Category Archives: the chorus

the chorus, travel

WCX, day 15-17

Day 15, Fri 6/13
On every road there is, trying to leave the Bay Area. Dropping off friends, picking up cars, returning other cars: we drive from San Jose to Sausalito. I get hopelessly lost on the many variations of Sir Francis Drake Blvd, bouncing between 580 and 101, almost taking a detour to San Quentin. But we get out of town by 3 pm, just in time for the Friday traffic.

We’re heading to Vermilion Valley Resort by Mono Hot Springs where we’re meeting CF’s friend Jason (“Sarong” is his trail name) on the Pacific Crest Trail. Jason calls just as we are heading out of town, so we know he’ll be there. This is great, because we were just hoping to show up and get lucky with the timing – tough when you’re trying to coordinate with someone walking from Mexico to Canada. But he’s there, waiting for us. We drive faster.

The 13 Chorus project (now TO DIE IN ATHENS) looms very large in my mind, and Chris’s too. We are both aware that the rewrite places us under the gun in terms of generating new material.

We spend the first 3 hours of the drive making a schedule for next week and going over our notes, musical and dramaturgical, for the rewrite. We’ve actually worked without a set schedule thus far, just using spare time in between traveling to talk over things. But it’s getting too close to have that flexibility any more. It’s an intense work session. We decide we’re going to work three hours a day in and around the workshops at HW, and add no new music after Thursday. We’ll do runthroughs Fri and Sat to prepare ourselves for the rehearsal and the reading Sun.

Chris has questions about the WASPS section being reinserted, and I discover that there’s a way to still have it but make the transition from Oed. at Colonus smoother. It means I am not quite done with rewriting, but it is a cut and a simplification. I want to be as much like O.S. as possible (Lydia playwright) in taking every good suggestion that comes along. I’m not there yet. I so wanted to be done with writing this thing. But this is a really good improvement on the text.

We talk through the new stuff musically up until the Wasps/Persians chorus mash-up. Just as we finish that, we emerge from a miserable stretch of highway into a curving, two-lane rural road. Into the mountains. I resolve to leave the play behind me, at least for 24 hours.

The sun goes down on us as we’re still going up the mountain, and we travel by a variety of lakes and byroads in the Mono area before we finally get to Vermillion. Once we get to the general Mono area, the road is so curvy and beautiful that we’re driving at about 5 MPH. Seven miles on one spur, seven miles on another, past enormous rocks, snowbanks, lakes, and reservoirs. It takes us an additional 2.5 hours once getting to the Mono area to locate Jason and Vermillion, because every misdirection takes at least half an hour each way. No one knows where Vermillion is, but we eventually find two folks from Canada who are familiar with the thru-hiking scene. You keep going, and then you keep going further.

There are signs everywhere for SoCal Edison, and power is being diverted from dams there all the way to my native Los Angeles. Makes me think of the Owens Valley.

We find the resort, marked by a circle of thru-hikers at a fire telling bear stories. Sleeping outside, under the trees.

Day 16, Sat 6/14
I sleep in, even on the ground. The first thing I see is an enormous tree when I poke my head out of the sleeping bag. Waking up at Vermillion, in a thru-hiker’s resort. We connect with CF’s friend Jason, who’s just come out of a ten-day stretch in the high Sierras, and are going to take him to stay at a friend’s condo in Mammoth for two days. We drink coffee surrounded by pine needles, and stare at a drying-up lake.

On the road: we drive from Mono Hot Springs through Yosemite Valley to Mammoth. Yosemite is crammed with tourists, so we don’t get out of the car much – we just take the scenic loop around the valley.

We approach Mammoth via 120, skimming the edges of red and blue mountains, and take Jason to a grocery store in town. He’s eager to resupply. We eat and drink at the condo and make plans for hiking tomorrow.

Day 17, Sun 6/17
Mammoth. Hiking at altitude: harder than it looks. I chicken out of a ten-mile hike across a pass to Devil’s Postpile, and end up sitting and reading Sophocles by Horseshoe Lake. Chris continues the hike and connects with another thru-hiker, Laces, en route – she joins us back at the condo that evening to shower, rest, and do laundry.

We clear the CO2 from our lungs in a hot tub. I’m not going to pretend that this condo thing isn’t fantastic. Chris and Jason talk football (and thru-hiking!) with a group of San Diego tourists, one of whom is another Dara.

