theater, travel

you never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough

The luxury of having your possessions around you, long alienated from the road. I see my books and they almost don’t seem to know me. It’s good to know you can live without your library, or that I can, having been, before this year, as attached to it as to any of my limbs. But I don’t particularly want to go on living without it.

I’ve been rereading some old friends since coming back to Menlo Park, including, with great delight and familiarity, the old proverbs from Blake’s MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL. This book knows me, at least, because it was my play once. What an amazing show that was to work on. What a ride.

Sometimes I wish I could ask Blake where I should go next, what do next, but I know what he’d say:

What is now proved was once only imagin’d.

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the chorus, theater, travel, Uncategorized, writing

WCX, days 6 – 12

Day 6, Weds 6/4 – Day 8, Fri 6/6
Ashland, Ashland, Ashland. There’s never enough time. I have nothing more to add to what I said in my previous post – only that I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to see, due to being really under the weather for most of this stop. I will definitely be coming back for CLAY CART, OTHELLO and the other shows I missed as soon as I can. It’s a great season this year. I also saw some old friends. Not enough of those, either. I have to go back. It’s so frustrating to have getting sick correspond with your most beautiful outdoor stop on the trip. Mountains and rivers and theater, all missed. Still, did get to see one very heated political Shakespearean tragedy, and that worth all the trouble.

What? Coriolanus in Corioles?

Day 9, Sat 6/7
Feeling much better. We rent a car and drive the most scenic route possible from Ashland to the San Jose airport, dropping off the car five minutes before the cutoff. Highlights of the trip: the 101, the 1, the Humboldt redwoods, Confusion Hill, Whiskey Creek Road, and a gas station in Mendocino that sells organic wine. Cisco picks us up at the airport and we talk about old friends.

Day 10, Sun 6/8
Brunch and an enormous Stanford/Mirlo reunion at Stacks in Menlo Park, complete with an RA! I get to meet Quentin (of Megan) and Ben (of Romina), two husbands of my freshman dormmates. The evening is composed of Scrabble and Laphroaig. I get to play “GYRE.”

Day 11, Mon 6/9
We drive around Sausalito and Marin County with an old friend of a friend. The evening is, again, composed of Scrabble. I begin the next pass of the rewrite of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS during the Scrabble game. I get to play “DIPTYCHS” off of “DIP,” the highest-scoring Scrabble play I’ve ever accomplished, 60 points. Cisco attempts to play “ANBOGUS,” which, in case you’re wondering, is not a word – although both “QAT” and “FORGAT” are. I feel the rewrite energy swamping me and I know I’m not going to be able to rest again until the play has a Draft 6. And a new title.

I don’t manage to do much rewriting, only to psych myself out about the need to do it. I do, however, discover a very confusing note in my OED. AT COLONUS edition, indicating that one of the most dramatic sections is “similar to a dirge.” I consult with a Stanford classicist. A dirge? Really?

Day 12, Tues 6/10
Morning in Mountain View. Today is a major work day, making up for all the fun over the weekend. We spend about 6 hours at 2319 working on the piano – CF transfers all the guitar music he’s written. It amazes me how much pieces of music that I thought were so attached to one instrument shift flawlessly into another. He was completely right about many of them, esp. the MEDEA sections, being better suited to piano.

We also demo techniques for integrating his music into the HW choral voice workshop. I read a variety of choruses out loud and he plays along with them. Some bumps in the road at first – I don’t know exactly what it is I’m trying to do, only what doesn’t work. After some false starts, we end up choosing a chorus section which I’ve adapted myself, which is more rhythmical than some of the other translations out there, for the first unison exercise.

Child, child, child of Oedipus,
Miserable child of unhappy Oedipus,
We pity you in your despair,
Just as we pity him for his misfortune –
But we tremble to think of what the gods may do.
We cannot risk helping you.
We will not kill him – that is enough.
But you must leave our city at once.

We’re very well prepared for the first day of the chorus workshop, I think. We will have to do some new preparation after we see where the students are at in responding to our work. But we’re ready for Day One – and I have lots of directions it can go after that.

During the day, I also meet with two old friends and Stanford professors – a computer scientist and a humanist. I talk theater with both of them. One of them tells me that I’m doing something meaningful with my life. I hope she’s right.

After a brief stop for sandwiches and a mid-rewrite crisis of confidence, we go to a Mountain View coffeehouse and I plow ahead on the rewrite. Suddenly, the play opens itself up to me again. I add new characters – a Messenger and Darius – and a mixed-up ending composed of the ending of seven different plays. I’m still working on it now.

Zeus in Olympus is the overseer
Of many doings. Many things the gods
Achieve beyond our judgment. What we thought
Is not confirmed and what we thought not, the gods
Contrive. And so it happens in this story.

The play is now tentatively titled TO DIE IN ATHENS.

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theater, travel

WCX, day 5

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.”

