“Stanford University today announced the largest increase in its history for its financial aid program for undergraduates.
Under the new program, parents with incomes of less than $100,000 will no longer pay tuition. Parents with incomes of less than $60,000 will not be expected to pay tuition or contribute to the costs of room, board and other expenses.”
STADIUM DEVILDARE, which is now open at NOTE in Los Angeles, got a nice review in the LA Weekly: “The creativity of co-directors Richard Werner and Karen Jean Martinson’s production makes for jaw-droppingly weird fun. “
I spoke to Rich briefly over the weekend, and he’s really happy with how the show turned out. I’m so proud of him. This production has been a long time coming. It. Must. Be. Seen. Like, if you’re in LA and you don’t go to see this, you’re so crazy.
“Within the limitless confines of the Stadium, contestants battle for the ultimate prize, the suit of Guts ‘N Glory, a protective armor that will enable a warrior to confront and defeat America’s greatest enemy – a cipher known only as G*dzilla X. Enter a parallel game universe where we find a reflection of our own world, where familiar situations explode with violence and the showpower of extreme events. Root for your favorite contestant and discover the terrifying secret behind STADIUM DEVILDARE!”
Fri/Sat 8 pm, Sun 7 pm. (except Feb 24th) through March 23rd.
Tickets: $22; Student/Senior $18
1517 N. Cahuenga (just north of Sunset)
Hollywood, CA 90028
Reservations By Phone: (subject to availability) :
323.856.8611
Parking Info : Arclight Cinemas (enter on Ivar, just south of Sunset) $3.00 will get you parking for the evening. Bring your ticket to the NOTE box office and we will validate.
After blogging a couple days ago about starting to write an opera/musical verse play with Marian about the Antioch college student strike of 1973, I got a comment from Tim at the Antioch Papers, an open-source archive of Antioch materials, who sent me to this extraordinary 22-minute video, the senior communications project of 1991 Antioch graduate Kirsten Ervin.
She documents the chronology of strike events in a heartbreaking deadpan narration. Most moving to me was the original recording of students singing a takeoff on Sitting by The Dock Of The Bay:
“Well, I left my home in Harlem,
And I came to Yellow Springs –
They called me New Directions,
And they promised me all kinds of things –
But now I’m sitting on the picket line…
Sitting on the picket line…
Sitting on the picket line,
Wasting time…”
The song cut through me. I felt like I could hear the 60s ending. It also confirmed to me how right we both are to think of this as a play with music.
A bit more research this morning also led me to Alexandra Kesman’s blog about trying to save Antioch from its current funding crisis.
Although I’m dying to dive into all of this right now, I think I have to learn from my past overcommittment mistakes and promise to not begin researching, or even looking at, this material until after SAGN opens on April 5th. I need to be in the world of Ken Kesey. I’m going to email Tim and tell him as much, too. But maybe I need to schedule a trip to Ohio in April, before going to New York.
I can’t wait to get started. It’s such an American project, with so much in it about good intentions gone wrong, and the different paths individuals and institutions take for social change.
Marian’s and my ideas also excite me from a formal point of view. Trying to write an opera / musical verse drama that uses formal elements, that has a chorus (the strikers, of course? Yes?), that has both monologues and arias, both verse and prose – with writing and music both of a high artistic level – a project with as much formal diversity in its text and score as political and ethnographic diversity in its cast.
Here’s a summary of the events of the strike and the events pulled from a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article in 2007, part of the national press coverage of the projected closing of Antioch College.
“In April of that year [1973] , school President James Dixon and trustees were confronted by poor, inner-city students, known as the “New Direction” class, who worried that the school would renege on its promise to fully pay for their education. When Antioch officials couldn’t satisfactorily guarantee financial support, the students rebelled.
They chained campus buildings and picketed at the entrances. Later came vandalism and firebombs. While the school wasn’t fully closed, since some professors held classes off-campus, the student strike effectively shut down the campus for more than a month, causing an estimated $1 million in lost revenue. The number of applicants for the following school year was down by 50 percent, and enrollment, once at more than 2,000, has been dwindling since.
The school never recovered, physically or financially, from the spring of 1973, former students say.”
Belatedly, via Rob Kozlowski, the Onion lets you now write to an advice column where you can Ask The Stage Directions To Tennessee Williams’ CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. I like the idea of there being stage directions to direct all of us in our lives. To give a little context. To tell us what our action is, or more likely, our emotion – something we can’t play, can’t do anything with, but is there nonetheless. This is what mine would look like, nine days out of ten:
DARA
(confusedly, as if waking up out of a nightmare drawn by Roz Chast)
What just happened?
