The Plagiarists

OUR STORY:

It started with the dream: to bring to Chicago a sweet, unpretentious play about two odd, shy young people that fall in love. We were a group of theatre artists that coalesced around this dream, found a theatre, raised the money, and then the company that controlled the rights to that play pulled their permission, in hopes that a larger local company would premiere it and they could squeeze more money and publicity out of it. Frankly, it was the last straw. Years of working on others’ projects had left us feeling ignored, mistreated and, generally ill-used. So we took it upon ourselves do a show that would safe from interference by the powers that be. And so we created Living The Dream, a comedy assembled from our experiences as theatre artists in the city. The success of the show went far beyond its good reviews and high attendance. In the months following the show, we found ourselves changed by the experience, imbued with the idea that it was possible to steer our destiny rather than be its victim. We decided to form a company that would be an expression of our joy in working together, our sense of optimism and play, and our rejection of authority over our work. The Plagiarists were born.

OUR PHILOSOPHY:

In the spirit of our venture, let us begin with someone else’s words:

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .” —John Donne

But, of course, we did not discover this quote unaided. It was discovered at the beginning of an essay by Jonathan Lethem concerning ideas about cultural ownership and inspiration. This essay has, in many ways become our founding document. Some choice moments form “The Ecstasy of Influence”:

“If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist.(1) If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism. “(2)

“Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.(4) Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing. “(5)

“Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights. “(3)

As our company was born of frustration with “ownership” of art and of our own submersion in postmodern culture, the philosophy Lethem articulates struck us as the best way to approach creating art in the current era. In the last few years, music and software have been at the forefront of ‘open source’ and ‘sampling’ culture and we want to bring that spirit to theatre. Literature and theatre were doing it in one form or another for centuries, but recently the tradition has withered as modern trends valued ‘originality’ over actual quality or accessibility.

OUR PROJECTS:

Our current works are being developed in much the same way as our first. We write communally, piece by piece, then read and edit each other’s work. Our debut as “The Plagiarists” will come at the ABBIE HOFFMAN (died for our sins) festival in August. 
For the festival, we are working on a piece that is very close to our hearts.  The piece is of rich historical importance and speaks volumes about the complexity of the human experience. It will be an adaptation of three short plays by the obscure German playwright Herzlichen Gluckwunsch Zum Geburtstag.  The Corsage, The Lamp, and The Quilt were all written between noon and three in the afternoon on August 9, 1922. His plays were vital influences on the Surrealists and Absurdists that followed him – many believe that The Corsage was the primary inspiration for Waiting For Godot. Unfortunately, he was killed in a horrific baking accident on August 9, 1922 at 3pm. Many believe he committed suicide, as no one could have accidentally added that much yeast to the dough, but we believe his mind was simply on larger things. Who knows what other masterworks he was cooking up when that oven door decapitated him?
**NOTE: Due to the graphic nature of this piece and its raw sexual subtext, the Plagiarists do not recommend this piece for any individuals between the ages of 8 and 16.**
**NOTE: There is not nor has there ever been a playwright named Herzlichen Gluckwunsch Zum Geburtstag. It means “Happy Birthday” in German**

 
 Our second upcoming project is based on the work of the aforementioned Jonathan Lethem. His “Promiscuous Materials Project” is an attempt to put into practice what he preaches in his essay. Here is his introduction to the project:

"I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of adaptations, appropriations, collage, and sampling. I recently explored some of these ideas in an essay for Harper's Magazine. As I researched that essay I came more and more to believe that artists should ideally find ways to make material free and available for reuse. This project is a (first) attempt to make my own art practice reflect that belief."

Lethem has made a number of his short stories available for adaptation for a negligible fee. We have taken up the challenge and are creating a full-length piece based on his stories.

Work Cited: Dave Itzkoff (1), Judge Richard Posner (2), David Foster Wallace (3), George L. Dillon (4), and Mary Shelley (5)