Charles L. Mee
Encyclopedia
Charles L. Mee is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts.
in 1938. He led a typical middle-class, Midwestern boyhood until he contracted polio at the age of fourteen. His memoir A Nearly Normal Life (1999) tells how that event informed the rest of his life.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1960, Mee moved to Greenwich Village and became a part of the Off-Off-Broadway
scene. Between 1962 and 1964 his plays were presented at venues that included La MaMa E.T.C
., Caffe Cino
, Theatre Genesis, and the Ontological at St. Mark’s.
In 1961 Mee began work at American Heritage publishing company and eventually became the editor of the hardback bi-monthly Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts
. He was also the Advising Editor and then Contributing Editor of TDR (Tulane Drama Review) until 1964 and its Associate Editor from 1964 to 1965.
To support himself and his family, Mee turned from writing plays to writing books in 1965. Lorenzo De’Medici and the Renaissance, the first of his many nonfiction books, was published in 1969 by HarperCollins Juvenile Books.
At the same time he increasingly became caught up in anti-Vietnam War politics, campaigning for anti-war congressional candidates and writing anti-war polemics. He wouldn't return to writing for the theater for another 20 years.
In the 1970s, he became the co-founder and chairman of The National Committee on the Presidency, a grassroots organization which called for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
His political activism and investigation of American imperialism led to his writing of political histories for the general public. Meeting at Potsdam (1975), about the 1945 Potsdam Conference, was chosen as a main selection of the Literary Guild
, and was adapted for film and television by David Susskind
. He went on to write other books on summit diplomacy, international power sharing, and American history, including The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (1980), The Marshall Plan: The Launching of Pax Americana (1987), and The Genius of the People (1987), about the 1787 Constitutional Convention.
A Visit to Haldeman and Other States of Mind (1976) was called "part autobiographical meditation, part elegiac crank letter to the American Republic, part confession and part essay on democratic politics" by Time. As recently as 2002, Greil Marcus
claimed that it was one of the best books he had read about American patriotism.
Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World (1993) was Mee’s final published work of history.
Vienna: Lusthaus was his first produced script since his Off-Off Broadway days. He continued working his day job (as the editor-in-chief at consumer health publisher Rebus, Inc.) and writing books as his plays began to be produced. Later, in 2002 Mee revised about a third of his Vienna: Lusthaus script. It was reprised as Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited). Clarke and Mee would collaborate again in Belle Époque (2004).
Another Person is a Foreign Country (1991) was the first of Mee's many collaborations with director Anne Bogart
. The En Garde Arts
site-specific performance took place in the courtyard of the decrepit Towers Nursing Home in New York City. It was a "multi-cultural freak show." One critic described it as "A Chorus Line for people who can’t get an audition."
Orestes was Mee’s breakthrough play in 1992. It was directed by Robert Woodruff
at University of California, San Diego and by Anne Bogart at the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI)
. In the summer of 1992, Tina Landau
directed an En Garde Arts production as Orestes 2.0 on an abandoned pier on the Hudson River in New York City. The play was the first of ten plays that would use Greek texts as scaffolding upon which he would stick his new fragments of text and then "throw the scaffolding away and call whatever remained the script." In 1996, The Constitutional Convention: A Sequel, was produced by Clubbed Thumb
.
In other plays, Mee explores twentieth-century American history and culture through the points-of-view of contemporary visual artists in: bobrauschenbergamerica (Robert Rauschenberg
), Hotel Cassiopeia (Joseph Cornell
), soot and spit (the musical) (James Castle)
, and Under Construction (Jason Rhoades
and Norman Rockwell
).
His comedies and romances, include Summertime, First Love, True Love, Big Love, Wintertime, Fetes de la Nuit, A Perfect Wedding, and Fire Island. As source material, Mee would use Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Molière, Anton Chekhov, René Magritte paintings, Bollywood musicals, and his own writing. His play Full Circle is based on the Bertolt Brecht
play The Caucasian Chalk Circle
.
