I read the news today, oh boy.

You want to come see Traveling Light. I haven’t been writing much lately, but other people have been, and the hard work of the production team and actors is coming to fruition in a delicate and multifaceted setting. Fortunately, so far our coins in the wishing well are echoing and rippling rather nicely. Playwrights work in planned obsolescence; you write and hope that your work will be handed off to others who will include enough of themselves that the piece can live on its own. So far, this theory holds up beautifully.

City Paper’s annual Fringe roundup includes a feature piece about Traveling Light by Mark Cofta. There are a lot of shows mentioned in this article worth your attention, but trust me, the Traveling Light article is there. Keep scrolling!

The Philadelphia Daily News featured Traveling Light in their feature article by Chuck Darrow.

Liam Castellan was interviewed by Phindie, and the box office has been notified that Vladimir Putin is absolutely not permitted to attend our show. Sorry, Pooty-Poot, you’re banned.

RepRadio came to rehearsal so we could talk about things. if you like to listen to conversations about theatre, RepRadio should be on your short list of podcasts. Darnelle Radford is really good at bringing out what’s best about theatre in this area.

Last night, Kyle Cassidy came and took photos of the final dress rehearsal. Having a photographer present seemed to give the actors a strong sense of how they relate to space and each other and remind them of physicality. Kyle has an excellent ability to use light to create texture and palpability in his photos. It also felt like having Obi-Wan Kenobi with us, at the beginning and at the final dress, to bookend the creative process.

I’m going to put photos in a separate post, because they’re big and beautiful and speak for themselves, but for now, here’s a taste:

Clickenzee to Embiggen!

Tickets available here, if two is not enough dimensions for you. And it should not be.

JOIN US!

September 6, 2013 0

sometimes, having an autistic brother is funny.

It’s not often enough that you have to say this sentence, “Electric fences don’t work on my brother.” Not because my brother is Iron Man, but simply because he is who he is. By way of explanation, I wrote the following story, and it seemed good enough to share, so enjoy.

My brother, Ted, has an official diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorder with autistic-like symptoms. He’s relatively high-functioning and his behavior tends to be somewhere between Rain Man and Forrest Gump, with a fair amount of Captain Jack Sparrow and Vincent Price thrown in for good measure.

When Ted was in his 20s, he had all the same daredevil urges that most guys that age do. Fortunately, he wasn’t interested in kegstands and extreme sports (although he did like to ride around on a mountain bike, until he was run off of a road by an asshole aggressive driver and broke his collarbone). He also liked to spend a lot of time walking around in the yard in costumes or his pajamas, talking to himself.

His pajamas at the time consisted of a red V-neck giant t-shirt that (thank God) came down to his knees. I got used to it. Looking back I realize that it may have seemed odd to others. At the time, he was over six feet tall, blond, and built like your basic frat boy. but he would wander around the yard scheming about his imagined future career as a late-night horror movie host.

My father had a swimming pool built sometime around 1991 or so. We now call it Lake Mistake. Ted would spend his afternoons by the pool in his concept of a pirate costume with all of his stuffed animals and his Playmobil pirate ship set (which he acquired when he was about six or seven and in which he didn’t lose interest for another 20 years or so). His pirates would do battle and then he took a wooden plank, weighted it with bricks at one end of the pool, and made all of the stuffed animals walk the plank to meet their watery graves.

We were finding teeny tiny pirate accessories in the pool filter system for years. The stuffed animals never quite dried out.

Now that I think about it, Ted went through a period where he built a wooden raft in the barn out of whatever scrap wood he could find, and he and his teddy bear would set sail on Ridley Creek (which is about 2′ deep at the most near our house). The raft was about 3’x4′, had a mast and sail, weighed a ton and was as seaworthy as a cinderblock, but he kept dragging it down to the creek and back, along with his teddy bear, Captain Junior Foozergraph Bear, who also wore a pirate costume, and who bore many knife wounds from various steak-knife skirmishes with the other stuffed animals. Between the old rusty nails and the questionable cleanliness of Ridley Creek, the whole thing was a massive testament to hepatitis and tetanus, but somehow Ted survived. He did get really sick from playing in the creek too much, but he managed to sleep it off somehow.

as a result of the sickness he got from too much creek swimming, he tried to launch his raft in the swimming pool once. I don’t know how he got it out, but he never did it again. He and my mother managed to reach a compromise that the raft could be next to the pool and he could imagine sailing it across the ocean more enjoyably than actually trying to float it in the pool.

so, for a couple of years, we had this treacherous pallet of scrap lumber and found nails sitting next to the swimming pool, along with the chaise lounges and chairs.
“what’s that?”
“oh, that’s Ted’s pirate ship.”

