wine glasses on an empty table: a quizzical examination

Do critics go straight home?
Do they stop at a bar first? Lube the synapses?
Do they go out with people and talk about the play to confirm their own suspicions, or do they shelter their precious opinions away from the ruckus, the hubbub of chittering little theatre birds who like too much and too often?

How quickly do they process? Do they know the moment the applause stops whether they are moved, whether they will be moved tomorrow afternoon on their drive home from their editor's office? Or do they let it all sink in; marinate?

Seven wine glasses with some cheap cheap red sit on the unused tablecloth covering a thoroughly used table. The stage empties, and the actors are gone. The lights quickly dim, and the glasses are gone too. This moment has been a long time coming; it has been earned, as they say in the biz. But it is over too quickly. The actors speed off. And the wine in the glass has barely settled before the room's gone dark. We want it back.

"This is not a play about dishes, or food, or costume changes, but rather a play about people in a dining room" -- A. R. Gurney, Jr. Preface

Jess in her genius -- or the genius of her artistic team, she will tell you -- simply get rid herself of the dishes and the food. No newspapers. No tea-cups or birthday cakes. But through the soundscape, there they were. Perfectly timed movements to perfectly simple sounds: the snap and shuffle of the morning news, the clinking of china. The groundlings would say, on their commute through the plague-ridden streets, "we are going to hear a play."

Nothing throughout the show, save a table and chairs. No props to lean on or hid behind.

And then these glorious glasses with shining wine. In the final scene, the materialization of a dream: the simplest dream of reality. But so quickly gone. I want them back. Wait. Please. Just a little longer. Hold that cue...

But maybe that is the point: the vignettes of The Dining Room are -- if not straight memory scenes -- always nostalgic. Always about longing. Always about the past. A past we can never get more of. The sands in an hourglass slipping through. The last glance at a wine glass before the rose fades to gray fades to darkness.

I wonder if critics feel regret? Do they think of their reviews like referees think of calls? Snap judgments under pressure; under a deadline? Do they ever go back and look at the feed and say, wow, I really fucked that up. I should have stopped at a bar on my way home.

I hug Jess on the way out of the theatre. I think about mentioning the wine glasses. I wanted more of them, Jess. Just three more seconds alone with that image. Please? But I didn't say that. I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad I let it marinate.

Well, Jess. I wish you happy reviews, well-deserved. I smiled at a stranger walking her dog on the walk home from the bus, and for some reason I know it's your fault.

SIR G
A long time ago, God told me when I was going to die.

LADY B
Is it today?

SIR G
I don't remember.

Beat

LADY B
That seems like the kind of thing one would write down.

Day Off

Day Off may be a misleading title as I have Jerome Fellowship applications to review for The Playwright's Center. The problem with not having a 9-5 like job -- one of the few problems with not having a an 9-5 like job -- is that your non-9-5 job follows you home; but I have so far done an alright job at keeping the Goodman out of my home life. Or I was doing an alright job before the New Stages Festival started two weeks ago. Six staged readings of six new plays were what the public saw; but behind the scenes was fifteen hours of rehearsal per play plus the prep work. So it wasn't that the Goodman followed me home so much as I never went home.

But New Stages is over! A fairly successful undertaking, I think. I heard an audience member (some one from the industry) comment that it is telling that the Goodman can fill their smaller Owen Theatre for a reading while some off-loop theatres are struggling to get people in for an actual show. Sad. Very sad considering that three of the six readings were not very good. Well I guess this is more accurate: two were pretty awful, two were unsuccessful but show promise (one more than the other), and two were great.

One of them I spent doodling just to keep awake:

Act I:Act II:
And one of them I just straight up skipped after sitting through the final run at rehearsal. There are so many great writers out there who are talking about new ideas in new ways, why do we pander to big names? Tanya gets up in front of the audience every night and explains that all of the plays are works that we are excited about or playwrights who we want to start or continue a relationship with. Maybe she is lying? Maybe this is a nice little PR plug? Or maybe this playwright has just not brought his/her best work to this festival? I don't know. I sit in the dark corner of the theatre, writing down the problems in my head as I sketch out my complaints in the code of a doodle. Silently diplomatic.

