bearded poems

I read the March poems written by the two E’s - Ellen and Emma - with whom I trade poems, without any idea of which one wrote which one. Usually, I would know by style, but this time they each hit close to a certain bone and I can’t tell whose is whose.

Not only does this make me evaluate them both more fairly, in my mind, their authorship becomes collective.

Somehow their styles merge, and I attribute to each of them - and to both poems - the respective poetic histories of BOTH writers.

I think this has not a little to do with seeing BEARD OF AVON. To have uncertain authorship is an interpretive gift. If any author is possible, all possibilities are possible.

from the a-pun-is-worth-a-thousand-words department

I’m so full of great ideas once we get into the theater. Such as: “Popsicle Styx,” a super-short stop-motion film about dead souls being ferried down a river of, you guessed it. Part of a series of artsy shorts made entirely from kindergarten art-project materials. To be followed by “Tracing Paper Follies” and “The Ballad of Chalk and Vellum.”

Will there ever be any respite from Piers Anthony’s influence on my consciousness? I think I loved puns this much before I even read those books. I remember discovering, once elected one of the writers for the Stanford Band, that puns (and rhyme) were the only kind of humor I had access to.

and that’s why they call it opera

“The Metropolitan Opera House has also had its brush with murder. In 1981 a Met stagehand, Craig Crimmins, was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for hurling a violinist, Helen Hagnes Mintiks, to her death down an airshaft from the roof of the opera house. Ms. Mintiks had disappeared during an intermission of a Berlin Ballet performance.”

(”Many nights at the opera involve emergency room” - NYT)

physics and other diversions

We are on stage early this weekend - the carpenters finished the towering behemoth of a set quickly, and we’re spacing. Tech begins Wednesday.

I’m reading a book by Alan Lightman that a physicist friend recommended, GREAT IDEAS IN PHYSICS. It’s a survey non-majors kind of thing, but not dumbed down. I’m skimming through the conservation laws now. Lightman’s writing is refreshingly clear. I haven’t had physics since 9th grade, so this is all new to me, or seems so.

My father is a social scientist, and my mother is a scientific humanist - a librarian, but with a pragmatic approach to the world of the humanities. They both have feet in both worlds. I think their two children, in response, went to the opposite ends of the spectrum: theater and computers. We find ourselves pretty far apart in terms of our fields of work, but Z and I both take a lot of pleasure in bridging the gap between the two cultures whenever possible.

It feels like when I read science books, I’m doing something in connection to my family, and to our most firmly held belief - which has to do with education, and how you can never have enough of it, and how there is no excuse for not knowing everything there is to know, or trying. I think, although I don’t know for certain, that Z may feel the same way about his explorations of the arts. It’s in honor of our upbringing that we both religiously explore the other fields.

My desire to be well-rounded in this aspect used to be a drawback - I would go to the extent of not taking the classes I most wanted to take, usually in the English department, because “that was what everyone does” and I needed to also know about everything else. This is how I got through school without ever taking a Shakespeare class. I showed up on the first day of several, and decided that this was something I was already familiar with, and it would be “better for me” to suffer through something less exactly what I loved. Big mistake. I both know much less about Shakespeare than I should and also have a lingering resentment of certain other subjects.

I no longer feel that way, having given myself the luxury of specialization, and surfeited on theater to the extent that I sneeze and produce a ground plan. These days, reading physics is pure joy. Taking a break.

During spacing today, one of the actors referred to the “Z axis,” and I had to take way too long to remember what that was - a string of memories that took me back to ninth grade, to graph paper, to math that I enjoyed, math involving things like “line segments.”

I actually had to remember the cover of my old graph-paper pad, a green and burgundy thing, before I could remember the “Z axis.” I miss geometry. (Lightman says geometry was da Vinci’s favorite.) I was never patient enough to be good at it - but I did like it, and I think it more than any other discipline of science or math stayed in my brain.

Geometry was also where I developed the one joke which I actually made up myself - a joke about a protractor which achieved legendary status in that particular math class, in my junior high. (You had to be there.) I have never since been able to create a math joke, or any kind of joke, but geometry seems unmathematically playful, and works with my mind.

That made me think about staging a scene for SIAW a couple years back, when I was still struggling to get out of my tendency to over-block everything. I let the actors do what I considered to be a very free process, with lots of improv, and (for me) relatively little shape-based intervention.