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theater, travel

WCX, day 1-5

This post begins the 2008 West Coast Xtravaganza Tour, otherwise known as WCX – over three weeks of traveling down the west coast of the US from Vancouver to Los Angeles, mostly by train. It’s the end of my year of freelance assistant directing, and the end of the completely itinerant, apartment-free lifestyle. We’re going by train, and stopping in Seattle, Vancouver, Ashland, San Francisco and LA. I’m traveling with a composer from Indianapolis who created the music for 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS in February’s Indy Convergence. We’re using the traveling portion of the trip as a way to revise the script, and we’ll workshop it in LA. I’ll also be teaching a new workshop on the choral voice in Los Angeles, and directing another reading.

Day 1:
Fly to Seattle. Rent a car (they stick us with a white PT Cruiser with a plastic-lollipop gearshift) Pick up CF at airport. Make a pilgrimage to the Pacific Ocean and get to the 75th Avenue overlook in Ballard as the sun is going down. Dine with the Miners, my aunt and uncle. At night, we hike through a road down to the beach where there’s been a collapse, and almost fall into a huge hole. We make it to the ocean. I never should have left the West Coast. Well, maybe you have to leave to know how strongly you want to come back.

Day 2, Sat 5/31
Walking and trail-running with my family. Afternoon with relatives: houseboat tour, lunch at Horizon House, Goodwill shopping with my cousin who helps me find my rock-concert jacket. Armed with an atlas, a map, and Google directions, and with the two best lattes in the galaxy (from the Java Bean in Ballard) we drive three hours in the Lollipop Mobile to the Gorge Ampitheatre in George, WA – where we watch Rush perform with the backdrop of a river. I am completely won over by both the music and the location. Lighting instruments sway in the wind above the stage. The drive back to Seattle after the concert is brutal, but we make it alive.

Day 3, Sun 6/1
Sleep for an hour and a half. Cornmeal variation pancakes with the Miners in the morning, and a four-hour bus ride from Seattle’s Union Station to Vancouver. We bought Swiss chocolate and spoke French at customs. Arrive in Vancouver, and walk down Commercial Drive with Mike and Kristel (Vera’s meat can’t be beat…) We meet up with Dasz. We watch a documentary on the history of metal.

Day 4, Mon 6/2
Much needed sleeping in – we meet Kristel for lunch at Canada Place and sit looking over the waters. The ocean in Canada is slate-colored. We take the ferry to Granville Island and wander in and out of the theater companies, the silk stores, the open-air markets. We careen in a bus down Broadway, and buy a twelve-pack to make up for last night. (Friendliest beer store in the world.) We watch overtime hockey, eat Panago pizza, drink Alexander Keith ale and talk about making animated movies out of the dreams in EINSTEIN’S DREAMS. CF and Mike experiment with the oscillator. (Really.) Kristel and I gmail-chat and talk at the same time and it’s still as if we will never be able to say all the things we are thinking to each other.

Caitlin calls to tell us that we/the Indy Convergence have made it to round 2 of Creative Capital. This is extraordinary news – I remember writing that grant as I was sitting in between rehearsals at PCS. I’m very happy.

Day 5, Tues 6/3
We wake up early and take the bus from Seattle to Vancouver.
Blogging from Seattle, at the Tully’s round the corner from Union Station.
We go from here on train to Eugene, then via bus to Ashland. Ashland is where this entire odyssey started for me, and it’ll be interesting – it’ll be difficult, but important – to see what I feel like going back there.

See you in Oregon.

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theater, travel

the demon barber of peachtree

Zack, Pam and I are going to see Sweeney Todd tonight, at Atlanta’s historic Fox Theatre. It’ll be nice to hear the music that was cut from the film. I enjoyed that movie so much that I walked alone through the snow (ten miles, uphill, both ways) in Denver one night to see it by myself, after seeing it with a group of the LYDIA actors.

This will be my first time since I was a kid seeing a touring production of a show. I am reminded of some of the things an actress friend of mine said to me about how difficult it is for audience members to tell when they’re seeing the Equity or the non-Equity version of the tour. Producers sometimes abruptly fire the entire Equity cast before or during the tour, and replace them with non-Eq actors. Of course, there are asterisks (or not) in the program – but if marketing materials and review quotes remain the same, audience members don’t learn the difference till they’ve already paid for their tickets.

And, of course, the tickets still cost just as much. Not that non-Eq casts can’t be just as good, but they haven’t really come straight from Broadway.

So I tried for myself to determine if this was an Eq or non-Eq cast, and couldn’t, not through a few simple clicks. I’m going to wait and be surprised.

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politics, travel

(belated) dispatches from texas

I spent Memorial Day Weekend visiting my friend Sari in San Antonio. We drove from there to Brownsville, at the very southernmost tip of Texas.

We dropped off her aunt Rosa to travel further south, to a relative’s ranch in Monterrey, and the two of us spent a few days exploring Brownsville, Matamoros, and even, very briefly, the spring-break destination of South Padre Island. She used to be a reporter for the paper there, and so is very connected – and we got to catch up with folks from the Mexican consulate, the economic development commission, and the paper.