That is the problem with being an intern: you are there to facilitate the process but not necessarily the work so you are quiet most of the time. You write down notes that you never show anyone and quietly rejoice when the same advice is given an hour later by someone with a voice. You learn from Odysseus: slip in criticisms as compliments or asides. Undoubtedly a good lesson for one who is often too critical: of twenty thoughts you can choose half of one to share on the elevator ride up to the offices. Pick the most important. Pick the one that no one else is likely to see.

Two plays were great though. Naomi Iizuka's Ghostwritten -- a reinterpretation of the Rumpelstiltskin story and the relationship between America, Vietnam, cultural identity, and food -- was playful and poignant. And Mickle Maher's Spirits to Enforce -- in which superheroes telefundraise for a production of The Tempest, which they eventually perform for a house of supervillains -- is one of the smartest and best written plays I have seen/read in a long time.

Day Off. Right. This is why I usually do the title last. The apartment is clean and the dishes are done. I had a Blueberry Hill flashback as I was handling the cleaner: I almost put the 409 down on the floor instead of on the counter because of health code violation. I read Diana's blog to catch updates: "a successful staff party, hirings and firings, wars fought with managers from other staffs." I miss them. I miss the gossip. I wonder who was fired. I wonder what the battle was over and who won. But I guess I'll have to wait until Thanksgiving to find out.

Shit: still have to rent a car.

Karma

In was thinking about writing this play about two weeks ago now: on a man's bikeride home from work, he is struck by a car door and the entirety of the play happens as he is flying through the air before he dies. The play opened with this interestingly cinematic focus on the biker (sorry, cyclist) as he pedals around the staged and then somehow glides through the air after he is hit. And then he stops in the air. Floats. I have no idea how this would be done. Strings, no doubt. But that is what is lovely about being behind the script: you don't have to figure this shit out.

Of course then I wrote about punching that one patron in the face. And I wrote about the eternal war between bikers and taxicab drivers. I am sure I sinned little sins throughout the week. So I should not have been surprised when a mother of two with a yappy mutt in the back of her SUV swung her door open right into my wrist and handlebar, flipping my bike to the side and sending me sprawling.Maybe the body knows when it is going to die and when it is not, and maybe it only entertains the almost-certainly-doomed with that fabled flash of a lifetime in the mere flicker of that last second. Because NOTHING flashed before my eyes. One minute I am up and going 15 miles an hour; the next minute I'm on the ground. There is no in between.

I have recreated what happened from my injuries. The most apparent is the bruised scrape and lack of skin on my left elbow and arm along with a bruise down my left thigh and a scrape on the outside of my left knee: the street. Little indentions and a bruise on my right wrist which aches: where the car door hit me and swung me. A bruise on the inside of my left shin where my bike must have landed on me. A bruise near my right shoulder. Where is that from?

I am on my feet. Checking my wounds. Pushing everything to make sure nothing is broken. I check my bike, which is an old heavy mountain bike: the Volvo of bikes. The woman is freaking out. Cursing. Jesus. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Oh shit. Oh shit. Replaying it in her head. I am going to say something nasty -- I feel the need to say something poignant and lasting on behalf of all the cyclists of Chicago who save money, time, and the environment by biking downtown everyday; the cyclists who are closer to the road than any save maybe the taxicab drivers -- but then her two kids get out, and I replay it in my head. Mother in front seat. Sons in back. Sons getting out. Be careful. Wait for mommy. Head turned backwards to make sure they are ok. Dog yapping in her ear. Quick. Need to get out before they run off: boys will be boys.

No time to check the side mirror for bikes.

Sigh. How can one stay angry?

She offers me a drink of all things. My elbow is bleeding pretty freely. I cannot tell yet if my wrist has a hairline fracture or some other thing that I have heard from one of many doctor-oriented television shows. I am fixing my headlight which has popped open. A drink? No, no, I'll be fine. Just some scrapes. I'll just need some bandaids. I have bandaids, she offers. Not big enough for this, I think. But I simply refuse. She walks away.

