Temptation now has three of nine performances down.
The Equity issues are settled, and all is well, though I discovered I had to cut the fog machine from the end of the show -- the brand-spanking-new 2006 AEA Showcase Code prohibits the use COMPLETELY of smoke/fog machines in AEA Showcases (when I did my shows earlier this year, I was still sent the 2000 code, which doesn't have this restriction). So the ending of the play is a bit . . . well, not what Havel or I intended. It's supposed to potentially scare the audience into running from the theatre in terror, at least as Havel wrote it (he noted that the curtain call is for those audience members who haven't fled the space), and as I was determined to actually DO it. But now, well, it gets the show done and ends the story and characters, just doesn't bring it forward and out into the real world, as it should.
But these are the compromises you wind up making, I guess. If I'd known I would have had to make this compromise, I might have actually chosen a different show. Not that I did the show for the ending, but the forcefulness of it, and building the whole show to that point, was a large part of why I wanted to do the piece -- Edward recommended the show to me after reading that last stage direction, knowing it was "right" for me.
Wednesday night at the show, I had three other members of the Northfield Mount Hermon class of '86 in the house, Sandy Beech, Ben Robertson, and Charlotte Jones. With me and Aaron there for the show, it was a mini-class reunion. There had been a talk-back scheduled for after the show, but no one apart from the old friends seemed to be all that interested in it, so we had an informal, standing-around discussion of the show and what I was trying to do with it. They liked the show, and yes, it's a good show, really. That night's performance seemed a bit rushed at times, losing some of the subtlety we had in it before, but that's ephemeral theatre, you don't get all of it all the time. Still, good as it is, I feel odd about it, almost defensively telling these old friends of mine, who've never seen my work before, and really liked this one, that this isn't the type of stuff I normally do. I feel a bit like a semi-abstract artist hired to do a craftsman's job on a big representational mural, who puts his heart and soul and talent into it, yes, and makes something wonderful, really really good, but wants to say to the people who like it, "Yeah, but you should see my real work." Which makes me feel self-centered and lousy.
I usually try to create a "world" onstage, where the acting, set, props, sound, and lights are all part of one integrated system, a constantly shifting landscape of colliding elements, where there are elements of "story" or "plot" but in a dreamlike way. Moments of stillness, silence, clarity, honor, and purity are brief respites in a universe of confusion, pain, repression, and sensory overload. Usually in something like my rethinkings of the Foreman plays, or some of my originals, there's somewhere like 150 to 200 light and sound cues in a 70-90 minutes show. Sometimes more. Constant change, then the car hits the wall in a moment to think, before backing up and driving off again, dented, wounded, and smoking.
Temptation has 31 light cues and about 20 sound cues in two hours and forty minutes. Preshow music and lights, scene lights, scene change lights and music, scene lights. Repeat as needed. Almost no underscoring except for music in the "party" scenes. Intermission music. Exit music. Almost no internal light cues.
And this is what this play should have; anything else I would add to it would just be wrong. Self-indulgent. And yet . . . I watch and I don't see a world, I see a setting -- not a bad one, either, really -- in which really FINE actors are performing really FINE text in a really FINE way. This should be enough, right? Right?
The actors are terrific, and I'm proud of what we've done together. Sometimes I climb down from the booth to watch from the back of the house for a bit -- the 10 scenes are 9 to 18 minutes long, with, as I said, almost no internal cues, and the view/sound from the booth is lousy and makes everything look dim and sound tinny. So I come down so I can appreciate how good the acting actually is, and how much I like the lights most of the time (there are a couple of places where I can't get light where I need it -- I was expecting to have the moving I-Cue units cover these places, but it wound up being I can have my practicals dimmable OR the I-Cues -- and I have to avert my eyes here and there in disgust at these bad lighting moments; luckily they don't last long). It's good work. Really strong.
I've taken a personal tack on the play in many ways, so it's certainly not uninterested, faceless work to me. Maybe it's just ego. I did Havel's play the way I thought Havel's play was best served. It's not MINE. Probably that's it. I felt a slightly similar disconnect with the other two long "straight" plays I've directed/designed, Clive Barker's Frankenstein in Love and Richard Foreman's Harry in Love, but I was also acting in both of those, so I wasn't quite so distant.
I seem to do these things well. I think the more abstract work I do actually serves me well in staging straighter things like this -- normally I'm trying to get at the "machine language" of theatre, the raw basic code behind the normally spiffed-up gestures of drama, breaking it down, showing the impulses behind the gestures, why these things "work," while at the same time making them still work. So just putting the friendly user interface back on is pretty easy. Underneath, all that code is still running.
So, it's good, yes. Audience reaction has been quite positive, and not from gladhanders. The acting is very special, and when the lights work (the way the hanging fluorescent tube lights Walter's face in the "trial" scene, for example), I'm really happy. Just wish I could be happier.
Okay, time to leave this and get going - laundry to finish, have to clean myself up. Why have I been nervous all day, as noted in each of my blog entries? This afternoon I go to a small, intimate reception for Mr. Havel to meet the people behind The Havel Festival, at the residence of Ambassador Martin Palous, as a representative of the board of Untitled Theatre Co. #61 (and as myself/Gemini CollisionWorks, of course, but I'm only there cause I'm on the board). Time to get the nice clothes out of the dryer, pull the blazer and tie outta the closet, shower, shave, trim the beard, and try and re-preppy-fy myself into something presentable. Burning a disk of the music I'm using in the show for Havel as well; maybe he'll enjoy that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
