Max "Bunny" Sparber

Proud To Be White

Someone finally said it.
How many are actually paying attention to this?

There are African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, etc. And then there are just Americans.

You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction. You call me 'White boy,' 'Cracker,' 'Honkey,' 'Whitey,' 'Caveman' ... and that's OK.

But when I call you, Nigger, Kike, Towel head, Sand-nigger, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink ... You call me a racist.

You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you, so why are the ghettos the most dangerous places to live?

You have the United Negro College Fund.
Youhave Martin Luther King Day.
You have Black History Month.
You have Cesar Chavez Day.
You have Yom Hashoah.
You have Ma'uled Al-Nabi.
You have the NAACP.
You have BET.
If we had WET (White Entertainment Television) we'd be racists.
If we had a White Pride Day, you would call us racists.
If we had White History Month , we'd be racists.
If we had any organization for only whites to 'advance' OUR lives we'd be racists.

We have a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a Black Chamber of Commerce, and then we just have the plain Chamber of Commerce. Wonder who pays for that?

A white woman could not be in the Miss Black American pageant, but any color can be in the Miss America pageant.

If we had a college fund that only gave white students scholarships you know we'd be racists. There are over 60 openly proclaimed Black Colleges in the US. Yet if there were 'White colleges' THAT would be a racist college.

In the Million Man March, you believed that you were marching for your race and rights. If we marched for our race and rights, you would call us racists.

You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you're not afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists.

You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at us. But, when a white police officer shoots a black gang member or beats up a black drug-dealer running from the law and posing a threat to society, you call him a racist.

I am proud. But you call me a racist.

Why is it that only whites can be racists?

• As a boy, fantasized about going to "Fairyland" where there was "no strife"
• Antisocial
• Had appendicitis, made him afraid of physical activities
• Hockey fan; loved the Maple Leafs
• Fan of Captain America
• Insisted his comic book collection be pristine
• Once called himself Count Herberto Buckingham Khaury the First
• Laid in bed and invented his own radio shows, acting them out in his head
• Took violin as a child, hated it, hated his teacher, dropped the class
• Sang along to Victrola recordings in his room, sometimes performed for his parents' friends
• Often wrote songs, including one to Elizabeth Taylor
• As a young man, often tried to meet the people he idolized, collected signatures
• At school, stood under the stairs and serenaded the girls
• When he dropped out of school rarely worked; instead, spent most of his time in his room, obsessively listening to records
• Read fan magazines and listened to gossipy radio shows, fantasized about being a star
• Huge fan of Arthur Godfrey; bought Gidfrey plastic ukulele; learned to play is with Godfrey book; attended his radio show until was asked to leave, possibly for being inappropriately excited
• Switched to guitar for a while, and began to attend parties, playing guitar
• Was invited to the parties, often by strangers, to amuse guests
• Used name "Larry Love"
• Performed at an amateur night; didn't use high voice, but did a song where he would cry and tear and bite at himself
• Obsessed with "classic beauties"; went to parties just for the chance to search for girls he thought were classically beautiful
• Began wearing makeup and perfume at this time
• Began obsessively dieting: Bernarr McFadden diet of wheat germ, honey, bananas, etc.
• In 1954, saw picture of Rudolph Valentino with long bangs; experimented with that and eventually grew all his hair long
• Father was so angry by his appearance and his late hours that he smashed guitar across Tiny Tim; Tiny patched the guitar and continued to use it for years
• Tiny was also occasionally physically violent: omnce attacked and choked his father

• Tends toward disarray and clutter
• Adores National Enquirer and National Tattler
• Uses the phrase "thankgodtoChrist" -- spoken as one word -- frequently
• Never leaves his room
• Showers five times per day, including taking showers every time he uses the toilet
• Always eats alone
• Often makes phone calls to businesses using fake voices and names
• Believes women exist to please men with their beauty
• Gives out trophies every year to the girls he thinks are prettiest
• Compulsively considerate
• Authority on forgotten pop music
• Will not share a bed with his wife
• Doesn't believe in birth control
• Tends to just talk about whatever he believes, with little prompting, even if he looks foolish as a result
• Crazy about the LA Dodgers
• Jewish mother, primarily spoke Yiddish
• Father was Lebanese Catholic
• Fan of comic books when a boy
• Grew up singing Jewish songs
• Listened to old music obsessively in his room
• Academically unmotivated
• Dropped out of school
• Couldn't keep a job
• Passionate crush on Liz Taylor
• Grew his hair long in 1953
• Wore cosmetics
• Became very religious Catholic in late teens or early 20s
• Stopped swearing
• Calls all men Mr. and all women Miss
• Reads self-help books
• Parents tried to commit him when he was young

