CollisionWorks

There was originally the hope that we'd maybe get some more shows in - a small extension in July or something - which I thought was probably unlikely, but at least possible, given the difficulty in getting together all 20 members of the cast at one time. Unfortunately, the expense of renting the costumes has made it impossible - there's no way we could spend the money for them again right now.

Ambersons has wound up the most expensive show I've ever done - close to double the nearest ones in the history of GCW (Ian W. Hill's Hamlet and Temptation). There the expenses were mainly for rehearsal space, here it was for the costumes. I keep feeling odd about spending the money, but the show needed those costumes, and we had the money, and (as both Berit and Timothy Reynolds have reminded me) the money is GCW money - from our new credit line and donations - and can't be spent on anything other than our shows, so it's not like it used to be, where it was B & I's funds, and spending too much on a show meant having our phone shut off, or almost no money for food, or not having necessary dental work or car repair (which has almost always been the case anyway, even on that cheaper level - if we had any cash, it went into the show). As it is, GCW owes B & I money now that we put into the project from our own pockets rather than the company's.

Wish we got to do it more . . . Tuesday night was beautiful, just beautiful. The show was good to start with, just gets better. Maybe in another year and a half when AEA Showcase Code regs allow me to bring it back, I will. I'd like to do it more now, but this was a kinda long-standing dream project of mine, a folly that The Film Festival "allowed" me to indulge, and once this run ends, I wonder if I'll ever have the same passion and drive to get it done as I did now. I'll have other, newer shows on my plate then, I'm sure . . .

Ah well, yes, next shows. Three in August to get back to full-time now. Though I still have to wait a bit as I pick up the pieces of Ambersons - I have to return the costumes and do the books on the show (more immediately, formally, and properly than I once would) - and deal with whatever I have to do this upcoming birthday weekend (I have to take the car in for some minor repair, go to an audition for a special "movie trivia" week on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? - yes, really - and figure out whether I'm going to have to drive up to Maine or not for a few days to deal with getting my driver's license renewed and re-registering the car).

And now it's time to get going on the Ambersons part of the day - programs to print, disposable props to buy - fixes to make (even now) . . .

Back tomorrow.

No expressions of dislike to my face as yet - like you get those too often - and very few reactions that sounded like someone trying to be polite who didn't like it (which I can pretty well suss by this point).

Two reviews as yet (and probably ultimately altogether) - a GIGANTIC SLAM from Backstage, and a PRETTY SERIOUS RAVE from nytheatre.com (no links - find 'em yourself if interested). And the slam is kinda stupid and missing-the-point (he seems to want a theatrical copy of cinematic techniques that just doesn't work in theatre - you can do it, but it looks stupid, has nothing to do with theatre, and at best comes off as a trick). Martin Denton's rave is nice and he pretty well gets it - and it's not like I haven't gotten raves that made me feel odd and unhappy because the reviewer liked the show but obviously didn't get it at all; Martin "got" this one. So that's all fine and good.

The Film Festival: A Theater Festival is also the Pick of the Week on nytheatre.com, which is nice, and is illustrated with a publicity still from Ambersons.

Damned hot weekend, much of which I spent at The Brick, even after Friday night's Ambersons. Saturday I was on duty for six hours for a tech for Tod & I, which opened yesterday for one of two performances (I probably won't get to see it, but it looked gorgeous, and Hope & Jeff (on duty for the show itself) told me the story was lovely. No one showed up for the 4 pm screening at the space which I was supervising, so I went home and spent the rest of the day and night fading in and out of sleep, anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour at a time up or down. Sometime late, while barely awake, I got word from Berit, who had Michael from The Brick on the phone, that the lights at the space were blacking out and flickering during a show, which usually means that the dimmers are overheated and/or needing cleaning (which I should indeed have done before the Festival). I agreed to go over yesterday morning and clean them before the first show.

So I did, but the problem still existed. Everything was clean, and I now had a fan blowing on the dimmers, but no go, they kept going off and on at about 10-second intervals. This began some panic, as a show was coming in and setting up, and there was basically no lighting (and the show REQUIRES it - it's mostly shadow-puppets). Todd, the LD/operator for Tod & I came up to help me out, and we spent some time trying to find the problem - mainly, we were able to eliminate all the things that weren't causing it, while getting no closer to a solution (he put in a call to a friend of his for advice and I called ETC in the meantime). Todd, somewhat by chance, then held the fan up to the tiny vent on the control module on the dimmer pack, and the problem stopped. We tried it off and on for a bit, and it was clear that this was the source. The control module was dirty and/or overheating, so we pulled it out (after another call for advice on just how to do that, as it isn't obvious), hit it with the compressed air, replaced it, and all was well again (though we kept the fan going on it as well, just in case).

