Category Archives: travel

travel, Uncategorized

welcome to brooklyn

“It was all good. She had forgotten how good the world was.” – Phillip Pullman

I need to go to Target right now and buy all the things you don’t need in a year of freelance assistant directing, most pressingly, sheets and a towel. But I’m here (having got the taxi driver lost on the way over, and driving through neighborhoods full of Hebrew-language posters), I’ve learned that this neighborhood is Clinton Hill, I’ve met my Pratt Institute roomies, and it’s a fabulous four-bedroom apartment with an outdoor porch, a cat named Cheeseburger, college-style couches, a beautiful kitchen, and everything one could want. Including, praise the gods, wireless, and a bagel place.

It’s gray and it looks like it could start raining at any moment. To the streets!

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travel

the things they carried

For me, buying a new suitcase is like adding a new room to your house. It’s a big deal. Today I spent a long time at a luggage store – maybe not the best way to appreciate Vancouver, but an essential stop for me. I left Portland with insufficient luggage to carry all my stuff, and it’s been bugging me ever since. I ended up augmenting my luggage stores, not replacing, so now I have to check a bag when I travel. This isn’t a bad thing. If I’d caved and done this earlier, I might have enjoyed the logistics portion of this travel more.

I now travel with:
– a rolling carryon / computer case / file bag (which I bought today, it’s a kind of office bag)
– a guitar in a hard shell case (which gets checked)
– a purse
– a oversized backpack (which gets checked)
It’s like one of every type of luggage. And I also have a collapsible duffel within the oversized backpack, for dirty clothes.

Having this new “room” to my house – the office/file/computer bag – makes me much more relaxed about the traveling that still lies ahead.

Tonight we’re going to Autreche – tomorrow I take the bus back to Seattle.

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SAGN, travel

Vancouver

SAGN is open. We had a glorious show for a very appreciative Portland audience, who clapped wildly at “The Great Northwest – where it is in him for a man to be as big and important as it is in him to be.” It was fun and well-deserved. We partied at the Armory, the Life of Reilly, and a club in Southeast that I couldn’t tell you where it was. I slept through my first train, and made the second one.

My year of assistant directing is complete. On Thursday, when Aaron gave the last of the notes, I felt something slipping away from me, like taking off a jacket. It’s over.

I’m celebrating in Canada. Arrived by train from Portland and bus from Seattle yesterday, for the first vacation in 4 years. Staying with Krist3l and MiQ. Drum and bass and a fake Halloween party last night, breakfast this morning with a Vancouver actor named James – the world of theater is as big as a postage stamp, and that stamp travels to every city in the world. We talked about audiences and locations and all the same old things. It feels like home, but everywhere does now.

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SAGN, travel

Sometimes A Great Portland

After a day of travel, I’m awake and alive in beautiful downtown Portland, blogging from the cafe at Powell’s on 11th, and there is no more snow. In fact, it’s so warm I don’t have to wear a jacket. The light looks like San Francisco, especially in the afternoons, and it’s like I can tell, in my bones, that the Pacific Ocean is closer than it’s been in months.

I checked into my apartment, walked around the Pearl District, wandered into a free reading of a play being considered for next year’s season at PCS, did yoga until my head felt like it was going to fall off my spine, and am generally catching up on weeks of backlogged business since before the Convergence and Denver.

I miss Robert & Caitlin, and I had a moment of loneliness when I found myself in my artist housing, with nothing to do but unpack and start prepping for the next show. But it’s so, so great to be back on this coast. And my apartment has a blender, a luxury I’ve wanted since last April.

Talked to Ron Allen, too. He’s very excited about the EYE MOUTH opening at NOTE this Wednesday.

This show (SAGN) marks one year of freelance assistant directing. And one of the things I’ve learned, the hard way, is to always get to town much earlier than needed, so you can settle in. We don’t start rehearsals till the 4th of March. Plenty of time to read the collected works of Kesey.