Though the context is Soviet, the production, co-directed by Herwig and Jennifer Ilse, evokes a timeless void that could apply anywhere at anytime. The set seems transient just as life and time themselves are transient and of course, war always ramps up that already awful inevitable transient feeling. Americans in the shadows of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan will tend to categorize Ivan’s derision as post-traumatic stress, which it surely is. But text writer Max Sparber’s miraculous and moving use of language comes from the depths of the soul and not once from psychobabble. Every single word is connected directly to the heart and/or the gut. You will be confronted wherever you’re coming from.

The set is beautiful and cleverly transforms into layer upon layer of dream-like sequences and settings that Ivan recalls from life and returns to in his memory. The memories are surreal – it’s not a strictly linear play – and the interaction between the music, setting, and acting/dancing are evocative of intense emotion, often with no words for minutes at a time. Some of the scenes are nightmarish; but it is always clear that they are based on events from his life. At no time does it seem completely random – the action is grounded in a reality, even though we as audience members only have a minimal sense of the reality, it’s clearly there.

There’s always something miniature about Off-Leash Area’s riveting movement-theater productions. Yes, they’re often produced in small spaces, including the garage of co-artistic directors Paul Herwig and Jennifer Ilse. But it’s also the way in which Herwig and Ilse compress, hone and embed the major events and existential issues of human life (birth and death, being and meaning, parenting and family, abuse and mental illness, war and peace) into singular characters as finely wrought as figures inhabiting whole worlds painted on a thimble.

“Ivan The Drunk & His Terrible Tale of Woe” is spectacular – in the old school theatrical sense of the word spectacle. Off-Leash Area takes five actors and the basic building blocks of story-telling and carefully, very precisely, creates something amazing and funny and strange. Space, sound (and its opposite, silence), the human body (and inhuman props), light (and its opposite, darkness), music, voice, dance, and imagination – rarely have a seen them all better used, and even more rarely all in the same production.

To say that the journey there is heavy and hard is an understatement. Ivan evokes moods aplenty, all of them tainted with bitterness and a sense of the horror we routinely inflict on ourselves, and those of other tribes. The beauty, when it comes, is so strange that we struggle to identify ourselves within it. It's life and history, undeniable and awfully jaundiced.

For being such a dark, sober (heh) story, Ivan the Drunk does not take itself too seriously. Which is to say it took itself just seriously enough. I’ve seen reviews that use phrases like “full of laughs” or other euphemisms for funny, and that’s not it, exactly. There are a few truly absurdly funny moments—and you should not feel guilty about laughing at them—but this play isn’t funny.

This war story is profound, fantastically strange, sometimes sprawling in scope, and, of course, hellish.

As are most Off-Leash Are productions, this is a movement-heavy show, and the rest of the company — Karla Grotting, Judith Howard, Jennifer Ilse and Kym Longhi — assume various personas ranging from Ivan's mother to the fever-dream specters of his mind. But while the movement is evocative, it too often exists for its own sake rather than for that of the story.

The way I work with Off-Leash Area is complicated, in that I am one of a group of collaborators, and, ultimately, I am working on the play that the company wants to produce, rather than my own script. They are a physical theater, and so have a lot of ways to express themselves besides relying on text. Sometimes I would turn in a scene that was written as you would a traditional scene, and, when I would see it rehearsed, they would have cut out all but a few words. I don't mind this, as, in many cases, everything I wanted to express in text was being expressed anyway, and I tend to overwrite, because it is easier to edit down than to try to add text. But it is a very different way of working from traditional playwrighting, which is just fine with me, as theater is a collaborative art, and the traditional approach to playwrighting, in which a playwright types up a script and then sends it off to a theater to get produced, tends to leave the playwright out of a lot of the process, and limits a theater company to interpreting the words of a distant author.

Tiny, or a Meditation on Themes Inspired by the Life of the Performer Tiny Tim, Also Known as Herbert Khaury, Retold with Original Text and Music and Accompanied by a Ukulele.