I’m totally digressing away from the point.

We had a golden retriever named Chowder (my family’s never been good with pet naming), who was completely nuts, a jumping, barking, running tornado of blond hair and love. My parents installed an invisible electric fence to keep him from running up to a particular house about a mile away where there were two golden retrievers, where, of course, he would fight with the made dog and have sex with the female dog. he was a four-legged viking (There is no such thing as a story about my family that stays on one tangent for long. It just doesn’t work). Chowder managed to figure out that if he made a beeline from the front porch to the furthest downhill corner of the yard, he could build up enough speed that he could zip across the fence with little to no ill effect. Either that, or his dog brain just said, “GO! GO! GO!” and he was going so fast that he didn’t even realize he was in the danger zone until he was out of it. The invisible fence people kept telling us to crank the signal higher and higher, and we said that the electric shock was now high enough to cook a Thanksgiving turkey, but it wasn’t stopping Chowder when he put his mind to it.

So, one day, my boyfriend Dave and I were at the house wandering around the yard, as was Ted, and of course he was in his red V-neck t-shirt, covered in food and ink stains. Thank God Dave also had an autistic brother, so he understood the behaviors pretty well.

TED: Have you tried out the electric fence yet?
ME: What do you mean, ‘tried out’?
TED: Have you walked across it while wearing the dog’s collar?
ME: No. Have you?
TED: Huhhuhhuhhuh…
ME: You did, didn’t you?
TED: Maaaybe.
ME: What does it feel like?
TED: Like Frankenstein being brought to life!

Yes, my brother took a dog’s collar with an electrical box with two metal prongs sticking out of it on his neck, lined up the prongs on his neck, and walked across an electrical fence cranked up to its highest setting. For Science. you know. as you do. I’m kind of surprised it didn’t seriously hurt him, but I’m also kind of not surprised.

Anyway. A few minutes later, the dog decided to take a run from the front porch to the far downhill corner of the yard, again, and of course he made it across the fence and off to someone else’s yard. We ran after him, and back then Ted was a really fast runner, so he managed to make it across the yard, the bridge over the creek, across the street, and into a neighboring yard, where he grabbed the dog and dragged him back. We caught up with him about ten feet away from the other side of the electric fence.

Now that the dog was moving at a normal pace, he refused to cross the invisible fence. The collar makes a warning sound, a high-pitched beep, when it gets in close proximity to the fence, so the dog has some warning before it gets zapped. The collar was beeping, so we took the collar off of Chowder and hung onto his indoor collar to see if he would let us drag him across the line that way. Nothing doing. Chowder was a big dog, and he settled his full weight down and would not budge. Finally Dave picked up the dog and carried him across the line. Dave was not a big guy, and the sight of him carrying a giant yellow dog half his size was hilarious.

It was so intoxicatingly funny that I completely forgot that I was holding the collar, by the box, with the two prongs stuck between my fingers.

The image that flashed through my mind was a giant gold and silver rattlesnake biting my hand off. I screamed a high C bloody murder and threw the collar as far as my arm would flail. I also probably levitated about four feet off the ground. Dave dropped the dog, who went back to his usual routine of jumping up and down and barking and rolling in the grass. We managed to get the collar back on the dog, and the adrenaline rush made me completely useless for about the next four hours.

So, in the great scheme of things, I will never know which is the biologically superior being, my brother or me, but I’m pretty sure it’s him.

And, SCENE.

August 26, 2013 0

too late to be night, too early to be morning

So, here’s some of what we were up to at Mount Moriah Cemetery. Again, Kyra Baker as WPC Foster, Doug Greene as Joe Orton, Bob Stineman as Brian Epstein, all photos by Kyle Cassidy.

