Category Archives: the chorus

the chorus

We have come to Athens, father, at last

I now have a copy of the recording of the TO DIE IN ATHENS reading, playing behind me right now as I write. It’s the best quality recording I’ve ever had of any of my work. Drew did so much with volume adjustment. The piano is a little creaky, but the whole thing sounds like an old BBC radio broadcast -really echo-y and rich.

Mandi, Drew and I had a meeting in Echo Park last night, listened to this, and talked. They have a really amazing concept about doing TDIA in club venues. I was stunned by how much they’ve dreamed about the project, and have come up with a way it could fit into a very different venue than traditional theater. And they’ve been listening to the recording themselves, which amazes me. We’ve made something other people want to listen to.

Audio is a purer way of capturing theater than video is. This was, of course, a reading, so there wasn’t much to see. But it’s making me wish I had a really nice audio recording of every show I’ve ever done. I’m thinking of taking the videotapes of AVW and BH and getting someone to make them into audio files.

You can listen, and imagine the play. It’s very effective. I don’t know if this recording is the one we’ll be sending out to lots of people – probably one more generation of rewrites to be done first. But it’s lovely.

Father, I do not know this place,
But the city is Athens.

Standard
the chorus, theater, travel, writing

destination: chicago

After tonight’s reading, I officially have no plays in the grapevine from a directing point of view, and no projects, either, except writing projects.

It seems like as good a time as any to announce that I expect this next year to be more about playwriting and poetry than about directing. It’s time to explore choruses through language, not only through staging. I think when I do direct it’ll be events like tonight’s reading – one-time events with new formal innovation within them, concepts I want to beta-test. I also wouldn’t mind continuing to explore choral voice workshops. But even that is a move towards text.

I think what tonight’s reading proves to me is that my instincts for manipulating text chorally have been refined through all these years of directing and assistant directing – and it’s time to trust myself, and write the plays I’ve wanted to write all along.

So, the future. I’m in LA for most of the rest of this month. Then I and the architect for the National Theatre of the United States will be driving from LA to SF at the end of July, using the trip to scout locations in the desert outside of Vegas for our twin ampitheatres (one Greek, one Roman) and the rest of the ten-theater complex.

And then I’m moving to Chicago, where I expect to be based from for at least the next year. I’m going to have an apartment and a home base, maybe even a regular job. This move is predicated on many things, but largely the presence of the Convergers and the excitement of the theater and poetry scenes in that city. Also, the cheap housing prices, and the large number of theaters hiring for next season. And my need to move somewhere – and have that somewhere be somewhere I can work. And my best friend in the world, Eileen, is moving there too. We’re going to be roommates.

I’m excited to think about going to a new city (I’ve never been to Chicago at all – I’m taking Robert and Caitlin’s word for it) and starting a new life there – in terms of writing, location, avocation, and lifestyle. But yield who will to their separation, and all that.

I am aware that it’s going to be first very humid, then very cold. But I would live on a planet without light or oxygen and have my lungs fed air through a tube and take Vitamin D tablets for sun if that was what it took to survive in theater. (It’s often what it feels like during tech!) This is the next step I have to take, so it’ll work out. And there is a lake. And Bree tells me that getting really, truly “snowed in” is more rare than my nightmares suggest.

Putting it up on the blog makes it real. Chicago. I’m excited, and scared, and so ready to live somewhere for longer than six weeks. I think this is the best place for me right now, despite my passing interest in Belfast after doing all that Van Morrison research for Jess.

As Carl Sandburg says, in his poem on my new city,
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Standard
the chorus, theater

“I like repetition” – Brandohead

Tonight was the reading of x restrung cortex, the 5-minute Ron Allen play, at Theatre of NOTE. The actors – Jemal, Jo.D., Wendi, and Michelle H – performed the play three times, interspersed with jazz and poetic songs from Ron’s band, Code Zero. Each time they performed it, new meanings and new interpretations came to the action on stage.

The audience was a full house.

The play was a royal flush.

By the third repetition, Jo.D. had the audience calling the second halves of his lines back to him, call-and-response style, and screaming with laughter.