So this was a new one on me - I knew the dimmers needed to be cleaned with some regularity, but never knew about the control module. Now I do, and all is good - though I didn't feel all that good after being silly and using that much canned compressed air in the tiny space of The Brick's tech booth without regular breaks for fresh air (it's not good for you, and it says so on the label, if I'd been smart enough to look - mainly, it just left an awful metallic taste in my mouth that wouldn't go away).

Which leads me to my current source of nervousness - at some point yesterday, after going to The Brick for Stolen Chair's Kill Me Like You Mean It last night, the interior of the car began to REEK of spray paint. It didn't on the way over, but it did when I got something out of the car before the show (I didn't quite catch that it was coming from the car), and when I got in to drive home, it was overpowering.

So there's probably a can of spray paint in the car that got overheated and sprung a leak.

In the car. With the costumes and props for Ambersons. Underneath all of them where I can't get to it.

Silver spray paint, Berit says, as she ran out of the one other color she had been using. I've twice gone through what I can get to in the car to see if I can find it, but after taking everything out that can be easily grabbed, it's not there - all that's left is the immense pile of costumes that I can't take out because I have no place to pile them when I'm not at the theatre. And the smell, when trying to look for the can in a stationary car, without wind blowing through windows, is overpowering and nauseating and I can't keep looking for all that long.

So, I'll go over to the space a couple of hours early today to get all the stuff out carefully and try and find the problem element, and hope that none of the rented costumes were hit - the spray paint would have been inside a plastic bag, maybe even two bags, so that should help, but who knows how much. I hope the costumes don't wind up reeking too much of it - maybe some serious Febreezing will be in order . . .

{sigh}

So there's the day and week. Show tomorrow and Thursday (and that's IT for this show - no way I can extend it, as I can't afford the costume rental again), then focus more on the Festival in general and the August shows in particular as I can. Should get back to writing this week on Spell and Everything Must Go and recast the actress I lost from the former of those.

Okay, back to the needed relaxing before the back to work . . .

Bo Diddley was . . . well, great. He was Bo Diddley. I keep discovering that I have acquired more of his work than I imagined even existed (much of it on vinyl, and thus currently untouchable, unfortunately), and I return to it with more joy than most of the rest of early rock and roll - I don't know why. He wasn't the songwriter Chuck Berry was, or quite the performer/personality many of the others were (though he still gave an amazing show when I saw him about 10 years ago), but Bo just makes me happy (and oh, hey, dad - I lost the tape with "Please Mr. Engineer" on it that I made at your place - could you slip me an mp3 of that one? - and the rest of you, if you've never heard that song/monologue - with one of the most amazing guitar sounds ever recorded - find it).

I wrote a little about Bo when he had a stroke last year, and included some videos, but they're all a no-go now. HERE's a link to a replacement for one of them, Bo in The Big T.N.T. Show, 1966. Damn.

Robert H. Justman was a producer, assistant director, and production manager who was best known for his work on the original Star Trek series, though he did much more than that. He worked for director Robert Aldrich for years, including on the film Kiss Me Deadly, one of my very favorites.

I note his passing because one of his in-house personal gags has become a Gemini CollisionWorks tradition - Justman was known for his humorous scene breakdowns that would be given to the crew of any production he was managing - you get these writeups the day before or the morning of a shoot to let you know what the plan is for the day, and Justman had a smart-ass way of doing it that made everyone on set smile right at the point when they needed it. I wish I could remember what book his breakdown of the apocalyptic final scene of Deadly is in - I just remember that he titled the scene "Let's Go Fission" - but he was famous for his use of the obvious abbreviation "F.O.'s" to mean "exits" in his breakdowns (though I suppose it should really be "F.'s O."). A scene breakdown handed to the crew on Trek might read "McCoy enters, bitches at Kirk for a while. Spock raises his eyebrow. Kirk tells McCoy to shut up, go back to the lab and figure out a solution, but not so fast as to be before the act break. McCoy effoes to sickbay."

So "F.O.," and the advanced verb form "effoe," have become the standard GCW way between Berit and I and the actors of indicating exits (as in, "Laertes then effoes down center").

I'm pleased that Justman's gag continues on, as I heard Adam Swiderski using the term casually when he directed his episode of Penny Dreadful, and, even better, the actors all knew what he meant right away.

