Category Archives: theater

Baltimore, poetry, theater

Slampoonedicidecyclopsitalfringe

Yesterday, I took care of lots of business (mmm, health insurance!) and found out that I have been officially approved for my new apartment, near 30th and St. Paul in Charles Village, in the form of a lease in my email. HuzzaH.

I then went to see Single Carrot’s SLAMPOONED the second time, followed by a “slamback” where Baltimore slam poets, many of whom were associated with Baltimore’s long-running Slamicide poetry event, performed after the show.

Baltimore’s individual champion poet was there – they are trying to raise money to send him to the worlds in Berkeley. He performed a hilarious boy-meets-girl, boy-screws-girl, boy-breaks-up-with-girl-because-she-gave-him-an STD crowd-pleaser, entirely written in references to computer and Internet technology. I can’t remember the lines exactly, but it was like, “Baby, you cheated on me with a Mac?? And you didn’t use a firewall??” It was really good. I’m not conveying it adequately.

Slamicide is seeking a new venue – many of the folks at the show last night suggested the newly opened Cyclops Books down the street. Cyclops is a music, poetry, and bookselling venue at Maryland and North.

I stood outside their front door with a Louisiana musician who said his name was Traveler for about an hour before SLAMPOONED last night. He held the door for a stream of men with amplifiers, while, one hundred feet to our left, a sixteen-year-old girl was getting arrested. Traveler is on his way to Florida for awhile, to record a new album. We exchanged road woes stories and hoped the girl would get let go.

My favorite Cyclops dialogue:

A (to a large man wearing an undershirt): Are you with the band?
B: No, I’m with the strippers.

All this is to say that I think it’d be a great place for a Baltimore poetry slam…and conveniently located ten blocks or so from my new Appartement.

This Morning, someone outside my window is honking like they are getting paid for it. In a few hours, after the obligatory watering of the plants, I and friends are going to see Harry Potter (which Anthony Lane didn’t like, but I’m not going to let that stop me) and then road-tripping to DC for two Capital Fringe shows. It’s my first time in the nation’s capital. I do think it’s appropriate that all I’m doing is seeing theater. (I’m trying to send a message.)

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film, theater

I use antlers in all of my decorating

One last “why Menken/Ashman are in yr house, eating yr dinner” post from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST – I’m almost done rhapsodizing about how theatrical it is. First, Gaston has Lady M’s line, “Screw your courage to the sticking place!” They just throw it in there, in perfect rhythm with the rest of it. And then, I realized that the “No one fights like Gaston” number is totally that amazing number you give the character actor, the one who doesn’t get the girl…it’s the “Sit Down, You’re Rocking The Boat” or even the “Make Them Laugh” of this movie.

So good.

Lyricist Howard Ashman died of AIDS six months before the film was released, which is something I also didn’t know in 1991.

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theater

“What would you have me do?” – C. de Bergerac, to Le Bret

Yesterday, I finished a pass through the script of Burgess’s translation of CYRANO DE BERGERAC. I’m collaborating, for the second year in a row, with my friend J, the drama teacher at Q School, to help prepare her fall production for her high school students. Last year we worked on LYSISTRATA. This year, it’s Rostand’s CYRANO, which is one of my favorite plays.

J had already done one pass of cuts, so I was working on a script that had already been heavily edited and still needed to lose 35 pages. (It’s a very long play.) I challenged myself to find something that could be cut in every single page of the script.

I did it, with two exceptions: the second to last pages of Acts 3 and 4. This makes sense, if you think about it: those are pages on which a lot of plot elements are being tied up into one big laundry bag full of cliffhangers. You need all the information.

Otherwise, Rostand is such a poet that there was lots that could be sliced. Identifying the cuttable portions was not a problem, but reconciling myself to doing it was. The language is so gorgeous. It was particularly heartbreaking to shorten any of the love scenes with Roxane. But what’s done is done. Now J has to retype the entire thing into a new document, since so much has been cut that the script pages are illegible.

I wonder if J’s students, like the actors on every professional production of a translated / edited play I’ve ever worked on, will come in with the original text in hand, arguing for the reinstatement of their lines.

I amused myself at one point by wondering whether Cyrano, if presented with this task, would have been able to bring himself to eviscerate his own poetry.

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Poland, theater

all’s well that ends well

The US Artist Initiative is over – the blog will continue to exist as an archive of interviews conducted with all the participants each year, but won’t have daily updates.

I return to Chicago tomorrow, and then have just a few days there before moving to Baltimore. Today is a free day for me in Wroclaw. I’m going to wander around and see what there is to see that isn’t theater.

My roommates and I are packed, sitting in our living room discussing politics. It will be strange not to live with them any more – it’s been almost a month. One is on her way to Minneapolis, then Istanbul, the other to New Jersey. I don’t know when I’ll see them again, although being on the East Coast gives me hope that I can keep in touch.

This trip has been – this trip has been. It just has.

I think I’ll know more about what its impact has been on me a few years from now. I don’t know now. I know I am returning to the US with B’s Polish-English dictionary in my backpack.

