themes, images—from the previous scene.

Scenes can either end with traditional scene breaks or stop abruptly in the middle of a scene.

A writer’s contribution can consist of one sustained scene or a series of shorter scenes.

There’s no rule about style—so long as there are characters and incidents, the scenes can take whatever the writer’s imagination can conjure up.

With each writer having control over only a small piece of real estate, there was the usual freedom that comes from constraint. Almost every writer I spoke to afterward told me they experienced an initial moment of panic, followed (in most cases) by the pleasurable feeling of plunging in—you had the wheel, the jeep was yours to steer for a bit. The more control you gave up, the more you enjoyed the ride.

A word of praise is due here for the directors who brought these scripts to life: they managed to take heterogeneous, occasionally jagged scripts and, with the help of excellent actors, turn them into coherent stage experiences. By not making it obvious where each scene began and ended, their work made the Dainty Cadaver a game for the audience as well, in that people had to work to spot the transitions. That was an odd thing for that character to say—did a new writer just start? Did that blackout mean there was a transition? Is that the voice of my playwright friend or someone else?

In reality, there was also a morbid aspect to the audience’s fascination. The possibility always existed that these narratives would crash and burn. Would a writer completely hijack the process and take the play hostage? Would unexpected paradoxes, jarring transitions and hilarious anachronisms occur? Everyone loves a good car crash, almost as much as they love a satisfying narrative. At its best, I think these Dainty Cadavers provide both.

In the end, like all games, the Dainty Cadaver needs to be judged by its playability. Did the players and spectators enjoy themselves? To all appearances, yes. Can it be played again, with different but equally interesting results? Absolutely. A handful of committed artists and a few rules forged a path through unexpected freedom and infinite possibilities to reach an entertaining, maybe even enlightening, end product. Having outrun our pursuers and emerged into a sunny clearing, with smoke rising into the sky from the comfort of a safe village ahead, we’re shaken but exhilarated. We’ve completed our adventure, and a rare, precious artifact is in our hands. It was worth it. We’re already thinking of going back and doing it again.

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Hello Readers:

There’s a Tom Waits lyric that says “I’m lost on your Midway / I’m reckless in your arms / just give me a couple more throws.” Its slippery juxtapositions are an inherently exciting semantic construction. I often refer to this line as a metric for making editorial selections; when I find a play that makes me feel lost, reckless, and anxious to return to it, I publish it. Consequently, I’ve been a fan of the theater that Piper McKenzie has been making in Brooklyn for a few years now: wild, unexpected, and reckless. After Piper McKenzie’s Artistic Director, Jeff Lewonczyk, got me involved in the Dainty Cadaver program in this issue, it took me about one minute to realize that this project was a perfect fit for Midway. Much of what we publish is well-honed and finely crafted, shows that have been given a lot of time and attention, works of damn talented writers making good art. They are focused creations. These Dainty Cadaver scripts—a play on the surrealist Exquisite Corpse exercise—are just the opposite. They are the spin and the list of the midway. Disorienting, cobbled together, these three scripts were made quickly with no idea of what anyone else was doing, beyond the ten minutes just before theirs. These plays were assembled like the carney putting up his booth, with only the slightest idea of what his neighbors are up to; only sure they are fellow carneys on the same dubious adventure/routine/scam. The plays were rehearsed, memorized, performed once, and then gone again. The carney barks away your cash and maybe gives you a beneath-WalMart-quality stuffed bear—though that’ll get you laid if you’re a 16-year-boy, and the carney knows, as an American, you’re probably a 16-year-old boy in there somewhere. After the show the carneys take down their stands and move to the next fairground. We’re happy to let these exquisite corpses get up and zombie around our fairground, to take the pennies form their eyes and spend them on games of chance. The writers in these Dainty Cadavers often hold the spirit of Midway, of the midway, of a midway. Enjoy the risk, enjoy your good luck. After all, the pleasure isn’t in getting the ring around the neck of the milk bottle; it’s in the toss itself.

We love you.

Justin Maxwell
Drama Editor

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