nick manhattan  You have been writing plays for some time. I first saw one your plays in Chicago in 1979. The young Remains Theatre was then producing in a very small triangular space, but it appeared to me to be an almost perfect venue and production for SIXTY-SIX SCENES SCENES OF HALLOWEEN. I know that this play is published as SEVENTY SCENES OF HALLOWEEN, but I'm almost sure that the Remains production was billed as SIXTY-SIX SCENES OF HALLOWEEN.

jeffrey jones  Actually--and this is wonderful--they counted the number of scenes and changed the title accordingly. What happened was that Matthew Maguire and I cut four scenes from the New York production after the publicity went out. I felt the phrase "Seventy Scenes" was more melliflous than "Sixty-Six Scenes", but was also amused that a title with such seeming specificity was in fact inaccurate--that I was short-weighting my audience. Remains of course assumed I had made a simple mistake (or couldn't count?) and changed the title back. Without informing me. Which amused me even more since one of the ideas in the play was to give over a certain amount of authorial control. They also sent me my first check, which was transformational.

nick manhattan  Many in that Remains ensemble left theater to the celebrity of being television and film actors. Most everyone in theater does their work in relative obscurity. Many of us in RAT sense a chasm between one's career in theater and one's life in theater.

The press always partially invents and creates the story, especially the Tabloids. And it's also apparent that the Celebrity surrenders part of the "story of who he is" to this mechanism. None of the characters in DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS seems to possess his/her own life. The Paparazzi lurk in bushes everywhere waiting to ambush and usurp their story.

Jeffrey Jones is a celebrity in Seattle this week. Both major papers, the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, are doing feature articles on him. Even though being a celebrity in theatre is almost an oxymoron, there are some obvious shared issues (image, reputation, audience, etc.) on which everyone working in public art forms deliberates. Sometimes in art this is called a career.

So what's your story? What are all those Dirty Little Secrets on why you are a playwright, and what do you want to be when you grow up?

jeffrey jones  I am grown up. I am doing as I please.

The Dog Who Belonged To Himself

nick manhattan  I know that. But I was putting the question before you in the context of a comparison/contrast of your story (your life in art) with that of the Celebrity. Most of the characters in DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS are artists of some sort. How similar are they to the artists that are creating this production of your play?

I think Celebrity often reads as the Major Leagues. While, say, writing or acting in theatre appears often as the minor leagues, wannabe status.

I guess I am asking you to define the nature of this Dog Who Belonged To Himself.

You're an elder to many in theatre and I think your story could guide and encourage others early in their careers and lives in this work where payment is in things other than money. What things?

So the question again. What's your story? What are all those Dirty Little Secrets on why you are a playwright, and what do you want to be when you grow up?

jeffrey jones  In speaking about oneself, I think it is important to keep silent as much as possible. In part, because I despise self-aggrandizement, but also because through silence one creates the space which allows another person to read in, and it is only through reading in that one can understand another person (no matter what they say).

I do not choose to be a role model. Nor do I think an artist is improved by one. An artist needs to understand herself. An artist needs to come to grips with who she is.

To say "I am grown up" in this day and age is no small thing. We are not encouraged to grow up, for the most part. To be grown up means, among other things, accepting that no one else is responsible for one's own life but also accepting or being willing to accept the responsibility for the lives of other people. To be grown up is to be completely free and completely responsible at the same time.

Now when we speak as adults of what we "want to be when we grow up" we imply that we are currently living our lives in a way we may have to give up because it is in some way frivolous or wanton or irresponsible. To say, on the other hand, that one is doing as one pleases is to say that one is not bound by the conventions or the rules of other people. It is to say one is following one's own heart or desire, regardless of where it may lead, in full knowledge of the consequences of the choice. To be an artist seems to me to entail coming to understand what it means to do as one pleases and the consequences thereof.

I had wanted to respond with something by Su Tung-P'o (1037-1101), the great Sung poet who worked as a provincial official and, falling out of favor, was sent late in life into exile.

These lines seemed suggestive :
         ...But I in dark ignorance have destroyed myself
         ...Years now I've stolen posts I never should have had
         ...Don't treat me like a high official!
         ...Outside I look like one but inside I'm not
         ...Thanks to rain that fell at the third watch last night I get another cool day in this floating life

But while this poem came close, it wasn't quite apt.

ON FIRST ARRIVING AT HUANG-CHOU (1080)
Funny--I never could keep my mouth shut;
It gets worse the older I grow.
The long river loops the town-fish must be tasty;
Good bamboo lines the hills-smell the fragrant shoots!
An exile, why mind being a supernumerary?
Other poets have worked for the Water Bureau.
Too bad I was no help to the government
But they still pay me

On the other hand, Lu Yu (1125-1210), who adopted his literary name, Fang-Weng , "The old man who does as he pleases" as a gesture of defiance upon being dismissed from an official post for "drunkenness and irresponsibility," wrote two wonderful pieces--one from work, the other from exile:

GOING TO THE OFFICE (1189)
Dot on dot of frail petals drop into my cup of green wine;
Lightly, lightly the lean horse tramps on through yellow dust.
Before my eyes, great lines of poetry, but I pass by as though they were nothing;
In dreams old friends now and then come to pay a call.
I ask to be sent to the border, the old madness still on me;
Look at my graying beard in the mirror and feel the press of age.
This morning, pleasantly cool, papers to be dealt with are few;
I lean on my desk by the southern window, listen to the thunder roll.

WRITTEN IN A CAREFREE MOOD (1192)
Old man pushing seventy,
In truth he acts like a little boy,
Whooping with delight when he spies some mountain fruits,
Laughing with joy, tagging after village mummers;
With the others having fun stacking tiles to make a pagoda,
Standing alone staring at his image in the jardiniere pool.
Tucked under his arm, a battered book to read,
Just like the time he first set off for school.