Justman and production executive Herb Solow also wrote a great book about the making of Star Trek that's fascinating not just because of its connection to the series, but as a description of how a TV show was made in the 1960s, how Hollywood was changing at that time, and what it was like then at a small, struggling production company like Desilu which barely had the money and resources to produce, as they were doing, Trek, Mission: Impossible, and Mannix on adjoining, decrepit old RKO Radio Pictures soundstages, while being mismanaged by the brand-new MBAs who were coming in and knew how you were supposed to sell abstract widgets, but knew nothing about the entertainment industry.

Also among the dead now are two other people best known from Trek, but with important work elsewhere: composer Alexander Courage, who composed the theme and some music for the series (before having a nasty falling out with Roddenberry over royalties), who was more notable perhaps as an arranger/conductor for other composers (primarily Jerry Goldsmith).

Joseph Pevney was best known as a director on the original Trek, including the very best episodes of the series (at least 6 of the top ten, in my opinion), but he was an actor for many years before, and gave notable performances in three classic film noirs, Body and Soul, Thieves' Highway, and Nocturne, which I've written about elsewhere. I was stunned to see in looking at his IMDb listing that these three films comprise a full half of his film work as actor - a pity, as he's terrific in all of them.

The year of my birth was a nasty one, and the Summer got VERY nasty indeed - if the previous year had been The Summer of Love, 1968 was The Summer of Hate. The month of my birth got off to a rousing opening forty years ago today when Andy Warhol had a very very bad day at the office. Meanwhile, Haskell Wexler was filming Medium Cool, mainly in Chicago, and Jean-Luc Godard was in London spending the month of June filming The Rolling Stones as they put together their new single, which at this point, 40 years ago, contained the line "I shouted out, who killed John Kennedy . . .". The lyric would change within the next week.

(I originally used the word "shooting" instead of "filming" twice above, but that wound up coming off a little wrong in describing the events of '68)

And in old show housecleaning, Ian W. Hill's Hamlet has been mentioned in a fine piece by Leonard Jacobs as to why he's not seeing the new Hamlet from The Public. He seems to have a positive thing to say about the production, but I'm not sure it was the point I was going for. Whatever.

So, The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage opened and worked out quite fine. Ran smooth. Not perfect, of course. Most of the problems are things of mine or Berit's that need to be fixed (sound cues that run too short, light cues that need to be lengthened or put in slightly different places).

Some of the cast are still having problems with the immense number of costume changes, many of them quick changes. A couple of set changes weren't quite right (although at least one was improved in being slightly off, I think). I'll see what I can do to correct these through email.

I did a terrible job on my narration, unfortunately - as Michael Gardner noted, accurately assuming it was from exhaustion. I got better as I went on, but I was on auto-pilot for the opening, just doing the "sonorous narrator" tone that I, like so many honorary graduates of the Gary Owens Radio School for Big-Voiced Men, can just fall into if not thinking about it. I've worked very hard on the tone I want in the narration, a very subtle one (as did Welles, though I've taken pains to be as different from Welles as I can, except for a couple of line readings I can't improve upon), and I just didn't have it until after the long, long break where the narrator reappears after an hour or so. I'll keep working on it for Friday.

I'm typing up my notes at the same time as writing this - which is why it's been four hours since I opened both the email to send to the cast and this posting window - and my big repeated notes are "CUES!", "CUES AND LINES!", and "QUIET BACKSTAGE, DAMMIT!" The first and last being the biggest problems (the lines were pretty much all there and right). Though I may be wrong about some of the backstage noise, as I'm seated onstage directly below the window with the A.C. in it, and I can hear EVERYTHING going on across the alley in several homes and businesses.

It all came right together when it needed to. Berit and I spent an all-nighter getting everything set Saturday/Sunday - after attending Matt Gray and Dina Rose Rivera's (lovely) marriage and reception in Fort Greene and DUMBO, I dropped Berit off at The Brick at 10.30 pm to finish the set/prop build, and went home to finish the sound/projection design (and send notes to the cast on Saturday's run-thru). We kept in touch every couple of hours by cel, and both stayed fairly cheery all night, until Berit finished at 6.30 am and I showed up at 7 to go over the sound levels and other cues with her. It took us two hours of crankiness to get that done (Aaron Baker showed up around 8 to load the projections into his laptop for use in the show, and he said Berit sounded drunk - she was falling asleep at the board while setting sound levels; luckily, she could read most of her writing during the show). Once we got home, Berit got to sleep for several hours while I kept at work making up the program, getting it copied, and getting some last props for the show. I got two hours of sleep myself and then we went back to The Brick to get set up.

