Category Archives: SAGN

SAGN, the chorus

Impressions from Days 1-4 of SAGN

I didn’t manage to blog once in the first four days of SAGN rehearsal. I suppose they must be keeping me busy. To add to the insanity, Robert and I finished a Creative Capital grant for the Convergence less than 45 seconds before the first readthrough was about to start. I was sitting in a corner of the stage management office typing crazily. But we got it in.

That first read: Kesey is a genius. A room with eleven men in it, cast as lumberjacks, is a room full of testosterone. And they are all so, so well cast.

I played the composer’s banjo on Tuesday and it broke my heart. It was all I could do to keep from rushing out of the rehearsal room, then and there, to continue playing it. It’s been so long.

Wednesday was a day full of the Six, and our first pass at the logging chorus. Thursday was a day of the Stamper family. I have felt so happy to be able to be useful to these actors, to get them books or resources they need. The week of research I did has paid off.

Thursday was also my wonderful brother’s birthday. He sent me, in the mail, a tape of a long-lost production.

Today the choreographer, the director, and I all arrived at a new conception of the first logging chorus. Our original sketch of it didn’t do everything it needed to do. But this one is much closer, and we are going to tweak it more tomorrow. I feel so very proud of our ability to get to this place.

I learned something today. (Actually, I could have learned it yesterday, had I been paying attention, because the director did a variation on it, but my head was in the sand.) I learned that when trying to find the soul of a chorus, it makes total sense to give all the text in it to one actor (in this case, Leland), as an exercise. Then when the text goes back to the chorus, it has been voiced by a single sound, and that spirit remains.

And we made it through the first act.

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SAGN

SAGN, Day 0

This morning, after four days of searching, I tracked down a hard copy of the Holy Grail of logging videos: THE OREGON STORY: LOGGING, which the Oregon Public Broadcasting office made us a copy of. We went to pick it up in person, and drove back through an Ashlandesque landscape of Oregon greens.

Lunch with the director, trip to the shop, meetings all afternoon – and tomorrow is the first readthrough. Sometimes A Great, Ready Or Not.

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SAGN

Blogging about logging

Happy belated Leap Year. An extra day in the month of February has never been so useful. I don’t have Internet in my room at the hotel, which has limited my blogging, but I have been mostly out of the room anyway – running around the libraries of Portland, looking at men cutting down trees.

I’ve spent lots of time this week at the Oregon Historical Society, looking at their pictures and watching their videos of loggers from the 20s to the 60s. It’s great stuff, breathtakingly old and strange, but the videos can’t be removed from the library, which makes them only useful for my brain, and not for the cast.

So I spent yesterday going through a bunch of videos from the public library that might or might not have logging footage in them – mostly documentaries on forest fires. Some of them had a little. The best stuff we have, by far, though, is still the footage from the original film of SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION. Though that movie gets almost everything else wrong in the plot, its portrayal of the actual choker-setting scene (wrapping a big cable around a big log before said log gets dragged up a hill) is pretty great.

There’s also a little documentary called The Oregon Story: Logging through Oregon Public Broadcasting that I have on hold and am probably going to break down and order tomorrow.

And there are Youtube clips of recreational logging competitions.

I was saying to Toby the other day that this year of extreme specialization in a variety of very different subjects has given even my short attention span a lot to look at. In 2008 alone, it’s been El Paso, TX and Mexican immigration, the Greek chorus, and now Kesey, the Bus, and Oregon loggers.

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SAGN

One flew east, one flew west

I’m rereading CUCKOO’S NEST. Well, I shouldn’t say rereading, because I realized immediately upon opening it that I’m only familiar with the play and the film. Kesey’s narrative voice (and his illustrations, which this edition has) are a third character in and of themselves.

I’m so glad our script of SAGN preserves some of the Kesey voice, through the chorus.

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SAGN, the chorus, theater, writing

Shiver Me Timbers

I walked into a church on Alder Street in Portland yesterday, to check out the architecture, and felt like I’d walked inside a beautiful, varnished, giant log, or a religious incarnation of the Colossus rollercoaster at 6 Flags. If there’s one thing this town has, it’s lots of lumber.

I also got introduced to the production folks at PCS yesterday, and am meeting with the costume designer today. Research is taking me to the public library, to the Oregon Historical Society, and, no doubt, to the trees.

Last night I went to the season announcement, too – a packed mainstage full of people heard the PCS artistic director announce his plans for 08-09. I was very happy to hear that they included Nancy Keystone’s next installment of APOLLO.

In other news, through a great effort of will, and after consulting every single member of my family who I could get on the phone, I decided not to turn in another application for a directing program which would have taken place this late spring / early summer. It was a hard decision to make, but the right one, I think, since I want to have time to work on these scripts in progress.

I’ve never before in my life had the luxury of two different composers excited to work on two different scripts, and it seems just wrong to disregard their free time by filling up every single second with directing jobs. I have to trust that working more in playwriting can only help my self and my career, and that these directing gigs will be there, to come back to, if writing doesn’t work out.

It’s hard to do, though, because I remember vividly that one year ago, I couldn’t even have been a candidate for these gigs. Now I’m in a position to turn them down, or to not consider them – to think that there are other things more important to do. My life changes so quickly.

After I had decided it, I talked to the composer for 13 WAYS, Chris F., and found out that the dates of this program were the exact ones in which both of our schedules left us free! He said to me, “If you can’t believe that you did something, it’s probably the right thing.”

Another sign came from the oracles later that evening. At the season announcement, the artistic director offhandedly joked: “The first play this season is a Greek tragedy…where everyone dies…Just kidding! No one would come!” He then announced that it was GUYS AND DOLLS.

I think that I and CF have a chance of bridging that perception gap between Greek plays as boring and full of death, and musicals.

Because the Greek plays are musicals – musical dramas with choruses in them – and if we could bring those two worlds together, maybe the Greek plays could be as popular as they once were, and as musicalized. If we can enliven the choruses, the plays will be irresistible again. It’s a huge undertaking of translation and adaptation, and of new composition, but I think that in CF I’ve found someone with as much hubris as myself. And we’re going to take it on.

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SAGN, travel

Sometimes A Great Portland

After a day of travel, I’m awake and alive in beautiful downtown Portland, blogging from the cafe at Powell’s on 11th, and there is no more snow. In fact, it’s so warm I don’t have to wear a jacket. The light looks like San Francisco, especially in the afternoons, and it’s like I can tell, in my bones, that the Pacific Ocean is closer than it’s been in months.

I checked into my apartment, walked around the Pearl District, wandered into a free reading of a play being considered for next year’s season at PCS, did yoga until my head felt like it was going to fall off my spine, and am generally catching up on weeks of backlogged business since before the Convergence and Denver.

I miss Robert & Caitlin, and I had a moment of loneliness when I found myself in my artist housing, with nothing to do but unpack and start prepping for the next show. But it’s so, so great to be back on this coast. And my apartment has a blender, a luxury I’ve wanted since last April.

Talked to Ron Allen, too. He’s very excited about the EYE MOUTH opening at NOTE this Wednesday.

This show (SAGN) marks one year of freelance assistant directing. And one of the things I’ve learned, the hard way, is to always get to town much earlier than needed, so you can settle in. We don’t start rehearsals till the 4th of March. Plenty of time to read the collected works of Kesey.

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