The redeeming demon

WHAT is duende?

In Spanish, that storehouse of extreme feeling, it’s one of many words that convey the spirit of deep soul. Lorca defined duende the best he could as “a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment.”

In song, the duende would appear not in a beautiful voice but when that voice tears, scorches, robs itself of the security of technique and opens into the unknown.

And onstage? Duende rises to edgy, inexplicable urges; it applauds impossible unions, sexual and otherwise. It resides in irrational fears, oversized desires and long-buried secrets.

According to Lorca, “All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die and open their contours against an exact present.”

I like to think that duende lives deepest in the writing of plays.

But it does not repeat itself. When the writer strains for effect, it recedes or completely disappears. Then the work feels empty, didactic, aped. Sometimes others champion such writing as beautiful, revealing. But the writer knows deep inside his/her blood that it’s weak, insincere -- not worthy.

We feel it more than think it. When the duende is activated in a person, we all vibrate.

Lorca says it best: “The duende takes it upon himself to make us suffer by means of a drama of living forms.”

But it’s not all suffering. “The magical property of a poem is to remain possessed by duende that can baptize in dark water all who look at it.” Just because the water is dark doesn’t mean it can’t be blessed. And a poem can also be a song, a play or a moment of exquisite performance.

Writing is a hurt business, akin to ballet, boxing, chess and other trials by fire. If you come out of it unscathed, you most likely haven’t done very much. I have been wrestling with my personal duende for nearly 20 years of playwriting. This guarantees me neither award nor pension. But it grants me lived experience going after life, love and death on the page and hopefully, eventually onstage.

The things we rightly avoid in daily life we want and must have in our theater. I want to live happily and quietly, but in my plays I need to search for extremity, for boiling points, in each character as well as in the greater story.

This is how a dramatist can be revolutionary. I’m not simply talking politics. Rather, I mean actively unearthing taboos, transgressions, in order to unleash the real feelings beneath the surface of a character. This can be brutal business, because the unearthed revelations are often highly personal.

Undoubtedly there are feelings, ideas, images and words that can be dangerous when exposed. But Lorca and I demand the strenuous use of the heart muscle. This means taking chances.

The dramatist invents opportunities for characters to reveal themselves. This is how we open up what’s really going on inside a person -- inside ourselves.

We trade in the unexplained when we write for actors; we hear voices, we channel experiences outside our daily grind. We summon thoughts, feelings -- even the ghosts of the departed -- in the drumbeat of our work. Playwriting is a bit of a black art, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of that.

It’s a solemn rite. We rouse the animal want inside each of us from its sleep. We give it voice; we add pain, increased awareness of death and the mordant sense of humor and even joy that comes with it. Then we fling it into the wind.

That is what a play can be.

On main stages throughout the country and in the language, writers and audiences settle for so much less. Minus this level of investment and immediacy, plays and performers miss their ritual and spiritual aspects, and theater loses its elemental functions. With neither flow nor connection on an animal level, plays function according to type at surface levels, hardly dipping into the deep waters that are always there.

Ambition is the question. Not the ambition to win a Pulitzer or a movie deal but the appetite for investigation -- first of oneself, then for the world -- one person at a time.

Playwriting is a terrible business. Theater is indefensible on a spreadsheet. Numbers don’t add up because it’s not about the numbers. Of course we in the theater want hits, cash, adulation -- but the joy of doing it is not about any of those things.

We’re counterintuitive; we often do our best work for free, when we’re hungry and tired, with only a few stragglers in the audience. Because we live in an age of rampant capitalism, we in our poverty can be made to feel that we’ve failed when compared to this week’s blue-screen blockbuster’s box office returns. But ours is another kind of currency.

WHEN we’re doing what we should onstage, we’re battling to free our inner selves by using all the charm, beauty, ugliness and rage we share at this moment, living on this planet together. We’re diving into dark waters with no idea how deep down they go. We’re tickling the universals, unsure whether we’ll get a laugh or a sneeze in return. We’re creating something new, and that’s always the hardest of businesses, because it’s not a business at all. It’s a vocation, a calling.

Each of us has a particular path to destruction, individual as a thumbprint or a smile. Whether comedic or tragic, good writing provides a candle to enlighten at least our first few steps into this cave of ourselves. After that, each of us is on his/her own.

My desires, fears and secrets are as particular to me as yours are particular to you. But we both have them.

We in the theater are miraculously beholden to no one but ourselves. We’re outside the corporate mentality, the steady paycheck and the loyalty oath; and here in Hollywood, despite our shared talent pools, we’re often separate from the movie industry. And this may just be a very good thing.

We have the chance, if we take it, to be free -- even if it’s only for a moment. Not irresponsible, or silly. But liberated to say what’s sleeping in our blood, what’s beyond language, what’s outside reason and away from the dollar sign.

What is truly new. Truly now. And we have the chance to do this together.

The way to begin is deceptively simple. Rather than reaching to Joycean literary extremes or subscribing to one faith-based politics or another, the foolproof way to awaken one’s own revolutionary urges is to really ask -- what do I want? What am I afraid of? What is my secret?

Once you really know those things (which by the way are quite changeable from day to day), and once you are willing to take the chance of revealing all, then you will feel amazingly free to give these desires, fears and secrets to your characters, which in turn gives them life, specificity and hopefully that blushing, scorching, vibrating immediacy we come to theater to see.

Lorca asks, “The duende ... where is the duende?” He answers, “Through an empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents ... announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.”

What new landscapes remain to be baptized? We’ll never know till we know how to ask.

In my new play, “Young Valiant,” one of the characters quotes e.e. cummings when she says, “Always the beautiful answer who asks the more beautiful question.” The dramatist spends a career, or a lifetime, asking the unanswerable. The answer, if there is one, does not belong to us, or what we’ve written. If an answer comes at all, it will be in the blue streak of recognition we all feel -- when we’re very lucky -- during a performance.

What blushing revelations are about to be unearthed? What exquisite duende can we tempt from the dark caves within us?

I’m asking.

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Oliver Mayer is assistant professor of dramatic writing at the USC School of Theatre. His plays include “Blade to Heat,” “Joe Louis Blues,” “Ragged Time” and “Conjunto.” A critical edition of his plays, “The Hurt Business,” will be published this fall by Hyperbole Books.

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‘Young Valiant’

Where: Casa 0101 Theater, 2009 E. 1st St., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Sept. 18

Price: $15

Contact: (323) 263-7684, or www.latheaterproject.org