Today I was going to post more of the beautiful photos which Kyle Cassidy took for us, photos not only showing off the beauty of Mount Moriah Cemetery, but also the beauty of actors Kyra Baker, Doug Greene and Bob Stineman. Oh, your Monday could have been full of a visual cornucopia of symbolism debating the struggle between life, death, fecundity, sterility, society vs. chaos, Oh, the visual feast for your senses. You would have transcended your blue Monday and felt like you were in Midnight In The Garden Of Good and Evil, but more sexy and British.
In fact, today I was also going to take my hastily scribbled notes and start work on a new play, about hoarding and alternate dimensions. But you know what? Nope. Not today.
Today, my brother’s caregiver is running late. This is a trend with him. If caregivers for people with special needs were paid a living wage, then it would be worth their time to arrive on time. But no, today he’ll arrive “sometime late this afternoon,” and we really have no idea when we’ll see him. So, instead, my brother Ted and I are taking this opportunity to go clean my house.
Who could resist this face?
Ted can’t go without productive activity for about 15 minutes at a shot. When he gets bored, lonely, and feels like things are meaningless, he’ll wander around town talking too loudly to everyone he meets and demanding that they back his next production of the all-puppet Citizen Kane or something. which, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad idea. in fact, some days I’d like to print up a whole bunch of T-shirts saying “My Caregiver Called Out Today, Now You Get To Entertain me,” find every single special needs person I know, get them all hopped up on M&Ms and Red Bull, and let them wander singing all over the Capitol building until someone steps up funding for people with mental disabilities, so they can have structured care and meaningful activity.
But, obviously, I must be nuts to think such a thing might be a good idea. Better that mentally disabled people should just be heavily medicated and left to watch tv all day, right?
Thanks, Harrisburg!
P.S. Ted says, “Oh my God. I think that’s gonna start some shit. You should post that.”
I promise, this isn’t going to turn into The Traveling Light Blog. Really, it isn’t. I really do have other things to write about besides this. But, when life hands you Good Collaboration, you shout it from the mountaintops as much as possible, as well as wrap it up in cool cotton blankets and feed it nice things and take good care of it.
Yesterday afternoon, the cast (or, three-fourths, anyway; Kyra, Doug and Bob), the director and producer (Liam) and photographer and man-about-town Kyle Cassidy packed into the back of Toshiro Mifune (our tough, versatile and quiet Honda CRV) for a drive through the back alleys of South Philly, Grays Ferry, West Philadelphia, and finally, beautiful Mount Moriah Cemetery, for a photo shoot.
Mount Moriah Cemetery.
Mount Moriah Cemetery is one of those things that everyone should know about, but when you go there, you want it to be kept a secret and only invite your few close friends who will be inspired with the same wonder and respect you do. It inhabits a dreamlike between-space: its ownership is currently legally undetermined, it provides burial space to all faiths, its monuments are of many different aesthetic styles, and it’s wild and cultivated at the same time. The Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery have established a volunteer committee, responsible for cleaning, gardening and care. However, its 200 acres and decades of neglect can’t be fixed overnight, so despite its accessibility it still has some parts where the wilderness rules.
The forecast called for a 70% chance of rain, so Liam and I brought a total of six umbrellas, to be sure that we wouldn’t need them. It worked. The sky was just cloudy enough to give us diffuse light, keep the temperature not unbearable, and give the sky some rich color.
Here we see Kyle in rare jungle footage, as he prepares for his leading role in “Anacondonado IV.”
Kyle specializes in journalistic photography, portraits, and fast improvisation. I’ve participated in one of his photography workshops, and he is extremely good at taking what’s available in a space and using it to great effect. He’s efficient as heck and carries around a positive attitude and sense of humor that is contagious.
So, we turned off of the road and the sight of a lush green hill dotted with stones, punctuated with columns and framed by mausoleums (mausoleii?) made us all squeal like teenaged Goth chicks at a 2 for 1 sale on black lace fingerless gloves.
LINDSAY: I don’t know, you guys, is this grave-y enough?
BOB: Is this grave-y enough?
I turned the car onto the least-beaten path, and then again, and within a minute or so, we were surrounded by Mid-Atlantic Jungle.