Photo by Kyle Cassidy. — “do you know the story about the woman who had to be buried in the wall of the graveyard?”

Only seven weeks to Opening Night.

Performance Summary:

Traveling Light by Lindsay Harris Friel, directed by Liam Castellan.

Produced by Liam’s Sofa Cushion Fortress, September 6-14, 2013

at the SkyBox at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St 3rd Floor, Philadelphia PA 19103

Ticket Prices: $20 (tickets $10 on 9/6)

Tickets: at the door or www.fringearts.com or call the Festival box office

More Info about the play and all the artists involved: www.liamcastellan.com

July 23, 2013 0

the trickle-down of medicare spending cuts

Hey, guess what, guess what?

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.

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.”

July 22, 2013 0

A tale of two Georges

Last night we watched Living In The Material World, the George Harrison documentary that Martin Scorsese made a few years ago. It’s very good. It’s about half George’s solo career and life after 1970, and the other half is his childhood and the Beatles years, without going into too much detail. Overall, the film makes the point that George Harrison was very good at balancing his spiritual and earthly selves: he could perform, have relationships, produce movies, play jokes, and make money, but he also was the guy who could just float away on a cloud of spiritual sound.

The documentary has no narration, so the individual clips and interviews speak for themselves. Which is nice. You don’t feel like you’re being spoon-fed or distanced. So, for example, it opens with film of the World War II bombings in England, coupled with the song “All Things Must Pass.” The documentary also includes letters George wrote to his family, while the Beatles were in their first years of touring, read by Dhani Harrison, which is heartwarming and also kind of eerie.

Dhani Harrison is totes adorbs, by the way.

So, for three hours, I put away my phone, knitted, and watched this documentary about someone who spent their life trying to make the world a better place for everyone he met. It seems as though he did. George Harrison was no pushover, there is a part that shows him telling a reporter to step off shortly after the announcement of his cancer diagnosis. But in general, people talk about his literal and spiritual generosity, his peacefulness, how he could walk into a room and make everyone there calm and happy. It’s infectious, and leaves you wanting to sign up for a meditation course.

Then I picked up my phone, checked Facebook and Twitter, and found out about the Zimmerman verdict.

When I was young, and learning to drive, my mom and grandmother, on the other hand, gave me the talk about Driving While Female and Dealing With Police. They said, “if you are driving alone at night, and a cop tries to pull you over, drop your speed, get over towards the side, and drive your car to the nearest well-lit and populated area, where people can clearly see you.” and then, don’t sass off, make eye contact, make sure they can see your hands.

One night, I was at home on a Saturday night because my boyfriend was working at the local movie theater. This was back in the days when movies were on magnetic tape in small plastic boxes and you had to go to a store and borrow them in exchange for money. I had a hankering to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, so I went down to the local video store, rented the movie, stopped at the convenience store next door, got some tasty snacks, and thought, I bet my boyfriend would like a tasty snack (not a euphemism). so I took the long way home, stopped by the box office, said hi, gave him a snack, got back in the car and headed home. I knew my parents would be pissed at me for being gone for more than the fifteen minutes it really takes to rent a movie, so I was a little anxious.

It was probably about 8:30pm, after dark, and I turned onto a long downhill stretch that’s clearly marked at a speed limit that is less than your car would take if you were coasting. It’s the kind of road that suburban teenagers and idiots love to burn through, so you almost have to fight your car’s weight a bit to stay under the speed limit. I always liked this strip of road, and I always liked the challenge of trying to coast and stay as close to the speed limit as possible. So I coasted the mile or so to the next stop light. Was I speeding? I don’t know. Was I pressing the pedal to the metal? No.

At the next stop light, I noticed that the car behind me had its high-beams on, as if the driver were trying to intimidate me, or see what radio station I had on, who knows. It was bright enough to make me think, Jeez, somebody’s a bit too interested in me.

Having been followed late at night by guys trying to intimidate women before, I thought, that doesn’t look good. Delaware County has a lot of bored people, and a lot of cars. It wasn’t uncommon for bored male drivers to try to intimidate female drivers around there, and I had been followed by unsavory creepy drivers before (once I had to drive back to the movie theater after a late-night shift because a drunk guy followed me, and as he told my friends after they got between his car and mine, “I was just tryin’ to get some pussy”). I told myself that this was all in my head, and to get home so my mom wouldn’t be mad.

