The soul stirrers

See That My Grave Is Kept Clean sets PR against the spirit of Harry Smith
BY ROBERT AVILA

The set is modestly spare, a disheveled if not quite ramshackle affair, being the basement studio of an imaginary low-watt radio station run by a solitary disc jockey (Peter Newton) with a thing for Japanese culture, an anguished relation to the American scene, and an insomniac disposition. But just as the deepest truths can rise immaculately from the muffled vibrations of a scratchy old blues record, so does Bay Area playwright Gary Aylesworth's new play See That My Grave Is Kept Clean slyly and unassumingly sound nothing less than the soul-stirring chords and discords of an embattled American imagination.

The play's DJ-everyman, sitting at his desk and console in a kimono, his samurai sword on one side, his classic blues discs on the other, coos into the microphone to whomever might be listening to the evening's program. Caught between suicidal despair and a desire for revitalization, he's fending off the highly bankable depression of a Prozac nation with the ameliorative properties of Japanese rice balls. He's also bent on finding a little truth amid the "tsunami of propaganda" that characterizes the society outside. To this latter end, he's got the classic recordings from the Anthology of American Folk Music on heavy rotation, markers of another era of American depression — marvelous songs Newton and Aylesworth actually perform live (including the song borrowed for the play's title) in lilting harmonies to their own musical accompaniment.

But our DJ sets some archival interviews spinning too, in counter-rotation to one another, as it were. The other characters (played by Aylesworth, acting out the interviews the DJ intersperses throughout the program) are two formidable contemporaries and spiritual adversaries of the mid-20th century: Edward Bernays and Harry Smith. The juxtaposing of these two figures, polar extremes yet both highly influential in the economic and cultural spheres, becomes the motive propelling Aylesworth's deceptively casual, humorous, melodious, and intriguing new play.

Bernays, considered a father of the public relations industry ("public relations" being a phrase he coined to substitute for the tarnished term “propaganda”), was by the 1920s and for decades afterward the much sought-after guru of ballyhoo. He sold everything from cigarettes to presidents to a bloody US-backed coup in Central America on behalf of the United Fruit Company. Bernays was also (not incidentally) the nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose ideas he put to pioneering use in the realm of what he called "the engineering of consent."

On the other side of the stage (and every other important extreme) is Harry Smith, the play's prickly patron saint. A character too protean and idiosyncratic for a neat label, Smith was among other things an experimental filmmaker and the musicologist who compiled the legendary multivolume Anthology of American Folk Music, recordings largely made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Originally issued on the Folkways label in 1952, it was so influential in the folk music revival and beyond that Bob Dylan (our DJ reminds us) once boasted that he would not have existed but for Harry Smith. Along the way, the play broaches Smith's other passions as a jazz enthusiast, painter, and even a record producer (he recorded the Fugs’ debut album in 1965, which leads to the story recounted in the play of how he came to be consulted on the best way to levitate the Pentagon as part of a famous 1967 antiwar action).

Aylesworth plays the nonagenarian Bernays with a high, rasping voice and a set of repetitive, almost cartoonlike gestures that (along with a tendency for the "taped" interview to slow down and speed up at odd, sometimes telling moments) poke fun at the self-congratulatory figure. Bernays is a man so far from shy about bragging of his connections and achievements that he unconsciously paints an entirely grim view of modern society with the cheeriest of dispositions. By contrast, Smith (played with equal facility and a slightly hyperbolic, wry affect) has a cantankerous air about him. While forthcoming enough, he casts back a knowingly cautious, skeptical, even sarcastic tone to his various interviewers.

Here are two spiritual fathers, you might say, of the 20th-century United States, whose diametrically opposed outlooks constitute and reflect something like a metaphysical rift in the culture at large. Blended with Aylesworth's simple yet choice staging, the acute and droll performances, and the laid-back but excellent renditions of selections from the Anthology, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean approaches its themes with a charm all the more forceful for being quirky and understated.

And if our DJ channels the despair of the age, it's clear that despair cuts two ways too. It leads either to the acquiescence and metaphysical poverty of Bernays-style fables of freedom and plenty or to the awakened, agitated thought, action, and social conscience of a Harry Smith, which seeks nothing in the end more than the obliteration of myth and the reanimation of the senses. With its rousing good humor and a shrewd theatrical assurance whose crystalline simplicity resonates with far-reaching themes, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean gives eloquent voice to the restless rebel wide awake beneath the glossy, manufactured surface of the American dream. SFBG

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It's not coincidental to his new play that local playwright and performer Gary Aylesworth has spent the past decade out of the professional theatrical world. It was essential.

"If you work in the type of school I work in," says Aylesworth, who has been teaching at a Waldorf school, "which has a spiritual basis to its education, a creative basis, the children are completely instructed through arts and imaginative presentation on a daily basis. The study of the human being from Rudolf Steiner, who founded Waldorf, absolutely informed the aesthetic of the play."

Aylesworth, who has won awards for works like "The Orphan King," returns to San Francisco theater with "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," a work at Traveling Jewish Theatre that juxtaposes the lives of two important 20th century American men, public relations maven Edward Bernays, the "father of spin," and filmmaker, ethnographer and music archivist Harry Smith.