And it was all there and worked out just fine. First time I've felt that way in a long time on an opening night. Now to make it better for Friday. Back to the notes . . .

(And a great big CollisionWorks thank you to the current donors to our season: Luana Josvold, Daniel McKleinfeld, and Edward Einhorn! your names will be in the Ambersons programs as soon as I run out of the supply I've made already . . .)

The actors have been trying to stay on top of the latter of these, but we have to keep going over and over the moves - especially as we never have everyone there (last night we had 18 out of 20 actors, a record). We lost an actor this week, and I had to split his part up between four other actors. We gained our last actor (FINALLY!) last night, Josh Hartung, who stepped in quickly and got right to it, even with being thrown all of the "now you move the screen, now you move the box" directions.

We had two 6-hour rehearsals on Saturday and Sunday to try and get all the movement down. Berit had her game board next to her to keep track of the people who weren't there.

This is the setup for the start of the immense ball scene (22 pages out of a 104-page script; took us three hours on Saturday to work out):

Here, Berit is either listening to a question from an actor or is watching someone screw up the blocking and is about to jump in to fix it (at rear, Roger Nasser, Timothy McCown Reynolds, Scot Lee Williams):

Perhaps Stephen Heskett (George) has a question about the placement of the screens (built, but without fabric yet) or the seating boxes (not built when the photo was taken, built yesterday) for the vigil scene in the hallway outside Isabel's room. Walter Brandes (Jack) also is interested, while at rear, Sarah Engelke (Isabel) goes over her deathbed lines:

So Berit tells them what to do (fortified by Diet Mountain Dew, dried fruit, jelly bellies, and some kind of icy beverage):

(for years, there has been a joke - I think started by Maggie Cino - that in 80 years time Berit will be the subject of a feminist theatre scholar's Master's thesis, which will put forth the idea that B was the true brains behind much of the creative work of myself, Edward Einhorn, Daniel Kleinfeld, and Frank Cwiklik - the above photo will be Exhibit #1 in the text of Berit Johnson: The Squelched Voice)

Here's the actual director, as he looks toward the end of a rehearsal (Berit, my stylist, also mussed my hair up more to make me look even more harried):

Still to do for Ambersons:

Postcard.
Fabric in the screens.
Paint the set boxes.
Get or build props.
Get costumes.
Make the projections.
Make the sound disks (with edits, etc.).
Build light cues.
Send out email blast.

We open Sunday. Whee.

Also, as Brick TDs, B & I have to go over and get the whole space ready for techs and the Film Festival itself. And we're supposed to go down to the Kings County Clerk's Office today to get our dba for Gemini CollisionWorks taken care of.

So I have to get the hell out of here now . . .

So, I've made up some playlists of videos I've been watching recently - longer programs that have been broken up for posting on YouTube, which I've brought back together so you (and I) can watch them straight through.

So, inside each of these cuts, a playlist (or four) embedded for your dining and dancing pleasure.

First, this 66-minute documentary on the career of the Pre-Fab Four, by Eric Idle, Gary Weis, and Neil Innes:

( The Rutles in ALL YOU NEED IS CASH )

I was led to this next one by queencallipygos, a project from 1990 I'd never heard of - One World One Voice, a "chain tape" started by Kevin Godley and sent to musicians all around the world to add parts in a massive jam, with over 250 musicians and groups coming together to try and raise consciousness about environmental issues, becoming a massive jam of musicians of all styles and lands coming together on multitrack tape.

The musicians include Afrika Bambaataa, Laurie Anderson, Bagamoya Players, Cedric, The Chieftains, Clannad, Johnny Clegg & Savuka, Terence Trent D'Arby, Dred, Peter Gabriel, Bob Geldof, Dave Gilmour, Kevin Godley, Eddy Grant, The Gipsy Kings, Rupert Hine, Chrissie Hynde, Howard Jones, Salif Keita, The Kodo Drummers, the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, Maria McKee, Milton Nascimento, Native Land & Themba, New Frontier, New Voices of Freedom, Nu Sounds, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Courtney Pine, Lou Reed, Robbie Robertson, Michael Rose & Junior, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Shakespear's Sister, Dave Stewart and The Spiritual Cowboys, Sting, Joe Strummer, Steven Van Zandt, Suzanne Vega, Venice, Adam Woods and Guo Yue. And others, who looked familiar, but I wasn't sure (I think I saw Yellowman - annoyingly, I couldn't find a complete list of the players online).

