Monthly Archives: November 2007

directing, LA theater, style, the chorus, theater

“The stones would explain the smile”

I saw a great show with Phil C last night – the Evidence Room/Unknown Theater co-production of Martin Crimp’s* ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE. Seventeen scenes in different styles, textures, and voices, all about one woman – Anne. Brilliant. And there were quite a number of choral elements in it, too. The two companies’ ADs co-directed it, alternating and switching off scenes, which is what I had wanted to try with a different show. So glad to see it working.

AOHL doesn’t have stage directions or divisions of text. I heard someone mention a production where all the actors learned all the lines, which is what I still want to do with choruses.

Every time I see one of Bart’s productions it makes me want to direct the play one day. Which I mean as a compliment to him. Often I see theater and it leaves me sick of the play, tired of it, never wanting to think of it again. Bart’s work makes the play seem like the most wonderful thing ever. Like there could be so many new discoveries in it.

Phil & I went to Cosmic Pizza after and discussed. I’m still spinning from the thoughts of the show. I wish I could see it again, but I leave Thursday.

Then, later, at the Silver Spoon with Ezra, this came up: has the presence of directors in theater actually removed some of the actors’ natural ability to self-direct? And who “needs” directors more – actors who naturally hold back, or who are naturally over the top?

Would it be a good thing for all actors to be in a production without a director? To try that? What would that mean?

*The very first show I worked on it LA was Martin Crimp’s DEALING WITH CLAIR, at the Matrix. I ran box office. Funny how these things come together – this Crimp will be one of the last shows I see in LA, for quite some time.

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a propos of nothing, classics, politics

About time, Augustus

Appropriately, I hear this in Los Angeles: “Italian archaeologists believe they have found the cave where, according to legend, a she-wolf nursed Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome.”

Do we use that prefix “she-” for anything else? She-bear? I want to be a she-human. It sounds more like you’re a predator.

I also love this sentence, which sounds like it comes from a real estate bulletin, or something about the ongoing Malibu fires: “Closed to the public for decades due to the risk of collapse, Augustus’ palace will reopen in February.”

We went to Zuma yesterday, but the canyons are burning today.

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L'Internet, TV, writing

That and fifty cents will get you a formulaic television series

My father, who is more up on his entertainment industry news than I am, due to living in Los Angeles, informed me of what the world has known for two days – Quarterlife has been picked up by NBC.

TVSquad:“This isn’t a realistic portrayal of twentysomethings (at least I hope it isn’t). It’s merely an interpretation of twentysomething lives as seen through the eyes of fiftysomething producers.”

And, from the comments on that same post: ” “I only see one relevant sentence in that NY Times article. “The series … will not be affected by the current writers’ strike because of its ownership structure.” I think NBC just jumped at the chance to have any kind of scripted programming on for the spring.” “

So, since Herskovitz is a producer – and like all the producer/writers on reality TV and otherwise, is avoiding the WGA by claiming not to be writing – and since he’s writing QL, making it bad, but also making it scabbable – he’s managing to not only sell out the indie-cred of the Internet, but also work around the WGA strike (which is ABOUT getting WGA members paid for Internet work) thereby undermining the strikers even further. His rhetoric about working outside the studio system has played back into the studio system’s hands.

Now THAT – a producer tries to be indie and ends up selling out days later, through a model of creating scripted TV that removes the need for striking Guild writers – would be an interesting concept for an Internet television series.

WGA negotiations resume Monday.

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the chorus, theater, travel

Dispatches from the Las Vegas airport

As if anticipating the excitement, over the Grand Canyon, a passenger went into medical distress. The flight attendants asked for doctors on the plane, and they clustered around him and lowered the cabin temperature. A woman in her thirties and a man over seventy confer over the patient. They lay him down in the aisle. We land and paramedics rush onboard.

We wait, and stare out at the skyline, and think about death. From the window of the plane: an enormous black pyramid wearing an Absolut logo over its triangular hips like a pair of designer jeans.

The first thing I see when I get off the plane is a bank of slot machines like docks in a harbor, with people anchored at almost every terminal – and an equally large wall of candy in plastic barrels, and children docked at those.

The sound of slot machines rings and arpeggiates through the air like crows mating. The sound of winning sounds like someone sliding the back of their hand up the keys of a reverby electric piano. It sounds like a smile. A big, fake smile.

A bottle of water costs $3.25, and an Odwalla $5.00. We’re not in Ithaca any more.

