My second 24 hours in New York yielded buckets of theater gossip, a job prospect, a possible apartment, an exorcism of ghosts from the past, a dinner in the Village, a drink, and a dead cell phone which forced me to end the day early. Susan says there are chargers you can carry with you which operate on hand-cranks. I need some kind of backup. I’d still be out there now, but the phone decided it had had enough.
TriBlogCa
Last night, after the LYDIA preview, I got on a red-eye from Denver to Boston, Boston to JFK. The problem with the red-eye from Denver is the connection to the East Coast is shorter, so you don’t sleep as long.
On arriving, I took the AirTrain this morning to TriBeCa, showered at my aunt and uncle’s apartment, and went in for a full day of auditions midtown. I rode the 123 to midtown. I met the director at the Tick Tock Diner and got debriefed on the other sessions, and then we were in the audition room for 8 hours. It was an incredible day.
The actors here are just as good as everyone says they’re supposed to be. Being in an audition room blocks from Penn Station, with theater-steeped New York actors, gave me goosebumps.
Then I had dinner with my NY-based family at a German restaurant, and we talked about economics and art and social responsibility, and health care reform. My cousin showed me his samurai and skate videos from high school (he’s studying filmmaking) Tomorrow my uncle, an economist, is going to give me his take on government subsidizing the arts. These are conversations I wouldn’t have, people I wouldn’t get to see, if I weren’t traveling around like this.
I still feel homesickness, like weights in my shoes. But I think if you abandon the idea of an orientation, or a home, or a plot, you don’t feel so disoriented. So I went to bed in Denver and woke up in midtown Manhattan. Neither of them is home to me. The only place that is really starting to feel like home is an airport.
I miss the LYDIA cast and I’m sorry to not be there for opening tomorrow. But I’m lucky to be able to keep moving.
And another hundred people just got off the train.
I never go to New York without this feeling like I’m parachute jumping from a helicopter onto a supersonic submarine-zeppelin-Train a Grande Vitesse. It’s exhilarating, but you hope you’ll still have all your limbs when you land.
And another hundred people…(Pamela Myers singing, with orchestra.)
turn the page
I’m packing – tomorrow I fly to NYC, after the evening’s preview, on a red-eye. I’ve been in Denver since Dec 6th, the longest I’ve been anywhere since Ashland.
Today I met my great-aunt and great-uncle by marriage, Rose and Floyd, who have been in Denver since 1944. We had a really great conversation over dinner at Hotel Teatro Cafe on 14th before they came to LYDIA this evening – we talked about WWII, Japan, Hawaii, the 100th Battalion, the segregated units, the internment camps, the GI Bill, the US, Israel, the concept of apikoros (non-practicing believer), Judaism, Unitarianism, theater, city planning, architecture, and our families. And borders. And the meaning of global citizenship. And my brother Zack, who they haven’t seen since Lew and Susan’s wedding – fifteen years ago? – playing the piano. It was a conversation of memory and history and I’m still spinning around from the ideas in it.
Looking over the past few blog entries I can smell homesickness, longing for LA, even second-guessing my decision to spend this year running around the country like a chicken with its head cut off. But meeting people like this, even if it’s briefly, makes the entire project seem worthwhile. I never would have known them if I hadn’t come to Denver.
I hope they enjoyed the play – well, as I was saying to a departing audience member, enjoyed isn’t the right word – but I hope they were moved by it. I sat four rows from the stage tonight, and it was amazing how O.R. could make her eyes look like a brain-damaged person. Her portrayal is naturalistic in detail but theatrical in scale.
I also had a phone work session with Tony on Oedipus today, and with Amina on Medea yesterday, and the Convergence proceeds inexorably.
It’s a disjointed life I’m leading, but a full one. If there doesn’t seem to be a plot right now, maybe that’s all right. Maybe this part of my existence is more of a montage. Or an overture to an unwritten opera.