The final 52-minute-long piece is all over the place, from the sublime to the ridiculous, but the ridiculous is at least entertaining, and the sublime is . . . sublime:

( One World One Voice )

In 1997, all four of The Monkees reunite to create a new album, Justus, which Mike Nesmith only agrees to do if they actually write all the songs and play all the instruments themselves, which they do. Then Nesmith writes and directs a pretty-much-ignored TV special, Hey, Hey, We're The Monkees!, based on the concept that TV shows never actually stop when they go off the air - the characters are going on with their stories, they're just not getting aired anymore. So The Monkees are still trapped in their looney show as middle-aged men trying to ignore the "adventures" that come their way and still trying to get their band off the ground. This is a playlist of the bits of this bizarre show I've found on YouTube and stitched together:

( A Lizard Sunning Itself on a Rock )

And, more in the research category, an interview with Orson Welles, back when TV had something like real interviews:

( Orson Welles on the Dick Cavett Show )

And finally, all four parts of John Berger's classic 1972 Ways of Seeing series for the BBC. It seems everyone reads the book version of this in college now, but the video version is a far preferable version of the text, and worth sitting down and watching:

( WAYS OF SEEING, parts 1-4, by John Berger )

Enjoy.

Larry Levine, regular engineer for Phil Spector and Eddie Cochran, occasional engineer for Brian Wilson and Herb Alpert, died at the age of 80. Idolator passed me through to a good obit at All About Jazz and a nice interview with Levine at CNN from 5 years ago. Levine was one of those engineers who took their job to a level beyond being just a technician, working hard to make the improbable and difficult-to-capture-on-vinyl sounds that their genius bosses were demanding (Geoff Emerick's recent memoir about his career, primarily with The Beatles from Revolver onward, does a good job of explaining just what someone like Levine or Emerick does, and why they are so crucial to good records).

Also now gone, the great Will Elder, 86, one of the original artists on the Mad comic book, and probably the best interpreter of Harvey Kurtzman's vision for that book (and other, later work, though I'd rather like to forget Little Annie Fanny). The master of what came to be known as the "chicken-fat" school of cartooning (beloved first by the French nouvelle vague filmmakers, some of whom deliberately copied Elder's cramming of offhanded details and jokes throughout the frame in their films), a good obit is here in The Comics Reporter, and he is remembered by writer/comic book historian Mark Evanier HERE, and in two blogs with appropriate names, Edwin Hunter's Chicken Fat and Bhob Stewart's POTRZEBIE (Bhob also reproduces a classic Elder splash panel - for "Restaurant!" - in large form HERE).

Some of my favorite Elder work for Mad can be found online thanks to Gatochy's Blog, including "The Hound of the Basketballs" and "Dragged Net." I wish I could find "Starchie," or "Ping Pong!" or "Mickey Rodent!" or "Howdy Dooit!" somewhere on line to pass on to you, but here's all of "Restaurant!" as well, and you can see a nice collection of Elder pages at The Electronic Almanac of Dr. Derek Wisdom, Metaphysician.

RIP. HOO-HAH!

Rehearsals have been going very well. Good productive work. Generally I feel in a damned good mood about everything. I had a bad depressive period in the afternoon the other day, the black cloud taking over, but that's just screwed-up brain chemistry coming out as it does, and I rode it out into the evening, when I could use rehearsal to direct me away from it until it faded away, unnoticed.

Last night I didn't call the full cast of Ambersons (or, rather, as much of them as I could get, which would have been maybe 11 out of 20) as I had planned, but just called the members of the central families who were available. There was more than enough work to do with just the six I had: Stephen (George Amberson Minifer), Ivanna (Fanny Minifer), Vince (Wilbur Minifer), Bill (Major Amberson), Walter (Jack Amberson), and Shelley (Lucy Morgan) - I couldn't even get to some of the scenes I'd planned on. We did the big ball scene twice (it's 22 pages out of a 104-page script, so a lot gets done when we plunge into that), as well as the post-ball hallway scene, and onward with various configurations so I could gradually let more actors go as we went later, and wound up ending with the Lucy and George duo scenes. I have to find some time to go over the Aunt Fanny/George scenes some more . . .

