COLLISIONWORKING VI: Harry in Love - part two

The penultimate installment of my posts at The Brick's blog, B(rick)log is up, HERE. It's listed as being the last, but I'll have a postscript entry up later today - just some influential videos to wrap it all up - maybe late for any kind of promotional purposes, but what the hell, it'll feel more structurally sound to me.

Friday Moving Towards Normality Again, Maybe

The last two nights have contained the penultimate show of Everything Must Go and the antepenultimate show of Spell. Tonight, the penultimate Harry in Love.

(I was friends with a Classics teacher at Northfield Mount Hermon - I never studied Greek or Latin but I was interested in it and we had interesting "language" talks - who was VERY firm, correctly, on the proper use of "penultimate," and the word and its variants have been stuck in my head, to be used far too often, ever since)

Nice houses, in both size and reaction, mostly. Spell is a hard show to get right on both sides of the text - performers and audience - and if you imagine, as I do, the actual "work," what the play is, what we're striving to accomplish, the connection, the communication, as an abstracted straight line with arrows at either end hanging in the air between stage and house, essentially connecting work and auditors, then Wednesday's Spell was a bit more as if that line broke apart and forked off into multiple smaller lines with arrows at the ends of them shooting off at stage and house - some hitting the performers and perceivers, some shooting off around them into walls, ceiling, and everywhere else.

The more I do this, the more it all boils down into purely technical things - the internal, "emotional" stuff will take care of itself, the text will take care of itself, if the rhythm and cadences, pace, focus, diction, projection, intensity, blocking, and light are all given the proper attention.

(and, yes, there's been some snippiness recently from playwrights - appropriately - on some blogs recently about directors using the word "text" when they mean "play," but I often do use "texts" rather than "plays" - not sure what the difference is exactly, but I know it when I see it - Spell and Harry in Love are "plays," EMG and the NECROPOLIS shows are "texts")

Especially focus. Everything else is almost a subset of that. I joke about it in Everything Must Go, but it's all about focus, focus, focus. Too many distractions going on too much of the time these days. Not enough focus. I'm getting old and crotchety here.

(hell, I always was - once I was at breakfast in my boarding school dorm, and the aforementioned Classics teacher, Scot Hicks - who of course had to have been in his mid-20s or so at this time - came in to the cafeteria, saw me, sat down at the table with a big grin on his face, and announced, "Ian, I've figured out what you are! You're a CURMUDGEON!" - I was 17 and I guess it's only gotten worse . . .)

In any case, Harry tonight. I am completely at a point of looking forward to the shows themselves, but dreading everything I have to do around them. I SO don't want to go and put up the Harry set, but . . . well, you gotta do what you gotta do.

I really need to figure out a proper photo call for each show, too.

Meanwhile, this morning, what does the iPod come up with as the first Random Ten from 26,103 tracks?

1. "Come On Down Maryann" - Ohio Express - Bubblegum Classics Vol. 5
2. "When the Record Goes Around" - The Playmates - Playmates Golden Classics
3. "Little Palaces" - Elvis Costello & The Costello Show - King of America
4. "Reject" - Green Day - Nimrod
5. "Watcha Gonna Do?" - The Evil - The Montells/The Evil LP
6. "Fingertips (banjo)" - They Might Be Giants - Apollo 18
7. "It's a Monsters' Holiday" - Buck Owens - (It's a) Monsters' Holiday
8. "Heart of Gold" - Johnny Cash - Unearthed
9. "Johnny Lee's Mood" - John Lee Hooker - Alternative Boogie 1948-1952
10. "Freak Trim (Kim Outs a Big Idea) - The Mothers of Invention - the MOFO project/object

Oh, hey, I got some new cat photos, too - most just from the last half hour, though Berit took this one a few days ago . . .

I went around trying to get a good photo of Hooker this morning, but for once, he was pulling the Moni act and not holding still for a moment:

And that's the best I could get. I went looking for Moni, figuring she'd be somewhere near the sleeping Berit, which she was, but it was hard to find her . . .

Hey, there she is, on the dirty clothes pile at the end of the bed, just above Berit's foot . . .

Okay, off to finish the other blog post and get over to The Brick early so I can get the place set up and then actually relax for a while so I'm ready to do the show . . .