Using a record-playing everyman character as the framing device, Aylesworth digs into the biographies of the two men, who have done influential work behind the scenes of American culture. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was one of the first masters of public relations. (And can it be emphasized enough how influential that is?)

"He was working with Uncle Freud's ideas of unconscious," says Aylesworth, "the instinctual urges that they don't even know they have. He was working behind the scenes with companies, working behind the conscious minds of those he's trying to influence. Bernays was creating pseudo-events -- supplying and staging the news. He was working behind presidents, United Fruit, big tobacco, here, there and everywhere."

Bernays' contemporary Harry Smith also exerted an influence out of the limelight but with a completely different approach. Smith is most famous for his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, which fueled much of the folk revival of the '50s and '60s. His experimental films have been cited as influences by numerous filmmakers. Smith anticipated his legacy; his revelations about hidden aspects of America's social history were designed to make an impact.

Putting these divergent figures together, along with the live performances of selected folk songs by the playwright and collaborator Peter Newman, is designed to reflect on current cultural conditions. "Smith was pulling from artistic and spiritual ends of the spectrum, but he was dragged down from his inability to meet the material demands of his career. Bernays, on the hand, had trouble with the artistic demands of his position. He was promoting propaganda as antidote to society's ills," says Aylesworth.

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'Grave' digs deep
Column by Chad Jones

"GRAVE" MUSIC: Peter Newton (left) and Gary Aylesworth explore American folk music in the show "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean'" at San Francisco's Traveling Jewish Theater. (ANNE HAMERSKY)

GARY AYLESWORTH'S "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" may be the most intriguing new play of the year. It's also one of the strangest.
Aylesworth, a schoolteacher who has been creating interesting theater in the Bay Area, digs deep into the American psyche to try and figure out who we are as a nation and how we got that way.
What makes Aylesworth's experiment — at San Francisco's Traveling Jewish Theater — so nifty is that he passes by the major historical figures of the 20th century and settles his sites on two surprising influences.
The first is Edward L. Bernays, the man credited with creating our modern notion of public relations and "spin." Think about it: Where would we be today without spin?
Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and had a major impact on the elections of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, on labor relations for the United Fruit Company and even the color green as a bold fashion statement.
The other figure is Harry Smith, the ethnographer, musicologist and artist responsible for assembling the landmark "Anthology of American Folk Music," released in 1952.
Bernays and Smith were both obsessed with discovering who we are as Americans in the deepest sense. Bernays wanted to know so he could manipulate us and better serve his clients. Smith wanted to know because he cared about and wanted to preserve the art and sounds of our vast cultural landscape.
Aylesworth's show, which takes its name from a 1928 Blind Lemon Jefferson tune, is part biography, part collage and part musical.
Peter Newton plays the operator of a one-watt basement radio station broadcasting tracks from Smith's "Anthology." By spinning these tunes and rambling into his microphone, this hobbyist DJ hopes to spread the word about Smith's pioneering musical work and keep himself off anti-depressants.
Aylesworth plays both Bernays and Smith, and throughout the 90-minute show, both actors play multiple instruments and sing some great old songs like "The Coo Coo Bird," "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" and "No Depression in Heaven."
"See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" defies easy description and labeling, but one thing is sure: it is completely fascinating.
Call (415) 831-1943 or visit http://www.constructioncrewtheater.com for information.

You Spin Me
The ethnomusicologist and the flack tell a beguiling tale of influence
By Chloe Veltman 
Article Published Aug 16, 2006

See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

Directed By:
Gary Aylesworth
Starring:
Aylesworth and Peter Newton

 
Sultans of Spin: The DJ (Peter Newton) and the father of PR (Gary Aylesworth) compare notes.

There are probably few people in the history of the 20th century less likely to crop up in a play together than Harry Smith and Edward Bernays. Considered by many to be the father of public relations, Bernays (1891-1995) was as brilliant at selling ideas and products to the masses as he was at selling himself. He turned America on to everything from Ivory soap to Calvin Coolidge, all the while promoting himself as a "counsel on public relations" and the nascent PR industry as a bona fide social science. Harry Smith (1923-1991), on the other hand, was a terrible businessman. A beatnik ethnomusicologist, archivist, experimental filmmaker, artist, and practitioner of kabala, Smith sponged off his acquaintances and lived from hand to mouth. Besides his abstract movies, Smith's best known contribution to modern life was his record collection. The Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), comprising three volumes of two vinyl records each culled from Smith's vast treasure trove of 1920s and '30s American ballads, gospel, and blues songs, played a major role in the folk music revival and cultural shift of the 1950s and '60s, influencing the likes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Unlike the characters in most plays that contrast two conflicting personalities for dramatic effect (Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, and Denis Johnson's Purvis being three that spring to mind), Smith and Bernays, though more or less contemporaries, inhabited separate worlds. As the well-connected nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays collected famous clients the way Smith collected old 78s. The two men probably never met. Yet in Gary Aylesworth's beguiling new play, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, Smith's and Bernays' lives and ideas intersect and reverberate across the decades to convey something about the insidious nature of spin.

