Play With Your Food

I spent most of the day working on setting up the box office for Turtles, scheduling a meeting of the designers for Turtles, and cooking and working in the garden.

Setting up the box office for a play is almost as much fun as setting up a database for a theater company. Whoo-hoo. So many details. So many phone calls and forms to fill out and emails. 

I cleaned out the squash and zucchini patch of old leaves, and harvested a few, plus some tomatoes. The garden has been giving us so much great food this summer. Just about everything except the onions are doing great. 

I made a pot of chicken soup and a pan of cucumber salad, I guess that's what it's called. It's just cucumbers, vinegar, water, and sugar. A great summer side dish. You pour the liquid over the cucumbers and let them soak in it in the refrigerator. We still have more cucumbers in the fridge. 

Sue asked for turkey burgers tonight for dinner. It's the one night both of us are free, so we try to have a nice meal together. 

I'll go out in the garden and cut some dahlias for the table tonight. Sue likes fresh flowers. I do, too. She says it's because I'm a Libra. 

I went to the store twice today, because I had forgotten some ingredients. Twice, I forgot. I actually like grocery shopping. I think it's a throwback to hunting and gathering. I'm still a hunter and gatherer. 

Here's my dream: A theater on a farm with the productions in a big barn. Dinner is served before, meals prepared there in the farmhouse everyday fresh, made with ingredients from the farm. Fresh vegetables and homemade pasta and bread and cheese. Good wine and beer. No, I would not call it Play With Your Food. 

Tweet This

I was emailing an old friend, Craig Moodie, whose new children's book, Into the Trap just was released today, and I told him that I tweeted the news, "for what it's worth." Then I commented that I can't believe I lived to see the day that the word, "tweet" is a verb.

First, Craig's book can be found here. And here's his blog. (If you think I'm a crusty old writer, get a load of his mug.)

I wrote about Craig's work sometime ago, too. He and I met way back in the corporate world--many lives ago for me. He's still hanging in there, has a beautiful wife, two kids, and home.

But tweeting. One of my professors, a dramaturg, kept saying that the old model of the theater is gone--where you send in a script and if they like it it's produced--and that now to succeed now in the theater you have to be "part of the conversation." That does make sense; that people who know you and who know your work are more likely to produce it. But that means you have to follow God knows how many Twitter accounts, blogs, Web sites, and I don't know what all. To be honest, it's comes across like a full-time job, and I think for dramaturgs and artistic directors it's a great thing to do. But if I'm tweeting and blogging and Facebooking and surfing, I'm not writing. And now there are new social networking sites coming out, like Google +, that's making me choose what to call people: friends, family, acquaintances, people who I barely know and can't figure out why they're still on my Christmas card list I guess it's simply laziness or something else deep-rooted that I'm too tired or scared to figure out. 

So if I'm part of this conversation I'm not part of the real conversation, the conversations that my characters are having. It's enough to make this writer want to spit. 

It all kind of seems as ridiculous to me as that section in Huckleberry Finn where Jim is being held in that shed in the back of Tom Sawyer's uncle's house, and Tom has him writing on tin pans and carving things and throwing them all out the back window because that's what the romantic, swash-buckling heroes did that Tom read about. I feel Tweets and root-a-toot toots are just as silly sometimes, as I try to write something witty and pithy in 140 characters or less.

But then, I do wonder if I'm not a Willy Loman, left behind by the world and on my own, just trying to get by on a smile and a shoeshine. (BTW, I know no one would ever say that, but I love that line.) I know I'm not exactly like Willy. I believe in hard work and talent more than charm and a handshake, but I will admit I do it all with an underlying feeling of desperation that I'm still swimming against a tide that will still sweep me into oblivion.

I saw some terrific theater...

...and you can argue with me that it wasn't. Some might say it really wasn't theater.

The actors weren't professional. It didn't take place in a theater. It wasn't the result of any theatrical process. In other words it happened in the "real world" by "real people" reacting "in the moment." But my experience, my reaction to it, was exactly what I would hope I'd have from a piece of theater.

It was produced just one time, and then it closed forever. It happened last Friday at a retirement party on the Cape at a country club. I didn't know hardly anyone there--just one or two people; I just a quiet observer, just like I'd be in the theater. A man was retiring--he was leaving a life he knew for 32 years--so the stakes were pretty high, at least a dramatic moment was ripe for the taking.