Jo.D.: The actors are…
Audience: NUDE!

Jo.D.: The narrator wears a…
Audience: TUXEDO!

Jo.D.: The following exchange represents…
Audience: SUBMISSION!

Some variation on this technique is definitely going in the next draft of 13 WAYS. The word “chorus” can also include repetition in the sense of alternating with verses. We’re going to take a chorus (or a scene-as-chorus) and do it with unchanged text, but changed intentions and action, 3 times over.

Standard
quotes, the chorus, writing

location, location

There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.

– Annie Proulx, “Them Old Cowboy Songs”

One of the functions the chorus has is the same as the narrator – telling you the way things are, the way things should be, the way things ought to be. And the chorus has always been unreliable, because they are real characters and have information hidden from them. They continue to be optimistic even when the audience knows it’s curtains for Antigone. But this line, and others like it that I keep stumbling into in fiction, make me think of choruses. Like this:

CHORUS
There is no happiness
like that of a young couple
in a little house they have built themselves
in a place of beauty and solitude.

It is so specific – it makes an aphorism, a general statement about life, out of something so very particular. There is no happiness like – but they has to be young, the house little, the place must be beautiful and isolated. Then, and only then, is there no happiness like it.

Standard
the chorus, theater, travel, writing

the end of the WCX

Day 24, Sun June 25
We wake up like we’re going to battle, and go to the theater. We barricade ourselves in Semele with water bottles and folding chairs, and prepare to rehearse. To repeat. To rejoice.

We rehearse for four and a half hours, with a crew of tried and true actors – AVW, BH, and MOH&H are all proudly represented – and two new to the Dara Experience. They jump in like champs. We learn music at breakneck speed. I have an hour left at the end of it to do the bad director’s version of talking them through the play. Enough is enough. I leave it. I go five minutes overtime, which I am still vaguely ashamed of.

We eat pizza and spinach. We put bags of ice and frozen corn on our heads. We walk over the stage to the one restroom. Chris works music in the piano nook behind the stage while I take actors outside to talk over their parts – the Messenger, Oedipus, Medea. We make strong choices. We do shortcut staging. We decide. Directing in the fast lane.

We do the reading with a small but intense audience – some old HW friends, my designer cohort of Dan and Erin, a director from my freelance AD world, actor friends, and, just like with the cast, two who have never seen my work before.

I take the actors outside and remind them, in Prof. Martin’s words, that “the chorus exists because people come in groups.” We sing a song to warm-up and for sound check – we have a real hard-core audio engineer recording us – and we launch ahead. I babble at the audience about the chorus, about larger political and social movements, vs. the heroic individual characters. I make no sense. I sit down. They begin.

The reading is lovely. Everything works, as we knew it would. The actors deliver something with all the intensity I could have desired. I am beside myself with joy with the transitions from the Wasps to the Persians to the Wasps/Persians mash-up choruses. The world is real. One chorus is bleeding into another.

The audience begins the discussion, afterwards, by saying “Have you thought about masks?” and continue to generously share staging ideas with me. I realize to what extent I’ve separated myself from directing, because I haven’t thought about it at all. An hour of feedback later, all the comments have been positive. They like the music, they like the tone, they like the poetry – they spent the reading imagining it as a live production.

They suggest, without any prompting from me, that characters go into / come out of the chorus, that the ensemble all learn all the lines, and that this production be driven by the chorus. I have managed to get this idea which is stuck in my head, and stick it in some other people’s heads. I’ve created something which can stand for itself. I know that there’s no way I could have done it without Chris. The music is what makes this special. I’ve gotten the text to a good level, but his work is what makes mine work.

It’s over. We put the chairs back, lock the space, and go home. We talk as if the words were going to expire at midnight. We’re both very proud. It couldn’t have gone better, in either of our dreams, although I’m sure Chris wishes we’d been able to secure a piano without a malignant G sharp key, or else that he had written that note into less of the music. But things like that aren’t worth even remembering, in the face of this – a triumph.

“Good show.”
“Good show.”