You say theater, I say spectacle
Rich “Tough Guy” Werner’s mind-blowing, gore-spattered, makes-American-Gladiator-look-like-a-tea-party, makes-little-girls-cry, puts-the-ass-kicking-back-in-theater production of STADIUM DEVILDARE at NOTE now has a trailer, shot by Ezra:
Mmm, trailer. So delicious. Seriously, if you’re in Los Angeles, “Come witness the battle, cheer for your favorite contestant and discover for yourself the terrifying secret of STADIUM DEVILDARE.” It opens Feb. 15.
Oh, they also have both merch and swag. You can buy a T-shirt supporting your favorite contestant.
In support, Style Over Substance will be hosting a countdown:
Only 25 more shopping days till STADIUM DEVILDARE, the glorious theatrical production, opens at NOTE.
Several contestants battle for possession of a mystical suit of armor (the suit of Guts N Glory) that will enable them to defeat America’s greatest enemy known only as G-dzilla X (perhaps the rubber costume, perhaps the the war in the Middle East).
I yam what I yam
CXXI.
‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d,
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost which is so deem’d
Not by our feeling but by others’ seeing:
For why should others false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad, and in their badness reign.
Shakespeare: now stealing from Popeye. By the way, I really love the use of the word “bevel” in this, and the one-word-per-beat line: “Which in their wills count bad what I think good”. I know there’s a word for that, and SK would know it, and maybe in my NEXT year of assistant directing I’ll know the words for all the rhetorical devices. (Maybe.)
Rules of the Road
Starting a new category, things I’ve learned on the road:
1) Do your laundry not the day you’re leaving town, but the day before, so the sweaters that can’t be dried have time to hang dry. Did I remember this time? Yes. Have I ever remembered before? Not often.
Lydia, countdown
Last night, the director hosted a party for the L. cast, featuring chicken mole with sauce flown in from a restaurant in Los Angeles, by one of her friends. We watched a slideshow of production photos and ate 3 different kinds of cakes. I’ve been exposed to some of the best vegan baking ever on this show.
We preview tonight and tomorrow, and open on Thursday, but I fly to New York tomorrow for auditions – this will be my first time leaving a show before it opens.
I was reminded
recently that April will mark one year of assistant directing, and also one year of not having a home and living on the theater road. I can’t believe it. Seven shows in 12 months, and each in a different location – and various other workshops and projects in there, too. I spell Crazy with a D, two A’s and an R.
I do feel more like the entire country is my home now. But I feel much less like any particular place is where I belong. And I miss LA more than I thought possible. I’m lucky to have had this year, of course, and these opportunities, but it’ll be so good to take time off in April.
I’ll visit Seattle, Vancouver, NYC, maybe try to start writing an article about this whole year, and take a moment of chill in the theater of the non-theatrical. Maybe I’ll take up surfing.
The bad thing about making too many plans is that life may have something better to offer you. So I’m trying to not plan out all of April, not yet. It’ll happen.
“Surprise me.”
Shout-out to Cahuenga
Theatre of NOTE‘s 13th Annual Performance Marathon is going on right now, and will be going on until even the Lost Girls come home.
Excerpts from VAST WRECK and MOH&H performed in the 11th and 12th Marathons. And I saw, among other things, Judy reading Dorothy Parker quotes, Hiwa and her fellow hula performers, Rich being unmasked by fifty paper plates, fire dancing, water balloons, a spiderweb of string, people hanging by hooks in their skin, and plastic Barbies making love to robots. I ate peanut butter sandwiches and talked to strangers.
The Marathon is one of the few places where my work is comparatively tame. Someday, I’ll make something disturbed enough to go on after midnight.
It’s sad to not be there, but good to be thinking of them –
somewhere between Hollywood and Sunset, east of Wilcox and west of Vine,
in between the Hotel Cafe and Groundworks,
in between Aklia’s and Jack-In-The-Box,
around the corner from Amoeba,
around the other corner from the Piano Bar,
down the street from Solar de Cahuenga,
in between the dream of theater and the reality of money,
first to the right, second to the left, and straight on till morning.
You still have five or six hours to get there. The really trippy part is just getting started.
Dara Weinberg 