Assembling the Minions for My Theatrical Battalion

Auditioned 40-odd high school freshmen this afternoon for two and a half hours.  A good bunch of kids, there were only about 5 that I would have trouble working with, and, really, only two that I have no use for.

There's an Anne Shirley.  I'm not sure if she's a kindred spirit, but she's definitely Anne Shirley, because what else can you think when a red headed girl storms into the audition room with fervour and her words run over themselves as she tells you how very sorry she is to be late, and she must introduce herself, and her name is Anne (it's not) and I say, "Ann without an e?" and she says, "Oh, no.  Never.  But I must meet you because I want to be involved, and I want to do absolutely everything and I've never done this before and what do I need to do?"  Compare her to a very sure of herself young lady who has good command of game theory, but is otherwise kind of lifeless, and I'll take Anne Shirley every time.

I am a fan of the strange kids, the ones who got up there and did things in spite of their abilities and without any clear self-judgement.  I told them to be fearless, to make strong choices, because the kids who can embrace that are the kids you can work with.

It's still strange to see faces that repeat, and realise the owners of the faces appear to be fundamentally the same people.  The girls with the wide faces and big eyes who are sweet, and completely awkward, the spindly ginger boy who is a beloved diva, the swimmer you hope will amaze you, but it turns out he's going to be almost totally inept at everything he tries, the thin-faced girl who shakes like a leaf and tries not to let you see how nervous she is.

I walked into today really uncertain of what was going to happen, and walked out and didn't feel I'd done everything wrong.  It's a good way to feel.

The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen

I went to a show last night that friends who saw preview performances said was innovative and thought-provoking.  It was a mistake to get my hopes up.  What I saw was a run of the mill performance of an obvious concept for a show that was just fine, but wasn't breaking any new ground for me.

At the moment the lead male was kissed by a supporting male, however, gasps rang through the audience, and I was forced to admit that someone in the audience was having a thought-provoking experience.

I've been lucky enough to work with people trained in burlesque, busking and street performance.  It's different from stage acting, it's more raw, more real, and this was fake acting up close in a show that was afraid of the audience sitting six inches from it.

The best performer the entire evening was the scenic designer, a friend who was forced to be a real person because he was playing the locale's bouncer, a very real necessity for a show featuring that many scantily clad ladies, and was also incorporated into the performance.  He knew what he was doing.  The rest of the cast was just acting.

I was disappointed.  I know the problem is me, and people will be lauding the young director as a genius, and if I were 18 and looked up to him, I would probably agree, but...  It could have been so much more.

The other difficulty was they billed the show as 18+.  I assumed this meant that it had some guts and took some real risks, but I think all it meant was that the bar it was performed in had an 18+ license.  A show that could have been ribald and raunchy wasn't willing to be more than just a little bit naughty.

Genuine props to the curtain call, which did not exist.  It was the right choice, it was done pretty well, and the only thing it needed was one tiny something to make the audience realise it wasn't a mistake.  The bar was still open, so they couldn't toss a towel over the taps, but if they'd had the stage manager come out and turn off the single stand light, that would have done it, I think.  Just a tiny signal, because instead of being powerful with the audience, it became an awkward moment that turned funny, so, like every other choice in the show, it was a solid idea that didn't really come to fruition, but this one was the most successful, because it DID create a moment of "wait, what?" in the audience that the show failed to create at any other time, it just wasn't entirely crafted.  He's young.  He will learn.

Maybe it's the culture.  As a product of this culture, I sort of doubt it, but it might explain why I can't get my actors to come with me on my show.  Maybe it's the actors:  these aren't actors, they're people with real jobs who sometimes act and enjoy theatre.  There's nothing wrong with that.  That's fine.  But if you're a person who can't take the risk not to have a full time job with benefits and actually perform, you're probably not going to take those risks as a performer.

I'm not a performer.  I don't take those risks as an actress, or rather, when I act, that's risk enough, what more do I have to do?  So I understand, but I pick and choose my roles and shows.  As a director, I'm willing to go there.  As a playwright, I'm not.  I should be.  Those acts tumble from my brain just the same whether I scribble them furiously in the margins of a script or type it out and print it.

So I will probably make my audience on Tuesday night extremely uncomfortable.  That's my goal.

In the Event of Death by a Salesman

Rolling up my driveway to leave yesterday, a man was attempting to knock on my front door.  I stopped and rolled down the window.  He was from the cable company.  We have Internet through them, our neighbours have cable, and their cable has been down for nearly a month because a tree fell on the wire.  It's our tree, but their wire.  The electrical company came out and dealt with a previous tree in 24 hours, the cable company, not so much, it seems.