Day 25, Mon June 26
The day after. The meaning of fatigue. We teach three hours of chorus workshops, polishing the work the students have done for their final showcase. We drive to check out a house for Chris’s brother in Eagle Rock. Back to H-W to record Chris for the showcase (since he won’t be there).

And then, since this entire trip began with a beach, looking over the Pacific from Seattle, we defy traffic and drive from the 101, over Topanga Canyon, up PCH to Zuma. Chris runs on the beach while I sit, freezing, wrapped in a towel, and feeling the first terrible sensations of post-opening maudlinity. I miss the play already. We swim in raging waves, and the waters knock me out of feeling any kind of sorry, or anything but good.

Then, trying to give Chris as much Los Angeles as he can handle in his last hours, I take the winding, wealth-track boulevard of Sunset all the way back from the coast, through the Palisades, through the Strip, through Hollywood to Los Feliz, and we stop at Zankou Chicken. I tell him that if he were Ben Affleck, or Mark Wahlberg, or (better yet) Vin Diesel on a bad day, he would dispatch his personal assistant for half a chicken.

The moment we get into the house I crash so hard I’m still falling. No one told me that writing would be harder than directing – and feel better – and hurt more – all at once. I’ve never been this tired. It has nothing to do with how little sleep my body has gotten, and everything to do with the release of tension of this reading being over. I can’t be awake.

Day 26, Tuesday, June 27
Somehow I wake up, and drive Chris to the airport this morning. The last song that his IPod shuffled into our consciousness was Rush’s “Fly By Night.”

“Fly by night, away from here
Change my life again…”

I drove away from the airport, feeling, again, like I had beaten the universe at its own game of chess. Who gets to be me, and do the things I do? Who gets to write a new chorus play-with-music while traveling from Vancouver to Los Angeles? I sang the songs from 13 CHORUS as I drove back to H-W, for another scene study meeting. Chris texted me from the security line that he’d just realized what he wished he’d played differently in the Overture. We both have the show stuck in our heads.

The rest of this week has been full of catching up on things that were shelved for the WCX – things like family, friends, finances, work. Every time I open something I think I couldn’t possibly be more broke than the last time, but this is a record. Perhaps I should say “broken.” I feel like half a person, or a quarter. I don’t know what to do with myself.

On Wednesday I had dinner with Ethan and Veronica, two friends and audience members from Sunday, to hear more of their thoughts on the script. It overwhelms me, and makes me grateful, how strong the response has been. E&V push me on the narrative structure, on the difference between TO DIE IN ATHENS (an Oedipus-based story) and 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS (a chorus-based story.) I realize I have work to do. I have to contact thirteen translators, or else decide I’m going to re-translate all these works myself.

But the feedback continues to be good. Even our audio engineer has emailed me to tell me that he’s loved working on the tape.

Today I had lunch with my parents (a good reminder that I do have a life outside of the theater, and people who love me no matter what) and went back to the high school to polish the chorus showcase scene. They are the best class I’ve ever had. I think the way that Chris and I got to be working on chorus scenes and the play at the same time really paid off.

I also returned Phil W’s drum to him, and managed to get a ticket coming off of the Cahuenga offramp. Thanks, LA. I’ve only been in Los Angeles a week…it reminds me why this town and I don’t really mix any more. Traffic school again, I suppose.

But for now, I’m here – house-sitting in Pasadena with two dogs, working on a grant for the Convergence, turning in job applications (I’m hoping to work for the DNC / for Obama’s campaign for the summer) and reeling from the many things that have happened, all at once. I’m making plans to see all the friends I’ve missed for this past year. I’m looking forward to working on a political campaign, and gaining, at least for some time, some life experience unrelated to the stage or the chorus. I know it won’t be long before I come back to it – in fact, I know I won’t leave it at all. It’ll be in my mind all the time.

“Change my life again,” indeed. My year of freelance assistant directing is over. My life of writing (playwriting, poetry, and others) is beginning.

Standard
the chorus, theater

“today is gonna be the day…”

of the TO DIE IN ATHENS reading, this evening.