On what must have once been brick platforms, rising to either side of the path, were clusters of rich green forest, and a vine-embraced tree that was twisted in the way trees will when their roots defy stone and their branches combat for light. It made a canopy around a granite memorial column from probably the late-Victorian era, and we said, “Yep, that’s it.”
You know you’re making risky art when you’re changing your clothes by the side of a car, using a window for a mirror and someone is offering you bug repellent. The lantern I’d brought was deemed not period correct (I agreed, but it was the closest thing I could find), so Kyle made some magic happen and slid an electronic device up Kyra’s sleeve, and voila: the illusion of a period-currect flashlight.
Behind The Scenes shot of the shoot.Liam Castellan, director, producer, and all-around git-er-done guy.
We played around the monuments for a while and Kyle took pictures, Liam was the Cheez-Itz powered voice activated light stand, and it was a lovely evening in the land of the dead.
and then we packed it up, and went home to brick boxes in which people live.
I don’t think there’s anything better than having good collaborators. There’s a quote about writing, often attributed to Dorothy Parker, which goes, “I don’t like writing, I love having written.” The first draft, and second and third, are always a bear, a tiring process of grunt work, made worse because it’s lonely. But, when you get together with creative collaborators and actually do something with what you’ve written, and they bring their own ideas and resources to the project, that’s the real reason that I write.
“Make this mistake with me.”
TL:DR; Another life peak experience. Coming soon: Real Photos!
We’re trying to find designers to work on Traveling Light.
Here are the details.
Liam’s Sofa Cushion Fortress presents the Philadelphia premiere of “Traveling Light” by Lindsay Harris Friel, directed by Liam Castellan.
Load-in is Monday, September 2, and performances are 9/6 through 9/14, in the Skybox at the Adrienne.
1967 London: the “Summer of Love”. Playwright Joe Orton confronts Beatles manager Brian Epstein late at night in a Jewish cemetery. They spar over big ideas and big secrets. When a policewoman and her male superior arrive, it could mean big trouble!
COSTUMES:
Looking for a costume designer for four costumes total.
SCENERY:
Looking for a designer to build and install a unit set.
Both positions pay a stipend. Looking for designers based in the Philadelphia area (or with “local housing”).
Traveling Light makes its Philadelphia premiere this September in the Philly Fringe.
Once upon a time there was a young man who heard some really beautiful music. He’d dedicated his whole life to aesthetic pursuits, but when he went down into a dark cavern and heard the beat and the harmony, he knew he had to bring that beautiful music up out of the dark and polish it and present it to the whole world. This music became bigger and stronger and more beautiful, until finally it could move on its own, and it was too heavy for him to carry any more, and it threatened to break him.
At the same time, there was another young man, almost exactly the same age, who liked to tell stories. Unlike the first young man, he’d been surrounded by a lot of ugliness and anger for most of his life, and the best way for him to deal with it was to create stories in which tricksters gave the bad people the badness they created right back. He went to a school that taught all about beauty (strangely enough, the same school that the first young man attended), and the first time he tried to make something beautiful and strange, it was so strange that people got scared, and he was sent to prison. While he was in prison, he polished his process, and when he got out, he continued making things that were strange and odd and funny and sad, with a vengeance.
This was all at a time when the world was changing. It was easier to make your voice heard over miles and miles, and the world seemed to be getting smaller, and people were starting to realize that maybe if they started treating each other as equals, kindly, amazing things could happen. But sometimes, even that was abused, because it’s awfully hard to get rid of things like greed and jealousy.
The first young man said to the second one, maybe this beautiful music I manage and your odd and strange stories could be put together to make something amazing. and the second young man said, I’ll see what I can do. so the writer went home and wrote a story, and brought it back to the music manager.
and the music manager said, this is too much. this is just too extreme, and rough, and unusual, and I don’t even know how to describe it.
and the storyteller said, but you’re just the same as this kind of story, you’re indescribable in the same way. you’re also that which can’t speak its name for fear of prosecution.
Later that summer, the storyteller came home, to find the person he expected to be waiting for him, waiting, as always, but this time with a hammer and a jealous rage, and by morning, the storyteller was dead.
and twenty-one days later, the music manager took too much medicine that he thought he needed, and the next morning, he was dead too.
the story teller kept a diary. so did the music manager. those diaries are kept secret, as diaries should be. but some things happened that summer, and some of the diaries’ pages are believed to be destroyed. and nobody knows why.
that summer was called “the summer of love.” which is an odd name for a summer in which there were a lot of fires and war and riots and protest. there were also a lot of warm, sexy nights where people broke rules and did what their hearts told them to do.
this isn’t a dissertation. it’s a play. less factual, more fun.
