well, I’m the kind of guy who likes to roam around

I’m never in one place,
I roam from town to town…
And when I find myself
a-falling for some girl
I get right into my car
And I drive around the world
Cause I’m a wanderer,
Yeah, the wanderer,
I get around, around, around, around, around…

I leave New York tomorrow morning.

saturday morning in brooklyn

Yesterday at lunch I went to sit in Madison Square Park. I ended up next to a businessman who was making a conference call. The benches were like subway trains - people grabbing seats as soon as they were vacant. And every bench was lined with people appreciating the sunlight.
The businessman was so happy to be outside. He told me that you have to think of New York as a constant adventure.

Last night I went outside in my sneakers to make sure that there was street parking on Taaffe, for A’s visit. There is. It was a hot, windy night, and I was looking up the side of a building at a fire-escape stairway, zig-zagging like ivy up the bricks. And cheesy as it was, I suddenly heard someone humming “For there’s no one for me but Maria…Every sight that I see is Maria…(Tony, Tony)” And I remembered that I have dreamed about this place for a long time.

And this morning, outside on the deck, with wireless in the open air and a square of sky above.

I worked full-time every day this week, except for the day that I missed my train then took the wrong train and ended up in Queens. It’s been five days of subway rush-hours, lunches in blazing sunlight, elevators, doormen, accounting, check requisition forms, and general dayjobbery. And the evenings - I saw a friend at a Oaxacan restaurant, went to a SSDC meeting, saw another friend at a British restaurant, drank with my Pratt Institute roommates and, last night, made phone calls to a host of people I’ve been neglecting. Did I mention I also furnished the apartment?

The SSDC meeting was amazing - it was called “Directing Your Directing Career,” and it was the first time in my life I’ve been in a room with sixty other stage directors in it. I understood what it’s like to be an actor and feel those eyes on you. Analyzing. It was wonderfully liberating to feel myself in their company.

Today, the weekend promises to be an invitation au voyage. Where to is undecided. But the cities of the East Coast present themselves like shells on the beach to be picked up.

welcome to brooklyn

“It was all good. She had forgotten how good the world was.” - Phillip Pullman

I need to go to Target right now and buy all the things you don’t need in a year of freelance assistant directing, most pressingly, sheets and a towel. But I’m here (having got the taxi driver lost on the way over, and driving through neighborhoods full of Hebrew-language posters), I’ve learned that this neighborhood is Clinton Hill, I’ve met my Pratt Institute roomies, and it’s a fabulous four-bedroom apartment with an outdoor porch, a cat named Cheeseburger, college-style couches, a beautiful kitchen, and everything one could want. Including, praise the gods, wireless, and a bagel place.

It’s gray and it looks like it could start raining at any moment. To the streets!

The Shakespeare In Performance database

is “a searchable database of performance materials from over 1000 film and stage productions related to Shakespeare’s works,” and I’m listed on it, as the AD for Romeo and Juliet this summer at OSF. It’s still pretty new. If I search for the director of R&J, for example, it lists that but not his production of Two Gents the year before. Still, a cool idea.

Like IBDB or IMDB.
Now if someone would just make an Internet theater searchable database - for all productions, historical and present - it’s so silly that IBDB is only Broadway - so I could search for Moliere, for example, and see all the productions he acted in as well as those he wrote…It would have to be a wiki, so the scholars could edit it back and forth at each other. And as long as they’re granting my wishes, maybe it could also include future productions, so I could know what my next show was going to be.

I bet that would be something that would take off. If some programmingly inclined person wants to help me and Amina hack a basic version of it onto Upstage, we might be able to get something started. Eh?

I made two wikis for the DCTC production I’m on now, by the way - both private, for production use only. It’s a very useful theater tool. I should write a post about how to make a wiki, but it’s so easy it seems silly. You just do what pbwiki.com tells you.

In Pursuit Of Thanksgiving

Safely in Los Angeles, where we made the Chez Panisse persimmon pudding today, and visited the Gelsons, the TJS and the Vons to get all the ingredients for tomorrow. Zack and Pam are en route.

On Ithaca And Going Home

So we’re almost done with the projects that brought me here. Today is my last day in Ithaca, which makes me very sad, but you can always return to Ithaca. Penelope is always waiting for you here, along with memories of Telluride, rivers, waterfalls, rocks, falling leaves, friends, and the mixed joy and extreme sadness of being an intellectual, whatever that may or may not mean from one moment to another. I never feel like myself more than in this town.

It was snowing last night as we walked home and I saw snowflakes on the ground and on my jacket, looking like crystal beads or tiny models of chemical molecules.

