theater

trouble in the redwood forest

On Monday, it will have been one week since the Merc announced Shakespeare Santa Cruz had one week to raise $300,000 or go dark. State budget cuts made it impossible for UC Santa Cruz to maintain its economic partnership with the theater whereby, as they had the last few years, UCSC made up SSC’s budget shortfalls. Currently, they are at $278,516 (as of Friday). On Monday, they’ll announce whether or not they made it.

To donate and help save the Shakespeare festival surrounded by the California redwoods, click here. I wish I had money to give them myself.

These times are hard. We are facing the very real danger of shutting our doors forever. But theatres have faced hard times before, and theatres will face hard times again. And I’ve always thought (perhaps perversely) that hard times are when we need theatre the most.
– SSC artistic director Marco Barricelli

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theater

that and fifty cents

Over all, [NEA] endowment officials said, the demand for nonmusical theater simply is not what it used to be.

“In a sense, the dilemma of nonprofit theater can be simply summarized — supply has outstripped current demand,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the national endowment, wrote in a preface to the report. “The remarkable growth and professional management of theatrical organizations across the nation has not yet been matched by equally robust growth in audiences.”

– from an NYT article on the declining audience for “nonmusical theater”, via ArtsJournal.

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directing

heating the cold turkey

I saw a play recently, with friends. I felt the usual confusion of emotions, like going into a bar after having quit drinking, being surrounded by the cues and quirks of your old haunt. The cold women’s bathroom, spiderwebbed, improperly dusted, because actors are responsible for the cleaning. The cast members, ranging from awkward to extraordinary, with every gradation in between.

I got to thank a couple of the actors afterwards for their work. Seeing an actor I wanted to work with was very tempting. It would be so easy to get back on that particular three-legged horse. I’ve been directing for almost ten years, and this – from June to December of 2008 – is the longest voluntary break I’ve taken from it since I started.

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art, comix, workstyle, writing

rote social banter

This cartoon, Snow Dope, by Dean Haspiel, is so so so wonderful. So deliciously lonely. He writes:

I realized that it was better to reject rote social banter to quell my fear of being alone and embrace solitude this holiday weekend.

If my time in New York had been like that, I’d still be there. Maybe it was – I remember a friend buying me a bottle of incredibly expensive artisanal bourbon (almost on the level of couture bourbon, or something) and us starting to drink it, and him having to explain to me that no, now I was this drunk, I could not just get back on the subway. He introduced me to the concept of the Brooklyn car service. If I had been able to never leave Brooklyn, and just stumble around being an artist with a part-time job, perhaps I would have found inspiration in that city. It was the twice-daily commute to the island that killed me, and the day job I had to hold down there to pay the rent and buy the booze. By the time I escaped, I was barely writing at all.

The problem with New York is Manhattan.
I think it would be perfectly liveable if you just stayed in the outer boroughs.

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directing

know it like the back of my head

I recently saw some images of the workshops from THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, in late 2006.
My own face, or the back of it, was interspersed with the faces of the actors – photographed in close black-box quarters by my duo of consumnate Craigslist videographers. I see my ponytail and my head swathed in a bandanna (I obviously didn’t shower that morning), and that fake leather jacket from Target I wore every day for a good year and a half. I’m a very jaded and world-weary 24, but from the ancient vantage of 26, looking at her, I look as young as a teacup.

I have a variety of these back-of-Dara’s-head-while-directing pictures: from the first LYSISTRATA even, at seventeen. It’d be a fun little image montage to put together.

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chicago

here in my car

Today, I drove a friend to the bus station – my first time operating a vehicle in falling snow since the ’08 Convergence, and my first time navigating Chicago on wheels since we were apartment-shopping in August. I was driving an enormous Isuzu Trooper, with 4WD, and I still found it all but impossible to park, keep from skidding, etc. And unlike Indianapolis, these weather conditions are occurring in crowded city traffic.

North Avenue
(please don’t kill me, other drivers)
Fullerton
(please don’t kill me, other drivers)
Armitage
(please don’t kill me, other drivers)
Montrose

While I was trying to park in and around some growing snowdrifts, for the very first time since coming to this city, I found myself thinking, “It might have been a mistake to move to Chicago.”

The moment I set that car key down on my friend’s dining room table, I was, once again, happy to be here, and on foot, and I walked the long block between Damen and Western with positive exuberance at how cold I was, purposely stepping in the tallest snowbanks because I could.

When I got on the bus, the floor was slick with water, and I tried to put my transit card in the meter, but the driver told me to sit down so I wouldn’t fall. He did the same thing for everyone. When the weather is like this, people have to help each other out, or else, you know, be alone, cold, and grumpy, or fall down on the floor of the slippery bus… Maybe that’s part of why everyone is so nice here. The weather made them do it.

The snowbirds flee, the city becomes less populated, and those who stick it out either get really whiny or else form a sort of brotherhood. We’re all in this together, right? I think that’s what it’s going to be like for, as people keep reminding me, “the next FOUR MONTHS.”

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theater

stalling:

I am on one deadline, and I have nightmares about another one. I dream, variously, of not having organized everything for the set build (I have no sets that need to be built) and of financial shortfalls in a theatrical production (no such production exists.) My mind reverts to the most recent set of artistic stresses. It’s kind of nice to wake up feeling guilty over having neglected a nonexistent play, when I haven’t worked on any theater since June. My anxieties are retro.

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poetry

Supersonnet

Trying to make a poem fit into a page limit, I cut out all the stanza breaks except the one that seems essential. The result: two enormous stanzas, one of forty lines, one of twenty. Now if it was 40:30, it’d be some kind of gargantuan sonnet: an enormous poem in the proportions of 4:3. But I still think it’s a cool form.

Stanza breaks mean so much less to me now. It’s like everything I write could go as well in couplets, or triplets, or whatever. This is a state of affairs I never could have imagined when I was eighteen.

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