We interrupt the theater for a shout-out

Yesterday was my brother’s birthday, and he sent me, in the mail, a CD he made of a sound recording of CASSANDRA SPEAKS/CLYTEMNESTRA RESPONDS, my wild attempt to create a 9/11 show with choruses. I haven’t had the courage to listen to it yet. That was 2001, and this is 2008, and I’m still working on this stuff. I can’t imagine what I thought I was doing seven years ago. I can barely figure it out now.

But I do want to say that if it weren’t for Zack and Shweta, I would have absolutely no documentation of this ambitious and flawed project. It was a time in my life when I was keeping bad records. They both attended the performance, and Shweta had a script – and Zack a recording.

This is not the first time in my life that Zack has helped me remember something important, something I don’t want to forget. He’s the best brother there ever was (and nothing like Hank Stamper). Happy birthday, ZAW. Wish you many more.

Impressions from Days 1-4 of SAGN

I didn’t manage to blog once in the first four days of SAGN rehearsal. I suppose they must be keeping me busy. To add to the insanity, Robert and I finished a Creative Capital grant for the Convergence less than 45 seconds before the first readthrough was about to start. I was sitting in a corner of the stage management office typing crazily. But we got it in.

That first read: Kesey is a genius. A room with eleven men in it, cast as lumberjacks, is a room full of testosterone. And they are all so, so well cast.

I played the composer’s banjo on Tuesday and it broke my heart. It was all I could do to keep from rushing out of the rehearsal room, then and there, to continue playing it. It’s been so long.

Wednesday was a day full of the Six, and our first pass at the logging chorus. Thursday was a day of the Stamper family. I have felt so happy to be able to be useful to these actors, to get them books or resources they need. The week of research I did has paid off.

Thursday was also my wonderful brother’s birthday. He sent me, in the mail, a tape of a long-lost production.

Today the choreographer, the director, and I all arrived at a new conception of the first logging chorus. Our original sketch of it didn’t do everything it needed to do. But this one is much closer, and we are going to tweak it more tomorrow. I feel so very proud of our ability to get to this place.

I learned something today. (Actually, I could have learned it yesterday, had I been paying attention, because the director did a variation on it, but my head was in the sand.) I learned that when trying to find the soul of a chorus, it makes total sense to give all the text in it to one actor (in this case, Leland), as an exercise. Then when the text goes back to the chorus, it has been voiced by a single sound, and that spirit remains.

And we made it through the first act.

SAGN, Day 0

This morning, after four days of searching, I tracked down a hard copy of the Holy Grail of logging videos: THE OREGON STORY: LOGGING, which the Oregon Public Broadcasting office made us a copy of. We went to pick it up in person, and drove back through an Ashlandesque landscape of Oregon greens.

Lunch with the director, trip to the shop, meetings all afternoon – and tomorrow is the first readthrough. Sometimes A Great, Ready Or Not.

result: happiness

From the blog of one of the actors in SAGN, about what makes theater people unique: “it must be said that we are also, at heart, a brotherhood of explorers.” I enjoyed it a lot, especially his posts on salary vs. cost of cigarettes. It’s a familiar calculus, if you substitute “food” for “cigarettes.” Freelancing is like riding bumper cars, except you also get to sleep in them at night.

Blogging about logging

Happy belated Leap Year. An extra day in the month of February has never been so useful. I don’t have Internet in my room at the hotel, which has limited my blogging, but I have been mostly out of the room anyway – running around the libraries of Portland, looking at men cutting down trees.

I’ve spent lots of time this week at the Oregon Historical Society, looking at their pictures and watching their videos of loggers from the 20s to the 60s. It’s great stuff, breathtakingly old and strange, but the videos can’t be removed from the library, which makes them only useful for my brain, and not for the cast.

So I spent yesterday going through a bunch of videos from the public library that might or might not have logging footage in them – mostly documentaries on forest fires. Some of them had a little. The best stuff we have, by far, though, is still the footage from the original film of SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION. Though that movie gets almost everything else wrong in the plot, its portrayal of the actual choker-setting scene (wrapping a big cable around a big log before said log gets dragged up a hill) is pretty great.

There’s also a little documentary called The Oregon Story: Logging through Oregon Public Broadcasting that I have on hold and am probably going to break down and order tomorrow.

And there are Youtube clips of recreational logging competitions.

I was saying to Toby the other day that this year of extreme specialization in a variety of very different subjects has given even my short attention span a lot to look at. In 2008 alone, it’s been El Paso, TX and Mexican immigration, the Greek chorus, and now Kesey, the Bus, and Oregon loggers.