I recently answered some questions for the Spring 2014 issue of Chicago Arts Journal. As they don't currently have a web presence, with their permission I have reprinted the interview below.
(I have made one small correction; they had noted my "association" with a couple of very talented individuals dates to the "mid-1990s" but I've known one of 'em since more like late '90s and the other I met late '99…)
Questions for Ray Rehayem
We have long admired the various and prodigious creative endeavors of performance poet and musician Ray Rehayem. His associations with fringe fixtures including Jenny Magnus and Barrie Cole go back to the late-1990s, and now we find him acting as theater reviewer in the pages of New City. Here he lets us pick his brain on a few subjects near and far.
We have long admired the various and prodigious creative endeavors of performance poet and musician Ray Rehayem. His associations with fringe fixtures including Jenny Magnus and Barrie Cole go back to the late-1990s, and now we find him acting as theater reviewer in the pages of New City. Here he lets us pick his brain on a few subjects near and far.
Chicago Arts Journal: You’ve been making work in Chicago performance circles for at least fifteen years (that we know of). How did you start?
Ray Rehayem: My first performances in Chicago were with my DeKalb band, The Beatles. I was the singer. We’d drive into town and play some ill-suited venue. We changed our name to The Mercury Players not long before we moved to this here big city. My fellow former Mercury Players are immensely talented gentlemen and the creative approach we immediately arrived at shuttled us to some particular territory I have ever recognized as ideal to the efficient and inspired generation of both idea and delivery. I am pretty sure that whenever I’m “on” — if I’m singing, making a joke, writing a poem — which are all the same thing anyway — I am “on” the same kinda ride or roll we were on. And when I’m on, I’m good at all that. And when I’m off, maybe all bets are too. But the bet is where it’s at, so you gotta let it ride. [At this moment, Rehayem gets up to get a cup of tea.] I like tea, but there’s no way I ask for a cup of tea at my last meal.
CAJ: We know your work as a poet, a playwright, a writer of fiction — what determines the form when you develop new writing? Do you have different habits and foibles around each?
RR: It’s all one poem to me. Or many, or a song. No, I’m stretching; it’s all one poem, Names have been changed so it’s fiction. Names that never existed too. Names that couldn’t be, because there’s no one there. When I’m singing, making up melodies & lyrics, though my detractors (they harken back to the original stiffs and dullards, but they are not without insight) wouldn’t. Wouldn’t call it singing, that is. Regardless, for that I never can “write.” I have to make up all that while the band plays. It all has to take place as a song for me to knock out words for one. When I don’t have a band, that form’s not even considered. And then I suppose honestly a lot of those lyrics are better than most of my poems. Like, some of my lyrics for o.u.r. band, Athletic. I’ll read or sing one right now, but the neighbors always worry. Poems I write about the same way, but without musical collaborators, so it’s more insular — at times some of those I tweak and revise. That doesn’t happen to the lyrics. My fiction is just longer sections of the same poem, generated in same way and never very long, probably for that reason. Honestly, I have left my creative process largely unexamined. When people distrust me, they suspect it's all based on serendipity. When those same people trust me again and before, they suspect the same. People who just plain trust me, which is most people, never put forth a hypothesis. Thinking of it now, I suspect they're right. But if I were to put forth anyway, I'd say I don't know.
CAJ: We hear you have recently returned to Chicago after a period on the West Coast. What sort of work and/or creative endeavors marked your time there? Any comment on the atmosphere of art-making there, at small or at large?
RR: I had some demoralizing line in my back pocket for ages in case anyone ever asked this, and now you have and I don’t recall my reply. That’s why I don’t think ahead: I’m sure the reply wasn’t very good. I didn’t do much creatively in Los Angeles for a long time. At first my only creative outlet seemed to be Athletic endeavors during occasional visits back here to the city with shoulders. Outside of any artistic community — I really had no sense on how to tap into one, at least not for quite some time — the only avenue I could see was to write. Just, write. Words. But the solitude of that can be uninviting when you’re new to a town that has such potential to isolate you. And even more when you’ve been there a while. Any town, new or old, can be about the isolation. Very various factors (Very us, verily!) make the Los Angeles variety variably powerful. That’s part of the Southern California magic they sell and buy all over the world. Isolation, good and bad. It’s just you and the sun. And you have to be on the sun’s side. If it’s a battle, the sun always wins. It’s the most demanding star in a town full of ‘em. Los Angeles is a fascinating place and it’s my distinct impression — I witnessed this — that culture there could accelerate very quickly. There’s a ton of creative people. There must be. Took me a while to start meeting more than the ones I already knew from Chicago. There’s a lot of that too: America goes to California. It’s just spread out and once people get connected then what’s spreading can get stunning. Ever been there? Weather’s often nice. No fresh water though, and earthquakes. Such conditions could halt all the blooming.
CAJ: We saw and very much enjoyed your recent show, "Barred Poetic Disorder," in the Rhinoceros Theater Festival this winter. Can you tell us something about the development of that piece, both its writing and its performative shape?
RR: I’m awfully glad you enjoyed it, thanks. The bulk of the writing started months earlier, in the spring. They were individual poems which I was writing for their own sake and posting to my blog, and to my social media generality. And I just kept writing them. When the Rhino arose, I thought rather than write a performance piece I would do a poetry reading. I right then thought I shouldn’t simply read the poems; it’s the Rhino — I should take the work to a sufficiently maximized and theatrically attuned state. So — what? It had to have a woman. It was very obvious this material might be shackled without a female reader. The reader became a character. The other character had to be a man, a reader: me, because this was all an excuse for my poetry reading. I was going to put it into some dialogue form once I found an actress. Shortly before the Rhino I had the good fortune to meet the versatilely remarkable Heather Marie Vernon, who is the artist you really should be interviewing. She was very enthused about doing the show, and she is perfect for it. So I wrote the framework for the show and we read it as we performed — because there was no time to memorize all that and besides I wanted it to still be a reading at the same time it was a performance, so memorizing was never the desire. The slim framework was originally written to delineate the connection between the pieces and the humor throughout.
CAJ: We have also read your work as a theater reviewer. How do you approach responding to and potentially critiquing other people's works, as a maker of work yourself?
RR: I hardly think at all about the work I make when I’m looking at the work I’m reviewing. I approach the reviews generally as someone who is not averse to going to the theater. “Sure, let’s see what’s in store at the theater tonight.” That sort of approach. Because, I have to have a little enthusiasm just to go, right? We all do, for any art. So I look for something in the play that attains a quality I want to write about. Because I’m a writer really, not a critic. I think the best I can do for anyone reading the reviews is just write the best thing I can — make the review worth reading — and put that to the service of communicating if and in what ways the play is worth seeing. It’s not the most natural outlet for my writing, but I value it. And also, I approach my reviews without trying to weigh the financial cost to the unknown reader. Theater is expensive. The reviews list the ticket price, and that’s important. I recommend shows as reviewer that I don’t personally recommend to most people I know — solely because of the cost. I couldn’t afford to go to most of these shows.
CAJ: What are you excited about lately? Any particular books, people, shows, abstract concepts that get the blood going this season?
RR: Is there a season? I am particularly interested in the art my friends make, simply because my friends tend to make great art. Just last month Dead Rider put out a new album. Back during the Rhino, there was Barrie Cole’s Elevator Tours. And the 75th issue of King Cat Comics and Stories is forthcoming. Those are three disparate works that achieve a miraculous balance of blood and abstraction.