There are a lot of firsts here for me. I’ve had a lot of choruses in my life, but the music for this production is at a new level. The MOH&H music came close, but that was all improvised, so it wasn’t possible to have singing or the level of melodic specificity we do now. I’ve also never really strung sections from so many different Greek plays together in one spiderweb. And it’s the first time in a long time that a text I’m responsible for adapting is going semi-public. And it’s full-length. Although I am directing this reading, I see my contribution to this play as much more playwright than director. If I had been able to find someone else to direct it, I would have – and I’ll try to do that next time.

We have been working on this text, and this music, in one way or another, since February. I guess I’ve been on the script since November. This is the seventh draft, but only the 2nd to make it to a reading.

But I’ve been on the chorus since 1998. So, in that sense, ten years.

This is closer – every production gets closer – to what it should be, what it can be. I know it’s about the process, not about the destination. But it’s hard not to feel blisteringly excited about giving the chorus its music back. Its legs.

There are no professional destinations for this yet – and the translators’ rights muddle would be something else, if we were to try to really stage it. I don’t know what the next step is. I don’t care. It’s been a battle, and an honor, to try to get it this far. There will be another step, that’s for sure, but I won’t know that till after tonight. Chris keeps saying “When we record the album…”

“You go with head held high.” – the chorus, to Antigone.

Standard
the chorus, theater

WCX, day 23

Day 23, Sat June 22
The day before the TO DIE IN ATHENS reading. Casting is finally completed, the script is done, the music is done. The work we have to do now is about stitching the quilt together.

Chris and I go to the theater and continue working through the rest of the show, stopping for every little thing that doesn’t make sense to us – every note, every stage direction, every transition. Hours. Some minor frustrations: a piano with sticky keys, a melody we thought we knew that we don’t, a section which, in retrospect, perhaps I could have cut. But we make it through. We psych ourselves out and get ready to start again.

When it’s done, we start the show again from the beginning – with me reading all the lines, and him playing all the music. I find myself getting overwhelmed by the language and actually acting, more than I have in years – trying to throw myself into Oedipus, Medea, and the others. I overdo it and have to pull back – I don’t have the vocal training to read, at full energy, and sing, for this long. But I wish I could. We stop a few times but not much.
Even with some stop-and-start it’s under an hour twenty.

Notes session and we’re done. We leave the theater after what feels like a lifetime. We are both exhausted, like running a marathon twice in a day. The show I was supposed to see this evening is sold out – the party I was supposed to go to is nearly over and miles away. No brain for anything else. We make it to the grocery store to buy food for the actors for tomorrow, and that’s it.

Collapse. Well deserved. Our of our hands.

Standard
the chorus, theater

WCX, day 22

Day 22, Fri 6/21
I did finish the rewrite of TO DIE IN ATHENS last night. This draft of the script is done. Chris and I both go straight to our computers in the morning. The backlog of work at this stage of the game is enormous – notation, rewrites, last-minute casting changes. I send out so many emails this morning I start to feel like the post office. There isn’t enough time, even with Hermione’s Time-Turner, which I broke when I dropped it in the garbage disposal.

Today is the first TO DIE IN ATHENS singing rehearsal, with Gabby and Phil C. It’s such a relief to hear actors’ voices on these words, words that have heard no voices except mine since Indianapolis. That work is followed by scene study, followed by 2 solid hours of working through the script fine-tuning details: transitions, intros, recitative sections. The music is going to be so gorgeous. It all seems to be working, so far.

“So far it’s working out,
Everything’s different now
So far…”
– Buckcherry

A side note: in directing this realistic scene, I find myself using less blocking than ever before in my life. I am content to let the actors wander wherever they want. All I care about is whether their choices seem motivated. And they do, putting on their military jackets and 50s-era dresses for the first time. The costumes constrain them beautifully. They seem much more wound up.

We work until the evening. We watch an improvised Jane Austen show at Impro Theater, with my friend Michelle in the cast, along with all the HW students. It’s delicious and extremely refined longform improv. On the way home, CF says improv might be the purest form of acting – all impulse. I say I want an improv company to be part of my theater collective, along with dance and everything. He says that concert dance is the one art form he doesn’t see merging with theater. We talk about symbiotic art. The chorus is an example of it.