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books, film, travel

Bibiliotheque Nomadique

Kim and I had breakfast this morning and went to Half Price Books. I got lost in brilliant, wonderful Anthony Lane‘s Eric Bentleyesque anthology of film criticism, NOBODY’S PERFECT. I adore his writing:

“On a broiling day, I ran to a screening of Contact, the Jodie Foster flick about messages from another galaxy. I made it for the opening credits, and, panting heavily — which, with all due respect, is not something that I find myself doing that often in Jodie Foster films — I started taking notes. These went “v. gloomy,” “odd noir look for sci-fi,” “creepy shadows in outdoor scene,” and so on. Only after three-quarters of an hour did I remember to remove my dark glasses.”

I had some momentary sadness about not being able to buy the book, due to being s.d.f. The only book I’ve allowed myself to acquire in the last year is Kate Christensen’s THE GREAT MAN – I took a paperback pre-release readers’ copy from a laundry room in Denver. But the day reminded me that I need to keep wandering through bookstores, and that my ideal life (which I have not arrived at yet) will include both living out of a suitcase and having a place in which to accumulate a library. An apartment is secondary. Just a library.

If I were wealthier I would buy every book I want in every city I go to, and give them away upon leaving, thereby reading everything and also disseminating bookage. Which is a lovely plan, but about as practical as the advice I read for prospective pet-adopters in a magazine today: “If you want to adopt a pet but have no time to spend with them, but have a lot of money, adopt the pet and pamper him with visits to doggie day care.” Somehow I think that the “but have lots of money” clause is going to be a problem.

More Anthony Lane in a profile: “The truth is, that if you’re working on a piece at three in the morning, you’re not Keats; you’re just late. The glitch in this argument is that I’m not a creative writer. I don’t write poetry or novels or drama but criticism, which is the eunuch of the family. I watch other people doing it and talk about what they’re doing in a squeaky, high voice.”

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travel

Ghostbusters

My second 24 hours in New York yielded buckets of theater gossip, a job prospect, a possible apartment, an exorcism of ghosts from the past, a dinner in the Village, a drink, and a dead cell phone which forced me to end the day early. Susan says there are chargers you can carry with you which operate on hand-cranks. I need some kind of backup. I’d still be out there now, but the phone decided it had had enough.

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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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family, Lydia, politics, travel

turn the page

I’m packing – tomorrow I fly to NYC, after the evening’s preview, on a red-eye. I’ve been in Denver since Dec 6th, the longest I’ve been anywhere since Ashland.

Today I met my great-aunt and great-uncle by marriage, Rose and Floyd, who have been in Denver since 1944. We had a really great conversation over dinner at Hotel Teatro Cafe on 14th before they came to LYDIA this evening – we talked about WWII, Japan, Hawaii, the 100th Battalion, the segregated units, the internment camps, the GI Bill, the US, Israel, the concept of apikoros (non-practicing believer), Judaism, Unitarianism, theater, city planning, architecture, and our families. And borders. And the meaning of global citizenship. And my brother Zack, who they haven’t seen since Lew and Susan’s wedding – fifteen years ago? – playing the piano. It was a conversation of memory and history and I’m still spinning around from the ideas in it.

Looking over the past few blog entries I can smell homesickness, longing for LA, even second-guessing my decision to spend this year running around the country like a chicken with its head cut off. But meeting people like this, even if it’s briefly, makes the entire project seem worthwhile. I never would have known them if I hadn’t come to Denver.

I hope they enjoyed the play – well, as I was saying to a departing audience member, enjoyed isn’t the right word – but I hope they were moved by it. I sat four rows from the stage tonight, and it was amazing how O.R. could make her eyes look like a brain-damaged person. Her portrayal is naturalistic in detail but theatrical in scale.

I also had a phone work session with Tony on Oedipus today, and with Amina on Medea yesterday, and the Convergence proceeds inexorably.

It’s a disjointed life I’m leading, but a full one. If there doesn’t seem to be a plot right now, maybe that’s all right. Maybe this part of my existence is more of a montage. Or an overture to an unwritten opera.

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