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Still Treading Water a Bit
May. 18th, 2006 06:44 amJust thinking about the show for a few days. Nothing much else. Going over sound and video cues. Transcribing the "beat poet" recitation from High School Confidential for use in the show as part of the lead-in to the "Beatnik Bar" scene. I was going to work with Maggie this week on the choreography for the scene as well, but she got temp work, so no go. I thought I was supposed to work with Stacia today on her scenes, but I haven't heard from her. Now that I look, it doesn't seem that I emailed her to confirm. Still might happen. I have to be out by The Brick and Stacia's place tonight anyway to pick something else up.
Preparing for a long drive tomorrow to go to Daniel Kleinfeld and Sally McGuire's wedding way upstate. Looking forward to getting away for a weekend in the country ("smelling jasmine/watching little things grow"), but I have so much work to do on the show. Well, so much and so little. The last rehearsal put the whole thing together in many ways, now it's just all the little steps and detail work to make the whole thing a going concern.
I'm having more and more ideas about the dialogue, but they're coming from two directions and I like both of them, I'm just not sure if they're compatible. Either I can go with the most blank, bland, cliched language ("Hi, honey, I'm home." "Good day?" "Oh, about the usual, I'd say.") or a more fragmented, stream-of-consciousness style, like most of my prose writing ("This. Alla this. I say, and the bill. Yeah, the bill, too. Trust face. All come down in a fall of the symptom. My span. My own face. A pleasureness. To show and to shoo. This waste, this seeming. Not a jot."). Actually, and this should have been obvious to me in the first place, they're perfectly compatible, of course, if I use the bland-blank for "spoken" and the stream-of-consciousness as, well, the internal monologues I have set. Duh.
This alleviates the self-conscious feelings I get both ways: If I wrote everything deliberately blank-bland, I'd be worried it'd look like I couldn't actually write "interesting," and if I wrote everything "abstracted," I'd be worried I was looking like a show-off or something. What was that I said about not caring what people thought? Well, I don't, ultimately, I just worry about it for a while before I finally say "Oh FUCK what anydamnone thinks!" and move on to doing whatever the hell I want.
Now my main worry is the lighting, but it's a house Festival plot and so there's next to nothing I can do about that at this point, except plan out my practicals and request that they have a couple of edison plugs on the ground or in the air that are dimmable from the board. I will have color scrollers and two moving IQ units to work with, so, great, I'm counting on those.
Saw The Death of Little Ibsen by Wakka Wakka Productions last night, which was quite good. Excellent puppetry. Solid script, not amazing, but at least workable, to the point, and short. Simple but effective set, with some beautiful built-in surprises (I love things that become many other things with a small turn or flip). Excellent lighting, for the most part (where it wasn't, it generally seemed it was the actor who was just a bit off from where they should be). Some sloppy transitions, but then I never think anyone's scene transitions are acceptable -- I can only get it right about 85% of the time myself, and they were good on that maybe 75% of the time. The group's work is so precise, so good, that I think I'm harder on them for when they're just a bit off, as it's much more glaringly apparent. But, good show all around. Wish I could afford to see more theatre -- I wasn't bored nor horrified by the last few things I saw as much as I used to be by other peoples' theatre (I don't like anything much, unfortunately, it's just degrees of acceptability with me). Wakka Wakka had received support in part from the Norwegian Consulate General for this production, and, it would seem, for several past productions, and they even performed for the King and Queen of Norway last year. Thus reminding me that I should get on the ball about a project that could get some of that phat Scandinavian cash . . .
Well, someday, I'll get to the Festival of August Strindberg's history plays. They're wonderful plays, and I'd advise anyone reading this to go right out and read them, but they're almost all out-of-print in English -- I read them about 12 years ago in a collection they had, and hopefully still have, at the Performing Arts Library. Just did an Amazon search now and found a few editions listed -- some at insanely high prices (around 70 bucks), some reasonable but more than I care to spend right now (12 bucks), and one collection of The Vasa Trilogy that I couldn't resist, used, for 5 bucks in hardcover. I got interested in these plays because of the family legend that we were descended from the illustrious Sture family, which Strindberg wrote about in one of these plays (The Last of the Regents or Last of the Knights or something else entirely, depending on the translation). The legend has been seemingly discredited (we're descended from a Sture family, not the Sture family, most likely), but I got to read some great plays, in any case. They're just as good as any of ol' Crazy Eyes' famous "great" plays, written at the same time, but unjustly ignored. Someday I'll put together the Festival of all of them, and I'm sure the Swedish Consulate would help out -- they used to help Tribeca Lab all those years ago when they were doing tons of August's stuff, with cash and new translations and such. The Brick would be a good place for these shows.