Brownsville is beautiful – it’s so close to the water that the air is always full of low, oceanic clouds. The streets have cracks and cobblestones. Tourists flock to South Padre Island, a beach-and-condo-coated island awash in T-shirt and seashell shops. You get to the island by hurtling across a long freeway bridge, that turns into a parking lot when you try to leave.

(Lots of interesting Jewish dynamics in this part of Texas, too – I was assured by everyone I met that Israelis run all the T-shirt shops and Mexicans the seashell shops on SPI, and even told by one person that the T-shirt shops were “laundering money for Israel.” I didn’t have time to be offended by this before it was explained to me that cartel-based money laundering is so prevalent in those environs that no one means anything particular by it.)

Sari also took me to see the old Jewish cemetery in Brownsville, next to the much larger town/Mexican/Catholic cemetery. The Jewish cemetery is surrounded by a wall and has better groundskeeping – the graves are spaced, the grass is cut. It looks like a postage stamp of excessive order on an envelope of a larger, overgrown graveyard. We talked about the origins of separate graveyards, and how religious customs can come off as racism sometimes.

Border Patrol cops were ubiquitous. On the drive down, we passed an enormous detainment camp for immigrants who are being deported. Sari and I walked down the beach to the end of the United States, to the Rio Grande and the border, where you can look across the water to Mexico. We saw people swimming and fishing in the water on both and all sides, oblivious of – or in defiance of – the national dividing line.

We met with a farmer who’s arguing with Homeland Security about them putting “the wall” across his land – issues of compensation, of the land losing its value, of them not knowing what kind of a wall it’s going to be. The whole operation seems disorganized, but it moves forward anyway, despite its lunacy. As one of Sari’s friends said to us this weekend, “If you build a sixteen-foot wall, they’re just going to get a seventeen-foot ladder.”

After all, building enormous walls is always such a great political move. With the upcoming election and (hopeful) change in political parties, this idiotic wall may yet not happen. But they continue to move forward, trying to buy up land at less than its value and impact the livelihood of small Texas farmers.

This farmer, whose name I won’t mention (because we didn’t tell him we’d be writing about him) was as pro-enforcement and conservative as you can get. He doesn’t want any illegal immigration happening on or around his land. But he’s also a practical man who makes his living farming, and he knows the wall’s
a) not going to work
b) a terrible idea.
c) not going to work.

On a less political note, the food was amazing. I ate the best huevos rancheros I’ve ever experienced in my life, at the Toddle Inn. We were greeted as old friends at Captain Bob’s, a self-run fishing operation and sea food restaurant. Bob is also the purveyor of a local blog. Brownsville is blog-crazy, both for politics and for gossip – everyone we met was talking about the comments on such-and-such’s blog.

I loved it – the community, the people, and the landscape – and I hope I get to spend more time there soon.

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a propos of nothing, travel

dispatches from georgia

I went running this morning on the Georgia Tech campus, past the sign on Marietta Street marking the surrender of the city of Atlanta. I did laps on the Astroturf, listening to Cisco’s hip-hop mix, which I got from him at the start of this year. It’s humid here, and my hair is curly. Running reminds me how small everything is, how insignificant – breathing in the rhythm of the grass and the asphalt, and realizing your own life is only a breath. And is mine an exhale or an inhale? When I’m not making theater, I don’t know what to make of myself.

Now Zack is making pancakes while Pam and I hang out. They live by a freight shipping train line, and an endless stream of tanks and armored cars on flatbed train cars is running by their window – going to war.

Waiting for news, undistractable, distracted. Pam suggested I read Pratchett’s The Hogfather, which I did. I begin every Pratchett book loving it and then he loses me stylistically at some point. I want to like it more than I do. But I enjoyed this one, particularly this quote:

“The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be readily seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.”

A point well taken in a time of needless self-importance. I’m going to write my delayed Texas post now.

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a propos of nothing, directing, theater, travel

a time of decision

One way or another, the events of the next ten days will determine my future for the next year – and it’ll be nice to have more of a location forecast. Partly West Coast with a chance of East? As of July, I intend, I vow, to have moved somewhere in this country for an entire twelve months.

I am waiting to hear about a couple of large deadlines. If one comes through, I will go where it takes me. If not, I will go where I feel like going. Where that is is still unclear to me, but it will, at least, be only one place at a time.

In the spirit of this year of travel, I’m going to be in Texas, Atlanta, and Seattle, with friends and loved ones, at the time when these deadlines come forward. One way or the other, I’ll still be seeing the people I love.

One way or another, I’ll be directing two readings in Los Angeles in June – one of a short play by Ron Allen, one of a long and messy play adapted, by me, from the Greeks (all of them.)

And one way or the other, I expect to be very hard to reach for the next ten days – to go into the hermit crab’s shell while I wait for the shell of the wanderer crab to fall off.

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