J sent me this link to comments on SAGN at Followspot, a Portland theater blog. I really like the way that the actual post is just factual and discussion happens in the comments – an interesting model.
Category Archives: SAGN
You been on the road a pretty good piece?
“Enough to make me think I won’t mind standing awhile.”
– Leland Stanford Stamper
Vancouver
SAGN is open. We had a glorious show for a very appreciative Portland audience, who clapped wildly at “The Great Northwest – where it is in him for a man to be as big and important as it is in him to be.” It was fun and well-deserved. We partied at the Armory, the Life of Reilly, and a club in Southeast that I couldn’t tell you where it was. I slept through my first train, and made the second one.
My year of assistant directing is complete. On Thursday, when Aaron gave the last of the notes, I felt something slipping away from me, like taking off a jacket. It’s over.
I’m celebrating in Canada. Arrived by train from Portland and bus from Seattle yesterday, for the first vacation in 4 years. Staying with Krist3l and MiQ. Drum and bass and a fake Halloween party last night, breakfast this morning with a Vancouver actor named James – the world of theater is as big as a postage stamp, and that stamp travels to every city in the world. We talked about audiences and locations and all the same old things. It feels like home, but everywhere does now.
blogging from the old year
On a personal note (which for me is usually G) I spend the last half hour of being 25 typing preview notes – a fitting ending to my year of assistant directing, which began at South Coast Rep and is ending here at Portland Center Stage. We moved the location of intermission tonight, very successfully. My parents are here in town, and they saw SAGN tonight and really loved it. We had a great dinner, too.
As Chris Henderson says in SAGN,
“You can do as you please. Me, I’m figuring to move on.”
Oh, I got a job in New York today – a low-key day job, which is just what’s needed, and I have an apartment I’m subletting. So that promise I always made to myself, that I wouldn’t go to NYC without housing and employment, has been kept. There is now nothing preventing me from going there to write, to see shows, and to have a great time.
Here are the preview/birthday notes to myself, since it’s been a week of notes:
DARA:
– Only make promises you can keep, to yourself and to others. And keep them.
– When you’re trying to remember what it was like being 25, remember that it was disorienting, unstable, confusing, but that it was worth it. All of it. Every second. There have been some years that you’ve regretted. This one isn’t going to be one of them. You did really good work this year, if you do say so yourself.
– When you were ready for a composer to come into your life and your work, really ready, you met two in less than a week. It’s the same way with all the things you wish for.
– You’ve always been a writer more than anything else. Now all you have to do is BE a writer more than anything else.
– There have been more than enough things you’ve done that were absolutely no fun. The year of being 26 gives you dispensation from all of them. If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.
– In the logging scene, please take two steps downstage. Your sidelight is being blocked by a giant black umbrella.
– Diction on “To be or not to be.”
My birthday is tomorrow, or in ten minutes. I’m sure I’ll spend another birthday in previews soon, perhaps next year, or the year after that. And I won’t regret a second I’ve given to theater, and I never have. But next year is going to be more about giving some of those seconds to myself, too. Maybe we can share them.
I’m going to finish these notes, go get a drink to celebrate, and go home to my Portland apartment overlooking the church on Alder Street. And I’m going to go to sleep in the second quarter of my life.
From a basketball point of view, being in a later quarter can only be a good thing. The game gets more interesting.
sagn spoiler alert
Part of this play is watching a man drown – an actor, and a character, who we all love – on a nightly basis. Watching the life go out of his eyes. He’s so good at it that I feel I have watched him die every night for the last week.
It’s just a simple stage illusion of a light covering him, but it’s breathtakingly painful. It reveals everything.
If it were more realistic, you wouldn’t actually get to see him die. As it is, the lack of realism forces you into the emotional truth of the situation. Abstraction, of one kind, brings out emotion. The detail of realism can get in the way of that.
Every night, I see the exact moment when his eyes under the water become dead, and it’s horrifyingly well done.
SAGN – the final week
Previews are going well. My parents are in town, actually, to see the play tomorrow and to visit. They came from Seattle today.
The show opens Friday, and I go to Vancouver Saturday, to visit Krist3l and miQ. And then a whole week off, and then travels, ending in NYC. This will be the first time in more time than I care to think of that I haven’t known what my next show is, the first real vacation since graduating from college almost four years ago, and the first time in over ten years that I am letting directing rest for a bit to focus on writing. I am looking forward to all these things with the tangible anticipation of wanting to eat dinner, or drive fast.
I’ve been reading YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN and voyeuristically drooling over descriptions of being a Writer in New York. I expect it to be every bit as awful and painstaking as the book describes, and fraught with just as many terrible problems, but I still want it like a bad metaphor.
from the means-more-than-it-seems-like department
We just got out of a three-hour-long fight rehearsal for the fight at the end of the play, where Lee and Hank beat each other up until all their angst from their childhood is released. The fight choreographer was talking about tension, and he said, “The first thing you have to do is relax the muscle before you can move it.” And I thought, well, that’s one of the truest things I’ve heard.
Also in this same fight, the director comments that Hank feels on safe ground in fights. There’s a certain relaxation in knowing that it’s familiar territory. Sure, his life is falling apart around him, but at least he has the fight.
simul // taneous
Today we were working with some simultaneity, with an intercut between two different scenes. It reminded me of when we intercut Romeo and Juliet’s respective “banished” monologues. Both directors used a technique without any freezes – the idea is that the scene that doesn’t have dialogue is still going on, even though they’re not talking. It took me seeing this twice to internalize it.
I also finished, yesterday, a timeline of all the events in this play, which makes me happy. It begins in 1898, includes the Korean War and the start of the strike, and ends on Thanksgiving Day, 1961 – and I actually looked up when Thanksgiving Day, 1961 was!
And then we ended the day with working the second logging chorus. Both these choruses are staged with a lot of simplicity and clarity. Five minutes before we were done, I realized what I really wanted was to see both of them happening at the same time.
on the call of the woods
Listening to Hank and Joby Stamper talking about the rush of topping a spar tree, I realize they feel about logging the way we feel about theater. It’s a risky business, often thankless, requiring long hours. There is great pride in the pain of how hard it is, how poorly paid, how exhausting. There is even pride in knowing that if it were ten times as hard, you would still do it. And if you have to ask why, you wouldn’t understand.
This is not to say that Hank wouldn’t like to be able to have new equipment, or that the folks I know wouldn’t like to work shorter hours and be paid more. It’s just that we’re doing it, one way or the other, even if we have to hand-log the whole darn hill.
And they do call it “the show.” Just like baseball players call the big leagues “the show.” Theater is the metaphor for that arena of exhaustion and exhilaration. Hank even compares the spar tree to the center tent-pole of a circus.
Kesey understood that.
Sometimes A Great First Week
My favorite word for this week is “nascent”. This may have to do with finishing THE RAINBOW.
Today, the following things happened:
– Daylight Savings, arrived at rehearsal late. Only ten minutes, but, still. Classy.
– Chorus scene was stellartastic.
– Got to run simultaneous scenework with Lee and Viv – loads of fun – and also took the opportunity to publicly announce my intention to Move To New York For Two Months This Spring And Write A Damn Play. And that felt so good.
– Run of Acts 1 and 2, at the end of our first week of work.
And right now, color me working on a timeline of events in a play based on a Ken Kesey novel, always a shady proposition – getting ready to watch AXEMEN this evening at Joby’s. Feelin’ like about a million. Good first week, Team.
Dara Weinberg 