Also have the FassbinderFest and WellesCon to think about getting to one of these days, too. Should maybe have a sit-down sometime with The Brick People (as I like to think of them, like a Jack Arnold-directed 50s monster movie) and actually try to work these things out, if they're as interested as they've seemed to be in the past (I call dibs again on Blood on the Cat's Neck and The Magnificent Ambersons, respectively, for these Fests, if they ever happen).
2007, maybe?
Preparing for a long drive tomorrow to go to Daniel Kleinfeld and Sally McGuire's wedding way upstate. Looking forward to getting away for a weekend in the country ("smelling jasmine/watching little things grow"), but I have so much work to do on the show. Well, so much and so little. The last rehearsal put the whole thing together in many ways, now it's just all the little steps and detail work to make the whole thing a going concern.
I'm having more and more ideas about the dialogue, but they're coming from two directions and I like both of them, I'm just not sure if they're compatible. Either I can go with the most blank, bland, cliched language ("Hi, honey, I'm home." "Good day?" "Oh, about the usual, I'd say.") or a more fragmented, stream-of-consciousness style, like most of my prose writing ("This. Alla this. I say, and the bill. Yeah, the bill, too. Trust face. All come down in a fall of the symptom. My span. My own face. A pleasureness. To show and to shoo. This waste, this seeming. Not a jot."). Actually, and this should have been obvious to me in the first place, they're perfectly compatible, of course, if I use the bland-blank for "spoken" and the stream-of-consciousness as, well, the internal monologues I have set. Duh.
This alleviates the self-conscious feelings I get both ways: If I wrote everything deliberately blank-bland, I'd be worried it'd look like I couldn't actually write "interesting," and if I wrote everything "abstracted," I'd be worried I was looking like a show-off or something. What was that I said about not caring what people thought? Well, I don't, ultimately, I just worry about it for a while before I finally say "Oh FUCK what anydamnone thinks!" and move on to doing whatever the hell I want.
Now my main worry is the lighting, but it's a house Festival plot and so there's next to nothing I can do about that at this point, except plan out my practicals and request that they have a couple of edison plugs on the ground or in the air that are dimmable from the board. I will have color scrollers and two moving IQ units to work with, so, great, I'm counting on those.
Saw The Death of Little Ibsen by Wakka Wakka Productions last night, which was quite good. Excellent puppetry. Solid script, not amazing, but at least workable, to the point, and short. Simple but effective set, with some beautiful built-in surprises (I love things that become many other things with a small turn or flip). Excellent lighting, for the most part (where it wasn't, it generally seemed it was the actor who was just a bit off from where they should be). Some sloppy transitions, but then I never think anyone's scene transitions are acceptable -- I can only get it right about 85% of the time myself, and they were good on that maybe 75% of the time. The group's work is so precise, so good, that I think I'm harder on them for when they're just a bit off, as it's much more glaringly apparent. But, good show all around. Wish I could afford to see more theatre -- I wasn't bored nor horrified by the last few things I saw as much as I used to be by other peoples' theatre (I don't like anything much, unfortunately, it's just degrees of acceptability with me). Wakka Wakka had received support in part from the Norwegian Consulate General for this production, and, it would seem, for several past productions, and they even performed for the King and Queen of Norway last year. Thus reminding me that I should get on the ball about a project that could get some of that phat Scandinavian cash . . .
Well, someday, I'll get to the Festival of August Strindberg's history plays. They're wonderful plays, and I'd advise anyone reading this to go right out and read them, but they're almost all out-of-print in English -- I read them about 12 years ago in a collection they had, and hopefully still have, at the Performing Arts Library. Just did an Amazon search now and found a few editions listed -- some at insanely high prices (around 70 bucks), some reasonable but more than I care to spend right now (12 bucks), and one collection of The Vasa Trilogy that I couldn't resist, used, for 5 bucks in hardcover. I got interested in these plays because of the family legend that we were descended from the illustrious Sture family, which Strindberg wrote about in one of these plays (The Last of the Regents or Last of the Knights or something else entirely, depending on the translation). The legend has been seemingly discredited (we're descended from a Sture family, not the Sture family, most likely), but I got to read some great plays, in any case. They're just as good as any of ol' Crazy Eyes' famous "great" plays, written at the same time, but unjustly ignored. Someday I'll put together the Festival of all of them, and I'm sure the Swedish Consulate would help out -- they used to help Tribeca Lab all those years ago when they were doing tons of August's stuff, with cash and new translations and such. The Brick would be a good place for these shows.
Also have the FassbinderFest and WellesCon to think about getting to one of these days, too. Should maybe have a sit-down sometime with The Brick People (as I like to think of them, like a Jack Arnold-directed 50s monster movie) and actually try to work these things out, if they're as interested as they've seemed to be in the past (I call dibs again on Blood on the Cat's Neck and The Magnificent Ambersons, respectively, for these Fests, if they ever happen).
2007, maybe?
