Category Archives: theater

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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theater

What was your first Shakespeare, and how has it affected you?

I have a theory, which probably derives from Harold Bloom, that we are directed in the course of our work as theater artists in the English-speaking world by the first Shakespeare play we ever saw. (If it was Bloom’s theory, it would expand to include all people, theater artists or otherwise.)

I tested this theory on two of my Convergence colleagues. Sure enough, we all had different answers – Robert had seen HAMLET first, which is remarkable. (I’ve never seen a live production of HAMLET.) Tony saw ROMEO & JULIET.

The very first Shakespeare I saw was MIDSUMMER, at the Theatricum outdoors. I remember these things from it:

– Puck swinging in on a rope from an enormous oak tree. The element of surprise. The feeling that the stage was alive with actors, that anyone might jump out of any crevice. That the ground, the hills, the walls were exploding with language.

– “But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so.”

– the lovers running through the twisted paths of a Topanga Canyon hill.

– the fairies saying “And I. ” “And I.” “And I.” (A chorus?)

– Bottom’s mask of a donkey’s head.

– The Mechanicals. “O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall.”

– laughing so hard that my face hurt.

– “If we shadows have offended” – the fantastic power embodied in that one actor, who was carrying all the threads of the play lightly in his mouth.

– Rhyme.

MIDSUMMER is about magic and love and language games, and I think I could even argue that it’s a landscape of imitation – between people and semihuman god-things, people and animals. Imitation being, of course, the founding principle of the improvised chorus. And it’s set in Athens, too. Which takes me back to the Greeks.

So I can derive all of my influences from it. I think I derive the other half from the film of “The Little Mermaid,” especially the fish-choruses.

SOS will be hosting an informal poll in the comments of this post. Let us (er, me) know what the first Shakespeare you ever saw was. What do you remember of it? Do you think it shaped the direction of your work, or relationship to literature, or theater? If so, how? If not, Harold wants to talk to you.

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humor rhymes with tumor, theater

(As the curtain rises, someone is taking a shower in the bathroom, the door of which is half open.)

Belatedly, via Rob Kozlowski, the Onion lets you now write to an advice column where you can Ask The Stage Directions To Tennessee Williams’ CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. I like the idea of there being stage directions to direct all of us in our lives. To give a little context. To tell us what our action is, or more likely, our emotion – something we can’t play, can’t do anything with, but is there nonetheless. This is what mine would look like, nine days out of ten:

DARA
(confusedly, as if waking up out of a nightmare drawn by Roz Chast)
What just happened?

Chris Danowski’s BRANDOHEAD stage directions were so lovely that many of the people who worked on that production wanted to somehow have them read aloud or staged. And the piece he wrote as the follow-up to BRANDOHEAD was even more intensely packed with stage directions. Now if only I’d take their advice.

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theater

ParaDaisey

Sumana directed me to a conversation at Parabasis, which I have excerpted below, about monologuist Mike Daisey‘s piece, “How Theater Failed America,” which discusses, among other things, the casting system which I have been part of perpetuating in NYC this week. (Although our show has about half its actors local, the other half from New York.)

“what Daisey essentially says (And I agree) is that the original regional theater model of rep companies has basically devolved into a system in which theaters import all of their artists from other places (mainly New York) and put on shows. […] No one in the communities they perform for has any real connection to the work they’re doing because the casts and crews are these anonymous interchangeable people who rarely come back and with whom you have no connection.”

Wicked Stage reaction, and thoughts on theater and community.

Theatre Ideas reaction: “I think the freelance system of doing theatre, where an artistic team is put together piecemeal for each project through auditions and interviews, is artistically and economically bankrupt. It turns the creation of art into a crap shoot, and denies the experience of every other group art form in existence which shows that artists who work together over time create better work. […] I think that the only way live theatre is viable, both economically and artistically, is in the form of semi-permanent companies or “tribes.” ”

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theater, travel

TriBlogCa

Last night, after the LYDIA preview, I got on a red-eye from Denver to Boston, Boston to JFK. The problem with the red-eye from Denver is the connection to the East Coast is shorter, so you don’t sleep as long.

On arriving, I took the AirTrain this morning to TriBeCa, showered at my aunt and uncle’s apartment, and went in for a full day of auditions midtown. I rode the 123 to midtown. I met the director at the Tick Tock Diner and got debriefed on the other sessions, and then we were in the audition room for 8 hours. It was an incredible day.