So, I turned onto a winding, forested back road to get home, and the car followed. I thought, okay, please leave me alone, pal. The high-beams filled my rear window, and I got scared. I sped up. Next thing I know, the rearview mirror was full of spinning red and blue lights.

Within sixty seconds, a young State Police officer was shining a flashlight in my face and asking why I was driving so fast on a back road. In a panic, I spit out that I had been followed by Bad People before, that I thought this was happening again, that I was scared and trying to get away from him.

A few seconds of silence passed.

The officer apologized, gave me back my documents, and said I was free to go.

When I got home, I told my mom what had happened. She told me that in my dad’s years in criminal litigation, he’d heard many stories from police officers in suburban areas who used to intimidate young women with threats of speeding tickets and having their license taken away in exchange for blow jobs.

Is this the same as The Talk and Driving While Black? No.
Have I encountered police officers whose ego was bigger than their intelligence? Yep.

Similarly:

-An ex of mine had a story about how, at about age 17, he was walking from a girlfriend’s house to his car, parked several blocks away, after dark, and was picked up by the police because someone had seen trespassers in the area. He was handcuffed to a radiator and hollered at by cops until they got bored and let him go.

-Once upon a time in New Jersey, I carefully made a legal left turn onto a road and was pulled over by a bored State Police cop who didn’t like my rainbow bumper sticker, and offered to take apart my car to search for marijuana. I was dumb enough to say, “Go right ahead, knock yourself out, you won’t find anything.” He decided not to search my car. I guess he didn’t want to do the paperwork. My car was impounded, and when he asked if I understood why he was taking my car and issuing a ticket, I said, “No, I don’t. Why did you pull me over?” he said, “I always pull over cars that have…” then he gestured at the back bumper of my car, waving left-to right, following the pattern of the rainbow sticker, and said, “License plates like that.”

The Zimmerman case isn’t about police intimidation. He wasn’t a police officer. He’s a small man with an ego bigger than his intelligence. It’s “hey you kids get off my lawn” taken to the worst possible conclusion. I’m angry that the prosecution didn’t make a stronger case, and wondering exactly what kind of rocks the jurors live under.

I’m wondering why we’re a nation of intolerance and ignorance. We all have the capacity for compassion and empathy, we all have the opportunity to sit down and quiet our minds or de-escalate a drama. I don’t understand the attachment to violence George Zimmerman must have to not just leave Trayvon Martin alone.

It’s a dangerous precedent.

On that note, here’s a classic piece of American literature which I think should be recommended reading in all schools. Be kind today.

July 14, 2013 0

Life Peak Experiences and Collaboration

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 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." — 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.

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." — “Make this mistake with me.”

TL:DR; Another life peak experience. Coming soon: Real Photos!

July 12, 2013 0

We’re looking for theater artists.

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”).

Email liamcastellan@yahoo.com with resume/etc. and any questions.

JOIN US!

July 5, 2013 1

A Midsummer Night’s Dreamers

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.

——————————————————————-

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.

Details to follow. Keep your eyes peeled.

June 13, 2013 0

Good things, small packages

I’m very happy to say that I’m part of the Philadelphia Installment of the One-Minute Play Festival.

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 29^th, Tuesday July 30^th, and Wednesday July 31^st 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.

June 12, 2013 0

Summer 2012 Review

Recently I was introduced to the Tumblr, whatshouldwecallplaywrights.tumblr.com, which made me laugh so hard that my core muscles ached, and I have to thank its creators for giving me a workout. If you are not a playwright, you’ll find it funny, at least for the pop-culture references. if you are any kind of a writer, especially a playwright, you will find it painfully funny, with an emphasis on pain.

As I was dragged into its web, my experience went from gleeful to sad, and then I moped around like a loser with my chin in my chest. The Tumblr talks about things like “when i have a reading and…” or “when I have an audition and…” or “when I have rehearsal, and…” and I haven’t had the “actively making theater with other live human beings in the same room” experience for a long time.