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It feels weird to be promoting this play in Philadelphia, now, when I wrote it years ago. The production in Minneapolis, by Theatre Pro Rata, directed by Natalie Novacek, is still extremely close to my heart, and had a lot of magic in its site-specific production at Layman’s Cemetery. Carin Bratlie and I still brainstorm and I still miss Minneapolis, the people I met there, and their commitment to making fun, brilliant theatre. After that production, I somersaulted straight into Temple’s MFA program, and it’s been hard to come up for air at all ever since.
I don’t want people to think this is the only play I’ve ever written, but it seems to be the one people like the most, and I’m deeply grateful that Liam Castellan said, “I am going to pick this play up and run with it.” and finally, this play gets to happen in my home town.
We have a cast. They’re beautiful. We’re still looking for designers and crafting press releases and planning photo shoots and so on and so forth. for now, I get to be so excited about it that I am forced to be experimental with capitalization.
It’s exactly what you think: an evening of short plays, all of them one minute or less, a highly concentrated, haiku-esque dose of solid theatre. Creator Dominic D’Andrea has been making this happen in cities around the country, and I’m pleased as a pig in mud to be included on the same bill as these playwrights and directors. Some of them are longtime friends, some I’ve admired from a distance, and some of them are people I’ve never met, and we’re all crunching ideas into delicious tasty cake pops of emotional substance. Or, you know, coal into diamonds. Your mileage may vary.
I have created this kind of super-short theatre before, and “short” never means “simple.” For several years I was a contributing playwright to Night of 1000 Plays, produced by The Brick Playhouse. In that case, each performance piece was three minutes or less. Some of my favorite work came out of writing for N1K, especially Juliet Balcony, Let’s Call Him Matt, Not Without My Pumpkin, and Car and Driver. Writing Car and Driver let me play with a vocal style to give a car a personality, which later became the voice of the Lotus in Phoebe and the Lotus. So, I sort of knew what I was getting into when I started creating pieces to submit, and how they could help me in the future. It’s not that you’re creating a sketch: these are full, finished, stand-alone works. They exist best as a smaller piece of something big and diverse. and provide great opportunity for imagination, because your limitations are so severe.
So far, I have to say, writing a one-minute play is harder than writing a three-minute play. Basically, you get in, make meaning, and get out. Then remove the first and last ten seconds. Then condense, and condense, and condense. “Excuse me, but I need to buy a plant, can you help me?” has to become “Can you help me buy a plant?” which in turn has to become, “How much is the green thing?” or, “Please help me.”
Alternately, you just come up with the most concentrated dose of meaning you can think of. BAM.
So, anyway. Writing this kind of thing is fun, and it looks like the performances will be, too. They take place on Monday July 29th, Tuesday July 30th, and Wednesday July 31st at 8PM, at Interact Theatre Company, at The Adrienne Theater, 2030 Sansom Street, Philadelphia. Tickets are $20 and the significance is all-you-can-digest.
YOU GUYS YOU GUYS YOU GUYS. This morning I discovered that, in one of my greatest childhood fears, and most enduring recurring nightmares, I am not alone. Other people also find the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Ride at Disneyworld terrifying, yet irresistibly attractive.
Like schadenfreude, I’m sure the Germans have a word for that combined passive-aggressive force of terror and excitement which this (now nonexistent) ride causes, but I don’t know what it is. But, early this morning, celebrated genius and madman John Hodgman live-tweeted his experience watching an amateur video of the ride, sharing all the fascination and fear I had long thought was just a figment of my own insanity.
Sadly, I missed this live-tweet treat. I was asleep. I know, it’s really irresponsible for me not to stay awake all night hoping that a forty-something-year-old man will get all liquored up and describe the YouTube videos he watches from his lonely hotel room. Fortunately, his tweets are preserved for Internet posterity:
5:51 Paul Frees as Captain Nemo is playing a mashup of organ music and fish talking. http://t.co/3USS3WqrgN
Now, with my oatmeal and coffee, while waiting for the air conditioner repair technician to come over and provide us with The Startup Special (maintenance check and cleaning, not a tasty beverage served with brunch for people too cheap for mimosas and too easily confused for bloody marys, although it’s a good idea and someone needs to get on that), I can sit here and relive all the Terrorfascination of my childhood. AND SO CAN YOU.
