A friend of mine just sent me this message:
Wishing you a Happy New Year filled with health, prosperity and all the joy you can possibly stand.
I thought that summed it up pretty well – the things I wish for my friends and family and colleagues, in that order. I’m passing it on to all of you.
We finished our second pass through Act 2 and then ran the second act of the play. We ended with an hour of fight choreography.
My perspective on what fight choreography is has changed from watching this work. After ROMEO & JULIET, where every “fight” was actually a battle with weapons, I wasn’t expecting to see a fight choreographer come in to show us how to drag a woman off stage. There are no blows exchanged, and my instinct would have been to just wing it and see what happened. Don’t we all know how to drag people already?
But the FC was there telling one actor how to drag the other without injuring her, blocking beats for specific escape struggles and how he’d recapture her, addressing issues of shoulder joints and legs and knees and feet getting stepped on.
I could see that he was both essential for safety and actually, through his expertise, made the struggle seem more violent than would have otherwise been possible. That was what got me excited. I often assume that maximum violence is achieved through a little more improv, but sometimes that’s not the case.
It’s as if every force in my theatrical life is driving me back into the arms of choreography.
8 is my lucky number, and my aunt’s too.
Last night, the cast of LYDIA had a New Year’s potluck. I made a roasted turkey breast, gravy, and rosemary potatoes. We watched the fireworks on the 16th St. Mall from the balcony of the apartment complex on 15th St. in Denver. It was the closest I’ve ever been to exploding fireworks. The cloud of smoke behind them was more beautiful than the lights.
Then the cast wrote an Exquisite Corpse poem together. It was one of the best I’ve ever seen. My line was,
“If all we have to give each other is the present – ”
Then we discovered that last call in Denver is earlier than it should be.
I learned a new tradition – you eat twelve grapes and get a wish for each one. I spent all of mine of the same wish, but I can’t tell you what it was.
And we had black-eyed peas, collard greens, cornbread and chili this morning in a New Year’s Day brunch with the Millans.
Happy New Year, world.
Saw SWEENEY TODD last night with some of the actors from LYDIA. It was decadent and lovely, and it made me want to slit someone’s throat. I do like how Tim Burton makes the camera move like a rollercoaster, or a video game.
My favorite performance was Anthony’s, (Jamie Campbell Bower) which surprised me, cause I’ve seen a lot of insipid Anthonys – but this one was nicely blood-spattered and tormented. Joanna drove him mad.
For what’s the sound of the world out there?
(What, Mr. Todd? What, Mr. Todd? What is that sound?)
Those crunching noises pervading the air!
(Yes, Mr. Todd! Yes, Mr. Todd! Yes, all around!)
It’s man devouring man, my dear!
And who are we to deny it in here?
Here’s a video of Angela and George tearing up that number, “A Little Priest.”
“First of all, huh? Little cowboy shoes? I don’t know what those are. Also, anyone who can imagine wearing these outfits should be taken out back and beaten with their little cowboy shoes.”
from one of the posts at Claudia’s Room, where Tiff blogs her way through the Baby-Sitters Club books. It’s so much fun making fun of the writing. (One of the actors in the show got a BSC book for Christmas, as a joke present, and the name of the blog.)
Using “books” as a category tag for this is stretching it.
“Dawn actually says, “People in California don’t have yard sales.” MY ASS! Come on Cali readers, back me up on this one! I refuse to believe that nowhere in Southern California has there never been a yard sale (or a more convoluted sentence).”
I was emailing with a friend of mine in a Calarts MFA, and she talked about spending long nights “in studio.” MFA students in art and design work together in a shared lab space, working on their projects simultaneously at their desks. We’ve seen a dramatization of this in PROJECT RUNWAY, where all the designers are draping and cutting at the different tables, just a few feet away from each other.
I wonder what it would be like to try the same thing with writers, or with directors. There are three new plays simultaneously being put up at the DCTC now, and I wonder if anyone has gotten the 3 directors together.
I suppose the Internet is the writers’ shared studio, of sorts.
When Meredith and I were working on our theses, senior year, we would go together to coffeehouses with our laptops and write at the same time. That was one of the most productive writing experiences I’ve ever had. If I had a bad sentence, or a tough transition – just like if I was having trouble draping a sleeve, I don’t know – Mere could help me.