The chorus doesn’t make sense, isolated from its co-symbiotes (word? not a word?) of music, dance (I guess I should say “movement”), meter, rhythm, of collective speaking and acting, of multiple actors.
Poetry is untranslateable. The language, the original beauty of it, is lost to us. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try to give the chorus back what it’s missing.

Cindy emails me an article about choruses when I get home, so depressing to me I don’t even want to link to it – another person who has cast the chorus as a single individual, and doesn’t know what their dramatic function is.

Standard
the chorus, theater

WCX, day 18-21

Day 18, Mon 6/18
Down the curving 395, all the way home. Check into the house-sitting. Rental car return. I am exhausted, and the fact that I will be staying in this one location through July 22 feels like forever.

Day 19, Tues 6/19
First day of the Choral Voice workshop at HW – we have the kids work on a unison chorus and then go into their individual presentations of the choruses they’ve brought in. It was a good idea to have them each pick a short chorus to present – invests them in the work. My teaching objective for this course is to empower the individual actor’s voice and impulse within the chorus, and to move “beyond unison into harmony, complexity, and variety.” It’s the same sort of thing I was doing with improvised choral movement, except with text.

We perfect our unison chorus first, in order to know what the point is we’re departing from – Chris’s idea, and a good one. I make them read it over and over again, for listening, for volume, for acting values. We must do it over twenty times.
This is the unison chorus, from 13 CHORUS / Colonus:
Child, child, child of Oedipus,
Miserable child of unhappy Oedipus….

In each case, CF plays drums and/or piano with the choruses after they’ve done them a couple times, improvising and supporting them. There is a wonderful “aha” moment when the first kid hears his film-music-style improv behind her text, and she realizes how much more powerful she is with music behind her…it’s great.

“The chorus is never alone,” I say, quite often.
“People come in groups. The chorus is never alone.”
“The music is part of the chorus.”

The individual choruses the kids brought range from Greek stuff to Shakespeare to pop music. We also hear quite a number of selections from SPRING AWAKENING and SWEENEY TODD. I love some of the short Greek ones: one girl brings in just “But who would do that? Who would choose to be dead?”

We hear each kid present his or her chorus individually, and then I start shading them in – adding
more actors, either as spectators or second voices. We don’t quite finish the presentations of individual choruses.

That same day, I also begin scene study work, on a scene with a character who’s lost his arm in a war. CF works in a practice room in and around our sessions – we are spending hours and hours every day on choruses now. Our work on the schedule was worth it.
Dinner with my parents, Katsuya. We stop by Semele in the evening – it will host the reading of 13 CHORUS this weekend – and check out the space. Unfortunately, the piano can’t be opened, so we won’t have prepared piano as we’d hoped, but in all other ways it’s excellent.

Day 20, Weds 6/20
I wake up and have some intense dental work done at the crack of dawn, then return for the second day of the Choral Voice WS at HW. We return back to the unison chorus – the kids are outraged – “You said we were moving beyond unison!” but only to make it more complicated: we introduce cacophony, chaos, harmony voices. One group seems to grasp this intuitively, the other insists on dividing choral speakers into “core” and “coloring” members. I find this a bit simplistic at first but the notation of it is a useful phrase.

After our check-in with unison, we finish the individual chorus presentations. I encourage them to classify choruses – narrative, performative, moralistic – “the way things are, the way things are supposed to be” – speaking to the audience – speaking in public – but don’t labor the point. Next we move into small-group presentations of separate choruses – “breakaway groups,” as it were. I let them break up to prepare the choruses on their own. Then I assemble all the groups on stage and tell them we’re going to do all the choruses at once – but we run out of time. It’s a very dramatic finish to the first group, but I feel like I mistimed it a bit. My pacing is even more off in the second group, and we don’t even finish their individual chorus presentations. We do take lots of time to really finesse each chorus, which never hurts.