He is the only resident playwright of the theatre ensemble SITI Company, for whom he wrote Orestes, bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, Under Construction, and soot and spit (the musical). Mee was the Signature Theatre Playwright-in-Residence for the 2007–2008 season.
In 2008, Shakespeare and Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt
collaborated with Mee to write Cardenio. It premiered at The American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in 2008.
He currently teaches playwrighting at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
made his Fatagaga pieces toward the end of World War I: texts have often been taken from, or inspired by, other texts.”
The openness of Mee’s scripts do not allow for one authoritative interpretation. They are dependent upon the directors who interpret them.
/telnet
English Server
in the mid 1990s. By 1996, with the help of his friend Tom Damrauer, the (re)making project, a web site with his full scripts was launched. It contained an invitation for people to “do freely whatever they want with them.” He is the first and only playwright to make such a large body of theatre work available on the internet.
This was not viewed by Mee as a challenge to the current copyright law or a vehicle to raise issues of intellectual property. It was done as a populist gesture towards his utopian vision of a free and democratic internet. In 1996 he said "I’m attracted to the idea of things being owned in common." It also represented "Mee’s Golden Rule: of do unto my writing as I have done unto the writing of others."
National Public Radio called Mee the "Public-Domain Playwright" in 2000 and credited him with touching "a raw cultural nerve" by making his work freely available.
Writer Jonathan Lethem
credited Charles Mee as one of the inspirations for his "Promiscuous Project" in which he made a selection of his stories available for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt at a dollar apiece.
In an explanation about the (re)making project on his current web site, Mee says that his plays are protected by copyright if they are “essentially or substantially performed” as he has composed them. He continues, however, to invite others to freely pillage his texts to make their own work, without any attribution to him.
Awards (Vienna: Lusthaus (1986) and Big Love (2002)), PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama, and the Fisher Award given by the Brooklyn Academy of Music
.
Early Life and Early Career
Mee was born in Evanston, IllinoisEvanston, Illinois
Evanston is a suburban municipality in Cook County, Illinois 12 miles north of downtown Chicago, bordering Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, and Wilmette to the north, with an estimated population of 74,360 as of 2003. It is one of the North Shore communities that adjoin Lake Michigan...
in 1938. He led a typical middle-class, Midwestern boyhood until he contracted polio at the age of fourteen. His memoir A Nearly Normal Life (1999) tells how that event informed the rest of his life.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1960, Mee moved to Greenwich Village and became a part of the Off-Off-Broadway
Off-Off-Broadway
Off-Off-Broadway theatrical productions in New York City are those in theatres that are smaller than Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres. Off-Off-Broadway theaters are often defined as theaters that have fewer than 100 seats, though the term can be used for any show in the New York City area that...
scene. Between 1962 and 1964 his plays were presented at venues that included La MaMa E.T.C
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is an off-off Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, and named in reference to her. Located on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the theatre grew out of Stewart's tiny basement boutique for her fashion designs; the boutique's space acted as a theatre for...
., Caffe Cino
Joe Cino
Joseph Cino , was an Italian-American theatrical producer and café-owner. The beginning of the Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement is generally credited to have begun at Cino’s Caffe Cino...
, Theatre Genesis, and the Ontological at St. Mark’s.
In 1961 Mee began work at American Heritage publishing company and eventually became the editor of the hardback bi-monthly Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts
Horizon (U.S. magazine)
Horizon was a magazine published in the United States from 1958 to 1989. Originally published by American Heritage as a bi-monthly hardback, Horizon was subtitled A Magazine of the Arts. In 1978 Boone Inc. bought the magazine, which continued to cover the arts...
. He was also the Advising Editor and then Contributing Editor of TDR (Tulane Drama Review) until 1964 and its Associate Editor from 1964 to 1965.
To support himself and his family, Mee turned from writing plays to writing books in 1965. Lorenzo De’Medici and the Renaissance, the first of his many nonfiction books, was published in 1969 by HarperCollins Juvenile Books.