Yesterday, I finished the draft of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS. 25 pages in 12-pt Courier. Its intertwining plots are now like this:
- Oedipus at Colonus
- Medea
- Oedipus at Colonus
- The Wasps
- The Persians
- The Wasps & The Persians, simultaneously (staggered, and so on)
- The Persians and Antigone
- Antigone
I hope with all my heart that it makes sense to the folks in Indy, because I don’t know how to make it make more sense without directing it. At least I had some great collaborators - being able to have the privilege of rewriting and restructuring the greatest dramatists who have ever written is always satisfying. This made me remember how much fun it was to work on the script for LYSISTRATA, how I felt that each new translation I wove into it brought me closer to the original and to the spirit of the Greeks’ work.

Amina continued work on the web design for UpstageProject - we are almost at the point of being able to launch the blog. I’m going to try to write a manifesto of sorts for its launch, too, as Heidi Julavits did for THE BELIEVER - something about why we think the world needs this website now.

I’ll be in Los Angeles tomorrow, after months away. I was reading Ursula LeGuin this morning, from her book DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, and she quotes Carolyn See writing in GOLDEN GIRLS:

“Where did those girls walk? They walked for miles in the center of the city…They walked northeast and down a long sweet incline to where Griffith Park Boulevard and Los Feliz and Fletcher Drive met…They walked the old streets, Hyperion over to Vermont, stopping at the grocery store at …Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard…walking the width of the town they knew, over to La Brea…and then another long, long walk home.”

And then LeGuin writes, “Those streets are named for the love of saying their names. The girls walk in love.”

It will be very strange and wonderful to see those streets again. To drive on Franklin Avenue between Vermont and La Brea, my NOTE corridor. I’m happy here, in Ithaca, but it’s the happiness of a place you’ve never risked a long time in. It’s a vacation happiness. Los Angeles - Hollywood - Los Feliz - Woodland Hills - NoHo - SilverLake - Franklin, always Franklin, between Vermont and Virgil, between Cahuenga and Western, is home. And that’s where I’ll be, tomorrow afternoon.

Thirteen Ways Of Looking At The Chorus

Here’s a sample from what I wrote about the Umbrella Project in process, for the 2008 Indy Convergence. It’s going to be an exploration of the chorus.

“The texts to be used are still under discussion, but will probably include one chorus from each of the major Greek playwrights - Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides - and one chorus created out of a text which is not a traditional chorus.

We will explore the nature of the chorus in all the different art forms represented by the Converging artists, with lots of emphasis on dance, music, and character acting - but also on using visual art and multimedia to stage the choruses.”

If anyone reading has opinions about what the best Greek choruses are to experiment with, for these purposes, please comment on the wiki for the project. Thanks!

And We’re Back

So, Anne Bogart says, in A DIRECTOR PREPARES, that her best loved play in New York, or one of them, was the one she thought only theater people could like. It makes me wonder, more, about a play set in the time of tech. Real-time. Ten out of Twelve.

I feel like the theater folks around me are a really Chekhov group - the way I keep hearing people repeat “Some actors are moths, and some are cockroaches” reminds me of Simeon-Pischik, or something.

Golda’s Balcony Notes - Day 4

From 9.7.07: our 1st day of staging. We finish text work, from p. 27 on, then get into it - beginning blocking at 4 pm.

We talk about how the biggest conflict in the Middle East is between secular and religious people. In Israel, even the most secular Jews are more in touch with religion. But their making room for the fundamentalists of Judaism in the country has, in a way, backfired, as that population has expanded into a huge conservative swing minority.

Golda’s character’s passion is intellectual, not religious.

Aaron has a great sense of what motivates digression, the sense of how thoughts turn. He also has a good way of leaving things open-ended: “Let’s keep this on our table of questions. Once we know this play better, we’ll be able to answer it.”

We discuss the opening beat - we won’t actually be having Camille smoke. We talk through it, then run through it. Aaron, coming fresh off the design meeting, emphasizes that the images on the screen are pictures in her brain.

Then we start working forward, one section at a time. No preblocking. It’s run, improvise through, run again.

We work without the table and chair but end up putting both back.

We’re finding in the enacting that it’s best if these 3rd-party people face directly out front.

Lots of clarifying of simple stuff: who Golda’s speaking to and when, where her attention is.

It’s amazing how carrying an ashtray across a square of empty space, SL to SR, can change an environment, a play, a set, so completely. Placement of objects transforms a space. Props are powerful.

Everything comes through Golda’s mind. She puts memories on hold to reflect on them, then they come back to her and she reenacts them.

In a little less than 2 hours, we stage through the first section, top of p.4.

Seattleite 2

Spent yesterday sailing in Puget Sound and the evening drinking in Eastlake.

Today I’m meeting with two Seattle theater folks, an actress and a costume designer, to learn more about the town.