Category Archives: employment

employment, theater

there’s nothing forbidden about this planet

I finished a big project today – a draft of various lists of projects I am and am not interested in taking on, for another grant, this one multi-year. I called it “Planet Admin” and “Planet Art,” and there was a sub-list called “Forbidden Planet” of things I no longer want to keep doing in the theater world.

It was actually a lot of fun to write, as testimony to the weirdness of the last two years – from the Open Fist to the Matrix to NOTE to the Met to the many lives and theatres of Bill. It included things like:

“- Cleaning the premises of the theater in any way, or killing rodents or insects which have infested the theater, or dealing with fire or health inspectors.
-Organizing other people’s files, throwing out other people’s trash.
– Reminding people about phone calls, appointments, etc.
– Laundry or dry-cleaning.
-Cooking, bartending, food or alcohol preparation, serving, transportation or storage.
-Building management, facilities operation (lightbulbs, carpets, toilets)”

What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever done for your “art”? Have you distributed buckets around the floor of an ancient shell of a vaudeville stage, to catch the water during the show?

Have you used a ShopVac to suction water, standing a foot deep, from the floor of the women’s restroom, and pumped it back outside – even as rain was coming in through giant holes in the wall?

If not, why not? 🙂 And would you do it again?

But the Planet Art list was a lot of fun to write. It’s good to be clear that I want to be moving forward on directing one show a year, writing one play a year, going abroad, and doing chorus workshops.

I think I should remind myself that I have already achieved all those goals for this year, and if I do nothing more for the rest of 2007, I will have already done more than enough. How about directing one show, assisting on five, (MWB, RnJ, T, GB, L) and traveling throughout the US? And teaching more darn chorus workshops than I ever have, before, in one year? The style in which I live my life is a style of overwork.

Tasks for the rest of the day include adapting the right page from Flatland and getting back to Ellen with a poem. If I can do those things, I think I can spend tomorrow watching movies.

It’ll be nice to have a few days in Portland. I leave on Tuesday, after another understudy rehearsal with Joan.

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directing, employment

A Life In The Theatre

Got in the Denham app for LYDIA, and Toby and I are brainstorming about doing German together this summer in Middlebury.

Mary Orr Denham is perhaps best known for her first short story, entitled “The Wisdom of Eve,” upon which the Oscar-winning film “All About Eve” was based. She sold the story to Cosmopolitan for $800 and it was published in the May 1946 issue. Ms. Orr married the director Reginald Denham in 1947 and together they wrote four plays that opened on Broadway. Ms. Orr also had a successful acting career, appearing in many Broadway plays, including The Desperate Hours in 1955. A longtime resident of Manhattan, Ms. Orr passed away in September 2006 at the age of 95.

Looking at this now I wish I had made some reference in the app to Mary being a hybrid artist herself, but hopefully it’ll work out by context. Les doights crossed.

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directing, employment, theater

Back in town

I flew from Seattle to San Jose today. Back in Menlo Park, blogging from Borrone’s.

I’ve officially been hired, and I begin my new job tomorrow, as the assistant director for Aaron Davidman on TheatreWorks’s production of GOLDA’S BALCONY, by William Gibson. I’ll be helping Aaron out with whatever he needs, including but not limited to taking notes and the understudy rehearsals.

I’ve read the play a couple of times over the course of this trip. It’s a complicated portrait. Should be quite the journey. This is my first time on a one-woman show. The actress playing Golda is Camille Saviola.

The end of the Seattle stay was great – my meetings with Jen and Chris were wonderful, and made me very excited about coming back to do some theatre in that town.

Last night, Sam, Erica, Kyle, Rob and I made dumplings (their method definitely added some improvements to mine), tofu, stir-fried beef, woodear mushrooms, and bok choi, and (drumroll) crab, boiled alive. Yum.

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a propos of nothing, employment, F&F, film, interviews

Sffffffff

Back in Menlo from a whirlwind, exhausting SF trip: saw Ellen, Gabe, Morgan, Mary, Nelle & Mia, and Mere all up here. PHEW. Plus interviewed with Octavio Solis and Aaron Davidman: two of the best I’ve had so far. And James Still on the phone. Such great stories. It must mean something, perhaps about my self-satisfaction, that the more theater people I meet the more I love theater. But there are amazing folks in this business, in this basket-weaving, early-music-making, hybrid of the extreme past and the unrealized future. Nothing “present” about it. Dreamers.

The last time I was on Florida Street, where I met Aaron at the TJT offices, was years ago when I took the CASSANDRA SPEAKS crew up to a show there, and thought it would be a good idea to get off at the 22nd Street caltrain station and WALK from there to Florida Street. We arrived, halfway through the second act of a dance performance at Theater Artaud, absolutely exhausted, having trudged lost through the streets of SF for nearly two hours. I thought this would be a good “bonding experience” for the cast. This is, without question, the worst thing I have ever done to a group of actors.

So I must have grown some since then – at least now I’d know to get off at 4th & King…Perhaps if the Millbrae BART connection had been up then, I wouldn’t have so completely traumatized all of us. Blame your bad directing on the public transporation system. What would Darin Nichols do?

And it seems like there’s always more of SF to find. Ellen and I got totally windblown in this park at 19th and Yukon. Mary and I walked all around Union Square looking for something that wasn’t a glorified sandwich. North Point and the Marina with Gabe. (Again, more wind.) Mere and I went to the Ferry Building and the Embarcadero. Lots of good solid tourist stuff. And I explored Oakland with Morgan a bit – saw her house, and Mike’s enormous fish triptych. But my heart still belongs to 16th & Valencia. To the Mission district. Morgan and I hit Club Baobab and I watched people who know how to salsa.

I’ve been driving Shiyan’s hybrid Toyota Camry for a day now. Delightful. Pushes a button to turn on. She had to drive from Syracuse to NYC after trouble with a Chicago connection dropping her brother off at Cornell…and then a big-rig overturned on the freeway south from Syracuse, and she had to sit in traffic for hours on end.

Mere has been helping me set up my bookcase encampment too. And we watched the end of Sabrina 2 and most of Avenue Montaigne. Is it just me, or do French directors find naivete more attractive than anyone else does? Americans like our ingenues jaded.

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employment, the chorus, theater

Aspirin Doesn’t Work

I woke up early this morning and revised my resume for SHARES meetings with folks from Utah Shakes and San Jose Rep. It was very interesting. I remember finagling my way into a meeting with folks from SJ Rep when I was 22 and not having a clue what to say to them. I think this one went fairly well – there may actually be some synergies between SJ’s education program and this whole improvised choral theater business…I have to make up some real materials on it.

And Utah! Their AD program is only a few years old, and there’s apparently some room for flexibility. They haven’t chosen 08 ADs yet. Fingers crossed.

It’s been a couple days of information-getting: Mara B and David C gave me some rundowns on Chicago and Canadian theater, respectively, which I’ll post here soon.

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