I assumed that's why he had come- the neighbours have an easement on our driveway because that's the only way to access their backyard and handle things like garbage pick up.

"Do you have cable?"
"No, it's the neighbours.  They're down the driveway."
"Oh, they're the other apartment?"
"It's not an apartment, they're the house down there, they use their back door for a service entrance."
"So, do you just have...?"
"Internet, yeah."
"You like it?"
"Sure."
"Any problems with it?"
"Only when it rains."
"Really?"
"Yeah, sometimes."
"Have you called about it?"
"No."

This same Internet provider company in a different town always maintained this same problem, which happened with greater frequency, wasn't their fault.  Of course I'm not likely to call a national company up just for them to read me the same script.

"Next time it happens, give them a call and let them know, because it could be something real simple and they can get out and fix that, no problem."

I wonder about my neighbour's cable, and why he's not down there fixing it, if this is the case.

 "So, why don't you have cable with us?"
"I don't like to pay that much money for ads."

I once stymied a satellite salesman with this argument.

"I see your point there.  Did you have cable with us before?"

Oh.  This man is not a tech.  He's a salesman.  Great.

"For a while, it's not something we watch enough to make it worth the money."
"How little would you be willing to pay?"

Guy, I'm sitting in my car, in my driveway at 5:30.  Do you really think that I want to have this conversation with you right now?

"Sixteen bucks," I say, remembering how much we pay for Netflix.  I should have said 6.
"I can do twenty."
"Tell you what, you give my husband a call and tell him about it."
"Oh, is he home?"
"No.  I'm going to pick him up right now.  I'm late picking him up right now."
"Well, you know, I don't like to do a hard sell or anything."

I'm in my car.  I am trying to leave my house.  You are still talking.  What part of that is soft selling?

"I say, give him a call, he likes to watch football, maybe he'll go for it."

I'm in the process of divorcing my husband.  There's no way he's going to go for it.

"Yeah, it's a great sports package, did you watch Company's Proprietary Sounding Sports Channel before?"
"I have no idea."
"Tell you what, let me leave this flyer with you, and you can talk it over and give us a call."

 Ah, you don't have the power to call him.  That's fantastic.

"That sounds great."
"Because, you know, that'd be twenty, so you'd be paying 89.99 instead of what you pay now."
"Absolutely, we'll think about it, you have a great day, OK?"
"Uh, yeah."

We currently pay about 75.  75+20!=89.99

I take his sheet, and drive up the driveway and away.  I wonder suddenly where this man's van is.  There's no parking on the bend I live on, he's certainly not parked in the driveway anyplace.  I know my brother is home, so even if this guy is just checking out properties to rob later, there's someone in the house.

I pick up my husband from work, drive home to drop him off at the top of the driveway and drive to the rehearsal I have to be at in half an hour.  Further up the street, I pass the cable guy again, walking, talking on his phone.  He does a double take as I drive by.

If we're all found dead and robbed in the next month, please look for Eric, the phoney cable guy.

Those two words are nearly a Google Whack.

First read rehearsal.  It was disturbing to discover that the 80 page script I anticipated would run 95 minutes if we were doing things very extremely wrong, ran instead for two hours.

It's a highly sensual script.  I debated between saying erotic, or pornographic, but I think sensual is correct, due mostly to what I discovered was rather inaccessible language for most of the cast.  Phantasmagoria.  Turpitudinous.

I don't think of the theatre as an inaccessible art, I don't consider the rhetoric extremely technical or complex, because it's life.  How can metaphor and life experience created by people who mostly aren't scientists or philosophers, but are sometimes both accidentally, be difficult?  And then I remember, after a conversation about her family and weekend plans, the sister of a friend said, "You do talk about normal things."  When I have to.

Although, it's also an erotic script.  One scene deals explicitly with necrophilia, another with coprophilia, where another could be described as merely foreplay and I thought, "I wonder if it's possible to link every scene with a sex act?"  Yes, either a clear or sub-textual sex act for each of the 25 scenes.  So, that makes my Google history all the more unique.

Candaulism is the word for a man who likes his wife to be the subject of other men's voyeurism.  Comes from an ancient King of Lydia who contrived to show another man his naked wife.  She discovered the plot, and told the peeping tom she was either going to kill him, or her husband, the choice was his.  He chose to live, and the Queen married him, and that's, apparently, how you choose to tell the story in order to cover up a murder and still become King of Lydia.

Noticing the irony that the most disturbing thing to come out of a rehearsal for a script about perversion, censorship and the nature of good and evil was the run time.