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.
SAGN in blogs
J sent me this link to comments on SAGN at Followspot, a Portland theater blog. I really like the way that the actual post is just factual and discussion happens in the comments – an interesting model.
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.
You been on the road a pretty good piece?
“Enough to make me think I won’t mind standing awhile.”
– Leland Stanford Stamper
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.
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.
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.
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.
SAGN – the final week
Previews are going well. My parents are in town, actually, to see the play tomorrow and to visit. They came from Seattle today.
The show opens Friday, and I go to Vancouver Saturday, to visit Krist3l and miQ. And then a whole week off, and then travels, ending in NYC. This will be the first time in more time than I care to think of that I haven’t known what my next show is, the first real vacation since graduating from college almost four years ago, and the first time in over ten years that I am letting directing rest for a bit to focus on writing. I am looking forward to all these things with the tangible anticipation of wanting to eat dinner, or drive fast.
I’ve been reading YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN and voyeuristically drooling over descriptions of being a Writer in New York. I expect it to be every bit as awful and painstaking as the book describes, and fraught with just as many terrible problems, but I still want it like a bad metaphor.
bearded poems
I read the March poems written by the two E’s – Ellen and Emma – with whom I trade poems, without any idea of which one wrote which one. Usually, I would know by style, but this time they each hit close to a certain bone and I can’t tell whose is whose.
Not only does this make me evaluate them both more fairly, in my mind, their authorship becomes collective.
Somehow their styles merge, and I attribute to each of them – and to both poems – the respective poetic histories of BOTH writers.
I think this has not a little to do with seeing BEARD OF AVON. To have uncertain authorship is an interpretive gift. If any author is possible, all possibilities are possible.
Dara Weinberg 