Ambersons has a wide range of actors in terms of the ways I need to direct, maybe wider all around than usual, even with such a big cast. I have the actors who need to talk a lot about intention, and the ones who just want words like "faster," "slower," "more," "less." I have the ones who will keep coming up with more and more interesting options each time we do a scene, and the ones who will get it ABSOLUTELY PERFECT the first time in, who I have to hold back to doing it that way over and over from then on without getting bored and keeping it new and fresh. And there are the ones who are get a scene about 85% "right" immediately, and getting that last 15% is like adjusting a watch very delicately with very fine tools. And the ones who have absolutely nothing right the first time they do a scene, and you wonder at first why you cast this person, but with some simple directions and several runthrus (and sometimes just by getting off book), they're right on the money.

I put a lot of trust in my instincts when casting, more than what I see in a reading or monologue. I just want to know if they can speak clearly and with intention, and the rest is whether I just think the actor can handle the part. I got a big education in this when doing a show back at NADA in 1996 - at the first script reading, the lead actress, who I'd never met before, was such a bad reader you'd have thought that not only was there no way she could act, but that she could barely comprehend the English language. I know the playwright was concerned, as I certainly was since most of my scenes were two-handers with her. Turned out she was just a stultifyingly bad reader, and, once off book and on her feet, one of the most amazing, incandescent performers it's ever been my joy to work with. I directed her in a couple of shows later, and she remained a terrible, TERRIBLE reader, and amazing onstage.

So I don't trust cold readings or first script readings too much, but they can give you a good idea of what kind of actor you have and what you'll need to work on with them. This week has reached the point where it's getting more fun because you can see you show beginning to come through the work. The work is still there on top, but it's getting more and more translucent. By June 1, it has to be transparent.

Anyway, today's rainy day fun Random 10, out of 25,557 in the iPod:

1. "Missione Segreta" - Ennio Morricone & Bruno Nicolai - O.K. Connery
2. "Solomon Grundie" - Eric Morris - Intensified! Original Ska 1962-1966
3. "The People In Me" - The Music Machine - Turn On
4. "I Walk On Guilded Splinters" - Dr. John - Mos' Scocious: The Dr. John Anthology
5. "The Sheik Yerbouti Tango" - Frank Zappa - Sheik Yerbouti
6. "Something In Love" - Art Zoyd - Lost Sixties Delights Vol. 1
7. "All Men Are Liars" - Nick Lowe - Party of One

I'd never heard this song before, I think -- some lyrics that caused me to have to stifle a big laugh (Berit is sleeping), made funnier with the recent RickRolling fad:

Well, do you remember Rick Astley?

He had a big fat hit, it was ghastly

He said I’m never gonna give you up or let you down

Well, I’m here to tell ya that Dick’s a clown

Though he was just a boy when he made that vow

I’d bet it all that he knows by now

Well, on this cheery day (he said sarcastically, looking at and listening to the dreary rainfall out the window), we could all look on the bright side of life with Darth Vader and his son . . .

( Darth Vader Got The Blues So Bad )

And here are the best cat shots from this week - first a nice closeup of Moni, asleep on the couch next to Berit:

And Berit crept in while I was taking a nap the other day, and had been joined by Hooker, so she could get a shot of "her boys:"

And Michael Gardner showed me this at The Brick yesterday - one of the most impressive bits of animation I've seen in a while. It's all over the web this morning, but if you haven't seen it, here it is - seven and a half minutes of impressiveness:

( MUTO by Blu )

Enjoy. Back to work here . . .

There's a debate going on in some blogs and comments about how to, or even whether or not to, blog about the process while you're creating a play (at Isaac Butler's Parabasis and Mac Rogers' SlowLearner). My attitude, and part of the reason for this blog, is a qualified "Yes." I started the blog as a response to theatre blogs that I felt were all head and art-talk, to talk about the day-to-day nuts and bolts of making a show.

At the same time, I rapidly discovered I couldn't talk about everything, or even as much as I wanted to, when it came to the rehearsal process. It's just instinctual - there are some things that can be shared, and some things that can't, and not just when it comes to the work of the actors, but even for myself. I wouldn't mind throwing up some of a work-in-progress, but just some bare notes? No. And that is the state some of these shows are still at.

Again, though, it's all instinctual. I usually mention to the actors on any of my projects now (though I think I forgot it with some of the current ones) that I have this blog and unless they say otherwise everything is open game for me to write about, and I've gotten polite responses making it clear where the line is (one actress was very good in her emails back and forth, as we discussed her character for a show last year, in noting "THIS IS NOT FOR THE BLOG" when she didn't want something shared outside the two of us).

So I don't write about it as much as I'd like, because when I remove what I can't write about, what's left becomes "We had a good rehearsal last night" or "last night's rehearsal was harder than I thought, and we didn't get as much done as I wanted," and that just gets boring. I'll try to find new ways to write accounts of these things that aren't just that, promise.