But, God, it’s a theater town! A spectacle town. I think about Dan and his year on the Blue Man show here. Posters for theatrical experiences plaster the sides of the moving sidewalks. I don’t see a single ad for anything but a show. Zumanity – Penn &Teller – Phantom – Chippendales – Mamma Mia – Spamalot – The Producers. The walls are bustling with the snarling, laughing faces of actors and dancers. And they look like they know they’re the only game in town. It’s sexy. I’m enthralled. All thoughts of email blasts begging for donations so that theater companies can survive are blissfully wiped from my mind. I’m in Athens – or perhaps in the antiAthens – and Dionysos is ruling the terminals.

I start staring at an ad for UNLV that says “Do you have what it takes to make it in performance art?” and almost trip over the woman in front of me. Do I what? In PERFORMANCE ART?

I feel like I’ve gone tripping back in time to a sleazy Broadway, like I’m walking down some numbered avenue in pinstriped trousers, humming “They say the neon lights are bright…” People come to this place to have physical experiences. To see things live. They come for the damn plays.

Despite myself, I start wondering what it would take to work here. The Red Death / The Story Of O / LOST GIRLS / Pompeii Prohibited : The Vegas Experience? “The show that’ll make you wish you’d never come to Vegas?” Would Alan Moore license his work to a theater company? Or Battlestar Galactica: The Vegas Experience? Or, really, it ought to be MAHAGONNY, or Titus, or Aristophanes. An updated Thesmophoriazusae.* +

Or the Bacchae. They’re building a performance culture here and it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to transfer a serious play, isn’t it? Am I out of my mind? Is there such a thing as off-off-Vegas? **

Next time I’m going to have to go through more than the airport.

* From Wikipedia: “Thesmophoriazusae (Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria) is a comedy written by the Greek playwright Aristophanes. It was first produced in 411 BC, probably at the City Dionysia. How it fared in the competition is unknown. In the fantasy, the character of Euripides learns that the women of Athens are secretly holding a trial of sorts to decide his fate. The female population is up in arms over the playwright’s continual portrayal of women as mad, murderous, erotomaniac, and suicidal (even as his most sympathetic protagonists). They are using the festival of Thesmophoria, an annual fertility celebration dedicated to Demeter, as a cover for their plot to hold Euripides accountable for his slanderous words.”

+ Comic choruses on the brain. Aren’t they more active than the tragic? Can’t you say that they affect the course of the plot, sometimes?
Last night Lauren and I were talking Nietzsche and choruses, and I think I need to do a bit more work on how the comic choruses fit into that – whether they fall into the same spectator dynamics.

** You say obsessive. I say persistent.

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politics, workstyle

As Easy As Jumping Out Of A Plane

Last night we ate at Madeleine’s on the Commons with a group of Amina and David’s friends, including a guy who’s a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and a member of IVAW, Iraq Veterans Against The War. He’s involved in the planning for their March 2008 event, Winter Soldier, where a group of veterans will testify in Washington about the war crimes in Iraq.

We talked about this, and also about his training (he was part of an airborne unit) which involved, among other things, training to jump out of a plane with other medics, find a Humvee loaded with medical supplies (which had also been dropped out of a plane) turn it upright, and drive it around looking for injuries sustained by other soldiers who ALSO jumped out of planes.

I asked him why soldiers jump out of planes, which is something I’ve never completely understood. His answer was that if you can land a force from any point in a country, defense no longer becomes about defending borders, but about defending every square inch of territory – forcing nations to spread out their armed forces in their own defense.

Practically speaking, he thinks this technique doesn’t work very well, and never has in practice – you land and are usually separated from your unit, confused, and often injured, and its successful results during WWII had more to do with the Germans being overwhelmed by the surprise of it – but that the continued existence of airborne units is a really strong recruiting pull for the Army. People like the myth and the bravado of jumping out of planes.

(He didn’t actually jump out of planes in the war in Afghanistan, only in training.)

We talked about how we could help out Winter Soldier, and he said that a big part of it was just getting the word out and helping to publicize their efforts. In that spirit, here’s the statement from their website:

In 1971, over one hundred members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered in Detroit to share their stories with America. Atrocities like the My Lai massacre had ignited popular opposition to the war, but political and military leaders insisted that such crimes were isolated exceptions. The members of VVAW knew differently.

Over three days in January, these soldiers testified on the systematic brutality they had seen visited upon the people of Vietnam. They called it the Winter Soldier investigation, after Thomas Paine’s famous admonishing of the “summer soldier” who shirks his duty during difficult times. In a time of war and lies, the veterans who gathered in Detroit knew it was their duty to tell the truth.

