Monthly Archives: April 2008

Uncategorized

saturday morning in brooklyn

Yesterday at lunch I went to sit in Madison Square Park. I ended up next to a businessman who was making a conference call. The benches were like subway trains – people grabbing seats as soon as they were vacant. And every bench was lined with people appreciating the sunlight.
The businessman was so happy to be outside. He told me that you have to think of New York as a constant adventure.

Last night I went outside in my sneakers to make sure that there was street parking on Taaffe, for A’s visit. There is. It was a hot, windy night, and I was looking up the side of a building at a fire-escape stairway, zig-zagging like ivy up the bricks. And cheesy as it was, I suddenly heard someone humming “For there’s no one for me but Maria…Every sight that I see is Maria…(Tony, Tony)” And I remembered that I have dreamed about this place for a long time.

And this morning, outside on the deck, with wireless in the open air and a square of sky above.

I worked full-time every day this week, except for the day that I missed my train then took the wrong train and ended up in Queens. It’s been five days of subway rush-hours, lunches in blazing sunlight, elevators, doormen, accounting, check requisition forms, and general dayjobbery. And the evenings – I saw a friend at a Oaxacan restaurant, went to a SSDC meeting, saw another friend at a British restaurant, drank with my Pratt Institute roommates and, last night, made phone calls to a host of people I’ve been neglecting. Did I mention I also furnished the apartment?

The SSDC meeting was amazing – it was called “Directing Your Directing Career,” and it was the first time in my life I’ve been in a room with sixty other stage directors in it. I understood what it’s like to be an actor and feel those eyes on you. Analyzing. It was wonderfully liberating to feel myself in their company.

Today, the weekend promises to be an invitation au voyage. Where to is undecided. But the cities of the East Coast present themselves like shells on the beach to be picked up.

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travel, Uncategorized

welcome to brooklyn

“It was all good. She had forgotten how good the world was.” – Phillip Pullman

I need to go to Target right now and buy all the things you don’t need in a year of freelance assistant directing, most pressingly, sheets and a towel. But I’m here (having got the taxi driver lost on the way over, and driving through neighborhoods full of Hebrew-language posters), I’ve learned that this neighborhood is Clinton Hill, I’ve met my Pratt Institute roomies, and it’s a fabulous four-bedroom apartment with an outdoor porch, a cat named Cheeseburger, college-style couches, a beautiful kitchen, and everything one could want. Including, praise the gods, wireless, and a bagel place.

It’s gray and it looks like it could start raining at any moment. To the streets!

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a propos of nothing

outside Roscoe, NY

on the Short Line Bus from Ithaca to NYC, I see a man standing in the river, not moving, with a white-coated lab mix next to him. I know it’s Roscoe because, moments later, we drive by a flat hillside where the words ROSCOE are planted in low-lying green bushes. The bus goes on. I wonder how much longer he’ll be standing there in the river, and if he’s cold.

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travel

the things they carried

For me, buying a new suitcase is like adding a new room to your house. It’s a big deal. Today I spent a long time at a luggage store – maybe not the best way to appreciate Vancouver, but an essential stop for me. I left Portland with insufficient luggage to carry all my stuff, and it’s been bugging me ever since. I ended up augmenting my luggage stores, not replacing, so now I have to check a bag when I travel. This isn’t a bad thing. If I’d caved and done this earlier, I might have enjoyed the logistics portion of this travel more.

I now travel with:
– a rolling carryon / computer case / file bag (which I bought today, it’s a kind of office bag)
– a guitar in a hard shell case (which gets checked)
– a purse
– a oversized backpack (which gets checked)
It’s like one of every type of luggage. And I also have a collapsible duffel within the oversized backpack, for dirty clothes.

Having this new “room” to my house – the office/file/computer bag – makes me much more relaxed about the traveling that still lies ahead.

Tonight we’re going to Autreche – tomorrow I take the bus back to Seattle.

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SAGN, travel

Vancouver

SAGN is open. We had a glorious show for a very appreciative Portland audience, who clapped wildly at “The Great Northwest – where it is in him for a man to be as big and important as it is in him to be.” It was fun and well-deserved. We partied at the Armory, the Life of Reilly, and a club in Southeast that I couldn’t tell you where it was. I slept through my first train, and made the second one.

