Theme and Variation: Staging a Migraine with Wolf 359

Director Michael Rau and Playwright Michael Yates Crowley—who together comprise performance group Wolf 359—joined A.R.T. Publications & Artistic Programs Associate Robert Duffley to talk about Song of a Convalescent Ayn Rand Giving Thanks to the Godhead (In the Lydian Mode), playing at OBERON in October 2016.

ROBERT DUFFLEY: Could you tell me about the origins of your company?

MICHAEL YATES CROWLEY: Michael Rau and I went to high school together in Chicago. We met doing Shakespeare. We then went to different colleges, but after we graduated, we started Wolf 359. We refer to ourselves as “narrative technologists.” Which is 40% a joke. But we very purposefully don’t call ourselves a theater company to remind ourselves not to get stuck in that way of thinking: “Audience sits here. Stage is here.” Instead, we now start from, “what is the story we want to tell?” or “what is the question we’re trying to answer? And what’s the best way of telling that story?”

RD: And where did the story of Song of a Convalescent Ayn Rand… originate?

MYC: When I was younger, I was diagnosed with migraines, and I kept “migraine diaries”: every time you have a headache, you record what you were doing that day, what you ate, and what color the air was, and a million other things, because you’re trying to figure out what causes them—no one knows. So we had the idea to stage these diaries. We started exploring the medical, as well as the artistic, history of migraines. A lot of historical figures had migraines: Nietzsche, Beethoven, as well as Ayn Rand. And I became obsessed with Ayn Rand’s idea about pain: that it’s imaginary. I think the show is about this question: can you think your way out of pain? It’s about the struggle between trying to cure your migraines by letting Ayn Rand take over your life, versus facing the pain and learning to live with it.

MICHAEL RAU: To connect the idea of narrative technology to that, I would add that this play is a very structured progression of themes and variation. There are themes of different experiments, and different ways of trying to answer these questions. We’ll do a dance, we’ll do a song, we’ll play with the projector to find another way to tell the story.

MYC: Some of the sections are very historical, and in some cases we’re using actual text of Ayn Rand or Oliver Sachs, or Emily Dickinson. And some of it is more fantastical, because nobody really understands migraines. One of the recurring characters is a drag queen who sings songs about migraines. There’s actually a very bizarre genre of migraine art. People create paintings and other things based on the hallucinations they have. The subject opens itself to an experimental approach: how do you stage a migraine? It’s very difficult, because it’s entirely in your head.

RD: This season at A.R.T. is focused on adaptations—theater pieces created from movies, novels, poetry, and histories. How do you synthesize these different sources into a performance?

MR: I think our approach to adaptation is that we’re always interested in giving audiences a different perspective on a conventional narrative. And we do that through humor. If I could say there’s one technique to our adaptations, it’s that we’ll set up a series of jokes that then pay off in something that’s really kind of sad, or something that will allow you to see a deeper, unexpected aspect of a character.

RD: Where does the title of this piece come from?

MYC: It’s based on a Beethoven String Quartet, one of the very last that he wrote. He was extremely ill—everyone thought he was going to die. But, in fact, he got better, and as he got better, he wrote an extremely long movement in this quartet—the longest movement of any of his string quartets—and it is exceedingly beautiful and strange. It uses an ancient tonality that isn’t major or minor: the “Lydian Mode.” The title is “Song of a Convalescent Giving Thanks to the Godhead (In the Lydian Mode).” So we took our inspiration from this quartet and tweaked it slightly with the addition of Ayn Rand.

RD: What would you say is the overall experience of the show?

MYC: Think of it as if you’re going to a concert of words and ideas and characters. The piece has a structure of theme and variations. You hear something in the beginning, and then you will hear 24 different versions of that. They build on each other, and there are characters that you follow through the piece. And part of the fun of it is, you don’t know what will come next. We have a lot of fun doing the show, and I think that it is a lot of fun to see. Part of the fun is in that experimentation.