Over thirty years later, we find ourselves faced with a new war. But the lies are the same. Once again, American troops are sinking into increasingly bloody occupations. Once again, war crimes in places like Haditha, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib have turned the public against the war. Once again, politicians and generals are blaming “a few bad apples” instead of examining the military policies that have destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once again, our country needs Winter Soldiers.

In March of 2008, Iraq Veterans Against the War will gather in our nation’s capital to break the silence and hold our leaders accountable for these wars.

Here’s the statement of support for Winter Soldier, and more on how to get involved.

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Uncategorized

On Ithaca And Going Home

So we’re almost done with the projects that brought me here. Today is my last day in Ithaca, which makes me very sad, but you can always return to Ithaca. Penelope is always waiting for you here, along with memories of Telluride, rivers, waterfalls, rocks, falling leaves, friends, and the mixed joy and extreme sadness of being an intellectual, whatever that may or may not mean from one moment to another. I never feel like myself more than in this town.

It was snowing last night as we walked home and I saw snowflakes on the ground and on my jacket, looking like crystal beads or tiny models of chemical molecules.

Yesterday, I finished the draft of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS. 25 pages in 12-pt Courier. Its intertwining plots are now like this:
– Oedipus at Colonus
– Medea
– Oedipus at Colonus
– The Wasps
– The Persians
– The Wasps & The Persians, simultaneously (staggered, and so on)
– The Persians and Antigone
– Antigone
I hope with all my heart that it makes sense to the folks in Indy, because I don’t know how to make it make more sense without directing it. At least I had some great collaborators – being able to have the privilege of rewriting and restructuring the greatest dramatists who have ever written is always satisfying. This made me remember how much fun it was to work on the script for LYSISTRATA, how I felt that each new translation I wove into it brought me closer to the original and to the spirit of the Greeks’ work.

Amina continued work on the web design for UpstageProject – we are almost at the point of being able to launch the blog. I’m going to try to write a manifesto of sorts for its launch, too, as Heidi Julavits did for THE BELIEVER – something about why we think the world needs this website now.

I’ll be in Los Angeles tomorrow, after months away. I was reading Ursula LeGuin this morning, from her book DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, and she quotes Carolyn See writing in GOLDEN GIRLS:

“Where did those girls walk? They walked for miles in the center of the city…They walked northeast and down a long sweet incline to where Griffith Park Boulevard and Los Feliz and Fletcher Drive met…They walked the old streets, Hyperion over to Vermont, stopping at the grocery store at …Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard…walking the width of the town they knew, over to La Brea…and then another long, long walk home.”

And then LeGuin writes, “Those streets are named for the love of saying their names. The girls walk in love.”

It will be very strange and wonderful to see those streets again. To drive on Franklin Avenue between Vermont and La Brea, my NOTE corridor. I’m happy here, in Ithaca, but it’s the happiness of a place you’ve never risked a long time in. It’s a vacation happiness. Los Angeles – Hollywood – Los Feliz – Woodland Hills – NoHo – SilverLake – Franklin, always Franklin, between Vermont and Virgil, between Cahuenga and Western, is home. And that’s where I’ll be, tomorrow afternoon.

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UpstageProject, workstyle, writing

Planama

Amina and I are at Gimme, working on more UpstageProject documents. Everyone in the world in Ithaca is coming through this coffeehouse – in their variations of dressing for thirty degree weather.

She’s writing on big sheets of newsprint and I’m typing, and we’re dividing up editorial responsibilities between the blog, articles/essays, and reviews/interviews departments.

I feel like a broken record continuing to say this, but I had always assumed that we would launch this site like a baby bird and just let it struggle and sink or swim – but, with Amina’s help and her planning brain, we’re giving it so many good resources. We’re being planned parents. Very responsible.

So we’ve divided up the site into three major sections – Blog, Reviews/Interviews, and Articles/Essays – and we’re listing frequency of posting, editorial responsibilities, writing responsibilities, and resources needed for each one.

I sometimes am intimidated by making planning documents. I would rather just start working and realize what planning we haven’t done later, when it stabs us in the back.

But it’s nice to try doing something the right way for once.

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poems to remember

Sonnet 7

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol’n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth
That I to manhood am arriv’d so near;
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endu’th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure ev’n
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav’n:
All is, if I have grace to use it so
As ever in my great Task-Master’s eye.

– Milton

(not just for hating on rhyme: also for that weird feeling of not having accomplished enough yet.)

I’m going to try out a feature of posting the poems I like best in this blog and archiving them, so I can access them remotely.

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