I never go to New York without this feeling like I’m parachute jumping from a helicopter onto a supersonic submarine-zeppelin-Train a Grande Vitesse. It’s exhilarating, but you hope you’ll still have all your limbs when you land.
And another hundred people…(Pamela Myers singing, with orchestra.)
I’m packing – tomorrow I fly to NYC, after the evening’s preview, on a red-eye. I’ve been in Denver since Dec 6th, the longest I’ve been anywhere since Ashland.
Today I met my great-aunt and great-uncle by marriage, Rose and Floyd, who have been in Denver since 1944. We had a really great conversation over dinner at Hotel Teatro Cafe on 14th before they came to LYDIA this evening – we talked about WWII, Japan, Hawaii, the 100th Battalion, the segregated units, the internment camps, the GI Bill, the US, Israel, the concept of apikoros (non-practicing believer), Judaism, Unitarianism, theater, city planning, architecture, and our families. And borders. And the meaning of global citizenship. And my brother Zack, who they haven’t seen since Lew and Susan’s wedding – fifteen years ago? – playing the piano. It was a conversation of memory and history and I’m still spinning around from the ideas in it.
Looking over the past few blog entries I can smell homesickness, longing for LA, even second-guessing my decision to spend this year running around the country like a chicken with its head cut off. But meeting people like this, even if it’s briefly, makes the entire project seem worthwhile. I never would have known them if I hadn’t come to Denver.
I hope they enjoyed the play – well, as I was saying to a departing audience member, enjoyed isn’t the right word – but I hope they were moved by it. I sat four rows from the stage tonight, and it was amazing how O.R. could make her eyes look like a brain-damaged person. Her portrayal is naturalistic in detail but theatrical in scale.
I also had a phone work session with Tony on Oedipus today, and with Amina on Medea yesterday, and the Convergence proceeds inexorably.
It’s a disjointed life I’m leading, but a full one. If there doesn’t seem to be a plot right now, maybe that’s all right. Maybe this part of my existence is more of a montage. Or an overture to an unwritten opera.
Rich “Tough Guy” Werner’s mind-blowing, gore-spattered, makes-American-Gladiator-look-like-a-tea-party, makes-little-girls-cry, puts-the-ass-kicking-back-in-theater production of STADIUM DEVILDARE at NOTE now has a trailer, shot by Ezra:
Mmm, trailer. So delicious. Seriously, if you’re in Los Angeles, “Come witness the battle, cheer for your favorite contestant and discover for yourself the terrifying secret of STADIUM DEVILDARE.” It opens Feb. 15.
Oh, they also have both merch and swag. You can buy a T-shirt supporting your favorite contestant.
In support, Style Over Substance will be hosting a countdown:
Only 25 more shopping days till STADIUM DEVILDARE, the glorious theatrical production, opens at NOTE.
Several contestants battle for possession of a mystical suit of armor (the suit of Guts N Glory) that will enable them to defeat America’s greatest enemy known only as G-dzilla X (perhaps the rubber costume, perhaps the the war in the Middle East).
CXXI.
‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d,
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost which is so deem’d
Not by our feeling but by others’ seeing:
For why should others false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad, and in their badness reign.
Shakespeare: now stealing from Popeye. By the way, I really love the use of the word “bevel” in this, and the one-word-per-beat line: “Which in their wills count bad what I think good”. I know there’s a word for that, and SK would know it, and maybe in my NEXT year of assistant directing I’ll know the words for all the rhetorical devices. (Maybe.)
Starting a new category, things I’ve learned on the road:
1) Do your laundry not the day you’re leaving town, but the day before, so the sweaters that can’t be dried have time to hang dry. Did I remember this time? Yes. Have I ever remembered before? Not often.
Last night, the director hosted a party for the L. cast, featuring chicken mole with sauce flown in from a restaurant in Los Angeles, by one of her friends. We watched a slideshow of production photos and ate 3 different kinds of cakes. I’ve been exposed to some of the best vegan baking ever on this show.
We preview tonight and tomorrow, and open on Thursday, but I fly to New York tomorrow for auditions – this will be my first time leaving a show before it opens.
recently that April will mark one year of assistant directing, and also one year of not having a home and living on the theater road. I can’t believe it. Seven shows in 12 months, and each in a different location – and various other workshops and projects in there, too. I spell Crazy with a D, two A’s and an R.