And Sari has a kind of shared studio environment in her paper, where all the reporters’ desks are right near each other.
I was in Golden, Colorado over the Christmas break. Golden is the home of the Coors Brewery, and also the home of Kersti, a friend from Ashland. We were at the Buffalo Rose – a biker bar with dollar bills with tacks in them stuck all over the ceiling – if you throw the dollar up and it sticks, you get a free drink.
And I talked to a veteran of the first Iraq war. He enlisted to get an education and to travel, and served for two years. His politics had now shifted to the point of being against this conflict.
We talked about union politics in the merger between Coors and Miller – Miller is unionized, apparently, but Coors isn’t, and the Coors employees don’t want the union because their benefits already exceed what the union guarantees – and then we talked about Iraq.
I told him that wherever I had gone in the US for the past six months, people started talking about the war, and he agreed that it was on everyone’s mind. His perspective was that the only people who weren’t willing to consider that the war might be a mistake, or its continuation might be a mistake, were those whose conviction in it came from religious beliefs.
The next day, as Kersti and I were driving back to Denver to have breakfast with the Millans, under falling snow, we heard the news about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and mourned the death of another moderate political leader.
Back from Xmas, and we’re working through the second act of the play, for the second time. Tomorrow we’ll run Act 2.
Yesterday, going into a playful, childlike scene where 4 of the characters flash back to childhood, the director had the actors play Zip, Zap, Zop (an energy-trading circle game) and another game where everyone on the outside of the circle imitates the sound and movement of the person on the inside.
After this went on for awhile, she removed the 3 actors who weren’t in the scene and had the game continue with only the 4 characters in the childhood flashback.
Then they improvised the scene.
This seems like such an obvious thing to do, to let an exercise evolve into scene work by reducing the exercise to the characters in question, but I have never, ever seen anyone do it before. It worked well.
And today the director used a very simple exercise to work lines in a scene with physical tension, initiated by one of the actors. The two actors in question arm-wrestled while they ran the lines.
This allowed them to work the lines of the scene without having to trip up over the dynamics of the fight, but while keeping contact and energy between them.
“Hey little girl looking for a sale,
Test drive this American male…”
I was watching HAIRSPRAY again to get inspiration for the Convergence chorus project. I want the final mash-up of the Wasps and Persians choruses to be a full-out musical chorus number, at least before it all goes terribly wrong.
“Hey little girl on a spending spree,
I don’t come cheap but the kisses come free…”
Wikipedia on director Adam Shankman: “Prior to directing Hairspray, Shankman was known in Hollywood primarily as a fixer of lowbrow films—a director who could take charge of lackluster productions that were expected to flop and turn them into box-office hits. “I’ve done so many things I’m not super-proud of,” he admitted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
I think it is something to be proud of – one of the marks of a great director is being able to make good theater, or film, out of almost any script imaginable. But I’m glad he finally got material this good.
It started snowing at about 1 am last night like it was making up for the week of clear skies. Outside, it looks like a sideways salt shaker.
I was trying to find a nice Charles Bukowski poem to put up here for Christmas – Death Wants More Death, for example – but I stumbled on this old article instead – about a guy who found some of his poems in the street in my old neighborhood in LA –
“…In any event, just weeks after Bukowski’s death, Stella came upon an important piece of the poet’s life in a heap of trash on a Los Feliz curb.”
As long as we can still discover poetry in the Los Angeles garbage, there’s hope – for both poetry and my city. (And for garbage.) I wish I was at home, especially over the holidays, careening down Franklin towards the Valley, but Charles’s ghost is doing a great job of holding down the fort. If you’re in LA, do me a favor – check your trash for poems tonight. And your poems for trash.
I have two Christmas parties tonight, one with little kids. I bought one of them a box of 64 Crayolas. She’s probably too young for it, but I want to give it to her anyway. I remember my 64-crayon box very well.
And then rehearsals resume tomorrow.
“….
and I run child-like
with God’s anger a step behind,
back to simple sunlight,
wondering
as the world goes by
with curled smile
if anyone else
saw or sensed my crime”
Dara Weinberg 