What Ever, Steppenwolf's eight-act work written by Heather Woodbury deserves the title of epic. It all started as a dare, she tells Ian Kilroy.
"Epic" is a word much abused. These days, if a film is long enough to require a change of reel, it's an epic; any novel that is thick and long enough to give you repetitive strain injury from turning the pages is sure to be an "epic" - and if it's written by a recognisable name, it's an "epic masterpiece".
The idea that an epic should in some way embody a nation's conception of itself, particularly its past, has largely been lost in the application of the appellation. The Odyssey was an epic, Ulysses was an epic - but Cruise and Kidman in Far and Away?
An eight-act show from Chicago's Steppenwolf theatre company, What Ever, however, deserves the title. Performed over four nights, totalling 10-and-a-half hours, there are 10 main characters and more than 100 minor ones; a time frame that spans the 20th century and that criss-crosses the US in terms of locations; and all portrayed by a single actor - now, that's what I call epic.
Created by New York-based performance artist/writer Heather Woodbury, What Ever receives its Irish première at the Galway Arts Festival this month. It is a theatre show with a special history, the result of a dare, as Woodbury says down the telephone line from Los Angeles.
"I was living in New York and doing these performance pieces, when my best friend dared me to write a new show every week and perform it live. I took him up on his dare and did it for nine months in the back of a bar in New York, a sort of unplugged punk rock club called The Fort."
The show gathered something of a cult following. The same people began to come again and again, to find out the fate of their favourite characters.
The plan was eventually to edit the material down into a more conventional show. "I planned to distil a normal hour-and-a-half kind of show out of all the messing around I did. What quickly emerged was a narrative and characters that kept coming back. It was a kind of Dickensian serial novel for the turn of the last century."
Finally, all her hours of recorded material were edited into their present form, by What Ever director Dudley Saunders. Woodbury calls the piece that resulted a "performance novel". "Dickens used to write his instalments weekly . . . I used a form similar to Dickens," she says.
What Ever does, indeed, have a form similar to that of the 19th-century novel. It has several central characters in the foreground, with a whole multitude of minor characters dwelling in the background. It is told episodically, with the plot reiterated for those that missed one or other of the evenings. The advantage of this is that, while it is better to attend all four evenings, it is possible to attend only one as a fully-realised evening of theatre.
The subtitle of the play - "an American odyssey" - reflects the scope of Woodbury's one-woman show, as it follows its main characters from one end of the US to another, and from one remembered era in US history to another. "The subtitle refers to the fact that the characters are all on a journey," says Woodbury, "they're all on a transforming journey, such as the journey of The Odyssey."
If there is something Homeric about What Ever, it is that it was composed on the tongue, it is a tale recounting the deeds of many characters told by one person that has committed it to memory. And the deeds it recounts, sometimes in verse, concern the life of the nation - in this case, the American nation. In short, there are many of the essential ingredients of an epic, in the true sense of the word.
One of the play's central characters, Skeeter, is a kind of teenage, rave version of Telemachus, hitch-hiking his way across the US in search of his father. But there the echoes of The Odyssey end. Other characters, equally to the fore in the work, have no conscious classical parallels - Violet, for example, the eightysomething heart of the piece, who kind of embodies the history of the US in the 20th century.
"Violet's sort of the soul of the piece and Skeeter's sort of the engine, the person who moves - you see America because Skeeter sees it. Violet, then, is struggling with her own mortality and with the meaning of her life, with what to do in life when most of your life is behind you. She's sort of a counterpoint to the kids in the piece, who are crazy about rave."
But Woodbury makes trans-generational links in the tapestry of What Ever, as themes re-emerge, although slightly altered with time and from generation to generation. There is a link between the jazz that Violet loved and that was disreputable in her youth, and the rave culture of characters such as Skeeter, a culture which is considered disreputable today. John Coltrane morphs into Kurt Cobain, and language sets the meaning echoing.
Indeed, it is with language that Woodbury starts. Hers is not the Stanislavskian approach of constructing a character, inventing for it a history and a past. With Woodbury it is the spoken word that brings the character into existence. "Generally, I get inspired by little bits of dialogue that I hear - kind of like the way that a forensic scientist gets a little bit of DNA and builds from there".
And what a structure she has constructed; having started the whole project in the mid-1990s, isn't she tired by now of the experience, of trying to carry around all that text in her thirtysomething head?
'IT is pretty full-on and pretty daunting. But after the first year and a half it got hard wired into my brain. Now, it just needs to be reactivated whenever I need it - I think scientists who are studying memory should come and study my brain. What I find most difficult, however, is how lonely it is - it's pretty lonely rehearsing a one-woman show of that size."
Woodbury says that while What Ever is being published next year as a "performance novel", it is her hope that it will also be filmed - "That might be the moment when, as an artist, I am able to completely put it to rest", she says. With the amount of work it took to bring it into being, however, it is likely Woodbury will perform What Ever for years to come.
For the moment, though, she is working on a new "performance novel", A Tale of Two Cities: in this case, New York and L.A. With a term actually having been coined for some of her more obsessive fans - "Heatherheads" - it seems likely that this latest project will find a ready-made audience, just waiting to engage. Whether or not the ranks of the Heatherhead brigade are to swell with new Irish recruits is yet to be seen. You'll have to get yourself along to Galway to make up your own mind.
What Ever runs at the Black Box Studio, Dyke Road, Galway, as part of the Galway Arts Festival, from July 17th to July 20th, at 8 pm. Booking: 091-566577 or at www.galwayartsfestival.ie. See Heather Woodbury's site at www.heatherwoodbury.com