Welcome to the first monthly feature on the Public Image! At the beginning of each month, I will conduct an interview (and an outing of their direction) with a different Rust Belt artist. I thought there would be no better way to commence this new tradition than with my old friend Wilhelm, a tragic playwright currently living in Macomb, Michigan.
Wilhelm was in Chicago the weekend of September 22nd trying to escape the wrath of his five other roommates, who had all waged a territorial war in their 3-bedroom home in the dense neighborhoods of the outer-Detroit suburbs. We decided that we would wander into the artistic by-ways of the city to explore a few bookstores and record shops.
Q1: Most people would consider your living situation “communal”, since none of your roommates are related by blood and have all united under the common purpose of supporting each other’s artistic careers. Have you encountered any problems, either interpersonally or legally, because of it?
Legally, it can be an issue. There are places in the country with a pretty strict family-centric occupancy limit that have even given extended families trouble. Zoning committees in a lot of areas have outlawed it altogether even if they won’t outright admit it. The six of us had to get an exception from the city council, sign a couple of conditional permits, pay a fee, and even then I didn’t think we’d make it work. But we did. Socially, it can be a huge pain, too. My roommates, they’re…well, they’re tortured people. The world doesn’t really work for them. It doesn’t work for any of us, but still it works for some more than others. The ones who find a way to make it work are good people. The ones who can’t, they tend to be explosive.
Q2: Tell me more about your history as a playwright. When and why did you start? What do you want to accomplish?
First I wanted to be a screenwriter, that’s how it began. I wrote a screenplay called Opus of Leichenberg about five or six years ago, but that’s totally lost to time now. I sent it over for review to one of my cousin’s screenwriting professors and he replied a few months later with some very honest feedback. It was actually brutally honest. I got so angry at myself, so hateful of my own work that I went outside and burned the only physical copy of it that I printed out. And then I deleted it off my computer. I didn’t write for, like, three months after that because I was so upset. But then I got to thinking about one thing that this professor said, and it was that the setting changed so quickly and so drastically that my imagination actually ended up being detrimental to the story. And so I thought, maybe I should be a playwright instead. Because if you’re writing a story to be performed in one sitting, on one stage, with limited sets and actors, you limit yourself to the essentials. The professor… I still hate him, don’t get me wrong, I still think he was a total asshole… he said that Opus was “excessive”. That there was too much going on, and he had trouble following it. So the first thing I did was try to adapt that into a play and see how I liked that. I wish I hadn’t deleted the original screenplay so that I could compare the two, but I think that the play adaptation was better. Another thing I realized that I like a lot about plays, that you can never really get with movies is that they can be interactive. Around that time I started reading books about the origins of the Greek tragedies and how the audience members were also participants in it. They believed that they were seeing the actual characters onstage, they had to kind of, like, bypass imagined reality in order to really get there. It was also used by ancient mystery cults to publicly celebrate their rites, to celebrate them allegorically so that non-initiates wouldn’t be exposed to them. Anyways, I thought that was really interesting. I want to reestablish those kinds of riotous stageplays, that’s part of the current project I’m on right now.
Q3: Just out of curiosity, what was Opus of Leichenberg about?
Well, I don’t even know. It’s stupid. It was about this old guy who woke up from a nightmare with the sudden urge to compose a symphony. And he thinks that he was visited by some kind of rageful messenger trying to prevent him from shattering an oath that he made in a past life, so he starts composing it and it takes him years to do it. But then he finally completes it, and by the time he’s completed it he’s gotten so adept at reading music that he can hear the symphony in his head as he’s looking at the sheet music. He realizes that he’s written the best piece of music to ever exist, and at first he’s really excited, sends it out to an orchestra trying to convince them to perform it, and goes out for a celebratory drink. There’s music playing at this restaurant, but he finds himself completely disgusted with it. He goes home in a taxi and forces the cabby to turn off the radio because he’s tormented by how awful it is. Eventually he goes completely insane because he can’t handle this secret he’s uncovered. And then the orchestra gets back to him saying that they’ve decided to publicly perform it, and he intercepts the symphony from ever reaching the audience’s ears by blowing up the whole building.
Q4: What’s your newest project going to be? Will it ever be available to the public, or do you think it’s too good for any of us to comprehend?
This new project I’m keeping a secret. I don’t want to give any specifics until I know for a fact that it’s ready, and I’m not going to make any revisions. But I’m very excited about it. I’ve reached out to some actors proactively, and I know a good amount of them because one of my roommates is an independent filmmaker who started off in theater. My other roommate, who does some sculpting and tailoring, is helping me with stage props -- masks, costumes, things like that. I’ll probably anticipate its completion between late 2024 and early 2025. I started working on it almost a year ago. December 8th, 2022 is the exact date.
Over the course of the outing, we visited Bucket O' Blood Books and Records, Meteor Gem, and Reckless Records on our way back to South Loop.
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