His co-workers put on skit, this wonderful piece of theater I'm referring to. They structured it. They actually realized they needed something to hang their skit on, and instead of concentrating on something classically Aristotelian--rising action, climax, denouement--they chose the alphabet. I loved it. Something we've known since our childhood. Something familiar. Something simple. Twenty-six scenes. Each "actor" was assigned a letter, and had to stand up at a staged area and talk about the retiree, and the script, their monologue, because that's what it was, was to be rooted in that letter.

When you give people, people who are not trained or comfortable in being in front of an audience, give them a microphone and force them in front of an audience, they are stripped bare. The are naked. And my reaction was I cared for each and everyone. I applauded their bravery, which in a small way spoke the something deep and meaningful in the human spirit, and also something that I think is waning in our society too.  I wanted to hear what everyone had to say. I rooted for the ones who were uncomfortable. I enjoyed the more polished speeches. But even deeper, I was amazed but how much was revealed.

There was Mr. Popular. He was attractive to look at. Vivacious. Funny. Comfortable. And it was easy to see why people liked him. And he reveled in his place in this little community.

Conversely, there was the guy who was unpopular, and you can see how he struggled for the group's approval. Everything Mr. Popular wasn't--not comfortable in his own skin, unfunny, inarticulate, the group still accepted him and drew him in.

From A to Z I saw quiet people, smart but reserved people, the outsiders, and people who believed in sincerity and love, and weren't afraid to show it, because when you put people under pressure, and make no bones about it, these people were under pressure, people will resort to what they are most comfortable with, their core values and beliefs.

And there were two other characters. There was the man for whom all this was done: the retiree. who seemed at first so much outside of all this. Sometimes it seemed as if I wasn't so much at a retirement party as I was at a wake, and the participants were celebrating their life, their vitality, because they were going to go on living in the world they and the man had occupied. He was the one moving on.

And then there was me. The outside spectator, who thought about his own life, his community, if there even is one, and how long it's been since I've had a "real" job, one where the office was my life and characters like I was watching were a part of my life. Thirty-two years. Thirty-two years of his life the man spent in his career. Wow. And now it was over. They talked how he now had time to paddle his canoe and read his Boston Globe. Hmmm....

I wish I could write scenes like this, actors' pieces, that are simple and rely on the talents and instincts of people who can replicate this kind of world night after night. This is storytelling at its best, something I strive for but never seem to be able to get it quite right. It's frustrating as hell, to sit here at a keyboard day after day, then see it so genuinely and endearingly done by people who aren't even trying.

Theater as Church: The Search for Community

Just noticed that StageSource ran a short piece I wrote on theaters trying to build community.

Give it a read here.

New Exhibition Room: Shh!! -- orignal theater in Boston

From Nora Long, one of the founders of New Exhibition Room in Boston.

Hey Everyone I know (pretty much)

I wanted to take this opportunity to personally invite you to my theatre company’s first show. We’ve worked fairly hard over the last 6 weeks to make a quirky, frenetic exploration of censorship. Everything in the show is true or an abstraction of something true, so I think the show is equal parts hilarious and terrifying. There will likely be nudity, gratuitous violence and definitely adult language and content, so this might not be the best show to bring grandma to. It would be great to see you. For those of you who are too far away to come, I thought you might be interested in what I’ve been up to.

Also, it’s free, it’s T-accessible, and there will be cookies afterwards – what more could you ask for in a night at the theatre? Get tix here.

You are, of course, welcome anytime, but it would be particularly awesome to have some friendly faces (and voices) in the house opening weekend (July 9-11). A few members of the press will be coming, so we want to make sure they see the best possible show, which is, in large part do to the audience.

In addition to the show, there will be a reading of a new play each Saturday at 4PM. The writers include John J. King, Theo Goodell and Rachel Kelsey. These readings are also free, and a great opportunity to hear some new work by some of the most talented local writers we know.

Feel free to forward this email around.

Hope to see you there.

Lots of love,
Nora

PS. If you haven’t seen it already, my baby sister made a couple of killer videos of our rehearsals. Check them out.





New Exhibition Room presents Shh!
July 9-25, 2009
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/69085

Good Boston theater: The Pain and the Itch and Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls

Saw a double-header of theater this weekend, not something I get to do as much as I used to, primarily because I simply can't afford the price of a ticket. Disposable income is not something Sue and I have a lot of, and if we have any at all it almost exclusively goes straight into the travel fund. On a Friday or Saturday night you're as likely to find us at home, reading or delving into our musical pursuits as much as you'll see us out on the town.

