Community

I've never had a stronger sense of community than when I lived here during the late 70s through the 80s. Professionally, it was my most visible (as opposed to productive) period locally, with three talented directors committed to doing my work, Steve Smith at Theatre Workshop, Gary O'Brien at New Rose Theatre and Peter Fornara at Cubiculo Theatre, the latter two where I was playwright-in-residence. Only one play written during this period, Song of the Salmon, was not immediately produced. Personally I had many friends and acquaintances that I saw almost daily. I had a strong sense of belonging and contributing to Portland -- and indeed, in 1999, in its 25th anniversary, Willamette Week named me as one of those who in the past 25 years had "made Portland Portland." My participation in the community had been noticed (reference).

I say this because today, still in Portland, I have no sense of belonging to community whatever. Indeed, no one in the theater community, where my past activity had been strongest, who has been here less than twenty years has any evidence that I exist. This is not all a consequence of my "retirement" as a playwright. After a theater dedicated a season to my work in the late 80s, "Charles Deemer's Oregon," I became dead as a playwright here. The retrospective was, in fact, a funeral. Only one play was done here in the 90s, a play that bombed despite being a finalist for a prestigious award in Ireland after its premiere there (the play was "Who Forgives?").  My divorce from the local theater community was aided by my sudden obsession with hyperdrama and by the departure of my three supporters: Smith retired, O'Brien left town to care for his father in Ohio, and Fornara died much too young. Had I been single I would have left Portland in the early or mid 90s, I suspect. I didn't like any of the changes in the city. Still don't. Been my wife loves Portland, and here we are. Portland State University asked me to start a screenwriting program, which I did and where I still love teaching, the best thing about the city for me now.

Although my career is dead here, my stage actually widened as I became active on the net. Plays got done in Ireland, Chile, Mexico; students in Sweden and Denmark studied my hyperdramas; I was invited to submit papers to academic meetings, the latest a submission of a series of videos to a 2008 hypertext conference in Pittsburgh (I had attended the first ever hypertext conference at Yale some years before) (see Changing Key). And yet none of this activity and recognition actually gives me a sense of "community." I'm not sure why.

So I work in isolation. That's my sense of what I do. I have little sense of "having an audience." My real audience are my archives at the universities of Oregon and North Carolina, which is to say, I have a stronger sense of writing for future strangers, whom I assume to exist, than for any contemporaries. It's a very different feeling than the feeling of community I had thirty years ago. And perhaps my sense of "a future audience" for my work is an egotistical delusion. I'll never know. If I'm writing only for myself, then that's unfortunate because I don't get as much satisfaction from my work as I did when I was younger. Mainly I get tired. Very tired.

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I look forward to finishing the film, putting it online, showing it at Blackbird, and then returning to Alice and my animated chamber opera. Very much look forward to this. Music comes front burner after the film is done.

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Of course, I have the strongest sense of all of having lived a charmed, blessed life. It's not hard to find those who haven't.