Saturday we worked on Spell, which I've been writing more and more as it's been coming to me. The previous day I had written a difficult little piece, where I needed to have the Three Witches of the play, in the third scene, predict where the rest of the 32 scenes of the play would go, in abstracted rhyming couplets (which, I decided, should also never repeat a rhyme and all had to mention the scene number in some way). First then, I had to figure out what all the scenes of the play were actually going to be, which still had been up in the air, and once I had that, hacked away at the scene, which took the afternoon (the couplets falling into an anapest pattern, which is what I normally fall into if I'm not trying to do something else), and may need some revising, but worked well when spoken, and will do for now:

( Scene 3: The Witches Predict the Rest of the Show )

Sunday night I went out in the car to pick up some dinner for Berit and I, and as I was making a right-hand turn I suddenly had a big "Eureka" moment that solved how I was going to write a scene between THE MAN and FRAGMENT 1 that had been driving me nuts - literally right in the time that I had the steering wheel turned. I never get sudden ideas like this plopping right into my head, and it so stunned me I missed my next turn and had to keep circling around, still nodding to myself, "Oh my god, yeah, that's it exactly, that's exactly how that scene needs to work!" I wish I had more moments like that, like a clear white light shooting into my brain; most of the time, it's pounding away hard at the words until the right ones become clear. I still haven't written the scene, but it's there in my head, waiting and ready. It's exciting, and I'm almost nervous about setting it down - but it solves several potential expositional problems with the play, and opens it up on one more meta-level.

In other nuts-and-bolts work, I've been dealing with all the Equity forms for all the shows, writing the Ambersons press release, revising schedules as more conflicts come in, and sending out emails for info that I need or reminders to the casts. And writing lists of what still needs to be done on Ambersons before we open on June 1, which is suddenly not very far away at all. Two weeks and five days. Yeesh.

In the rest of the world, Robert Rauschenberg is dead. The Times obit HERE calls him a "Titan" in the headline, and I couldn't think of a better word. Another obit, from the Chicago Tribune is HERE. I've always had a mixed reaction to RR - either he really hits it and I just LOVE a piece, or it's just "meh." Never really disliked anything I saw, I don't think.

I once got the freelance job of mounting the slides he'd created for a Trisha Brown dance piece at White Oak. They had been doing the dance for years with just RR's original slides, and had finally decided to make copies of them to use, and put the original slides away in storage. So they were delivered to me from the lab that made the copies, but I was surprised to have the original RR slides delivered to my little office in The Piano Store theatre on the LES, as well as the roll of copies, and I had to give my dad and stepmom a kind of hysterically giggly call about how I had a box of Rauschenberg originals sitting next to my foot in my crappy little office. I kept them very safe for the week or so that I had them.

Back to work now on forms I need to fill out for the AEA Showcase. More rehearsals tonight and every night for a while. More here when I get to it.

The new piece didn't bug me so much at first, once I got past the vomitous opening paragraphs - in the end, I just kinda felt, "Well . . . he's trying . . ." about this piece on the move to Off-Broadway of several OOB works. I had a discussion with some other Brick staff about it, and we somewhat came to that conclusion as well. He's trying, at least, even if OOB appears to be a wild, woolly, and lawless wild west zone to WTFC. There's some interesting info on ERS and Jenny Schwartz in there, and hey, I thought, if WTFC brings some audience to those shows, fine, I'll take the insults.

Maybe it's being an OOB artist who is used to having my level of theatre slapped around by the press that created that shrug and lethargic response to this piece. Garrett Eisler at The Playgoer, a critic who knows and respects his Indie Theatre, is not so sanguine about it, and got my blood properly boiling again with his take on the piece, "Ish Sets OOB Back 30 Years."

As Isaac did, I recommend Garrett's piece for a good explanation of why we should be so damned angry with WTFC for this piece. He's right.

So, as long as I'm posting video (as always now, behind cuts, for those with the browsers that crash), here's some others I ran into today and wanted to share . . .

flyswatter posted this Rudy Ray Moore trailer for a favorite BadFilm of mine (my friend Jim Baker introduced me to it, calling it "Plan 10 From Inner City"). Can you motherfuckers take the power of DOLEMITE?

( Goddamn, Mama, This Sure Is a Spooky Joint . . . )

(my favorite RRM film is still Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil's Son-In-Law, though)

And finally, courtesy Tom Tomorrow at This Modern World, a civics lesson as Penguin and The Batman discuss the American electorate:

( Remember, NO POLITICS )

Enjoy.

