The Slow Fade

The illness slowly abates. Yesterday began with one of those false start mornings where you wake up feeling almost completely normal and can get suckered in to going about your normal routine, but then the sickness creeps back up on you and you've just made it worse by being active again too soon. Luckily, I was not fooled and stayed inactive.

So, better, but not great.

And I've definitely caught Berit's conjunctivitis and will have to go get a prescription for eyedrops ASAP.

Meanwhile, work on shows slows. Casting nearly done on my four shows for June and August (to recap, June: The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction; August: Harry in Love by Richard Foreman, and two originals, Spell and Everything Must Go), but now I have to focus on Penny Dreadful for the next week and two days. Bryan and Matt, as writer-producers, have been handling a lot of things for me during this sick-week, which has been a big load off my mind.

I've been able at least to plan out most of my music cues for the show. Using all Bernard Herrmann, I think. I'm currently having a big internal debate about whether to underscore one tense, nasty, and dialogue-free scene with nothing but the sound of a ticking grandfather clock - my first instinct - or to set it all to Susan Alexander Kane's aria from Citizen Kane (in a recording where it's actually sung well by Kiri Te Kanawa), which actually times out perfectly with the dramatic beats and rises and falls of the scene. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and each would play better for a different kind of house, but of course I have no idea what the house will be like until the show is running. So I just have to mock it up first and look at it both ways and then see if that makes things easier.

The purity of the scene with just the clock keeps being appealing to me, and I wonder if I like the idea of doing it with the music because it will make the scene seem a bit more "tour-de-force" and directorially showy. Then I wonder if the clock way is too pure, too sparse, and will suck the life out of the scene while being formally interesting, and the music way will keep the scene theatrically alive and give it the power it's supposed to have. I shouldn't be afraid of the grand, showy gesture when it's appropriate. This is a melodrama, after all.

Gotta love a script with a page-and-a-half of nothing but stage directions for me to interpret as I'd like - and actually, the scene before the big wordless scene is another dialogue-free scene of about 3/4ths of a page. So I have about 5 minutes or so of pure movement and sound and light to put together toward the climax of this piece. As much as I love working with actors on getting line readings right, sometimes I just like to focus on eyes, fingers, and body postures and tell stories that way.

It's a pretty easy script to stage, luckily (in the the pure blocking sense of "where does this person move now?" - I can see the best way immediately and don't have to think about it). And it'll work nicely in the front space of The Brick the way it's set up now (with no audience risers). If the space I have to work with in the theatre is a big square seen from above, and you split it with a diagonal line from lower left to top right, I'm putting the audience in the right half and the stage on the left. I can use the staircase and entrance walkway from Notes from Underground as sets in very appropriate ways, and there are plenty of lights available in this part of The Brick now (as opposed to last month's Penny).

Looking forward to showing up tomorrow and starting to direct this thing. A nice feeling, being in just as director on this one - really feels like being jobbed in on a TV show that you really like or something - you know the drill, the format, and you can't break it or bend it so much, but you can have a lot of fun within it. And for once, being in as director/designer means only as director/designer, and not also as line producer or production manager, so I get to just focus on my proper jobs, while Matt, Bryan, and the rest of the regular PD crew handle everything else.

A very excellent Random Ten this morning from out of 25,224 in the iPod. Good way to start the day:

1. "Trem Two" - Mission of Burma - Vs.
2. "Sex Junkie" - The Plasmatics - Beyond the Valley of 1984
3. "Gary and Priscilla" - MX-80 Sound - Out of Control
4. "Alone Again Or" - Calexico - Alone Again Or
5. "Tombstone Blues" - Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
6. "Hang On To Your Emotions" - Lou Reed - Set the Twilight Reeling
7. "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" - They Might Be Giants - Severe Tire Damage
8. "Mamá Cuchara" - Manu Chao - La Radiolina
9. "You Burn Me Up and Down" - We The People - Mindrocker 60's USA Punk Anthology Vol 6
10. "Mom and Dad and God" - Suburban Lawns - Suburban Lawns

And some recent kitty pictures - focusing on the very pretty Moni. Here she is doing her imitation of an apostrophe ('):

Close up of sleeping sweetness:

And with a blurred Hooker - but she's the one with the adorable face here . . .

Well, I'm mostly over the sickness, but not completely yet (there's a reason I've been up since 4.30 am, after a couple hours sleep that was apparently spent sweating about five gallons worth into the bedding), which means I need to now go spend another day of forced relaxation (which has actually been quite boring) so I'll be ready to start work tomorrow. Needed a cheery time last night, so we watched Myra Breckinridge, Blazing Saddles, Dark Star, and Kentucky Fried Movie (didn't quite make it to Modesty Blaise, which was next on the playlist). Before that, mainly Warner Bros. cartoons for days on end.

I'm running out of "fun" stuff to watch -- oh, that's right, we haven't stuck to just the happy films: I also watched Peter Greenaway's cruel and amazing film The Baby of Macon and Peter Brook's Marat/Sade, which seem to have joined Ken Russell's The Devils and Godard's Tout Va Bien on a list of "France-related, incredibly depressing movies that have something to do with my original August shows in some strange abstract way that I can't at all articulate yet but when I figure it out will help me crack those shows right open."

An unwieldy name for a list, but as accurate as you can get. Okay, medicine and back to bed maybe.