His name was (is) Oliver! (See last post)

This image is blurry. There isn't much I can do about it. So oh well. It's kind of like a chuck close painting. Or one of those pictures that you stare at and then you see something else (like a sailboat!) but only if you let your mind go or let your eyes relax or something having to do with relaxation or release.

On Tuesday I found a 30 day pass on the bus much like the one you see above. Only much crisper. It had been started and it is only good until the Halloween, but it is pretty f-ing sweet all the same. It's basically like finding 20 dollars. Or like finding a 20 dollar gift certificate to a store that you like to frequent multiple times a day but only spend 2 dollars at a time. I felt guilty for finding it at first: there are some schools of thought that when you get three wishes, your wishes are granted but at the expense of others and they never turn out quite like you expect them to. The rules of wishes are a bit shaky. But I didn't wish to find someone's lost CTA pass, and what am I going to do? Post a Craigslist ad?

That's just dumb.

It couldn't have come at a better time. It has been a busy week with two callbacks for the two shows I am turging. I continue to define what a dramaturg's* role actually should be and to whom a dramaturg's allegiance should be: the director or the playwright. His allegiance should ultimately be to the play but what the hell does that mean? Whose play is it? I had a...debate about it tonight with a dear playwright friend...she says our friendship will continue, but we will have to wait and see.

*Dramaturg in the context of this entry is shorthand for research dramaturg and not new play dramaturg; new play dramaturg's are clearly present for the sole support of the PW. **

**I realize that most of you*** really don't care.

***Screw you.

Dramaturgs help playwrights kill babies. -Old Aztec Saying

glimpsed memories

I started work on two shows today with two different companies that open the same week in March.

A long time in high school -- which it is safe to say was a long time ago because a) I just turned 26 (jesus) and b) I have very few actual memories of high school; I do have echoes of memories that have been distorted and colored from bouncing off the walls of my brain for the better part of a decade (jesus), but all specificity of those years has been bumped by more recent memories and more recent relationships; I once had a girlfriend who told me that people fill momentary moments in other people's lives, and once they are gone let them go. I guess I remember that. -- I used to do too many things.

I don't remember why.

I played drums in a garage band with my closest friends, but I never practiced -- to their chagrin -- because I was busied by Spring Musical rehearsals when I wasn't at practice for soccer (first waterpolo: those pictures have thankfully been burned), or tennis. I think at various times I was associated with various other associations: the art club (I think I was VP? Maybe? I don't think we did anything.), the environmental club (I think I joined for the babes? I don't think we did anything), that one club that met in the morning before school (I have no idea what that was or what we did), NHS (we didn't do anything), and yearbook (which wasn't a club, but a class, but we still had to do stuff after school...didn't we...).

They were social gatherings that had names that reflected well on college applications. If you are going to hang out with your friends anyway, call it a club (was I in chess club too? did we have a chess club? maybe it was math league...but only for that one competition because they needed a substitute...) I think I genuinely enjoyed most of them...some of them.

In college I slowed down. Didn't I? Wow: it's already getting blurry. Scents and senses. Shapes and feelings. I can hear Andy's voice but not what he's saying. I can tell you the configuration of my Freshman dorm room but not what Freshman year was like. Good, right? Art classes. Shopping carts. Andy. Mike. Kim. My first martini. Acting I. The Spring Musical. Jami Ake's Shakespeare class. Sophomore year: Andy. McNiell driving to crack church in his gas guzzler. 9/11. Stacking our furniture to have stadium seating in our common room. Dauten. Jacob. All Student Theatre. Medal of Honor. Blueberry Hill. Junior Year. Andy. McNiell painting his room in our apartment blood red. Jon the Mormon. My closet sunroom of a room. School work. Never having time for Andy. No cell phone: talked to Rachel long distance from land lines and free phones at school. Woodcarving. England. Amy. England. Five weeks around Italy and France and Spain. Alone and lonely. The 40 year old Californian lesbian from Ireland who told me I had an old soul in Barcelona (what is the Spanish word for old soul?) Angel. Ginny. Chaucer. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sussex library. That one friend I made...what was his name...from Emory...what was his name...Amsterdam. Senior year. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Carter. Playwriting. Jon. Ginny. Andy. Julia. Stephanie until Travis came back (bastard). Cruddy cheap off-campus housing. Playwriting. Blueberry Hill. Andy knocking on my window to get me to hang out, me ignoring him because I had work to do. A thesis to finish.