In 1942, Orson Welles' second feature film, and probable masterpiece, was mutilated by RKO Radio Pictures. 43 minutes were cut, and several scenes were reshot in an attempt to make Welles' dark, Chekhovian adaptation of Booth Tarkington's story of a family and town swallowed up in the Industrial Revolution a happier and more commercial experience. It didn't work. The film was buried by the studio, both in the marketplace and physically - all unused footage from the film was destroyed - and Welles' version is gone forever, one of the great mythologized films of Hollywood.

In this show we attempt to reconstruct, as well as we can from the documents and photos that still exist, a theatrical interpretation of Welles' cinematic take on Tarkington's novel. It's not the movie, but it's as close as you're ever likely to see.

with David Arthur Bachrach, Aaron Baker, Linda Blackstock, Walter Brandes, Rebecca Collins, Ivanna Cullinan, Sarah Malinda Engelke, Larry Floyd, Stephen Heskett, Justin R.G. Holcomb, Amy Lizska, Roger Nasser, Vince Phillip, Maire-Rose Pike, Shelley Ray, Timothy McCown Reynolds, Bill Weeden, Natalie Wilder, Scot Lee Williams


Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville
by Richard Foreman - directed by Ian W. Hill
9 performances - July 31-August 21 - $15.00

Harry Rosenfeld is a big, neurotic, unnerved and unnerving man who believes his wife is planning to cheat on him. His response: drug her and keep her knocked out until her paramour goes away. The plan works about as well as should be expected and, over several days, a number of people are sucked into Harry's manic, snowballing energy as it becomes an eventual avalanche of (hysterically funny) psychosis.

Before embarking on his great career directing his own groundbreaking avant-garde plays, Richard Foreman briefly entertained the possibility of being a commercial Broadway playwright. This 1966 boulevard comedy (which Foreman has compared accurately to the plays of Murray Schisgal) nearly made it to Broadway, which very well might have meant a very different career for Foreman. It's not what you probably know from him, but it's as funny as his best work, and any line from it, out of context, would not sound out of place in one of his later plays. Really.

with Walter Brandes, Josephine Cashman, Ian W. Hill, Tom Reid, Ken Simon, Darius Stone


Spell
written, designed, and directed by Ian W. Hill
9 performances - August 1-August 24 - $12.00

An American woman who considers herself a patriot has committed a horrible terrorist act as an act of protest and, she hopes, revolution against the government, which she believes no longer represents the law, people, and Constitution of the USA.

As she is interrogated, her mind reinterprets her surroundings into a chorus of voices - witches, revolutionaries, doctors, generals, bossmen, old boyfriends, fragments of herself - arguing over the validity of her violent actions while at the same time trying to deny that the monstrous act has ever occurred, or that she could be capable of such a thing. A meditation on - among other things - whether violence can ever be truly justified, and if so, what limits are there and where does it end?

with Fred Backus, Olivia Baseman, Jorge Cordova, Gavin Starr Kendall, Iracel Rivero, Alyssa Simon, Moira Stone, Liz Toft, Sammy Tunis, Jeanie Tse, Rasha Zamamiri


Everything Must Go (Invisible Republic 2)
text, design, direction and choreography by Ian W. Hill with the company
9 performances - August 2-August 24 - $12.00

A play in dance and fragmented businesspeak. A day in the life of an advertising agency as they work on a major new account, interspersed with backbiting, backstabbing, coffee breaks, office romances, motivational lectures, afternoon slumps, and a Mephistophelian boss who has his eye on a beautiful female Faust of an intern.

A constantly shifting dance-theatre piece in which anything that matters must have a price, anyone is corruptible, and everything must go.

with Gyda Arber, David Arthur Bachrach, Becky Byers, Patrick Cann, Maggie Cino, Ian W. Hill, Amy Lizska, Brandi Robinson, Dina Rose, Ariana Siegel, Julia C. Sun

All shows will be at

The Brick - 575 Metropolitan Avenue - Williamsburg, Brooklyn
right by the L Train stop at Lorimer - G Train stop at Metropolitan/Grand

Advance tickets for all shows will be available at Theatermania.com - there will be special discounts for seeing two or three of the August shows. More info as it happens . . .

hope to see you at our shows, and thanks for your continued support,

Ian W. Hill, arts
Berit Johnson, crafts
Gemini CollisionWorks


Gemini CollisionWorks is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions in behalf of Gemini CollisionWorks may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.