At the same time he increasingly became caught up in anti-Vietnam War politics, campaigning for anti-war congressional candidates and writing anti-war polemics. He wouldn't return to writing for the theater for another 20 years.
In the 1970s, he became the co-founder and chairman of The National Committee on the Presidency, a grassroots organization which called for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
His political activism and investigation of American imperialism led to his writing of political histories for the general public. Meeting at Potsdam (1975), about the 1945 Potsdam Conference, was chosen as a main selection of the Literary Guild
Book of the Month Club
The Book of the Month Club is a United States mail-order book sales club that offers a new book each month to customers.The Book of the Month Club is part of a larger company that runs many book clubs in the United States and Canada. It was formerly the flagship club of Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc...
, and was adapted for film and television by David Susskind
David Susskind
David Susskind was a producer of TV, movies, and stage plays and also a pioneer TV talk show host.-Personal:...
. He went on to write other books on summit diplomacy, international power sharing, and American history, including The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (1980), The Marshall Plan: The Launching of Pax Americana (1987), and The Genius of the People (1987), about the 1787 Constitutional Convention.
A Visit to Haldeman and Other States of Mind (1976) was called "part autobiographical meditation, part elegiac crank letter to the American Republic, part confession and part essay on democratic politics" by Time. As recently as 2002, Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.-Life and career:Marcus was born in San Francisco...
claimed that it was one of the best books he had read about American patriotism.
Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World (1993) was Mee’s final published work of history.
Playwriting career
Mee returned to playwrighting in 1985. His libretto for Martha Clarke’sMartha Clarke
Martha Clarke is an American theater director and choreographer noted for her multidisciplinary approach to theatre, dance, and opera productions. She is the creator of plotless, dreamlike works that are perhaps described by the term "moving paintings. Her work frequently emphasizes striking...
Vienna: Lusthaus was his first produced script since his Off-Off Broadway days. He continued working his day job (as the editor-in-chief at consumer health publisher Rebus, Inc.) and writing books as his plays began to be produced. Later, in 2002 Mee revised about a third of his Vienna: Lusthaus script. It was reprised as Vienna: Lusthaus (Revisited). Clarke and Mee would collaborate again in Belle Époque (2004).
Another Person is a Foreign Country (1991) was the first of Mee's many collaborations with director Anne Bogart
Anne Bogart
-Biography:She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Bard College in 1974, followed by a Master of Arts degree from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1977. She served as Artistic Director of the Trinity Repertory Company for its 1989-90 season...
. The En Garde Arts
En Garde Arts
En Garde Arts was an award-winning New York City based not-for-profit arts organization that created site-specific theatrical production...
site-specific performance took place in the courtyard of the decrepit Towers Nursing Home in New York City. It was a "multi-cultural freak show." One critic described it as "A Chorus Line for people who can’t get an audition."
Orestes was Mee’s breakthrough play in 1992. It was directed by Robert Woodruff
Robert Woodruff (director)
Robert Woodruff is an American theater director.-Early life:Woodruff graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from the University at Buffalo in political science. He has a masters degree in theater arts from San Francisco State University...
at University of California, San Diego and by Anne Bogart at the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI)
SITI Company
The SITI Company is an ensemble-based theater company whose three ongoing components are the creation of new work, the training of young theater artists, and a commitment to international collaboration....
. In the summer of 1992, Tina Landau
Tina Landau
Tina Landau is an American playwright and theatre director.Born in New York City to film and television producers Edie and Ely Landau, Landau moved with her family to Beverly Hills, California, where she graduated from Beverly Hills High School before attending Yale University, where she directed...
directed an En Garde Arts production as Orestes 2.0 on an abandoned pier on the Hudson River in New York City. The play was the first of ten plays that would use Greek texts as scaffolding upon which he would stick his new fragments of text and then "throw the scaffolding away and call whatever remained the script." In 1996, The Constitutional Convention: A Sequel, was produced by Clubbed Thumb
Clubbed Thumb
Clubbed Thumb is a downtown theater company in New York City that commissions, develops, and produces "funny, strange, and provocative new plays by living American writers." Since its founding in 1996, the company has earned four OBIES and presented plays in every form of development, including...