When you cannot put any weight on your elbow, it makes you realize how god-awful your posture is.

The resurrection of the ghost of the noble Sir Gawain

Three years ago, I convinced myself that there was a dramatic structure that could house Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Seeing The Mikado in June made me realize that the poem is about the desperation to live; seeing Passion last night made me realize that it revolves around the bedroom and unrequited love and rejected advances. And now, three years later, with absolutely no time, I know what it will look like.

Sir Gawain seems to awake in a lavish lonely room.

Everynight
The same dream.
Everynight.
The slightest of changes
to the smallest of details.

A Christmas festival.
A night of merrymaking,
interrupted.

A giant
all green:
a green knight
enters on a great
green
steed
and presents my king a challenge.

A beheading game.
A Christmas game:
hit for hit
blow for blow
wound for wound.
Head for blessed head.

My king.
Our court.
My sacrifice.
I will keep my words plain
I ask for this battle to be mine.
What is the life of a knight
next to that of a king?

The ax is heavy --
steel and gold.
Lopping off the knight's green head
is easily done.

All done, I think.
The dark deed's done.
The mad dog's down.
And even now
in my dreams
I sigh.

But his green blood
Stains my clothes.
It stains the stones
and the tapestries.

It stains memory.

And then that thunderous laugh.
The deepest laugh of the oldest tree
buried beneath the greenest moss
hidden in the darkest corner
of Britain's most unholy forest.

Videos of stick figure fighting - Xiao Xiao 3

On punching the guy next to you, and why it is okay.

I feel my elbow bend and the muscles tense like my cat when she is about to pounce her brother. And then it springs: one swift punch to his temple. I feel his consciousness crack. He's out. I catch his head and quickly balance his chin on his chest. His date doesn't even notice. Thinks he has simply fallen asleep. The play isn't that entertaining, so it is plausible.

It is this plausibility that may be the culprit: the play isn't that entertaining, and the gentleman beside me (seat F2) is letting the surrounding patrons know this with his exaggerated sighs. Exhaling: hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. He has a little bit of mucus in his throat. A little cold maybe. So every third or fourth hhhhhhhhhhh ends in a chunky cough.

Counting the three New Stages staged-readings, this production of Sondheim's Passion -- hhhhhhhhhhhh -- is the sixth show I am seeing in five days. This number is also counting Pat McCurdy's genius set at the Beat Kitchen which he performs almost every Monday night, which might be a little unfair. Pat is on a level all his own. And one can drink beer in the dark back room of a bar while singing along to hilarious songs. But of the five playz: one was great (definition: well-crafted, well-executed, intelligent, pleasing), one was fun (definition: silly, entertaining, maybe would have paid for it if I had to and if tickets were cheap), one was pleasant (definition: glad I saw it; gladder it was free), and two were chores (definition: chores).

Some plays are chores. And you go. And you feel older when you leave. You want those hours of your life back so you can do something more worthwhile such as pretty much anything else you can think of. But, like your mama taught you, your chores need to get done. And your chores are someone else's pleasant experience. Your pleasant experience may be some one else's great. And I found Passion pleasant.

And so I feel my elbow coil and the tension build. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I try to remember that place on the neck that you can karate chop someone so that it knocks their adam's apple just so. hhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I begin to wish I had watched Star Trek so that I would know how to execute the Vulcan pinch. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

But of course I do nothing.

I think maybe people become playwrights because they are too cowardly to enact some of their more socially-unacceptable, morally-ambiguous, physically-improbable fantasies, like walking over to that asshole over there who decided not to turn his cell phone off -- even though he is in a theatre and even though he was reminded by the usher and by the house manager -- and taking said cell phone from his hand and, raising it high like the Spartans lifted their unwanted babies skyward before hurling them off Mount Taygeto, snapping it in half for all to see.

But then maybe that is why people go to the theatre as well.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. POW! BAM!