Home / Chronology / Hotel Cassiopeia / More About Hotel Cassiopeia The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2006 Humana Festival HOTEL CASSIOPEIA A wall of stars: the constellations or the moon or a vast star map of the cosmos covers the back wall. These are the initial stage directions in Charles L Mee’s Hotel Cassiopeia, a play that explores collage artist Joseph Cornell’s life, art, and way of seeing. Cornell was an artist of what he called metaphysical ephemera: he saw beauty in the utterly commonplace, and made ordinary things seem exquisitely beautiful. The play follows Cornell as he observes the city he so loved, overhears—and fabricates—parts of conversations, is inspired by movies and overwhelmed by the glorious bustle of Manhattan’s streets; he argues with his mother, talks his brother to sleep with stories of his wanderings. The images in Mee’s play echo Cornell’s collage-art boxes, which are crafted from star charts or cut-outs of birds or cork balls or sand, suspended or hidden, everyday objects reaching towards the infinite. The play, Mee says, "calls up a world that Cornell would have made, if he had been a theatre artist rather than a collagist." Although images of Cornell’s work appear on stage, Mee is also trying to recreate the experience of viewing Cornell's art. Created in collaboration with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, Hotel Cassiopeia is a work of rigorous and unexpected juxtapositions, as Mee and the SITI Company search, as Cornell searched, for the perfect articulation of the moments that make a life worth living. A paper cutout cockatiel descends from the flies and an old newspaper ad for the Hotel Eden is projected. Cornell has been called an artist of longings, and he himself connected his ardent desire to preserve cast-off ephemera of his childhood, which was rich with imagination and freedom, and was cut suddenly short. Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York on Christmas Eve 1903, the oldest of four children in a comfortably middle-class household. As a child, he was thrilled by family outings to Vaudeville shows and Coney Island, playing with fireflies and tadpoles in their big back yard, singing as his mother played the piano. When he was fourteen, his father died suddenly, ending his family’s financial security and, to a great extent, his childhood. His father’s employer sent him to private school in Andover, Mass., which he left without a diploma after his senior year, rejoining family in Queens. His two sisters eventually married and moved to Long Island, but Joseph would live with his mother and brother, who had cerebral palsy, for the rest of their lives In New York, Cornell worked as a cloth salesman and later in a factory to support his family, but he lived for movies and the ballet. He wandered Manhattan, collecting the objects and magazines he made first into collages and later into the boxes that comprised most of his career. He spent his afternoons walking, collecting, and sitting at a cafeteria observing the world around him or meeting with his friends who included artists Marcel Duchamp and Matta, writers Marianne Moore and Susan Sontag, ballet dancers, filmmakers and many others. He made sure to return home by 5:30 every day to take over care of his brother Robert. He spent his early evenings entertaining Robert with films he bought and reedited and worked through the night in the basement cutting, sanding, creating. He had intense friendships, and obsessions with a succession of women, but found romantic companionship only at the end of his life. He outlived Robert by seven years and his mother by five, dying alone at home on Utopia Parkway in Queens in 1972. We see skyscrapers a dark blue night sky lauren bacall behind a glass frame an orange ball. Mee has structured his play around what Cornell called "sparkings," those breathtaking moments when the mundane details of life shift into transcendence, when the glimpse of a girl crossing the street combined with the arc of a constellation and the profile of Lauren Bacall, when the quotidian suddenly fuses with the eternal. Cornell’s art was an attempt to sustain this awareness, to save it from time. He yearned for a dreamworld of the present moment, a merging of the eternal and the daily. His work was initially dismissed as mere toys for adults, but as New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik observes, Cornell’s desires weren’t lost to a rapture of ethereality. "Cornell is an artist of longings, but his longings are for things known and seen and hard to keep. He didn’t long to go to France; he longed to build memorials to the feeling of wanting to go to France. He preferred the ticket to the trip, the postcard to the place, the fragment to the whole." Indeed, it is his collaged perception of time and experience—fragmentary but tangible—that sustains Mee’s fascination to this artist. An entire back wall of the theatre with bottles with things in them or the entire fabulous window of a pharmacy or a thousand sorts of watch springs. Hotel Cassiopeia is one of a quartet of plays Mee is writing about American artists, re-learning theater as he shapes his plays through their specific visual point of view. He knows that Cornell’s way of seeing "will be hard to put on stage. But one thing I love about beginning with the life of an artist—trying to do a piece inspired by a way of seeing the world—is that it leads to discovering very different theatrical forms. I've learned a lot about how to make theater from Max Ernst and Rauschenberg, and now, I hope, Cornell." In Hotel Cassiopeia, Cornell and in turn Mee can show us all a path to the radical joy in life as it’s lived, one moment jumbled against the next, the transcendent and the utterly forgettable side by side. Here we are given a chance to experience Cornell’s shock of recognizing all time in an instant, when our most interior impulses become the our most universal, uniting us with the longings, fabulous and mundane, that define a life. a crescent moon through the top of bare branches a star above it clear, fresh beauty night blue gently faded — Adrien-Alice Hansel CHARLES L. MEE I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world. Chuck Mee has spiralled in and out and finally back into playwriting over the last fifty years. The playwright grew up in postwar suburban Barrington, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, and in 1953, at age fourteen, was diagnosed with polio. The lingering effects of the disease kept Mee from participating in the 50s sports fixation, but he found solace exploring the physicality of football and baseball through his writing. In 1960, Mee graduated from Harvard College with degrees in English and history, and began writing plays for Off-Off Broadway. At the height of the Vietnam War, Mee became involved in the anti-war movement, switching gears to write and publish historical criticism on American international relations and Cold War politics, including Meeting at Potsdam, The Marshall Plan, and The End of Order. In 1986, he revisited playwriting with the Obie Award-winning Vienna: Lusthaus, directed by dance-theatre mogul Martha Clarke. In 1991, Chuck Mee coupled with director Anne Bogart and En Garde Arts on Another Person is a Foreign Country, a site-specific piece performed in the courtyard of an abandoned hospital in New York. In 1992, The SITI Company, led by Bogart, debuted with Mee’s adaptation of Orestes. Bogart and the SITI Company, like Mee, view theatre as a collaborative process of discovery and recontextualization. Mee’s (re)making project encourages other artists to "pillage my plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece." Mee, who has placed his portfolio of works online for public use (at charlesmee.org), snips his dialogue from found texts, popular culture, and personal narrative, and challenges others to cut, paste, and poach chunks from his own plays and others’ to create new pieces. Mee unabashedly describes his presence at SITI workshops of his pieces as opportunistic: he encourages actors and designers to bring in found and original materials, then steals what he likes, re-arranging the pieces to form a larger work. Hotel Cassiopeia is one in a quartet of plays in the American Museum Series that Mee will produce with Bogart and the SITI Company. The first, bobrauschenbergamerica, premiered at the 2001 Humana Festival. Under Construction, which takes Norman Rockwell as subject, is a play in flux, an "ongoing, open-ended, never-ending collaboration" whose text will consist of Mee’s original script pieced together with submissions and tinkerings from worldwide web surfers (full text available at www.guthrietheatre.org). The last play, Soot and Spit, is a folk musical about artist James Castle. Other Humana premieres include Big Love (2000) and Limonade Tous Les Jours (2002). — Joanna K. Donehower