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It almost makes me want to try and work out Spacemen from Space as an actual monthly serial to do at The Brick, but that piece - though it's a play broken up into 6 serial "episodes" - wouldn't actually work in serial form without major changes (and there'd be no way to keep the cast together as needed, month-to-month; Bryan and Matt have been able to work around actor conflicts in a way my story couldn't).
Work continues on Spacemen and the other August shows; nothing more interesting to report there. Casting work continues on all of them, to various extents -- suggestions come in, meetings are set up. About a third of the people I wanted for the cast of Spacemen are interested, but either can't confirm or don't think they can do it. {sigh}
I'm meeting this weekend with Trav S.D. at Theatre for a New City where I'll be directing his play Kitsch: Or, Two for the Price of One in November - it's a version of The Comedy of Errors set in immediate post-Wall Berlin, with the sets of identical twins (sent to either side of the Iron Curtain) being babies formerly experimented on by Nazi doctors. Very funny. Really. And it'll be a big thing for me to direct/design at TNC -- a new space, a different kind of play.
So I have a bunch of great plays coming up this year. I am really, really looking forward to getting started this Friday with the first reading of A Little Piece of the Sun by the full cast (assuming I cast one last role by then; I'm seeing a couple of people tomorrow).
Unfortunately, I have to undergo a little medical procedure on Friday before that. It's nothing major, but not all that pleasant, and I do have to be knocked out for it. I've already postponed this once, and it's a pain to reschedule, and at the same time it's almost impossible to get the whole Little Piece cast together right now, so I can't really give up either of these Friday appointments. I'm hoping I'll be recovered enough by Friday night to properly supervise and participate in the reading, and that Berit won't wind up having to read my part.
I may be continuing to think and act like I'm ten years younger and can do things like this with near-superhuman stamina. I'll find out two days from now just how much stamina I have, I guess . . .
Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera to the Penny tech this weekend before the shows, so I didn't get any good shots of my own. Bryan took pictures though, and has posted them on the Penny Facebook site. I downloaded a bunch and cleaned them up as best as I could, but their still not quite what I could have gotten with my own camera.
But I was quite pleased with the look of this month's episode ("The House Where Bad Things Happen" -- a quote from me about the Cyrus Pierce house, where the episode I directed - and this one - almost entirely took place), so here's some of the better shots I could fix from what Bryan took:
Preshow. Leslie Caldwell (Matt Gray) tied up in the basement of the Pierce House, mourning his murdered wife, remembering another life he couldn't save - a little girl sacrificed by devil-worshiper Alexander Hugh Crain at Baker Beach, years ago:
Caldwell is visited by the spirit of Crain (Britt Lafield) and a strange demonic figure (Becky Byers):
Crain and the Demon accuse Caldwell:
Also bound in the basement, Varney the vampire (J. Malcolm Rymer):
Varney jumps back and forth from speaking to Caldwell, with hate, in the year 1910, and to Penny (Jessica Savage), with love, in the year 2012:
As Caldwell is about to be tortured by Mrs. Max (Pepper Dylan), he remembers Crain's sacrifice of the little girl to his Lord Baphomet:
The Demon reappears to Caldwell in his distress, revealing itself as heiress-anarchist-terrorist Abigail Pierce, who had prayed for the deaths of Caldwell and his wife:
Caldwell is saved from torture by his old friend Teddy Roosevelt (Bob Brader), but Teddy is promptly shot dead by William Jennings Bryan before he can help any more, and Crain's spirit lets Caldwell know that there is no hope here:
Mary Bryan (Audrey Crabtree) now tries to get the combination to the safe containing The Book of Days (which details the history of the world from 1910 to 2012) from Caldwell with more tender means than Mrs. Max, as Crain mocks him:
The Bryans' associate, the killer Black Max (Adam Swiderski), learns what happens when you suddenly open a red-hot, sealed, air-tight safe filled with flammable goods, as The Book of Days goes up in flames, taking Max with it:
Mary and W.J. Bryan (Merlyn Wolf Berg) are forced to combine forces with the author of The Book of Days, Hin Tsu (Viet Vo), a man from the year 2012, who they find playing piano in the music room:
Hin Tsu, once a heroic figure trying to save the world, now a villain, The Black Dragon, twisted and broken in mind and body, tells Caldwell of his plans to become the greatest and most evil dictator and mass-murderer of the 20th Century:
The Alliance of Tomorrow - the richest most powerful men in the USA of 1910 - gather under the direction of the Bryans and The Black Dragon to drink the vampire blood of Varney, in an attempt to gain immortality:
Coda. In 2012, Penny, a woman from 1907 still trying to fit in, working as a bartender, has wound up friendly with The Assassin (Samantha Mason), who we have seen eliminating all of Hin Tsu's associates (and who is apparently about to go try and kill Hin Tsu himself, a mission we saw her fail at in Episode #9):
But, in the BIG SURPRISE ENDING, The Assassin is frightened away from the bar by the reappearance of Penny's one-time lover and employer, The Magical Mister E (Clive Dobbs), who we last saw, apparently dead, in Colorado, in 1909, in Episode #3:
The FINAL episode of Penny Dreadful, "The Last Century," plays at The Brick Saturday, March 28 at 11.00 pm, and Sunday, March 29 at 2.00 pm. We're trying to arrange a THIRD show on that weekend as well, as this will be a big finale (probably in two acts with intermission) and we've been selling out all the shows the last couple of months, even without all of our audience "regulars" able to make it to each performance (hell, now that we've had 65 actors appear in the serial since it started, we could more than sell out one house just with all the Penny Dreadful alums coming back!).
And can I say that I'm really REALLY jazzed that Matt & Bryan have asked me to return as a "special guest director" for one sequence in the final episode? Kinda like Tarantino on Sin City.
Can't say much about it yet - hell, I don't really KNOW anything about it yet - but I guess I get to come back and deal with some of the things that I supervised in the full episode I directed, #5: "The Deb of Destruction, or The Poor Little Witch Girl." Bryan knows I'm drawn to the darker, unsettling or scary parts of Penny, so I'm hoping and thinking they're giving me something good and NASTY to design and stage next time.
Bryan and I are the spoil-sports with Penny. We want to unnerve and upset people while entertaining them with this, and we get a little pissed sometimes at the large amount of laughter the show is getting in - to us - inappropriate places. Yes, it's a melodrama, deliberately overplayed to a certain extent, and over-the-top in general, and with plenty of intentional laughs in it, but we have more and more been getting an audience that comes in a bit drunk and rowdy and finds EVERYTHING funny.
So with #11, there was, in the writing and design, some real effort made to dampen this aspect. Three continuing characters were killed off, including the nominal hero (whose wife had been horribly killed in the previous episode). The two most audience-pleasing comic characters have also been offed in the last two episodes (one, as I had hoped, getting the "Scatman Crothers in The Shining" treatment, rushing to save the hero for the two episodes previous, then getting blown away almost instantly on showing up). As Bryan and I kept saying as we dry-teched #11, at times making it as assaultive as we could in lights and sound, "We're not fucking around here, folks." This is a gaslit, moody, pulpy melodrama, with quite a few deliberate laughs, yes, but it is also a work of horror.
So next time at Penny . . . The Paradise of Destruction . . . ANARCHY!
. . . heh-heh-heh . . .
