A brief History of Hell
This covers the historical time-line of Mr. Hell from a performance/publishing perspective.
The thing to remember about Mr. Hell is I never intended this for a public performance. I wrote it as an exercise for a novel writing course I was taking after I came back from Europe. The assignment was to write something about life and death and set it on an airplane.
I was approached after the reading to participate in a series of one act plays and I agreed to participate as a writer, but come up with another piece, – what would become “The Best of All Possible Talk Shows,” as an alternative.
They agreed on the condition that they had to like the alternative more. So I sat down and wrote “Talk Shows,” and went about the process of pulling Mr. Hell and burning the thing. Really.
Ultimately, Paul negotiated that neither one of us would decide the fate of Mr. Hell and set up a blind performance for an unsuspecting couple to see the thing. What they didn’t know was their thumbs up or down would decide the fate of Mr. Hell.
So the couple sat down, I watched them and at the end of the first ever public performance I asked, “so, what do you think?”
“Well,” she said, “I am a Jewish tax accountant.”
I looked at Paul and he was shitting himself. He didn’t know her religion or her job.
Her boyfriend, and fellow bad-ass, finished sizing me up as I’d finished sizing him up. Paul was babbling and almost in tears until he told Paul to shut up.
“The main character’s name is Hell,” he said, “and the other character is Job. He betrays his faith over words. Interesting.”
“His Job,” he said to her, “is Tevia.”
“Interesting,” I said, “I hadn’t thought of it like that, but you are right.”
“The fight isn’t between us,” he said, and picked her up and helped her to the door. “These things upset her. Her family…you understand. ”
“So what does she think?” I asked him.
“Now I see,” he said, “he wants to know if it should be seen.”
“Yes,” she said, “of course. Of course it must be seen.”
After they left, Paul said, “I thought he was going to kill you.”
“That’s funny,” I said, “I thought I was going to have to kill him for trying to kill me. Which was my whole god dammed point.”
“You’re right,” Paul said, “and I was wrong. So we are going to do both your plays.”
So up they went. We will leave the how I was screwed over phase other than to say, I went from having 3 broadcast cameras(ever wonder how much those camera use for football cost), switcher, director, and crew to a borrowed Sony Hi8mm camera(now own).
Fast forward 10, 12 years, and I was hired to direct a dance piece about a serial killer because of Mr. Hell, at the same time Mr. Hell was being revived by Paul. I came to closing night of Mr. Hell and no one knew who I was, except Paul and his partner. Anyway, it was a kick in the ass when I became, “the writer.” The nice thing about this production was people came away with the right conclusion – betraying one’s faith and giving into hatred is a bad thing.
Independently of all this, I started another play and basically got stuck at the end of act two. I set it aside and figured something would come along and it did in the form of my father having a heart attack and dying on Christmas day. Hell was back in the picture.
I had a third act and rewrote the first two. I came close to getting it financed a couple of times, got disgusted, got hired to do some other writing gigs, thanks to Mr. Hell, which also crashed and burned as is the custom and I walked on. Then my mum had her stroke, and here we are.
These days there is enough emotional distance between me and Mr. Hell that it doesn’t bother me and I can enjoy it for what it is. I hope you can do the same.
When my mum died, I found myself in the dining room of Oakdale Hights, her home at the end, when one of her care givers came in and said, “I know Mavis is dead, but is she still here.”
She didn’t see me and but the staff who were there looked to me to see my reaction.
“Mavis has left the building,” I said, “now she is with Elvis.”
As an eulogy, I couldn’t have written that without seeing Mr. Hell first.