Confession: I have spent my summer chin-deep in new work in progress. This always sounds so exciting, like I’m conjuring glowing dancing fairies out of the palm of my hand while hapsichord music plays in the background. In reality (I have no talent for making animated gifs, so I won’t submit this to them), I have been typing, scribbling, talking to myself, and having fights with junk food. I read scenes out loud to the dogs. Squeaky was particularly excited about the scene that involved knocking on a door.

Then, my inner smart playwright said, that’s it, I’m turning the car around. People won’t know that you write plays that are good and so on and so forth unless you have a public writing platform type thing, so do what you know you need to do. Back to the blog with you, Nessie.

Hello. I’m back in the game.

Other than the work-in-progress (It’s fine. I’ll let you know when it wants to be known about), here are some other things that I enjoyed this summer.

Sleep No More. I was introduced to this by my dear friend Jennifer, who organized a trip for a bunch of us to go up to New York to see it. I had attended immersive theater experiences before, such as Pig Iron’s Pay Up, and have a deep, abiding love for site-specific theatre. Creating Mixed Drinks at O’Neal’s Pub in 2003 was one of my life peak experiences. I love being inspired by a space to create a piece that works in it, and I love complicated relationships between artists and audience. Sleep No More does not disappoint in any way, shape or form. More than that, it gets under your skin and becomes something you can’t stop thinking about. When you meet other people who have seen it, it’s like being members of the same secret religion, and you curtail yourself off to talk in hushed tones, “Did you…?” It’s a theater experience that is incredibly real, changes based on the audience, and makes you re-think about how you exist in space and power relationships with others.

All this praise being said, I feel like I did Sleep No More wrong. I followed all the rules, particularly the most stern commandment, “Fortune favors the bold,” but I seemed to always be walking into a room just as a pivotal scene was ending and the actors were leaving. Or I would find a room where a character was having a private moment outside of the main plot. The experience I had was beautiful, inspiring, intricately woven, and emotionally intense, but afterwards I found out that one of the people in our group had managed to follow one of the actors like a hawk through the entire show, and had gotten a full, cohesive plot out of her experience that differed completely from mine.

If I had to trade that for the things I did see, I wouldn’t. I found a mirror in a bedroom that reflected back everything in the room, except for me standing in front of it. I found spells scratched into the bottom of a drawer and read patient records on hospital bedstands. I found a room plastered from floor to ceiling with pictures of birds. I never found the apothecary’s “pills” that everyone talks about. I witnessed passionate, acrobatic scenes between all the side characters with their own secret stories, but I didn’t see anything involving the power couple until the banquet scene. It whets my appetite to go back, find what I missed, and learn more about how to create this kind of theatre.

Unfortunately, for someone like me, it is expensive. By the time I paid for the ticket, handling fee and transportation, I had spent myself dry for the week. I might end up turning tricks to pay for my Sleep No More habit.

The Starlux. Vince and I don’t get out much when it’s not one of his gigs, so a long weekend in Wildwood was a big deal for us. Vince used to spend his childhood summers there, so he was good at navigating, and I pretty much just rode along. If you want the simple, relaxed Jersey Shore experience, with a certain amount of quiet and a certain amount of excitement, The Starlux is your best bet. It’s two blocks from the boardwalk, near the convention center, so there’s just enough convenience if Morey’s Piers and the boardwalk bustle are your thing, and just enough distance if you want quiet. Separate from the main building are two lovely remodeled Airstream trailers, and we stayed in the one pictured here. I fell in love with it very quickly.

Pros: A deck you share with one other trailer, with tables and a grill. With the air conditioner, it’s quiet enough that you will never hear the traffic (unless a Really Loud Motorcycle goes by, and that was infrequent). The decor is pretty, with clean cool colors and sweeping lines reminiscent of the movie Sleeper, it’s very comfortable, and the mini-fridge and microwave make everything very convenient. The service at the Starlux is outstanding. Everyone is remarkably, genuinely friendly and does everything they can to make your stay pleasant.

Cons: If you are six foot four or taller, you may want to get one of their regular rooms or a suite instead. Vince fit inside, but didn’t stand up much. Had I been as, shall we say, girthsome, as I was in 98 or so, this would not have been a fun time. We were at close enough quarters that this would just be very uncomfortable for people who aren’t happy with seeing each other naked or hearing each other fart. That’s the Airstream experience, they’re small. Get with it.

