Day 5, Tues 6/3 (cont.)
Bus from Vancouver, BC, to Seattle.
Train from Seattle, WA, to Eugene, OR.
Bus from Eugene, OR, to Medford, OR.
Car from Medford to Ashland.
17 hours of travel: over 600 miles.

We spent a good 3 hours of the train ride having a preliminary meeting for this go-round on 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS – we went through the entire script, scene by scene, and talked about what did and didn’t work. We’re staying with different friends in Ashland, and I’m going to use the break to bring the draft of 13 CHORUS up to date from our meeting. The next round of changes is about the text, not the music, so the ball is in my court. The play needs two new scenes, a style overhaul (like redesigning your company’s branding, I guess) and a new title. Piece of cake.

We made one really exciting breakthrough on a chorus of 3 verses which incorporates a round – we added more repetitions so that each verse got a chance to pop out from the muddle of simultaneity. It was a bit like making a 12-tone matrix. I love being able to be mathematical with text, sometimes.

I can’t go through Eugene, OR without some kind of horrible bug bite-related incident: otherwise, it’s a lovely town. Pizza and beer down the street from the station in Eugene, and my first Greyhound by night: playing DJ with each other’s Ipods. A long and weary ride in the darkness.

But when we got to the Rogue Valley and the landscape changed to those open skies and soft hills, I felt a year of memories rushing over me. No place in the world looks like this place. The air is so liquid. The hills are the darkest, most merciless green. And everywhere you look, there’s a slope of low-lying mountains covered with trees. It couldn’t be more beautiful, or it’d kill you. If this isn’t the forest of Arden, I don’t know what is. And although I have greatly overused the opening lines of 12th Night in this blog, I can’t help but think about the willow cabin at the gate.

I think that Ashland being as beautiful as it is was part of what assured me I was making the right choice in leaving LA and taking on a year of freelance assistant directing. Although this year has been marked by crisis, poverty, and more travel than anyone really wants to do, I’ve seen more and more beauty each place I’ve gone. And what’s being young and stupid in theater for, if you can’t see the most gorgeous places this country has?

But it also makes me think of Ashland like a kind of Helen of Troy, dragging the young and idealistic theater people to their own destruction on the rocks of its breathtaking physical beauty. I know so many people who got into this profession, or stuck it out in spite of hardship, because of the charms of Ashland and OSF. And I guess though I’m not one of them – it was the Theatricum Botanicum, and Puck swinging in on a rope from the trees, that really did me in first – Ashland has increased my mania for this profession. So I have to thank, but also distrust, this unreliable and heartbreaking valley of theater.

O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me!

Day 5 ends with hydrogen peroxide and “Death and his brother Sleep.”