When one of my friends saw the scene, he said, with total honesty, “I never would have thought of staging it that way - with all the triangles.” I guess it wasn’t as free a process as I’d thought.

I do hope that this is all somehow leading back to FLATLAND. I blogged a few months back about the incumbent destruction of Meyer Library, and how I feel like before they destroy it, they should let me and J.W. stage that book in and around its hallowed halls. I’ve done exactly nothing about this, but now I’m mentioning it again, and maybe it’ll happen.

(Created a “science” category with this post.)

Printemps

You know you’ve lost a sense of proportion when you find out about the holidays from the graphic designs in a search engine’s name - but I’m still glad to know it’s the first day of spring.

from the means-more-than-it-seems-like department

We just got out of a three-hour-long fight rehearsal for the fight at the end of the play, where Lee and Hank beat each other up until all their angst from their childhood is released. The fight choreographer was talking about tension, and he said, “The first thing you have to do is relax the muscle before you can move it.” And I thought, well, that’s one of the truest things I’ve heard.

Also in this same fight, the director comments that Hank feels on safe ground in fights. There’s a certain relaxation in knowing that it’s familiar territory. Sure, his life is falling apart around him, but at least he has the fight.

the so-called normal case

The preservation of self: that could be the motto for all of Sacks’s writing on neurological disorders. The so-called normal case is highly contingent, he seems to be saying, depending on the physical integrity of the brain beneath, and in what we refer to as the abnormal case we are still dealing with a self in the fullest sense. There is always an “I” there, someone to whom things matter; so long as there is consciousness at all, there is a subject of that consciousness. Even if you can’t tell your wife from a hat, there is still a you that must deal with this disability. Ultimately, then, Sacks’s clinical case studies are exercises in love and respect.

From Colin McGinn’s NYRB piece on Oliver Sacks’s new book about music.

Off topic but on subject, I rented a guitar yesterday. I went in for a banjo but couldn’t bring myself to do it. The two I could afford weren’t any good. So, for a very small amount of money, I have an Ovation around the Portland apartment now.

simul // taneous

Today we were working with some simultaneity, with an intercut between two different scenes. It reminded me of when we intercut Romeo and Juliet’s respective “banished” monologues. Both directors used a technique without any freezes - the idea is that the scene that doesn’t have dialogue is still going on, even though they’re not talking. It took me seeing this twice to internalize it.

I also finished, yesterday, a timeline of all the events in this play, which makes me happy. It begins in 1898, includes the Korean War and the start of the strike, and ends on Thanksgiving Day, 1961 - and I actually looked up when Thanksgiving Day, 1961 was!

And then we ended the day with working the second logging chorus. Both these choruses are staged with a lot of simplicity and clarity. Five minutes before we were done, I realized what I really wanted was to see both of them happening at the same time.

on the call of the woods

Listening to Hank and Joby Stamper talking about the rush of topping a spar tree, I realize they feel about logging the way we feel about theater. It’s a risky business, often thankless, requiring long hours. There is great pride in the pain of how hard it is, how poorly paid, how exhausting. There is even pride in knowing that if it were ten times as hard, you would still do it. And if you have to ask why, you wouldn’t understand.

This is not to say that Hank wouldn’t like to be able to have new equipment, or that the folks I know wouldn’t like to work shorter hours and be paid more. It’s just that we’re doing it, one way or the other, even if we have to hand-log the whole darn hill.

And they do call it “the show.” Just like baseball players call the big leagues “the show.” Theater is the metaphor for that arena of exhaustion and exhilaration. Hank even compares the spar tree to the center tent-pole of a circus.

Kesey understood that.

Sometimes A Great First Week

My favorite word for this week is “nascent”. This may have to do with finishing THE RAINBOW.

Today, the following things happened:
- Daylight Savings, arrived at rehearsal late. Only ten minutes, but, still. Classy.
- Chorus scene was stellartastic.
- Got to run simultaneous scenework with Lee and Viv - loads of fun - and also took the opportunity to publicly announce my intention to Move To New York For Two Months This Spring And Write A Damn Play. And that felt so good.
- Run of Acts 1 and 2, at the end of our first week of work.

And right now, color me working on a timeline of events in a play based on a Ken Kesey novel, always a shady proposition - getting ready to watch AXEMEN this evening at Joby’s. Feelin’ like about a million. Good first week, Team.