I do feel more like the entire country is my home now. But I feel much less like any particular place is where I belong. And I miss LA more than I thought possible. I’m lucky to have had this year, of course, and these opportunities, but it’ll be so good to take time off in April.
I’ll visit Seattle, Vancouver, NYC, maybe try to start writing an article about this whole year, and take a moment of chill in the theater of the non-theatrical. Maybe I’ll take up surfing.
The bad thing about making too many plans is that life may have something better to offer you. So I’m trying to not plan out all of April, not yet. It’ll happen.
“Surprise me.”
Theatre of NOTE‘s 13th Annual Performance Marathon is going on right now, and will be going on until even the Lost Girls come home.
Excerpts from VAST WRECK and MOH&H performed in the 11th and 12th Marathons. And I saw, among other things, Judy reading Dorothy Parker quotes, Hiwa and her fellow hula performers, Rich being unmasked by fifty paper plates, fire dancing, water balloons, a spiderweb of string, people hanging by hooks in their skin, and plastic Barbies making love to robots. I ate peanut butter sandwiches and talked to strangers.
The Marathon is one of the few places where my work is comparatively tame. Someday, I’ll make something disturbed enough to go on after midnight.
It’s sad to not be there, but good to be thinking of them –
somewhere between Hollywood and Sunset, east of Wilcox and west of Vine,
in between the Hotel Cafe and Groundworks,
in between Aklia’s and Jack-In-The-Box,
around the corner from Amoeba,
around the other corner from the Piano Bar,
down the street from Solar de Cahuenga,
in between the dream of theater and the reality of money,
first to the right, second to the left, and straight on till morning.
You still have five or six hours to get there. The really trippy part is just getting started.
Just today, in this matinee’s preview, the performance was stopped for a man sitting in the front row to be helped out of his seat – they thought he was having a heart attack – and paramedics came to get him.
The SM came on the God mic and asked everyone to be patient while they assisted the gentleman having the medical emergency. The actors went into the wings.
In a couple of minutes, the man was safely out of the theater. Then the SM called for them to begin again at the top of the interrupted scene, the actors came out on stage, and the audience applauded them.
They continued on through the performance, which I think was our best yet, and received (again) a standing ovation and had to come back for more bows.
We’re all in this together, after all – actors, performers, people – we’re all doing live theater, of one sort or another. When things go wrong, and people manage to get through it, it makes the entire performance seem more special somehow.
It was as if this shadow of mortality during our show renewed everyone’s faith in the enterprise at hand, the enterprise of life – reminded us all of how short our lives are, and how we’d better be together for the time we had. And be grateful for it.
Theater is a metaphor for existence. I know I’m not the first person to have said or felt this, nor the last, but I’ve never said it to myself in the way I said it today.
Theater is the ultimate defiance of death. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but I do mean it. Life defies death – so for life to reproduce life, to re-create it, is twice defiant. And yet every show is dying from the moment it is born, just like every person – and the doubleness of theater, life upon life, makes it twice more prone to death.
Nothing is more ephemeral than the live creations of living people. Which is why it’s amazing when they live – or they live on.
I wrote that last post about “Travel” before realizing that her rhythm was actually much more sophisticated than anything I used in my rhyming period. But something like that is what I thought I was writing. Of course, I was writing something much, much worse.
Joel took me to task on metrical grounds when he read my TIME TO RHYME copy, and I remember being frustrated with him. It had been so hard to write the whole thing in rhyme in the first place, let alone worry about meter. But although I wasn’t ready to hear it at the time, I think I can take that as the compliment it was – that he knew I was capable of more, and should have been doing better. Or, maybe not should have, but ought to in the future.
How hard it is is never the point. It’s supposed to be hard.
I wonder why it is that I’ve avoided meter, even to the point of consciously trying to forget the names of the various feet. I think it’s that I’d rather understand it aurally, and I thought there was something fake about people who learned meter out of feet in a book. But that particular mental subterfuge has run its course. I need the technique now.
Dara Weinberg 