Smith and Bernays never address each other directly in this plotless riff on their lives. Instead, Aylesworth — proving himself as fascinating an actor as he is a playwright — conveys the wild contrasts between the two characters with a bipolar panache that makes us feel like we're listening to a musical conversation, if not a verbal one. While the hunched, bespectacled Smith spends most of his time slouching at the foot of a stepladder against red lighting, jabbering on in a nasal voice about kielbasa and occultist Aleister Crowley like a basement Quasimodo, Bernays relays most of his recollections of a life lived in the public eye from a white wooden chair under a white light on the opposite side of the stage. Even in his 90s, Aylesworth's larger-than-life Bernays is wily and vivacious, punctuating his prose with self-satisfied tummy taps and wags of the index finger for emphasis.

Neither character is particularly attractive. But while it's easy to forgive Smith's gentle eccentricities, Bernays, with his blustering speeches about "molding public opinion," becomes increasingly odious — part figure of fun, part freak of modern mass culture. The moment in which Bernays, a Jew, talks about his PR books being used by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is pure Grand Guignol: Lit at a steep angle by a strong light, Bernays looks like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. And when a younger version of Bernays at his professional prime barks orders at one of his subordinates or sweet-talks a society lady into staging a PR stunt for American Tobacco on the phone, he does so with two curly Martianlike antennae sticking out of his ears.

Aylesworth's presentation of these two very different characters' existences conveys a deliberate agenda. The playwright's portrait of Bernays is in some ways more complete than that of Smith — we see Smith only in his rickets-suffering, cantankerous old age, while Bernays is represented in his youth, in his middle years, and at the end of his life. His Uncle Sigmund even makes a few appearances, stroking a Cuban cigar in a decidedly slimy way. Yet the odds are clearly stacked against the "high priest of spin": See That My Grave Is Kept Clean is really Smith's play.

Smith's freewheeling, free-associating spirit and primary passion — folk music — permeate the production. Its very title comes from a song first recorded by blues artist Blind Lemon Jefferson in 1928, captured on Smith's Anthology, and later reworked by Dylan. The rumpled set, with its emphasis on the arcane (assorted musical instruments, mismatched furniture, scattered records, and three Japanese rice balls winking at us from a desktop — a Zen take on the executive stress toy), works like a physical representation of Smith's mental state. The protagonists' monologues are framed by the patter of a radio folk-music disc jockey (Peter Newton), who divides his set between playing tracks from the Anthology and interviewing both characters, and spouting off against a whole range of societal dysfunctions, from America's reliance on antidepressants to the onslaught of the propaganda machine in contemporary society.

Newton's smooth-talking DJ seems to be channeling Smith: His stream-of-consciousness banter jumps from subject to subject like a needle skipping tracks on vinyl. Even more intoxicating are the actors' renditions of 15 songs from Smith's Anthology. Scattered throughout the play, tunes by old-timers like Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Carter Family, and Mississippi John Hurt burst with renewed life through Aylesworth and Newton's passionate string- and percussion-accompanied duets. With all this, it's hard not to fall head over heels for Smith and all he stands for. Hell, I forked over more than $80 for a copy of the Anthology the very next day.

Aylesworth might want us to identify more closely with Bernays than Smith, but at a deeper level, the playwright demonstrates just how slippery and untenable his agenda really is. For Bernays isn't the only spinmeister here: The relationship between Smith's vinyl-spinning interests and Bernays' spin-doctorly ways draws the two characters subtly together. Ultimately, the bias toward Smith spins on its head with the realization that the ethnomusicologist could never have created the Anthology — and influenced the important cultural shift of the mid-20th century — if it weren't for the PR-led mass consumerism upon which the record industry was founded.

If you come out of this play with your soul and head spinning out of control, don't be surprised. Aylesworth's own spin-doctoring is so clever that he leaves even Bernays behind. For as much as his play criticizes mass consumerism and corporate greed, Aylesworth also understands the modern problem of being caught between the desires for a simple life and for a life filled with modern conveniences. Listening to the crackly recordings by those long dead Depression-era artists brings the problem home for me personally: I probably wouldn't be hearing these old troubadours if it weren't for my iPod and, more subliminally, Apple's clever advertising campaign in support of it.

©2006 Village Voice Media All rights reserved

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Digging A Fresh Grave
By Hiya Swanhuyser
Anne Hamersky.

See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.
Local playwright Gary Aylesworth's new play has a good guy (in folk music maven Harry Smith), a bad guy (in inventor of public relations Edward Bernays), and someone caught in the middle: a DJ. See That My Grave Is Kept Clean is a two-man production featuring Aylesworth and longtime co-conspirator Peter Newton; it includes some of the great old songs collected by Smith in the 1920s, starting with the title tune and extending to "John the Revelator" and "No Depression in Heaven." The battle between cigarette commercials and "Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting?" plays itself out as the mere mortal Everyperson disc jockey tries to broadcast the truth about this fine country of ours.
 

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