Monthly Archives: January 2008

poetry, rhyme, travel

“Travel”

The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I’d rather take,
No matter where it’s going.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

There was a time when I thought that to write poetry in the rhythm, form, and shape shown above was not only my highest ambition, it was my only one. I was so prolific in it – I wrote 365 poems (ANIMA’S DAYS) plus a bunch more, three plays (FAUST adaptation, GILGAMESH, CLYTEMNESTRA SPEAKS) , and a 200-page thesis (TIME TO RHYME) in that exact poetic form. And that’s only what I remember. I was the monotonous and versatile balladeer. I still have a lot of affection for that structure, if only because we’ve traveled so far together – but these days, to make myself write like that now, I have to, well, make myself write like that.

There isn’t even a category for “rhyme” on this blog. I’ll create one, for old time’s sake, but I don’t know how much it’ll get used. I have been trying to write a tetrameter sonnet lately, and it’s killing me. Not that I can’t do it – I can do it easily – but I can’t do it WELL. I used to use that form so thoughtlessly, but it was like using a blender to brush your hair.

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a propos of nothing, style

Iturns

So, this actually is related to style – to stycomythia. I swear. To the idea of exact alternation. It’s downright theatrical, actually, and it’s about how patterns perpetuate themselves.

The following: Two men at a small party alternate their Ipods, one after another. Variations on the theme of country music. They give the hostess a cash “tab” for Itunes and buy songs they have to have immediately. One plays a song on his, the other on his. Ruby. The Pleasure Barons. Out of both respect and competitiveness. They alternate.

I screw up this order by trying to play some OCMS but I fail to make it work. They resume the alternating order.

This goes on until one of them has the idea, antithematically, of Journey, and the other turns out to have two Journey songs on his Ipod. He plays both. This disrupts the order of things, and the party ends shortly thereafter.

Shelby Lynne: “You can’t roll a joint on an Ipod.”

Patterns.

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Lydia

Quite right – Ibsen forever!

After second preview, the director and I spent some time talking to one of the house managers tonight, who, before becoming a head usher and SM had other lives as a paramedic, a firefighter, a ranger, and 30 years as a flight attendant. He went from managing audiences in airplanes to audiences in theaters. And he wants to become an Equity membership candidate and stage manager.

I’m so amazed by all the people who have to come together to make theater possible, from such different walks of life. For someone to take up house management after retiring from a long career in a stressful job – that makes me want to work even harder, to make the shows better and the process more open, for the sake of everyone who loves this stuff more than eating, sleeping, or breathing. Because it certainly interferes with all three, more often than not. It’s not a relaxing profession or an easy one.

But when, as I did tonight, I heard a roomful of audience members gasping as an actress onstage moved her eyes from one object to another – when I hear grown adults forget themselves and actually begin talking to the characters onstage – “No!” “Stop!” – when I hear people breathlessly explaining the show to each other, translating the Spanish for their dates, debating the mysteries at intermission and weeping at the end-

I think that if I had ten lives to give to the theater I would willingly give all of them and still think it wasn’t enough.

This play shocks people. It deals with adult material. It’s poetic and brutal and honest and funny. It’s O’Neill and Williams and Wilson all wrapped into one. And it leaves you wrecked, like your heart’s been smashed on the stage.
When I watch audiences reacting to this play, I feel like I know what it was like to watch audiences at A DOLL’S HOUSE, before anyone knew that Nora was going to leave her husband at the end. This play has an equivalent emotional impact.

I can’t say anything more about it in case anyone is going to see it. But God, it’s a good show. And it leaves the possibility of hope open. No more than life does, but no less, either.

As one of the characters says, “There is no why. It just happened.”

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a propos of nothing, Lydia

6.8

Today is the anniversary of the Northridge earthquake. My father, who’s a professor at Cal State-Northridge, was almost certainly saved by the earthquake happening as early in the morning as it did (4:30 am) since that campus was devastated by the quake. January 17 never passes without me thinking about it.

Our house, which had an enormous stone chimney in the front, had its entire front wall crumble. Bookcases came out from walls, turned around in midair, and sat back down on the other wall. The kitchen was a collage of glass, and every surface was covered in books.

Today is also our first preview. I invited some local friends and students to see our dress rehearsal yesterday, and they were thrilled after intermission and crying after the 2nd act.

