Safely in Los Angeles, where we made the Chez Panisse persimmon pudding today, and visited the Gelsons, the TJS and the Vons to get all the ingredients for tomorrow. Zack and Pam are en route.

So we’re almost done with the projects that brought me here. Today is my last day in Ithaca, which makes me very sad, but you can always return to Ithaca. Penelope is always waiting for you here, along with memories of Telluride, rivers, waterfalls, rocks, falling leaves, friends, and the mixed joy and extreme sadness of being an intellectual, whatever that may or may not mean from one moment to another. I never feel like myself more than in this town.

It was snowing last night as we walked home and I saw snowflakes on the ground and on my jacket, looking like crystal beads or tiny models of chemical molecules.

Yesterday, I finished the draft of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS. 25 pages in 12-pt Courier. Its intertwining plots are now like this:
– Oedipus at Colonus
– Medea
– Oedipus at Colonus
– The Wasps
– The Persians
– The Wasps & The Persians, simultaneously (staggered, and so on)
– The Persians and Antigone
– Antigone
I hope with all my heart that it makes sense to the folks in Indy, because I don’t know how to make it make more sense without directing it. At least I had some great collaborators – being able to have the privilege of rewriting and restructuring the greatest dramatists who have ever written is always satisfying. This made me remember how much fun it was to work on the script for LYSISTRATA, how I felt that each new translation I wove into it brought me closer to the original and to the spirit of the Greeks’ work.

Amina continued work on the web design for UpstageProject – we are almost at the point of being able to launch the blog. I’m going to try to write a manifesto of sorts for its launch, too, as Heidi Julavits did for THE BELIEVER – something about why we think the world needs this website now.

I’ll be in Los Angeles tomorrow, after months away. I was reading Ursula LeGuin this morning, from her book DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, and she quotes Carolyn See writing in GOLDEN GIRLS:

“Where did those girls walk? They walked for miles in the center of the city…They walked northeast and down a long sweet incline to where Griffith Park Boulevard and Los Feliz and Fletcher Drive met…They walked the old streets, Hyperion over to Vermont, stopping at the grocery store at …Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard…walking the width of the town they knew, over to La Brea…and then another long, long walk home.”

And then LeGuin writes, “Those streets are named for the love of saying their names. The girls walk in love.”

It will be very strange and wonderful to see those streets again. To drive on Franklin Avenue between Vermont and La Brea, my NOTE corridor. I’m happy here, in Ithaca, but it’s the happiness of a place you’ve never risked a long time in. It’s a vacation happiness. Los Angeles – Hollywood – Los Feliz – Woodland Hills – NoHo – SilverLake – Franklin, always Franklin, between Vermont and Virgil, between Cahuenga and Western, is home. And that’s where I’ll be, tomorrow afternoon.

So, Anne Bogart says, in A DIRECTOR PREPARES, that her best loved play in New York, or one of them, was the one she thought only theater people could like. It makes me wonder, more, about a play set in the time of tech. Real-time. Ten out of Twelve.

I feel like the theater folks around me are a really Chekhov group – the way I keep hearing people repeat “Some actors are moths, and some are cockroaches” reminds me of Simeon-Pischik, or something.

From 9.7.07: our 1st day of staging. We finish text work, from p. 27 on, then get into it – beginning blocking at 4 pm.

We talk about how the biggest conflict in the Middle East is between secular and religious people. In Israel, even the most secular Jews are more in touch with religion. But their making room for the fundamentalists of Judaism in the country has, in a way, backfired, as that population has expanded into a huge conservative swing minority.

Golda’s character’s passion is intellectual, not religious.

Aaron has a great sense of what motivates digression, the sense of how thoughts turn. He also has a good way of leaving things open-ended: “Let’s keep this on our table of questions. Once we know this play better, we’ll be able to answer it.”

We discuss the opening beat – we won’t actually be having Camille smoke. We talk through it, then run through it. Aaron, coming fresh off the design meeting, emphasizes that the images on the screen are pictures in her brain.

Then we start working forward, one section at a time. No preblocking. It’s run, improvise through, run again.

We work without the table and chair but end up putting both back.

We’re finding in the enacting that it’s best if these 3rd-party people face directly out front.

Lots of clarifying of simple stuff: who Golda’s speaking to and when, where her attention is.

It’s amazing how carrying an ashtray across a square of empty space, SL to SR, can change an environment, a play, a set, so completely. Placement of objects transforms a space. Props are powerful.

Everything comes through Golda’s mind. She puts memories on hold to reflect on them, then they come back to her and she reenacts them.

In a little less than 2 hours, we stage through the first section, top of p.4.

Spent yesterday sailing in Puget Sound and the evening drinking in Eastlake.

Today I’m meeting with two Seattle theater folks, an actress and a costume designer, to learn more about the town.

Or, to be more specific, the womb.

Welcome to the universe, Harrison Gray Barrett. (Belatedly.) August 30 is a day that shall be remembered.

Great workshop yesterday. We incorporated the text of a poem into the chorus workshop. The group was very open to the work and we got to a place I’ve never seen before.

After one hour of basic chorus exercises, which we went through in just half an hour (Dara calling out leader switch, leader switching within group, more than one leader) we were taking a piece of text (Ruth Eisenberg’s poem JOCASTA) and handing out two scripts of it, which belonged to the Jocasta speaker and the Chorus speaker. Then there was a 4-7 person chorus improvising in the background.

The rhythm of the text was the “music” they responded to.

By our final improv, the characters were fluidly and naturally moving in and out of the chorus, in and out of text, and the responsibility for the storytelling was collective.

It was beautiful.

Jessica and Lava had many questions and ideas about how this method could be used – Lava wants to try it with a newspaper article. I’m still blown away that this simple integration of text, which I’ve been fighting off for so long (and avoided in MOH&H by the expedient of text without a linear sense to it) worked so well.

Credit to Jessica’s amazing calm sense of direction, and to the group of folks who were so open.

We had a very talented actress in the group, Betsey, who had a broken foot, and incorporated her sitting on a chair – that was a good development too.

It’s such a joy to me every time I get to do one of these workshops – and now I think pushing towards text is something I’m always going to do. Linear, narrative text, poems or plays, with characters and speakers. Why not? It works! And it’s the next logical step.

I’m so happy that Lava and Jessica both saw other ways this method could be used, with approaches different from my own. It means something about it must work. Lava also liked the idea of “the set being another actor.”

Jessica was concerned that with improv blocking some nights would be much worse than others, and I didn’t have a good answer to that, only to tell her that with training, that doesn’t happen. But she did wonder if you could use the improv chorus just for the chorus folks, not the characters. Which is what I did in Human Bombing, albeit without improv, so yes, you can. It’s just a method, and it works in a lot of different ways.

Abandoning the specificity of “this moment must look like this” has freed me greatly as a director, but I do understand that it’s not exactly what everyone wants to do. If I want this technique to be used I have to be open to any kind of use.

This is such a great feeling, to have shared the work with strangers and have them become friends. We went to the Tiki Bar afterwards and celebrated, but we evaporated early cause I was kind of wiped out from yesterday at Powells (I got both FLATLAND and GOLDA’S BALCONY) I also met with Melina, the MOH&H graphic designer yesterday at Staccatto Gelato. She was a former virtual collaborator from that show, and we’d never met in person.

Zack and I are off to Seattle this AM, at the end of our road trip.

Home of the 2 pm last call and the town so small there’s not room for two Daras. You will be missed.