Readers of the second would especially recognize the buddha-mind of the foolish old man. [I am leaving out the numerous references to public drunkenness which appear in both poets, but there are many connections as I think you know between the drunkard and the person who has recognized her own buddha-mind.]

You asked me to measure my life against the notion of celebrity. Here's why I think that's such a bad idea. A celebrity, surely, is someone whose entire life is made public. To the extent they have experiences which are not public, they are not part of the life of the celebrity and do not exist. This is in some measure why celebrities need to be trivial and uncomplicated people. Nor is it in anyway shameful to gossip about a celebrity, since gossip is simply the process of making public what would ordinarily be kept private. To refuse to gossip about a celebrity is to begin to make them disappear.

[DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS, by the way, is not so much about celebrities as about people who live so close to celebrities that they find their own private lives exposed to public scrutiny. And don't like it.]

But an artist is someone whose private experience is very important. One might go so far as to say that a great deal of the making and the enjoyment of art is necessarily a private experience. To me, it is a great mistake to discuss theatre as a public experience. It is no more public than we are public by virtue of having bodies and living in the world with other people. I prefer to think of theatre as a shared private experience, which makes it a very rare and curious experience indeed. Trying to ask why theatre cannot be more effective as a public experience makes as much sense to me as asking why it can't be a bit more orange and salty.

What I resent and fear so much about the modern world is the cooptation of private experience by business. To the extent that business is successful in coopting my desires, it owns and controls my private experience. To the extent that celebrity is offered up as the "successful lifestyle" for our time, it is an even more direct assault on the value of private experience.

To make theatre as a grown up, you have to value your private experience. That is the only way to keep doing it. To make theatre for grown ups, I think, you have to create a shared private experience, which is a kind of secret-in-public. (Once again, I am reminded how much of the lessons of life behind the Iron Curtain have renewed value for us on the other side now. The vitality of private experience was cherished above almost everything else; and the manner in which it was cherished was to share it secretly with other people.)

Think of theatre as a secret thing.

Now, the Dog is always a play on kunos (Cynicism being the art of living the doglike life; Diogenes being the first Cynic), but it is also a direct reference to a book by Margaret Wise Brown, and since you appear unfamiliar with it, why don't I give you the text?

MISTER DOG
The Dog Who Belonged to Himself
By Margaret Wise Brown
Illustrated by Garth Williams

Once upon a time there was a funny dog named Crispin's Crispian. He was named Crispin's Crispian because-
He belonged to himself
In the mornings he woke himself up and he went to the icebox and gave himself some bread and milk. He was a funny old dog. He liked strawberries.
Then he took himself for a walk. And he went wherever he wanted to go.
But one morning he did not know where he wanted to go.
"Just walk and sooner or later you'll get somewhere," he told himself.
Soon he came to a country where there were lots of dogs. They barked at him and he barked back.
Then they all played together.
But still he wanted to go somewhere, so he walked on until he came to a country where there were lots of cats and rabbits.
The cats and rabbits jumped in the air and ran. So Crispian jumped in the air and ran after them.
He didn't catch them because he ran bang into a little boy.
"Who are you and who do you belong to?" asked the little boy.
"I am Crispin's Crispian and I belong to myself," said Crispian. "Who and what are you?"
"I am a boy, " said the boy, "and I belong to myself."
"I am so glad," said Crispin's Crispian. "Come and live with me."
They went to a butcher shop-"to get his poor dog a bone," Crispian said.
Now, since Crispin's Crispian belonged to himself, he gave himself the bone and trotted home with it.
And the boy's little boy bought a big lamb chop and a bright green vegetable and trotted home with Crispin's Crispian.
Crispin's Crispian lied in a two-story doghouse in a garden. And in his two-story doghouse, he had a little fur living room with a warm fire that crackled all winter and went out in the summer.
His house was always warm. His house had a chimney for the smoke to go out. And upstairs there was a little bedroom with a bed in it and a place for his leash and a pillow under which he hid his bones.
And there was plenty of room in his house for the boy to live there with him.
Crispian had a little kitchen upstairs in his two-story doghouse where he fixed himself a good dinner three times a day because he liked to eat. He liked steaks and chops and roast beef and chopped meat and raw eggs.
This evening he made a bone soup with lots of meat in it. He gave some to the boy and the boy liked it.
The boy didn't give Crispian his chop bone, but he put some of his bright green vegetable in the soup.
And what did Crispian do with his dinner?
Did he put it in his stomach?
Yes, indeed.
He chewed it up and swallowed it into his little fat stomach.
And what did the little boy do with his dinner?
Did he put it in his stomach?
Yes, indeed.
He chewed it up and swallowed it into his little fat stomach.
Crispin's Crispian was a conservative. He liked everything at the right time-
Dinner at dinnertime,
Lunch at lunchtime,
Breakfast in time for breakfast,
And sunrise at sunrise,
And sunset at sunset,
And at bedtime-
At bedtime, he liked everything in its own place-
The cup in the saucer
The chair under the table
The stars in the heavens,
The moon in the sky,
And himself in his own little bed.
And then what did he do?
Then he curled in a warm little heap and went to sleep. And he dreamed his own dreams.
That was that the dog who belonged to himself did.
And what did the little boy who belonged to himself do?
The little boy who belonged to himself curled in a warm little heap and went to sleep. And he dreamed his own dreams.
That was that the little boy who belonged to himself did.

GOOD NIGHT AND SWEET DREAMS

See?

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