I had a meeting on Friday with Professor Weber. Keywords: THE TRIAL OF LUCULLUS (Brecht’s radio play, the Paul Dessau opera) the Humboldt grant, Heiner Muller’s PHILOCTETES, the Festival d’Avignon, the Schiller marathon, the Schaubuhne, Moliere, the Comedie-Francaise. We also talked about THE INVESTIGATION.
JoAnne Akalaitis is on campus for the next week, in residency with the Public Theater, working on THE BACCHAE.
My parents saw ACROSS THE UNIVERSE and called me to say that I should do a musical based on Dylan (too late) or Queen (too late) or Fleetwood Mac.
“Except RUMORS already is a musical…”
“You know, like MOULIN ROUGE…”
I want to do FASHION NUGGET: THE MUSICAL. I see it as the story of one excessively self-reflective guy and the voices in his head. (Now that’s theater.)
Actually, I think it would be great to do something called JUKEBOX MUSICAL – maybe it’s a dance-improv-chorus thing? Where the audience actually gets to pick the songs from the jukebox and they improvise dance (and a plot, and characters) to whatever it is? And the plot continues to the next song? Maybe that would be truly awful.
But, look, a real musical made out of a variety of different rock songs – like a jukebox…oh wait, that’s ROCK OF AGES…Anyway, the form is in the air. I am serious about Cake.
Theatre of NOTE is, by far, the best small theater in Los Angeles, because it’s connected to its community and its audience. NOTE makes art by, for, and about the residents of Los Angeles, and has been telling wonderful and weird local stories for years. This production, “Local Story”, a NOTE member rental coming up in November is a great example of that.
If you’re in Los Angeles and want to eat some great food, see good entertainment, and support local theater, come out and support the “Local Story” cast and crew this Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at the Oasis Theatre for the LOCALS’ NIGHT Fundraiser: It’s going to be a great party.
LOCALS’ NIGHT
The “Local Story” Fundraiser
Saturday, October 20, 2007
6-10 pm
at
Oasis Theatre
5100 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Admission: $25.00 (Includes food, one complimentary drink and
entertainment) Cash only at the door.
*Included in your evening: Food. Cash bar. Opportunity Drawing.Music. Prizes. Storytelling. Love. Laughs.*
RSVP via email: localstoryplay @ gmail.com
Confirmed Performers: Steve Silverman, Bobby Banuelos, Gina Garcia, Courtney Hoffman,
and Hiwa Bourne.
Please, come wearing a costume representing your own local story, hometown or culture. Even if it’s just your grandpa’s hat or a T-shirt with your favorite sports team on it. The best costume will receive a special gift.
All proceeds from this event go to support “Local Story”, a new play by Kristen Palmer, produced by Inger Tudor, Karen Smith, Phil Curry and Michelle Hilyard in association with Theatre of NOTE.
Cast: Jefferey Emerson, Jennifer Ann Evans, Elizabeth Liang, Monroe Makowsky, Mandi Moss, Michelle Hilyard and David Wilcox.
For more information about “Local Story”, please go to: http://www.myspace.com/localstoryplay
Also in great things at NOTE, Wreck of the Unfathomable gets Pick of the Week in the LA Weekly.
I finished a big project today – a draft of various lists of projects I am and am not interested in taking on, for another grant, this one multi-year. I called it “Planet Admin” and “Planet Art,” and there was a sub-list called “Forbidden Planet” of things I no longer want to keep doing in the theater world.
It was actually a lot of fun to write, as testimony to the weirdness of the last two years – from the Open Fist to the Matrix to NOTE to the Met to the many lives and theatres of Bill. It included things like:
“- Cleaning the premises of the theater in any way, or killing rodents or insects which have infested the theater, or dealing with fire or health inspectors.
-Organizing other people’s files, throwing out other people’s trash.
– Reminding people about phone calls, appointments, etc.
– Laundry or dry-cleaning.
-Cooking, bartending, food or alcohol preparation, serving, transportation or storage.
