collisionwork | Feb. 25th, 2009

The penultimate episode (#11 of 12) of Bryan Enk & Matt Gray's serial Penny Dreadful went up at The Brick this past weekend, and was one more and still bigger success. Matt & Bryan have wound up with an entertaining and excellent piece of melodrama with a real following, and it's exciting to be a part of it, and feel the excitement of the returning audience members who just want to know what's going to happen NEXT!

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:

( PENNY DREADFUL #11 in 15 Photos )

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!