Chris Danowski’s BRANDOHEAD stage directions were so lovely that many of the people who worked on that production wanted to somehow have them read aloud or staged. And the piece he wrote as the follow-up to BRANDOHEAD was even more intensely packed with stage directions. Now if only I’d take their advice.
Something else emerges from the Convergence. A composer from the Walker Center who I met here in Indianapolis is interested in working further on the Antioch College student strike project, perhaps even developing it into an opera that uses Sprechstimme and choruses. I’m excited. I feel like I’m finally becoming AboutLastNightworthy. Time to create a category for the project.
It also looks as if I’ll be in LA for a week longer than I’d originally thought. I think I’ll be in town June 9-25ish. And if I can get any of these scripts up to the point they should be at after the weeks in New York writing, then maybe I’ll try to do some readings. I want this libretto to be able to stand alone as a good play.
Kim and I had breakfast this morning and went to Half Price Books. I got lost in brilliant, wonderful Anthony Lane‘s Eric Bentleyesque anthology of film criticism, NOBODY’S PERFECT. I adore his writing:
“On a broiling day, I ran to a screening of Contact, the Jodie Foster flick about messages from another galaxy. I made it for the opening credits, and, panting heavily — which, with all due respect, is not something that I find myself doing that often in Jodie Foster films — I started taking notes. These went “v. gloomy,” “odd noir look for sci-fi,” “creepy shadows in outdoor scene,” and so on. Only after three-quarters of an hour did I remember to remove my dark glasses.”
I had some momentary sadness about not being able to buy the book, due to being s.d.f. The only book I’ve allowed myself to acquire in the last year is Kate Christensen’s THE GREAT MAN – I took a paperback pre-release readers’ copy from a laundry room in Denver. But the day reminded me that I need to keep wandering through bookstores, and that my ideal life (which I have not arrived at yet) will include both living out of a suitcase and having a place in which to accumulate a library. An apartment is secondary. Just a library.
If I were wealthier I would buy every book I want in every city I go to, and give them away upon leaving, thereby reading everything and also disseminating bookage. Which is a lovely plan, but about as practical as the advice I read for prospective pet-adopters in a magazine today: “If you want to adopt a pet but have no time to spend with them, but have a lot of money, adopt the pet and pamper him with visits to doggie day care.” Somehow I think that the “but have lots of money” clause is going to be a problem.
More Anthony Lane in a profile: “The truth is, that if you’re working on a piece at three in the morning, you’re not Keats; you’re just late. The glitch in this argument is that I’m not a creative writer. I don’t write poetry or novels or drama but criticism, which is the eunuch of the family. I watch other people doing it and talk about what they’re doing in a squeaky, high voice.”
“It was snowing
And it was going to snow. ”
I just had to point this out, since I used to play – and can still fake three and a half songs – a five-string electric Tranjocaster with 2 pickups. But no whammy bar. Darn. $1000.
Sexier: the Deering electric banjo with fake little I-wish-I-was-a-Gibson-SG horns. 3 grand-plus. But, so pretty, and “the Crossfire is the only banjo which is fully equipped to participate as an equal in all musical styles without the volume limitations.”
Two days ago limbs were falling off a dead tree in Kim’s yard and Robert was saying how he thought he could cut it down, 3 inches at a time, by climbing to the top with a rope around his waist. No one was willing to let him do it, but I could see that he was perfectly convinced of his ability to finish the job.
I love the chorus because it is my dead tree that I’ve climbed to the top off. I may very well die in the attempt (I hope to die in the attempt!) or drop branches on someone’s hapless Toyota below – but I think I can do it, and that’s all that matters at the moment. I keep on cutting it down, 3 inches at a time.
Driving with Robert and Caitlin, from Pendleton back to Indy. Listening to the radio. All 3 of us chiming in, as a chorus, on “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.” Our 3 voices, without premeditation, joining together. Thrilling. Realizing once again that audiences singing along with choruses (radio choruses?) is my latest obsession. Audiences knowing texts well enough to recite them. Orality by proxy. Reviving oral epic chorus-poetry.
Mariel, at Caitlin’s unbirthday, said I should write a chorus book and call it “Preaching to the Chorus.”
Aquarius…
Aaah-quaaar-iii-us….
I wish that so much of being a freelancer wasn’t about discovering that your bank doesn’t have a branch in the state you’re freelancing in.
Dara Weinberg 