This video is particularly perfect because I visited Disneyworld in 1980 at age ten (yes the math is easy and you can skip that), so this experience is almost exactly what I suffered. My brain was completely split on the issue. First of all, the film was part of my Dad’s childhood experience, not mine; he was the one who was jonesing hard for this ride. The movie wasn’t part of my childhood, so I didn’t know what to expect, except that we were getting inside one of a flotilla of identical pointy submarines to experience a simulated threat. I knew there was a British guy with a beard, a pipe organ, strange machinery, and a giant squid, all of it underwater. This is pretty much all you need to know, true. But, being ten, my brain was right on the fence between “I know this is a manufactured illusion, and I can appreciate that,” and “I am buying this hook line and sinker I need a scuba tank NOW NOW NOW WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO DROWN ME, DAD, WHAT DID I DO THIS TIME?”
Then the former thought process overtook the latter. The fear of being miles below the ocean’s surface, in a metal can helmed by Paul Frees and en route to being squid food was far outweighed by another possibility:
Robot Fish.
Not only Robot Fish, but Robot Sharks, silently patrolling a graveyard of broken, sunken tall ships. With their barnacle-covered masts just barely visible in the darkness, of course it made me wonder what lurked below. More machinery, turning over and over in the watery darkness?
What if the pane of glass, against which my nose was inextricably pressed, were to crack?
I backed off a bit.
What if there were a leak? Had anyone gone over safety procedures with us? Where was the steampunk stewardess with a nice clear Disney name badge explaining the proper use of oxygen masks in the event of cabin depressurization? If one of the windows broke, would the robot sharks get sucked in here, along with gallons and gallons of water? Or would we get sucked out? Would I end up trapped in the water under a ceiling of machinery, the sleeves of my shrinking wool sweater tangled in the mechanical tracks and arms? Would my last sight be the too-close face of dead robot fish eyes and teeth? Would I meet a watery grave in the arms of a faceless seaweed farmer? Or would I just be trapped under giant white molars of fiberglass shaped like glaciers?
My childhood fascination with Greek myths made me perk back up at the mention of Atlantis. As we came around a corner to meet an adorable little coven of mermaids, their pearlescent faces too cute to be anything but dolls’, I wondered what an actual bloated human corpse, trapped in their mechanism, would look like. By the time the squid tentacles wrapped over the windows, all I could think about was in what ways a human head would be destroyed by that kind of water pressure. Would it explode, or implode?
Fortunately, the ride isn’t even fifteen minutes long. My over-active imagination and I survived the trip. I still have recurring dreams about riding on Disney gondola rides and being pushed out of the boat, into the dark water, and sucked into the machinery below, as sober-faced statues stare me down.
Now that I think about it, I wasn’t ten when I took this tour. I was fourteen. That explains why I was more worried about what I couldn’t see than what I could. I remember that, on an earlier Disney World trip, when I was ten, the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Ride had been shut down for cleaning and maintenance. We rode The Skyway over the Magic Kingdom, looking down at the soggy neon landscape, as maintenance workers brushed and hosed rubber coral reefs in the November sunshine. My dad, for once, was silent, the opportunity to share pure fear with his children deferred.
The Walt Disney Company plans to shoot a new 20,000 Leagues movie in Australia. So, maybe within the next five years or so, my brother and I will get to relive our childhood fears on some new version of that ride. I hope this time they have actual seats, rather than those little metal stools that folded out of the wall, because our butts will be much less forgiving by that point. Until then, we’ll just have to satisfy us with loving tribute websites, like 20Kride.com and Lost Attraction Tribute, which not only share the fun of the ride experience, but the creepiness of the backstage.
Thank you, John Hodgman, for not only reminding me of my first grand mal anxiety attack, but helping me relive it, and helping me know that even if I am insane, I’m not the only one who has this recurring nightmare.
And I know, I haven’t posted anything in nearly six months. I have a good explanation, but that’s for another time.
6630 Productions 