After dinner, I discover I can get online, so I take a deep breath and deal with the casting emails. Things seem to have (mostly) worked themselves out, and I’m within a stone’s throw of a final cast. Semele is kindly letting us use their theater, so we have a space for the reading Sunday.

Day 18, Mon 6/18
We drive to Los Angeles today. The choral voice workshop at H-W begins tomorrow.

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the chorus, theater, travel, Uncategorized, writing

WCX, days 6 – 12

Day 6, Weds 6/4 – Day 8, Fri 6/6
Ashland, Ashland, Ashland. There’s never enough time. I have nothing more to add to what I said in my previous post – only that I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to see, due to being really under the weather for most of this stop. I will definitely be coming back for CLAY CART, OTHELLO and the other shows I missed as soon as I can. It’s a great season this year. I also saw some old friends. Not enough of those, either. I have to go back. It’s so frustrating to have getting sick correspond with your most beautiful outdoor stop on the trip. Mountains and rivers and theater, all missed. Still, did get to see one very heated political Shakespearean tragedy, and that worth all the trouble.

What? Coriolanus in Corioles?

Day 9, Sat 6/7
Feeling much better. We rent a car and drive the most scenic route possible from Ashland to the San Jose airport, dropping off the car five minutes before the cutoff. Highlights of the trip: the 101, the 1, the Humboldt redwoods, Confusion Hill, Whiskey Creek Road, and a gas station in Mendocino that sells organic wine. Cisco picks us up at the airport and we talk about old friends.

Day 10, Sun 6/8
Brunch and an enormous Stanford/Mirlo reunion at Stacks in Menlo Park, complete with an RA! I get to meet Quentin (of Megan) and Ben (of Romina), two husbands of my freshman dormmates. The evening is composed of Scrabble and Laphroaig. I get to play “GYRE.”

Day 11, Mon 6/9
We drive around Sausalito and Marin County with an old friend of a friend. The evening is, again, composed of Scrabble. I begin the next pass of the rewrite of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS during the Scrabble game. I get to play “DIPTYCHS” off of “DIP,” the highest-scoring Scrabble play I’ve ever accomplished, 60 points. Cisco attempts to play “ANBOGUS,” which, in case you’re wondering, is not a word – although both “QAT” and “FORGAT” are. I feel the rewrite energy swamping me and I know I’m not going to be able to rest again until the play has a Draft 6. And a new title.

I don’t manage to do much rewriting, only to psych myself out about the need to do it. I do, however, discover a very confusing note in my OED. AT COLONUS edition, indicating that one of the most dramatic sections is “similar to a dirge.” I consult with a Stanford classicist. A dirge? Really?

Day 12, Tues 6/10
Morning in Mountain View. Today is a major work day, making up for all the fun over the weekend. We spend about 6 hours at 2319 working on the piano – CF transfers all the guitar music he’s written. It amazes me how much pieces of music that I thought were so attached to one instrument shift flawlessly into another. He was completely right about many of them, esp. the MEDEA sections, being better suited to piano.

We also demo techniques for integrating his music into the HW choral voice workshop. I read a variety of choruses out loud and he plays along with them. Some bumps in the road at first – I don’t know exactly what it is I’m trying to do, only what doesn’t work. After some false starts, we end up choosing a chorus section which I’ve adapted myself, which is more rhythmical than some of the other translations out there, for the first unison exercise.

Child, child, child of Oedipus,
Miserable child of unhappy Oedipus,
We pity you in your despair,
Just as we pity him for his misfortune –
But we tremble to think of what the gods may do.
We cannot risk helping you.
We will not kill him – that is enough.
But you must leave our city at once.

We’re very well prepared for the first day of the chorus workshop, I think. We will have to do some new preparation after we see where the students are at in responding to our work. But we’re ready for Day One – and I have lots of directions it can go after that.

During the day, I also meet with two old friends and Stanford professors – a computer scientist and a humanist. I talk theater with both of them. One of them tells me that I’m doing something meaningful with my life. I hope she’s right.

After a brief stop for sandwiches and a mid-rewrite crisis of confidence, we go to a Mountain View coffeehouse and I plow ahead on the rewrite. Suddenly, the play opens itself up to me again. I add new characters – a Messenger and Darius – and a mixed-up ending composed of the ending of seven different plays. I’m still working on it now.

Zeus in Olympus is the overseer
Of many doings. Many things the gods
Achieve beyond our judgment. What we thought
Is not confirmed and what we thought not, the gods
Contrive. And so it happens in this story.

The play is now tentatively titled TO DIE IN ATHENS.