.
In other plays, Mee explores twentieth-century American history and culture through the points-of-view of contemporary visual artists in: bobrauschenbergamerica (Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
), Hotel Cassiopeia (Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage...
), soot and spit (the musical) (James Castle)
James Charles Castle
James Charles Castle was an American artist born in Garden Valley, Idaho. Although Castle did not know about the art world outside of his small community, his work ran parallel to the development of 20th Century art history. His works have been collected by major institutions...
, and Under Construction (Jason Rhoades
Jason Rhoades
Jason Rhoades was an installation artist who enjoyed critical acclaim, if not widespread public recognition, at the time of his death, and who was eulogized by some critics as one of the most significant artists of his generation...
and Norman Rockwell
Norman Rockwell
Norman Percevel Rockwell was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening...
).
His comedies and romances, include Summertime, First Love, True Love, Big Love, Wintertime, Fetes de la Nuit, A Perfect Wedding, and Fire Island. As source material, Mee would use Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Molière, Anton Chekhov, René Magritte paintings, Bollywood musicals, and his own writing. His play Full Circle is based on the Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
play The Caucasian Chalk Circle
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. An example of Brecht's epic theatre, the play is a parable about a peasant girl who rescues a baby and becomes a better mother than its natural parents....
.
He is the only resident playwright of the theatre ensemble SITI Company, for whom he wrote Orestes, bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, Under Construction, and soot and spit (the musical). Mee was the Signature Theatre Playwright-in-Residence for the 2007–2008 season.
In 2008, Shakespeare and Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar.Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term...
collaborated with Mee to write Cardenio. It premiered at The American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in 2008.
He currently teaches playwrighting at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
Style and Method of Writing
On Mee’s web site, the (re)making project, he says “There is no such thing as an original play.” and that his plays are “composed in the way that Max ErnstMax Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
made his Fatagaga pieces toward the end of World War I: texts have often been taken from, or inspired by, other texts.”
The openness of Mee’s scripts do not allow for one authoritative interpretation. They are dependent upon the directors who interpret them.
Use of the Internet
Mee began using the internet as a textual source for composing his pieces in the early 1990s. He first began making his own work freely available by posting three of his plays on Carnegie Mellon’s humanities gopher/ftpFile Transfer Protocol
File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...
/telnet
TELNET
Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...
English Server
EServer.org
The EServer is an open access electronic publishing cooperative, founded in 1990, which publishes writings in the arts and humanities free of charge to Internet readers. It is rated by Alexa as the most popular arts and humanities website in the world. As of 2005, the EServer published more than...
in the mid 1990s. By 1996, with the help of his friend Tom Damrauer, the (re)making project, a web site with his full scripts was launched. It contained an invitation for people to “do freely whatever they want with them.” He is the first and only playwright to make such a large body of theatre work available on the internet.
This was not viewed by Mee as a challenge to the current copyright law or a vehicle to raise issues of intellectual property. It was done as a populist gesture towards his utopian vision of a free and democratic internet. In 1996 he said "I’m attracted to the idea of things being owned in common." It also represented "Mee’s Golden Rule: of do unto my writing as I have done unto the writing of others."
National Public Radio called Mee the "Public-Domain Playwright" in 2000 and credited him with touching "a raw cultural nerve" by making his work freely available.
Writer Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels...
credited Charles Mee as one of the inspirations for his "Promiscuous Project" in which he made a selection of his stories available for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt at a dollar apiece.
In an explanation about the (re)making project on his current web site, Mee says that his plays are protected by copyright if they are “essentially or substantially performed” as he has composed them. He continues, however, to invite others to freely pillage his texts to make their own work, without any attribution to him.