We spent most of our time relaxing in their pool, eating well, and working our way through Juan Pablo’s margarita menu. The Starlux also has complimentary bicycles to borrow, so we were able to get in a few local bike rides. Also, I fell from 100 feet up in the air. I can prove it. I recommend this experience, mostly because it’s good to be comfortable with the feeling that you have when everything you think makes sense is so far away that it no longer makes sense, and you think, “Okay, so this is how I’m going to die.” (And then, of course, you don’t die, but it doesn’t seem like it will be that way at the time.) Also, the view of the ocean is stunning and humbling.

Gardening. I’m not much of a gardener. I go to Linvilla Orchards, I buy plants, I put their roots in the soil, and then I try to keep them from dying. My only goal is to make a garden that looks like the complete and total antithesis of all the neatly planted sterile gardens in our neighborhood. If it looks like Willy Wonka suddenly went from candy to plants, as far as I’m concerned, achievement unlocked.*

If you have ever tasted the difference between a home-grown, well-loved tomato, and the kind you buy in supermarkets, you can get a little nuts trying to make his happen at home. We have some tomato plants (some Better Boy and some Brandywine, which are an Amish heirloom variety), enough basil to make pesto occasionally, a rose bush, and we have a lot of morning glories. The rose bush was nearly dead this past spring, but frequent watering and some compost has made it come back with a vengeance. One tomato, so far, has grown to the point of being red and ready to eat. The rest are taking their time. Daily watering gives us a meditative ritual for the day, it’s very peaceful and it feels productive. Pulling weeds lets me get out a lot of aggression. And, speaking of getting out aggression…

Zombies, Run! Six to Start briefly offered this game for $1.99 for one day only early this summer. William Mize recommended it, and I thought, if this gets me moving, it’s worth its usual $8 price tag. It is a blast. The notion is that you go for a run, and the app does usual running record-keeping things that you want, such as pace and distance, but it also integrates a story with your music playlist. So, you’re not just running (or walking really fast, in my case). You are Runner 5, on a mission to get more supplies and food, unraveling a mystery as to what caused this post-apocalyptic adventure, and avoiding traveling packs of hungry zombies. So, as you run (or walk or cycle or whatever it is you do), not only does it switch between messages from the characters and songs in your playlist, but it lets you know when you’ve picked up useful items, like tinned food, a sports bra, or 9 millimeter bullets. It also lets you know when a random zombie horde has been detected, and how far away they are.

One day, Squeaky and I were on a mission, and the game warned me that a zombie horde was right behind us, just as This Way To the Egress’ “Delicious Cabaret” spun up. In the interest of avoiding traffic, I made a sharp turn down an alley we’d never taken, and sped up. Just as I thought, “I can’t do this,” not one but two big guard dogs decided to half-hop their fences, snarling and barking like I had pockets full of steak, that I’d stolen from their moms. I took off like a rocket. Squeaky was not amused.

So, yeah, it gets pretty real. This game will make you move. This past spring I was able to go for 40 minute walks at a clip, at a speed of about 2mph. Now I’m walking for 75 minutes at a clip at a speed of between 4 and 5 mph. My self-confidence and endurance have increased, and I feel better.

The sad ending to my summer: On the same day that all my reading lists for next semester arrived, Amazon.com pronounced my Kindle dead. Since it’s out of warranty, they offered me a discounted, refurbished Kindle with “sponsored screensavers and supported content.”

So, basically, the Kindle died, and they offered to sell me a (refurbished) means to look at their advertising. If I’m paying for it, shouldn’t it be ad-free? If I’m looking at their ads, how can they charge me? And if they can sell me a refurbished Kindle, why can’t they just refurbish my Kindle?

All I know is that I have 23 plays to read. If I have to read them on a backlit screen, that’s not good. Looks like I’m expanding my paper library this year, or I’m buying a new Kindle. Bastards.

I’m less than a week away from a new semester in Temple’s MFA program, Vince’s band has gigs coming up, and the mint is knee-high, so please send bourbon.

————————

*This should explain the presence of Gardenbike, our trellis for morning glories, daylilies and mint. I thought it was a Frankenbike. I was wrong. It’s a Gardenbike.

August 23, 2012 0