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Poland, theater

Brooking Encouragement

The Peter Brook production of Beckett’s FRAGMENTS lived up to my very, very high expectations. Brook does so much with so little. His minimalist, understated, actor-driven directing reminds me of my teacher T from Harvard-Westlake. It was like coming home, seeing his work again. He’s so good. He only keeps getting better. I can’t hype him enough.

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Poland, theater

in brief,

Yesterday, I ran around Wroclaw, going to and from my housing and the Institute so many times that I finally drummed it into my head how to get from one to the other. If you keep turning around to look at the architecture, you get lost a lot. I got lost a lot.

The Market Square is very large and linear on the outside, but on the inside, is a convoluted mass of alleys. Little shops spring up behind every corner. When people try to give you directions from one place to another, they stand up and move in several different directions, like the Turtle in Logo.

Today, I stayed in and finished my presentation, and had a chance to answer email for the first time since getting here. One last breath before it all starts. Tomorrow, the conference begins.

I have new blog posts up on the USAI site – you can see the schedule of events there too, and a list of all the participants in the US Artists Initiative.

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metablog, Poland, theater

US Artist Initiative weblog launched

Last night, I started a new blog with Rachel for the US Artist Initiative project, the program through which I’m here in Poland at the The World As A Place Of Truth festival.

I’ll be writing posts about the theatrical / Grotowski experiences of the trip there, rather than here. I’ll try to link to this page when I have a new post there, but I’m hoping to write there every day. All the 30 participating US directors and theatre artists will also be able to post there, once they arrive, so it should be a good place to get different perspectives on the trip.

Here it is: US Artist Initiative Weblog – Grotowski Year 2009

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int'l theater, theater, travel

to the airport

And so, it’s time to travel again – this time with a better suitcase. I think the so-called wisdom of age is only about equipment. I am not any wiser, but I have more tools.

Yesterday was a day of packing and errands and scenes from John Lennon’s music and discovering that the poets are a bunch of unreliable narrators all over again. It is possible to do so many things quickly in Chicago, but sometimes quickly is not well – like my decision to buy an alarm clock that turns out to beep every hour, on the hour. I don’t think I can take it with me. The other people on my ten-hour flight would have something to say about it.

There’s no more time. Maybe that’s what the clock is trying to tell me.

I have just emailed people to let them know that I am traveling, today, to Wroclaw, Poland, to participate as one of the US directors in the US Artists’ Initiative as part of the Grotowski Year 2009. This will involve attending performances in the World As A Place of Truth festival, going to workshops, and learning a lot more about director Jerzy Grotowski’s work and influence. I am one of about 30 US directors who have been invited to participate in this initiative, and to observe. It’s such a great honor for me to have been included with this group of people.

My grandfather left Poland in the 30s to come here, and I am going back – the first of our family to return since then. Those who left, survived, and those who stayed, did not. I will be trying to remember that story while I am traveling, too.

My flight is nonstop Chicago to Warsaw. C is driving me to the airport this afternoon, during which time we’re going to talk Indy Convergence some more – I will have an opportunity to give a short presentation on my work and my affiliated theater company.

I will be trying to blog live from the conference. My cell phone will not work at all, starting today, until I return around July 4th, but I will have some access to email.

There is a window of Chicago directions left on this screen from last night. It’s always funny when you wake up and see maps from yesterday. It reminds me of seeing the Thomas Guide to Los Angeles’s freeways, or some other guidebook to a place I don’t live any more. I close the window.

Here’s to making a new map.

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grants & fundraising, ideas, theater

booked to why

I have been taking some time off to rest and end the vicious cycle of endless ear infections, which is my latest excuse for not blogging. This has not prevented me from, today, ensconcing myself at the library to finish another grant proposal for a Chicago theater that I should have been done with days ago.

Here is the list of books my brother recommended in response to my Julian Jaynes quandary.

School A
Metaphors We Live By – Lakoff
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things – Lakoff

School B:
Mental Spaces – Fauconnier
Mappings in Thought and Language – Fauconnier/Turner

Synthesis of A and B:
The Literary Mind – Turner (which was the first one he mentioned)
More than Cool Reason Lakoff/Turner
Where Mathematics Comes From Lakoff/Núñez

I am imagining a Saturday in July, or even August, where I have time to sit down at a library with all of them in a stack.

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theater, writing

footnotally,

didn’t manage to write the though-of-Hamlet-our-brother’s-death scene for playwriting class, by the way. I thought I knew what it was, so I wasn’t able to do it. I can only write things with uncertainty. This is like the time I spent two years thinking I was going to write a poem that was “like PRUFROCK, except better” and didn’t write a thing.

Instead, I flaked and brought in a scene from a play I’m not even “working on,” something old and messy. Course, everyone liked it better than anything I’ve brought in all quarter – and the reason I’m not “working on” it is because it’s too painful – and that’s why it’s better, even though it’s as raw as (insert appropriate comparison) – it’s realer. Hrmph. I would rather be stabbed in the eyeballs with pencils than write any more of it. At least today.

Is “I would rather be (X) than (Y)” a comparison too? I have to watch it.

I don’t have a “playwriting” category. I just have “writing” and “theater.” Somehow I think this post, which is more about cowardice than courage, is not going to be the post that creates that category.

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