Patronage
In 1998 Mee’s friend, former chairman of Morgan Stanley and philanthropist Richard B. Fisher and his wife, Jeanne Donovan Fisher offered to provide Mee with enough money to support himself. The rare arrangement imposed no stipulations or conditions upon Mee or his writing nor did it specify how long the relationship would last. Although Richard B. Fisher died in 2004, Jeanne Donovan Fisher continues to support Mee and his work. The Fishers patronage has been hailed as one "without parallel or precedent in American theatrical philanthropy."Awards
Among other awards, Charles Mee is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two OBIEObie Award
The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards given by The Village Voice newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City...
Awards (Vienna: Lusthaus (1986) and Big Love (2002)), PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama, and the Fisher Award given by the Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn Academy of Music is a major performing arts venue in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, United States, known as a center for progressive and avant garde performance....
.
Selected Books
(collection consisting of Vienna Lusthaus, The War to End War, The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador, Orestes, The Trojan Women a Love Story, Time to Burn)Plays
(Note: Charles Mee's complete scripts are freely available on his web site, the (re)making project. Dates listed are provided by Scott T. Cummings. They do not reflect when the work was actually written. Mee often writes the plays a year or more before they are produced. The play categories are Mee's own. He also makes his unproduced (undated) plays available on the (re)making project.)- Solos
- First Love (premiered 2001)
- The House of Cards (originally produced under the title
of Chiang Kai Chek (premiered 1996) - Life is a Dream (originally produced under the title
of My House is Collapsing Toward One Side) (premiered 1996) - Salome (premiered 2003)
- Duets
- Limonade Tous les Jours (premiered 2002)
- The Trilogy: Imperial Dreams
- I. Iphigenia 2.0 (premiered 2007)
- II. Trojan Women: A Love Story (premiered 1994)
- III. Orestes 2.0 (premiered 1992)
- Other Tragedies and History Plays
- Agamemnon 2.0 (premiered 1994)
- The Bacchae 2.1 (premiered 1993)
- The Constitutional Convention: A Sequel (premiered 1996)
- Full Circle (premiered 1998)
- Bedtime Stories (originally produced under the title
of The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem (premiered 1988) - The Investigation (originally produced under the title
of The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador) (premiered 1989) - Time to Burn (premiered 1997)
- True Love (premiered 2001)
- The War to End War (premiered 1993)
- Fragments
- Gone (premiered 2007)
- Requiem for the Dead (workshopped 2003)
- The Lives of the Artists
- bobrauschenbergamerica (premiered 2001)
- Hotel Cassiopeia (premiered 2006)
- Picasso's Masterpiece
- Self Portrait
- soot and spit
- Under Construction (premiered 2009)
- Comedies and Romances
- Big Love (premiered 2000)
- Fetes de la Nuit (premiered 2005)
- Fire Island (premiered 2008)
- A Perfect Wedding (premiered 2004)
- Paradise Park (premiered 2008)
- Summertime (premiered 2000)
- Wintertime (premiered 2005)
- Cardenio (written with Stephen Greenblatt) (premiered 2008)
- Dance Theatre Pieces
- American Document (premiered 2010)
- Another Person Is a Foreign Country (premiered 1991)
- Belle Époque (premiered 2004)
- Café le Monde
- Daily Life Everlasting
- Eterniday
- The Four Seasons
- Heaven on Earth (workshopped 2009)
- The Life Of George Washington
- Memory Palace
- Night and Day
- Night (Thyestes 2.0)
- Day (Daphnis and Chloe 2.0)
- Vienna: Lusthaus (premiered 1986)
- A Walk in the Park
- The Streets of New York
- The New World Order
- Coney Island Avenue (premiered 2009)
- The Mail Order Bride (reading 2004)
- Queens Boulevard (premiered 2009)
- Utopia Parkway (workshopped 2002)