-Building management, facilities operation (lightbulbs, carpets, toilets)”
What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever done for your “art”? Have you distributed buckets around the floor of an ancient shell of a vaudeville stage, to catch the water during the show?
Have you used a ShopVac to suction water, standing a foot deep, from the floor of the women’s restroom, and pumped it back outside – even as rain was coming in through giant holes in the wall?
If not, why not? 🙂 And would you do it again?
But the Planet Art list was a lot of fun to write. It’s good to be clear that I want to be moving forward on directing one show a year, writing one play a year, going abroad, and doing chorus workshops.
I think I should remind myself that I have already achieved all those goals for this year, and if I do nothing more for the rest of 2007, I will have already done more than enough. How about directing one show, assisting on five, (MWB, RnJ, T, GB, L) and traveling throughout the US? And teaching more darn chorus workshops than I ever have, before, in one year? The style in which I live my life is a style of overwork.
Tasks for the rest of the day include adapting the right page from Flatland and getting back to Ellen with a poem. If I can do those things, I think I can spend tomorrow watching movies.
It’ll be nice to have a few days in Portland. I leave on Tuesday, after another understudy rehearsal with Joan.
NOTE has two shows, Chris Kelley’s Wreck of the Unfathomable and Barry Rowell’s Before I Wake (dir. Ezra Buzzington, who co-produced MOH&H) both opening tonight.
Some of the best and most gory, October-appropriate theater in Los Angeles. Not to be missed. (B4 I Wake is a late-night, taken from Dracula.)
You should probably be at the October meeting of the Director-Choreographer Network, where they’re going to discuss the LCT Directors’ Lab and the Drama League Directors’ Project Fellowship Program.
6-7:30 pm, SCDF, 1501 Broadway, Suite 1701, NYC.
Reservations required. Free. RSVP: foundation @ ssdc.org
” FYI, one of the (formerly) live plants on SL was
dead when we came in tonight, so Josh removed it from
the stage. There is a fake plant a little bit in
front of it, so there isn’t a noticeable hole. They
are continuing to water the plants every other day.”
One more living creature sacrificed to Dionysos.
Via The Stranger: Women’s Expressive Theater (NYC) has threatened to sue Washington Ensemble Theatre (Seattle) over its name.
(The Seattle WET is one of the companies I was thinking of trying to do a workshop at, before the month of November started leading me to the East.)
The script of Matt and Ben, the play about Damon and Affleck as written and played by two women, just arrived via UPS. These are the opening words:
(The stage is dark.)
MATT. It’s stealing!
BEN. Adaptation is the highest form of flattery!
MATT. Imitation?
BEN. Yes, Imitation. Adaptation. Yes.
So maybe this is how we can have theater with common cultural references – theater about celebrities, instead of about politicians. Instead of Henry 4 and King Louis.
And this experiment in representing celebrities without actually representing them – not impersonating, not even trying to cast close to them, deliberate cross-racial and cross-gender casting – lends itself so well to theater.
It’s not about re-presentation. It’s not about competing with film.
It’s a form of art and of satire that can only exist on stage.
I love it.
From Sam French’s ridiculously detailed prop lists:
“Large bakery cupcake with vanilla icing (1 per show, should be approximately 3 inches in diameter. If not available, improvise with a large corn muffin and a can of frosting)”
If not available? When is a cupcake not available, after the Cupcake Craze of 2006? One can only hope that at some future time in the universe a cupcake will not be available.
Tonight at Molly Magee’s, after two run-throughs in our final day of tech, (and my laptop fainting like a woman of fiction in the middle of the second one) we fell into another conversation about bad theater and the way it happens so often – through money, through paint-by-numbers directing or writing, through “prescription audiences,” through mediocrity.
We criticized theater with the attention to detail of intimate family. We know her flaws better than anyone else does. (And, I suppose, she knows ours.)
I suddenly overheard myself saying that every new audience is an new opportunity to do something better. I don’t always believe that, but I try to work as if I did.
Dara Weinberg 