The actors here are just as good as everyone says they’re supposed to be. Being in an audition room blocks from Penn Station, with theater-steeped New York actors, gave me goosebumps.

Then I had dinner with my NY-based family at a German restaurant, and we talked about economics and art and social responsibility, and health care reform. My cousin showed me his samurai and skate videos from high school (he’s studying filmmaking) Tomorrow my uncle, an economist, is going to give me his take on government subsidizing the arts. These are conversations I wouldn’t have, people I wouldn’t get to see, if I weren’t traveling around like this.

I still feel homesickness, like weights in my shoes. But I think if you abandon the idea of an orientation, or a home, or a plot, you don’t feel so disoriented. So I went to bed in Denver and woke up in midtown Manhattan. Neither of them is home to me. The only place that is really starting to feel like home is an airport.

I miss the LYDIA cast and I’m sorry to not be there for opening tomorrow. But I’m lucky to be able to keep moving.

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theater

Shout-out to Cahuenga

Theatre of NOTE‘s 13th Annual Performance Marathon is going on right now, and will be going on until even the Lost Girls come home.

Excerpts from VAST WRECK and MOH&H performed in the 11th and 12th Marathons. And I saw, among other things, Judy reading Dorothy Parker quotes, Hiwa and her fellow hula performers, Rich being unmasked by fifty paper plates, fire dancing, water balloons, a spiderweb of string, people hanging by hooks in their skin, and plastic Barbies making love to robots. I ate peanut butter sandwiches and talked to strangers.

The Marathon is one of the few places where my work is comparatively tame. Someday, I’ll make something disturbed enough to go on after midnight.

It’s sad to not be there, but good to be thinking of them –
somewhere between Hollywood and Sunset, east of Wilcox and west of Vine,
in between the Hotel Cafe and Groundworks,
in between Aklia’s and Jack-In-The-Box,
around the corner from Amoeba,
around the other corner from the Piano Bar,
down the street from Solar de Cahuenga,
in between the dream of theater and the reality of money,
first to the right, second to the left, and straight on till morning.

You still have five or six hours to get there. The really trippy part is just getting started.

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theater

The “live” in theater

Just today, in this matinee’s preview, the performance was stopped for a man sitting in the front row to be helped out of his seat – they thought he was having a heart attack – and paramedics came to get him.

The SM came on the God mic and asked everyone to be patient while they assisted the gentleman having the medical emergency. The actors went into the wings.

In a couple of minutes, the man was safely out of the theater. Then the SM called for them to begin again at the top of the interrupted scene, the actors came out on stage, and the audience applauded them.

They continued on through the performance, which I think was our best yet, and received (again) a standing ovation and had to come back for more bows.

We’re all in this together, after all – actors, performers, people – we’re all doing live theater, of one sort or another. When things go wrong, and people manage to get through it, it makes the entire performance seem more special somehow.

It was as if this shadow of mortality during our show renewed everyone’s faith in the enterprise at hand, the enterprise of life – reminded us all of how short our lives are, and how we’d better be together for the time we had. And be grateful for it.

Theater is a metaphor for existence. I know I’m not the first person to have said or felt this, nor the last, but I’ve never said it to myself in the way I said it today.

Theater is the ultimate defiance of death. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but I do mean it. Life defies death – so for life to reproduce life, to re-create it, is twice defiant. And yet every show is dying from the moment it is born, just like every person – and the doubleness of theater, life upon life, makes it twice more prone to death.

Nothing is more ephemeral than the live creations of living people. Which is why it’s amazing when they live – or they live on.

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books, theater

The Caldecott medal

goes to an enormous 544-page graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. “Orphan, clock keeper, and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity.”

I have been out of touch with the world of kids’ books since I stopped working at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. Like all other interests in my life, it’s gone the way of theater. When I first got to LA, I landed a great job at Children’s Book World (where Toby used to work) but after one day of the commute from Hollywood to midtown West Side, I knew it was going to leave me too drained to rehearse in the evenings. So, very reluctantly, I had to quit.

But listening to the Golden Compass on audiobook has made me miss that universe. I wonder if there’s an opportunity for a theater company to do a new release of a straight-to-audio book, one that doesn’t have a printed version.

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