But...

Currently there are two shows running in Boston that are must-sees: The Pain and the Itch at the BCA, produced by Company One, and Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls at The Factory Theater, produced by Holland Productions. Both are crisply written, superbly acted, and very well-directed.

The Pain and the Itch is aptly titled because it is painful to watch what you're seeing on stage and you will squirm from that itch in your very private parts: A family of very well-off white people who drink the right white wine and watch PBS and espouse all the appropriate, liberal values. Of course there are a few characters who act as flies in the ointment, but funny, those aren't the ones who are making us squirm. The cast is a terrific ensemble. There's no need to give accolades to any one actor on the stage because each character is perfectly drawn and presented, and meshes (or not) with the other characters. The set is sublime, complete with working HD TV. Get ready for the surprise ending, which frankly, threw me at first. Contrived, I wondered, until I reached back and realized how deftly the playwright, actors, and director led me by the nose.

Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls, as the title might intimate, asks, Are there times when you can't tell if your life is coming or going? Well, then aloha, which means both hello and goodbye. A fun, quirky script that transverses time and space--one minute you're in Alaska, the next Hawaii, and sometimes that person looks vaguely familiar and so does the dog. The cast barrels along at a non-stop brisk pace, and it's all fun but in retrospect it does ask some serious questions, particularly about our relationships with one another. And that's the production's charm: It's so darn entertaining you forget its serious theater until you're having drinks afterwards.

If I don't call attention to particular cast members of either production, both directors should be given high praise. Avid baseball fans will know that many times a win on a sleepy, hot summer's day comes from one manager out-dueling the other. The success of both productions rests humbly and mightily on the shoulders of their respective directors: M. Bevin O'Gara for The Pain and the Itch and Krista D'Agostino for Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls.

Bad Jazz: Really good stuff from Zeitgeist Stage Company

Finally, something you can sit through for an hour and 45 minutes and not even notice there wasn't an intermission. You want it to keep going and going, at the fever pace it established from the beginning of the play and it kept going throughout the entire play, non-stop, boom, boom, boom, boom, bang, clang--the last two notes because it is all Bad Jazz.

The New England premiere of Bad Jazz opened last week at the Boston Center for the Arts for a three-week run. The structure is a play within a play, always fun for an actor like me to watch, but you don't have to be an actor to enjoy this farce, to laugh at the driven, creative "genius" director, who many times is the only one who has a clue about what he's talking about, if he's talking about anything at all, or shake your head at the obsessive method actress who eventually lives her part as a hooker.

All the actors deftly deliver on Robert Farquhar's snappy, cutting script with it's combination of Mamet-like dialogue, one part humor, one part irony, and one part laser-sharp observation on relationships--Noisy improvisation that start out with structure but break down to make something that can only sound and be called bad jazz.

Especially delightful, though, are Kara Manson playing Natasha and Mac Young playing Danny.

Manson plays Natasha with depth and range, taking her character on a journey that starts with an ended relationship, through the fire of the play she inhabits as a tortured young woman looking for love and coming out empty out the other side. My God, Farquhar must have the same love/hate relationship many people in the theater have for the theater.

Young nails the young male actor we've all seen, talented but clueless to the subtlety and meaning of the script due to inexperience in life and, God knows, just plain naivete, but Danny eventually learns a lot more about life, although he never learns to expertly shoot heroin. His final role in the play is purgatory for all actors.

Michael Steven Costello, as Gavin, the megalomaniacal director makes some interesting choices that are fun to watch. Rather than play it dark and brooding, Costello saunters and dances across the stage as his character stabs and thrusts and feints at the world and theater, as he eventually gets his just reward from Elvis, a minor character played by Zachary Winston with relish. Costello plays it almost, but not quite, cartoon-like, which is masterful and works for the entire play except at the very end, where he meets his end. He just needs to tone it down a bit, that's all.

Becca A. Lewis plays a quirky, twisted sort as Hannah, the playwright. She might have the best line in the play, when Danny demands to know what the play is about, and she tells him she hasn't a clue. Lewis also performs a wonderful counterpart to Hannah as Danielle, the producer of the play.

David J. Miller both director and set designer, maintains his vision, and it's interesting to walk into the theater and have some of the audience actually walk through the set to get to their seats. From the beginning we know it's going to be and in-your-face experience. Again, the actors come out like racehorses out of the gate, and don't let up for a minute.