I have to remember that there is no timeline here. They learn as much as they’re ready to learn. I can work quickly if they can – if they want to dig deep into a particular concept, there’s no reason not to. I like to follow their energy when I can.

It’s not easy, but I do enjoy being able to work with high-school-age actors on extremely difficult and experimental concepts. I feel like they can tell how hard this stuff is, and if they’re good – and these are – they like it.

More scene study, and Chris and I work some more on the play, in a practice room the size of a teacup. We are hunched over the piano like it’s food. He’s working very fast. Dinner with Chris’s brother Dan: we grill corn, salmon, and rutabagas. I manage to break a bracelet and spill the grill’s ash tray all over the front porch steps. CF and DF play on keyboards and drums, Journey, Rush, sugarcane rock, and I can’t enjoy it. My mind is elsewhere, that’s for sure. I am exhausted – I have one scene to rewrite and it’s not happening. Casting woes, too. I sleep badly, as I always do when I know I’m supposed to be writing.

Day 21, Thurs 6/21
I meet at the HW Coffee Bean, scene of high-school skullduggery and iced blended things, with a former classmate of mine who’s thinking of directing a Greek play next year. It’s wonderful to dive back into the seas of LYSISTRATA – and it’s very satisfying for both of us to be working together again. We talk about text selection, adaptation, translation. She thinks there may be an opportunity for me to come out and play with choruses with her kids. That’d be awesome.

Third day of the Choral Voice WS at HW. My classmate joins me to hear the kids’ work: I have them do some unison for her, to prove they still remember it, then some cacophony/chaos/harmony on the unison. I then drill them slowly on having one speaker present an individual chorus with a 2nd and 3rd voice being added – very rudimentary, very step-by-step, but I want her to see it. I think the review helps them, too.

Next I throw some harder text at them, a 3-part canon Chris wrote out of the “A promise to you is no promise at all” section. They get it all. I’m quite proud of them. They concentrate. My classmate leaves. Bringing in an audience member of sorts really helped them step it up. I am grateful for her presence, and decide to remember this next time.

I decide to give them an exercise I know they can succeed at – I break this group up into even smaller groups, 2-person sections, and let them work on their chorus presentations that way. Some nice surprises out of this. They try to derail the work with silliness but I keep agreeing to all their ideas, and the silliness – which is really just energy – leads to more choruses. I’m happy with it.

The next group comes in. I had planned to build them up from unison, like the first one, but they are very eager to do 4 choruses on stage at once, as I promised at the end of the last session. I don’t think they can handle it, but I let them try – and sure enough, they are ready, and we break out into a Marriage-Of-Heaven-And-Hell-style free radical chorus jam session. Anything goes. All the texts, all the time. It’s quite lovely. The kind of class that makes you love teaching.

A spontaneous moment: “What is a chorus? Is anything a chorus?” and I bounce it back to the group: and they are ready with answers. “A chorus has to have an audience.” “A chorus talks about the way things are supposed to be.” “A chorus knows the story already.” In my head, I think, “A chorus is never alone. People come in groups.” But they know that – it’s so obvious, it doesn’t need to be said.

I have a scene study session on the short scene, and I have the kids do an exercise where they get to say all their subtext out loud. I think I stole it from Amina’s Meisner class. It’s quite emotional, but worth it.

CF and I work for a couple more hours after the workshop. He’s been highballing, and has finished all the music for the show, on time. (And I still have a scene to rewrite…) The jazz combo practice rooms have great energy – there’s a sign on the wall that says “Make sure to leave the room looking as if it’s been ransacked by Visigoths.”

Dinner at Mexicali, tequila, and a 23-minute-long Dream Theater song on the drive home. I water a lawn in Pasadena and feel like all the stability I gave up to pursue this career could be mine at the drop of a hat – just by inhabiting someone else’s house. Walk the dogs, and sit with laptops in the living room. Clearly, I’m not rewriting, but blogging, all appearances to the contrary. All right, Theseus. Je vous attend.

(It is such a relief to write a post that doesn’t have to be categorized as “travel” as well as everything else. There is no travel going on right now. Thank goodness.)

Standard