Reading of play in progress at CenterStage tonight: ran into two people who I know from Planet Theater, one only by email and another an old friend. I like how small our world continues to be.
Category Archives: theater
just finished
resurrecting all the sound and light cues and all the blocking for A VAST WRECK, which I directed in 2006. This has been, by far, the most difficult part of the grant I’m working on. It was interesting to have the opportunity to look over the show again, but, man…it was like pulling out all the stitches in something you’d already sewn together. Makes you see how it’s constructed, yes. Makes you appreciate how much work it was, yes. But I really didn’t want to take it apart. That’s one piece that, to me, was completed. Really and truly perfectly completed.
There’s nowhere to rest on that stage or in that show, and every time an actor sits down, he or she is usually overturned.
Every time I spend time away from that DVD, I forget how good the actors and the designers were. I think I must have exaggerated it in my memory, because I have that show on such a pedestal. And then I watch it again, and it’s like, “Oh, no, they were even better than how you remembered them.” Every time.
almost ready
to leave, but not quite.
I’m getting on a plane to Berlin tomorrow, and from there, a train to Wroclaw, for a week-long workshop with Song of the Goat. I’ll be back on the 20th. I won’t have phone or reliable Internet until then. I’ll put something up here, however, when I return.
To be continued.
weekend update
Last night, working on the grant in the computer lab. Rows and rows of empty workstations. Not a lot of people writing papers on the first weekend of the semester, and the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. I wanted to go to a musical improv session (the Volunteers’ Collective is starting up again) at the Red Room, but I wasn’t done with the writing. Today, I’m still working on it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the last two Parallel Octave sessions. We had unexpected guests at both. Two weeks ago, two kids–brothers, I think–who lived nearby wandered in and ended up playing spontaneous percussion for us. Last week, some actor friends came in–people I did my very first Baltimore chorus workshop with–and one of them brought her sister, who was visiting. Last night, I saw the sister again, and learned that she, like I used to, is living from job to job, from one place to another, and not paying rent.
It’s unreal, but good, that I have a space where people like that can come through and play or act. Kids, or travelers.
Today, I woke up and made pancakes for the week. I’m in the mindset of preparing in advance. Everything has to be done by Friday, when I get on a plane.
There’s a free yoga class at the Hampden Baltimore Yoga Village at 5 pm, and I’m really going to try to get finished in time to go.
nuts, ands, or bolts
Yesterday, a good recording session for ||8ve–our twentieth. (Twenty weeks of chorus workshops. I’m very happy.)
I spent the rest of the night doing various things to get ready for taking a trip to Poland next week. I haven’t mentioned it here, but I’m going there to take a theater workshop from September 9-20. There are many things that must be done before I leave, including finishing a grant.
To this end, I spent the morning organizing photo files, and am about to go print them. Looking at four-year-old productions. Remembering the person I was when I saw those people every day, when those images were moving, not fixed.
animated cacti
The Annex Theater premieres
FISTFUL OF FLOWERS
Fri Sep 3, 8pm.
Creative Alliance at The Patterson
$10, $8 mbrs & stus.
Fistful of Flowers is a soulful, multi-hued, queered Western. Collaborating with artists, performers and musicians, Annex Theater is one of Baltimore’s most innovative young companies. Hurt cowboy, ex-lovers seek vengance amidst animated cacti and live music by the company and musician Gerry Mac. A woman plays a gay man while an exit wound bleeds a thirty-foot long batik of the western landscape.
3134 Eastern Avenue
Baltimore Maryland 21224
Phone: 410-276-1651
Dissemble all your griefs and discontents
TAMORA
My worthy lord, if ever Tamora
Were gracious in those princely eyes of thine,
Then hear me speak indifferently for all;
And at my suit, sweet, pardon what is past.SATURNINUS
What, madam, be dishonoured openly
And basely put it up without revenge?TAMORA
Not so, my lord; the gods of Rome forfend
I should be author to dishonour you.
But on mine honour dare I undertake
For good Lord Titus’ innocence in all,
Whose fury not dissembled speaks his griefs.
Then at my suit look graciously on him;
Lose not so noble a friend on vain suppose,
Nor with sour looks afflict his gentle heart.
[Aside to Saturninus] My lord, be ruled by me, be won at last.
Dissemble all your griefs and discontents;
You are but newly planted in your throne;
Lest then the people and patricians too,
Upon a just survey take Titus’ part
And so supplant you for ingratitude,
Which Rome reputes to be a heinous sin,
Yield at entreats, and then let me alone
I’ll find a day to massacre them all
And raze their faction and their family,
The cruel father and his traitorous sons,
To whom I sued for my dear son’s life;
And make them know what ’tis to let a queen
Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.
Come, come, sweet emperor; come, Andronicus,
Take up this good old man, and cheer the heart
That dies in tempest of thy angry frown.
– Titus Andronicus (1.1.427)
on my way
to an afternoon of villanelle choruses at the Free School, after an evening of ten-minute plays at the Annex. Formalists? Formalists.
their siren voice
“In June [of 1958], however, he [Beckett] was still resolutely struggling with the new prose work and finding it horribly difficult. Even though he could see clearly what he wanted to do, and that it should be only about 100 pages, he felt he was making very little progress, or only just enough to keep him from giving it up in disgust. ‘I rely a lot on the demolishing process to come later and content myself more or less with getting down elements and rhythm to be knocked hell out of when I am ready…It all takes place in the pitch dark and the mud, first part man alone, second with another, third alone again. All a problem of rhythm and syntax and weakening of form, nothing more difficult,’ he told Barney Rosset. Yet, comically perhaps, he was once again hankering after other forms of composition–theatre or radio. ‘I hear their siren voice and tell them to stick it up.’ “
– Anthony Cronin, Beckett: The Last Modernist (30.489)
Dara Weinberg 