It comes in a rush, and I see so many holes that were filled with school work rather than friends. Studying rather than conversations. At the graduation party, Andy's folks came up to me and said I was a good influence on their son, getting him to focus more on his school work.

My papers were good, and I remember none of them. All my time in the library blends together into one peaceful memory. But that night when we taped Mike to a chair and pushed him to Schnucks in a shopping cart where we were stopped by a rent-a-cop ("not a cop; hate cops")...the night in Steph and Julia's apartment watching 24 (one of the decent seasons) when I told Pedro his girlfriend was incredibly attractive moments before she walked in the door behind him...walking through the gated neighborhood with Andy and getting told we were not allowed to be walking through the gated neighborhood...

You call old friends to catch up, but it's never like it was and every conversation reminds you of that. Every conversation is an exercise in interactive nostalgia. Once they are gone let them go.

This was an entry about beginnings and it turned into an entry about loss. My apologies. I started work on two shows today with two different companies that open the same week in March. New projects. New associates. New friends.

But I miss you guys. For the first time, I wish I wasn't allergic to cameras.

I want to say his name was Doug. The guy from Emory. He wanted to be a writer.

Quick Sand Glass Houses

There is dust in my pocket watch. Maybe it is sand: sand from glass rubbing up against the metal frame...oh wait. Sand doesn't come from glass.

I am sitting at auditions for The Boys are Coming Home. More accurately: I am sitting outside the hallway outside the auditions for The Boys are Coming Home checking in eager actors awaiting an open call. It is a lot like hosting back at Blueberry Hill except the patrons are nicer. They have to be nicer. They don't know if I am taking notes. I am of course, not that anyone can read them:


An actress asks me about the call-back procedure. Another asks me which accompanist is in which audition room. Another asks me, "what are they looking for." Eventually I explain, I'm the literary intern. I spend most of my days reading scripts. I have no idea. I'm here because they needed bodies. I do not detail how I will spend the remainder of my day completely reorganizing the Goodman's library. Logging in a series of plays from the '50s, none of which I have heard of (save Auntie Mame). Questioning the need for our Encyclopedia set in light of that merry little innovation, the Internet. Lamenting the boxes full of random photos from random productions and wondering what the hell to do with them.

I went biking in the rain yesterday. Not wise considering I was fighting off some bug; I am fighting off that bug a little harder today. Low-grade fever. Head full of fuzz. No fun. I hate being sick. Usually I can wrap my mind around it; come to terms with it on an intellectual level; level with it; see it eye to enzyme. But for some reason this one is blocking me. It won't let me in, and so it persists.

There is thunder outside? Fireworks? Sounds kind of like a soft bombing of a not-so-far-away city, but that is probably because I can barely hear it over the Journey that is coming from Rachel's computer. I wonder if that kind of war will ever come here. Liz brought her Venezuelan friend to our taco & tequila party Friday night. Conversations turned politely political. She explained how Venezuelans take an interest in their neighbors -- ten points if you can name one of them -- and their leaders. "Do you know who the Prime Minister of Canada is?" she asks. "Mexico's President?"

I know it was Fox...

All this information at our fingertips...the problem with being always connected, what do you connect to?...I bookmark Canada's globeandmail online newspaper and Mexico Daily...

Do you think the Internet will ever get full? Or will we simply get sick of information piling on top of information piling on top of information...

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.