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the chorus

from passing strange

Great show. Live musicians on stage the whole time. And this is what I realized: The (epic)chorus is a chorus of characters: it is composed of many people each in their own one-man show: portraying many characters, at once, consecutively, etc. It is composed of a group of epic poets.

I think this is why ADing on GOLDA was so pertinent to my work. Although the actress was a chorus of one, she was still choral in the fluidity of her identity.

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SAGN, the chorus

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.

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family, the chorus

We interrupt the theater for a shout-out

Yesterday was my brother’s birthday, and he sent me, in the mail, a CD he made of a sound recording of CASSANDRA SPEAKS/CLYTEMNESTRA RESPONDS, my wild attempt to create a 9/11 show with choruses. I haven’t had the courage to listen to it yet. That was 2001, and this is 2008, and I’m still working on this stuff. I can’t imagine what I thought I was doing seven years ago. I can barely figure it out now.

But I do want to say that if it weren’t for Zack and Shweta, I would have absolutely no documentation of this ambitious and flawed project. It was a time in my life when I was keeping bad records. They both attended the performance, and Shweta had a script – and Zack a recording.

This is not the first time in my life that Zack has helped me remember something important, something I don’t want to forget. He’s the best brother there ever was (and nothing like Hank Stamper). Happy birthday, ZAW. Wish you many more.

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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, 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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the chorus

On pledging one’s life, again, to the impossible

Two days ago limbs were falling off a dead tree in Kim’s yard and Robert was saying how he thought he could cut it down, 3 inches at a time, by climbing to the top with a rope around his waist. No one was willing to let him do it, but I could see that he was perfectly convinced of his ability to finish the job.

I love the chorus because it is my dead tree that I’ve climbed to the top off. I may very well die in the attempt (I hope to die in the attempt!) or drop branches on someone’s hapless Toyota below – but I think I can do it, and that’s all that matters at the moment. I keep on cutting it down, 3 inches at a time.

Driving with Robert and Caitlin, from Pendleton back to Indy. Listening to the radio. All 3 of us chiming in, as a chorus, on “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.” Our 3 voices, without premeditation, joining together. Thrilling. Realizing once again that audiences singing along with choruses (radio choruses?) is my latest obsession. Audiences knowing texts well enough to recite them. Orality by proxy. Reviving oral epic chorus-poetry.

Mariel, at Caitlin’s unbirthday, said I should write a chorus book and call it “Preaching to the Chorus.”

Aquarius…
Aaah-quaaar-iii-us….

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the chorus

Mission: Clarified

There was a moment in our Sunday readthrough where I was explaining to all the dancers that it was okay to sing even though they didn’t sing, because they were in a chorus. I talked about Rocky Horror / Messiah / Buffy: The Musical / Sound Of Music sing-alongs, and religious music, and I eventually said “I want to make a world where I can go see Greek plays and sing along with them, from the audience.” And I had a moment of “Oh, THAT’S why I’ve been working on this for so long.” Because that would be worth any amount of work.

I have seen the chorus, and it has a V on its forehead in lipstick.

(Robert says when you google the Greek chorus, I’m one of the later results. I haven’t been able to replicate that, but just that it happened once made me very happy.)

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convergence, F&F, the chorus, writing

back in the saddle

Directing, that is, or travel – both. Spent the weekend between Red Bank and Philly, exploring the NJ Transit system. (Penn – Red Bank – Rahway – Trenton – Septa to 30th St.) Saw Aaron’s gory and wonderful MACBETH at TRTC, and met to talk SAGN choruses.

In Philadelphia, I visited Eileen and Danny, and achieved the rewrite of 13 Ways of Looking At The Chorus (which I’ve retitled “The Chorus Complex” in homage to Oedipus, for this draft, at least…) between 4 and 8 am. It felt creatively productive to see those guys again, but I also think it was just time to get it done. It’s funny how when you’re really ready to write something, you just wake up, no matter what hour of the day it is – and write it.

The new script has way more rhyme in it than I had imagined it would.

Today Susan and I saw Stoppard’s ROCK N’ ROLL (loved the second act, could have done without the first) and this evening I had design teleconferences with David (video) and Chris (piano.) I fly to Indianapolis tomorrow morning for pre-production on the Convergence and this flexibly titled chorus project. Rehearsals begin 1/31.

This has been a really wonderful stay in NYC, and unless something else comes up, I plan to be back in this city in April, May, and June – seeing lots of theater, and working on a script.

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