My year of assistant directing is complete. On Thursday, when Aaron gave the last of the notes, I felt something slipping away from me, like taking off a jacket. It’s over.

I’m celebrating in Canada. Arrived by train from Portland and bus from Seattle yesterday, for the first vacation in 4 years. Staying with Krist3l and MiQ. Drum and bass and a fake Halloween party last night, breakfast this morning with a Vancouver actor named James – the world of theater is as big as a postage stamp, and that stamp travels to every city in the world. We talked about audiences and locations and all the same old things. It feels like home, but everywhere does now.

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a propos of nothing

by mirthday’s dotay (yes, that’s from the muppet movie)

I went downstairs for a couple of seconds, to be outside in the Portland air as it struck midnight. I was humming “Only The Good Die Young” to myself. I thought about texting folks but didn’t. After all, in a cut line, “What can you say? What can you possibly say?” But I cut the line too, and just thought it. “Play the moment without the line.”

And then, just like that, I was 26. And I tell you, I feel so immensely relieved about it. I think all my birthdays after this are going to get easier and easier. I stood downstairs in the Armory lobby, and laughed, and said “Thank God that’s over.”

Thank God this is beginning.

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a propos of nothing, SAGN

blogging from the old year

On a personal note (which for me is usually G) I spend the last half hour of being 25 typing preview notes – a fitting ending to my year of assistant directing, which began at South Coast Rep and is ending here at Portland Center Stage. We moved the location of intermission tonight, very successfully. My parents are here in town, and they saw SAGN tonight and really loved it. We had a great dinner, too.

As Chris Henderson says in SAGN,
“You can do as you please. Me, I’m figuring to move on.”

Oh, I got a job in New York today – a low-key day job, which is just what’s needed, and I have an apartment I’m subletting. So that promise I always made to myself, that I wouldn’t go to NYC without housing and employment, has been kept. There is now nothing preventing me from going there to write, to see shows, and to have a great time.

Here are the preview/birthday notes to myself, since it’s been a week of notes:
DARA:
– Only make promises you can keep, to yourself and to others. And keep them.
– When you’re trying to remember what it was like being 25, remember that it was disorienting, unstable, confusing, but that it was worth it. All of it. Every second. There have been some years that you’ve regretted. This one isn’t going to be one of them. You did really good work this year, if you do say so yourself.
– When you were ready for a composer to come into your life and your work, really ready, you met two in less than a week. It’s the same way with all the things you wish for.
– You’ve always been a writer more than anything else. Now all you have to do is BE a writer more than anything else.
– There have been more than enough things you’ve done that were absolutely no fun. The year of being 26 gives you dispensation from all of them. If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.
– In the logging scene, please take two steps downstage. Your sidelight is being blocked by a giant black umbrella.
– Diction on “To be or not to be.”

My birthday is tomorrow, or in ten minutes. I’m sure I’ll spend another birthday in previews soon, perhaps next year, or the year after that. And I won’t regret a second I’ve given to theater, and I never have. But next year is going to be more about giving some of those seconds to myself, too. Maybe we can share them.

I’m going to finish these notes, go get a drink to celebrate, and go home to my Portland apartment overlooking the church on Alder Street. And I’m going to go to sleep in the second quarter of my life.

From a basketball point of view, being in a later quarter can only be a good thing. The game gets more interesting.

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SAGN

sagn spoiler alert

Part of this play is watching a man drown – an actor, and a character, who we all love – on a nightly basis. Watching the life go out of his eyes. He’s so good at it that I feel I have watched him die every night for the last week.

It’s just a simple stage illusion of a light covering him, but it’s breathtakingly painful. It reveals everything.

If it were more realistic, you wouldn’t actually get to see him die. As it is, the lack of realism forces you into the emotional truth of the situation. Abstraction, of one kind, brings out emotion. The detail of realism can get in the way of that.

Every night, I see the exact moment when his eyes under the water become dead, and it’s horrifyingly well done.

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