Special notice, too, goes to Jeff Adelbeg for lighting, creating the proper mood and space from the rehearsal theater to Gavin's apartment late at night.

The Halfway House Club closes...Paul has left the building

The Halfway House Club closed last night. We ran three nights; the fourth--Friday night--was canceled because of the snow. Ah, the snow. We still have a major storm raging out there. Snow, now turning to ice. Gotta love this New England weather. (We canceled, but that left time for us to head out in the blizzard to Club Passim to hear Lori Mckenna's solo set.)

THHC was a good run. An interesting story. My kind of story and play. As an actor, I'm being even more choosy than ever. Looking for just the right parts. Looking for plays that resonate with my viewpoint of life and the world. I don't care about the old chestnuts anymore, if I ever did. They have their place, and God love the theaters and the actors and directors who keep them alive. I'm looking for the plays that have meaning today; not the ones written in the 1950s who people excuse with, "but they have just as much relevance today as they did fifty years ago." Well, maybe. But they've been beaten to death, and I'm looking for new ground to break.

I always have a favorite line or lines in a play that just dig right down to the core for me. I have to. I always look for those lines, and in The Halfway House Club, these were the lines, spoken by Ann to Paul, my character, a philanderer who said he never hit a woman in his life:

"Maybe no physically. But emotionally you've hit them. You've hit them harder than you ever could possibly with your own hands. Being cheated on. Having your heart broken. It's as if you're being stabbed. Slowly. And painfully. Without remorse."

It's true. As a society, we've yet to recognize that people who harm people emotionally are just as much thugs as people who physically harm people. Maybe even more so, because people who hurt others emotionally tend to do it consistently because that's just what they've learned to do; that's how they've learned to get what they want. If I hit someone, I can be hauled off to jail, and for good reason. But the person who seriously hurts someone emotionally is allowed to continue their behavior. If I were run over by a bus, no one in their right mind would say, just shake it off. But someone can run over me with a bus emotionally, and what's the first thing out of most people's mouths? Just shake it off. Forget about it. Move on. It's not right. As a society we should recognize that these emotional batterers are just as nasty as anyone else who hurts someone. And as a species, we should realize that there is a part of us that, even though we can't see it, can still be hurt in the same way as a physical part of us. As Ann says, the pain is the same. That should tell us something.

It's a good play, and Philana Gnatowski, the playwright who also played Samantha, is well on her way to having a really great play. The setting is a halfway house for people with broken hearts. My character, Paul, cheated on every woman he's ever been with. What brought him to the halfway house was he finally cheated on the one woman he loved. With a little imagination, we set up a world where, because Paul's father left him when he was ten, he became frightened whenever he found himself in a real relationship. The ensuing battles between all the characters, to paraphrase Paul, raises some good issues about the way men and women interact. And finally, on closing night, I, as Paul, was able to look across the stage at Philana who was playing Samantha, and see the character as just a younger Paul, and hating myself, or what I had become, and not wanting her to follow my path, I was able to cross the stage and stop her from hating me, and thereby I stopped hating myself. A nice bit of theater.

The Boys of Winter: Review is good

We close this weekend. It's been a long haul. The rehearsal process was brutal. We were scheduled Monday through Friday 6:00 to 11:00, but most nights we got out between 10:30 and 11:00. The last hour was usually just a sleep-deprived shuffle across the stage, the actors just trying not to fall over and remember some semblance of our blocking. Despite the schedule, we took the stage on opening night with about a week and a half of rehearsal.

But then the production takes off, and the magic starts to work on the stage.

The Jewish Advocate gave us a good review.

I wish there was more to say. I wish I had some dirt on the backstage goings on of the cast or something like that, but it's pretty much cut and dried. We all meet at the theater, usually I'm the first one there, and then the rest trickle in. The stage manager gives us the remaining time notice...thank you, fifteen...and he's learned to look for me in the darkest recesses of the back hallway where I go over my opening lines and just think and feel the character for a bit until it's places and I watch the lights go down through a crack in a door and creep onto stage for the top of both acts. Then it's an emotional roller coaster ride that depends so much--for me, at least--on the reaction and the energy from the audience. Theater is not a spectator sport. The tacit agreement I always walk onto stage with is this: You give me energy, and I'll take it and do my darndest to move you. And this is especially so in this play. Without tipping too much of my hand, the Narrator comes out at Act I, Scene I and kicks the fourth wall down. Just obliterates it.