The director did something interesting with scheduling yesterday – we had our dress run in the morning and worked in the evening, and now we have another work session this afternoon before our evening preview, which ensures that we have 8 hours of rehearsal between dress and previews.

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books, theater

The Caldecott medal

goes to an enormous 544-page graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. “Orphan, clock keeper, and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity.”

I have been out of touch with the world of kids’ books since I stopped working at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. Like all other interests in my life, it’s gone the way of theater. When I first got to LA, I landed a great job at Children’s Book World (where Toby used to work) but after one day of the commute from Hollywood to midtown West Side, I knew it was going to leave me too drained to rehearse in the evenings. So, very reluctantly, I had to quit.

But listening to the Golden Compass on audiobook has made me miss that universe. I wonder if there’s an opportunity for a theater company to do a new release of a straight-to-audio book, one that doesn’t have a printed version.

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books, quotes

We are now officially out of tech

and, feeling behind on all my other work, and attempting the rewrite again (the pages of the Greeks are scattered on the coffee table in front of me), here is an appropriate article about talking about books you haven’t really read, by Pierre Bayard – his book on the subject, “How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read,” came out Jan. 10th and is getting really popular.

“Non-reading goes far beyond the act of leaving a book unopened. To varying degrees, books we’ve skimmed, books we’ve heard about and books we have forgotten also fall into the rich category that is non-reading. Life, in its cruelty, presents us with a plethora of situations in which we might find ourselves talking about books we haven’t read.

To get to the heart of things, I believe we must significantly modify how we talk about books, even the specific words we use to describe them. Our relation to books is not the continuous and homogeneous process that certain critics would have us imagine, nor the site of some transparent self-knowledge. Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these spectres. “

And another article, on why authors want to be anonymous, by John Mullen, whose book on THAT subject, “Anoymity,” comes out on Jan. 17.

“Jonathan Swift arranged for a sample part of Gulliver’s Travels, transcribed in another man’s handwriting, to be dropped in secret by an intermediary at the house of publisher Benjamin Motte. It was accompanied by a letter from one “Richard Sympson”, supposedly Lemuel Gulliver’s cousin, offering the whole of the Travels for publication in return for £200. Motte was told that, within three days, he should either return the “Papers” or give the money “to the Hand from whence you receive this, who will come in the same manner exactly at 9 a clock [sic] at night on Thursday”. Motte bravely accepted the mysterious offer and a few nights later he duly got the rest of the book.”

Both of these are testing my resolve to not acquire more books until I have acquired a place to live. Now, if someone would just write an book on how to write plays you haven’t written.

All of this is via ArtsJournal and the Guardian.

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Lydia

It’s the last day of tech

and I’ve only just now discovered the tea in the wardrobe department. Better late than never.

Wardrobe here is really fun – there’s a sign on the door that says “We Are The People Your Parents Warned You About.”

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directing, film, style, theater, writing

Noun Modifiers

In the course of the Convergence teleconferences, I mentioned to a friend of mine, who’s a filmmaker, that I make a distinction in my mind between directing and writing – directing is about allowing more freedom to other people in the process, being open to new possibilities, and writing is about total control over a limited sphere. They are very different. I didn’t use to feel this way, but I certainly do now, since I’ve stopped being such a controlling director.

Coming from the POV of film, however, he said that “everything is writing – directing is writing, editing is writing.” Because he does still have total control over every sphere. Because you can select the take, and you can get exactly – EXACTLY – what you want.

This is probably why film stresses me out as a medium. I can no longer imagine wanting that many things that specifically. I tried it, and it was exhausting. There’s so much freedom in being able to share those wants with others – to let them want things, and let that inform the process and the result.

And I think I’ll look to writing for control, and to directing for the absence of it. This came to my mind again as I was working on/with an actress with/on a monologue from Measure For Measure this afternoon. If I had gone into the session knowing what I wanted to see from her, I never would have been able to see what she had to bring to it.

The only way I would make a film again would be either an animated one (which is all writing) or else something like Chris Guest, with improv-based writing – where the film captures the final result of a process which is more theatrical.

Maybe writing isn’t even “writing” in that controlled way. Maybe the best writing is when you surrender control, as well, to the characters, the words, the sounds. Maybe everything is directing.

I am so unlike the artist and person I was at seventeen that I can barely recognize myself. At least I still use too many adjectives and adverbs. It’s still a problem, but at least it’s a problem that’s familiar. I can say, “Oh yeah, that’s me – I use too many adjectives.”

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