The Boys of Winter Playbill

Playbill gave a nice writeup about The Boys of Winter.

It's a good story--one that needs to be told--and I'm very proud as an actor and an artist to be part of this project.

There are people in this world who need a voice. The Creator gave me a voice. I mean one I can really use. And this is the sort of thing I always want to do.

I mean, does the world really need another production of Little Shop of Horror or Fiddler on the Roof??

SlamBoston

Josh and I performed Tuesday night at the BCA. We did it, and what a process. We went a bit over our allotted time, as did a lot of the plays. Lau, the director, said she didn't account for laughs when she timed us during rehearsal. Given that we rehearsed three times, and one of those times was at 7:00 the morning of the production we did pretty well. SlamBoston is held like a poetry slam (hence the name) and after each production a panel of judges hold of cards like at a diving or skating contest. We took a lot of risks out there, and I already knew that people would either love us or hate us. We got as low as 4.5 and we were one of two plays that another judge gave a perfect 10.0.

And that was the whole point of me working like that. It was the whole process I was interested in, from the audition through rehearsal and into the one-night production. I want to work more organically, on characters and in productions that push the limits of reality and believability. I don't want to go back to straight plays, with linear narratives and all the old, tired messages, metaphors, and analogies. I want to break down the barriers I have as an actor, and learn to push what's inside me to deliver new and fresh interpretations. I don't want to go back to the rehearsal process of just memorizing lines and blocking and just running the show over and over and over until you're in one deep, boring rut. Every show is different every night, but I want to push that concept to its limits, for my sake and the audience's. It makes for an amazing theater experience for both the actors and the audience members, and in my mind that's what it's all about. Forget people pay for the ticket, sit down, and are entertained. For me, there is an implicit contract between the actor and each audience member. We're in this together, people. The actors and the audience are interacting in an implicit way just as the actors are on stage. And for my theater life to continue, I need a whole lot more of that.

Love and death in the theater

At one time or another, everyone in the theater asks themselves this question: Ok, remind me again: Why do I do this?

I am so tired. For a ten-minute play. We open tonight and I didn't get home from tech until around 11:30 last night. (I slept late today for the day job; the alarm didn't go off until 6:00. Man, those birds are loud.) I was so tired last night that I garbled a line. Just incomprehensible. God, be on my side tonight, please?

We do this because we care so much about it (even though I don't know why I care so much about it) that we'd rather be acting or designing sets or lights or stage-managing than doing our day jobs that actually are supposed to have meaning but don't, even though most of the time theater doesn't pay, or it doesn't pay enough to cover even our parking tickets, even though it takes so much time away from my kids and Sue that I feel so guilty and I say I'll take a break and then when I actually do take a break I miss it so much and then I start feeling selfish.

Actors suck

Talking to an acquaintance this morning on the train platform, she told me she had been invited to see a play and, wrinkling her nose, she said she declined. Surprised, because I know she is, shall we say, a patron of the arts, I asked her what she didn’t like about the theater. You people, she said, laughing and jabbing me on the shoulder.

Yes, I admit, a lot of theater people suck. And I told her that. I also told her that there are a lot of hard-working people in the theater who feel the same way she does. Actors in particular, can always be “on.” As a matter of fact, it is actors we’re talking about here. The techies are some of the most serious, talented people in the theater. I’ve always said that the real talent lies in the tech and the direction. So yes, some actors can be extraordinarily selfish, self-indulgent, and desperately crying to be noticed and it is more than annoying and pathetic, it can get in the way of a good work.

But here’s the thing: it’s been my experience that it’s the bad actors, the ones with the least amount of talent, who act that way. The hard-working actors, who take their craft seriously, are too busy working and honing their talent to act like jerks. They’re the ones who are busy exploring life, and bringing what they learn in life to the stage.

Acting is truth. And to get to the truth, you have to suppress the ego. That takes a very brave and talented person. You have to be both, and all that flamboyant posing is simply a waste of time.

Right now I’m working with an actress from my Meisner class. We meet a couple of times a week plus class. She’s the mother of two teenagers, about the same age as my two girls, and I have yet to see a moment of this theater crap. She has a laser eye for the truth and an incredible desire to get to it. She doesn’t, nor do I, have time any for nonsense. We’re too busy trying to get better.